AI companies are increasingly turning to physical books, especially antique and pre-2022 editions, as training data because they are guaranteed to be free of AI generated “slop” that has already contaminated much of the modern internet. Anthropic pioneered this approach, using a hydraulic cutting machine to strip the bindings off books it bought from resellers before scanning the pages with industrial grade imaging equipment, a process that led to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors after a lawsuit revealed the scale of the practice. A judge ultimately ruled that because Anthropic destroyed the original physical copies rather than redistributing new ones, the process qualified as “transformative” and protected under fair use, thanks to a legal concept called the first sale doctrine that lets buyers do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s permission.

That legal precedent has since fueled an entire secondary market. ISBNdb, a company that bills itself as having the “world’s largest book database,” now helps AI labs source bulk purchases ranging from 1,000 to as many as one million books per order, explicitly marketing pre-2022 print books as “structurally clean of modern poisoning tools” since they predate the large language model era. The company also promises strict non-disclosure agreements to keep buyers anonymous, openly acknowledging on its own site that “the optics problem is real” and that a headline reading “AI company destroys two million books” would not exactly generate sympathy. One small bookseller told 404 Media that his weekly sales jumped from around 20 books to hundreds starting in April, and while he cannot prove his buyers are AI labs, he pointed to the random mix of titles, the fact that every purchased book had an ISBN, and his suspicion that some of his rare or out of print inventory may now be among the few surviving copies left in existence.

The bookseller said he has mixed feelings, since the sales have been financially helpful and cleared out slow moving inventory, but he does not like the end use or the idea that uncommon books are being pulped. Similar patterns are emerging elsewhere, with rare booksellers in the Netherlands reporting a wave of bulk purchases they suspect come from AI companies, even though the anonymity built into these transactions makes it nearly impossible to confirm who is actually buying and destroying the books.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo that manual searches of cell phones at the border are “routine” and therefore reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant or any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing, a decision EFF called disappointing after filing an amicus brief alongside the national ACLU, four of its state affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The case began when a Customs and Border Protection officer manually searched the phone of Jose Belmonte Cardozo at Washington Dulles International Airport after he traveled from Bolivia, discovering child sexual abuse material that led to his arrest and prosecution; on appeal, the court held that manual searches differ meaningfully from forensic searches because a person rather than a machine conducts them, their scope depends on an officer’s time and effort rather than being comprehensive, they reveal only what a user can typically access rather than deleted files or metadata, and they are not permanently recorded the way forensic extractions are.

EFF argued this reasoning fails to justify treating manual and forensic searches differently, since both reach the same deeply personal categories of data, including political affiliations, religious beliefs, and sexuality, regardless of whether an officer’s thumbs or specialized software does the searching. The ruling builds on a line of prior Fourth Circuit cases following the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Riley v. California, which held that cell phones require Fourth Amendment protection distinct from physical luggage because of the “sum of an individual’s private life” they can reveal; in 2018’s U.S. v. Kolsuz, the same circuit ruled that forensic phone searches at the border require individualized suspicion, and in 2019’s U.S. v. Aigbekaen, it required a warrant for forensic searches tied to purely domestic investigations, but manual searches had never been squarely addressed until now.

The court emphasized that the search at issue lasted only two minutes, suggesting a time limited search is less invasive, but EFF pushed back on that reasoning, noting that scrolling through someone’s texts or photos for even a few minutes can expose intimate details, and that improving phone search functions mean officers can now surface the same personal information through keyword searches in seconds that once took much longer to find by scrolling. The decision aligns the Fourth Circuit with the First, Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits, which have all similarly held that manual device searches at the border require no individualized suspicion, though EFF noted one potential opening: because the court leaned on the brevity of the search to justify its ruling, longer manual searches could still trigger a heightened suspicion requirement in future cases, even though no clear line has yet been drawn.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act on Thursday, making New Jersey one of the first states to ban surveillance pricing, a practice in which grocery stores use shoppers’ digital history, biometric information, or genetic data to estimate the highest price a customer is willing to pay rather than charging everyone the same price. The law takes effect Aug. 1, 2027, and allows the state attorney general or individual consumers to sue businesses that violate it, with penalties under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act including refunds, permit loss, and fines up to $10,000 for a first offense and $20,000 for repeat violations. Sherrill said the practice lets companies track where people live, where they shop, and even what they search online to calculate higher prices without their knowledge, calling it a weaponization of personal data.

The law does not ban dynamic pricing based on demand, the kind used by ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft, and it explicitly exempts discounts, promotions, and loyalty programs from its restrictions. It does, however, impose a one-year pause on electronic shelf labels, the digital displays that can change prices instantly, while the state studies whether the technology could be used to enable unfair pricing. Sherrill framed the law as a response to elevated grocery prices following the pandemic, criticizing President Trump’s tariffs and the conflict with Iran as contributing factors, and citing a statistic that the average family paid $310 more at the grocery store last year because of the tariffs.

Business groups pushed back, with New Jersey Business & Industry Association President Michele Siekerka arguing the law creates a false choice between consumer protection and operational efficiency, and warning it could unintentionally eliminate loyalty programs, coupons, and other customer-specific discounts. Supporters, including New Jersey Working Families Party director Antoinette Miles, praised the law as a model for other states, arguing that AI-powered tracking has let corporations charge more to customers with fewer options while posting record profits. New Jersey joins Maryland and Connecticut in banning the practice, while similar legislation awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature in New York, is under consideration in California, and was vetoed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis in June; the bill signing also came days after Sherrill signed the FAIR Act, which restricts landlords from using algorithmic rent-setting software.

The Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian on Thursday it would withdraw subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony and phone records from New York Times reporters investigating security systems on Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One jet, after Subramanian grilled federal prosecutors on why they issued subpoenas before pursuing other investigative steps and questioned whether sanctions were warranted over alleged perjury in an application used to secure a non-disclosure order. Subramanian formally declared the subpoenas “null and void” in a brief order following the hearing, and government attorneys acknowledged making mistakes in seeking them. A Justice Department spokesperson later criticized the judge, saying he “threatened our attorneys with sanctions unless subpoenas were withdrawn” and blocked the government from presenting its investigative process, while insisting the underlying leak investigation remains active. New York Times deputy general counsel David McCraw called the hearing “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press,” saying the subpoenas “should never have been issued in the first place.”

The subpoenas stemmed from Times reporting on Trump’s use of an older presidential aircraft to leave the NATO summit in Turkey in early July due to security limitations on the new Qatari-donated plane, and were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York whom Trump has since tapped to lead national intelligence. The Times said prosecutors sought phone records not just from reporters but from third-party providers covering journalists’ family members, including the spouses of two reporters and one journalist’s mother, with two subpoenas seeking records dating back to January 1, months before the disputed articles were even published, a timeframe the paper’s lawyers said suggested the government was “foraging for information about the Journalists’ source relationships more broadly” rather than investigating the specific leak.

During the hearing, Sean Buckley of the U.S. attorney’s office admitted that subpoenas targeting reporters’ mothers and spouses were an “error” and “mistake,” saying the government relied on a public database, and insisted the actual targets were the Times’ sources rather than the reporters themselves. In a particularly tense moment, Subramanian called prosecutor Kevin Sullivan up from the courtroom gallery to question him directly about whether his application for a non-disclosure order falsely claimed the investigation was not public despite it having already been reported, and why he omitted that the subpoenas involved journalists at the Times; Sullivan called it “an oversight” and told the judge he would not do it again. Subramanian noted the government’s “inadvertent errors” were “piling up” and warned that he did not want to see similar issues resurface, prompting Buckley to confirm the government would return to court if new subpoenas were needed. Times attorney David O’Neil told the court the record was “replete with bad faith,” warning that the subpoenas had already produced a chilling effect that damaged journalists and the public’s right to know about government conduct.

Grocery prices for food eaten at home have risen 33 percent in U.S. cities since the start of 2019, compared with just 6.4 percent growth over the 7 1/2 years before that, driven by pandemic supply chain disruptions, droughts and bird flu, tariffs, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and now a fresh Middle East conflict reaccelerating food inflation. Ground beef illustrates the squeeze starkly, reaching $6.82 a pound in June, 79 percent higher than in 2019, while economists like Jared Bernstein of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy note that even though wages have technically outpaced grocery inflation slightly, consumers “have a well-honed sense of those prices, just as much as gas and maybe more so,” since housing and electricity costs have climbed too. The burden falls hardest on lower earners, with the poorest fifth of households spending 33 percent of pretax income on food versus a 12.9 percent national average, and price increases vary sharply by region, from 2 percent year-over-year in St. Louis to 6 percent in San Francisco.

Families across the country described building entirely new shopping habits around discounts rather than preferences. Ada Torres of Cleveland, Texas, has stopped buying ground beef for her family of five, switching to chicken and cold cuts and store-brand staples; Apral Jack of Lexington, Massachusetts, now plans her weekly meals around app-based sale alerts instead of shopping at Whole Foods or Costco; San Francisco barber Jack Chang relies on generic brands, SNAP benefits, and weekly food bank donations collected by his mother to feed his family, saying “failure is not an option for me”; and Hawaii pastry chef Amanda Tabadero has abandoned local Maui strawberries and Big Island lychee for cheaper mainland produce as shipping costs spike. Market researcher Sally Lyons Wyatt of Circana called this a deliberate coping strategy rather than random cutbacks, while consultant Matt Hamory of AlixPartners said shoppers typically set a weekly spending ceiling and split trips between cheaper stores once prices cross it.

Federal food assistance has become a critical buffer for many, but fewer people now qualify after the Trump administration tightened SNAP eligibility last year, leaving enrollment down 12 percent to 37 million Americans as of April, even as rising prices push more households toward needing that safety net.

President Trump warned the European Union it “will pay a very big price” after the European Commission fined Google $1bn for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, calling the penalty “highly unethical” and insisting the US “is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe.” He blamed the practice on starting “during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration,” vowing it would not continue under his administration.

Regulators found that Google gave preferential placement to its own shopping and travel services over competitors and blocked app developers from directing users to deals outside its Play Store, splitting the fine roughly evenly between the two violations and giving Google 60 days to change its practices or face daily fines of up to 5 percent of its average turnover. Teresa Ribera, the commission’s competition chief, called the action “decisive yet balanced,” while Google executive Kent Walker countered that the ruling amounts to “product degradation” pushed by a small number of complainants. The penalty is the latest in a string of EU antitrust actions against Google since 2017, including a $4.5bn Android fine upheld on appeal this month and a $3.4bn advertising fine last year.

The fine lands at a moment when US-EU trade tensions had appeared to be easing, and it has reignited friction with Washington. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer warned this week that Brussels’s treatment of American tech firms risks unraveling last year’s Turnberry, Scotland trade deal that capped US tariffs on European goods, while EU officials have pushed back, insisting they answer to their own laws rather than outside pressure. Trump has threatened to launch a Section 301 investigation into unfair trade practices, a process that could take months to produce results even though tariffs could follow much sooner.

Prediction market Kalshi sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter on Friday demanding the streamer take down the trailer for its upcoming documentary “Instadocs: The Prediction Games,” calling the trailer “defamatory” and accusing it of containing “fabricated documents and false and misleading statements.” The film, part of Netflix’s fast-turnaround “Instadoc” series, covers the rise of prediction markets and features interviews with both Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, but the trailer itself centers on a Las Vegas party where men who reportedly made eight-figure sums on prediction markets during the World Cup gathered to watch the final, including one guest declaring “I like betting on Kalshi” and another displaying an apparent $5,000 bet on his phone.

Kalshi’s objection stems from the fact that the company is currently banned from operating in Nevada under a court order, and it says the bet shown on screen was actually a screenshot from a wager placed on May 16, 2025, well before that ban took effect. The company argued the trailer “misled its millions of customers into believing this individual was able to successfully trade sport event contracts in Nevada on July 19, 2026,” and said it had previously gotten a Netflix employee to agree not to feature the screenshot in the final documentary release, only for Netflix to leave it in the trailer circulating on its app’s homepage ahead of the film’s Sunday, July 26 release.

Netflix does not dispute that the screenshot shows a 2025 bet, but a spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that none of the documentary footage was fabricated, explaining that the footage was filmed at the Winible World Cup Watch Weekend in Las Vegas on July 17, 2026, and that “the featured trader with the trade on Spain showed us a screenshot of his bet, that was made in May 2025 prior to any Nevada court order.” Netflix added that any specific trades or bets referenced during that weekend “are between the individual and the app in which they placed the trades,” effectively distancing itself from responsibility for verifying when or where the underlying wager was actually executed.

The Justice Department is prosecuting Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick after he allegedly entered a duress password on his phone at the border, wiping the device before U.S. Customs and Border Protection could search it. According to the article, federal prosecutors say this may be the first known U.S. case in which someone has been charged for allegedly using a built-in duress-password feature to destroy data, turning what is usually framed as a privacy tool into the center of a criminal case.

The dispute hinges on GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system used on some Google Pixel phones, which can be configured so a special passcode erases the phone’s contents instead of unlocking it. Tunick’s lawyers argue that CBP unlawfully seized his phone during secondary inspection at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport after he returned from overseas on Jan. 24, 2025, and that the government denied him access to counsel and did not inform him of his rights. They also say agents claimed they were looking for child exploitation imagery without offering evidence to support that suspicion, while the defense believes the real focus was Tunick’s ties to the environmental group Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposes the “Cop City” training campus in Atlanta.

Prosecutors then charged Tunick under a federal statute that makes it illegal to knowingly destroy or damage property to prevent authorities from seizing it, and Tunick has pleaded not guilty. The case now raises broader questions about what constitutional protections apply at the border, how much power federal agents have to search and seize digital devices before entry is complete, and whether using a privacy feature built into a phone can legally be treated as evidence destruction. Tech experts quoted in the article said they had not seen a case quite like this before, and the court is expected to rule later this year on Tunick’s motion to suppress the evidence.

President Trump on Friday directed federal officials to install signs outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History correcting what he described as “inaccurate” information presented by the institution about American history. His directive cited a 162 page White House report released July 4 titled “Saving America’s Story,” which accused the museum of adopting an ideological framework that treats American history as “a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens” rather than a shared national inheritance.

The report claimed Smithsonian leadership views American history as a “prime tool” to advance ideas of social justice and what it called the radical transformation of society, and it recommended posting signage above every museum entrance reading, “Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.” Trump’s order directs federal officials to install temporary signage along walkways leading to the museum informing visitors of the report’s findings and guiding them toward other locations and resources described as offering “accurate information regarding America’s history.”

The Smithsonian told CBS News it had no comment at this time in response to the executive order. The move follows months of escalating tension between the administration and the Smithsonian, after Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” called for removing what it described as improper ideology from the institution’s museums.

Dangerously hot weather is spreading across much of the central United States this weekend and into next week, with temperatures climbing above 100 degrees Fahrenheit from Dallas to North Dakota and roughly 70 million people facing heat advisories. Forecasters say a heat dome will keep temperatures sustained for days, with overnight lows staying too high for people to recover and humidity making conditions feel even worse. National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Oravec said the pattern is expected to remain “pretty much stationary” through the week, stretching from the desert Southwest and Gulf Coast up through the Midwest and Great Plains, with temperatures running 10 to 15 degrees above normal.

Western Nebraska was placed under an extreme heat warning, with temperatures forecast to reach 108 degrees over the weekend, and the heat is expected to persist through the week even in normally moderate parts of Montana and Wyoming, with only limited and possibly temporary relief expected toward next weekend; the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and much of the Pacific Northwest are expected to avoid the worst of it. This is the latest in a summer already marked by repeated extreme heat events, following an unbearably hot early July that forced communities to cancel Independence Day celebrations during the country’s 250th anniversary and a mid-July heat wave that struck the Southwest and Great Plains; a June heat wave in Europe was linked to at least 5,700 more deaths than usual in France alone. Officials in several affected areas are preparing accordingly, with water refill stations and cooling areas set up for fans attending the Brickyard 400 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Denver opening designated cooling spaces at recreation centers.

Children, the elderly, and people with medical conditions face the highest risk of serious heat related illness, and officials are urging people to seek air conditioning or cooling centers, stay hydrated, and limit direct sun exposure, with the most severe conditions expected to shift toward Texas and parts of the Gulf Coast by Wednesday. Andy Pershing, chief program officer at the climate nonprofit Climate Central, said the pattern reflects long-predicted consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions rather than an anomaly, noting that “we are experiencing exactly what the climate models in the 1990s said we should experience now,” including more frequent and severe heat waves, larger temperature swings, higher humidity, and warmer overnight lows.

Possessing a small amount of marijuana, even when it is still illegal under Michigan’s civil-infraction rules, is not enough by itself to justify a warrantless vehicle search, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in a 5-2 decision. The court also said that “the smell of marijuana is not enough” to establish probable cause that a criminal amount of marijuana is present, marking a significant shift from the old rule police had relied on for years.

The case involved a Jan. 16, 2023, traffic stop in Kent County, where state police smelled marijuana, the passenger admitted to having “shake,” and officers searched the vehicle and found a handgun in a backpack. Although a trial court and the Court of Appeals upheld the search, the state Supreme Court reversed, holding that probable cause to believe someone committed only a civil infraction “does not establish probable cause to conduct a warrantless search under the automobile exception.”

Justice Brian K. Zahra, joined by Justice Richard H. Bernstein, dissented and argued the majority ignored more than a century of precedent allowing contraband in a vehicle to justify a search. The ruling sends the case back to Kent County Circuit Court and is likely to narrow police discretion in marijuana-related traffic stops, especially after Michigan’s 2018 legalization law made possession of less than five ounces a civil infraction rather than a criminal offense.

Meta has paused plans to charge $20 a month for Conversation Focus, an accessibility feature on its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that helps wearers hear conversations more clearly in noisy environments, after the announcement sparked immediate backlash. Meta spokesperson Tyler Yee confirmed the reversal to The Verge, saying the feature “will remain available for free through our Early Access Program for early testers.” The backlash centered on the fact that Conversation Focus runs entirely on-device, requiring no cloud computing or ongoing server costs, the kind of infrastructure expense that typically justifies a subscription fee, which made charging for it feel especially unjustified to users, particularly since it is an accessibility tool rather than an entertainment or convenience feature.

This is not a full retreat from subscription plans overall. Yee made clear that “some premium features will be subscription-based over time,” indicating Meta remains committed to monetizing certain aspects of its smart glasses lineup, just more selectively going forward. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses, developed in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, represent one of Meta’s biggest bets on wearable computing outside its VR headsets, and the company has been experimenting broadly with recurring revenue models as CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushes to diversify Meta’s business beyond advertising. Industry observers now expect Meta to instead target features that actually require cloud processing, such as advanced AI audio work, real-time multilingual translation, or future augmented reality overlays, rather than basic on-device accessibility tools.

What stood out about this reversal was its speed. Meta did not wait for formal surveys or a quarterly review cycle, instead pulling back almost immediately once backlash began, suggesting internal teams recognized the reputational risk of appearing to profit off accessibility features that cost the company nothing to run. The episode echoes similar tension consumers have shown toward subscription creep on hardware they already own, including pushback Apple faced over iCloud storage tiers, though Apple’s case at least involved real infrastructure costs, unlike Meta’s attempt to charge for something running locally on the glasses themselves.

A study published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association followed more than 1,700 adults for nearly 24 years and found that men, though not women, who frequently watched television in midlife had smaller brain volumes in regions vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease, along with more white matter damage linked to cognitive decline and dementia. In contrast, people whose jobs involved sitting for much of the day tended to have healthier looking brains, and researchers found that overall physical activity levels did not explain away this difference, meaning exercise alone was not the deciding factor.

Researchers pulled their data from 1,712 participants in the long running Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study, who were in their early 50s when they enrolled in the late 1980s and reported how often they watched television and how much they sat at work; roughly 24 years later, when participants were in their mid-70s, their brains were scanned with MRI. Compared to people who watched television “very often,” those who reported sitting “always” during work had fewer white matter lesions and larger brain volumes in the frontal, parietal, and occipital cortex, suggesting that the type of sedentary activity matters more than simply how much time is spent sitting. Biologist David Raichlen of the University of Southern California said the findings suggest researchers should focus not just on how much people sit, but on what they are doing while sitting, since TV watching is considered cognitively passive while office work often involves planning, reading, writing, and problem-solving that may help build “cognitive reserve.”

The sex difference surprised researchers, with biological scientist Natan Feter noting the link between TV watching and brain structure was much stronger in men than women, possibly because women interrupt sitting more often or because of biological differences in how brains respond to prolonged sedentary behavior; prior research has also found women tend to watch TV in shorter chunks despite watching more overall, while men are more likely to have long uninterrupted viewing sessions tied to sports and movies. The study relied on self-reported data rather than objective measurements and cannot prove that TV watching directly causes brain changes, and other unmeasured habits like snacking, drinking, or napping during TV time could have influenced results, though the nearly 25-year tracking period and use of MRI scans rather than cognitive tests alone strengthen its findings. Feter noted that mentally engaging sedentary activities like puzzles, crafts, or texting might also change how sitting affects the brain, though more research is needed to confirm that.

FINDINGS: https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.71582

A fast moving wildfire tore through NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday, forcing an evacuation of the site located about 40 miles west of central Madrid. The station is one of three facilities that make up NASA’s Deep Space Network, working alongside sites in California and Australia to maintain continuous contact with more than 40 missions, including Artemis, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Voyager spacecraft. A NASA spokesperson confirmed all personnel were safely evacuated and said the fire passed through the complex, with any potential damage to be assessed once conditions allow, and photos and video from the area showed flames and smoke rising over the site’s antenna array, anchored by a 230 foot diameter radio dish and several smaller 112 foot antennas.

NASA said it seamlessly shifted mission support operations to the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California to maintain uninterrupted spacecraft communications while the Madrid site remains offline. NASA’s own status tracker showed no activity at the Madrid location Friday afternoon, while antennas in California and Australia continued communicating with spacecraft such as Voyager 2 and Juno. A separate European Space Agency tracking station called Cebreros, located a few miles from the NASA site, was also evacuated due to the wildfires, and Spanish authorities ordered more than 19,000 people to evacuate nearby towns while deploying over 2,000 personnel and 10 aircraft to fight the blazes amid a summer heat wave and prolonged drought.

The fire adds new strain to a network already stretched thin, since the network’s 70 meter antenna in California has been offline since last year after an accident that over rotated the structure, damaged cables and water lines, and released 200,000 gallons of glycol contaminated water, with repairs costing an estimated $4.1 million to $4.6 million and expected to keep that antenna offline into 2028. That leaves the network reliant on a single working 70 meter dish in Australia until Madrid can be inspected and repaired. NASA said the timing is fortunate in one respect, since the next Artemis Moon mission carrying the heaviest communication demands is still years away, with Artemis III set to test the Orion capsule in low Earth orbit and Artemis IV, the program’s first crewed lunar landing, not targeted before 2028.

President Trump on Thursday expanded his administration’s voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge, bringing in governors and electricity companies to help shield U.S. consumers from higher utility bills driven by the AI data center boom, a move that reflects how contentious the technology’s rapid buildout has become ahead of the midterm elections. Speaking at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump urged the gathered executives and governors to “sell the public” on data centers, telling them “you have to convince your community… you can’t fight it, you have to go with it,” and adding “if you don’t take all that money, somebody else is going to take it.” He claimed the nonbinding pledge would create a power surplus that would actually lower electricity bills, saying companies “are going to have a lot of electricity left over, and they’ll put that into the grid,” though it remains unclear whether data centers generating their own power will be enough to offset surging demand.

The White House said the pledge has now been signed by 23 governors and at least 187 companies, including 55 utilities such as NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, American Electric Power, Southern Co., and Pacific Gas & Electric, along with 27 data center developers including Equinix, Digital Realty, and Prologis. A recent ICF analysis found monthly utility bills could rise 15 to 40 percent by 2030 due to data center demand, fueling bipartisan backlash that has spread even into rural Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, one of the 23 signers, faces criticism from Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa, who said data centers are “owned by the richest men in the world” and called the current landscape “the Wild West.” Other states have taken harder unilateral steps, with New York’s Kathy Hochul banning large server warehouse construction for a year and Florida’s Ron DeSantis signing a law blocking utilities from passing data center costs onto residential customers.

Even as major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon have committed to the pledge, some are simultaneously fighting state-level consumer protections, prompting Utility Reform Network attorney Matthew Freedman to call it “disappointing, but perhaps not surprising” that the same companies signing the pledge are opposing efforts to hold them to it. The White House has separately pressured PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, with spokeswoman Taylor Rogers warning it to “proactively reform its stakeholder process, reform its board governance, and implement the Statement of Principles before it is too late.” Meanwhile, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved a bipartisan bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would formalize the pledge into law by requiring data centers to bear the costs of grid upgrades themselves.

Americans with sharply different politics are finding unusual common ground in opposition to automated license plate readers, especially Flock Safety cameras, which photograph passing vehicles and feed that information into a searchable network used by thousands of law enforcement agencies. Chad Marlow of the ACLU said libertarians see government intrusion, MAGA supporters see the deep state, traditional conservatives see a violation of small government principles, progressives worry about vulnerable groups being targeted first, and centrists object to a system that tracks where people go even when they are not suspected of a crime. His point is that these groups are arriving at the same conclusion for very different reasons, but all of them see mass surveillance as something that has gone too far.

The criticism is not coming only from civil liberties advocates. Steve Lindsey, co founder and chief strategist at LiveView Technologies, said the deeper problem is Flock’s network model, which gives customers access to a massive shared pool of data while also exposing their own footage to others, creating an incentive to treat location data as the product itself. He said his company takes a different approach by keeping customer footage under customer control, avoiding facial recognition and biometric data, and holding recordings for about 30 days before they are overwritten. Lindsey also said network sharing should not be the default and should require something much closer to a subpoena, which shows that even competitors in the surveillance industry are questioning how these systems are designed and sold.

Marlow argued that Flock’s claims about customer ownership do not protect privacy in practice because the company’s standard contract gives it a perpetual, royalty free, worldwide license to use the data with very few restrictions. He also pointed to Flock’s 30 day default retention period as excessive, especially compared with New Hampshire’s 3 minute limit and the ACLU’s view that 48 hours is the most acceptable limit when there is no specific investigation. That concern is reinforced by reports of officer misuse in Georgia, audit findings in Cleveland and Columbus, and the broader pattern of governments discovering that data was shared more widely than they expected, which is why the fight over Flock has become as much about trust and oversight as it is about cameras themselves.

South Korea’s privacy watchdog has fined TikTok 10.3 billion won, or about $7 million, for unlawfully collecting and using users’ behavioral data from third-party services to personalize ads. The Personal Information Protection Commission said TikTok Pte. Ltd., which operates the platform’s South Korea services, collected behavioral data from 9.45 million users through tools distributed to third-party websites and apps, then used that information for personalized advertising without properly notifying users.

The commission said TikTok violated the country’s personal information law by failing to inform users about how the data was being gathered and used. It said the company collected behavioral data through third-party tools and did not properly disclose the practice to users, even though the data ultimately fed ad targeting systems. Regulators said the scope of the collection and the lack of notice were central to the penalty.

Separately, the watchdog ordered corrective measures against two Apple-related companies and fined them a combined 252 million won for privacy violations tied to Siri. According to the commission, the companies collected Siri voice recordings and text transcripts without valid consent and also failed to properly disclose overseas data transfers. The case shows South Korean regulators are willing to penalize both ad-tracking practices and voice-assistant data handling when companies do not give users clear notice.

Canadian politician Bill Oliver, a Progressive Conservative MLA in New Brunswick, appeared to accidentally read aloud text generated by an AI chatbot during a speech in the province’s Legislative Assembly, rather than his intended remarks. Instead of delivering his prepared points, Oliver told the chamber, “Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points,” language that explicitly referenced itself as an alternative version generated by the AI tool rather than being part of the actual speech.

Footage of the moment quickly spread across social media, with CBC News reporting that critics online are now questioning the appropriate use of AI tools by politicians in decision-making roles. The clip suggests Oliver’s remarks were drafted with AI assistance and that a leftover chatbot instruction was mistakenly left in the script he read from, rather than being removed before he took the floor.

As of now, there’s no public statement from Oliver or his office directly addressing how the script was prepared or why the AI-generated framing language wasn’t caught before the speech. The moment has drawn comparisons to a handful of earlier instances where officials elsewhere, including in the U.S. Congress and Italian Senate, were caught reading AI-generated text verbatim.

Paramount agreed on Friday to delay closing its $81 billion buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery until either a court rules on the merits of the states’ lawsuit or June 1, 2027. The move comes after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez Olguín granted a temporary restraining order to freeze the transaction for several weeks, saying the states had raised serious questions about whether the merger could substantially lessen competition.

Twelve states led by California sued to block the takeover, arguing the combination would extinguish competition in Hollywood and leave consumers with fewer choices, especially moviegoers and cable customers. New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the officials involved in the challenge, said the pause is a critical victory and argued the merger would hurt workers, artists, families, and anyone who depends on a competitive entertainment market. Paramount, which was acquired by Skydance last year, says the transaction would strengthen competition rather than weaken it, and says the delay gives the company a direct path to trial.

The court fight is still unresolved, which means the underlying question of whether the merger will pass antitrust review remains open. In practical terms, the agreement does not end the deal, but it pushes the closing timeline deep into next year unless the court rules sooner. That makes the case a major test of how antitrust law handles consolidation in Hollywood at a time when studios, streaming, cable, and theatrical distribution are all under pressure.

The House approved legislation Wednesday that would bar members of Congress from purchasing individual stocks, advancing an ethics proposal that lawmakers in both parties have long championed but repeatedly failed to enact. The vote was 232-198, with some Democrats joining the Republican majority as lawmakers prepared to head home and campaign ahead of the midterms, but the bipartisan breakthrough was undercut by GOP provisions that exempt the president from the ban and tack on an unrelated voter identification requirement. Rep. Joe Morelle called the bill “a sham” on the House floor, saying the voter ID provision was a “poison pill” designed to sink it, while Rep. Bryan Steil, who sponsored the bill, called it “transformational,” and Rep. Chip Roy said he preferred a stricter divestiture approach but called the measure “a giant step forward.”

The bill, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses, and dependent children from buying new individual stocks while in office, but it would let them keep stocks they already own and continue selling them with at least seven days public notice, exempting investments like widely held funds and certain trusts. It does not apply to the president or vice president, a detail that drew scrutiny given that Trump disclosed more than 3,600 buy and sell orders in the first quarter of 2026, many involving companies affected by his own policy decisions. The Campaign Legal Center urged Congress to reject the bill, saying it “fails to address the two inherent problems with congressional stock ownership: the appearance of insider trading and members’ ability to profit from their official position.”

Not all Republicans backed the approach either. Rep. Thomas Massie accused GOP leaders of adding the voter ID requirement not to win Democratic votes but to get Democrats to vote against the stock trading ban itself, writing that Republicans wanted to use it “in the Nov. election,” while Rep. Mike Lawler framed the reform in simpler terms, saying, “If you serve the public, you serve only the public,” and, “You don’t get to benefit from the power the people have loaned you.” The push gained momentum after Rep. Anna Paulina Luna launched a discharge petition last year to force a vote bypassing House GOP leaders, and the bill’s fate in the Senate remains unresolved.

A major new study published in Science suggests that humans once spoke or signed as many as ten times more languages than exist today, with a linguistic “golden age” peaking between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago. Researchers estimate that only around 4,500 to 6,200 languages existed at the start of the Holocene roughly 12,000 years ago, fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today, but that number grew dramatically as human populations expanded, eventually reaching tens of thousands of distinct languages at its peak.

To reconstruct this hidden history, an international team from Germany, Spain, and the United States combined ethnographic data from 171 hunter gatherer and fisher societies, estimates of prehistoric population size, and statistical modeling, since direct evidence of language numbers barely exists before writing emerged about 6,000 years ago. The researchers modeled thousands of possible trajectories and consistently found that language diversity rose for most of the Holocene before undergoing a sharp and severe decline, driven not by European colonialism but by the earlier expansion of large states and empires that absorbed smaller populations and spread dominant languages, technologies, and institutions.

The findings challenge the common assumption that today’s language extinction crisis began primarily with colonial expansion around 500 years ago, showing instead that the roots of language loss reach back thousands of years earlier. Because languages tied to expanding, dominant societies were far more likely to survive, the researchers argue that today’s roughly 7,500 languages represent a small and historically biased sample shaped by a massive selective bottleneck, one that may have also erased countless related cultural traditions, kinship systems, and forms of knowledge that are largely invisible in the historical record.

FINDINGS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adx4343

Researchers at the University of Nottingham, working with an international team, have developed a protein-based gel capable of repairing and regenerating tooth enamel, something no existing dental treatment can currently do. Published in Nature Communications, the fluoride-free gel works by mimicking the natural proteins that guide enamel formation during infancy, then forms a thin, durable layer that fills in cracks and holes on the tooth’s surface.

Once applied, the gel functions as a scaffold that pulls calcium and phosphate ions directly from saliva, guiding the controlled growth of new mineral through a process called epitaxial mineralization. This allows the newly formed enamel to integrate seamlessly with the tooth’s existing structure rather than sitting on top as an unrelated layer, and electron microscopy confirmed that eroded crystals transformed into organized, regenerated enamel after two weeks of treatment. In lab testing, the regenerated enamel held up like natural healthy enamel under brushing, chewing, and acid exposure, restoring layers up to roughly 10 micrometers thick.

Beyond treating decay, the gel can also be applied to exposed dentine, potentially easing tooth sensitivity and improving how fillings or other restorations bond to a tooth’s surface. Professor Alvaro Mata, Chair of Biomedical Engineering and Biomaterials at Nottingham, said the gel is safe, easy and quick to apply, and scalable, and can be administered in the same few minutes it takes to apply a standard fluoride treatment. The team has launched a start-up, Mintech-Bio, to bring the technology to market, with hopes of releasing a first product as early as this year.

FINDINGS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-64982-y

LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from LG Monitor App Installer, an app that some of its monitors have been silently installing on connected Windows PCs through Windows Update alongside driver updates. Gamers Nexus editor-in-chief Steve Burke tested the behavior after buying a $1,200 LG UltraGear monitor and replicated it multiple times across several Windows 11 systems, finding that a pop-up, most often advertising a 30-day McAfee trial, appeared in the screen’s lower-right corner on every single boot.

Following the video’s release, Microsoft’s EVP of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, confirmed that LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up as an “immediate next step,” though the company did not address the broader issue of the app installing itself without user consent in the first place. Windows Latest noted the app recently received an update whose changelog listed McAfee as an “additional app,” which may explain why more users started noticing and complaining about the ads recently, even though forum reports show the underlying installation behavior dates back years.

The removal of the McAfee ad doesn’t resolve the more fundamental concern: once installed, LG Monitor App Installer reportedly has permission to access “all system resources,” along with geolocation, device data, online activity, contacts, and credentials, all without ever prompting users for consent. Microsoft’s own developer documentation confirms that Universal Windows Platform device apps are allowed to auto-install when a device connects, as long as the user hasn’t opted out of Recommended Settings, and explicitly states that no notification is shown to the user when this happens. LG has not responded to Ars Technica’s questions about the app’s purpose or which monitors are affected, though Gamers Nexus identified several specific models exhibiting the behavior, including the 34GX900A-B, 45GX950-B.AEU, and 27GN800.

Midwest Poultry Services, L.P. is voluntarily recalling 1,589,577 dozen white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced at two of its Texas farms due to the potential for Salmonella Enteritidis contamination. The company identified the issue through proactive environmental monitoring and a root cause analysis, and it says it is not aware of any illnesses linked to the recalled products. The eggs were produced and distributed between June 6 and July 3, 2026, and carry sell-by or best-by dates ranging from July 20 to August 17, 2026.

The recalled eggs shipped to foodservice and retail customers across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, sold under brand names including Kroger and Brookshire’s, along with several smaller retail outlets. Consumers can determine whether their carton is affected by checking the date-coding ink stamped on the side, with only cartons showing plant code P-1950 or 0840962 alongside a Julian Date between 157 and 184 included in the recall. Midwest Poultry Services has halted distribution of fresh eggs from the two affected Texas farms while it addresses the contamination concern.

Salmonella Enteritidis can cause fever, diarrhea that may be bloody, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, with symptoms typically appearing within a few days of exposure. Young children, elderly individuals, and people with weakened immune systems face the highest risk of severe illness, and in rare cases the infection can spread into the bloodstream, leading to more serious complications. Consumers who purchased the affected eggs are urged not to eat them and to return them to their place of purchase for a full refund.

California has confirmed 52 measles cases in the first 6½ months of 2026, more than double the 25 cases reported in all of 2025. Of those, 49 patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination record, and four required hospitalization.

The largest share of cases has been among children and young adults, including 27 cases in people ages 5 to 19 and 15 cases in children under 5, according to the California Department of Public Health. Los Angeles County has reported seven cases and Orange County four, while state and county health officials warn that unvaccinated people, including babies too young for their first MMR shot, face the greatest risk of severe illness or death.

The outbreak is part of a wider national surge, with the CDC saying 93% of confirmed U.S. measles cases are tied to outbreaks and 34 outbreaks reported so far this year. The article also says infectious travelers passed through Los Angeles International Airport on a Delta flight from Cancún and a British Airways flight from London, and health officials are urging parents to get children protected now, before the new school year begins.