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Trump holds off on major escalation against Iran as advisers raise concerns

Trump holds off on major escalation against Iran as advisers raise concerns

The New York Times reports: President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East. The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that have made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump…

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How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

  DW News: A new chapter of warfare is opening. The US-Israel war against Iran has included strikes from both sides against an increasingly important target: commercial data centers. Facilities in the UAE, Bahrain and Iran were hit across the Persian Gulf As military operations increasingly rely on AI, how long will it take adversaries to target them? What kind of attack, including in the US, is likely? They’re already central to many people’s everyday digital lives and their online…

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War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

Charlie Warzel writes: If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in…

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Fired ‘60 Minutes’ journalist says she was pressured to report on events that ‘never happened’

Fired ‘60 Minutes’ journalist says she was pressured to report on events that ‘never happened’

MS Now reports: Former CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega, one of several prominent journalists fired from the network’s signature broadcast this spring, said she was pressured by the news division’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, and other executives to include misinformation and political bias in reporting that aired this year. Vega’s account of Weiss interfering with independent reporting is similar to those of two other veteran “60 Minutes” correspondents, Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi, who were fired after David Ellison,…

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Trump’s anti-mail voting order gets blocked again, this time by federal appeals court

Trump’s anti-mail voting order gets blocked again, this time by federal appeals court

Democracy Docket reports: The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration’s request to pause a lower court order that blocks the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from executing the president’s March executive order attacking mail voting. The decision means President Donald Trump’s sweeping assault on mail voting won’t be carried out in 23 states and the District of Columbia. The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 against the Trump administration’s motion, with one – Judge Joshua D. Dunlap, a Trump…

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In Texas, the first U.S. city that’s on track to run out of water

In Texas, the first U.S. city that’s on track to run out of water

Science Alert reports: It seems inconceivable, even if you’re aware of the perilous situation that the world’s water supplies are in, but a developed coastal city in Texas that more than 300,000 people call home is now in serious danger of running out of water. The city is Corpus Christi, and difficulties with water scarcity are now coming to a head after years of concerns over shortages. There are multiple issues combining here, perhaps most importantly the arrival of major…

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Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

The Guardian reports: Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts. Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets…

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Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

The Verge reports: The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and…

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An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

Gizmodo reports: Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes asking Musk about his thoughts on the…

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Why Trump is facing his biggest danger from rising oil prices since the war began

Why Trump is facing his biggest danger from rising oil prices since the war began

Politico reports: The expanding conflict in the Middle East is thwarting the Trump administration’s bid to lower gasoline prices ahead of the looming midterm elections. It’s not just the Strait of Hormuz — oil tankers are now facing attacks on three major shipping routes as of this week. Global crude oil inventories are reaching critically low levels, with little hope of refilling them soon. And the temporary measures that have kept markets afloat since the war in Iran began, such…

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Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Reuters reports: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according ​to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight – attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment ‌at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the…

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Federal officials: Grants were cancelled ‘solely’ because states did not vote for Trump

Federal officials: Grants were cancelled ‘solely’ because states did not vote for Trump

The New York Times reports: When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste. But it wasn’t true. In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential…

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EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

Wired reports: The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union’s search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services—such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights—in search rankings. Google must also…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president

Bhaskar Sunkara writes: After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, AOC went to dozens of her constituents who had voted for both her and Trump and asked them why. She wanted to understand them rather than lecture them. Their answers – that she and Trump both read as outsiders, that both sounded like they were on the side of working people – informed her politics in the months to come. Some of the people who once formed the base of the…

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