This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

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Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM) that has been generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they have already arrested their first suspect—a 49-year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist named Darrin Bell.

The new law, which you can read here , declares that AI-generated CSAM is harmful, even without an actual victim. In part, says the law, this is because all kinds of CSAM can be used to groom children into thinking sexual activity with adults is normal. But the law singles out AI-generated CSAM for special criticism due to the way that generative AI systems work.

"The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."

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Photography enthusiasts pay a lot for their very powerful cameras. How much more should they pay to put them to much, much easier work as a webcam? However many hundreds of dollars you paid, Canon thinks you should pay $5 per month—or, heck, just $50 per year—to do that.

Roman Zipp detailed his journey from incredulousness to grim resignation in a blog post . He bought his Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II for something like $900 last year. The compact model gave him the right match of focal length and sensor size for concert pics. What it did not give him was the ability to change anything at all about his webcam feed using Canon's software. (The "$6,299 camera" referenced in Zipp's blog post title is his indication that all models of Canon's cameras face this conundrum, regardless of price point.)

Ah, but that's because Zipp did not pay. If you head to Canon's site, provide a name and email, and manage to grab the EOS Webcam utility when Canon's servers are not failing, you can connect one camera, with one default scene, at 720p, 30 frames per second and adjust everything on the camera itself if you need to. Should you pay $5 per month, or $50 per year, you can unlock EOS Webcam Utility Pro (PDF link), which provides full 60 fps video and most of the features you'd expect out of a webcam that cost hundreds fewer dollars.

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Visionary filmmaker David Lynch —whose work spanned midnight movie staples like Eraserhead (1977), neo-noir psychological thrillers like Mulholland Drive (2001), and beyond— has died at 78. According to Deadline Hollywood , the director had to evacuate his home due to the LA wildfires. He had been diagnosed with severe emphysema a few years ago and rarely left his house due to COVID-19 fears. Following the evacuation, his health deteriorated, and he passed away at his daughter's house.

“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the director's family said in a statement . “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

Reactions from Hollywood were swift and heartfelt. Kyle MacLachlan, who became a star when Lynch cast him as Paul Atreides in 1984's Dune , Blue Velvet (1986), and the TV series Twin Peaks , described the director as "the most authentically alive person I'd ever met":

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General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar agreed to a settlement that prohibits them from sharing driver location and behavior data with third parties, the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday. The proposed settlement comes less than a year after GM responded to public backlash by announcing that it stopped sharing driving data from its connected cars with companies such as LexisNexis.

The FTC said it "is taking action against General Motors (GM) and OnStar over allegations they collected, used, and sold drivers' precise geolocation data and driving behavior information from millions of vehicles—data that can be used to set insurance rates—without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent." GM did not admit to or deny the allegations.

GM and OnStar "will be banned for five years from disclosing consumers' sensitive geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies," the FTC said. Under the settlement , "consumer reporting agency" means a firm that collects or evaluates "consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to other parties and which uses any means or facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of preparing or furnishing consumer reports."

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Post-pandemic, my creed became "Bicycles deliver the freedom that auto ads promise." That belief is why I’ve almost exclusively used a bike to move myself around Portland, Oregon since (yes, I have become a Portlandia stereotype ).

However, that lifestyle is a lot more challenging without some pedal assistance. For a few summers, I showed up sweaty to appointments after pedaling on a $200 single-speed. So in 2024, I purchased the FX+ 2, based primarily on my managing editor’s review . It’s since been a workhorse for my daily transportation needs for the past year; I've put more than 1,000 miles on it in eight months.

So given my experience with that bike, I was the natural choice to review Trek’s upgraded version, the FX+ 7S .

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Thursday's teaser trailer for the Switch 2 made it abundantly clear that the upcoming console will be quite a bit larger than the original Switch that came before it. But Nintendo is still being coy about the specific dimensions of the Switch 2's expanded tablet and Joy-Cons.

Fortunately, the trailer itself features a number of head-on shots of the Switch 2 hardware next to a known quantity—the original Switch Joy-Cons. Using the established measurements of that older controller ( 102×35.9 mm ) and some Photoshop pixel counting, we can use freeze frames from that trailer to extrapolate a rough size and shape for the Switch 2 hardware.

Using the original Switch Joy-Cons as a reference, we can estimate the size of the Switch 2 shown in the trailer. Credit: Nintendo / Ars Technica

After spending a good chunk of Thursday performing just those calculations, we're ready to estimate that the Switch 2 hardware features a roughly 7.9-inch screen (measured diagonally), up from 6.2 inches on the Switch and 7 inches on the Switch OLED. We also learned that the Switch tablet itself has a roughly 33 percent larger footprint than that of the original Switch (in terms of total area), while the joysticks on the Switch 2 Joy-Cons have a roughly 26 percent larger diameter than those on the Switch.

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Blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic top the list of 15 drugs selected for the second round of federal price negotiations, which are scheduled to begin this year, with resulting bargained prices going into effect in 2027.

The first round of negotiations , involving 10 high-cost drugs, wrapped up in August, with resulting prices being 38 percent to 79 percent lower than list prices. Those negotiated prices will go into effect in 2026 and are expected to save people with Medicare prescription drug coverage $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs.

“Last year we proved that negotiating for lower drug prices works," Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement. "Now we plan to build on that record by negotiating for lower prices for 15 additional important drugs for seniors."

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Apple released new beta versions of iOS 18.3 to developers and the public yesterday, and one of the changes coming with the new software update will (at least temporarily) disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries for all apps in the App Store's News and Entertainment category, at least temporarily.

Apple said earlier this month that it would be instituting updates to how these notifications are handled after complaints from news organizations, and the company has apparently decided to turn them off entirely while it decides what those updates will look like. Most prominently, one user's notification summary from the BBC suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died of suicide; this was not true. Other examples have been cropping up since then.

For the notification summaries that remain, Apple is instituting changes to make it clearer when users are reading summaries and to make it easier to turn those summaries off. Notification summaries in iOS 18.3 will be italicized to help further distinguish them from individual non-summarized notifications—before, there was a small icon next to the text to indicate you were looking at a summary. Apple is also making it possible to turn off summaries on a per-app basis directly from the lock screen without diving into the Settings app to do it.

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