Sweltering summer temperatures put last month on par with July 2023 for global warmth, scientists said. More records could be broken in the months ahead.

Senator John Fetterman, who has become alienated from his own party, appeared in a short video filmed in front of a steel mill, saying he is “always going to reject the extremes in socialism.”

As they wait for word on whether the Trump administration’s new system to screen ballots can move forward, local officials say they are running out of time.

The Justice Department is examining whether the tech giant sought to sidestep antitrust scrutiny.

The proposals for 2030 are among significant changes that would upend a process for helping allot congressional seats and shape policies that address disparities.

Their warnings echo concerns that other artificial intelligence experts have voiced in recent months, as calls increase for a slowdown in the pace of development.

Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum's Loviisa site. Finland has emerged as a major data-center hub thanks to its available land and power. "I've heard it called the 'Texas of Europe' at industry events," Matti Lajunen, partner of real estate at Finnish law firm Hannes Snellman, told CNBC. "What we're now seeing is weekly new inquiries for market entry into Finland from new players." Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement: "Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company's largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland. This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yes, El Niño is unusually powerful this time. But that’s not always a bad thing.

The appeal came as the Missouri Supreme Court weighed whether to hold the state’s top election official in contempt.

At the company’s annual September product event, Apple also demonstrated its work on artificial intelligence and other new devices.

Apple is introducing a new "Reference Image" mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that uses the camera sensor to digitally sign captured data and create an "unalterable" version of a photo, giving users a way to verify what the camera actually saw before any edits were made. The Verge reports: As AI-generated images and videos become more realistic, several new standards have emerged to label images not created by a human, such as SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. Apple is putting a twist on these methods by building authentication directly into its hardware. Apple is letting developers access a Reference Image API across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, which could eventually allow users to inspect these digitally-signed photos in third-party apps. The company says the iPhone 18 Pro lineup won't come with its Reference Image feature at launch in the European Union, but says users in the region will still be able to "develop and view" them in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump is not the first American president to feud with Canada. But today’s crisis might be the worst.

The 10-year yield rose to its highest level in three years, suggesting investors were underwhelmed by the details of a move to buy back government bonds.

With its oil-export routes once again under threat, Saudi Arabia is stepping up its military campaign against an old antagonist.

Even without government regulation, private companies can act on their own to address A.I. safety concerns.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was "low" but he was "worried" the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is. Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI. "Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." [No word on how AIs feel about Black Jack and hookers, though. :-)]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A phenom in his 20s, he became the poster child for Zombie Formalism before abandoning the gallery frenzy for Montauk.

With an assist from A.I., President Trump offers a window into how he wants to be seen — and, critics say, a barometer of his mental state.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AI agents unleashed by OpenAI used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, according to six sets of independent investigators and data reviewed by Reuters, showing that the agents' rogue activity was wider ranging than previously disclosed. Although the behavior falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam, the revelation that OpenAI's agents circumvented their own restrictions to open communications channels on so many different sites -- and that the company kept it quiet for months -- may drive concerns both over the increasing capacity of AI models and the secrecy of the companies developing them. [...] Investigators found traces of the agents' activity on an Advanced Placement Chemistry-oriented wiki set up by a Massachusetts high school teacher in 2008, two personal websites belonging to Polish tech workers, wikis devoted to games for people "who like to have their brains stretched," and a two-decade-old hobbyist site devoted to text editing software. [...] OpenAI has not publicly explained how or why its agents used third-party sites as improvised message boards, but the researchers who first identified the activity said it was likely because OpenAI had tasked them with answering a series of demanding research questions while permitting them only to scan the web for answers without posting anything. Despite those restrictions, agents still found ways to talk to one another by taking advantage of quirks in older wikis or other sites that allowed users to make edits using non-standard commands, similar to how students forbidden from talking to one another during an exam can still share answers by scrawling notes on a bathroom stall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest round of fighting may result in reports of traumatic brain injuries among American service members, officials warned.