2026-07-22

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• What's Under Your Feet in New York City?

• Wreckage of Pan Am plane found 74 years after it crashed off Puerto Rico

Horseshit

• Sharon Stone on Quitting Weed

• The Rise of Fashion Slop

• A Locomotive Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry

• Armored Cars, Now on the American Road

• Fake kits worth £18M seized by police during World Cup

• The bugged stately home where German prisoners blabbed their secrets

• Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to 'Trackflation'

• The mysterious hum heard around the world may have an explanation

• Bump, Set, Boom: Why Girls Volleyball Is Suddenly Everywhere

• Device Hidden in Cars Across US Leaves Them Vulnerable to Hacking and Paralysis

  Dealerships installed alarms in millions of vehicles—and left them in even if the buyer didn’t want them. Now researchers warn they can be hacked to unlock, track, and disable cars.

• What it means to be rich in this economy – from your 20s to your 80s

• Tour de France hit by new wave of anti-doping tests

• Work Officially Begins on 2 World Trade Center

  As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, starting construction of 2 World Trade Center is not just a significant step forward for Lower Manhattan, but it is also an inspiring demonstration of New York’s strength and resilience in the face of adversity. This investment by American Express in a new, state-of-the-art tower advances our shared goal of completing the restoration of the World Trade Center as a site that supports commerce, remembrance, culture, community, transit and tourism for all the world to see," said Kathryn Garcia, executive director of Port Authority, in a statement.

• Mudlarking Became London's Hottest Hobby

• Airbus to test folding wings for next generation of bestselling planes

• What would happen if the Moon suddenly disappeared?

Epstein

• FBI Forced to Reveal New Details on How It Redacted Epstein Files

• The Gates Foundation met with Epstein about 30 times despite staff concerns

Musk

• Musk says new 2T param Grok model to be trained on SpaceX engineering corpus

• X (Formerly Twitter) Is Going Open Source

• Tesla cash burn to test investor faith in AI bets

• SpaceX targets July 23 for crucial Starship Flight 13 test launch after abort.

• Short positions in SpaceX reach 32% of float

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Amid nurse shortage, a university rolls out the welcome mat for men

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Pay up or not? Ransomware surge has victims facing tough choices

• VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide

• Why Aren't There More IMAX 70mm Screens for 'The Odyssey'?

• Meta faces Tennessee trial over allegations re: Instagram's design

• US Supreme Court won't block Texas app store age verification law

• Snap Nears Settlement of Addiction Case Ahead of Jury Trial

• The Light Flip Is the Stylish Dumb Flip Phone of Your Dreams

• Sports solved a problem that nearly killed television

• Pixar Bears Brunt of Disney Studio Layoffs as Company Axes Several Hundred

• Delaware judge dismisses UnitedHealth Group lawsuit against the Guardian

  Delaware superior court judge Calvin Scott’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit that the US’s largest health insurance conglomerate pursued against the Guardian in May 2025 over an investigation by the outlet which reported that UnitedHealth secretly made payments to nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers for residents. “The article’s reporting of the bonuses as ‘secret’ or made ‘secretly’ or ‘quietly,’ is substantially true,” Scott wrote in one part of the ruling. In another part, he added that the Guardian “is not required to publish facts just because United would have preferred more favorable facts”. Scott added: “The omissions do not render the statements false.”

• Nintendo says users voluntarily paid prices, have no right to tariff refunds

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 1985: C Source BASIC-C

  Someone has written the full set of C functions to mimic BASIC’s vocabulary, from ABS to WRITE. Over 80 routines to open and close files, “field” file buffers, convert their contents from and to strings (the CV? and MK? series), peek and poke, print using, clear screen, “instr”, on error goto...they’re all there.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic's Landmark $1.5B Copyright Settlement Is Approved

  • US judge approves Anthropic's $1.5B settlement of copyright lawsuit

  • Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

• The secret Trump administration battle to fight Chinese AI

  • Trump administration reportedly reviving push to ban Chinese AI models, Kimi K3

  • China's AI models have Trump's AI world at war with itself

  • Top American AI Execs Sound Alarm on Chinese Models

  • Chinese LLMs write more vulnerable code when prompted as U.S. officials

  • Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model 'theft'

• The rise of "comprehension debt" in the age of AI coding

• US is building 3000 data centers. The economics aren't as great as they seem

• The Hugging Face Breach Is a Warning for Every Company Betting Big on AI

  • Hugging Face warns an autonomous AI agent hacked its network

• Trump's latest AI czar has resigned

• France's edge in the AI race is cheap energy

• AI's Next Big Breakthrough Is Looking Pretty Scary

• AI's solution to 87-year-old riddle takes mathematicians by surprise

• New York blocks large data centers for a year

• Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre

• Thinking Machines draws from Chinese rivals in debut AI model

• Alphabet shares fall on report its AI model Gemini 3.5 Pro is delayed

• A.I. Vibecoded Apps Are Flooding Apple's App Store

• Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

• AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

• University of Tennessee sues Anthropic over neural network technology

• The U.S. Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens

• The AI Bubble Is No Ordinary Bubble

• Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go?

• Five tech giants are hiding $1.6T in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

• It was OpenAI that accidentally breached Hugging Face

  • OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident

  • OpenAI Says Its A.I. Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library

• The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

• White House to Redirect Billions in Research Funds Toward AI, Away from Colleges

• Moonshot AI eyes $50B valuation, Hong Kong IPO after Kimi K3 breakthrough

• Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Washington blocks Kalshi's sports prediction market over state gambling law

• Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

• Powerball ticket sales begin Tuesday in the United Kingdom

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Delayed Boeing jets only fit for baked bean tins, Emirates boss says

  Boeing has been dealt a fresh blow after Emirates said it would refuse to take delivery of 10 aircraft, claiming that the much-delayed jets would be better off being turned into baked bean tins. The Dubai airline has ordered a total of 270 new 777X planes from Boeing at $440m (£330m) apiece, with the first jet built in 2019. But repeated delays stemming from design modifications has meant Emirates is still waiting for the planes seven years later.

• Judge halts Paramount's $111B purchase of Warner Bros. in win for US states

  • Judge pauses Paramount-Warner merger.

  • Paramount Forced to Delay Warner Bros Merger After California Antitrust Lawsuit

• Oracle Credit Risk Hits Near 18-Year High on AI Debt Load Angst

• Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

• The Galaxy Card Is Samsung's Answer to the Apple Card

• IEA Predicts First Decrease in Global Oil Demand Since 2020

• TSMC to raise chipmaking prices by up to 10% from 2027

  • TSMC eyes price hikes of up to 25% on chip production services in 2027

• Could AI chip boom make ASML Europe's first trillion-dollar firm?

• The Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet

• The fall of America's farm superpower

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Conservative think tank wants Supreme Court to legalize home whiskey distilleries.

• Treasury Flags Concern over 'Potentially Abusive' Tax Trades

• US pauses $1B in Medicaid payments to California, Minnesota

Trump

• Trump admin launches its first major H-1B visa fraud investigation

• Securing America's Defense Supply Chains

Democrats

• Like It or Not, Kamala Harris Is the Democratic Front-runner

  Kamala Harris is very much looking like a presidential contender–in–waiting. “She’s been listening to the American people and really trying to figure out what’s impacting them and how she can be of service to them,” said Minyon Moore, a longtime Democratic strategist who ran the Democratic National Convention that nominated Harris in 2024. “I mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that right now we need leaders that can take us in a different direction and bring us back together as a party.”

• Body found at Boston home owned by husband of Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley

  Police spokesperson James Moccia told CBS News Boston on Saturday that officers were called to a house on Malta Street in Boston's Mattapan neighborhood at 1:52 p.m. "for a report to investigate a person." When they arrived, they found the person dead, Moccia said. Pressley and Harris do not live at the home. It's a rental property that's currently for sale. The asking price is $1.15 million.

• DNC officers asked to sign NDAs amid financial woes

  The DNC has nearly $15 million on hand but is $18 million in debt, according to its latest campaign finance filings through the end of May. The RNC has $125 million on hand and no debt.

Left Angst

• MAGA Media Lap Up Trump's Election-Interference Exaggerations

• Why Andrew Tate Is a MAGA Superstar

• A Man Who Runs the IRS Spied on Colleagues When He Worked at JPMorgan

• Don Lemon outrageously compares MAGA to Nazis in anti-Trump rant

  Former CNN host-turned-podcaster Don Lemon outrageously argued President Trump’s MAGA movement is “America’s version” of the Nazi Party – just “without the Holocaust and all that stuff.”

• California city chief arrested on a yacht just three weeks after taking over top job.

  Forbes initially told deputies the yacht belonged to her. Investigators later contacted the vessel’s owner, who said Forbes was not authorized to be aboard.

• ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

• Another red alert for American science

  The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB would subject every federal research funding decision to political review. Peer review has never been formally binding, but this proposal would dramatically expand the power of political appointees to override expert assessments of scientific merit. Agencies could end multiyear grants with no due process. They could also use the vague criteria of Trump’s “gold standard science” to identify institutions for preferential treatment. International collaboration with countries identified solely by the administration would be prohibited under the new rules, but more notably, all research that involves the expenditure of funds outside the US would require case-by-case approval. This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most, if not all, partnerships from moving forward.

• Brazil and US clash as popular Pix system stirs global interest

  • The US Escalates Its Assault on Brazil's Free-to-Use Digital Payments System

• How An Old Shipping Law Raises Consumer Prices

• Pete Hegseth's Reckless Message to Helicopter Pilots

• US civil rights agency moves to end demographic data collection after 60 years

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• META worker who developed 'digital experiences for kids' admits to trying to sext child in undercover NYC sting

  Josh Felker, 44, an engineering manager who’s now on leave from the Facebook parent company, admitted he had been grooming and sexting someone he thought was a teen girl during a sting by Predator Poachers Long Island, a vigilante group that seeks to catch would-be pervs.

• On the run for 20 years, most-wanted fugitive caught hiding as a biotech exec

  Richard Graydon was an alias for Ronald Fischer, a 70-year-old former anesthesiologist licensed in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, who fled amid his 2005 trial for first-degree sexual assault. Fischer was accused of raping a woman during a date on his yacht. That followed a similar incident in 1994, in which he was accused of raping another woman on another of his yachts.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The Space Force is now seeking to buy up to $30B in rocket launches

• Havana syndrome: US to compensate victims

• Boeing asks US to intervene over record EU loan to Airbus

• (PDF) Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism

  For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.

• FBI Director Kash Patel Planning a Trip to Russia

World

• Burnham is fifth UK PM in four years, now he'll try to buck the trend

• UK appoints Secretary of Justice with no Law qualifications or legal experience

• Raided Myanmar Scam Compounds

• French lawmakers vote on social media ban for children

• Nicaragua’s Ortega says ‘never again’ for elections after two decades in power

  “There won’t be any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega said in a speech on Sunday evening to commemorate the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which Ortega helped overthrow the US-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship. “The days when parties backed by the Yankees (United States) and the Somocistas would return to power are over - never again,” he added, in the 80-year-old’s first public appearance in two months.

  • Nicaragua's president extends rule, says country will not hold elections anytime soon

  The announcement also effectively cancelled Nicaragua's next elections, originally scheduled for November 2027. In January 2025 its government-controlled congress voted to extend the five-year presidential term by one year.

• India's youth-led Cockroach movement vows to continue protest after crackdown

• Cup Noodle releases cold-water instant ramen in Japan

• SCC affirms 7-2 that methods of medical treatment cannot be patented in Canada

• A Third of Serious Workplace Injuries in Japan Involve Workers over 60

• France first European country to ban social media access for under-15s

  • France becomes the first EU country to ban social media for children

  • French parliament approves social media ban for under-15s, a first in the EU

Iran / Houthi

• The U.S. Campaign Against Iran Is Moving Inland: This Is No Longer a Coastal War.

• Iran's IRGC claims attack on Amazon's main data hub in Bahrain

  • Iran says it's struck offline AWS facility in Bahrain again

China

• China's Z.ai Completes 1-Gigawatt AI Data Center Using Only Chinese-Made Chips

• China weighs tighter export controls on AI models and chips

Health / Medicine

• The surprising benefits of red light

• 3-5 cups of coffee is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• CDC travel notice for outbreak deadly incurable mosquito virus reaches Americas

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Organisms That Make Earth's Harshest Places Home

• Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies

• Italy Puts 10M Euros into Fighting Invasive Blue Crabs

• Firefighting drones in the works as wildfires plague US nearly year-round

• The shark that lives for 400 years – and what it can teach us about longevity

• Lake Tahoe doesn't know where its power will come from after next ski season

• Where do the biggest diamonds come from? Geology now has answers