DNREC Fines Delaware City Refinery $960K:
Environmental regulators in Delaware have fined the Delaware City Refinery $960,000 for releasing a toxic gas into the air for about three weeks in May.
The refinery in New Castle County released 745 tons of sulfur dioxide and more than 50 tons of oxides of nitrogen between May 7 and 30, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
The incident occurred when the refinery was repairing equipment designed to reduce pollution. It forced refinery operators to rely on secondary emission control methods that do not control sulfur dioxide. This switch caused the refinery to emit the air pollutants above permitted levels, according to DNREC’s notice.
Delaware City Refinery, owned by PBF Energy, has a long history of violations, having received more than 50 in the past 10 years.
The refinery has faced several mechanical failures that cause emissions. The facility released high levels of sulfur dioxide for 2 1/2 weeks last year when the facility undertook similar repairs.
A few months prior, Delaware City discharged high levels of carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide into the air for 10 hours after the same equipment failed.
Rogue DOJ Losing Hundreds Of Cases Alleging ‘Assault’ On ICE Agents:
The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.
“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”
With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.
In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:
In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.
Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.
Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.
In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.
Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.
The criminals are the DOJ and ICE. Case closed.
Which reminds me–look who’s taking up the cudgel of Trump’s election fraud allegations:
Markwayne Mullin, the US homeland security secretary, doubled down on Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated election claims on Friday amid his agency’s efforts to support the president’s agenda.
Trump used a review compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the basis of many of his unsubstantiated claims on Thursday during his televised primetime address to the nation.
“This isn’t about rehashing the 2020 election. This is just exposing what took place, and to make sure it never happens again,” Mullin said, after the president’s speech was widely criticized for revealing no new information about the safety and security of the US elections, despite claiming that system falls “catastrophically short” of “greatness”.
Throughout his press conference, Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding federal grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections.
“If they’re not willing to do it, it should raise serious questions. It’s not that hard. This isn’t a partisan issue,” the homeland security secretary said. The federal government has previously sought access to state voter rolls, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans. States have refused to turn the data over, resulting in a number of lawsuits the administration has lost.
Let’s not bury the lede–criminals are running this administration, and they’re trying to rig the midterms.
For all the attention given to improving model capabilities, the most important inputs to AI are not bits but atoms and electrons. To train and run its models, the AI industry needs to build. Data centers are incredibly complex technological and industrial operations—they require tech companies to erect power plants, build wastewater facilities, and set up all manner of electrical equipment, power lines, and advanced-cooling equipment. That calls for concrete, steel, silicon, glass, copper, and liquefied natural gas.
This data-center construction has long been frenzied, but now it is fast approaching an inflection point that is both awesome and alarming. The major players—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle—are on track to spend more on data centers by the end of the year than they bring in from their operations.
If anything, AI is poised to become even more like drilling an oil well. All the copper, silicon, electricity, and labor that go into building and running a data center are mustered to process and spit out “tokens”—in essence, words—that are the basic unit of AI.
By dominating the digital world, Silicon Valley has already exerted indirect control over the physical one. Today’s data-center build-out is a whole new beast. From the most concrete aspects—cooling, power, land—to the most abstract financial instruments, AI has morphed into a heavy industry.
What do you want to talk about?
