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Coloradan creates first commercial smart gun with facial, fingerprint recognition

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

BROOMFIELD, Colo. (KDVR) — A Colorado native created the first commercial biometric gun with fingerprint and facial recognition.Biofire Technologies founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer started working on smart guns nearly 11 years ago, in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting. “I had been to that movie theater, and so that's really for me what prompted me to start thinking about, you know, rather than building a robot or some other piece of technology, would it make sense to think about some piece of technology on a gun?" Kloepfer said. Gun owners group suing Polis, state over new laws Kloepfer started working on the idea for a science fair project. Over a decade later, the Biofire Smart Gun has been crafted with home defense in mind."I've never talked to a gun owner that wanted their kid to find their gun," Kloepfer said. "If we can provide them better tools that ensure that there's no possibility for mistakes, that their kid will never have access to that firearm, I think that's real...

Suspected Texas gunman caught hiding under laundry: sheriff

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

CLEVELAND, Texas (AP) — A four-day manhunt in Texas for a gunman accused of killing five neighbors ended Tuesday not far from the site of the shooting when authorities, acting on a tip, said they found the suspect hiding underneath a pile of laundry in the closet of a house.Francisco Oropeza, 38, was captured without incident near Houston and about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from his home in the rural town of Cleveland, where authorities say he went next door and shot his neighbors with an AR-style rifle after some of them had asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because it was keeping a baby awake.“They can rest easy now, because he is behind bars,” Capers said of the families of the victims. “He will live out his life behind bars for killing those five.”The arrest happened near Conroe, ending what had become a widening dragnet that had grown to more than 250 people from multiple jurisdictions. As recently as Tuesday morning, the FBI said that Oropeza “coul...

Man shot at Walmart in Lauderdale Lakes dies in hospital; suspect in custody

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

A man who was airlifted to the hospital after being shot at a South Florida Walmart has dies of his injuries at the hospital, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.Earlier, deputies said, hours after the shooting, they had taken a suspect into custody.The details around the shooter’s capture remain unknown.It all began before deputies arrived at the Walmart, located at 3001 N. State Road 7, Tuesday afternoon, just after 3. “It was my first time ever experiencing anything like that,” said Walmart employee Shay Johnson, “so I went with my first instinct, and that’s to protect. I went to go get my brothers.”Johnson was on her break and returning to the store when she heard the shots fired, and her first thought was with her twin brother.“And before I can get back to the room I’m usually in, I heard maybe like, five, six shots pop off right in front of me,” the employee said, “and I, without thinking, I just turned a...

Miami Springs road reopens after pipe burst

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

Public works crews have resurfaced and reopened a road in Miami Springs that had been shut down since Monday night.South Royal Poinciana Boulevard between Coolidge and Sheridan Drive had been closed after a pipe burst. Water and sewer workers had to tear it up to get to a leaking pipe.Operations in the area have resumed as normal.

Brunson, Randle help Knicks beat Heat 111-105 to even series

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Jalen Brunson scored 30 points and keyed the run the New York Knicks needed just in time to get by a Miami Heat team playing without Jimmy Butler, evening the Eastern Conference semifinals at a game apiece with a 111-105 victory Tuesday night.Julius Randle returned from a sprained left ankle that sidelined him in Game 1 with 25 points, 12 rebounds and eight assists, and RJ Barrett scored 24 points for the No. 5-seeded Knicks. Josh Hart finished with 14 points, 11 rebounds and nine assists.But it was Brunson, who pointed the blame at himself and said he had to be better after going 0 for 7 from 3-point range in the opener, who made the biggest plays in a game the Knicks trailed much of the way.Caleb Martin scored 22 points in place of Butler for the Heat, who host Game 3 on Saturday afternoon. They will hope to have Butler, the leading scorer in the playoffs who sat out after spraining his right ankle late in their 108-101 victory in the opener.They almost didn’...

‘Hyper-personalization’ or ‘creepy’: Snapchat’s new AI chatbot raising some concern about its conversations

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

A popular social media app recently rolled out new artificial intelligence, but wait until you see the conversations that have left some parents horrified. Karen Hensel has tonight’s 7 Investigates.When Kortni Couch, a Broward County mom of two, received a new notification from her Snapchat account, she didn’t think much about it.Kortni Couch: “Something about My AI. I didn’t really understand it.”My AI stands for “my artificial intelligence,” which is a new experimental chatbot on snapchat.Users can message and have a conversation with it in the app.Kortni Couch: “So I said, ‘Let me give it a try.’ I didn’t know much about it.”As a mom, she wanted to see what kids could do in the chat, and as she tested the boundaries, she was shocked.Kortni Couch: “My whole goal today is really just to make sure other parents are aware of this new feature on Snapchat.”Watch her conversation with the chatbot when sh...

In Ukraine, it’s not hatred they feel, its wrath

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.“We were invisible before, and to become visible is a huge step,” historian Olena Dzhedzhora said, as we discussed how Ukraine has drawn the attention of the rest of Europe and the United States.The dignified, gray-haired historian joined the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv as it was being founded in 2002 — the first Catholic university to open anywhere in the former Soviet Union — just three years after the country declared independence. And since Russia’s invasion, Dzhedzhora, an archeologist-turned-medievalist, has been busy making darkness visible, along with around 30 volunteers — students, lecturers and others — who’ve been video recording and transcribing war testimonies gathered from people of all walks of life in Ukraine.Last year, Lviv became a sort of Noah’s Ark, crowded with the displaced. And Dzhedzhora’s university stopped functioning for months — sheltering war refugees, feeding them, collecting medicine and rai...

Meet the Belarusians who tricked Russia into firing on its own men

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

KYIV — The Belarusian volunteers laugh as they tell the story of one of their commanders who deceived the Russians into unleashing artillery salvoes on their own positions near the war-torn salt-mining town of Bakhmut. “After we overran a trench, the commander used a radio we found, pretended to be Russian and gave false coordinates for a Russian fire mission,” explained Pavel Shurmei, a 46-year-old former Olympic rower who’s been fighting for Ukraine.“And it worked,” chimed in a 25-year-old volunteer, with a rueful smile.***Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has dubbed the Belarusians fighting for Ukraine “crazed citizens” — but of all the foreign troops battling in Ukraine, the Belarusian volunteers are largely seen by their peers as among the most disciplined and lionhearted. They’ve won battle honors, having in the early weeks after the invasion helped to defend Kyiv and recapture Irpin,...

Onions and prayer rugs: Turkey approaches its decisive battle for democracy

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

It’s now easy to forget that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was once hailed as the paragon of a “Muslim democrat,” who could serve as a model to the entire Islamic world. In the early 2000s, hopes ran high about the charismatic, lanky, former football striker, who received only one red card in his playing career, unsurprisingly for giving an earful to a referee. The man from the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of Kasımpaşa promised something new: Finally, there was a master-juggler, who could balance Islamism, parliamentary democracy, progressive welfare, NATO membership and EU-oriented reforms. That optimism feels a world away now, as Turkey heads into crunch elections on May 14 marked by debate over the centralization of powers under an increasingly authoritarian and divisive leader — dubbed the reis, or captain. Prominent opponents are in jail, the media and judiciary are largely under Erdoğan’s thrall and the kid from Kasımpaşa now rules 85 million people f...

Got Brexit done? Now sort electric car ‘cliff-edge,’ UK and EU told

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:48:11 GMT

LONDON — Britain and the EU finally stopped beefing over Brexit — and electric carmakers want them to use the love-in to swerve an oncoming trade “cliff-edge.”Fresh from resolving the post-Brexit deadlock over Northern Ireland trade rules, industry hopes have been raised that the two sides can start hammering out a plan to stop carmakers being clobbered by new tariffs at the start of 2024.Four people familiar with conversations told POLITICO that Britain and the EU are now — tentatively — talking at an official level about the problem, which centers on so-called “rules of origin” requirements under the U.K.-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Carmakers say they need much more clarity on the help they can expect, and fast.Under a temporary waiver in the TCA, up to 70 percent of an electric battery’s components can come from outside the U.K. or EU before tariffs kick in.But that threshold will plummet to 40 percent on January 1, 2024 — meaning vehicles exceeding this limit will ...