‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

Fortune reports: The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.” While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re…

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Ukraine disables 7 of 10 of Russia’s largest logistics centers for Wildberries online retailer

Ukraine disables 7 of 10 of Russia’s largest logistics centers for Wildberries online retailer

🔥 The largest Wildberries logistics hub in all of Russia has been finally destroyed.Koledino, Moscow. Wildberries appears to have made a conscious choice not to empty this warehouse despite knowing Ukraine will destroy it like all others.Expect $1.5+ billion in damages. pic.twitter.com/SISsou9uU2 — Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) August 16, 2026 Kyiv Post reports: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced on Sunday, Aug. 16, that recent operations have disabled seven of the ten largest logistics centers belonging to the Russian e-commerce company Wildberries….

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Sailors’ families denounce Trump and Hegseth for ‘dismissing their experiences and calling them liars’

Sailors’ families denounce Trump and Hegseth for ‘dismissing their experiences and calling them liars’

The Guardian reports: Naval families with loved ones deployed for months on US warships amid the Iran war have reacted with fury to Donald Trump and the defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of their concerns about the extreme pressures and dire conditions they are enduring. The Guardian has talked to three naval families who have been following the physical and mental stresses bearing down on their relatives with mounting alarm. The families, with loved ones on board the USS Abraham…

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Liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling the Supreme Court

Liberals push a slew of plans for overhauling the Supreme Court

The Washington Post reports: One bill proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 13. Another would cut their lifetime terms to 18 years. Others would create an enforceable ethics code and place standards on how the court rules from its relatively opaque “shadow docket.” The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn….

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How a false nuclear claim about Iran ricocheted from India to Washington, bolstering Netanyahu

How a false nuclear claim about Iran ricocheted from India to Washington, bolstering Netanyahu

The New York Times reports: On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said. It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim…

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Biden brought down drug prices, then Trump tried to take the credit

Biden brought down drug prices, then Trump tried to take the credit

The Guardian reports: The White House flooded social media on Saturday with an image of Donald Trump showing off the recent Washington Post headline “Prescription drug prices record sharpest drop in more than 60 years”, but failed to mention that experts cited in the article actually attributed the price drop to Joe Biden, not Trump. On its official accounts, the White House triumphantly captioned the photograph of Trump: “POV: you bring the receipts.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,…

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Scientists detect a surprising shift in human blood as atmospheric carbon dioxide rises

Scientists detect a surprising shift in human blood as atmospheric carbon dioxide rises

Science Daily reports: Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may already be influencing human biology. New research has identified long-term changes in blood chemistry that appear to track rising atmospheric CO2, raising concerns that an important blood marker could approach the upper end of its healthy range within the next several decades. The findings may be particularly important for children and teenagers. Because their bodies are still developing, younger generations are expected to experience the greatest lifetime exposure…

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Trump-appointed regulator OKs banking license for Trump-linked crypto firm

Trump-appointed regulator OKs banking license for Trump-linked crypto firm

Politico reports: The Trump administration has granted preliminary approval for a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump’s family to operate a federally chartered trust bank, over the protests of Democrats who decried the decision as riddled with conflicts of interest. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank regulatory arm of the Treasury Department, said in a letter on Friday that it was conditionally approving World Liberty Trust Co.’s application for a trust bank charter. The company…

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Depleted strategic oil reserve nears level that raises concerns about damage to storage caverns

Depleted strategic oil reserve nears level that raises concerns about damage to storage caverns

CNBC reports: The caverns that hold the U.S. strategic oil reserves could get damaged by the rapid release of stockpiles in response to the Iran war, experts warned this week as inventories hit a four-decade low. Damage to the caverns would make it more difficult to respond to future energy emergencies, the experts said. The oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is stored at 60 salt caverns thousands of feet underground at four major sites along the Gulf Coast…

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How Trump took charge of everything while accepting responsibility for nothing

How Trump took charge of everything while accepting responsibility for nothing

The Associated Press reports: It is among the most famous phrases in presidential history: “The buck stops here.” Except with President Donald Trump, it almost never does. Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround. The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the…

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The reason why Israel has done little to rein in settler violence

The reason why Israel has done little to rein in settler violence

The Associated Press reports: Palestinians in the occupied West Bank village of Qusra have huddled inside their homes for days on end, unable to leave because of the threat posed by Israeli settlers. The Israeli military, which over the past three years has displayed staggering military and intelligence capabilities from Beirut to Tehran, has yet to fully remove the settlers from the area of the village, about an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv. The United States, which provides billions of…

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Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Reuters reports: A terrifying game of hide-and-seek is playing out in this deadly corridor that snakes along the 1,200 km-long (750-mile) front line in Ukraine. The war, well into its fifth year, has become the first major conflict to be dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, with thousands of the cheap but deadly machines filling the skies. Ukraine and invader Russia are constantly advancing the new technology, which is transforming modern warfare. Both sides have had to abandon age-old tactics of…

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Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

The Straits Times reports: More than five years after the outbreak of Covid-19, most of us still remember the shape of the pandemic. It started small and distant. Then it passed from one person to another quickly, and we often did not even know we were spreading it. Today’s misinformation epidemic has the same shape: Fake news spreads quickly, and those “infected” by a rumour are often unaware it is untrue before passing it on to others. The “pink salt…

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The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

By Phil Wiseman, University of Southampton and Mark Sullivan, University of Southampton A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the universe was expanding. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered that this expansion…

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