Intel has announced its plans to launch Wi-Fi 7, the next generation W-FI Standard that is set to replace the current Wi-Fi 6E with double the data processing speeds reaching 5.8Gbps, support for up to 36 Gbps when working with data and more stable 6GHz bandwidth.
“We are currently developing Intel’s Wi-Fi ‘802.11be’ in order to obtain the ‘Wi-Fi Alliance’ certification, and it will be installed in PC products such as laptops by 2024. We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025 ,” Said vice president of Intel’s wireless solutions division Eric McLaughlin.
In addition, Wi-Fi 7 is set to be future proof, as it will be built ready to support bandwidth of up to 7GHz once the Federal Communications Commission opens it up.
“Wi-Fi 7 almost doubles the frequency bandwidth of 802.11ax (170 MHz) to 320 MHz and doubles the speed of Wi-Fi. Since there is more than a year left before the release of 802.11be, there is still a chance that we could improve the processing speed even further,” he added.
Apple on the other hand, is prepping for an imminent rollout of Wi-Fi 6E across their devices, long after it first started appearing in devices in early 2021. It was expected to be featured on last year’s iPhone 13 but is instead expected to launch with the upcoming iPhone 14.
Despite being late to the party, Apple’s rollout of Wi-Fi 6E will provide users with a massive upgrade in Wi-Fi speed, with access to the 6GHz spectrum and an increases speed to 2.6GBps over 2GBps from Wi-Fi 6. Whilst not even close to the doubling upgrade provided by Wi-Fi 7, its sure to bolster the connection speeds of the iPhones.
Currently, most Wi-Fi routers use under 50% of their total capabilities due to bottlenecking from firewalls, having multiple users on the same network and more. With Wi-Fi 7, Intel hopes to change that, allowing users to enjoy clearer and faster gaming, media streaming and overall connectivity.
Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general’s office interfered with efforts to recover erased Secret Service texts from the time of the US Capitol attack and attempted to cover up their actions, two House committees said in a letter on Monday.
Taken together, the new revelations appear to show that the chief watchdog for the Secret Service and the DHS took deliberate steps to stop the retrieval of texts it knew were missing, and then sought to hide the fact that it had decided not to pursue that evidence. .
The inspector general’s office had initially sought to retrieve the lost texts from across the DHS – spanning both the Secret Service as well as the former DHS secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli – as part of its internal review into January 6.
But six weeks after the inspector general’s office first requested Secret Service communications from the time of the Capitol attack, that effort was shut down by Thomas Kait, the deputy inspector general for inspections and evaluations, the House committees said.
“Use this email as a reference to our conversation where I said we no longer request phone records and text messages from the USSS relating to the events on January 6th,” Kait wrote in a July 2021 email to a senior DHS liaison officer, Jim Crumpacker , that was obtained by Congress.
The House committees also disclosed they had learned that Kait and other senior officials manipulated a memo, authored on 4 February 2022, that originally criticized the DHS for refusing to cooperate with its investigation and emphasized the need to review certain texts.
By the time that Kait and other senior officials had finished with the memo, the House committee said, mentions about the erased texts from the Secret Service or the DHS secretary had been removed and instead praised the agency for its response to the internal review.
The memo went from being a stinging rebuke that said “most DHS components have not provided the requested information” to saying “we received a timely and consolidated response from each component”, the House committees said.
Appearing to acknowledge the removal of the damaging findings in the memo, Kait asked colleagues around that time: “Am I setting us up for anything by adding what I did? I spoke with Kristen late last week and she was ok with acknowledging the DAL’s efforts.”
The disclosures alarmed the House oversight committee chair, Carolyn Maloney, and House homeland security committee chair, Bennie Thompson – who also chairs the House January 6 committee – enough to demand that top DHS officials appear for transcribed interviews.
In the four-page letter, the two House committees again called for the recusal of the DHS inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, and demanded communications inside the inspector general’s office about not collecting or recovering texts from the agency relating to the Capitol attack.
The deepening investigation has also revealed that Cuffari’s office was notified in February 2022 that texts from Wolf and Cuccinelli could not be accessed and that Cuccinelli had been using a personal phone – yet never told Congress.
Kait has a history of removing damaging findings from reports. In a DHS report on domestic violence and sexual misconduct, Kait directed staff to remove a section that found officers accused of sexual offenses were charged with generic offenses, the New York Times reported.
The controversy over the missing texts erupted several weeks ago after Cuffari first informed Congress in mid-July that his department could not turn over Secret Service texts from the time of the Capitol attack because they had been erased as part of a device replacement program.
That prompted Thompson, through the House January 6 select committee, to issue a subpoena to the Secret Service for texts from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack as it examined how the agency intended to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence on January 6 .
But the Secret Service provided only one text exchange to the select committee, the Guardian has previously reported, telling investigators that every other message had been wiped after personnel failed to back up data from the devices when they were swapped out.
Chinese police will be invited to Solomon Islands to provide training in management and leadership to senior officers, under the new security deal signed between the two countries.
Michael Aluvolomo, the transnational crime unit inspector for the Royal Solomon Islands police force, also did not rule out having Chinese police officers embedded within the force, saying it was up to the government to determine whether that was appropriate.
“China is new to us. There are plans with our commissioner on how we can strengthen our police activity. Now, they are very much focused on our capacity building in terms of our management and leadership,” said Aluvolomo, who was speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of the Pacific regional law enforcement conference in Fiji.
When asked whether there would be Chinese law enforcement officers embedded in the Royal Solomon Islands police, Aluvolomo said this was yet to be confirmed but insisted Solomon Islanders had nothing to fear.
“It is for the government of the day to accept Chinese police working within our local police. For the time, there [are] no Chinese police working with us but they are coming with a program on capacity development,” he said.
Last month, in his first interview since signing the controversial security deal with China, Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare told the Guardian that there would be no Chinese military base in his country as it would make Solomon Islands an “enemy” and “put our country and our people as targets for potential military strikes”.
Sogavare said that while Australia remains the “security partner of choice” for Solomon Islands, he would call on China to send security personnel to the country if there was a “gap” that Australia could not meet.
Aluvolomo said that Solomon Islanders with concerns about China’s presence in the country should communicate that with the government.
“The public should work along with us and provide us with much information so that we can build on that and come in to create inclusive intelligence information.”
The Pacific regional law enforcement conference, currently under way in Nadi, is organized by the Australian National University’s Australia Pacific Security College and is an attempt to create networks to help Pacific law enforcement deal with drug trafficking and other transnational crimes, which present an increasing problem for Pacific countries.
While there is existing regional security architecture to combat transnational crime, including through the Pacific Island Chiefs of Police, which is made up of 21 members including Australia and New Zealand, there are concerns that China’s increased focus on the Pacific could disrupt or undermine these security arrangements.
In May, China presented a sweeping economic and security deal to 10 Pacific countries that would have seen increased ties between them, including in the area of policing.
The China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision draft document, which was rejected by Pacific countries, proposed to “expand law enforcement cooperation, jointly combat transnational crime and establish a dialogue mechanism on law enforcement capacity and police cooperation”.
China proposed to hold “intermediate and high-level police training” for Pacific island countries and as a matter of urgency to “hold the first China-Pacific islands countries ministerial dialogue on law enforcement capacity and police cooperation”, as well as helping to construct laboratories for fingerprint testing, forensic autopsy, drugs, electronic and digital forensics.
Ewen McDonald, the head of the Pacific Office in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told the security conference on Monday that increased geopolitical tensions in the region representeda “strategic challenge” for law enforcement.
“Increasing external interest in the Pacific will bring benefits but also challenges to our hard-earned interoperability, our shared doctrine and our Pacific way of conducting law enforcement operations,” he said.
“At no time has a strong, unified [Pacific Islands] Forum been more important in addressing the threats and challenges we face together.”
Georgia taxpayers can now list embryos as dependents on their tax returns.
In a news release on Monday, Georgia’s department of revenue said it would begin to “recognize any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat … as eligible for [an] individual income tax dependent exemption”.
The announcement follows the supreme court’s ruling on June 24 that overturned the landmark Roe v Wade ruling that established the nationwide right to an abortion nearly 50 years earlier. A lower federal appellate court had also decided on July 20 to let the Georgia law banning most abortions in the state take effect.
Officials added that taxpayers filing returns from 20 July onward can claim a deduction of up to $3,000 for any fetus whose heartbeat could be detected. That “may occur as early as six weeks’ gestation”, before most women even know they are pregnant, the statement said.
Taxpayers must be ready to provide “relevant medical records or other supporting documentation … if requested by the [revenue] department”.
Legal analysts and advocates for abortion rights greeted the announcement with dismay and skepticism.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor and political scientist, tweeted that some pregnancies detected within six weeks of gestation “result in natural miscarriages”, which could leave the Georgia’s treasury “handing out a lot of cash for pregnancies that would never come to finish.”
And given how high the percentage of pregnancies that result in natural miscarriages, the treasury is going to be handing out a lot of cash for pregnancies that would never come to term. (That might be good public health policy though it may be a lot more money than anticipated.)
Lauren Groh-Wargo, manager of Stacey Abrams’s campaign for Georgia governor, tweeted: “So what happens when you claim your fetus as a dependent and then miscarry later in the pregnancy, you get investigated both for [possible] tax fraud and an illegal abortion?”
The Georgia revenue department’s announcement Monday came less than a month after a pregnant woman in Texas memorably argued to police that her unborn child should count as an additional passenger upon receiving a traffic ticket for driving alone in a high-occupancy – or HOV – lane. The woman did not talk her way out of the ticket but she has said she plans to go to court to try out her argument there.
More than half the states in America have either banned or are expected to ban abortion after the supreme court returned regulation of abortion to the state level. Bans like Georgia’s have forced patients seeking abortions to travel hundreds of thousands from home, at times placing them, their friends, their families and abortion rights organizations in legal jeopardy as some states seek to criminalize helping people terminate pregnancies.
A father of two is suing one of Australia’s biggest engineered stone manufacturers after contracting the deadly lung disease silicosis.
Nic Lardieri loved his job as a stonemason, when he helped manufacture kitchen and bathroom benchtops made from engineered stone.
But now the 38-year-old is suffering from the life-limiting lung disease silicosis. It’s caused by inhaling silica dust, which is released during stone cutting and drilling.
The 38-year-old is suffering from the life-limiting lung disease silicosis. (9News)
“I guess it’s hard for the family, you know, you try to be as strong as you can,” Lardieri said.
“There was no protocol, no one came out to talk to us, to tell us you know this stuff is harmful.”
Shine Lawyers’ Dust Diseases National Special Counsel Roger Singh is seeking compensation on Lardieri’s behalf.
The claim, lodged in the Victorian Supreme Court, lists several of Lardieri’s former employers and major engineered stone benchtop manufacturer Caesarstone.
Nic Lardieri loved his job as a stonemason, when he helped manufacture kitchen and bathroom benchtops made from engineered stone. (9News)
“Silicosis is an irreparable lung disease which can be terminal,” Singh said.
“It’s our view that Caesarstone knew – ought to have known – about the deadly product.”
Last year, there were more than 400 silicosis claims by Australian tradies against various companies.
“I just wish I could have my health back and live a normal life and do the normal things, kicking a footy and that sort of stuff,” Lardieri said.
By his own admission, Adam Hollier is not the kind of guy you want to have a beer with.
“You remember when George W. Bush was running and they were like, ‘He’s the kind of guy you want to have a beer with?’” he told me, by way of explaining his personality. “No one wants to have a beer with me.”
Why not, I asked?
“I’m not fun,” he said. “I’m the friend who calls you to move a heavy couch. I’m the friend you call when you’re stuck on the side of the road. Right? Like, I’m the friend you call when you need a designated driver.”
He repeated it again, in case I didn’t get it the first time: “I am not fun.”
Hollier, 36, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Michigan’s newly redrawn 13th Congressional District, which includes Detroit and Hamtramck, is a whirlwind of perpetual motion. A captain and paratrooper in the Army Reserves, he ran track and played safety at Cornell University despite being just 5-foot-9. After a fellowship with AmeriCorps, I have earned a graduate degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan.
Hollier’s brother, who is 11 years older, is 6-foot-5. His eldest sister of him is a federal investigator for the US Postal Service who went to the University of Michigan on a basketball and water polo scholarship.
“I grew up in a household of talent. And I don’t really have much of it,” Hollier said with self-effacing modesty. “My little sister is an incredible musician and singer and, you know, she has done all of those things. I can barely clap on beat.”
Hollier is running — when I spoke with him, he was quite literally doing so to drop his daughters off at day care — to replace Representative Brenda Lawrence, a four-term congresswoman who announced her retirement early this year.
Her district, before a nonpartisan commission remapped boundaries that were widely seen as unfairly tilted toward Republicans, was one of the most heavily gerrymandered in the country, a salamander-like swath of land that snaked from Pontiac in the northwest across northern Detroit to the upscale suburb of Grosse Pointe on Lake St. Clair, then southward down the river toward River Rouge and Dearborn.
Defying the odds, Hollier has racked up endorsement after endorsement by doing what he’s always done — outworking everybody else.
Early on, Lawrence endorsed Portia Roberson, a lawyer and nonprofit leader from Detroit, but she has failed to gain traction. In March, the Legacy Committee for Unified Leadership, a local coalition of Black leaders run by Warren Evans, the Wayne County executive, endorsed Hollier instead.
In late June, so did Mike Duggan, the city’s mayor. State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a fellow parent and a newfound political celebrity, backed him in May. A video announcing her endorsement of her shows Hollier wearing a neon vest and pushing a double jogging stroller.
Hollier’s main opponent in the Democratic primary, Shri Thanedar, is a self-financing state lawmaker who previously ran for governor in 2018 and came in third place in the party’s primary behind Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul El-Sayed. His autobiography of him, “The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in an Immigrant’s Life,” originally written in Marathi, tells the story of his rise from lower-class origins in India to his success of him as an entrepreneur in the United States.
A wealthy former engineer, Thanedar now owns Avomeen Analytical Services, a chemical testing laboratory in Ann Arbor. He has spent at least $8 million of his own money on the race so far, according to campaign finance reports.
Pro-Israel groups, worried about his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have backed Hollier, as have veterans’ groups and two super PACs backed by cryptocurrency donors. The outside spending has allowed Hollier to compensate for Thanedar’s TV ad spending, which dwarfs his own.
A firefighter’s son who couldn’t become a firefighter
The son of a social worker and a firefighter, Hollier recalls his father sitting him down when he was 8 years old and telling him he must never follow in his footsteps.
Asked why, his father replied, “You don’t have that little bit of healthy fear that brings you home at night.”
The comment stunned the young Hollier, who still considers his father, who ran the Detroit Fire Department’s hazardous material response team and retired as a captain after serving on the force for nearly 30 years, his own personal superhero.
“And that’s a weird experience,” Hollier said. “Because, you know, at Career Day, nothing trumps firefighter except astronaut. Every kid’s dad is their hero, but my dad is, you know, objectively” — objectivelyhe said again, emphasizing the word — “in that space.”
When he was 10 years old, in 1995, he persuaded his father to take him to the Million Man March in Washington, a gathering on the National Mall that was aimed at highlighting the challenges of growing up Black and male in America. They went to the top of the Washington Monument, where young Adam insisted on taking a photograph to get a more accurate sense of the crowd size.
His parents were not political “at all,” he said — he notes that when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Detroit just ahead of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, his father went to a baseball game instead.
Years later, Hollier admitted sheepishly, he did rebel against his father — by becoming a volunteer firefighter in college.
Hollier says he’s most proud of scrambling to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office in the State Senate.Credit…Emily Elconin for The New York Times
Early interest in politics
Hollier was very much a political animal from a young age, he acknowledged.
“I know it’s in vogue for people to say they never thought they would run for office, but I always knew I was, right?” he said. “Like, I was always involved in the thing.”
That same day in Washington, for instance, he met Dennis Archer, the mayor of Detroit at the time, who told him he should “think about doing what I do” someday — a heady experience for a 10-year-old. He took the advice to heart, winning his first race for student council president in high school.
Hollier’s first official job in politics was in 2004, working as an aid to Buzz Thomas, a now-retired state senator who considers his political mentor. Hollier lost a race for the State House in 2014 to the incumbent then, Rose Mary Robinson. In 2018, he was elected to the State Senate, where he worked on an auto insurance overhaul and lead pipe removal.
But the achievement he’s most proud of, he said, is scrambling to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office. In a panic, he called Archer, who gave him a list of 10 things to do immediately.
One of the top items on Archer’s list was tracking down former Senator Carl Levin, a longtime friend of labor unions who had recently retired, and whom he’d never met.
Don’t accept that GM would close the plant, Levin told him when they spoke.
“They’re not going to produce the vehicles that they produce there right now,” Hollier recounted Levin saying. “But you’re fighting for the next product line.”
Hollier took that advice to heart, and worked with a coalition of others to steer GM toward a different solution. The site is now known as Factory Zero, the company’s first plant dedicated entirely to electric vehicles.
Motivations and milestones
If Hollier loses, Michigan is likely to have no Black members of Congress for the first time in seven decades.
When I ask him what that means to him, he jumps into an impassioned speech about how important it is for Black Americans, and for young Black men in particular, to have positive role models. It’s one I suspect he has been giving some version of him for his entire life in politics.
Growing up in north Detroit, Hollier often ran into his own representative, John Conyers, the longest serving African-American member of Congress. Conyers, who died in 2019 at age 90, was known for walking every nook and cranny of his district.
But when Hollier knocked on his first door the first time he ran for office, the woman who opened it asked him, “Are you going to disappoint me like Kwame?” — a reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced former mayor of Detroit.
That experience sobered him about running for office as a Black man in Detroit, a highly segregated city where Black men are disproportionally likely to end up jobless or in prison. But it also motivates him to prove the woman wrong.
On his 25th birthday, Hollier recalled going to pick up some food from a store near his parents’ house. Told about the milestone, the man behind the counter replied: “Congratulations. Not everybody makes it.”
With just one day left before the primary, Hollier has spent 760 hours asking for donations over the phone, raising more than $1 million. His campaign says it has made 300,000 phone calls and knocked on 40,000 doors — double, he tells me with pride, what Representative Rashida Tlaib was able to do in the district next door.
But when I asked him if he would be at peace if he lost, he confessed, “That’s a tough one.”
He paused for a moment, then said, “I feel strongly that I’ve done everything I could have done.”
what to read
Republican missteps, weak candidates and fund-raising woes are handing Democrats unexpected opportunities in races for governor this year, Jonathan Martin writes.
Sheera Frenkel reports on a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues.
Madison Underwood, a 22-year-old woman from Tennessee, was thrilled to learn she was pregnant. But when a rare defect in the developing fetus threatened her life from her, she was thrust into post-Roe chaos. Neelam Bohra has the story.
—Blake
Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected].
By now, everyone who regularly visits the Gear section of powerup! knows that I am a huge sucker for big, beautiful, color-accurate ultrawide gaming monitors. Not only that, but MSI has previously impressed me with a Quantum Dot monitor that comfortably sits at my top spot for a 4K gaming monitor. So it’s somewhat surprising to me that I’ve been struggling to endorse the MSI MPG Artymis 343CQR.
Retailing for $999, it sits on the higher tier of mid-range ultrawides and the question I had going into this review is whether its worth it. That money gets you an ultrawide 34-inch Curved VA panel with 165Hz refresh, 1ms response time with HDR, 8-bit wide color gamut and all the essential gaming features.
However, after living with one for the past few weeks and playing a ton of different games plus some content creation work, I confess I am not as enamored with the value proposition of the Artymis 343CQR. After using MSI’s own do-it-all Optix MPG321QRF-QD and Alienware’s exceptional QD-OLED Ultrawide, this monitor just feels like something from a by-gone era. Let’s get into it.
MSI MPG Artymis 343CQR Review
The Artymis 343CQR is subtle in it’s design choices and looking at it from the front wouldn’t tell you it’s a gaming monitor. The large and curved 34-inch panel is the think that quickly brings us back to reality. On the back is an MSI Mystic light strip and Dragon logo which are more for aesthetic than ambient lighting for your setup. The only other color on the back comes from a bright, cherry red joystick nub which is used for navigating the OSD menu.
The stand looks sharp and aggressive thanks to its angled metallic legs that taper off to the front. The legs to take up a good chunk of space but you can always put your accessories or IKEA desk plants in between them. The stand is sturdy and offers the usual range of height, swivel and tilt adjustment and I didn’t get any monitor wobble from my typing. There’s a cubbyhole for cable management at the base of the stand as well.
Those cables will plug into the many I/O ports on the back of the Artymis 343CQR. There’s a DisplayPort, two HDMI 2.0 and a USB Type-C which is great for laptop connections. The lack of HDMI 2.1 can be forgiven due to consoles lack of support of 21:9 aspect ratio. The Artymis has also has two USB 3.2 Type-A ports powered by a Type-B upstream. Given its size, I’d have liked extra USB ports on the bottom or side for ease of access and a KVM switch so I can use the same peripherals between my PC and MacBook.
Panel and performance
The Artymis 343CQR uses a 34-inch Curved VA panel which is great for fast paced gaming thanks to it’s high 165Hz refresh and 1ms response time. Running the UFO Test, the Artymis 343CQR showed a little bit of ghosting which was unexpected for 165Hz refresh. However, I never experienced any ghosting while playing games at even higher framerates than the native.
Using a supplied MSI Trident X with an RTX 3080Ti, games like Wolfenstein Youngblood and Doom Eternal easily exceeded the maximum refresh and yet the monitor handled motion with clarity and smoothness. The Artymis 343CQR supports AMD FreeSync Premium which worked just fine with the NVIDIA card nonetheless.
Colors on Artymis 343CQR are saturated, punchy and vibrant which looks great in games. However, outside of games, it’s not great and I had to play around with the different presets to dial in something that looked more realistic and accurate. The situation is particularly worse when in HDR mode where white balance is off giving whites a brownish tint.
The OSD doesn’t offer any tools to adjust the HDR picture which is a bummer. However, things are better in SDR mode with controls for contrast and color balance as well as several presets for both gaming genres and professional work. I found the sRGB mode to work best for color accuracy though still not 100%.
Additionally, because the Artymis 343CQR uses an edge lit backlight, there really isn’t much in the way of local dimming to do proper HDR but while playing certain games, the HDR did have a positive impact on the visuals. Assassins Creed Origins dark interiors lit by candles and lamps was a clear example where HDR helped. The contrast in SDR is much better though with deeper blacks and whiter whites so avoid using HDR for non-gaming purposes. Again, after using the QD panel on the MSI Optix MPG321QRF-QD or the Alienware QD-OLED, this one really pales in comparison.
The 3440 x 1440 resolution is perfect for high resolution, high frame rate, immersive gaming. It’s a lot easier than 4K for most graphics cards to handle at high settings with good frame rates and my favorite way to play. With the RTX 3080 Ti, I was easily hitting getting over 100fps in vast majority of games at the highest settings which made everything look and feel wonderful. The panel’s 1000R curve is noticeable but not aggressive and seeing all corners of the display is easy which is important for seeing your HUD in games. The only downside to having a 21:9 aspect ultrawide is the pillar-boxing when you attach a games console.
I find this really immersion breaking but you can still absolutely do it. Games will run at a maximum of 2560 x 1440p at 120Hz which the Xbox Series X|S can output but for the PlayStation 5, the Artymis 343CQR automatically down samples the 4K input to 2K so you can still play games at fake 4K resolution. Alternatively, you could just use the Picture-in-Picture or Picture-by-Picture modes and split the display between two outputs in a 4:3 aspect ratio. That can be handy for a number of use cases.
Outside of gaming, the large screen estate is also perfect for multitasking with plenty of space for several full or half size windows in your different apps of choice. The pin sharp resolution means text is always clear and using things like Adobe Premier allows you to easily see your whole video timeline. Ultrawides are just so much better for more things.
Should you buy it?
At this point in 2022, I’d say no. The MSI MPG Artymis 343CQR is a good ultrawide that has since been outpaced by newer monitors that have come out this year. The Alienware QD-OLED has radically redefined our expectations of a high-end ultrawide gaming monitor and this older offering from MSI just can’t match. It’s fine by it’s own right but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
At $1000, you can get much better value for your money with something like the Gigabyte G34WQC or the Prismplus XQ340 Pro which cost several hundred less. I’m excited to see how MSI is going to refresh its monitor line very soon in answer to the competition; hopefully we’ll see a QD-OLED ultrawide with HDMI 2.1 and a KVM switch. Until then, save your money.
NRL match review committee members spent almost an hour deliberating over a Nelson Asofa-Solomona tackle before concluding the Melbourne prop had no case to answer.
The panel’s boss, Luke Patten, described any contact with Warriors hooker Wayde Egan as “possibly minor”.
Asofa-Solomona’s failure to attract a charge for an apparent forearm to the face and neck region of Egan sparked incredulity from some commentators, including Immortal Andrew Johns. “Look, I back the players all the time, and I don’t apologize for that but to me, that’s four months’ suspension,” Johns said on Nine’s Sunday Footy Show.
Patten took the unusual step of recording a video on Monday to explain how the panel had arrived at its decision not to charge Asofa-Solomona.
According to sources familiar with the situation, Patten and his fellow match review members agonized over the tackle for 45 minutes before deciding not to issue a further sanction against Asofa-Solomona, one of the most charged players in the game.
The NRL said it had clearer vision of Roosters enforcer Jared Waerea-Hargreaves’ elbow into Manly debutant Zac Fulton, which resulted in the Kiwi international being fined, as opposed to the camera angles of Asofa-Solomona’s tackle on Egan.
Nelson Asofa-Solomona escaped charge from the match review committee.Credit:Getty
Patten said the match review committee was comfortable Asofa-Solomona was trying to create space between himself and the ball carrier to avoid a crusher tackle, and decided against classifying the incident as a head slam.
A replay appeared to show Asofa-Solomona forcefully dropping his forearm onto the chin of Egan, who left the field with what he later said was two cracked teeth, despite initial fears he had broken his jaw.
“This historic legislation makes crucial investments in energy, health care, and in shoring up the nation’s tax system. These investments will fight inflation and lower costs for American families while setting the stage for strong, stable, and broadly-shared long-term economic growth,” 126 economists said in a letter sent to congressional leadership Tuesday, which was first obtained by CNN.
The letter was signed by key economists including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Obama Labor Department chief economist Betsey Stevenson, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf, and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, among others.
“This started to come together late last week with some of the signatories connecting with each other to discuss how they could highlight the economic value of the bill and push back on some of the economic disinformation surrounding it,” a familiar source said of the letter .
The economists touted the bill’s historic $369 billion investments in combating the climate crisis and, they wrote, it will “quickly and notably bring down health care costs for families” by allowing Medicare to negotiate certain prescription drug prices, along with extensions to expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Those investments, the group wrote, “would be more than fully paid for,” pointing to its provision to impose a 15% minimum tax on certain corporations.
“This proposal addresses some of the country’s biggest challenges at a significant scale. And because it is deficit-reducing, it does so while putting downward pressure on inflation,” the economists said.
That relief comes as prices continue to rise, with inflation hitting 40-year highs. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that inflation surged to a pandemic-era peak in June, with US consumer prices jumping by 9.1% year-over-year.
The bill, which was negotiated by moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, is currently undergoing a technical process with the Senate parliamentarian known as the “Byrd Bath,” a test designed to keep out extraneous provisions from legislation using the reconciliation process. Once the legislation has gone through that process, Democrats should be able to pass the bill with a simple majority. It remains to be seen, however, whether key holdout Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a moderate Democrat from Arizona, will vote with her party on the legislation.
Schumer said Monday he expects the parliamentarian’s process to be complete and for the Senate to vote on the bill this week ahead of the August recess.
“This week the Senate will take action on a groundbreaking piece of legislation, one that we haven’t seen in decades,” he said on the Senate floor. “Over the coming days, both sides will continue conversations with the parliamentarian in order to move forward the bipartisan ‘Byrd bath’ process. Our timeline has not changed, and I expect to bring this legislation to the Senate floor to begin voting this week. “
Some economists have said the legislation would do little to curb rapidly rising prices, particularly in the short term. Moody’s Analytics estimates that the legislation would have a “small” impact on inflation, and the Penn Wharton Budget Model also indicated it would have little impact on prices.
And Senate Republicans opposed to the legislation are pointing to an analysis from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which said the bill would raise taxes on Americans.
Kimberly Clausing, one of the signers of the letter and an economist at the UCLA School of Law, disputed the JCT’s analysis, suggesting in a tweet that it was incomplete.
“Many key factors are left out in these tables including, importantly, the effects of deficit reduction, the positive effects of the spending on clean energy, and the benefits from lower drug prices,” Clausing wrote.
CNN’s Tami Luhby, Matthew Egan, and Ali Zaslav contributed to this report.
The only way that a recent report about the Pixel 6a could be more surprising would be if someone said their new phone refused to take photographs at concerts and parades.
9to5Google says it has come across accounts in which owners of Google’s new Pixel 6a allow any fingerprint to open their phone.
The trade publication is not making too much out of this; they have only found eight reports. It is eight out of tens of thousands of reports. Of course, new phones have more niggling problems than those that are a generation old and biometric systems can break. Or, saints preserve us, the Internet could be lying to us.
But this is like a flip phone that would not flip or an iPhone 15 years ago that would not perform the illusion that you were pouring a beer into your mouth.
Biometric scanning is table stakes, and it is the only way a lot of people know how to secure their phones. If this is the type of a hardware iceberg, Google is headed for a tough quarter. But even if it is a software problem, company providers now supplying phones to employees will have to do (another) risk assessment.
Here is what is being reported by 9to5Google: At least two of the reports are from India, others are surfacing on Reddit.
The trade publication’s editors could not replicate the problem and “you either have it or don’t,” which means it does not happen after a fall.
If you hand your phone to a stranger and they are able to get in, immediately switch to PIN or password unlock.
The biometric sensor was changed by Google for the Pixel 6a, away from a Goodix sensor, 9to5Google previously reported, after reports of slow operation.
