Littler, who won the Grand Slam of Darts last week, hit checkouts of 170, 164 and 136 as he threatened to overturn an early deficit, but Humphries held his nerve to win the last three legs. “I’m really, really proud of that one to be honest,” Humphries told Sky Sports. FOR THE SECOND TIME 🏆🏆 Luke Humphries retains his 2024 Ladbrokes Players Championship Finals title, beating Luke Littler 11-7 in the final. pic.twitter.com/QUhxvSbGeu — PDC Darts (@OfficialPDC) November 24, 2024 “I didn’t feel myself this week playing-wise, I felt like I was a dart behind in a lot of the scenarios but there’s something that Luke does to you. He really drives me, makes me want to be a better player and I enjoy playing him. “He let me in really early in that first session to go 4-1 up, I never looked back and I’m proud that I didn’t take my foot off the gas. These big games are what I live for. “Luke is a special talent and he was right – I said to him I’ve got to get these (titles) early before he wins them all. “I’d love to be up here and hitting 105 averages like Luke is all the time but he’s a different calibre, he’s probably the best player in the world right now but there’s something about me that never gives up. “This is a great way to go into the worlds.” HUMPHRIES GOES BACK-TO-BACK! 🏆 Luke Humphries retains his Players Championship Finals title! Cool Hand puts on an absolute clinic to defeat Luke Littler 11-7 in an epic final! 📺 https://t.co/AmuG0PMn18 #PCF2024 | Final pic.twitter.com/nZDWPUVjWE — PDC Darts (@OfficialPDC) November 24, 2024 Littler, who lost the world championship final to Humphries last year, said: “It was tough, missed a few doubles and if you don’t take chances early on, it’s a lot to come back. “I hit the 170 and the 164 but just didn’t have enough in the end. “It’s been a good past two weeks. I just can’t wait to go home, chill out, obviously practice at home for the worlds. That’s it now, leading up to the big one.”
(The Center Square) – The University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents has recommended a number of new and revised policies for its institutions, such as a commitment to institutional neutrality, the prohibiting of DEI tactics, and a mandatory education in America’s founding documents. The University System of Georgia (USG) is made up of Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities as well as Georgia Archives and the Georgia Public Library Service. “USG institutions shall remain neutral on social and political issues unless such an issue is directly related to the institution’s core mission,” the board’s proposed revisions read. “Ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths, including diversity statements,” will be banned from admissions processes and decisions, employment processes and decisions, and institution orientation and training for both students and employees. “No applicant for admission shall be asked to or required to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about political beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles, as a condition for admission,” the new policy states. Additionally, USG will hire based on a person’s qualifications and ability. “The basis and determining factor” for employment will be “that the individual possesses the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities associated with the role, and is believed to have the ability to successfully perform the essential functions, responsibilities, and duties associated with the position for which the individual is being considered.” Beginning in the 2025-2026 academic year, the school’s civic instruction will require students to study founding American documents among other things. USG students will learn from the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, as well as the Georgia Constitution and Bill of Rights. When reached for comment, the Board of Regents told The Center Square that “these proposed updates strengthen USG’s academic communities.” The recommended policies allow a campus environment “where people have the freedom to share their thoughts and learn from one another through objective scholarship and inquiry,” and “reflect an unyielding obligation to protect freedom, provide quality higher education and promote student success,” the board said. The board told The Center Square that it proposed strengthening “the requirements for civics instruction” with the inclusion of “foundational primary sources” because of higher education’s duty to students. Colleges and universities “must prepare [students] to be contributing members of society and to understand the ideals of freedom and democracy that make America so exceptional,” the board said. As for ditching DEI, the board explained that “equal opportunity and decisions based on merit are fundamental values of USG.” “The proposed revisions among other things would make clear that student admissions and employee hiring should be based on a person’s qualifications, not his or her beliefs,” the board said. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER The Board of Regents also said it wants to “ensure [its] institutions remain neutral on social and political issues while modeling what it looks like to promote viewpoint diversity, create campus cultures where students and faculty engage in civil discourse, and the open exchange of ideas is the norm.” USG’s Board of Regents recently urged the NCAA to ban transgender-identifying men from participating in women’s sports, in line with the NAIA rules, The Center Square previously reported.
Frank Roche (68) sexually abused the victim as a child while she was minding his young son Stock image A man who engaged in “demeaning and humiliating behaviour” when he sexually abused a teenage girl over 30 years ago has been jailed. Frank Roche (68) sexually abused the victim as a child while she was minding his young son. The abuse involved the man touching the girl’s breasts, vagina and performing oral sex on her. Linda Travers (45) has waived her right to anonymity to allow for Roche to be identified in reporting of the case. Roche of Warrenstown Green, Blanchardstown Heath, Dublin 15 pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to six charges of sexual assault of Ms Travers who was aged between 12 and 14 years old in his home on dates between September 1992 and September 1994. Roche regularly cornered the girl in his home as she was leaving a room or in a hallway before molesting her. On one occasion, he sexually abused her in his son’s bedroom, while on another occasion, he sexually abused her in a car that his wife was driving. Ms Travers was sitting on the man’s lap as there was not enough room in the car because his son, mother-in-law and another teenage girl were in the car with them at the time. Imposing sentence on Thursday, Ms Justice Karen O'Connor said there would be a consecutive element to sentencing due to the “extraordinary” circumstances of this case. She noted that Roche engaged in controlling behaviour, that the offending started at a “high level of gravity” from which it escalated and “humiliation was visited on this child”. The judge noted this was historic offending, which occurred over 30 years ago and that the court “must abide by the parameters in legislation at that time”, which had a maximum penalty of five years. Ms Justice O'Connor noted the offence of sexual assault of a child now carries a maximum penalty of 14 years. She said the court was bound by the law in place at the time of the offending but added that if the most serious of the offences committed in this case had occurred today, she would set a headline sentence of 14 years. Ms Justice O'Connor imposed a global sentence of six years and nine months, with the final nine months suspended for one year on strict conditions, including that Roche has no unsupervised access to children. She backdated the sentence to October 7 last when the man went into custody. The judge said the aggravating features include the “massive breach of trust”, the age disparity, the duration of the abuse and the significant impact on the victim. She noted that Roche was in a position of authority and “should have been protecting the child, rather than abusing” her. Ms Justice O'Connor said another aggravating feature was that Roche showed the victim pornography, which was “abhorrent” and abusive towards the child. She said the abuse was aggressive and rough in nature, and that Roche engaged in “humiliating and demeaning behaviour” towards the victim Ms Justice O'Connor said the court had taken into consideration the man's guilty pleas, his health issues and work history as mitigating factors. Det Gda Tom Hughes told Gerardine Small SC, prosecuting at an earlier hearing that Ms Travers reported the abuse to gardaí in July 2022. When Roche was interviewed a number of months later, he told gardaí he believed Ms Travers was older and that she was consenting to the activity. Ms Travers said in her victim impact statement that Roche took away her childhood and stole her innocence. She said he also took away her choice as to when and where she would have her first sexual experience. “You abused me for over two years, abused me while minding your son. You groomed me and breached my trust – you physically restrained me,” Ms Travers continued. “You made me ashamed of who I was – ate away at my confidence. You didn’t seem to care who was around,” Ms Travers said before she referred to the fact that the man had made her watch pornography. She said the abuse has affected all aspects of her life, and she has had “constant issues” with her health. She said she is plagued with anxiety and panic attacks and has missed out on simple things in life, like nights out, family dinners and going to the cinema. Ms Travers said she was afraid to tell anyone because she was worried that she had done something to make Roche abuse her. “You made me question my trust in others. You made me feel dirty and ashamed of who I was,” she said. Ms Travers said that the abuse has affected her life as a mother to her children because she is afraid to leave them alone. “I reported the abuse for myself to hopefully be one day at peace. I reported it for my children,” she continued, adding that she wanted them to grow up confident and not to be afraid to stand up for themselves. Ms Travers said she knew that with the help of the garda and the charity One in Four, she would get through things. She said she was in court “not as a victim but as a survivor”. Ms Justice O'Connor thanked Ms Travers for her courage in delivering her victim impact statement in person, telling her, “You are helping other little children who don’t have the voice at this stage to make a complaint”. She told Ms Travers, “I know this is very painful for you and very triggering. You have to know there are other children that haven’t the voice at this stage to make a complaint, but at least they will know they are not alone.” “Their voices are taken away from them – eventually, they will hopefully find the voice to come forward,” the judge continued. Eoghan Cole SC, defending, said his client wished to offer an apology to Ms Travers and to indicate he is “deeply ashamed and remorseful”. He suggested that the Roche’s account to gardaí was “a version of events he had derived from his retreat into denial”.FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — A lawyer for former U.S. Rep. TJ Cox of California said the Democrat will plead guilty to two counts of fraud and pay $3.5 million in restitution after federal prosecutors alleged he perpetrated multiple schemes involving businesses he was involved in. Attorney Mark Coleman told the Fresno Bee on Wednesday that Cox wanted to avoid trial and had reached a plea deal that dismissed 24 of the 26 charges he has faced since 2022 . “It’s very stressful for him. It’s very stressful for his family, and he wanted to get it behind him,” Coleman said. At the next hearing in January, Cox will enter guilty pleas to wire fraud and wire fraud affecting a financial institution, the Bee reported. He agrees to pay $3.5 million in restitution and will be required to provide records of his financial standings once his plea changes, according to the deal. He is also subject to whatever sentence and fine is determined to be fair by the court. Prosecutors said Cox stole more than $1.7 million in diverted client payments and company loans and investments. They also alleged Cox created false records and a fraudulent loan guarantee in order to secure a $1.5 million construction loan through a sports nonprofit for improvements at Granite Park, a sports complex in Fresno. “Anytime you’re in business there are thousands of transactions, and people sometimes make shortcuts and it’s something he had to deal with,” Coleman said about the charges. The counts that were dismissed included wire fraud, money laundering and campaign contribution fraud. Prosecutors previously said that without the plea deal, Cox faced prison time and fines ranging from $250,000 to $1 million depending on the count, according to the Bee. The charges date back to business Cox was conducting in 2018, documents show, as well as during his time in Congress. Cox was elected in 2018 by beating out incumbent Republican David Valadao for the seat that covered Kings County and parts of Fresno, Kern and Tulare counties. Valadao retook the seat from Cox in a 2020 rematch. The Associated Press
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26. Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products. “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said a statement from OpenAI. Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide. His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends. Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT. “Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to notice subtle bugs or logical errors. “He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously.” Balaji later shifted to organizing the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the company’s famous chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement. He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported them in an October . He later told The Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a The New York Times last year to be the “most serious.” Times lawyers named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who might have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement. His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing. “It doesn’t feel right to be training on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you are able to do that legally.” He told the AP that he gradually grew more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after that led its board of directors to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was broadly concerned about how its commercial products were rolling out, including their propensity for spouting false information known as hallucinations. But of the “bag of issues” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright as the one it was “actually possible to do something about.” He acknowledged that it was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is accustomed to pulling data from the internet, but said “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time.” He had not been deposed and it’s unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions about the topic. Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with fellow colleagues that night with dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI , which Balaji saw as another impetus to leave. Schulman said Balaji had told him earlier this year of his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think that better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence “was right around the corner, like the rest of the company seemed to believe.” The younger engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some more off-the-beaten path ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said. Balaji’s family said a memorial is being planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino. —————- EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. or Canada is available by calling or texting 988. —————–
Skier/snowboarder Ester Ledecka has 2 Olympic races on same day in 2026, hoping for schedule change
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