Month: June 2022

The sulfer-coal-burning John E. Amos Power Plant in West Virginia. (credit: Cathy)

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case that will severely hamper the ability of the US to limit its carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. In an unusual move, the court kept a case alive that was focused on an emissions plan formulated by the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency—even though that plan was discarded and replaced by both the Trump and Biden administrations.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court determined that the EPA has only been granted the power to control emissions from existing facilities—it cannot force utilities to shift to different, cleaner-generating technologies. This will make it extremely difficult to use the Clean Air Act to compel a shift from coal to renewables, and it raises questions about whether the Clean Air Act can be used to set effective climate policy at all.

Twists and turns

The case is a product of a legal back-and-forth that started nearly two decades ago. During the Bush Administration, the EPA decided that the Clean Air Act did not give the agency the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. A number of states sued, and the case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the EPA's claim was incorrect: the Clean Air Act required it to determine whether greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to the US public.

Enlarge / In the new expansion pack The Delicious Last Course, Miss Chalice makes three. (credit: Studio MDHR)

Some people will look at an expansion pack like Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course and make up their minds after a single glance. This $8 add-on's beautiful brutality follows the same path as the original 2017 game Cuphead, a notoriously tough descendant of the Mega Man school of game design. Maybe you love playing games that are as beautiful as they are difficult. Maybe you don't.

I'm here to talk about Last Course because I might be a lot like you. I'm not Last Course's target audience. I never beat the original Cuphead. I have contended that a tough game like this is easier for me to watch than it is to play. But when I saw the expansion's hands-on demo at this month's Summer Game Fest Play Days, I shrugged my shoulders, grabbed a gamepad, and gave it a shot. Might as well occupy myself between other scheduled game demos, I thought.

And then I fell in love. For whatever reason, the demo I played, and my subsequent completion of Last Course's "normal" difficulty content, grabbed me and wouldn't let go—which is why I'm compelled to recommend picking it up.

Enlarge (credit: FT montage | Getty Images | Dreamstime)

Chinese university students have been lured to work at a secretive technology company that masked the true nature of their jobs: researching western targets for spying and translating hacked documents as part of Beijing’s industrial-scale intelligence regime.

The Financial Times has identified and contacted 140 potential translators, mostly recent graduates who have studied English at public universities in Hainan, Sichuan and Xi’an. They had responded to job adverts at Hainan Xiandun, a company that was located in the tropical southern island of Hainan.

The application process included translation tests on sensitive documents obtained from US government agencies and instructions to research individuals at Johns Hopkins University, a key intelligence target.