F.B.I. Assigns Scores of Analysts to Examine Election Records in Georgia
The expansion of an investigation into Fulton County’s election office reflects President Trump’s desire to prove his baseless claims that the 2020 election in Georgia was rigged.
Judge Demands Answers About Plans for Trump’s East Potomac Golf Course
In a fiery hearing, Judge Ana C. Reyes hammered the government over denials that the president was forging ahead with plans to renovate the course without approval.
MAGA Base Stays Quiet After Trump Reports Billions in Personal Gains
A new mandatory disclosure revealed that the president has earned $2.2 billion during the first year back in the White House.
Empire State Climbers Accused of Breaking Security Door to Get to Spire
Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, extreme climbers who have illegally scaled buildings around the world, were arrested after getting engaged atop the Manhattan landmark.
Rare Copy of the Declaration of Independence Is Discovered in London
A volunteer cataloging naval letters came across a copy of the document, printed 250 years ago in New Hampshire. “It was a thrilling find,” he said.
Man Rescued 8 Days After Quake, a Ray of Joy in Stricken Venezuela
The 44-year-old security guard was pulled alive from a pancaked basement, offering a fleeting moment of hope amid a soaring death toll.
Amy Coney Barrett Is the Lightning Rod
The Supreme Court seesaw is swinging hard.
Taylor Swift, What Are You Doing?
Why am I dreading the Swift-Kelce wedding?
Black Soldiers In the Revolutionary War: A New England Journey
Across New England, a writer traveled down dirt paths and into historic homes to find the forgotten stories of the enslaved men who fought for freedom on two fronts.
National Parks Can Continue to Remove Signs That Trump Calls ‘Negative’
The decision was a win for the Trump administration as it pushes to remove material that the president has called inappropriate or “woke.”
With Attacks on Crimea, Ukraine Hopes to Pressure Putin to End the War
Escalating drone strikes, fuel shortages and power cuts in the region Russia annexed are among the factors turning up the heat on President Vladimir V. Putin.
Labor Force Participation Rate Falls To Lowest In 50 years
The US unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in June largely because 720,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to 61.5%. Excluding the Covid-era jobs market, that's the lowest participation rate since June 1976. CNBC reports: The decline in the labor force marks a "massive exodus" driven by multiple factors, said Mike Reid, head of U.S. economics at RBC. "The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% as both the number of unemployed workers and the size of the labor force pulled back," Reid wrote in a post-report commentary. "This may well be a story of retirements but could also be a story of prior job seekers dropping out of the labor force."
[...] [T]he rolls of those counted as not in the labor force, a group that includes the unemployed and those not looking for work, jumped by 832,000. And while the establishment survey, which counts jobs filled, showed growth for the month of 57,000, the survey of households, which counts the actual level of those working, tumbled by 507,000. On a year-over-year basis, the labor force is down by just over 1 million, while the level of the employed also has fallen by 1.06 million and the ranks of the unemployed have risen by 40,000. The employment-to-population ratio slipped to 59% in June, the lowest since October 2021. All that has happened while the unemployment rate has risen by just one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.2%.
The drop in participation is sometimes attributed to a shrinking immigrant population and retiring baby boomers and Gen Xers. However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as "prime age" workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023. "Looking at the statistics now, that argument doesn't hold up so well," North said of the retirement and immigration rationale. "I hate to use the word 'alarming,'" he added, but said the numbers are cause for concern.
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JD Vance and Melania Trump Also Had Sharp Earnings Increases in 2025
But the revenue brought in by the vice president and the first lady paled in comparison to that of President Trump.
David Hearn, Olympian Canoeist, Is Indicted After Arrest at Trump’s Reflecting Pool
David Hearn, a former canoeist, is accused of vandalizing the algae-challenged pool, which President Trump has said he would repair and beautify with fresh sealant. But the algae returned and the paint peeled.
Trump-Linked Firm’s Fees for Organizing Freedom 250 Events Remain Secret
Event Strategies, Inc., a longtime vendor to President Trump’s campaigns, is organizing the Great American State Fair and the July 4 celebrations.
AI Agent Executes 'First' End-To-End Ransomware Attack
Sysdig says it has documented the first ransomware attack carried out end to end by an AI agent, which autonomously exploited exposed systems, stole credentials, established persistence, compromised a production database, and destroyed data. The research team named the attacker "JadePuffer" and said it gained initial access to an internet-facing Langflow instance by exploiting CVE-2025-3248. "The most striking characteristic, however, was the LLM's behavior," Sysdig director of threat research Michael Clark said in a blog post. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from The Register: JadePuffer's "self-narrating" payloads "contained natural language reasoning, target prioritization, and the kind of detailed annotations that human operators don't often write but LLM-generated code produces reflexively," Clark added. "The operation also adapted in real time, retrying failed steps within refined parameters. In one sequence, it went from a failed login to a working fix in 31 seconds." After exploiting CVE-2025-3248, a missing authentication vulnerability in Langflow that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary Python on the host, the AI agent began scanning for and collecting secrets, including LLM provider API keys, cloud credentials "with explicit coverage of Chinese providers" including Alibaba, Aliyun, Tencent, and Huawei, while also scanning for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, cryptocurrency wallets, and database credentials.
The AI also installed a crontab entry on the Langflow server to maintain persistence and call back to the attacker's infrastructure every 30 minutes. JadePuffer's intended target was a separate internet-exposed production server running a MySQL database and an Alibaba Nacos configuration service, we're told. Nacos is an open-source service-discovery and dynamic configuration platform developed by Alibaba and used in the cloud provider's microservices applications. The agent connected to the server's exposed MySQL port using root credentials, although Sysdig doesn't know how the attacker obtained them. These credentials weren't stolen from the victim's environment.
JadePuffer then attacked Nacos via multiple vectors including an authorization bypass flaw (CVE-2021-29441) and forging a valid JSON web token (JWT) using Nacos's default signing key. Additionally, using its root database access, the LLM injected a backdoor administrator into the Nacos backing database. It ultimately encrypted all 1,342 Nacos service configuration items using MySQL's built-in AES encryption function, and created an extortion demand, ransom note, Bitcoin payment address, and a Proton Mail contact [...]. However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can't recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated "from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale," without backing up any of the encrypted data.
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Godot Game Engine No Longer Accepts AI Code
The Godot Foundation will stop accepting AI-authored code, agent-submitted pull requests, and AI-generated text in contributor communications after maintainers were overwhelmed by low-effort submissions. "It is time for us to recognize that these problems aren't going away and therefore we need to take steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while ensuring we still have a pipeline to mentor new contributors to become future maintainers," the Godot Foundation said in a blog post. Contributors may still use AI for limited "menial things" if they disclose it, but humans must understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit. PC Gamer reports: The Foundation says the pileup of Godot pull requests pending review isn't all bad: It's a sign that interest in using and contribution to Godot is increasing. But the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests. "If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review," the Foundation said.
As the problem becomes increasingly unsustainable, the Godot Foundation says it's in the process of updating its contribution policies, focusing on "adding barriers to low-effort slop" contributions, encouraging maintainers to review code, developing new contributors into future maintainers, and crucially, requiring that all contributions come from humans who are accountable for their code -- and fixing it if it fails. "AI cannot take responsibility, and we can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it," the Foundation said.
The Foundation says we can expect Godot's contributing policy to soon include explicit rejections of AI-authored code, noting that contributors should only use AI assistance for "menial things" and must disclose its use. Additionally, the Foundation will reject any AI-generated text in human-to-human communications, saying it's "a basic principle of respect" -- though it says machine translations "are still acceptable" if the original text was human-authored. "Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available," the Foundation said. "We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve."
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U.S. Officials Believed Israel Was Plotting to Kill Iranian Negotiators
Any Israeli attempt to kill Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, or Mohammad Ghalibaf, the Parliament speaker, would have derailed peace talks, American officials feared.
All New York Suffers in a Heat Wave. It’s Worse in Jamaica, Queens.
“Heat-vulnerable” parts of the city have few trees, little shade and limited access to air-conditioning. And the risk of death is also higher.
Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features
Meta is introducing a subscription for expanded access to advanced smart-glasses features. According to Wired, "[U]sers will need the Meta One Premium Plan to unlock expanded access to some features for their smart glasses, whether it's the Ray-Ban, Oakley, or Meta-branded version." They'll still be usable with a subscription, but "certain features will be limited," the report says. From the report: Specifically, a feature called Conversation Focus, which boosts the audio of the person you're speaking with so you can hear them better in loud environments. You'll get three hours per month without a subscription, but if you want to use it more often, then you'll need to pay up. Though even then, you're still capped at 15 hours. Subscribing also nets you "Premium Device Support," where you'll get faster access to what Meta says are "human experts" trained on the smart glasses' features, should any problems arise. Guess humans are better at some things after all.
A Meta spokesperson tells WIRED that this is "not an AI rate limit." Rate limits are common on other AI platforms -- users get free access to a feature until they hit a certain cap, then they'll need to subscribe to use it more until the limit resets at the end of the month. However, the Conversation Focus feature runs on-device, meaning it doesn't need to head to Meta's servers for AI processing. There's no real-time way to monitor how many hours you've used Conversation Focus, but you'll receive a notification when you get near the limit.
"The subscription supports that ongoing work and gives power users expanded access along with premium device support," the spokesperson says. "We're going to start testing new optional subscription plans that offer more premium features and advanced capabilities for those who want to unlock more from our apps and AI glasses."
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