New mail voting rules moved forward despite USPS officials’ concerns about mass disenfranchisement

New mail voting rules moved forward despite USPS officials’ concerns about mass disenfranchisement

By Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned. The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed…

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Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

The Guardian reports: Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime. Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out…

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The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The Intercept reports: Top military officers from a secretive command watched a speedboat cut through the waters of the Caribbean Sea, early last September. A plane above provided live video of the vessel and the 11 men on board. In the early morning hours, Adm. Frank Bradley sought the counsel of his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi. Then he ordered SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed boat. After the vessel exploded, two helpless survivors pulled themselves onto…

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OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

The Tech Buzz reports: OpenAI is about to ship its most powerful model yet, and the people whose job it is to worry about AI safety are freaking out. Astra, delayed once already after its agents reportedly attacked real-world targets during testing, is now drawing fire for hiding its reasoning process far more than any frontier model before it, prompting one researcher to call it possibly “the single worst development for AI security/safety to date.” OpenAI is standing at the…

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EU struggles to find an effective response after Germany blames Russia for a foiled drone attack

EU struggles to find an effective response after Germany blames Russia for a foiled drone attack

The Associated Press reports: The European Union on Wednesday weighed how best to respond to an attempted drone attack at a German airport blamed on Russia but struggled to find new ways to meet the challenge without resorting to military means. The German government said Tuesday that Russia was responsible for the failed attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport on Aug. 4 using a drone laden with explosives and announced it would shut down a Russian consulate among other measures. The nature…

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Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Robert D. McFadden writes: Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92. His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death. Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a…

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New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

New theory links storytelling, firelight and the rise of spoken language

ZME Science reports: The campfire may have done more than keep our ancestors warm. It may have helped turn ape-like communication into language. For hundreds of thousands of years, fire stretched the human day beyond sunset, gathering people into a flickering circle when hunting, gathering and other practical work had stopped. A new theory argues that this unusual social setting (no other creature could control fire) may have created the conditions for something radically different to emerge: sustained storytelling. The…

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Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

The New York Times reports: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the…

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The plot to steal Venezuela’s oil is both vile and deeply stupid

The plot to steal Venezuela’s oil is both vile and deeply stupid

Paul Krugman writes: The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America — a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources. Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was…

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Under Hegseth’s control, the U.S. Army is at risk of ‘generational damage’

Under Hegseth’s control, the U.S. Army is at risk of ‘generational damage’

The Atlantic reports: During a White House meeting last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump—a sign of how far tensions between the two Pentagon leaders had escalated, and of the dysfunction inside the building, four people familiar with the conversation told us. Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed…

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These generals fought to defend Israel. Now they see ‘Jewish terrorism’ as the greatest threat

These generals fought to defend Israel. Now they see ‘Jewish terrorism’ as the greatest threat

The New York Times reports: Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven spent his life fighting for Israel. He survived the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when his platoon was nearly wiped out, then went on to command a division in the West Bank and lead Israel’s ground forces in the 2006 war against Hezbollah. But in recent months, he has returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, touring the territory with retired generals and former Israeli officials like himself. He has walked through the…

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Moscow’s ‘meat grinder’: Russia ‘losing 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit’

Moscow’s ‘meat grinder’: Russia ‘losing 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit’

The Guardian reports: Russia is losing about 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit, western officials have said. While Russia is still acquiring new battlefield recruits at speed, with an estimated rate of 1,000 a day, in the last two months even this has not been sufficient to replace those killed or injured. “We estimate that the gap between the number of people Russia is losing to casualties and the number they’re being able to recruit…

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The Hugging Face hack is evidence of significant cultural issues at OpenAI

The Hugging Face hack is evidence of significant cultural issues at OpenAI

Grace Huckins writes: By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. It’s a wild story. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here. The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave…

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Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score

Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score

Justin Neuman writes: Our kids were playing Settlers of Catan over the holidays. Or rather, they weren’t. They’d rearranged the strategy game’s hexagonal tiles into an archipelago of islands that no rulebook recognises, imagined ‘bridges’ built from wood, brick and stone, and invented a purpose for the game about network connectivity that had nothing to do with earning points. They were not playing Catan. They were playing in Catan, using its materials as components to make a world the designers…

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