Steve Mills has been collecting secondhand books in England to reawaken lost memories. His search revealed more about his family’s past than he thought possible.

Iran’s supreme leader believes the country can outlast the West in a war of attrition.

Old friends are bewildered by the turn taken by the second lady, a onetime Democrat and former litigator for a San Francisco firm. Others say she’s happy in the role.

By attacking Iran, President Trump has shown he is willing to engage in a distant war. This raises questions in Beijing about what he might risk for Taiwan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Swarms of tiny robots, each no larger than a speck of dust, could be deployed to cure stubborn infected sinuses before being blown out through the nose into a tissue, researchers have claimed. The micro-robots are a fraction of the width of a human hair and have been inserted successfully into animal sinuses in pre-clinical trials by researchers at universities in China and Hong Kong. Swarms are injected into the sinus cavity via a duct threaded through the nostril and guided to their target by electromagnetism, where they can be made to heat up and catalyze chemical reactions to wipe out bacterial infections. There are hopes the precisely targeted technology could eventually reduce reliance on antibiotics and other generalized medicines. [...] The latest breakthrough, based on animal rather than human trials, involves magnetic particles "doped" with copper atoms which clinicians insert with a catheter before guiding to their target under a magnetic field. The swarms can be heated up by reacting to light from an optical fibre that is also inserted into the body as part of the therapy. This allows the micro-robots to loosen up and penetrate viscous pus that forms a barrier to the infection site. The light source also prompts the micro-robots to disrupt bacterial cell walls and release reactive oxygen species that kill the bacteria. The study, published in Nature Robotics, showed the robots were capable of eradicating bacteria from pig sinuses and could clear infections in live rabbits with "no obvious tissue damage." The researchers have produced a model of how the technology could work on a human being, with the robot swarms being deployed in operating theatre conditions, allowing doctors to see their progress by using X-rays. Future applications could include tackling bacterial infections of the respiratory tract, stomach, intestine, bladder and urethra, they suggested. "Our proposed micro-robotic therapeutic platform offers the advantages of non-invasiveness, minimal resistance, and drug-free intervention," they said.

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After Zohran Mamdani’s performance in the New York City mayoral primary, Republicans and suburban Democrats attacked him, and party leaders seemed to be hedging their bets.

President Trump has long pushed the European allies to be more self-sufficient on defense, relying less on American protection. NATO committed to a major increase over the next decade.

The administration suggested an initial report of less-severe damage was already outdated as the president continued to defend his assertion that key facilities had been “obliterated,” though no intelligence official has yet directly echoed his view.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta escaped a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit from a group of authors who alleged the tech giant hoovered up millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its generative AI model called Llama. San Francisco federal Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that Meta's decision to use the books for training is protected under copyright law's fair use defense, but he cautioned that his opinion is more a reflection on the authors' failure to litigate the case effectively. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria said.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not been seen publicly or heard from in nearly a week. That absence has surprised and unnerved everyone from political insiders to the general public.

Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. From a report: Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training. [...] The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text responses to user prompts.

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Darrell Harris, a high school student, died after an encounter with men who were having a water gun fight at a local park, an official with knowledge of the incident said.

We can’t fix everything. But if it’s cheap and easy to save lives, why wouldn’t we?

In a heated hearing, Kari Lake, the Trump ally in charge of the federally funded international broadcasting network, called the media agency “a rotten piece of fish” that should be defunded.

Aaron Sorkin is officially working on a sequel to The Social Network. From a report: Last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed he was working on a film that would revisit the subject of Facebook, and Deadline has now reported that The Social Network Part II is in development at Sony Pictures yet isn't a "straight sequel." The original film, which traced the early days of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is rumoured to be directing the follow-up. "I blame Facebook for January 6," he said in 2024 on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: "You're gonna need to buy a movie ticket." The Social Network was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, and the sequel will be based on the Wall Street Journal series The Facebook Files. The 2021 investigation examined the damage caused by the social networking site and how internal findings had been buried. Subjects included the influence on the January 6 riot and the mental health of teenage users.

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The U.S. Treasury found ties between drug cartels and the Mexican companies, including a brokerage firm controlled by a former chief of staff of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

U.S. lawmakers have reintroduced the bipartisan Open App Markets Act, aiming to curb Apple and Google's control over mobile app stores by promoting competition, supporting third-party marketplaces and sideloading, and safeguarding developer rights. AppleInsider reports: The Open App Markets Act seeks to do a number of things, including: - Protect developers' rights to tell consumers about lower prices and offer competitive pricing; - Protect sideloading of apps; - Promote competition by opening the market to third-party app stores, startup apps, and alternative payment systems; - Make it possible for developers to offer new experiences that take advantage of consumer device features; - Give consumers greater control over their devices; - Prevent app stores from disadvantaging developers; and - Establish safeguards to preserve consumer privacy, security, and safety. This isn't the first time we've seen this bill, either. In 2021, Senators Blumenthal, Klobuchar, and Blackburn had attempted to put forth the original version of the Open App Markets Act.However, the initial bill never made it to the floor for an office vote. Thanks to last-minute efforts by lobbying groups and appearances from chief executives, the bill eventually stalled out. While the two bills are largely similar, the revised version introduces several key differences. Notably, the new version includes new carve-outs aimed at protecting intellectual property and addressing potential national security concerns.There's also a new clause that would prohibit punitive actions against developers for enabling remote access to other apps. The clause addition harkens back to the debacle between Apple and most game streaming services -- though in 2024, Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to allow cloud gaming and emulation. There are a few new platform-protective clauses added, too. For instance, it would significantly lower the burden of proof for either Apple or Google to block platform access to a third-party app.Additionally, it reinforces the fact that companies like Apple or Google will not need to provide support or refunds for third-party apps installed outside of first-party app marketplaces. The full bill can be found here.

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Many Muslim Americans in New York City were impressed by Mr. Mamdani’s campaign and thrilled at being able to see themselves reflected in a mayoral candidate.

Psylo, a new privacy-focused iOS browser by Mysk, aims to defeat digital fingerprinting by isolating each browser tab with its own IP address, unique fingerprinting defenses, and proxy-based encryption. "Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs," Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It's not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that." "This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different. The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse. "We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.

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While Zohran Mamdani won over some Jewish supporters, other Jewish Democrats suggested that concerns about their community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city they helped build.