Bangladesh is holding national elections for the first time since 2024, when a student movement ousted the prime minister.

Discord has moved to calm a user backlash over its upcoming age verification mandate by clarifying that the "vast majority" of people will never be asked to confirm their age through a face scan or government ID. The platform said it will instead rely on an internal "age prediction" model that draws on account information, device and activity data, and behavioral patterns across its communities to estimate whether someone is an adult. Users whose age the model cannot confidently determine will still need to submit a video selfie or ID. Those not verified as adults or identified as under 18 will be placed in a "teen-appropriate" experience that blocks access to age-restricted servers and channels. The clarification came after users threatened to leave the platform and cancel Nitro subscriptions, and after a third-party vendor used by Discord for age verification suffered a data breach last year that exposed user information and a small number of uploaded ID cards.

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A Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times, claiming that she tried to run him over. Newly released videos and text messages reveal fresh details about what happened.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn't that AI will take your job. It's that AI will save you from it. That's the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst -- and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins. But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn't a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines. As part of what they describe as "in-progress research," UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 "in-depth" interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees' to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

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Tumbler Ridge sits at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northeastern British Columbia, and is surrounded by expansive mountain ranges and a geological park.

In a courtroom in Ireland, prosecutors detailed the rambling, manic confessions of Henry McGowan, the New York man charged with murdering his father in a luxury hotel.

Six homeless people have died in the Italian city in recent weeks, highlighting the widening inequality as the Games unfold there.

A French logistics behemoth promised $20 billion for the United States, but a year into President Trump’s second term, only a fraction of the money has arrived.

In her first interview about her father, the exiled Hong Kong activist Anna Kwok said the authorities were targeting her family to try to silence her.

The rejection was a remarkable rebuke, suggesting that ordinary citizens did not believe that the lawmakers had committed any crimes.

Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country's central heating -- as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a formal reckoning with the possibility that climate change could render the island nation uninhabitable. Several recent studies have found the AMOC far more vulnerable to breakdown than scientists had long assumed. One, analyzing nine models under high-emission scenarios, saw the current weaken and collapse in every single instance; even under the Paris agreement's emission targets, the researchers estimated a 25% chance of shutdown. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of that study, said it was "wrong to assume this was low probability." Simulations of a post-collapse world project Icelandic winter extremes plunging to minus-50 degrees Celsius, and sea ice surrounding the country for the first time since Viking settlement. Iceland's national strategy for dealing with AMOC risks is scheduled to be finalized by 2028. The country has also flagged that NASA Goddard, a key source of AMOC modeling, has been targeted for significant staff and budget cuts under the current U.S. administration.

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Three Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting a bid by G.O.P. leaders to continue skirting a law that requires the House to vote promptly on measures challenging President Trump’s tariffs.

The man, Mike Sun, corresponded with Chinese government officials, monitored the visit of Taiwan’s president to California and backed the election of a city council member, according to court documents.

The pop hitmaker, who hasn’t released a new album in 10 years, sold the rights to her music to Primary Wave.

The vaccine maker’s shots involve the successful Covid vaccines’ RNA technology. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has broadly rejected it, canceling millions of dollars in research projects.

Ford Motor reported a big loss for 2025 because of its troubled electric vehicle division, which it has significantly scaled back.

In a meeting with employees at his company xAI, Mr. Musk revealed a vision for a facility that includes a giant catapult to launch his satellites into space.

hackingbear writes: China's Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve files. Generated videos run between 4 and 15 [or 60] seconds long and automatically come with sound effects or music. Its performance is unfortunately so good that it has forced the firm to block its facial-to-voice feature after the model reportedly demonstrated the ability to generate highly accurate personal voice characteristics using only facial images, even without user authorization. In a recent test, Pan Tianhong, founder of tech media outlet MediaStorm, discovered that uploading a personal facial photo caused the model to produce audio nearly identical to his real voice -- without using any voice samples or authorized data. [...]

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In their first sit-down interview, Michael and Susan Pretti avoided recriminations and recalled the son that Michael called “an exceptionally kind, caring man.”

The left needs a sharper A.I. politics.