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Suspect dead after shooting at Northern California school; 2 students hurt, sheriff’s office says
PALERMO – Authorities say a suspect is dead and two students are hurt after a shooting at a school in the Northern California community of Palermo on Wednesday.
The Butte County Sheriff’s Office says the incident happened around 1 p.m. at the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists.
One person was found by deputies with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, with the sheriff’s office confirming that the suspected shooter had died. Two students were also found shot; their conditions were not known at this time, the sheriff’s office says, but both have been taken to local hospitals.
The suspect has not been identified at this time. It’s also unclear if the shooting was random, the sheriff’s office says, but it doesn’t appear that the suspect had a connection to the campus.
Parents are being told to meet their children at the Oroville Church of the Nazarene at 2238 Monte Vista Avenue.
Due to the investigation, California Highway Patrol is diverting northbound traffic on Highway 70 at E. Gridley Road west to Highway 99. Southbound Highway 70 is also closed at Power House Hill Road, with traffic being diverted to Lone Tree Road.
The school serves about 35 students from kindergarten to eighth grade.
Palermo is a town about 25 miles north of Marysville and 65 miles north of Sacramento.
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Who were the 2024 election’s “crypto voters”?
In last month’s election, one of the biggest winners was not on the ballot — it was in a crypto wallet.
During the 2024 campaign cycle, cryptocurrency companies contributed one-third of all direct corporate contributions to super PACs, or political action committees. And it paid off: 85% of the congressional candidates supported by the industry won their races.
One crypto executive told 60 Minutes the success was not just because of the enormous amount of money the industry spent on ads. It was also because people they described as “crypto voters” turned out to cast their ballots.
“I think those who don’t believe there are passionate people about crypto are not paying attention to how significant this industry is already, today,” said Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, whose cryptocurrency XRP is one of the largest in the world.
Cryptocurrencies are digital assets that are not controlled by a country or financial institution. They run on a blockchain, a secure, decentralized virtual ledger that keeps track of every transaction.
Industry research shows that people who own cryptocurrency tend to be young, racially diverse, and see cryptocurrency as a way to gain more freedom over their financial lives. Overall, they agree that the industry needs clearer regulations and want candidates who are open to emerging technologies.
The voter base is growing and, apparently, up for grabs: While they support policies favorable to the industry, cypto voters don’t have a unified position on which party will best deliver them. Most industry research shows crypto owners are at an almost even split between support for the Republican and Democratic parties.
To help them make sense of which candidate to back, the advocacy organization Stand With Crypto assigns politicians grades based on statements they’ve made about the industry.
President-elect Donald Trump received an A grade. After calling bitcoin “a scam,” in 2021, Trump has since embraced the industry. In September, he announced his new cryptocurrency business, a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. This week, Trump announced he will appoint former PayPal Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” a move that highlights Trump’s desire to boost the crypto industry.
John Reed Stark, a former chief of internet enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is critical of crypto. He told 60 Minutes he owns no cryptocurrency but understands those who do.
“They have a mammoth distrust of financial institutions. And they love the edginess of the culture,” Stark said. “And I think those people do vote. And I think that’s another aspect of where these crypto PACs just executed a brilliant strategy, because they really tapped into that.”
Stark said the appeal of cryptocurrency traces back to the financial crisis and the lack of trust in institutions. But he maintains that cryptocurrency is dangerous.
“I think it’s fair to say, ‘I don’t trust institutions.’ I don’t either,” Stark said. “But that doesn’t mean let’s put a worse one in place.”
Whether or not voters knew the ins and outs of crypto is up for debate. The industry was not overt in making a crypto connection in its ads, regardless if they were for or against a candidate.
For example, Democrat Rep. Katie Porter in California had criticized cryptocurrency mining in a letter she co-signed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a known crypto skeptic. When Porter then ran for Senate during this year’s primary, every negative ad attacking her was funded by crypto, according to the Washington Post. Some of those ads simply called her a “a fake,” a “liar” and a “bully.”
Overall in this year’s election, the crypto industry backed 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats. The biggest crypto industry super PAC that financed these candidates is called Fairshake, which was started, in part, by Ripple.
Fairshake spent $131 million on ads supporting pro-crypto candidates this election cycle, and it already has another $103 million to spend on pro-crypto candidates in the mid-term elections in two years. But none of the television ads that Fairshake put out and paid for this year mentioned crypto, including those against Porter.
Ripple CEO Garlinghouse told 60 Minutes that, even if Fairshake did not directly mention crypto, the commercials were still educating voters.
Stark was not so sure. “All of these elected officials were very clear in their supporting of crypto,” he said. “Whether people understood that or not, I don’t know.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
CBS News
How classroom AI Khanmigo can help students in emotional distress
On an early morning in Hobart, Indiana, Abigail, a high school student studying chemistry, sat across from what could be the next big tech innovation in education.
Khanmigo, an AI platform designed by the educational nonprofit Khan Academy, is like Socrates in a laptop: it responds to questions with questions, imploring students to use their own knowledge to lead them to a fully understood, contextualized answer.
“I asked it… what are three examples of acids?” Abigail explained to 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.
After providing more examples, Khanmigo listed different types of acid found in common, everyday beverages.
Then it asked, “Can you think of any household items that might contain acid?”
“Khanmigo leads you toward an answer, and it asks you a question in return to help you think it out,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, got an early look at the underlying technology behind OpenAI’s Chat GPT in 2022.
He told Cooper he had immediate concerns that it could be used to cheat, like writing essays for students. But he also saw incredible potential: an artificially intelligent tutor with “guardrails.”
“To support students, to give them more feedback… to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing,” Khan said.
Now, Khanmigo is being piloted in 266 school districts across the U.S., in grades three through 12.
Teachers use Khanmigo to create lesson plans, review essays, and plan classroom activities. Students use it to get help when they’re stumped on homework, fine tune their writing, or work on practice problems.
“I was interested in it from a journalistic standpoint, but also just from a personal standpoint,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. My 4-year-old is going to be starting kindergarten next year.”
Cooper told Khan an AI tutor that could help his son with math and science homework in higher grade levels would be a game changer.
“That’s our hope. Although I will say… a lot of parents are embarrassed if they forgot things… learn it alongside your kids,” Khan said.
One of Khanmigo’s unique features for teachers is a usage tool that allows them to see students’ dialogues with Khanmigo and an activity log.
When Khanmigo is asked a question in a chat or used to draft an essay in the “writing coach” application by a student, a teacher can see the actions they took, the time the actions occurred, and how long a student spent on a particular assignment.
“It does provide a window for adults to supervise children through their homework and through their workflow that hasn’t really existed in this way before,” Cooper told Overtime.
“And I think for some students, for some kids, that might feel intrusive.”
In an interview with 60 Minutes, students from Hobart High School said they have heard that sentiment from some of their classmates.
“Everything you type in it, it sends it to your teacher… and I think that’s something really scary for students,” a student said.
Peggy Buffington, the superintendent of Hobart High School’s district, believes that this kind of oversight can save lives.
“One of the pieces of feedback that we gave to Sal [Khan] was just that safety net. ‘What if there are students out there that are struggling with some emotional things? Maybe suicide ideation?'” she told Cooper.
At the school’s request, Khan Academy created a feature to detect if a student is talking about hurting themselves or others and then notify a teacher immediately. If necessary, a mental health counselor can intervene to provide help.
“Have you actually had instances where Khanmigo has sort of raised a red flag about a student’s emotional health?” Cooper asked.
Buffington said she had.
“You see a lot of that in writing… and then, instantly, the teacher sees that,” Buffington replied. “It’s just another level of awareness that perhaps we didn’t know a student was internalizing… it can save a life.”
Cooper told Overtime he spoke with Khan regarding concerns about privacy around that data.
“Obviously, this kind of information is very sensitive,” Cooper said.
Khan told 60 Minutes that Khan Academy will never sell data that is collected by Khanmigo, and they will only use it internally to make Khanmigo better.
“Anyone under 18… if someone’s talking about self-harm, or harming others, or seems to not be in a good place, or… they’re trying to write, say, an inappropriate story with the AI…. [we’re] flagging that to teachers [and] administrators, so that they can take action if needed,” Khan said.
Khanmigo is still a work in progress.
“There’s kinks to be worked out,” Cooper told Overtime.
Students at Hobart High School told 60 Minutes Khanmigo still makes mistakes, but Khan says it’s continuing to get better.
“There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle in this… I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is here already,” Cooper told Overtime.
“I think that the onus is on, certainly, tech companies to have ethics and guardrails in place.”
“But it’s also on parents to just be involved and be aware of what your kids are doing to the extent you can.”
Cooper said the potential benefits of the technology are obvious to him as a father of two young boys.
“An AI tutor that’s with them in their home, that’s with them in their school… that they can consult with and learn from… I mean, the potential of that is incredible.”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sean Kelly.
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Meet Khanmigo: the student tutor AI being tested in school districts | 60 Minutes
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