I think my dad thought that had he had boys, fatherhood would have been different.

Canceling the visas of Chinese students in the United States is a horrible idea.

President Trump held a military parade the same day that hundreds of protests took place, in what amounted to a split-screen show of force.

“Recognize that God is present,” he said in a recorded video to a crowd gathered at the home stadium of the White Sox.

In Photos and Video

The wedding of Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, and Alex Soros, the scion of a liberal philanthropic dynasty, drew a rare concentration of wealth and power.

Eight families of Mennonites have moved from Mexico to Angola, in southern Africa, raising fears among some Angolans that they will be squeezed out by the new arrivals.

Meta's CTO, Palantir's CTO, and OpenAI's chief product officer are being appointed as lieutenant colonels in America's Army Reserve, reports The Register. (Along with OpenAI's former chief revenue officer). They've all signed up for Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps, "an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors," according to the official statement. "In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems..." "Our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army's modernization efforts," [Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth] said on X... As for Open AI's involvement, the company has been building its ties with the military-technology complex for some years now. Like Meta, OpenAI is working with Anduril on military ideas and last year scandalized some by watering down its past commitment to developing non-military products only. The Army wasn't answering questions on Friday but an article referenced by [OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin] Weil indicated that the four will have to serve a minimum of 120 hours a year, can work remotely, and won't have to pass basic training... "America wins when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital missions," [Palantir CTO Shyam] Sankar said on X. "This was the key to our triumphs in the 20th century. It can help us win again. I'm humbled by this new opportunity to serve my country, my home, America."

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The suspect, Vance Boelter, was appointed more than once to the Workforce Development Board, where he served with State Senator John A. Hoffman, who was shot on Saturday.

With the downtown facing an 8 p.m. curfew, the Los Angeles police began using tear gas and crowd-control munitions to break up protests after issuing a dispersal order.

The events in the capital were overshadowed by an assassination in Minnesota and turmoil in the Middle East.

In 1989 a computer scientist argued that more functionality in software actually lowers usability and practicality — leading to the counterintuitive proposition that "worse is better". But is that still true? Python's original creator Guido van Rossum addressed the question last month in a lightning talk at the annual Python Language Summit 2025. Guido started by recounting earlier periods of Python development from 35 years ago, where he used UNIX "almost exclusively" and thus "Python was greatly influenced by UNIX's 'worse is better' philosophy"... "The fact that [Python] wasn't perfect encouraged many people to start contributing. All of the code was straightforward, there were no thoughts of optimization... These early contributors also now had a stake in the language; [Python] was also their baby"... Guido contrasted early development to how Python is developed now: "features that take years to produce from teams of software developers paid by big tech companies. The static type system requires an academic-level understanding of esoteric type system features." And this isn't just Python the language, "third-party projects like numpy are maintained by folks who are paid full-time to do so.... Now we have a huge community, but very few people, relatively speaking, are contributing meaningfully." Guido asked whether the expectation for Python contributors going forward would be that "you had to write a perfect PEP or create a perfect prototype that can be turned into production-ready code?" Guido pined for the "old days" where feature development could skip performance or feature-completion to get something into the hands of the community to "start kicking the tires". "Do we have to abandon 'worse is better' as a philosophy and try to make everything as perfect as possible?" Guido thought doing so "would be a shame", but that he "wasn't sure how to change it", acknowledging that core developers wouldn't want to create features and then break users with future releases. Guido referenced David Hewitt's PyO3 talk about Rust and Python, and that development "was using worse is better," where there is a core feature set that works, and plenty of work to be done and open questions. "That sounds a lot more fun than working on core CPython", Guido paused, "...not that I'd ever personally learn Rust. Maybe I should give it a try after," which garnered laughter from core developers. "Maybe we should do more of that: allowing contributors in the community to have a stake and care".

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Cable networks covered President Trump’s Army parade on a busy day of protests, a political assassination and Middle East strikes. ABC, CBS and NBC aired other programming on their affiliates.

Last week America's financial aid program announced that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs." Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..." Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits. And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges. An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time... Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade. Fortune found one community college that "wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president. The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris. The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms... Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration. Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."

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The first lady’s outfit was fully in line with the controlled and contained public image she had been crafting since the end of her husband’s first term.

Will an expansion of biofuels increase greenhouse gas emissions, despite their purported climate benefits? That's the claim of a new report from the World Resources Institute, which has been critical of US biofuel policy in the past. Ars Technica has republished an article from the nonprofit, non-partisan news organization Inside Climate News, which investigates the claim. Drawing from 100 academic studies on biofuel impacts, the Institute's new report "concludes that [U.S.] ethanol policy has been largely a failure and ought to be reconsidered, especially as the world needs more land to produce food to meet growing demand." "Multiple studies show that U.S. biofuel policies have reshaped crop production, displacing food crops and driving up emissions from land conversion, tillage, and fertilizer use," said the report's lead author, Haley Leslie-Bole. "Corn-based ethanol, in particular, has contributed to nutrient runoff, degraded water quality and harmed wildlife habitat. As climate pressures grow, increasing irrigation and refining for first-gen biofuels could deepen water scarcity in already drought-prone parts of the Midwest...." It may, in fact, produce more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels it was intended to replace. Recent research says that biofuel refiners also emit significant amounts of carcinogenic and dangerous substances, including hexane and formaldehyde, in greater amounts than petroleum refineries. The new report points to research saying that increased production of biofuels from corn and soy could actually raise greenhouse gas emissions, largely from carbon emissions linked to clearing land in other countries to compensate for the use of land in the Midwest. On top of that, corn is an especially fertilizer-hungry crop requiring large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which releases huge amounts of nitrous oxide when it interacts with the soil. American farming is, by far, the largest source of domestic nitrous oxide emissions already — about 50 percent. If biofuel policies lead to expanded production, emissions of this enormously powerful greenhouse gas will likely increase, too.

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A Minnesota state representative and her husband were killed early Saturday, and a state senator and his wife were injured.

"People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT," reports the Washington Post. But that's just the first change, according to a New York-based start-up devoted to watching for content-scraping AI companies with a free analytics product and "ensuring that these intelligent agents pay for the content they consume." Their data from 266 web sites (half run by national or local news organizations) found that "traffic from retrieval bots grew 49% in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024," the Post reports. A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing. To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones [said TollBit CEO/co-founder Toshit Panigrahi]. But he also acknowledged that squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify.... In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like web search and "reasoning" to answer more complex queries, traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit's report. Panigrahi said TollBit's data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn't reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI "agents" that can complete tasks on a user's behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up's findings also add a dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet — optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms — will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. "To think of it as, 'Well, I'm optimizing my search for humans' is missing out on a big opportunity," he said. Installing TollBit's analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 2,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don't need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user. The Post also got this comment from the chief operating officer for the media company Time, which successfully negotiated content licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity. "The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism... There is a very, very long way to go."

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At least three people were killed and scores were wounded during an aerial battle over Tel Aviv, as Iranian missiles rained down and Israeli rockets attempted to intercept them.

Rocky Linux 10 "Red Quartz" has reached general availability, notes a new article in The Register — surveying the differences between "RHELatives" — the major alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The Rocky 10 release notes describe what's new, such as support for RISC-V computers. Balancing that, this version only supports the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series; it drops Rocky 9.x's support for the older Pi 3 and Pi Zero models... RHEL 10 itself, and Rocky with it, now require x86-64-v3, meaning Intel "Haswell" generation kit from about 2013 onward. Uniquely among the RHELatives, AlmaLinux offers a separate build of version 10 for x86-64-v2 as well, meaning Intel "Nehalem" and later — chips from roughly 2008 onward. AlmaLinux has a history of still supporting hardware that's been dropped from RHEL and Rocky, which it's been doing since AlmaLinux 9.4. Now that includes CPUs. In comparison, the system requirements for Rocky Linux 10 are the same as for RHEL 10. The release notes say.... "The most significant change in Rocky Linux 10 is the removal of support for x86-64-v2 architectures. AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures for x86-64-v3 are now required." A significant element of the advertising around RHEL 10 involves how it has an AI assistant. This is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed, and you can use it right from a shell prompt, as the documentation describes... It's much easier than searching man pages, especially if you don't know what to look for... [N]either AlmaLinux 10 nor Rocky Linux 10 includes the option of a helper bot. No big surprise there... [Rocky Linux] is sticking closest to upstream, thanks to a clever loophole to obtain source RPMs. Its hardware requirements also closely parallel RHEL 10, and CIQ is working on certifications, compliance, and special editions. Meanwhile, AlmaLinux is maintaining support for older hardware and CPUs, which will widen its appeal, and working with partners to ensure reboot-free updates and patching, rather than CIQ's keep-it-in-house approach. All are valid, and all three still look and work almost identically... except for the LLM bot assistant.

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