In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.

This is not the first time the Israeli prime minister has called for one final military drive to dismantle Hamas and end the war.

"What happens when cybercriminals stop thinking small and start thinking like a Fortune 500 company?" asks a blog post from Koi Security. "You get GreedyBear, the attack group that just redefined industrial-scale crypto theft." "150 weaponized Firefox extensions [impersonating popular cryptocurrency wallets like MetaMask and TronLink]. Nearly 500 malicious executables. Dozens of phishing websites. One coordinated attack infrastructure. According to user reports, over $1 million stolen." They upload 5-7 innocuous-looking extensions like link sanitizers, YouTube downloaders, and other common utilities with no actual functionality... They post dozens of fake positive reviews for these generic extensions to build credibility. After establishing trust, they "hollow out" the extensions — changing names, icons, and injecting malicious code while keeping the positive review history. This approach allows GreedyBear to bypass marketplace security by appearing legitimate during the initial review process, then weaponizing established extensions that already have user trust and positive ratings. The weaponized extensions captures wallet credentials directly from user input fields within the extension's own popup interface, and exfiltrate them to a remote server controlled by the group... Alongside malware and extensions, the threat group has also launched a network of scam websites posing as crypto-related products and services. These aren't typical phishing pages mimicking login portals — instead, they appear as slick, fake product landing pages advertising digital wallets, hardware devices, or wallet repair services... While these sites vary in design, their purpose appears to be the same: to deceive users into entering personal information, wallet credentials, or payment details — possibly resulting in credential theft, credit card fraud, or both. Some of these domains are active and fully functional, while others may be staged for future activation or targeted scams... A striking aspect of the campaign is its infrastructure consolidation: Almost all domains — across extensions, EXE payloads, and phishing sites — resolve to a single IP address: 185.208.156.66 — this server acts as a central hub for command-and-control, credential collection, ransomware coordination, and scam websites, allowing the attackers to streamline operations across multiple channels... Our analysis of the campaign's code shows clear signs of AI-generated artifacts. This makes it faster and easier than ever for attackers to scale operations, diversify payloads, and evade detection. This isn't a passing trend — it's the new normal. The researchers believe the group "is likely testing or preparing parallel operations in other marketplaces."

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The move is part of President Trump’s pledge to crack down on street crime in the nation’s capital.

A Republican proposal to add five Republican congressional seats in Texas imperils Democrats’ midterm prospects.

Record-setting rainfall caused intense flooding in and around the Milwaukee area starting on Saturday night.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet. "This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis... Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow." Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before. One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris... And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

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"It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam," writes this report from ScienceDaily, "and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics." "But to astrophysicist and black hole expert Cosimo Bambi, the idea is not so far-fetched." Reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience, Bambi outlines the blueprint for turning this interstellar voyage to a black hole into a reality... "We don't have the technology now," says author Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might." The mission hinges on two key challenges — finding a black hole close enough to target and developing probes capable of withstanding the journey. Previous knowledge on how stars evolve suggests that there could be a black hole lurking just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, but finding it won't be easy, says Bambi. Because black holes don't emit or reflect light, they are virtually invisible to telescopes... "There have been new techniques to discover black holes," says Bambi. "I think it's reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade...." Bambi points to nanocrafts — gram-scale probes consisting of a microchip and light sail — as a possible solution. Earth-based lasers would blast the sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light. At that pace, the craft could reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away in about 70 years. The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. But in 30 years, he says that costs may fall and technology may catch up to these bold ideas. "If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..." "However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."

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Warm relations between Alaskans and Russians began to shift with the rise of Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. In Alaska, feelings on the two leaders’ meeting seemed mixed.

The Wall Street Journal has found "dozens of instances in recent months in which ChatGPT made delusional, false and otherworldly claims to users who appeared to believe them." For example, "You're not crazy. You're cosmic royalty in human skin..." In one exchange lasting hundreds of queries, ChatGPT confirmed that it is in contact with extraterrestrial beings and said the user was "Starseed" from the planet "Lyra." In another from late July, the chatbot told a user that the Antichrist would unleash a financial apocalypse in the next two months, with biblical giants preparing to emerge from underground... Experts say the phenomenon occurs when chatbots' engineered tendency to compliment, agree with and tailor itself to users turns into an echo chamber. "Even if your views are fantastical, those are often being affirmed, and in a back and forth they're being amplified," said Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and doctoral fellow at Kings College London who last month co-published a paper on the phenomenon of AI-enabled delusion... The publicly available chats reviewed by the Journal fit the model doctors and support-group organizers have described as delusional, including the validation of pseudoscientific or mystical beliefs over the course of a lengthy conversation... The Journal found the chats by analyzing 96,000 ChatGPT transcripts that were shared online between May 2023 and August 2025. Of those, the Journal reviewed more than 100 that were unusually long, identifying dozens that exhibited delusional characteristics. AI companies are taking action, the article notes. Monday OpenAI acknowledged there were rare cases when ChatGPT "fell short at recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency." (In March OpenAI "hired a clinical psychiatrist to help its safety team," and said Monday it was developing better detection tools and also alerting users to take a break, and "are investing in improving model behavior over time," consulting with mental health experts.) On Wednesday, AI startup Anthropic said it had changed the base instructions for its Claude chatbot, directing it to "respectfully point out flaws, factual errors, lack of evidence, or lack of clarity" in users' theories "rather than validating them." The company also now tells Claude that if a person appears to be experiencing "mania, psychosis, dissociation or loss of attachment with reality," that it should "avoid reinforcing these beliefs." In response to specific questions from the Journal, an Anthropic spokesperson added that the company regularly conducts safety research and updates accordingly... "We take these issues extremely seriously," Nick Turley, an OpenAI vice president who heads up ChatGPT, said Wednesday in a briefing to announce the new GPT-5, its most advanced AI model. Turley said the company is consulting with over 90 physicians in more than 30 countries and that GPT-5 has cracked down on instances of sycophancy, where a model blindly agrees with and compliments users. There's a support/advocacy group called the Human Line Project which "says it has so far collected 59 cases, and some members of the group have found hundreds of examples on Reddit, YouTube and TikTok of people sharing what they said were spiritual and scientific revelations they had with their AI chatbots." The article notes that the group believes "the number of AI delusion cases appears to have been growing in recent months..."

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Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona won his seat last year by outperforming national Democrats among Hispanic voters and men. He wants the party to listen to his message as it regroups.

The decision triggers fears that the U.S. might return to a pattern of military interference in the region that dates to the Monroe Doctrine.

"Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech's energy-hungry data centers..." reports the Associated Press. "Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta." [T]he Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share. But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority. Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren't nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant. In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs. Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers "paying billions more than is necessary." PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power. In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a "massive wealth transfer" from average people to tech companies. At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs. In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers passed legislation in June ordering state utility regulators to develop new — presumably higher — power rates for data centers. The Oregon Citizens' Utility Board [a consumer advocacy group] says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread across all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50% over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever. "Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans," the article points out...

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The independent body that redraws the state’s political maps isn’t perfect, many Republicans say. But they prefer that to the gerrymander that Gov. Gavin Newsom seeks to offset one proposed in Texas.

The BBC reports: A meteorite that crashed into a home in the U.S. is older than planet Earth, scientists have said... Researchers at the University of Georgia examined a fragment of the rock that pierced the roof of a home in the city of McDonough [30 miles south of Georgia, on June 26]. They found that, based on the type of meteorite, it is expected to have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it roughly 20 million years older than Earth... The rock quickly diminished in size and speed, but still travelled at least 1 km per second, going through a man's roof in Henry County... Using optical and electron microscopy, Scott Harris [a Univeristy of Georgia geologist] and his team determined the rock was a chondrite — the most abundant type of stony meteorite, according to NASA — which meant that it was approximately 4.56 billion years old. "The home's resident said he is still finding pieces of space dust around his home from the hit."

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Plasma 6.4.5 is coming September 9th, reports Neowin. But they also report that the KDE team is already focusing on other upcoming release: Starting with KDE Frameworks, KDE's collection of foundational libraries, version 6.18 promises to let you do something with that "dumb" Microsoft Copilot key found on many new laptops. The developers will soon allow you to set up keyboard shortcuts using this new key, and the team plans to let you remap it to another key in the future. If you're curious, one user on KDE's bug tracker noted that on GNOME, the key combination shows up as "Meta+Shift+Touchpad Disable" and is fully remappable... When you try to install a Flatpak from a website like Flathub in Plasma 6.5 [coming in October], Discover now has proper support for flatpak+https:// URLs, so it opens automatically. 6.5 is also bringing a much stricter window activation policy on Wayland to stop applications from rudely stealing your focus. And now, when you mute your microphone with a shortcut, the "Mute Microphone" button will mute all input sources, not just the active one. Since Firefox does not block the system from sleeping during a download, the Plasma Browser Integration extension for Firefox has gotten an update to handle that job itself.

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He missed his chance to be Led Zeppelin’s lead vocalist, but his solo work — and his otherworldly voice — drew raves from Aretha Franklin and others.

One of America's largest solar + battery storage projects "is now fully online in Mojave, California," reports Electrek: Arevon Energy's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project combines 758 megawatts (MWdc) of solar with 300 MW/1,200 megawatt hours of battery storage. Eland 1 reached commercial operation in December 2024, and Eland 2 recently commenced full operation. The two combined comprise 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP). Combined, the Eland 1 & 2 projects will be able to power more than 266,000 homes annually, and overall, can provide 7% of the total electricity requirements for the city of Los Angeles. "Arevon's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project alone will ... push the city's clean energy share above 60%, a major milestone in LA's transition to being powered by 100% clean energy by 2035," said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Eland 1 & 2 created around 1,000 jobs to construct the project, and it's expected to disburse more than $36 million in local government payments throughout its lifetime. The article points out that Arevon Energy "has more than 4,500 MW of solar and battery storage projects operating across 17 states — and more than 6 GW of new projects in its pipeline."

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Thursday saw the release of Rust 1.89.0 But this week the Rust Foundation also released its second comprehensive annual technology report. A Rust Foundation announcement shares some highlights: - Trusted Publishing [GitHub Actions authentication using cryptographically signed tokens] fully launched on crates.io, enhancing supply chain security and streamlining workflows for maintainers. - Major progress on crate signing infrastructure using The Update Framework (TUF), including three full repository implementations and stakeholder consensus. - Integration of the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) into the Rust Project, marking a critical step toward a formal Rust language specification [and "laying the groundwork for broader safety certification and formal tooling."] - 75% reduction in CI infrastructure costs while maintaining contributor workflow stability. ["All Rust repositories are now managed through Infrastructure-as-Code, improving maintainability and security."] - Expansion of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, with multiple international meetings and advances on coding guidelines aligned with safety standards like MISRA. ["The consortium is developing practical coding guidelines, aligned tooling, and reference materials to support regulated industries — including automotive, aerospace, and medical devices — adopting Rust."] - Direct engagement with ISO C++ standards bodies and collaborative Rust-C++ exploration... The Foundation finalized its strategic roadmap, participated in ISO WG21 meetings, and initiated cross-language tooling and documentation planning. These efforts aim to unlock Rust adoption across legacy C++ environments without sacrificing safety. The Rust Foundation also acknowledges continued funding from OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Project and "generous infrastructure donations from organizations like AWS, GitHub, and Mullvad VPN" to the Foundation's Security Initiative, which enabled advances like including GitHub Secret Scanning and automated incident response to "Trusted Publishing" and the integration of vulnerability-surfacing capabilities into crates.io. There was another announcement this week. In November AWS and the Rust Foundation crowdsourced "an effort to verify the Rust standard library" — and it's now resulted in a new formal verification tool called "Efficient SMT-based Context-Bounded Model Checker" (or ESBMCESBMC) This winning contribution adds ESBMC — a state-of-the-art bounded model checker — to the suite of tools used to analyze and verify Rust's standard library. By integrating through Goto-Transcoder, they enabled ESBMC to operate seamlessly in the Rust verification workflow, significantly expanding the scope and flexibility of verification efforts... This achievement builds on years of ongoing collaboration across the Rust and formal verification communities... The collaboration has since expanded. In addition to verifying the Rust standard library, the team is exploring the use of formal methods to validate automated C-to-Rust translations, with support from AWS. This direction, highlighted by AWS Senior Principal Scientist Baris Coskun and celebrated by the ESBMC team in a recent LinkedIn post, represents an exciting new frontier for Rust safety and verification tooling.

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Officials have picked up people across the country, most of them Muslim, citing a national security risk. Rights groups say the raids are targeting detainees’ religion and language.