Retail Sales Growth Pauses As Higher Taxes Kick In

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Tuesday, the UK government announced a new law targeting the creation of AI-generated sexually explicit deepfake images. Under the legislation, which has not yet been passed, offenders would face prosecution and an unlimited fine, even if they do not widely share the images but create them with the intent to distress the victim.

Enlarge / Vladimir Putin meets with Roscosmos Director General Yuri Borisov on June 30, 2023. (credit: The Kremlin) Russia's once-vaunted launch industry has been much in decline due to a combination of factors, including an aging fleet of rockets, a reduction in government investment, and the country's war in Ukraine driving away Western customers. However, it is has been difficult for the country's leaders to explain these difficult facts to the Russian people.

Enlarge (credit: Joan Cros via Getty) When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company. Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft faced no consequences for its latest embarrassing failure.

Enlarge / NASA's existing plan for Mars Sample Return involves a large lander the size of a two-car garage, two helicopters, a two-stage bespoke rocket, a European-built Earth return vehicle, and the Perseverance rover already operating on the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA's $11 billion plan to robotically bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth is too expensive and will take too long, the agency's administrator said Monday, so officials are tasking government and private sector engineers to come up with a better plan. The agency's decision on how to move forward with the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program follows an independent review last year that found ballooning costs and delays threatened the mission's viability.

The pandemic, rather than crashing housing markets as initially feared, triggered a home price surge unlike any the country has seen, creating an unprecedented amount of wealth. Four years after the arrival of COVID-19, mountain resort communities continue to record the highest rates of home price appreciation in Colorado. At the same time, gains in some central Denver neighborhoods have failed to keep pace with inflation, according to a Denver Post analysis of home price changes in 401 Colorado ZIP codes provided by Zillow. Home price gains range from a nearly 107% gain in Edwards, an unincorporated area of Eagle County, to a 10.3% gain in downtown Denver.

I’d wager a guess that we are, as a species, rather fond of our home planet (our wanton carbon emissions notwithstanding). But the ugly truth is that the Earth is doomed. Someday, the Sun will enter a stage that will make life impossible on the Earth’s surface and eventually reduce the planet to nothing more than a sad, lonely chunk of iron and nickel. The good news is that if we really put our minds to it—and don’t worry, we’ll have hundreds of millions of years to plan—we can keep our home world hospitable, even long after our Sun goes haywire. A waking nightmare The Sun is slowly but inexorably getting brighter, hotter, and larger with time.