Little is known about Pickaxe Mountain, but some experts say it illustrates the impossibility of relying on force alone to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Several moves suggest Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could revive his campaign to question the safety and effectiveness of the shots after the midterm elections.

Sean Hannity criticized the pope. Tucker Carlson attacked Mr. Hannity. And President Trump suggested ranking MAGA figures: “good, bad, and somewhere in the middle.”

One reported tornado downed trees and damaged cars in Lena, Ill., an official said.

The profit motive was on trial. The verdict was scathing.

Friday’s meeting at the White House followed the introduction of Anthropic’s powerful new artificial intelligence model, Mythos, which U.S. officials believe could be critical for security.

A blast on Thursday night turned out to be for a video shoot, but it unnerved residents who had lived through a propane plant explosion in 2008.

A new Ipsos poll finds Americans are increasingly getting news from online personalities and comedians instead of traditional TV or newspapers. The survey says nearly 70% get news online in a given week, versus 55% from TV and 25% from newspapers, with figures like Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, and late-night hosts ranking prominently depending on political leanings. From the Hollywood Reporter: The poll, which was conducted in March, actually found the conservative politicians and cabinet members, including President Trump, were the top news influencers. When politicos were excluded, Joe Rogan led the list, followed by Fox News personalities Greg Gutfeld and Sean Hannity, and then TuckerCarlson and Ben Shapiro. The only three influencers to crack 10 percent were Trump, Rogan, and JD Vance. Among people who voted for Kamala Harris, the top news personalities were late night hosts, led by ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, followed by CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert, and Daily Show host Jon Stewart. Just under 70 percent of respondents said they get their news online in a given week, compared to 55 percent for TV, and 25 percent for newspapers. [...] Of traditional media outlets, TV dominated, with Fox News, the broadcast networks, and CNN topping the list of sources. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram were the most popular online news sources. "On these platforms opinionated personalities and comedians appear to drown out anyone who would fit in the traditional journalist category," said assistant professor of practice and Jordan Center Executive Director Steven L Herman. "Even in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, sensationalist and polarizing voices in print and later on air were among the most influential in the political landscape -- such as political satirist Mark Twain and populist Father Charles Coughlin."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A month of efforts to help a stranded humpback escape the Baltic Sea have culminated in a tourist and media spectacle, with no guarantee of success.

San Diego County is shopping a surplus of desalinated seawater to Western states that are facing increasingly urgent drought and short supplies.

The Silicon Valley chip maker filed a prospectus just as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI prepared for their own listings, in what is shaping up to be a wave of enormous initial public offerings.

NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. "CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST," it said. "This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissions, which increased 263% between 2020 and 2025. We don't expect this trend to let up anytime soon." The Hacker News reports: The prioritization criteria outlined by NIST, which went into effect on April 15, 2026, are as follows: - CVEs appearing in the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. - CVEs for software used within the federal government. - CVEs for critical software as defined by Executive Order 14028: this includes software that's designed to run with elevated privilege or managed privileges, has privileged access to networking or computing resources, controls access to data or operational technology, and operates outside of normal trust boundaries with elevated access. Any CVE submission that doesn't meet these thresholds will be marked as "Not Scheduled." The idea, NIST said, is to focus on CVEs that have the maximum potential for widespread impact. "While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same level of systemic risk as those in the prioritized categories," it added. [...] Changes have also been instituted for various other aspects of the NVD operations. These include: - NIST will no longer routinely provide a separate severity score for a CVE where the CVE Numbering Authority has already provided a severity score. - A modified CVE will be reanalyzed only if it "materially impacts" the enrichment data. Users can request specific CVEs to be reanalyzed by sending an email to the same address listed above. - All unenriched CVEs currently in backlog with an NVD publish date earlier than March 1, 2026, will be moved into the "Not Scheduled" category. This does not apply to CVEs that are already in the KEV catalog. - NIST has updated the CVE status labels and descriptions, as well as the NVD Dashboard, to accurately reflect the status of all CVEs and other statistics in real time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Also, a college with a cookie house. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they're a real human, provided they've already stared into one of World's glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan. [...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology. Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A career Justice Department lawyer, Maria Medetis Long, in Miami is said to have raised concerns about whether the evidence justified moving forward with a bid to prosecute John O. Brennan.

The companies had asked the justices to clear the way to move environmental lawsuits out of state courts, to friendlier federal venues.

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla's email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Thunderbolt allows organizations to do the following: - Run AI with their choice of models, from leading commercial providers to open-source and local models - Connect to systems and data: Integrate with pipelines and open protocols, including: deepset's Haystack platform, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and agents with the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) - Automate workflows and recurring tasks: Generate daily briefings, monitor topics, compile reports, or trigger actions based on events and schedules - Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android - Maintain security with self-hosted deployment, optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's newest Fire TV Sticks are dropping support for normal sideloading, blocking apps from outside the Amazon Appstore unless the device is registered with developers. Cord Cutters News reports: This week, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of a new Fire TV Stick HD. The new model will run on Amazon's Vega OS, rather than Android, so most streaming apps will be supported, but users won't be add third party apps. Now, on the product page to preorder the new Fire Stick, some Amazon customers are getting a message warning them that the new model won't allow sideloading. Interestingly, not all customers are getting the message, whether signed in to an Amazon account or not. The message, shown in a screenshot below, says: "For enhanced security, this device prevents sideloading or installing apps from unknown sources. Only apps from the Amazon Appstore are available for download." [...] The Fire TV Stick Select, announced in September 2025, also runs on Vega and some customers will see the same message about sideloading on that product page. [...] While Amazon continues to be a "multi-OS company," we should expect that future Fire TV models will also be built with Vega OS, limiting the apps users can access with their streaming devices to those from the Amazon Appstore.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has set up a meeting and a new office to speed project approvals and make Canada more attractive to investors.

Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, derided Canada’s trade strategy and said a North American deal needed to be reworked.