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Chief ‘disappointed’ to see clean water used as a political ‘tactic’ by ConservativesAlberta announces future coal mining policy plan, industry consults

On Thursday, Prashant Kishor, a renowned political strategist turned activist, gave a three-day deadline to the Bihar government, led by Nitish Kumar, to address grievances over a claimed question paper leak in a recent public service exam. The state has witnessed widespread protests by civil service aspirants regarding the issue, with police criticized for their use of force against protesters. Kishor, whose Jan Suraaj party had previously requested the cancellation of the exam, warned of further protests if police use force again. Joining the protest site in Gardani Bagh, Kishor promised support to demonstrators seeking a re-examination and vowed to partake in the protest march. Meanwhile, criticism emerged regarding his involvement, with others accusing him of seeking political gain from the unrest. (With inputs from agencies.)Tiki EV Introduces Customizable, Eco-Friendly Golf Carts in Port St. Lucie

The General Services Administration has made official its first batch of winners for the general small business track of OASIS+, the recompete of a massive government-wide professional services contract vehicle. Back in July, GSA posted a list of 1,383 small businesses that it deemed “apparent winners” of a position on the vehicle. Those awards were subject to protests over whether companies on that list were small businesses or not. Now the number stands at 1,373 final winners in new information posted Thursday to the Federal Procurement Data System. . These companies have received notices-to-proceed, but do keep in mind that this is not the end of the line to find out who wins a seat on OASIS+. GSA’s posting of the newest award batch reiterates what it has said before about the rolling process: “If, following award announcements, an offeror has not been notified of their award status, their offer as part of the rolling awards process. This cycle of rolling awards will continue until all awards are made.” The new One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services Plus vehicle has four other small business groups that are reserved for individual socioeconomic labels, in addition to the general SB track just awarded. GSA has made initial batches of awards for the 8(a), woman-owned, HUBZone and service-disabled/veteran-owned groups. More awards for those are due to fall during January and February. Related articles GSA apparently was able to move on, what it hopes are, its final selections for the OASIS+ Total Small Business Set-Aside track. Companies of any socioeconomic distinction and those with only an SB labeling were eligible to bid for the vehicle. One protest from Q2 Impact, a bidder GSA eliminated because the company’s proposal evidently involves the use of banned communications equipment. Q2 believes its waiver to use Huawei Technologies equipment on a U.S. Agency for International Development contract should apply for OASIS+, but GSA’s position is that the waiver only applies to USAID and not across government. Oral arguments are scheduled for Jan. 29, while all motions and responses to them have a Jan. 17 deadline. In the meantime, GSA also is moving ahead with its awards for the unrestricted portion of OASIS+. GSA added , bringing the total number of winners there to 588 so far. OASIS+ has no ceiling and a potential duration of 10 years, which includes an initial five-year base period and a single five-year option. Agencies use OASIS+ to acquire professional services that are not tech-centric in nature.Howling winds could not stop Notre Dame’s heart from beating again. With three resounding knocks on its doors by Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich, wielding a staff carved from fire-scorched beams, the cathedral roared back to life on Saturday evening. For the first time since a devastating 2019 blaze, the towering Gothic masterpiece reopened for worship, its rebirth marked by song, prayer, and awe beneath its soaring arches. While the ceremony was initially planned to begin on the forecourt, unusually fierce December winds whipping across the central Paris island, flanked by the River Seine, forced all events inside. Yet the occasion lost none of its splendour. Inside the luminous nave, choirs are singing psalms, and the cathedral’s mighty organ, silent for nearly five years, is thundering to life in a triumphant interplay of melodies. The evening’s celebration, being attended by 1,500 dignitaries, including President-elect Donald Trump, US First Lady Jill Biden, Britain’s Prince William, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, underscores Notre Dame’s enduring role as both a spiritual and cultural beacon. For President Emmanuel Macron, who championed the ambitious five-year restoration timeline, it was a rare moment of unity amid profound political crises and threats to his presidential legacy.Could Science Benefit From AI-mediated Communication? This Study Says it Could

Ibotta chief people officer Marisa Daspit sells $342,602 in stock

One of President-elect Donald Trump’s key achievements when first in office was keeping the benchmark oil prices within a very carefully managed range – ‘The Trump Oil Price Range’. The lower part of this is US$40-45 per barrel of the Brent benchmark, which is the price at which the bulk of U.S. shale oil producers can breakeven and make a good profit on top. The upper part is US$75-80 per barrel, which ties into historical data showing that a gasoline price of under US$2 per gallon has been most advantageous for U.S. economic growth. This US$2 per gallon level has historically equated to a West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil price of around US$70 per barrel. And as WTI has also historically traded at a discount of between US$5-10 per barrel to the Brent oil benchmark, this US$70 per barrel of WTI price equates to around US$75-80 per barrel of Brent. Judging from Trump’s comments on the campaign trail and in his ‘Agenda47’ blueprint for a second term, his view that oil prices should continue to be heavily influenced by the U.S. in such a way has not changed. And given these factors, his handling of the OPEC members of the OPEC+ oil cartel, and their de facto leader Saudi Arabia, will be much the same as it was in his first term in the top job. There are two vital reasons, to begin with, why the Trump Oil Price Range so rigorously enforced in his first presidency is so critical to the interests of Trump personally, his Republican Party, and the U.S. more broadly, as fully analysed in my latest book on the new global oil market order . One reason is economic and the other political, although as ever the two elements are closely related. The economic rationale revolves around the close correlation between oil prices and the wider health of the U.S. economy. Historical data highlights that every US$10 per barrel (pb) or so change in the price of crude oil results in around a 25-30 cent change in the price of a gallon of gasoline, and for every 1 cent that the average price per gallon of gasoline rises, more than US$1 billion or so per year in consumer spending is lost. The second – political reason -- is that since 1896, the sitting U.S. president has won re-election 11 times out of 11 if the economy was not in recession within two years of an upcoming election. However, sitting U.S. presidents who went into a re-election campaign with the economy in recession won only one time out of seven. The same pattern broadly applies to the re-election chances of candidates of any sitting president’s party in U.S. mid-term elections as well, the outcome of which affects the ability of the incumbent leader to push ahead with their legislative agenda for the last two years of their presidency. In any event, the statistics make sober reading for incumbent U.S. presidents and the senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial candidates of their party when considering how to handle domestic and international policies related to the oil price. Consequently, it is not surprising -- as Bob McNally, the former energy adviser to former President George W. Bush put it – that, “Few things terrify an American president more than a spike in fuel [gasoline] prices.” if(window.innerWidthADVERTISEMENTfreestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ placementName: "oilprice_medrec_atf", slotId: "oilprice_medrec_atf" });';document.write(write_html);} Related: Exxon: Don’t Expect ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Under Trump Trump’s preferred method of dealing with any attempts to disrupt this closely-managed and crucial oil price range was demonstrated early in his first presidency. Saudi Arabia and its OPEC brothers had just fought and lost the 2014-2016 Oil Price War aimed at destroying or at least severely disabling for years the then-nascent U.S. shale oil sector, as also as fully detailed in my latest book on the new global oil market order . This had left the Kingdom and its OPEC followers in devastated financial positions, which could only begin to be resuscitated by orchestrating OPEC-led rises in oil prices, which is what the cartel began to do, with the help of its new-found ally, Russia (which by that time had become the ‘+’ in ‘OPEC+’). These efforts pushed oil prices up over the key US$80 per barrel Brent ceiling of the Trump Oil Price Range in the second half of 2018, whereupon Trump warned Riyadh to stop doing this in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, saying “OPEC and OPEC nations are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world, and I don’t like it. Nobody should like it.” He added: “We defend many of these nations for nothing, and then they take advantage of us by giving us high oil prices. Not good. We want them to stop raising prices. We want them to start lowering prices and they must contribute substantially to military protection from now on.” Following Trump’s direct and clear warnings to Saudi Arabia’s Royal Family in the third quarter of 2018 of the catastrophic consequences if the Kingdom continued to keep oil prices higher than the US$80 per barrel Brent price ceiling, Saudi Arabia increased production and oil prices came down again. That period was the only part of Trump’s presidency that saw his Oil Price Trading Range breached to the upside. Over this period, oil prices stayed well below the US$84 pb or so level that the Saudis needed to breakeven on their national budget, never mind attempting to replace the hundreds of billions of dollars it had lost in fighting the 2014-2016 Oil Price War. Given this, it was little surprise to many that the Kingdom tried its luck again in the later part of the Trump presidency, with yet another Oil Price War in early 2020. It and its fellow OPEC members dramatically overproduced oil again, crashing oil prices and pushing WTI into negative pricing territory at one point, aiming as it did before to destroy the economic viability of as much of the U.S.’s shale oil sector as possible for as long as it could. Trump’s reaction to this was even more direct than before, with a telephone call made on 2 April (according to a very senior source in the White House spoken to by OilPrice.com at the time) in which he very clearly told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that unless OPEC started cutting oil production – so allowing oil prices to rise (above the danger zone for U.S. shale oil producers) – that he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. It was also made very clear by Trump that the next time the Saudis tried the same thing it would be the end of the 1945 Agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that had laid the foundation for their cooperation since that point, as also analysed in full my latest book on the new global oil market order . This, said Trump, would involve the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military assistance from the Kingdom, without further notice. Following that, Saudi Arabia and OPEC gradually cut oil production to bring prices back up. Despite this, Trump ordered that the ‘No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels’ (NOPEC) Bill be made fully ready to be passed into law at minimal notice, as a further deterrent to be used against Saudi Arabia. The NOPEC Bill would make it illegal to artificially cap oil production or to set prices, as OPEC does under the leadership of the Kingdom. The Bill would also immediately remove the sovereign immunity in U.S. courts for OPEC as a group and for every one of its individual member states. This would leave Saudi Arabia open to being sued under existing U.S. anti-trust legislation, with its total liability being its estimated US$1 trillion of investments in the U.S. alone. The U.S. would then be legally entitled to freeze all Saudi bank accounts in the U.S., seize its assets in the country, and halt all use of U.S. dollars by the Saudis anywhere in the world (oil is denominated in U.S. dollars, of course). It would also allow the U.S. to go after Saudi Aramco and its assets and funds, as it is still a majority state-owned production and trading vehicle. This would mean that Aramco could be ordered to break itself up into smaller, constituent companies that are not deemed to break competition rules in the oil, gas, and petrochemicals sectors or to influence the oil price. if(window.innerWidth ADVERTISEMENTfreestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ placementName: "oilprice_medrec_btf", slotId: "oilprice_medrec_btf" });`;document.write(write_html);} Consequently, although oil prices are likely to trend to the downside under a Trump presidency given his pledge to “Drill, Baby, Drill”, any attempts by Saudi Arabia and OPEC+ to push them above the top of The Trump Oil Price Range are likely to be met with an extremely robust response from the Presidential Administration. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.comJoin our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2024 has been a banner year for Perplexity . The AI search startup, founded by former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, raised hundreds of millions of dollars — its latest funding round reportedly valuing the company at $9 billion — and introduced several notable features, including Pages , Spaces , and innovative shopping experiences. These developments have solidified Perplexity’s reputation as an “AI-first” knowledge discovery engine, standing apart from traditional search giants like Google and Bing, which are bolting AI capabilities onto their existing engines. However, the journey is far from over. Facing intensifying competition, Perplexity is broadening its scope with a new addition to its portfolio: Carbon . The company has just acquired this startup, for an undisclosed sum, to address the “data gap” enterprises encounter with AI search and streamline the knowledge discovery process in their workflows. Carbon has developed a comprehensive retrieval framework that streamlines the process of connecting external data sources to LLMs. Users can tap the Carbon universal API or SDKs to sync their data sources and retrieve the data to use with LLMs. It offers native integrations with over 20 data connectors and supports more than 20 file formats, including text, audio and video files. The expanding scope of AI search From individuals to business users, almost everyone today uses AI search as part of their workflows. The idea of the technology is pretty simple — you don’t have to go through a swathe of links and content to find relevant insights and information. Instead, the information will come to you as the direct answer to your query. Perplexity has thrived on this approach, using a range of large language models to retrieve information from the web and simplifying how users work. It even allows teams to extract information from their personal or business files such as PDFs and Word documents. But, here’s the thing. The web is home to public information, and uploading internal files — PDFs, conversations, images — individually is not feasible for business users dealing with large volumes of proprietary data. This affects the quality of answers, keeping them generic and devoid of important organization-relevant contexts. Highlighting this “data gap,” Sanjeev Mohan, the former Gartner Research VP for data and analytics, told VentureBeat that one of the biggest AI trends for 2025 will be ETL for unstructured data . It will allow teams to extract and transform data from dispersed internal sources, ultimately powering their LLMs to generate highly relevant and accurate responses. Now, this is exactly what Perplexity plans to do with the acquisition of Carbon’s comprehensive, streamlined retrieval framework. Perplexity will integrate Carbon’s retrieval engine and connectors into its tech stack, giving users of the search platform a direct way to plug in their diverse sources of data, from Google Docs and Notion to Hubspot and Slack. This, the company says, will expand the knowledge pool powering the AI search engine, making its responses more comprehensive, relevant and personalized to users. What can users expect from Carbon-powered Perplexity? While Perplexity has just acquired Carbon and the integration is yet to be executed, it’s pretty easy to imagine how the additional data connectors will improve the workflows of enterprise teams using the AI search engine. For instance, if one has to move the date for a launch and needs to figure out the latest deadline and guidelines set by their team, Perplexity would be able to parse through all the data in Google Docs, Notion, and Slack — and make necessary correlations — to find the information that answers the question. In essence, there would be no more worrying about stitching together context from the web, individual apps, and messages. The platform does everything on its own to provide the answer. “The notable benefit of this setup is that our technology can find the answer without making you pinpoint the document/database where that information is stored,” Sara Platnick, who leads communications at Perplexity, told VentureBeat. Another example, she said, could be extracting customer meeting insights. Perplexity would be able to fetch the details and focus of the conversation from connected CRMs in no time. Notably, by leveraging Carbon’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows, Perplexity is making enterprise search more accessible, saving companies the hassle of building their own RAG pipelines from scratch. “By finding and interpreting proprietary data with Perplexity and Carbon, companies can address a range of multi-faceted gen AI use cases. We find the leading adopters are most focused on customer service, document processing, image processing and recommendation engines, Kevin Petrie,” VP of research at BARC US, told VentureBeat. Execution will be key Acquiring Carbon is just the beginning. The real key will be execution, or how seamlessly and safely the startup’s tech is integrated. After all, we are talking about proprietary data from some of the most critical knowledge repositories that enterprises maintain. “Companies are rightly wary of exposing their intellectual property to the public. So Perplexity and Carbon will need to provide governance controls that ensure companies can keep their data inside their own firewalls. They have no interest in sharing secrets or training a public model to mimic their intellectual property,” Petrie added. On Perplexity’s part, Platnick noted that “all information from internal and private sources on the engine is encrypted, as is all data transmitted and stored in Carbon’s data connectors.” She also pointed out that the company has additional protections to ensure that private documents stay private and aren’t accessible to non-authorized users. As of now, there’s no specific timeline for the integration of Carbon with Perplexity. However, the startup will cease operations of its managed API on March 31, 2025. Existing customers using the API have already been notified for offboarding, with the Carbon team assisting them in the transition. If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here . An error occured.

Valero Energy Corp. stock underperforms Thursday when compared to competitorsGun stock photo. Downloaded from Advance Getty Images account in November 2023. Natnan Srisuwan | Getty Images R. Eric Thomas Dear Eric: My nephew has three teens living at home; I gave him money to help with family summer activities. He used the money to buy guns for his kids, including an AR-style rifle, which breaks my heart. As best I can tell, the guns are only minimally secured. The parents are professionals, and they otherwise take good care of their kids, but they are heavily into the allure of a gun culture. I am very concerned because one of his kids has significant mental health issues and has been hospitalized. They have had dark fantasies and sometimes post pictures with their face painted to look like blood dripping. I am beside myself with worry that a bad stretch of mental health stress could lead to something devastating. I do not live in the same state. Is there someone I should alert? – Concerned Relative Dear Relative: If you have knowledge of a specific threat, you need to contact the local authorities and your nephew. It’s not clear from your letter if the dark fantasies fall into that category, so please exercise judgment and caution. If your concern is mostly related to the child’s mental health, you should make sure your nephew is aware of the posts. It’s not a crime to have mental health struggles; you’ll want to avoid treating it as such. Prioritize ensuring that the child is in a safe environment. I know it’s hard to reconcile the presence of the rifles in the home with your otherwise positive impression of your nephew’s parenting, but getting into a debate won’t serve anyone right now. It’s also not a crime to be a responsible gun owner. The keyword is responsible. Express your concerns and ask specific questions about the storage of the guns. Per the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “even modest increases in the number of American homes safely storing guns could prevent almost a third of youth gun deaths due to suicide and unintentional firearm injury.” Many states have Child Access Protection laws, which establish guidelines for storing unattended guns, particularly in homes with minors. You can visit Giffords.org to find out if the state your nephew lives in has one and talk it through with him. Read more Asking Eric and other advice columns. Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com . Stories by R. Eric Thomas Asking Eric: How to handle an uncomfortable secret from your partner’s family Asking Eric: How to tell a family member you’re traveling solo without hurting feelings Asking Eric: Turning your craft projects into thoughtful gifts or sales Asking Eric: Handling hurt feelings when your efforts go unacknowledged Asking Eric: Managing sibling relationships amid destination wedding pressure

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Haiti’s health minister loses his job after a deadly gang attack on a hospital in the capitalNoneThe General Services Administration has made official its first batch of winners for the general small business track of OASIS+, the recompete of a massive government-wide professional services contract vehicle. Back in July, GSA posted a list of 1,383 small businesses that it deemed “apparent winners” of a position on the vehicle. Those awards were subject to protests over whether companies on that list were small businesses or not. Now the number stands at 1,373 final winners in new information posted Thursday to the Federal Procurement Data System. . These companies have received notices-to-proceed, but do keep in mind that this is not the end of the line to find out who wins a seat on OASIS+. GSA’s posting of the newest award batch reiterates what it has said before about the rolling process: “If, following award announcements, an offeror has not been notified of their award status, their offer as part of the rolling awards process. This cycle of rolling awards will continue until all awards are made.” The new One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services Plus vehicle has four other small business groups that are reserved for individual socioeconomic labels, in addition to the general SB track just awarded. GSA has made initial batches of awards for the 8(a), woman-owned, HUBZone and service-disabled/veteran-owned groups. More awards for those are due to fall during January and February. Related articles GSA apparently was able to move on, what it hopes are, its final selections for the OASIS+ Total Small Business Set-Aside track. Companies of any socioeconomic distinction and those with only an SB labeling were eligible to bid for the vehicle. One protest from Q2 Impact, a bidder GSA eliminated because the company’s proposal evidently involves the use of banned communications equipment. Q2 believes its waiver to use Huawei Technologies equipment on a U.S. Agency for International Development contract should apply for OASIS+, but GSA’s position is that the waiver only applies to USAID and not across government. Oral arguments are scheduled for Jan. 29, while all motions and responses to them have a Jan. 17 deadline. In the meantime, GSA also is moving ahead with its awards for the unrestricted portion of OASIS+. GSA added , bringing the total number of winners there to 588 so far. OASIS+ has no ceiling and a potential duration of 10 years, which includes an initial five-year base period and a single five-year option. Agencies use OASIS+ to acquire professional services that are not tech-centric in nature.

Joe Alwyn 's isn't looking very Merry this Christmas ... riding a Lime e-bike on Boxing Day in Britain -- with a downcast expression on his face. The actor was spotted flying around London on the rental bike Thursday ... looking a bit worse for wear the day after Xmas. He's bundled up in a black jacket and pale blue jeans -- hair flapping in the wind -- though he's not cracking a smile while rolling down the road. Coal in his stocking, perhaps? While it's unclear if Joe's really down or if he just wasn't jolly during his ride, it's obviously been a tough couple years for Joe since he and Taylor Swift ended their relationship. As you know, the two broke up in early April 2023 ... and Taylor moved on with Travis Kelce just a few months later -- and, while Joe doesn't look stoked -- Travis and Taylor have been absolutely giddy while spending time with one another. Travis and Taylor were together just this past weekend ... with Taylor attending the Chiefs game against the Texans in Kansas City on Saturday. Unclear what they got each other for Christmas. It's been a big acting year for Joe ... with the star appearing in "The Brutalist" and "Kinds of Kindness," and he will appear in two Shakespeare-related movies -- "Hamlet," and "Hamnet" -- coming out soon. His career might be popping off ... but, given his expression, don't expect Alwyn to go caroling anytime soon.