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777bet casino ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) — Losses to the Chargers and Bengals with a playoff berth on the line show Sean Payton made a miscalculation when he agreed to flex the Denver Broncos' Week 16 game to a Thursday night. The NFL needed the Broncos' approval to replace the Cincinnati-Cleveland game with the Broncos-Chargers game because Denver had already played on a Thursday night on the road. He eagerly agreed to the switch, figuring the team's fanbase always travels well to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and the Broncos would be the more rested team at Cincinnati. But after an emotional comeback win over the Colts, the Broncos (9-7) lost to the Chargers in part because Payton got away from the run even though it helped them score touchdowns on their first three drives — and he had written “Run It!!” in marker on top of his play sheet. And they lost to the Bengals 30-24 in overtime on Saturday after Payton decided against going for 2 and the win when Marvin Mims Jr. hauled in a highlight-reel touchdown grab between two defenders with 8 seconds left in regulation. “We knew a tie for us was just as beneficial as a win,” Payton explained. “We felt like we had the momentum at that point.” Holding up two fingers, rookie QB Bo Nix lobbied for the 2-point try to no avail. “We discussed it all. We had plenty of time, plenty of time, plenty of time,” Payton said. "And the decision we made was the right one.” Well ... An extra point assured Joe Burrow would get the ball back, and the Broncos hadn't forced a single punt all game, something Payton acknowledged afterward that he wasn't aware of, and they hadn't stopped the Bengals since twice holding them on fourth down in the first half. They finally forced a punt in overtime, but the Broncos went three-and-out, something they did again after Bengals kicker Cade York doinked a 33-yard field-goal attempt off the left upright on Cincinnati's second possession. With the Bengals out of timeouts, all the Broncos needed was a first down and they'd be playoff-bound for the first time since 2015, but Bo Nix misfired to tight end Adam Trautman on third-and-long, so the Broncos punted and Burrow led the Bengals (8-8) on their game-winning touchdown drive. “I thought we could move the ball in overtime,” Nix said, “but we didn't.” The Broncos could render all of it moot with a win in Week 18 against Kansas City with the Chiefs (15-1) expected to rely heavily on backups as they rest up for the playoffs as the AFC's top seed. But Denver's defense has been dismal since November, giving up the most yards in the league, and another letdown against the Chiefs would give the Broncos their biggest collapse in two decades. “This is what we do it for — meaningful games here,” Payton said. "I think it’s important that you embrace it, and it is exciting. There’s nothing worse than playing games in the last part of the season where there’s nothing at stake. So I think it’s something we’ll all be excited about.” What’s working Denver's pass rush. The Broncos sacked Burrow seven times, giving them a league-high 58 for the season. Zach Allen had a career-best 3 1/2 of them and Dondrea Tillman's sack gives the Broncos six players without at least five sacks this season. What needs help Riley Moss led the Broncos with 14 tackles but he had a tough return to action after missing a month with a sprained MCL. Burrow targeted him over and over, including on the game-winning touchdown throw to Tee Higgins, who caught three TD passes. “Riley could have been healthy for the last eight weeks. Whoever’s opposite Pat, they’re going to go that direction, right?" Payton said. (Higgins) is a good player. A real good player. It wasn’t anything that we didn’t expect. In other words, that happens when you’re teammates with Pat.” Stock up WR Marvin Mims Jr. had a breakout performance with eight catches for 103 yards and two fourth-quarter touchdowns, a 51-yarder and the 25-yard catch on fourth down in the closing seconds while sandwiched between two veteran defenders. Stock down Denver's defense. Even with Moss back, which allowed DC Vance Joseph to go back to relying more on man coverage, the Broncos defense continued to struggle since the calendar turned to December. Injuries The Broncos came out healthy although superstar CB Patrick Surtain II was limping on the game's final snaps. Key number 5 — Number of NFL rookie QBs to throw for at least 3,000 yards and 25 touchdowns with Nix joining Justin Herbert, Baker Mayfield, Russell Wilson and Peyton Manning. What’s next It's all or nothing next week when a win over the Chiefs would send Denver to the playoffs. ___ AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL Arnie Stapleton, The Associated PressTOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there's one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas. That's because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory. The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn't been enforced since 2018. Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn't touch it. “Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.” Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas. “The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.” Kansas' experience appeared to receive little if any attention outside the state as Republicans elsewhere pursued proof-of-citizenship requirements this year. Arizona enacted a requirement this year, applying it to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or president. The Republican-led U.S. House passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP won control of the Senate in November. In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state revised the form that poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require those not born in the U.S. to show naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge declined to block the practice days before the election. Also, sizable majorities of voters in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and the presidential swing states of North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to amend their state constitutions' provisions on voting even though the changes were only symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all U.S. citizens could vote now say that only U.S. citizens can vote — a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible. To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught. “There is nothing unconstitutional about ensuring that only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, of Texas, the leading sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email statement to The Associated Press. After Kansas residents challenged their state's law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That's an issue Congress could resolve. The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn't justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year. In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.” Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved. “The technological challenge of how quickly can you verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.” The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kansas case in 2020. But in August, it split 5-4 in allowing Arizona to continue enforcing its law for voting in state and local elections while a legal challenge goes forward. Seeing the possibility of a different Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should pursue proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was the Kansas attorney general when his state's law was challenged. "If the same matter arose now and was litigated, the facts would be different," he said in an interview. But voting rights advocates dismiss the idea that a legal challenge would turn out differently. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court fight. “We know the people we can call," Johnson said. “We know that we’ve got the expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted "a flurry — a landslide — of litigation against this.” Initially, the Kansas requirement's impacts seemed to fall most heavily on politically unaffiliated and young voters. As of fall 2013, 57% of the voters blocked from registering were unaffiliated and 40% were under 30. But Fish was in his mid-30s, and six of the nine residents who sued over the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three even produced citizenship documents and still didn’t get registered, according to court documents. “There wasn’t a single one of us that was actually an illegal or had misinterpreted or misrepresented any information or had done anything wrong,” Fish said. He was supposed to produce his birth certificate when he sought to register in 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver's license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. A clerk wouldn't accept the copy Fish had of his birth certificate. He still doesn't know where to find the original, having been born on an Air Force base in Illinois that closed in the 1990s. Several of the people joining Fish in the lawsuit were veterans, all born in the U.S., and Fish said he was stunned that they could be prevented from registering. Liz Azore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans haven't traveled outside the U.S. and don't have passports that might act as proof of citizenship, or don't have ready access to their birth certificates. She and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make a proof-of-citizenship law run more smoothly today than it did in Kansas a decade ago. “It’s going to cover a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It’s going to be disenfranchising large swaths of the country.” Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

California to consider requiring mental health warnings on social media sites

A staff member conducts tests on a Walker X humanoid robot at a sci-tech company in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, June 26, 2024. (Xinhua/Mao Siqian) BEIJING, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- The explosive growth of humanoid robots represents a standout transformation in China's tech innovation landscape for 2024. As robust capital inflow fuels the emerging sector, the human-shaped machines are being fine-tuned for superior agility, and their versatile applications are becoming increasingly evident across a range of scenarios. "Humanoid robots have now reached the educational level of a high school junior or senior, and are expected to sit the college entrance exam as early as next year, which means their deployment in more scenarios," said Hu Debo, CEO of Shanghai-based Kepler Robot. NEW CAPABILITY In March, Hangzhou's Unitree Robotics released a remarkable video featuring their 50-kg Unitree H1 humanoid robot executing a standing backflip, a first for full-scale electric-driven humanoids. Two months later, a robot developed by Beijing-based RobotEra ascended the Great Wall, showcasing its stability and strength in different types of terrain. The Beijing-based startup's new STAR1 model also completed a long-distance run in China's Gobi desert in October, reaching speeds of six meters per second. Engine AI from Shenzhen unveiled the robot with the most human-like gait, with the promotional video going viral immediately. The evolution of these robots has captured people's attention on social media platforms and also secured substantial venture capital to fuel their growth. From January to October 2024, there were at least 69 global humanoid robot financing events, amounting to over 11 billion yuan (1.51 billion U.S. dollars), with 56 of these occurring in China, totaling more than 5 billion yuan, as per partial data from GGII, a Shenzhen-based consultancy for emerging industries. The market size of humanoid robots in China in 2024 is approximately 2.76 billion yuan, according to a blue paper published recently. AI-DRIVEN Now, the artificial intelligence (AI) has served as the "engine" driving this progress. "The deep integration of humanoid robots with AI constitutes a significant trend in the robotics industry this year," said Yang Fengyu, founder and CEO of UniX AI, a robotics technology company based in Shanghai. "In the past, robots lacked autonomous motion control capabilities and could only perform single tasks in a fixed environment, struggling to adapt when the environment changed," Xiong Youjun, general manager of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, told Xinhua. The advancement of AI's large-scale models not only makes robots more intelligent, but also significantly lowers their production costs. China boasts a comprehensive supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure, enjoys good policy support and vast market potential, and has an ample reserve of technical talent, said Xiong. APPLICATIONS This month, a Chinese tech firm declared the start of large-scale production for general-purpose robots. AgiBot, a startup established in February 2023, has already produced nearly 1,000 units of these humanoid robots. Automotive production lines are among the fastest deployment scenarios for humanoid robots. UBTECH Robotics, a leading robotics firm based in Shenzhen, has integrated their products into the training programs of automotive manufacturers like BYD, NIO and Geely. Xpeng, another new-energy vehicle manufacturer, has ventured into robotics directly, with its self-developed robots now being trained in factory settings. The development of humanoid robots for caregiving services in households has begun to take shape, although their implementation is slower than in industrial settings. In September, Tencent's Robotics X Lab revealed "The Five," a hybrid home-help robot featuring four-wheels, tactile skin and hands. Laboratory test footage demonstrates that the residential robot is capable of walking, carrying objects, and assisting seated elderly individuals in standing up at an elderly care home in Shenzhen. "The Five" is still at the prototype stage and needs additional technological refinements before it can be effectively deployed in nursing homes, according to Robotics X. The Chinese humanoid robot market, which is on the verge of a boom, still faces several challenges. The rapid growth is hindered by "dependence on overseas high-end chips and proprietary algorithms, along with a shortfall in domestic computational resources," said Xiong.

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