Latest news with #DavidMorgan
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Three counties in NM potentially exposed to measles
Jun. 13—Health officials said Friday that residents in three New Mexico counties have potentially been exposed to measles by way of two travelers who were diagnosed with the disease during their visit to the state. People in Bernalillo, Santa Fe and Sandoval counties may have been exposed by one adult with an unknown vaccination status, along with an 18-month-old child with an age-appropriate vaccination, the New Mexico Department of Health (DOH) said in a news release. The two were traveling separately and have since left New Mexico, said David Morgan, public information officer for the DOH. When there has been a potential mass exposure, the DOH seeks information to determine which public areas a person with measles has visited. "In addition to providing locations for potential exposure, we provide the public with what symptoms they need to be aware of and guidelines on what actions to consider taking if they suspect they may have contracted measles," Morgan told the Journal. Measles symptoms begin with a cough, runny nose and red eyes before progressing to a fever and rash. In the latest health alert, the DOH warned that there may have been an exposure risk at the following times and locations: —Monday, June 2, from 1-4 p.m. at the Rio Rancho Aquatic Center, 745 Loma Colorado NE. —Thursday, June 5, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Walmart Supercenter, 5701 Herrera Drive, in Santa Fe. —Friday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Walmart Supercenter, 2550 Coors NW, in Albuquerque, and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at El Super, 4201 Central NW, in Albuquerque. —Tuesday, June 10, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:40 p.m. at the University of New Mexico Hospital Adult Urgent Care, 2211 Lomas NE, in Albuquerque, and from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Albuquerque International Sunport main terminal, TSA security checkpoint, Terminal A, Gate A6. "These two cases remind us that travel remains an exposure risk when it comes to this contagious virus," said Dr. Miranda Durham, the NMDOH chief medical officer. "The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine remains the best protection against measles." New Mexico's total measles case count stood at 81 as of Friday.
CBS News
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
At 2025 Tribeca Festival, VR, augmented reality and AI showcase immersive storytelling
The 2025 Tribeca Festival continues this week with movie screenings, Q&As, industry panel discussions and public performances across New York City. But one program in this year's festival takes place in virtual worlds. For more than a decade, Tribeca has been expanding its focus beyond cinema and television to include new avenues of storytelling through the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other nascent technologies, producing some vivid immersive displays. Even if the storytelling aspect of the programs were limited, the artistic expressions could be powerful. This was especially true with past exhibits that enveloped the viewer in massive spaces, in which computer-generated imagery or time-lapse photography placed the viewer in new worlds, from exploding galaxies to swirling blood vessels. A view of "Boreal Dreams," a simulation of climate's impact on consciousness, one of many exhibits in the 2025 Tribeca Festival's Immersive program. David Morgan/CBS News Hosted under the umbrella title "In Search of Us," this year's installation in Lower Manhattan ties 11 projects together under the rubric of impacts on humanity — exploring topics from artificial intelligence to climate change, war, school shootings and transphobia. The exhibits with the most profound effects are those with the strongest and most emotional stories embedded inside them. The VR exhibit "Fragile Home" allows viewers to explore a house in Ukraine, before and after the Russian invasion. David Morgan/CBS News; Tribeca Festival Within a simple, delineated space furnished with minimal furniture, "Fragile Home," by Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina, uses mixed reality to recreate a home in Ukraine that comes under bombardment. Wearing goggles, the viewer walks through a comfortable, well-appointed living room, past a dinner table and a purring cat, and looks outside the window to a peaceful vista — all of which, in a flash, is replaced by the home's bombed-out remains, vandalized with Russian forces' "Z" graffiti. The sense of violation is made so powerful in so simple a setting — and the recognition that such destruction is multiplied millions of times over is heart-wrenching. But the objects that survived — those with personal meaning to just a handful of people – become representations of resilience to many. Left: A view of the cinematic game "Scent." Right: the AR "There Goes Nikki." Tribeca Festival; David Morgan/CBS News "Scent," by Alan Kwan, is a first-person cinematic game in which the player becomes a dog wandering a landscape, who observes people being attacked and killed by malevolent forces. In between avoiding bombs and gunfire, the dog helps guide the souls of those killed to become reincarnated. It's a meditative view of cruel violations impacting humanity and nature. Armed with a tablet, viewers of the augmented reality "There Goes Nikki" can wander a garden populated by virtual flowers, and a visualization of the late poet Nikki Giovanni reciting her poem, "Quilting the Black-eyed Pea (We're going to Mars)." By Idris Brewster, Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster. Attendees subject themselves to AI's judgmental streak in "AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego." David Morgan/CBS News How dangerous is artificial intelligence? How dumb is it? How snarky? "AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego," directed by Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot, provides viewers with an opportunity to become test subjects, as it were, to AI's judgmental streak. Upon sitting in a chair, the participant is captured on camera and analyzed by AI, which conjures up your name, personality traits, and goals. How close are they to reality? Prepare to get snarked. But if the AI program "likes" you? Your AI-altered image will turn up in its pantheon of favored carbon-based units (pictured above, right). A view of the VR exhibit "Uncharted," which combines a water-like background (actually composed of numeric symbols) and images of a dancer. Tribeca Festival Other exhibits are immersive representations of culture — some self-generated, some created by AI. "Uncharted" (VR, by Kidus Hailesilassie) combines footage of a dancer with spoken word and visualizations of symbols to become a rapturous demonstration of pan-African language and storytelling. The interactive "New Maqam City," by MIPSTERZ, allows you to become a DJ, manipulating drum beat patterns recognizable in Muslim communities around the world to create a transcendent vibe. "The Innocence of Unknowing" is a video essay and AI project studying media coverage of mass shootings, projected within a simulated classroom. (Created by Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani through the MIT Open Documentary Lab.) Strap in! Viewers of the haptic VR exhibit "In the Current of Being." David Morgan/CBS News One of the strongest impacts of any installation was made by "In the Current of Being," by Cameron Kostopoulos. Using haptic VR, the viewer is literally strapped into a chair; electrodes are attached to your fingertips, arms, and torso, along with VR goggles. Interesting, you think. Then, the presentation begins, recounting the true story of a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy. (As a teenager, Carolyn Mercer had been "treated" with electrical shocks in an attempt to "cure" her from becoming trans.) As images of female beauty are flashed before you, electrical impulses throb across your body. This is not virtual reality; the extreme discomfort is very real, forcing me out of the presentation less than halfway through. The upshot: aversion therapy works, because I will never allow VR electrodes to be attached to my body ever again. An AR component of "The Power Loom and The Founders Pillars" shows African imagery and textiles onto the pillars of the New York Stock Exchange. Tribeca Festival Beyond the confines of the exhibition space at 161 Water Street, the two-part "The Power Loom and The Founders Pillars" (by Lesiba Mabitsela, Meghna Singh and Simon Wood) includes a site-specific AR experience, visible on a mobile app six blocks away, at the New York Stock Exchange, creating a memorial to enslaved people once sold at the Wall Street Slave Market, established in the 18th century. While the Tribeca Festival proper concludes on June 15, "In Search of Us," presented in partnership with Onassis ONX and Agog: The Immersive Media Institute, runs through June 29. For more details and ticket info click here.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Defying debt warnings, Republicans push forward on Trump tax agenda
By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are determined to enact his tax-cut agenda in a political push that has largely abandoned longtime party claims of fiscal discipline, by simply denying warnings that the measure will balloon the federal debt. The drive has drawn the ire of Elon Musk, a once-close Trump ally and the biggest donor to Republicans in the 2024 election, who gave a boost to a handful of party deficit hawks opposed to the bill by publicly denigrating it as a "disgusting abomination," opening a public feud with Trump. But top congressional Republicans remain determined to squeeze Trump's campaign promises through their narrow majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives by July 4, while shrugging off warnings from the official Congressional Budget Office and a host of outside economists and budget experts. "All the talk about how this bill is going to generate an increase in our deficit is absolutely wrong," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo told reporters after a meeting with Trump last week. Outside Washington, financial markets have raised red flags about the nation's rising debt, most notably when Moody's cut its pristine "Aaa" U.S. credit rating. The bill also aims to raise the government's self-imposed debt ceiling by up to $5 trillion, a step Congress must take by summer or risk a devastating default on $36.2 trillion in debt. "Debt and deficits don't seem to matter for the current Republican leadership, including the president of the United States," said Bill Hoagland, a former Senate Republican aide who worked on fiscal bills including the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. The few remaining Senate Republican fiscal hawks could be enough to block the bill's passage in a chamber the party controls 53-47. But some have appeared to be warming to the legislation, saying the spending cuts they seek may need to wait for future bills. "We need a couple bites of the apple here," said Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a prominent fiscal hardliner. Republicans who pledged fiscal responsibility in the 1990s secured a few years of budget surpluses under Democratic former President Bill Clinton. Deficits returned after Republican President George W. Bush's tax cuts and the debt has pushed higher since under Democratic and Republican administrations. "Thirty years have shown that it's a lot easier to talk about these things when you're out of power than to actually do something about them when you're in," said Jonathan Burks, who was a top aide to former House Speaker Paul Ryan when Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted into law in 2017. "Both parties have really pushed us in the wrong direction on the debt problem," he said. Burks and Hoagland are now on the staff of the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. DEBT SET TO DOUBLE Crapo's denial of the cost of the Trump bill came hours after CBO reported that the legislation the House passed by a single vote last month would add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. Interest costs would bring the full price tag to $3 trillion, it said. The cost will rise even higher - reaching $5 trillion over a decade - if Senate Republicans can persuade Trump to make the bill's temporary business tax breaks permanent, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The CRFB projects that if Senate Republicans get their way, Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act could drive the federal debt to $46.9 trillion in 2029, the end of Trump's term. That is more than double the $20.2 trillion debt level of Trump's first year at the White House in 2017. Majorities of Americans of both parties -- 72% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats -- said they were concerned about the growing government debt in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month. Analysts say voters worry less about debt than about retaining benefits such as Medicaid healthcare coverage for working Americans, who helped elect Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress. "Their concern is inflation," Hoagland said. "Their concern is affordability of healthcare." The two problems are linked: As investors worry about the nation's growing debt burden, they demand higher returns on government bonds, which likely means households will pay more for their home mortgages, auto loans and credit card balances. Republican denial of the deficit forecasts rests largely on two arguments about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that independent analysts say are misleading. One insists that CBO projections are not to be trusted because researchers predicted in 2018 that the TCJA would lose $1.8 trillion in revenue by 2024, while actual revenue for that year came in $1.5 trillion higher. "CBO scores, when we're dealing with taxes, have lost credibility," Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin told reporters last week. But independent analysts say the unexpected revenue gains resulted from a post-COVID inflation surge that pushed households into higher tax brackets and other factors unrelated to the tax legislation. Top Republicans also claim that extending the 2017 tax cuts and adding new breaks included in the House bill will stimulate economic growth, raising tax revenues and paying for the bill. Despite similar arguments in 2017, CBO estimates the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act increased the federal deficit by just under $1.9 trillion over a decade, even when including positive economic effects. Economists say the impact of the current bill will be more muted, because most of the tax provisions extend current tax rates rather lowering rates. "We find the package as it currently exists does boost the economy, but relatively modestly ... it does not pay for itself," said William McBride, chief economist at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The legislation has also raised concerns among budget experts about a potential debt spiral. Maurice Obstfeld, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the danger of fiscal crisis has been heightened by a potential rise in global interest rates. "This greatly increases the cost of having a high debt and of running high deficits and would accelerate the point at which we really got into trouble," said Obstfeld, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Defying debt warnings, Republicans push forward on Trump tax agenda
By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are determined to enact his tax-cut agenda in a political push that has largely abandoned longtime party claims of fiscal discipline, by simply denying warnings that the measure will balloon the federal debt. The drive has drawn the ire of Elon Musk, a once-close Trump ally and the biggest donor to Republicans in the 2024 election, who gave a boost to a handful of party deficit hawks opposed to the bill by publicly denigrating it as a "disgusting abomination," opening a public feud with Trump. But top congressional Republicans remain determined to squeeze Trump's campaign promises through their narrow majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives by July 4, while shrugging off warnings from the official Congressional Budget Office and a host of outside economists and budget experts. "All the talk about how this bill is going to generate an increase in our deficit is absolutely wrong," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo told reporters after a meeting with Trump last week. Outside Washington, financial markets have raised red flags about the nation's rising debt, most notably when Moody's cut its pristine "Aaa" U.S. credit rating. The bill also aims to raise the government's self-imposed debt ceiling by up to $5 trillion, a step Congress must take by summer or risk a devastating default on $36.2 trillion in debt. "Debt and deficits don't seem to matter for the current Republican leadership, including the president of the United States," said Bill Hoagland, a former Senate Republican aide who worked on fiscal bills including the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. The few remaining Senate Republican fiscal hawks could be enough to block the bill's passage in a chamber the party controls 53-47. But some have appeared to be warming to the legislation, saying the spending cuts they seek may need to wait for future bills. "We need a couple bites of the apple here," said Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a prominent fiscal hardliner. Republicans who pledged fiscal responsibility in the 1990s secured a few years of budget surpluses under Democratic former President Bill Clinton. Deficits returned after Republican President George W. Bush's tax cuts and the debt has pushed higher since under Democratic and Republican administrations. "Thirty years have shown that it's a lot easier to talk about these things when you're out of power than to actually do something about them when you're in," said Jonathan Burks, who was a top aide to former House Speaker Paul Ryan when Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted into law in 2017. "Both parties have really pushed us in the wrong direction on the debt problem," he said. Burks and Hoagland are now on the staff of the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. DEBT SET TO DOUBLE Crapo's denial of the cost of the Trump bill came hours after CBO reported that the legislation the House passed by a single vote last month would add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. Interest costs would bring the full price tag to $3 trillion, it said. The cost will rise even higher - reaching $5 trillion over a decade - if Senate Republicans can persuade Trump to make the bill's temporary business tax breaks permanent, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The CRFB projects that if Senate Republicans get their way, Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act could drive the federal debt to $46.9 trillion in 2029, the end of Trump's term. That is more than double the $20.2 trillion debt level of Trump's first year at the White House in 2017. Majorities of Americans of both parties -- 72% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats -- said they were concerned about the growing government debt in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month. Analysts say voters worry less about debt than about retaining benefits such as Medicaid healthcare coverage for working Americans, who helped elect Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress. "Their concern is inflation," Hoagland said. "Their concern is affordability of healthcare." The two problems are linked: As investors worry about the nation's growing debt burden, they demand higher returns on government bonds, which likely means households will pay more for their home mortgages, auto loans and credit card balances. Republican denial of the deficit forecasts rests largely on two arguments about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that independent analysts say are misleading. One insists that CBO projections are not to be trusted because researchers predicted in 2018 that the TCJA would lose $1.8 trillion in revenue by 2024, while actual revenue for that year came in $1.5 trillion higher. "CBO scores, when we're dealing with taxes, have lost credibility," Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin told reporters last week. But independent analysts say the unexpected revenue gains resulted from a post-COVID inflation surge that pushed households into higher tax brackets and other factors unrelated to the tax legislation. Top Republicans also claim that extending the 2017 tax cuts and adding new breaks included in the House bill will stimulate economic growth, raising tax revenues and paying for the bill. Despite similar arguments in 2017, CBO estimates the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act increased the federal deficit by just under $1.9 trillion over a decade, even when including positive economic effects. Economists say the impact of the current bill will be more muted, because most of the tax provisions extend current tax rates rather lowering rates. "We find the package as it currently exists does boost the economy, but relatively modestly ... it does not pay for itself," said William McBride, chief economist at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The legislation has also raised concerns among budget experts about a potential debt spiral. Maurice Obstfeld, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the danger of fiscal crisis has been heightened by a potential rise in global interest rates. "This greatly increases the cost of having a high debt and of running high deficits and would accelerate the point at which we really got into trouble," said Obstfeld, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund. 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Geek Tyrant
08-06-2025
- Automotive
- Geek Tyrant
INDIANA JONES' Whip Goes Up For Auction and Could Fetch $500,000, But it Belongs in a Museum — GeekTyrant
Cue the John Williams fanfare and put on your fedora, Indiana Jones' iconic bullwhip from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade is hitting the auction block. And if you've got $500,000 just lying around, you might just be able to take it home. The whip is up for grabs through Propstore this September and it comes with the full rig, which includes holster, belt, and all. It was used by Harrison Ford in the 1989 Spielberg adventure film. The whip is an eight-foot beast crafted by David Morgan, 'the master whipmaker who supplied all the original whips for the classic Indiana Jones trilogy,' according to the auction house's press release. This particular set is the only known whip/holster/belt combo from the film in private hands, previously owned by an anonymous 'production source' who worked on The Last Crusade . It's never been up for sale before, and considering the provenance, it's unlikely to surface again anytime soon. The whip also carries some production tags linking it to the famous 'Rideaway Scene,' as well as a 'production-used call sheet' tied to the thrilling motorcycle chase filmed in Marin County, California. But that's not all—there's reason to believe it was used earlier in production during shoots in the UK and Spain as well. According to Propstore: 'The whip and holster remain secured by metal wire ties added by the props team to hold the set together. The whip also bears dark markings from previous bindings, consistent with how it was worn coiled on Indy's belt during filming.' Estimated to fetch between $250,000 and $500,000, this isn't exactly an impulse buy. But for the right collector, this is the kind of thing you don't stash on a shelf, you build an alter for it. Now, if you don't have that kind of money, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is swinging back onto the big screen for Father's Day weekend, courtesy of Fathom Events. Catch it June 14-15 and 18 in select theaters nationwide.
