Politics

The convicted crypto exec has been heaping praise on the president from behind bars. Most recently, posting on X through intermediaries that “Operation Epic Fury is working,” and backing Donald Trump’s war on Iran. According to CoinDesk:

Everyone was a bit caught off guard when the DOJ settled its antitrust suit against Live Nation. There was speculation that Donald Trump intervened to push for a settlement. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that was indeed the case:

The New York Times sued over the Pentagon’s more stringent policies late last year, and following today’s ruling, the Pentagon has been ordered to restore press passes for seven NYT journalists.

A Nevada judge has issued a temporary restraining order, saying the company can’t operate without first getting a gaming license. This is an escalation of a turf war between the states and the CFTC over who regulates prediction markets.

And the headline of the essay in which this happens asks if he should be burned at the stake. Father Paolo Benanti, the Papal AI advisor, doesn’t seem too pleased about Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Thiel has brazenly brought to Rome. “La Silicon Valley s’était lancée dans un coup d’État permanent.” I don’t think you need to know French to get the gist of that. one, but linked below is a summary of the essay. Make auto-da-fe great again??

I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.

After initially hitting 4Chan with a paltry £20,000 (about $26,500) penalty for hindering its investigation, Ofcom has now fined the website £520,000 ($690,000) for failing to comply with age assurance obligations. Should non-compliance continue, 4Chan risks facing additional daily fines of up to £800 (about $1,060).

From The Atlantic, on the market for Trump’s personal phone number and who has been calling lately:

He was commenting on deepfakes about Iran war being used to create online chaos. It’s quite the turn from a man who’s been aggressively deregulating the AI industry, blocking states from implementing their own safety guardrails, and personally using AI to spread political disinformation, smear opponents, and fabricate endorsements.

The FCC chairman has already targeted NBC, Comcast, ABC, NPR, PBS, and The View. And seems to believe it’s the media’s job to serve up propaganda. Now he’s trying to bully CNN over its coverage of the war in Iran. It’s not too surprising, though. We know Brendan Carr is a dummy.

The company recently hosted a series of speakers at AIPCon, including Cameron Stanley, the Department of War’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, who gave a chilling demo of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, where anyone or anything can be targeted for a military strike with a “Left click, right click, left click.”

MS NOW reports that content creators were offered $1,500 to make videos attacking Kat Abughazaleh, a former journalist now running for office in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District. The offer came from a group called Democracy Unmuted, which has since updated its website to attack the MS NOW reporter who broke the story.

Search-and-rescue operations lacked access to pinpoint data on where tornadoes touched down, because Kristi Noem’s DHS spending policies are holding up approval of a $200k contract, reports CNN:

The decision reverses a 2024 order for TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, and comes after an agreement that TikTok will implement “enhanced protection” for Canadians’ personal information.

In a court filing, US Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord says parts of the agency’s new refund processing system are currently 40 to 80 percent complete. According to Lord, the CBP will begin “performance testing in the next few weeks.”

You can find more details on the tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new 400,000-resident city in Northern California in this episode of the Volts podcast. Host David Roberts is interviewing its leader, former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, and in this first segment, starts to dive into things like water, urban design, and wildfires.

”The hacker expressed disgust at the presence of child abuse images on the device and left a message threatening to turn its owner over to the FBI, the person said.” Apparently they didn’t realize they were on an FBI server.

During an interview with Bloomberg, Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, says Anthropic’s move to sue the Pentagon was an “expected reaction” to its designation as a supply-chain risk.

We have no reason to believe that Live Nation is about to bankroll a Broadway spectacular based on the First Lady just because it managed to settle with the DoJ. We’re just saying, it feels like there’s a precedent.

Bloomberg reports Apple manufactured 55 million iPhones in India in 2025, up from 36 million a year before, following a concerted effort to move production after Trump’s tariffs. Its aim is reportedly to build the 60 million annual US iPhone sales to India by the end of this year.

Elon Musk’s short-lived agency rolled into the NEH with the mandate to cancel grants that it deemed contrary to Donald Trump’s anti-DEI agenda. According to the New York Times, decisions about which grants to cancel weren’t made after careful analysis and deliberation. Instead, they were made with a ChatGPT prompt.

Caitlin Kalinowski posted on X that she resigned from OpenAI, saying the company’s contract didn’t do enough to protect Americans from warrantless surveillance and that granting AI “lethal autonomy without human authorization” was a line that “deserved more deliberation.”