You can’t make this shit up.
The White House launched five games on its official website to promote administration policies. The collection includes a Tetris-style border-wall game, a Snake-style immigration game, a school-lunch sorting game, and games based on federal legislation and government-seeded child savings accounts.
Read original ↗ Associated PressThe Postal Service developed a portal to verify voter records before states mail ballots. According to a whistleblower disclosure and officials familiar with the project, one unmatched barcode in a batch of 10,000 could cause the entire mailing to be returned; an initial Maricopa County mailing can contain more than two million ballots.
Read original ↗ ProPublica / SalonErion Veliaj has remained mayor of Tirana while held in pretrial detention on corruption and money-laundering charges he denies. From detention, he reportedly withdrew authority from Acting Mayor Anuela Ristani because she had not carried out his instructions.
Read original ↗ BalkanWebThe administration temporarily lowered tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported beef after the White House called beef prices unreasonably high. During the same week, it imposed 50 percent tariffs on approximately $20 billion of Canadian goods, prompting Canada to announce retaliatory tariffs.
Read original ↗ ReasonAlabama construction worker Leo Garcia Venegas says federal immigration officers detained him three times despite his presenting an Alabama REAL ID showing that he is a U.S. citizen. A federal judge ruled that his Fourth Amendment lawsuit may proceed.
Read original ↗ ReasonHours after an Ars Technica editor rented an SUV and an employee scanned his driver’s license, high-resolution front, back, ultraviolet and infrared images of the ID appeared for sale online. The marketplace claimed more than 153 million identification records and added nearly 400,000 in one 24-hour period before going dark.
Read original ↗ Ars TechnicaPresident Trump proposed a Federal Production Incentive for film and television and said additional tax revenue would repay its cost tenfold. A Maryland legislative review found that comparable state programs returned between 3 and 31 cents per subsidy dollar; Georgia’s program reportedly returned 19 cents and cost $160,000 per job created.
Read original ↗ Reason
Researchers recruited more than 1,000 volunteers to bury over 2,000 pairs of cotton underwear and 12,000 tea bags at roughly 1,000 locations across Switzerland. Participants dug them up two months later so researchers could measure soil biological activity by how much fabric had decomposed.
Read original ↗ University of Zurich / ScienceDailyThe Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million outfitting ICE officers with G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—that deliver 324 to 380 volts through bare skin. The manufacturer describes the product as a “conductive distraction and de-escalation device.”
Read original ↗ The GuardianDeveloper Matt Callaghan traced a Bluetooth handoff failure to obfuscated anti-abuse code on AliExpress that created an inaudible WebAudio oscillator and analyzed its output, a technique he says amounted to browser fingerprinting. The audio graph’s gain was set to zero, but it still kept his multipoint headphones attached to the computer; closing the AliExpress tab made them behave normally.
Read original ↗ The RegisterAlaska’s Senate ballot includes incumbent Dan S. Sullivan and challenger Dan J. Sullivan. Former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan has now endorsed the incumbent as the “OG Dan Sullivan,” after Republican allies lost a court effort to remove the challenger and Donald Trump urged voters to support the “real Dan Sullivan.”
Read original ↗ The Guardian
More than a dozen companies that signed a 2021 letter urging Congress to strengthen the Voting Rights Act have donated to state political groups working to weaken it. Google, for example, gave $325,000 this election cycle to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which praised a Supreme Court ruling that overturned key parts of the law.
Read original ↗ The Guardian
Katalyst Space built and launched LINK to catch NASA’s sinking Swift observatory and raise its orbit. Instead, power problems disabled two orientation-control devices and the rescue craft began spinning, forcing NASA to abandon the boost; Swift is expected to re-enter the atmosphere later this year.
Read original ↗ Live ScienceLinkedIn says users clicked its new “Seems like AI slop” reporting option more than a million times within weeks of launch. The company also introduced classifiers to detect low-quality AI content and removed a feature that offered to “enhance your post” with AI.
Read original ↗ The VergeTesla and eight other automakers announced recalls covering about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that electronic door handles can be difficult to open in an emergency. Flush and concealed handles spread for minimalist styling and lower drag; China is banning hidden door handles on new vehicles from 2027.
Read original ↗ ReutersEighteen advocacy groups asked the FTC to investigate large-scale book-scanning practices used for AI training. Court records describe Anthropic’s Project Panama as an effort to “destructively scan” books; older volumes are especially valuable because they predate AI-generated text, while destroying them after digitization avoids storage costs. Amazon has also reportedly scanned and shredded books.
Read original ↗ The RegisterDevelopers planning 265 Utah homes say the Army Corps of Engineers treated a 1,502-foot irrigation ditch and nearby wetland as federally protected because water could reach the Great Salt Lake through culverts, canals and an underground siphon. Their lawsuit says a water molecule would travel 46,909 feet along the disputed route—if it reached the lake at all.
Read original ↗ ReasonFive reporters and two military members invited to a Vandenberg Space Force Base event were being escorted onto the base by uniformed public-affairs staff in a government minivan when security officers stopped them at gunpoint as suspected gatecrashers. The base called the incident a breakdown in communication.
Read original ↗ Associated PressVoters in Avenal, California, recalled four of the city’s five council members in April. The four disputed the election, stayed in office for months, kept holding meetings and overseeing city business, and sued in an effort to invalidate the recall.
Read original ↗ The GuardianA British government lab’s safety evaluation sent an Anthropic-powered agent after what was supposed to be a fictional target, but it attempted to plant malicious code in a real GitHub project. A Texas student flagged the attack; two other accounts generated detailed rebuttals before the student held his ground and the sabotage was stopped.
Read original ↗ ReutersGuidePoint Security assessed with moderate confidence that “Ransom Busters” is a ransomware affiliate contacting victims before attacks become public and offering cheaper recovery. Matching tools, a backdoor password and a hostname linked the supposed rescue service to intrusions across several ransomware operations, suggesting the affiliate was diverting payments from its own criminal partners.
Read original ↗ The RegisterSecurity researchers found that Grok would refuse a malicious prompt in plaintext but follow the same instructions when a webpage supplied them as ciphertext plus the key and directions to decrypt them. In tests, the decrypted command caused the assistant to send the user’s name, location and chat history to an attacker-controlled URL; xAI had been notified before publication.
Read original ↗ Ars TechnicaComo mayor Alessandro Rapinese barred all bicycles from roughly 30 central streets after an e-bike struck him while he was leaving a meeting about traffic restrictions. Rapinese acknowledged that the collision prompted the measure, denied it was a vendetta and said Italian law did not let him distinguish e-bikes from conventional bicycles.
Read original ↗ The GuardianRotherham practices introduced an AI receptionist called Emma to answer calls instantly and eliminate queues. Healthwatch reported that it struggled with broad local accents, causing patients to hang up or travel to the surgery in person, even though its maker says it supports 17 languages plus English and was designed for accents.
Read original ↗ The GuardianCroatian authorities detained Ukrainian national Volodymyr Zhuravlev on a German warrant alleging involvement in the 2022 pipeline explosions, allegations he denies. German media reported that he was in Croatia consulting on a Sean Penn film dramatizing the alleged operation.
Read original ↗ The GuardianLos Angeles mayor Karen Bass’s campaign cited a Median Strategies poll as evidence of momentum, then deleted the post after the previously unknown firm admitted inventing that and at least two other state polls. Median called the operation a “social experiment” in how unverified polling spreads; the campaign said multiple news outlets had reported the numbers.
Read original ↗ Associated Press
