Well, when I saw

an optional zero-data-retention feature for enterprise users

I interpreted it as "deleting everything".

Do the police have access to those betting patterns?
With any wildfire which was initiated deliberately, I'd want to look at anyone who "predicted" it - and their associates.

Somehow read an 8.5 mile hike that was actually 14 miles

8.5 miles is close to 14km. I can't see how that could have been a factor but the correlation feels too close to be coincidental.

The signs I've seen photographed in Google Maps (I'm several timezones away and am not about to just go there and check) do not say how long you can expect to take, so maybe nobody felt the need to upload a snapshot of one of those signs. Pretty much every such sign in Austria has that information, I find their estimates a bit pessimistic but that is not a bad thing.
18 miles is just under 29km. I'd feel safe in assuming I could do 20km on a well signposted trail with not too much vertical, although I'd need to do some hikes locally in order to build my endurance up in order to make sure beforehand, and I'd want a "get out of here" option if something went wrong. A 17-year-old has the potential to go further than me at my age, but they do not appear to have prepared this at all. I wonder where they were from, locals should have known better so maybe Vancouver.
I'm more a cyclist than a hiker and have come to the conclusion that Google Maps estimates are mostly for cyclists who are stronger / fitter than me (or have e-bikes) unless there's a following wind. Their estimates do make allowances for hills - take one of their estimates and swap the start and end points, there can be a massive difference if their elevations vary by much.

The good should not be an excuse to introduce a bunch of bad, even if the good still outweighs it. The bad should be rigorously minimized. I am not against such cameras, under certain conditions:
1) Strict limitations on what they can be used for. That also sets limits on data retention and on who has access to it (absolutely no 3rd parties)
2) Audits and oversight of how the system is being used, with real consequences for violations. The benefits of each use case to be evaluated from time to time, insufficient benefit or too much opportunity for abuse means the system will no longer be used for that particular use case.
3) Ironclad security to ensure none of this data ever gets out.
And 0) Those limitations on use should be tested against a more fundamental set of (ethical) rules, to ensure that the use is not expanded from "protect the children" to "auto-fine jaywalkers".

Only problem is that I wouldn't trust most governments to get any of these points right.

"Needs more Excel training" should not be the answer to any problem.

I read it - and found it interesting - when I was around 15, but that is a while ago now.
My initial thought here was "no wonder Trump is a fan" of AI models.

Would he have handed over the phone unasked and volunteered the password? Unlikely.
As far as I know, the phone behaves in a certain way when you enter the duress password. So it seems established that that is the password he provided. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if he wiped the phone earlier or not, that fact can no longer be established, and that alone would count under the (expanded interpretation of) that law.
Yes, we make assumptions. We’re not in court, we’re on the internet. Speculating on whether the state does or does not have a solid case. That is all.

If they never got into the phone, how do they know there was evidence on there?
They demanded the phone, and he caused the contents on it to be unrecoverable. At that point it does not matter whether the phone did or did not contain anything incriminating, according to the article 18 U.S.C. 2232 he was charged with.

It also sounds like at the time, he wasn't under arrest? He had asked for a lawyer and had been refused?
This was at a border checkpoint, and the rules are a little different. Customs officers can search your stuff (including your phone) without a warrant, probable cause or even suspicion.

He's not under any compulsion to give a password is he?
He is not, even at the border. Refusal can lead to refused entry, though. But once he gave the duress password, he effectively caused the phone's decryption keys to be wiped, and the aforementioned article kicks in.

The real question is whether or not wiping a phone constitutes "destruction of property" as mentioned in that article of law. By the letter, it does not. But data seems to be "property" in the spirit of this law. Similar to eating a physical letter before the cops get a chance to read it. Guess this is what is about to be tested in court.

Some things about his movies are very good: the cinematography, use of practical effects over CGI, scale, and good scoring. Sometimes he does drop the ball; while the score on Interstellar was epic, the one in Odyssey was bland and did not really mesh with what was going on on-screen. And he's a bit of a one-trick pony, with a rather dark and depressing tone in most of his movies. Works in Interstellar, didn't really help the Odyssey, ruined the Dark Knight. And his convoluted way of telling a story. Tenet was a mess as a result (and the time stuff just didn't work), but it worked fine in Interstellar and the Odyssey.

Loved: Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer
Liked: the Odyssey, Tenet
Didn't care for: his Batman movies, Inception, Memento.
Enough for me to go see a movie on the strength of him directing it.

What about Edward Bulwer-Lytton? An author so inspiring they named awards after him.

There is a bill which has either just been passed or is currently being discussed, it is to criminalise calling Israel's right-to-exist into question. It looks to me to be stupid posturing because the German constitution guarantees free speech.
What you will see quite frequently in Germany is a city banning a political demonstration for some reason or other. The organisers then appeal this ban in a court (it takes maybe a day) and it gets overturned. I can't remember such a ban not being overturned but maybe there were a couple, several years ago. It is stupid posturing with taxpayers' money which only serves to give work to a few lawyers.

There were two duty officers executing a warrant at the house of Niehoff

Was one of the unnamed people called Niehoff? I even did a text search in that Yahoo link and there was n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

Oh, Remember "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" from the early 1970s? Their "very interesting, but stoopid" fake German wore Nazi uniforms with all the associated symbols, I assume that could never have been shown in Germany. It could not have been anyway, nowadays most Germans speak decent English but that was not the case back then.

You know that the Telegraph was bought by the Axel Springer Verlag (which is German) a couple of weeks ago? I wonder how long that "rabidly anti-German" is liable to last.

The actual link takes you to a Yahoo page which is allegedly quoting a Telegraph article 1:1. I suppose that's borderline acceptable because an attempt to read a Telegraph article gets you a "Create your free account or log in" message, but the FA should have least carried a link to the original story.
I would have liked to have at least looked at the original article (without an account) to see when it was written and maybe also who wrote it - the Telegraph was taken over by the German "Axel Springer" group a couple of weeks ago.

Looking more closely at the allegations (and only articles from Germany and in German), Rainer Zitelmann compared Hitler with Putin - including pictures of both - and someone apparently took exception and complained to the police. RZ has no idea whether it was a Putin fan, a neo Nazi or whatever who complained. According to his lawyer, it was pretty much a joke and the complainant did not have a leg to stand on, the police agreed and dropped charges citing "insufficient evidence".
I remember discussions on this particular law around 45 years ago (it's nothing new), there had been an anti-Nazi demonstration in Berlin back then and the Police went after some of those involved for "glorifying forbidden symbols" - they showed a Nazi cross with a red line through it on a banner saying "Stop Nazis". This was during the cold war when West Berlin was an island surrounded by East Germany, some of the things the police got up to back then (with backing from the courts) were pretty outrageous - including a murder of a student in a crowd and refusal of medical help to a prisoner with cancer until it was too late. A terrorist group named themselves after the date of that murder and killed a politician or two before fading away, I don't think they were ever caught.

Now to Naomi Seibt and the AfD. I'd never heard of her but Naomi Seibt appears to be a Laura Loomer figure who was under observation by the "MI5 equivalent" as a potential extremist. Whenever there's an extremist political crime in Germany (or the UK for that matter) you will either hear that the perpetrator was under observation or that they were not. That Islamic murderer in Berlin a day or so ago (CSD) had been under observation. I don't know how many people currently have that status, Naomi Seibt used that (and her online friendship with Elon Musk) to claim persecution and go for asylum in the US.
The AfD is a collection of various streams of right-wingers with various motivations, some of them mutually exclusive. Some of the things some of them are calling for (expelling naturalised citizens of a darker hue) are explicitly against the country's constitution - the Nazis withdrew citizenship from Jews back in the day and the constitution explicitly rules that kind of thing out.

Three British MPs have been murdered in the past 11 years. Jo Cox (Labour) by a neo Nazi, someone whose name escapes me (Conservative) by an Islamic terrorist and Ann Widdecombe (Conservative, then Brexit, then "Reform" (Brexit re-branded)). Ann Widdecombe retired years ago, she was a public figure who appeared on TV a lot and was murdered around 3 weeks ago by some weirdo for reasons that I don't think have been made public yet, I believe he was not "under observation".