Trump keeps showering Putin with gifts as Russia strikes U.S. businesses

Trump keeps showering Putin with gifts as Russia strikes U.S. businesses

Axios reports: President Trump is indulging his fondness for Vladimir Putin at a moment of acute political peril, forcing Republicans in the midterms to take cover as he showers Moscow with one-sided concessions. Why it matters: With just three weeks until the election, Trump is rekindling a decade-long, scandal-scarred relationship with a dictator reviled by most Americans — including his own supporters. Driving the news: Since speaking with Putin on Friday, Trump has embarked on a remarkable five-day campaign of…

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Hegseth’s livestream execution finds tech fans. Trump not sure after learning shooter was paralyzed

Hegseth’s livestream execution finds tech fans. Trump not sure after learning shooter was paralyzed

Mother Jones reports: “I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.” So said Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, a military technology company that sells autonomous drones and software to the Defense Department, Customs and Border Protection, and militaries abroad in a vocal defense of “public and brutal” executions in general, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in particular. Executions are the “ultimate example…

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Texas DA says ICE intentionally struck and ran over an immigrant and may have withheld evidence

Texas DA says ICE intentionally struck and ran over an immigrant and may have withheld evidence

NBC News reports: Videos collected by local investigators make it “pretty obvious” that an ICE officer intentionally ran over Miguel Parra Hernandez during an immigration stop Saturday, which could lead to assault charges, the district attorney said Tuesday. “This was an intentional striking and running over of the person by the vehicle, and in that case, that is an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Texas,” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told NBC News. Teare said the federal…

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‘Tip of the iceberg’: OpenAI bugging suspect has ties to Saudi royal family

‘Tip of the iceberg’: OpenAI bugging suspect has ties to Saudi royal family

CNBC reports: Abdulrahman Alfozan, the Saudi national charged with secretly installing a recording device in an executive conference room at OpenAI, had booked a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia with his wife and a third family member before his arrest, federal prosecutors told a judge in a newly unsealed court filing. Alfozan “has the means — and will have the incentive — to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is…

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U.S.-made goods also got more expensive under Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs, new research finds

U.S.-made goods also got more expensive under Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs, new research finds

Fox News reports: Americans aren’t just seeing the price tag increase for imported goods. Thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, they are now paying more for products made in the U.S.A., according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In fact, the research finds that prices for many everyday goods would have fallen last year and into early 2026 without Trump’s tariffs. The findings offer new evidence of how the sweeping tariff policy, a centerpiece of…

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Rising costs push necessities out of reach for nearly half of Americans

Rising costs push necessities out of reach for nearly half of Americans

The New York Times reports: Close to half of Americans are having trouble paying for basic needs, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, as the rising cost of living continues to exact its toll. The financial burden is especially acute for lower-income adults. Nearly three-quarters said they struggled to pay for food, housing, medical care or daily transportation in the past year compared with 13 percent of upper-income adults. About half of those on the lower end…

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Trump’s new press secretary hit with bar complaint for practicing law without a license

Trump’s new press secretary hit with bar complaint for practicing law without a license

The New Republic reports: The new White House press secretary is facing a legal complaint over misrepresenting her credentials as a lawyer. The Campaign for Accountability, a liberal nonprofit organization focusing on ethics, filed a complaint with the State Bar of California Wednesday over whether Katie Zacharia falsely claimed to work as a lawyer. The complaint cited her claims of holding titles such as “outside counsel” to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, and “general counsel” to a…

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Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI, saying voluntary commitments are not enough

Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI, saying voluntary commitments are not enough

Reuters reports: Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, on Tuesday called for an international body ​to oversee containment standards and incident reporting for advanced cyber-capable ‌AI systems. The proposed body would set industry-wide containment standards and maintain a registry of significant security incidents, which the scientists said should eventually be made ​public. In an open letter, the researchers said frontier AI models ​should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject ⁠to independent oversight, arguing…

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Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

The New York Times reports: The president on Tuesday suggested on social media that Ms. Omar had engaged in fraud to make millions of dollars. He also suggested she had engaged in immigration fraud. “America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” he said. Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and retired law professor, said that the Trump Justice Department had so eroded trust that it had “sort of forfeited the right to a presumption of regularity,” a legal…

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Muse is a digital panopticon disguised as an imp

Mark Zuckerberg’s Muse is a digital panopticon disguised as an imp

Ariana Bindman writes: According to an October report from Yahoo Finance, Muse has been downloaded at least 5 million times since its launch in early September, earning 3 million concurrent users per week. Marketed as a round-the-clock digital serf whose entire existence is literally “built around your whole life,” Muse is meant to buy back users’ time by taking care of mundane busy work, Meta says. Based on reviews from tech reporters, it’s surprisingly capable and efficient. It can call…

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Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

  A dramatic escalation in Yemen has plunged the Middle East into a fresh geopolitical crisis, after a series of deadly Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil and gas infrastructure. The long running civil war is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. But why are the Houthis at war with Saudi Arabia? And how does it fit into the wider Middle East conflicts? In this episode of The Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is joined by Middle East…

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Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

The Hill reports: President Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia raised eyebrows on Tuesday when she was asked where she passed the bar exam, telling reporters that she did so when she moved to China. Zacharia made the remarks on the White House South Lawn alongside Trump before heading to Alaska with him for a campaign rally. “Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?” a reporter asked Trump, who turned to Zacharia to ask her, “which state?” “When…

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Why AI must not become a substitute for mathematical research

Why AI must not become a substitute for mathematical research

  Giordano Scarciotti, Imperial College London: AI is solving mathematical problems that have resisted some of the world’s greatest mathematicians for decades. Why are mathematicians concerned instead of celebrating? The answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes mathematics valuable. From Euler’s seven bridges of Königsberg to the race to the Moon, I explain why solving a problem is not necessarily the same as advancing science, and why the real value of mathematical research often lies in the discoveries made…

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Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Mother Jones reports: On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer…

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