Thunderstorms in the south and central United States caused flight delays during Memorial Day weekend, the beginning of the summer travel season.

The British monarch, who is Canada’s official head of state, is coming at a moment when President Trump has threatened the country’s sovereignty.

In a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, President Trump highlighted the sacrifices of soldiers and their families but also his own achievements.

alternative_right writes: The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries.

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For decades, California has been able to adopt its own emissions regulations, effectively setting the bar for carmakers nationally. And for just as long, Republicans have resented the state’s outsize influence.

As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would "basically kill" the AI industry. From a report: Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn't feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first. "I think the creative community wants to go a step further," Clegg said according to The Times. "Quite a lot of voices say, 'You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask.' And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data." "I just don't know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don't see how that would work," Clegg said. "And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight."

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Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews. The Federal Aviation Administration created the problem by relocating Newark's air traffic control operations from the understaffed N90 facility on Long Island to Philadelphia in 2024. Only 17 of 33 controllers accepted the move despite $100,000 relocation bonuses, leaving operations short-staffed. Rather than build new STARS servers in Philadelphia, the FAA opted to send radar data over 130 miles of commercial copper telephone lines. The remote feeds have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime over 10 months -- exceeding the agency's reliability standards and occurring 200 times more frequently than the FAA's internal analysis predicted. The agency simultaneously laid off over 100 maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists in February, further straining an air traffic control system that suffers around 700 outages weekly nationwide while managing 16.8 million annual flights with 1990s-era technology.

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President Trump says that the Russian president has “gone absolutely CRAZY’’ with attacks in Ukraine, but has so far refused to join Europe with its newest sanctions.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was pushed in the face as he left a plane in Vietnam. The bigger issue, he said, was the reaction, part of a string of disinformation by “crazy people.”

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that foreign service providers like Microsoft and Zoom that act against Russian interests should be "throttled." Putin said it was important for Russia to develop domestic software solutions.

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Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is the way it reflects our preposterous nightmare world.

Pakistan will allocate 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity in the first phase of a national initiative to power bitcoin mining and AI data centres, its finance ministry said on Sunday. The allocation is part of Islamabad's plans to use its surplus electricity to bitcoin mining and AI data centres.

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This year’s playoff ratings are excellent. But is a small-market problem looming?

With diplomatic efforts to reach a cease-fire appearing remote, and President Trump apparently abandoning the process, Russia has been escalating its assaults on Ukrainian cities and on the battlefield.

Amazon software engineers are reporting that AI tools are transforming their jobs into something resembling the company's warehouse work, with managers pushing faster output and tighter deadlines while teams shrink in size, according to the New York Times. Three Amazon engineers told the New York Times that the company has raised productivity goals over the past year and expects developers to use AI assistants that suggest code snippets or generate entire program sections. One engineer said his team was cut roughly in half but still expected to produce the same amount of code by relying on AI tools. The shift mirrors historical workplace changes during industrialization, the Times argues, where technology didn't eliminate jobs but made them more routine and fast-paced. Engineers describe feeling like "bystanders in their own jobs" as they spend more time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it themselves. Tasks that once took weeks now must be completed in days, with less time for meetings and collaborative problem-solving, according to the engineers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: [Last] week, it was announced that Docomo's emoji designs will no longer appear on any of the Japanese mobile network's devices. This marks the end of an emoji era that first began in 1999, even though the set hasn't been updated since 2013. [...] Unlike these earlier systems, Docomo's emoji set in 1999 was explicitly tied to mobile internet use and would become the template for emoji standardization in the 2000s and 2010s, alongside emoji design sets implemented by Softbank and KDDI on their own versions of i-mode (J-Sky and EZweb, respectively). Docomo's set would receive several updates between 1999 and 2013, introducing color support and additional concepts to the keyboard. But now, as per this week's announcement, it will finally be discontinued. Spanning 26 years, it's undeniable that Docomo's emoji set played a foundational role in emoji history, even if its last incarnation remained unchanged for almost 12 of those 26 years.

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President Trump on Friday threatened, and then paused, steeper tariffs on goods from the European Union. He also targeted Apple.

An extraordinary author-translator collaboration produced a book, “Heart Lamp,” that was lauded for enriching the English language.

Venture capitalists are inverting their traditional investment approach by acquiring mature businesses and retrofitting them with AI. Firms including General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and solo investor Elad Gil are employing this private equity-style strategy to buy established companies like call centers and accounting firms, then optimizing them with AI automation.

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"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future." But now "Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.". So they're funding short films "that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light," produced by Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors) So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled "Sweetwater," tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, "Lucid," examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream.... Google has much riding on convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI, per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said.... Negative public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are motivated to makeover AI's reputation. "There's an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the future," said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on a conference panel. "We, as an industry, have to do a better job of communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing."

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