girlfreddy

The first teenage girl to be sentenced in the 2022 death of Toronto homeless man Kenneth Lee will not face any more time in custody and will instead spend time on probation while participating in a community-based program for young people with mental health issues.

The girl, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was 13 at the time of the December 18, 2022 attack in downtown Toronto, was credited for 15 months of effective pre-trial custody and will serve another 15 months of probation under an Intensive Support and Supervision Program, which is designed as an alternative to custody for youth who have been diagnosed with mental health disorders.

Justice David Stewart Rose says the sentence reflects that the teen has taken accountability for her actions by pleading guilty, and experienced institutional malfeasance while in custody, such as being forced to strip naked during searches.

Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed.

While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program.

The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch.

"There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

(Seeing as I already posted an AI-is-dangerous article, here's one that shows the benefits of AI.)

Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed.

While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program.

The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch.

"There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

As investors weigh OpenAI’s valuation, they might consider the humble paperclip. A cautionary tale about corporate profit maximizers building a robot that so excels in producing the office supply that it wipes out humanity might seem far-fetched. But a single-minded capitalist could make the economically rational decision to bear such a risk. As OpenAI races towards a fundraising that could value it at $150 billion, the implicit promise is that gains enormous enough to make that danger thinkable are on the horizon. That itself underscores the barriers to growth.

The paperclip story goes like this. One day, engineers at ACME Office Supplies unveil a hyper-sophisticated AI machine with one goal: produce as many paperclips as possible. The incomparable silicon intellect chases this task to the furthest extreme, converting every molecule on Earth into paperclips and promptly ending all life.

Profit-hungry OpenAI investors like Microsoft might be assumed, like ACME, to only value short-term gains, inviting the risk that they build their own Paperclip Maximizer. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, says that he is mindful of the risk. His company’s structure is meant to limit bad incentives, capping profit available to investors. Such protections are worth an asterisk now: a ceiling on profit was set in 2019 at a 100 times return for initial investors. OpenAI initially expected to lower it over time. Instead, the company's latest fundraising now hinges on changing that structure, including by removing the cap, Reuters reported.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's ruling Liberals, trailing badly in the polls, face a struggle on Monday to retain a once-safe seat in a special election where failure to win could boost calls for a new party leader.

The election in the Montreal parliamentary constituency of LaSalle—Emard—Verdun was called to replace a Liberal legislator who quit.

Normally Trudeau's party could count on an easy win there but surveys suggest the race is tight. If the Liberals lose, the focus will fall squarely on Trudeau, who has become increasingly unpopular after almost nine years in office.

Unusually, some Liberal legislators are breaking ranks to call for change at the top. Alexandra Mendes, a Liberal lawmaker who represents a Quebec constituency, said many of her constituents wanted Trudeau to go.

"I didn't hear it from two, three people - I heard it from dozens and dozens of people," she told public broadcaster Radio-Canada last week. "He's no longer the right leader."

Ukraine said on Monday it had asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to join humanitarian efforts in Russia's Kursk region following a cross-border incursion by Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine's army remains in the Kursk region more than a month after launching the assault, in which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Kyiv has taken control of about 100 settlements. Russia's Defence Ministry said on Monday its forces had regained control of two more villages.

"Ukraine is ready to facilitate their work and prove its adherence to international humanitarian law," (Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii) Sybiha said on X after visiting the Sumy region, from where Ukrainian forces launched the cross-borer attack.

The group that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to bar the consideration of race in college admissions is taking the U.S. Naval Academy to trial on Monday in an effort to end a carve-out that allows military academies to still employ affirmative action policies.

The nonjury trial before a federal judge in Baltimore stems from a lawsuit filed last year against the Annapolis, Maryland-based school by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by affirmative action foe Edward Blum.

His group wants to build on the June 2023 ruling in its favor by the 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court banning policies used by colleges and universities for decades to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on American campuses.

The year 2023 was by far the warmest in human history. Climate extremes now routinely shock in their intensity, with a direct monetary cost that borders on the unfathomable. Over $3 trillion (US) in damages to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health have already slammed the world economy this century, owing to extreme weather. That number will likely pale in comparison to what is coming. The World Economic Forum, hardly a hotbed of environmental activists, now reports that global damage from climate change will probably cost some $1.7 trillion to $3.1 trillion (US) per year by 2050, with the lion’s share of the damage borne by the poorest countries in the world.

And yet we fiddle.

In today’s Canada, there is deception, national in scope, coming directly from the right‑wing opposition benches in Ottawa. In 2023, the populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre adopted “Axe the tax” as his new mantra and has shaped his federal election campaign around that hackneyed rhyme.

Boeing bosses are staring down the barrel.

The twists and turns of the past week paint a picture of managers badly wrong-footed by the depth of fury among workers who tossed out a 25% pay rise deal and launched strike action.

"They probably didn't think that we had enough people for the strike," Kushal Varma, a Boeing mechanic, told Reuters. "But this is a movement of people who are willing to put their livelihoods on the line to get what's fair."

For three days, the staff of an Orlando medical clinic encouraged a woman with abdominal pain who called the triage line to go to the hospital. She resisted, scared of a 2023 Florida law that required hospitals to ask whether a patient was in the U.S. with legal permission.

The clinic had worked hard to explain the limits of the law, which was part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ sweeping package of tighter immigration policies. The clinic posted signs and counseled patients: They could decline to answer the question and still receive care. Individual, identifying information wouldn’t be reported to the state.

“We tried to explain this again and again and again, but the fear was real,” Grace Medical Home CEO Stephanie Garris said, adding the woman finally did go to an emergency room for treatment.

Former BBC news anchor Huw Edwards, once one of the most prominent media figures in Britain, was given a suspended prison sentence Monday for images of child sexual abuse on his phone.

Edwards, 63, pleaded guilty in Westminster Magistrates’ Court in July to three counts of making indecent images of children, a charge related to photos sent to him on the WhatsApp messaging service by a man convicted of distributing images of child sex abuse.

Edwards’ fall from grace over the past year has caused turmoil for the BBC after it was revealed the publicly funded broadcaster paid him about 200,000 pounds ($263,000) for five months of his salary after he had been arrested in November while on leave. The BBC has asked him to pay it back.

Lawyers for Washington state will have past grocery chain mergers – and their negative consequences – in mind when they go to court to block a proposed merger between Albertsons and Kroger.

The case is one of three challenging the $24.6 billion deal, which was announced nearly two years ago. The Federal Trade Commission is currently fighting the merger in federal court in Oregon, where closing arguments are expected Tuesday. Colorado has also sued to block the merger.

But if the merger goes through, Washington residents would feel the impact more than the people of any other state. Albertsons and Kroger own more than 300 grocery stores in the state and control more than half of grocery sales there.