East Carolina cornerback Shavon Revel Jr., a potential first-round pick, declared for the 2025 NFL Draft on Friday. Revel, who sustained a torn left ACL in practice in September, had one season of eligibility remaining. "After an incredible journey at East Carolina, I am officially declaring for the 2025 NFL Draft," the senior posted on social media. "... Pirates nation, thank you for your unwavering energy and support every game. Representing ECU is an honor, and I look forward to continuing to do so on Sundays!" Revel recorded two interceptions in three games this season, returning one 50 yards for a touchdown on Sept. 14 against Appalachian State. Over three seasons with the Pirates, Revel had three interceptions, 15 passes defensed and 70 tackles in 24 games. He was a second-team All-American Athletic Conference selection last season. ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. ranked Revel as the No. 2 cornerback and No. 23 overall prospect in the 2025 draft class. --Field Level Media REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you. Read 3 articles and stand to win rewards Spin the wheel now
There is a lot of dither about the future of journalism. Make no mistake, it is the essential commodity. If you know what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine or Syria, it is because brave journalists told you. Not the government, not some academic institution, not artificial intelligence, and not hearsay from your friends or from a political party. The crisis in journalism isn’t that it failed analytically in the last election, or that we — an irregular army of individualists — failed, but that journalism has run out of money and its political enemies have found that the courts (and the fear of libel prosecution) can terrorize the companies that own the media. In 2016, the gossipy site Gawker was sued by the pro wrestler and political figure Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was financed by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Now come two suits, filed by President-elect Donald Trump: One that he won against ABC News, and one to be filed against the Des Moines Register. It is reported that conservative interests plan a series of these legal interventions against the media. This will have a frightening effect on news coverage. When there is fear of prosecution, there is less likely to be investigative news coverage. So far, the most troublesome of the prosecutions has been the one against ABC News. The network caved in early. It agreed to pay $15 million plus legal fees into a fund for what will be the first Trump presidential library. Could it be that ABC is owned by Disney, and Disney wants good relations with the incoming administration? However, a much bigger problem faces the media than the fear of prosecution. It is that the old media, led by local and regional newspapers, is dying. Although there are thousands of podcasts, they don’t take up the slack. You could listen to an awful lot of podcasts and not know what is going on. State houses and local courts aren’t being covered. The sanitizing effect of press surveillance has been withdrawn and, frankly, God help the poor defendants in a local court where there is a disproportionate desire to plead cases, to avoid honest trials even when there is conspicuous doubt. I never tire of repeating what Dan Raviv, former CBS News correspondent, said to me once, “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” Quite so. However, there is a problem: Journalism needs to be concentrated in a newspaper or a broadcast outlet where there is enough revenue to do the job. Otherwise, you get what I think of as the upside-down pyramid of more and more commentary, based on less and less reporting. We are awash in commentary, some of it very good and some of it trash. It is all based on news gathered by those news organizations that can afford to employ a phalanx of reporters. Regional newspapers used to have Washington bureaus and foreign bureaus. At one time, the Baltimore Sun had 12 overseas bureaus. Now it has none. This is the story nationwide. Fewer people actually cover the news, digging, checking and telling us what they have found. Throughout the history of journalism, technology has been disruptive, sometimes advantageously and sometimes less so. Modern printing presses developed at the end of the 19th century were important boosters, as was the invention of the Linotype machine in 1884. On the negative side, television killed off evening papers, and podcasts are taking a toll on radio. Now, the internet and tech companies have siphoned off most of the revenue that supported newspapers, radio and television. As one can’t have a free and fair society without vibrant journalism, we clearly need a new paradigm which is internet-based news organizations that are large enough and rich enough to do the job in the time-honored way with reporters asking questions, whether it is at the courthouse, the White House or on the battlefield. There is a clear choice: News and informed analysis, or rumor and conspiracy. — Llewellyn King is the executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He wrote this for InsideSources.com .
In the late 1970s, two Steves founded Apple Computer, Inc, with operations starting out in Steve Jobs' garage. With him was Steve Wozniak, and the two would go on to revolutionize not just the computer industry, but the entire technology sector on a global scale. While the company had its ups and downs, the foundations laid by Wozniak and Jobs in the '70s — and all of the smart decisions both of them made along the way — have led to Apple becoming a trillion dollar company today. These days, Apple covers multiple facets of tech, including smartphones, audio, VR headsets, and of course, computers. The Macintosh, nowadays known as the Mac, has been Apple's line of computers that served as direct competition to Windows-powered computers. Macs have always distinguished themselves as being computers for the higher end, and their designs almost always reflected that. Here are the best looking computers that Apple ever designed. Most commonly known under the acronym TAM, this flagship Mac was released in 1997 to celebrate Apple's 20th anniversary. The audio hardware, custom designed by Bose, was contained in a giant cylinder, a design that would appear once more on the 2013 refresh of the Mac Pro. The metal cylinder is the weak link in this case, as the TAM's design really shines through on the monitor. Actually, the monitor piece contains more than just the monitor. It also includes a 4x CD-ROM drive and a floppy drive, which take up quite literally half of the monitor panel. The monitor itself was a very contemporary matrix LCD with a 12" screen. It included a separate power supply and built-in subwoofer, as well as a trackpad from the PowerBook devices. Under the hood was the PowerPC 603e processor running at 250 Mhz, paired up with an ATI Rage 3D graphics chipset. It's funny by modern standards, but back in 1997, this machine was state of the art. It also started at $7,500 in 1997, almost $15,000 in today's money. [Featured image by Kai Wegner via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0 ] By the late 1990s, it was clear that Apple had gotten bored of appeasing the enterprise and professional market. In 2001, Steve Jobs came out on stage at that year's WWDC to announce the latest evolution of the consumer focused iBook, the G3. This was one of Apple's first consumer grade laptops to truly take off, and it laid the foundations for the later consumer focused MacBooks like the 2015 12" MacBook and the current MacBook Air. One of the most notable aspects of the iBook G3 was its design. It resembled the iMac G3, in itself one of the strangest Macs of all time. The very period-correct rounded shape and its flashes of color here and there really worked, and even to this day, the iBook G3 is one of the most recognizable laptops in history. Powering the iBook G3 was standard Mac fare for the time, a PowerPC 750 CPU running at 300 Mhz, various hard drive options, and a pretty high-res — for the time — 1024x768 screen. The G3 revision also included an AirPort, which we know today as wireless internet or Wi-Fi Despite being discontinued in 2003, from a design standpoint the G3 can still hold its own even with Mac OS X. [Featured image by D' via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 2.0 ] Before the Mac Pro, Apple's flagship desktop towers had an even more authoritative name: Power Macintosh. First launched in 1994, the Power Macs were the first computers to use PowerPC architectures, which Apple stuck with until 2006 and the switch to Intel architectures. The best-looking iteration of the Power Mac is undoubtedly the G5. Launched in the early 2000s, the G5 had the most serious design language out of all of them, but also what had to be the coolest design language. A solid metal tower with a mesh design on the front, and grab handles that integrated into the lines of the case. Such a menacing looking tower also deserves good power, and that was certainly the case. The Power Mac G5 used various PowerPC CPUs throughout its life, all of which used a 64-bit architecture. 64-bit is the norm today, but it was really uncommon back in the early 2000s. The last and most powerful G5s were clocked up to 2.5 GHz, an absurdly high number by the standards of the day. GeForce graphics did all the graphics heavy lifting, and you could spec the G5 with up to 16GB of RAM. Proper workstation stuff. [Featured image by Bernie Kohl via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC 1.0 ] 2015 saw the launch of what can best be described as a highly experimental MacBook. Instead of a Core i5 or Core i7 processor, the original 12" MacBook used an Intel Core M CPU and joined the Air as an entry level consumer grade Apple laptop. The 12" MacBook, like the name implies, also had a much smaller footprint than any of its stablemates, which left no room for active cooling. However, with such a low power chipset it wasn't necessary. We really enjoyed the the 12" MacBook when it launched and praised it for distilling everything that made the MacBook so good into such a tiny, more consumer-focused package. The biggest criticism levied at the earliest tiny MacBook was its single USB-C port, which you were forced to use for everything. Apple kept the 12" MacBook around for a few more years, but it went away in 2017. [Featured image by Maurizio Pesce via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0 ] As well as the Power Mac line of desktop towers, Apple also had a Power laptop line called the PowerBook. Whereas the iBook line used mostly plastic in its construction, the later PowerBook line of laptops was 100% metal, and some of them even came in titanium like the most recent iPhone models. Back in the early 2000s, experimentation was the name of the game when it came to portable computer design. Acer was making bright red Ferrari laptops, Asus threw its hat in the ring with the Lamborghini laptop, and various companies were cramming full Windows — including keyboards and mouse inputs — into devices the size of present-day smartphones . In comparison to those, the PowerBook G4, the last Apple laptop to use a PowerPC CPU, looks almost impossibly sleek and understated. It's a masterclass of design that lives up to the Power part of its name, and it's no surprise that every Apple laptop that came after it follows a similar design philosophy. Of course, the most notable thing about the PowerBook G4 was its 2006 rebranding to a name that we're all familiar with — the MacBook Pro. 2022 saw the first proper redesign of the MacBook Air in years. The screen bezels were slimmed down significantly and Apple also added the display notch that was previously only seen on the Pro line. A boxier overall design that was now even all the way around was introduced, along with, finally, the return of the much loved MagSafe charging. The 2022 Air was also moved to the M2 system on a chip, the second generation of the in-house designed Apple Silicon chipsets. Even though this is an ARM-based processor, it makes mincemeat of most tasks. I am using a 2022 M2 MacBook Air to write this, and when I first got it, it was so snappy, I had to check if the display is 120Hz or more. It isn't, but it certainly felt that way coming off an ancient (by comparison) Windows desktop with a puny Skylake Core i3. This evolution of the Air's design is a truly fantastic one, and it really is one of the sleekest laptops on the market right now. Not biased, I promise, it just is. The Midnight color that was introduced in the 2022 Air certainly contributes to that — when it's not caked in fingerprints and dust, that is. For those take on more demanding tasks on a daily basis, the Apple Silicon-powered MacBook Air is probably best avoided. A more appropriate choice would be the MacBook Pro, which is designed to chew through really tough tasks like it's nobody's business. Ever since the Pro line moved to the in-house Apple Silicon chipsets in 2020, it has become one of the very best laptops on the market — assuming money is no object, of course. The most recent iteration is the M4-powered MacBook Pro, and once you dry your eyes from the eyewatering price tag, it's almost unbelievable that a laptop has this kind of horsepower. Naturally, because Apple pays attention to the details, it's also quite the looker. From the big Retina display on the front, to the keyboard and its black backing regardless of the body color, to the precisely crafted exhaust ports on either side of the keyboard, the MacBook Pro does things that were only really possible on massive workstations a few years ago, but it also does it in style. While the PowerMac lineup was always fantastic, one of the potential issues that could crop up for a lot of users was their sizing. The PowerMac towers were quite the bulky machines, and if there's a space constraint on the user's desk, it could prove to be a problem. Apple's solution was the very sleek PowerMac G4 Cube. Launched in July of 2000, the G4 Cube had all of the horsepower and the performance of the standard PowerMac G4, but it introduced a much more compact design in the shape of — you guessed it, a cube. Powering the Cube was a PowerPC G4 processor that could be configured up to 500 Mhz and up to 1.5GB of RAM was also on offer. The G4 Cube was also a total revolution in one important aspect — it was one of the very first computers to be passively cooled. This is where the foundations of the modern Mac mini were laid, and the Cube is definitely a key part of Apple's computer history. [Featured image by Patrick Kuhl via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0 ]LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Voters dejected by the presidential election results need to find a way to give back and remain involved, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday as they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Clinton presidential library. The former president urged audience members in a packed theater to remain engaged and find ways to communicate with those they disagree with despite a divisive political time. The two spoke about a month after former President Donald Trump's win over Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election. “We’re just passing through, and we all need to just calm down and do something that builds people up instead of tears them down,” Bill Clinton said. Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who was defeated by Trump in the 2016 election, said she understands the next couple of years are going to be challenging for voters who don't agree with the decisions being made. "In addition to staying involved and staying aware, it’s important to find something that makes you feel good about the day because if you’re in a constant state of agitation about our political situation, it is really going to shorten your life," she said. The Clintons spoke during a panel discussion with journalist Laura Ling, who the former president helped free in 2009 when she was detained in North Korea with another journalist. The event was held as part of a weekend of activities marking the 20th anniversary of the Clinton Presidential Library's opening in Little Rock. The library is preparing to undergo an update of its exhibits and an expansion that will include Hillary Clinton's personal archives. Hillary Clinton said part of the goal is to modernize the facility and expand it to make it a more open, inviting place for people for convene and make connections. When asked about advice he would give for people disappointed by the election results, Bill Clinton said people need to continue working toward bringing people together and improving others' lives. “If that's the way you keep score, then you ought to be trying to run up the score,” he said. “Not lamenting the fact that somebody else is winning a different game because they keep score a different way." “And in addition, figure out what we can do to win again,” Hillary Clinton added, eliciting cheers. The program featured a panel discussion with cast members of the hit NBC show “The West Wing” and former Clinton White House staffers. The weekend amounted to a reunion of former Clinton White House staffers, supporters and close friends, including former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and adviser James Carville. McAuliffe said he and Carville ate Friday at Doe's Eat Place, a downtown restaurant that was popular with Clinton aides and reporters during Clinton's 1992 White House run. He said he viewed the library and its planned expansion as important for the future. “This is not only about the past, but it's more importantly about the future," McAuliffe said. “We just went through a very tough election, and people are all saying we've got to get back to the Clinton model.”
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WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden on Saturday signed legislation that averts a government shutdown heading into Christmas, bringing a final close to days of upheaval in Washington after Congress passed a bipartisan budget plan just past the deadline and rejected Donald Trump's core demand in the negotiations. The deal funds the government at current levels through March 14 and provides USD 100 billion in disaster aid and USD 10 billion in agricultural assistance to farmers. House Speaker Mike Johnson , R-La., had insisted lawmakers would “meet our obligations” and not allow federal operations to close. But the outcome at the end of a tumultuous week was uncertain after Trump had insisted the deal include an increase in the government's borrowing limit. If not, he had said, then let the closures “start now.” Johnson's revised plan was approved 366-34, and it was passed by the Senate by a 85-11 vote after midnight. By then, the White House said it had ceased shutdown preparations. “There will be no government shutdown,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer , D-N.Y. 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The difficulties raised questions about whether Johnson will be able to keep his job, in the face of angry Republican colleagues, and work alongside Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, who was calling the legislative plays from afar. The House is scheduled to elect the next speaker on Jan. 3, 2025, when the new Congress convenes. Republicans will have an exceedingly narrow majority, 220-215, leaving Johnson little margin for error as he tries to win the speaker's gavel. One House Republican, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, criticized Republicans for the deficit spending in the bill and said he was now “undecided” about the GOP leadership. Others are signaling unhappiness with Johnson as well. Yet Trump's last-minute debt limit demand was almost an impossible ask, and Johnson had almost no choice but to work around that pressure. The speaker knew there wouldn't be enough support within the slim Republican majority alone to pass any funding package because many Republican deficit hawks prefer to cut the federal government and would not allow more debt. Instead, the Republicans, who will have full control of the White House, House and Senate in the new year, with big plans for tax cuts and other priorities, are showing they must routinely rely on Democrats for the votes needed to keep up with the routine operations of governing. The federal debt stands at roughly $36 trillion, and the spike in inflation after the coronavirus pandemic has pushed up the government's borrowing costs such that debt service next year will exceed spending on national security. The last time lawmakers raised the debt limit was June 2023. Rather than raise the limit by a dollar amount, lawmakers suspended the debt limit through Jan. 1, 2025. There is no need to raise that limit right now because the Treasury Department can begin using what it calls “extraordinary measures” to ensure that America does not default on its debts. Some estimate these accounting maneuvers could push the default deadline to the summer of 2025. But that's what Trump wanted to avoid because an increase would be needed while he was president. GOP leaders said the debt ceiling would be debated as part of tax and border packages in the new year. Republicans made a so-called handshake agreement to raise the debt limit at that time while also cutting $2.5 trillion in spending over 10 years. It was essentially the same deal that flopped Thursday night — minus Trump's debt demand. But it's far smaller than the original deal Johnson struck with Democratic and Republican leaders — a 1,500-page bill that Trump and Musk rejected, forcing him to start over. It was stuffed with a long list of other bills — including much-derided pay raises for lawmakers — but also other measures with broad bipartisan support that now have a tougher path to becoming law. Trump, who has not yet been sworn into office, is showing the power but also the limits of his sway with Congress, as he intervenes and orchestrates affairs from Mar-a-Lago alongside Musk, who is heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency. (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel )India fighting TB in multi-pronged manner: PM Modi
World News Highlights: A Tumultuous Week in Global Affairs
