r/InterstellarKinetics

Cognitive psychologists and writing experts are raising alarms that students who rely on AI to write essays aren’t just cutting corners on composition, they’re undermining their capacity to think altogether, according to a New York Times essay examined by Futurism. “Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the Times, explaining that the act of writing builds critical cognitive faculties including working memory, executive planning skills, and metacognition, the ability to be aware of one’s own thinking. Kellogg compares the mental effort of drafting a basic essay to the physical exhaustion of digging a ditch, since writers must struggle to find the right words and organize ideas coherently for an audience, then revise through self-review or feedback. When that struggle gets outsourced to a machine, he argues, what results is no longer writing, and therefore no longer exercises the brain.

That claim isn’t just theoretical. An MIT study published earlier this year found that people who used AI while writing an essay showed lower brain activity compared to those who wrote without assistance. Even more strikingly, participants who composed with AI struggled to recall a single line from the essays they had just produced, and their brain activity remained suppressed even when later asked to write again without AI help, suggesting the cognitive cost lingered beyond the immediate task. Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University, warned that there’s no part of the writing process that can be handed off to AI without some cost, even though, as the Times piece acknowledges, few people would willingly dig a ditch either, and writing carries similar drudgery. NYT reporter Dana Goldstein extended that logic further: “If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything, whether it’s ‘The Crucible’ or AI itself, if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?”

Schools and colleges are now scrambling to respond. Some institutions have returned to pencil-and-paper essays and oral exams, while others are banning digital devices in freshman courses. Ivy League schools like Princeton University have gone as far as dropping Honor Code traditions that previously allowed students to take tests and exams unsupervised. Encouragingly, some students are reaching similar conclusions on their own. “You’re not strengthening that muscle by actually analyzing these really hard texts,” one college junior told the Times. “They’re meant to be hard.”

President Trump has nominated Dr. Heidi Overton, deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, to lead the Food and Drug Administration, a pick that immediately drew both praise and sharp bipartisan pushback, according to the Associated Press. Trump called her a smart and respected “rockstar” in a Truth Social post, saying she would deliver on his priorities of faster cures, innovation, lower drug prices, and wins for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Kennedy echoed that praise on X, describing Overton as having “exceptional judgment, professionalism, discipline and an unwavering commitment to the American people.” If confirmed, Overton would inherit an agency facing a raft of competing pressures, balancing Trump’s personal fixations, traditional Republicans’ anti-regulatory instincts, and Kennedy’s anti-corporate posture, the same tensions that dogged her predecessor, Dr. Marty Makary, who resigned in May leaving behind unfinished work on ultraprocessed foods, antidepressants, and COVID-19 vaccine policy.

Overton, who attended medical school at the University of New Mexico and holds a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins, previously served as chief policy officer at the conservative America First Policy Institute before joining the administration. She’s appeared alongside Trump at several major health announcements, including “most favored nation” drug pricing deals and his recent executive order splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three separate shots against the advice of medical groups. At that Oval Office event, she stood beside Trump as he falsely suggested vaccine timing or dosage could be linked to rising autism rates, a claim scientific consensus and decades of research have firmly rejected. Overton has also been critical of abortion pills, and if confirmed, would be positioned to roll back FDA rules that expanded access to mifepristone, a medication used in nearly two-thirds of US abortions that medical professionals consider “among the safest medications” the FDA has ever approved, a rollback that anti-abortion groups have been pushing for given their frustration that online-prescribed abortion pills continue undermining state bans.

Confirmation won’t be automatic despite the narrowly Republican-controlled Senate. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana who has previously criticized Trump’s vaccine skepticism, said Wednesday he has “strong concerns” about the nomination, citing Overton’s lack of managerial experience and calling her involvement in the MMR vaccine order “almost disqualifying.” Democrats were far more blunt. “Heidi Overton is a far-right, anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading the FDA,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray posted. Even some MAHA-aligned activists have voiced skepticism: Kelly Ryerson, a pesticide critic known as “Glyphosate Girl,” told the AP that Overton parroted Bayer’s talking points at an April White House roundtable. “I was stunned by the blatant, undisguised corruption,” Ryerson said.

Whoever takes the job faces a packed inbox left behind by Makary, whose tenure ended amid complaints from both health industry executives and anti-abortion activists, particularly over the agency’s inaction on flavored e-cigarettes; days before his departure, the FDA opened the door to more unauthorized vapes and nicotine pouches in a move that bypassed the agency’s own experts. Pharmaceutical companies are also pushing for changes after rejections or reversals of biotech drugs for rare diseases, while several of Makary’s own deputies, including vaccine and biotech chief Dr. Vinay Prasad and acting drug center director Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, already exited the agency amid industry and political pressure. Overton would also need to navigate MAHA’s expectations on peptide regulation, since a Kennedy-selected federal advisory panel recently recommended easing access to wellness-industry peptides despite FDA scientists warning they haven’t been proven safe or effective, alongside finalizing a contested definition of “ultraprocessed foods” and managing an ongoing review of antidepressants’ safety during pregnancy. All of this comes as the agency simultaneously investigates two active outbreaks, a cyclospora outbreak tied to tainted iceberg lettuce that has sickened thousands, and a multistate salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers.

A driverless Tesla Robotaxi was caught on video smashing through a row of plastic traffic bollards after apparently mistaking a blocked-off curb extension for a right turn lane, according to Futurism, which cited footage first spotted by Electrek. The video, uploaded Monday to the r/SelfDrivingCars subreddit, was recorded by a passenger sitting in the front seat who grew increasingly alarmed as the situation unfolded. “It’s going through bollards,” he says as the car inches toward the barriers, followed by, “There’s bollards right here. You can’t go this way. Don’t do that!”

According to the account, the vehicle appeared to recognize the obstacles blocking its path and froze in place for roughly a minute, fidgeting with the steering wheel and pulsing the brakes as if trying to work out a solution. Rather than reversing out of the closed-off area, though, the software ultimately chose a far more drastic option, driving straight through the bollards and knocking them down. Because the barriers were the flimsy plastic kind rather than solid posts, no serious damage appears to have resulted, but the passenger was left in disbelief. “It ran through the bollards,” he said. “Holy sh*t.” The incident raises pointed questions about the decision-making chain behind the failure, since the car first turned into a closed lane, then failed to recognize reversing as an option, and finally opted to run over obstacles it had visibly detected rather than backing out safely. It remains unclear whether Tesla’s remote teleoperators, who can assist or take over stuck vehicles, were involved in this incident at all.

The collision arrives roughly a month after Tesla’s official X account claimed the Robotaxi fleet had racked up “0 notable incidents across 380,000 miles traveled,” a claim in which the qualifier “notable” is doing significant work, given that the vehicles have separately been spotted driving the wrong way down a one-way street and behaving erratically in other situations. CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly insisted the company is “paranoid about safety,” even as the service appears to be scaling back rather than expanding, logging fewer paying-customer miles than before and running an active unsupervised fleet of only around a dozen vehicles.

A U.S. Army unit in Georgia is offering active-duty soldiers a four-day pass to play Grand Theft Auto VI when it launches this fall, using the highly anticipated video game as a reenlistment incentive, according to CBS News. Twenty soldiers in the Army’s 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, have already chosen this perk as part of their reenlistment package. “The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in,” said Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division. “The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist.”

The program, detailed in an Army memo authenticated by Task & Purpose and Military.com, applies to any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between August 1 and November 14, 2026, timed around the game’s November 19 release. Eligible soldiers must commit to reenlisting for a minimum of two years and up to six years in exchange for the special pass. About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said, though the program is not service-wide and was proposed exclusively for this one battalion, with the possibility of expansion if it proves successful. Anticipation for the title runs especially high among action and open-world game fans, since Rockstar Games’ last mainline entry, GTA V, launched back in 2013; the new installment returns to a fictional Miami setting and features the series’ first female lead character.

This tactic builds on a longer-running Army strategy of courting gamers to fill recruiting and retention gaps. Beyond this new incentive, the service has historically dangled college tuition, choice duty station assignments, and elite training programs like airborne or air assault schools to encourage enlistment and reenlistment. After missing its recruiting goal in 2018 for the first time in over a decade, the Army began attending gaming conventions and eventually launched its own esports team built around titles like Call of Duty, Fortnite, and League of Legends to scout potential recruits. Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, who oversaw Army recruiting command at the time, explained the reasoning behind targeting gamers directly to CBS News in 2019: “Is there something about what it takes to be a gamer today and what you’re looking for for Army jobs that overlaps?” he was asked. “Yes,” Muth said. “It’s the decision-making, it’s the ability to take in a lot of information quickly and to be able to make a decision… It’s about teamwork.”

A Massachusetts town is moving to fire and criminally charge an officer, while a Louisiana sheriff’s department has already fired one of its own, in separate cases where officers allegedly exploited Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader network to look up people they personally knew, according to ABC News. In Stow, Massachusetts, officer Jason Rogers is accused of improperly accessing information about someone he knows on at least five occasions, running vehicle information through Flock Safety and Criminal Justice Information Services “for no legitimate law enforcement reason.” The Stow Police Department said it learned of the alleged misconduct after a victim filed a complaint on June 18, and “within three hours of receiving that complaint, the Department placed Jason Rogers on paid administrative leave and revoked his access to department systems.” An internal affairs investigation sustained findings of “conduct unbecoming of an officer, improper use of an official position, failure to comply with written orders, use of false and unsubstantiated search reasons, and violations of department policies surrounding law enforcement databases,” police said. The town has since removed multiple license plate readers from the area entirely and filed a criminal complaint against Rogers with the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office; his employment status hearing is scheduled for August 26.

In Louisiana, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office fired an officer after media inquiries prompted an investigation revealing he had searched a single license plate “several thousand times over the course of several years.” The officer admitted during questioning that the plate belonged to his former fiancée, telling investigators the two “maintained a friendly relationship” and that she was aware of the searches. Despite that claimed consent, the department said the admission triggered immediate suspension and a criminal referral, framing the issue as a fundamental breach of duty. “Law enforcement officers are entrusted with access to sensitive information solely so they can perform their official duties and protect the public,” said Stow Police Chief Michael Sallese. “Using that access for a personal purpose is a serious violation of that trust, and it is a crime.” Sallese said he will present an updated ALPR policy to the town’s Select Board covering explicit use criteria, mandatory supervisory approval, and stricter logging requirements before any future reimplementation of the technology.

These cases join a growing pattern of documented abuse nationwide. In Wisconsin, a Menasha police officer who pleaded no contest to misusing a Flock system was sentenced Monday to jail time plus three years of probation. In Ohio, a Lucas County commissioner is pushing the sheriff’s department to pause Flock camera use entirely until an audit can clarify what legal authority officers rely on to access the data and how residents can be protected from mass surveillance. Sheriff Mike Navarre pushed back forcefully against that call, comparing the technology’s impact to the introduction of DNA evidence decades ago. “License plate readers have been a ‘game changer’ in recent years much the same way that DNA use became a valuable tool for law enforcement 40 years ago,” Navarre said. “Before you take away these crime-fighting tools, you must ask yourself if you are willing to sacrifice the safety of your children and loved ones. Communities that embrace technology are safer.” Facing mounting pressure, Flock announced policy changes last week requiring a criminal case number for database searches and shortening its data retention window from 30 days down to seven; the company did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the new cases.

US District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston lifted the administrative stay on Tuesday that had been blocking the Trump administration from terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for Ethiopian nationals, clearing the way for the program’s end. The ruling continues a pattern of recent court decisions permitting the administration to end TPS protections for nationals from Haiti, Somalia, Syria, and Myanmar, part of its broader immigration enforcement push, and follows a June Supreme Court ruling that allowed the administration to terminate TPS specifically for Haitian nationals.

The advocacy group African Communities Together had filed suit back in January arguing that Ethiopia remains in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, making termination of protections dangerous for those covered. The group warned in its original complaint that ending TPS would leave affected individuals facing “impossible choices: to uproot their lives yet again in search of a pathway to safety in a third country; to remain in the United States without lawful immigration status, at risk of imminent immigration confinement and removal; or to relocate to Ethiopia, a country still suffering violent conflict.” TPS itself, established under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, grants work authorization and deportation protection to nationals of countries the government designates unsafe due to armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary temporary conditions.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to the ruling with a blunt public message on X, stating, “those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don’t, we will DEPORT them.”

The BBC has formally asked a US District Court in the Southern District of Florida to authorize subpoenas compelling Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner to testify and hand over documents related to January 6, 2021, as part of the network’s defense against President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit, according to a court filing released Friday. The BBC’s legal team argued the three “have personal knowledge and likely have possession, custody, or control of records relevant to multiple elements of Plaintiff’s claims against the BBC.” The court has given Trump’s lawyers until Friday to respond. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team pushed back forcefully in a statement to CBS News, accusing the BBC of “seeking to harass him, his family, and supporters by abusing the deposition process,” and adding, “the BBC is simply trying to distract away from their own obvious liability.”

The underlying lawsuit, filed by Trump in December, accuses the BBC of defamation along with deceptive and unfair trade practices tied to a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary that edited a speech Trump delivered in Washington shortly before his supporters attacked the Capitol. Trump’s legal team has argued the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers” by “splicing together” two clips from the same speech that were actually 55 minutes apart, creating the impression Trump had explicitly called for violence, while omitting what his team describes as a “statement calling for peace.” The BBC publicly apologized last year, acknowledging the edit created “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” and said it would not air the documentary again, though it maintains the edit isn’t legitimate grounds for a defamation claim.

Court documents reveal the BBC had already tried and failed to serve subpoenas on the three family members back in May. Attempts to serve Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their Florida home were blocked by local law enforcement, and the Secret Service later told the network it couldn’t accept the subpoenas on the couple’s behalf. Separate attempts to serve Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in New York were also unsuccessful, with a concierge saying the person who normally accepted such documents might be at lunch, and a follow-up attempt two days later turned away because the “legal department” wasn’t in that day. The BBC argues all three are material witnesses to Trump’s actions on January 6, citing congressional documents showing Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump were present in the Oval Office while Trump was still revising his speech, that Kushner had drafted a statement condemning the Capitol violence, and that Donald Trump Jr. spoke directly with his father after rioters stormed the building. The BBC’s press office declined to comment on the case when asked by CBS News.

The National Park Service has purchased and installed Flock automatic license plate reader cameras at national parks including Yosemite, drawing sharp criticism from current and former rangers who say the surveillance technology contradicts the spirit of public lands, according to 404 Media. “Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem, but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy,” one current NPS ranger said, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. Another ranger added, “I just think that every American should be free to visit our national parks without their location being traced and tracked by the federal government. Wild places are at the core of American freedom and nobody should be afraid to visit them.” A former ranger predicted public backlash if awareness spreads: “I think if the public knew that their public lands were being surveilled, they would push back.”

Flock cameras continuously scan license plates, vehicle color, model, and make for every passing car, creating timestamped location records that become searchable by Flock’s law enforcement customers, typically without a warrant. Many cameras are part of a nationwide network, meaning an officer in one state can query vehicle location data captured by cameras installed anywhere else in the country. This capability has already fueled a broader national debate about Flock’s presence in communities, amid documented cases of officers abusing database access to stalk people without any legitimate investigative purpose, and local police performing lookups on behalf of ICE. According to open-source ALPR tracking site DeFlock, cameras are confirmed installed inside Yosemite and along a road leading to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. An internal NPS document reviewed by 404 Media also indicates the agency plans to install cameras from Verkada, a company with its own history of product misuse and facial detection capabilities in some of its hardware.

NPS defended the deployment in a statement to 404 Media, saying, “Yosemite National Park uses a traffic-monitoring system to measure vehicle counts, travel times and entrance-station wait times. The system helps the park better understand traffic conditions and provide visitors with information to help them make informed decisions about when to visit and where parking is available. The cameras are not connected to law enforcement or DMV databases.” Rangers remain skeptical given the agency’s own track record. One cited a prior controversy over Yosemite’s handling of a rule change regarding flags hung on El Capitan, which they say the park attempted to backdate to make it appear participants had broken the law at the time. “What happens when that sort of malfeasance is combined with the ability to track any park visitor’s location, anywhere in the country? If that happens, we are no longer free in this country,” the ranger said, adding, “I fear for the day when a visitor’s National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate.”

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley drew sharp criticism after telling Vanity Fair that his company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) “would have solved” the still-unsolved kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, insisting “one hundred percent, there’s no doubt in my mind.” The comment came during an interview where Langley was defending his company’s AI-integrated surveillance camera network, which has made Flock one of the most widely criticized brands in the country over its role in mass tracking of ordinary citizens’ movements.

The claim is difficult to reconcile with the facts on the ground. Guthrie was forcibly abducted in Tucson, Arizona, more than six months ago by an unknown attacker or attackers, and according to the ALPR-tracking site DeFlock, Tucson already had at least four known Flock camera networks and more than 120 individual cameras in place at the time of her disappearance, including units positioned along major routes in and out of the city like I-19, I-10 North and South, and state highways 77, 86, and 210. The infrastructure Langley credited with solving power was already deployed exactly where the crime occurred, yet the case remains unresolved.

Given that Flock’s cameras were already present in force and the kidnapper still hasn’t been identified, the claim raises an obvious question about what the technology is actually accomplishing. With more than 120,000 ALPRs now deployed across the US, critics argue the system’s demonstrated strength lies less in solving violent crimes like Guthrie’s and more in enabling police to track and surveil ordinary, non-suspect drivers at scale, a dynamic starkly at odds with Langley’s self-assured framing of the technology’s crime-solving capability.

Lake sturgeon, one of North America’s oldest freshwater fish species, may live far longer than previously believed, potentially reaching ages of 200, 300, or even more than 400 years old, according to a new study led by Edward Baker of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, published in the Journal of Fish Biology. This dramatically exceeds the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s prior estimate that lake sturgeon could live up to 150 years, a figure already far beyond human lifespans, which top out around 122 years. “Scientists have long recognized that lake sturgeon are among North America’s longest-lived freshwater fish,” said Michigan State University co-author Scott Colborne. “But the new study suggests they may live far longer than previously appreciated. These fish are a living connection to history.”

The breakthrough came from rethinking how scientists measure sturgeon age. Researchers traditionally count growth rings on the fish’s pectoral fin spine, similar to counting tree rings, but the rings become increasingly compressed and difficult to distinguish as the fish age, leading researchers to suspect systematic underestimation. To get around this limitation, Baker’s team turned to a capture-mark-recapture dataset spanning 44 years, comparing body length measurements of tagged fish over time to calculate adult growth rates. They then applied a mathematical model originally developed to estimate the maximum age of Greenland sharks, another species known to live more than 400 years, tracking mean annual growth in male and female sturgeon as a function of body size. The researchers suggest the species’ extraordinarily long lifespan may be tied to its ability to enter a low-energy torpor state during winter months.

The findings also echo knowledge that Indigenous communities have held for generations. “That was one of those goosebump moments,” Colborne said. “Here we were using modern analytical approaches, and they were pointing us toward something that Indigenous communities had long understood, that these fish live incredibly long lives.” Lake sturgeon, which can grow beyond seven feet and weigh up to 300 pounds, primarily inhabit the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basin, and the species has existed for roughly 150 million years. Decades of conservation tracking made this discovery possible in the first place, and collaborative efforts across federal, state, local, and tribal partners have already helped increase sturgeon spawning activity in their historic freshwater habitats, according to a 2024 USFWS announcement. Colborne emphasized the resilience of the species going forward: “Because of their life history, sturgeon are very resilient and adaptable animals. If we give them the opportunity to survive, they’ll figure it out. There’s a reason these fish have been around for millions of years.”

ABC filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, asking a federal judge to halt early broadcast license renewal proceedings the company says are being weaponized to punish its news coverage and editorial decisions. The complaint alleges the administration, acting through the FCC, has run a targeted campaign against the network. “Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the complaint states.

ABC says it has cooperated extensively with the FCC’s investigations despite objecting to their scope, responding to more than 600 separate requests and producing over 13,000 pages of documents across two separate probes. The network describes itself as having exhausted every alternative before turning to the courts. “Facing this existential threat, Plaintiffs have no choice but to seek redress from the judicial branch for the Administration’s blatant retaliation for their First Amendment speech,” the complaint states. “Plaintiffs come to this Court reluctantly with no alternative means to eliminate these ongoing and immediate threats other than total capitulation to the Administration’s demands.” Alongside the lawsuit, ABC filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction seeking immediate court intervention to pause the FCC’s actions while the case proceeds, arguing, “this case boils down to a simple question: can the Administration use its control over the federal regulatory apparatus to punish a media organization for editorial decisions and news coverage it dislikes? Because the First Amendment provides a clear answer, of course not, this Court’s intervention is necessary to stop the Federal Communications Commission’s extraordinary assault on free speech.”

The FCC pushed back sharply, framing its actions as routine regulatory oversight rather than retaliation. An FCC spokesperson said, “all broadcasters have a legal obligation to operate in the public interest, even Disney. The FCC has been examining claims that Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination for over a year. Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC’s proceeding, as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation as well as their decision to ask a court to stop the FCC from further pursuing matters. The FCC will continue to follow the facts and law wherever they lead.” The Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, is now positioned at the center of a legal fight that could set precedent for how far a federal regulator can go in scrutinizing a broadcaster’s editorial choices.

The Trump administration is considering a new IRS proposal that would require nonprofits to disclose on their annual Form 990 tax filings whether top officials have been convicted of certain financial or terrorism-related crimes, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity. The disclosure requirement would cover convictions for providing material support to terrorists, fraud, money laundering, securities fraud, tax evasion, theft, and civil judgments from SEC or state securities regulator enforcement actions, generally limited to the past decade. The proposal wouldn’t require organizations to name which specific officer, director, or trustee was convicted, and importantly, having a felony conviction doesn’t currently disqualify someone from serving on a nonprofit board under federal law. Federal officials view the rule as a way to pressure tax-exempt groups into cutting ties with people who have such records and to help donors make more informed giving decisions.

Support and opposition split sharply along predictable lines. Tom Jones, a Trump ally who leads the conservative American Accountability Foundation, argued, “no one has a right to privacy of their criminal record. If your board members are convicted criminals, I am hard pressed to understand why you have a problem with that being publicized.” But even inside the IRS, some officials have privately raised concerns about what the agency could lawfully do with this information and how it connects to actual tax law enforcement, viewing it as potential political targeting that could invite legal challenges on free speech grounds. Law professor Roger Colinvaux was blunt about the risk: “This disclosure rule goes directly to guilt by association. There’s no federal law that says a nonprofit cannot have a convicted felon on their board. It could just create a stigma and chill association. This would reach deeply into American civil society.” Legal experts also flagged a direct collision with precedent, specifically the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, which struck down a California requirement forcing charities to disclose major donor lists. Tax attorney Alexander Reid warned the bulk disclosure “would fail exacting scrutiny by chilling freedom of association without furthering a narrowly defined governmental interest.”

The proposal fits into a much broader pattern of the administration targeting nonprofits, particularly those perceived as left-leaning. Trump signed a national security memorandum directing the IRS to refer groups suspected of financing “domestic terrorism” to the Justice Department, and the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation launched a joint “command post” investigating possible nonprofit-terrorism links. This followed a directive from former Attorney General Pam Bondi urging investigations into antifa and other “extremist groups,” despite antifa being a decentralized movement with no formal organization, board, or officers to investigate. Active cases include a criminal prosecution against the Southern Poverty Law Center over allegations it misled donors by funneling money to informants for white supremacist groups, and a criminal tax investigation into Neville Roy Singham, husband of Code Pink’s founder and a major funder of far-left causes. Diane Yentel, president of the National Council of Nonprofits, which represents roughly 37,000 organizations, framed the proposal as part of that broader pattern: “Nonprofits welcome reasonable regulation as a way to maintain public trust,” but called this “a step too far when viewed in the context of all of the administration’s actions and rhetoric of the last 18 months, including equating some nonprofits to ‘domestic terrorists’ or ‘enemies’ of the American people.”

Fred Lambert, editor-in-chief of the electric vehicle blog Electrek, says his Tesla running the latest Full Self-Driving software nearly drove his car off the highway and into a ditch during a Sunday drive on Quebec’s Autoroute 55 in the Mauricie region. Lambert was cruising at roughly 68 mph in the right lane under clear visibility, no traffic, and freshly painted lane markers, conditions he describes as ideal for FSD, when the car suddenly activated its turn signal and began veering toward the shoulder while “self-driving” remained displayed on the screen. “The problem is that the ramp was already peeling off behind us. It was going to drive us straight into the ditch by turning this late at that speed,” Lambert wrote. “The car decided to put its blinker on and take an exit it had no business taking.” He managed to intervene in time, but described the moment as frightening: “I was ready to take control, and I did, but it was scary. My girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat, screamed in fear.”

What makes the incident notable is that Lambert, who covers Tesla extensively and understands the technology’s known weaknesses, was caught off guard specifically because the failure occurred in what should have been an easy scenario for the system. “Based on everything I’ve seen from v14, highway driving at night on an empty road is where the system is at its absolute best,” he said. “I’ve done thousands of kilometres of exactly this without touching anything. Which is why I was confident. And that confidence is the whole trap.” Despite its name, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature is officially labeled “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” a clarification added after regulatory scrutiny over potential false advertising, and it requires constant driver supervision with the ability to take over instantly, directly contradicting CEO Elon Musk’s repeated claims that his cars can “drive themselves.” FSD-enabled Teslas have also drawn federal regulatory investigation after repeatedly attempting to drive into the path of oncoming trains, and have been involved in multiple deadly accidents, including one case where a vehicle ran over an elderly woman while its cameras were reportedly blinded by sunlight.

Lambert argues the software’s high overall reliability is itself part of the danger. He previously wrote that “a system that works almost perfectly creates a trap, drivers trust it just enough to stop paying attention, but it still fails unpredictably and sometimes critically,” adding in his latest post, “I stand by every word, and Sunday night was the demonstration. A couple thousand miles between critical interventions is genuinely impressive engineering. It’s also exactly the interval that teaches your brain to stop scanning.” His experience isn’t isolated. In March, a woman sued Tesla after her self-driving Cybertruck allegedly attempted to drive off the side of a bridge, with footage showing the vehicle accelerating up an overpass ramp before slamming into a concrete barrier.

An investigation by 404 Media has caught Amazon scanning and destroying rare books to feed its AI model training pipeline, uncovered after a bookseller grew suspicious of a 1,000-book order placed through Biblio, a marketplace that allows buyers to remain anonymous. To verify their hunch that the order was destined for an AI company, the bookseller slipped an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the books and tracked the shipment to a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off books so the pages can be quickly scanned, a process that destroys the physical book. “I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books,” one Amazon employee wrote on a worker forum, as quoted by 404. “Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the barcodes.”

Notably, the warehouse section handling this work, called VGT3, uses a logo depicting a T-Rex holding a book it appears about to eat, an image 404 describes as looking possibly AI-generated itself. Amazon’s only response to 404’s inquiry was a brief statement: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” This practice first came to public attention through a lawsuit against Anthropic, which revealed the Claude chatbot maker was using industrial equipment to cut pages out of millions of books for scanning before disposing of the originals. In that case, a judge controversially ruled the practice “transformative” and therefore not a copyright violation, since Anthropic was converting physical texts into digital ones while destroying the source material.

Booksellers have long suspected their inventory was being funneled to AI training operations, previously flagging telltale signs like unusually large order sizes, seemingly random book selections, and a consistent presence of ISBNs across orders, though the anonymity of marketplace transactions made it impossible to confirm. The detail that Amazon warehouse workers are scanning ISBNs on every book they process lends credibility to a theory some booksellers have floated: that AI companies may be systematically working through lists of every printed book’s serial number in an attempt to digitize and absorb virtually the entire published book catalog. The bookseller who worked with 404 specifically dealt in rare books, meaning few copies remain in circulation for reasons beyond simply being first editions. “There are different types of value,” the bookseller said. “There’s monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”

404 Media Article: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

UK hospitals are struggling under extreme summer heat, with indoor temperatures reaching more than 107 degrees Fahrenheit in some wards, causing surgery cancellations and staff to faint, according to The Guardian. The data, obtained through a freedom of information request filed by the Liberal Democrats, shows that during July, the average temperature across National Health Service wards nationwide hit a sweltering 81.9 degrees Fahrenheit, already exceeding the NHS’s maximum safe temperature threshold of roughly 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius). Lib Dems health spokesperson Helen Morgan told The Guardian that hospitals are becoming “dangerously hostile environments for patients and healthcare workers.”

The Northern Care Alliance NHS trust, which runs four hospitals in Greater Manchester, recorded the worst conditions in the country, with one ward hitting a record 41.8 degrees Celsius, or about 107.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The consequences are playing out in concrete operational failures across the healthcare system. Some hospitals are cancelling surgeries outright because operating rooms have become too hot to safely operate in, while a nurse’s union reports staff collapsing amid what it calls “inhumane and impossible” working conditions. A separate NHS Alliance survey found that some patients are cancelling their own surgeries simply because it’s too hot to travel to appointments, and ambulance crews are struggling to keep medications at safe storage temperatures inside vehicles overheating in the sun.

Much of the problem traces back to aging infrastructure. Many hospital buildings were never designed to withstand heat waves and lack modern air conditioning entirely, while facilities that do have cooling systems have seen units fail under the strain of repeated extreme heat. In response, the Liberal Democrats are calling for the creation of an “NHS rapid adaptation unit” tasked with heatproofing hospitals, including installing air conditioning where it’s currently absent. David Williams, the body’s deputy director of policy, told The Guardian, “overheating NHS hospitals are affecting the health and wellbeing of patients and staff and the temperatures we have seen repeatedly this summer show what an urgent issue this has become,” adding, “a lack of investment in the NHS estate over many years has left crumbling buildings and dilapidated equipment in need of urgent repair.”

Farnsley Middle School in Southwest Louisville sent students home on the first day of the 2026 school year with agenda packets containing wildly inaccurate, AI-generated educational content, including a US map riddled with misspelled state names, misplaced cities, and entirely fabricated territories, according to local station WDRB. The map mislabeled Kentucky as “Venecky,” Texas as “Taxas,” Louisiana as “Lookoong,” North Dakota as “North Dahota,” Arizona as “Arizone,” New Mexico as “New Mizone,” and Oklahoma as “Olkchoma.” Even correctly spelled elements of the map were geographically scrambled, at one point placing Cuba’s capital city of Havana on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Some states, including Michigan and California, appeared with no labels at all, while the area south of a misspelled “Venneouer” (Vancouver) was rendered as an invented land called “Beehie,” supposedly bordering Washington state.

Kentucky mother Stacey Morris, whose son brought home one of the packets, summed up her reaction to WDRB: “Arizona is Arizone. Illinois starts with a V. I mean, it’s crazy.” The errors extended well beyond geography. Social media images showed a periodic table listing magnesium with an impossible atomic mass of negative 3.08, and a solar system diagram labeling Mars as “Marc,” accompanied by a caption reading verbatim, “Planetary distance are temporatory earth, equater the elenonts and regnestiom org toed dishligns… Net to scale.”

The school district’s executive officer of communications told WDRB that officials “spoke with the school today about inaccuracies in their agenda, and they are communicating with parents about the issue.” Following the discovery, school administrators reportedly emailed teachers instructing them to remove 17 pages of AI-generated material before distributing the packets going forward. The incident follows a separate recent story of parents homeschooling children using AI chatbots to build lesson plans and curricula, including influencer Savannah LaBrant, who said she used ChatGPT to teach her kids “where the states are and how to locate them.”

President Trump is being sued by nonprofit news groups The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation over Truth Social’s “Truth API,” which sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users on the platform, with the lawsuit alleging Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information. Trump’s social media company began charging customers up to $100,000 per month this month for the earliest access to posts capable of moving financial markets, with initial customers mostly consisting of high-frequency trading firms positioned to benefit financially from receiving official government news milliseconds ahead of everyone else. “This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company,” the lawsuit states. Seth Stern, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s chief of advocacy, called the arrangement stark, saying “a president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago.”

Filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit asks the court to declare that exclusively posting official government information on Truth Social while charging for expedited API access is unconstitutional, and seeks an injunction barring the president and his aides from continuing that practice as long as the platform maintains its paid tier. Ben Muessig, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, said “Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell. We won’t let it stand.” The complaint notes Trump frequently posts official government announcements exclusively on Truth Social, including military attacks and ceasefires, agency leadership changes, and major domestic policies, and Stern argued the scheme is especially galling given Trump’s history of using the platform to attack journalists, saying he “frequently uses his Truth Social account to berate journalists and even to announce his plans to sue them and criminally investigate them. Then, he makes them wait in line behind paying customers to find out about it unless they’re willing to subsidize the platform he uses to attack them. This brazen grift targets not only the markets but the First Amendment.” Named defendants beyond Trump include Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp and Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino, both of whom have access to and post on Trump’s Truth Social account, along with the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office.

The legal argument centers on alleged violations of the First and Fifth Amendments, with the lawsuit stating that “the First Amendment guarantees equal access to the President’s public announcements, and even content-neutral burdens on that access must be narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest,” while arguing “there is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information.” The suit also flags Truth Social’s apparent plan to restrict web scraping and make its API the only way to access deleted or edited archived posts, quoting interim CEO Kevin McGurn’s earnings call comment that “we’re going to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly.” The financial stakes for Trump Media & Technology Group appear significant: the company reported just $1.7 million in revenue against a $238.1 million net loss last quarter, and McGurn said the firm has already signed up more than 10 customers paying $60,000 to $100,000 monthly, mostly high-frequency trading firms, with plans to expand to cloud computing companies, major news organizations, AI developers, and eventually retail investors.

New GTA 6 gameplay footage and map images have leaked online just nine days ahead of Rockstar’s scheduled GTA 6 Extended Look premiere on Netflix, surfacing on August 18 from a leaker going by “Cyberleek.” One clip shows protagonist Jason driving on a highway, veering into oncoming traffic, and crashing into a delivery van, triggering a confrontation where the angry driver threatens him before the two engage in melee combat, with Jason ultimately delivering a jump kick and punch followed by several wrench strikes that escalate his Wanted level to six stars (displayed as a two-star system with 6 stars visible). The footage also reveals new UI elements, including loadout and storage options in the back of Jason’s vehicle, with storage shown at 0 out of 4 capacity, plus a fuel gauge suggesting fuel management will be a gameplay factor. Jason ultimately escapes police by crashing into an ambulance before approaching a helicopter as the clip ends.

A second, shorter clip shows Jason near the home featured in GTA 6’s second trailer, where he jumps down to a driveway containing a boat matching one previously revealed by Rockstar, then picks up a basketball. An on-screen prompt explains the shooting mechanic: “To shoot, aim and hold until the rings overlap, then release.” After Jason sinks the shot, a “Focus” stat appears and increases by 2%, with the footage ending as the ball lands in nearby water. Separate leaked map images reportedly reveal several previously unknown in-game locations, including Dalton Island, Tequesta Retreat, Gloriana Key, Catalan Key, and Catalan Bay.

Rockstar hasn’t officially confirmed the authenticity of the leaked material, but the studio has reportedly begun issuing DMCA takedowns against the leaks, a strong signal that the content is genuine. If authentic, this would rank among the most significant GTA 6 leaks since Rockstar’s 2022 network intrusion exposed dozens of development videos. Cyberleek says they plan to keep posting in protest of Rockstar’s decision to make GTA 6 digital-only, though so far only two videos and a handful of map images have surfaced. Notably, insider NateTheHate claims the leaked clips are over a year old, meaning they may not reflect the current state of the game players will see at the Netflix event. Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look is set to premiere on Netflix at 3 p.m. ET on August 27, followed by release on Rockstar’s YouTube channel and website six hours later, ahead of the game’s November 19, 2026 launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

President Trump is blaming vandals for large patches of dead, brown grass on the National Mall near the World War II Memorial, the exact spot where his own crew built a stage and hosted crowds for his July 4 celebration, without offering any evidence for the claim. “Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday, adding, “anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!” This follows a pattern where Trump has repeatedly attributed damage to his own capital renovation projects to vandalism, often contradicting his own officials, as happened when he lashed out at US Attorney Jeanine Pirro after her office concluded the Reflecting Pool damage stemmed from poor construction rather than vandalism.

Independent experts dispute Trump’s characterization of the grass damage. Penn State University turf professor John Kaminski said the photo Trump posted “matches what you’d expect to see with a large summer event,” adding, “nothing in the photograph clearly indicates vandalism. Jumping to that conclusion seems like a fairly large leap, although it is impossible to rule anything in or out.” Freelance journalist and golf course consultant Bradley S. Klein was more pointed, saying Trump “sounds like every grumpy golfer who’s complaining about their golf course and actually has no idea what it takes to maintain it on a day-to-day basis.” Notably, this specific stretch of lawn isn’t connected to a genuine vandalism case authorities announced Friday, when Melissa L. Farris, 41, was charged with felony vandalism after painting “Clean hands dirty $” on the World War II Memorial and filling a fountain with bubbles; charging documents in that case make no mention of the grassy area Trump is now highlighting, and Farris’s prior arrest for camping on federal property was tied to a different location several blocks away. Farris was released on her own recognizance Monday with conditions to stay away from the memorial and Washington, D.C., and is due back for a pretrial hearing September 3.

The straightforward explanation for the dead grass points to the July 4 event itself. Photos from a Washington Monument webcam show a large bandstand and seating areas covering nearly the entire lawn Trump now says was vandalized, and Associated Press photos taken afterward show workers dismantling those structures to reveal brown, damaged grass underneath. Trump claimed without evidence that more than 400,000 people attended the event, which also coincided with Washington setting an all-time record temperature of 103°F on July 4, forcing organizers to shut down activities for hours on July 3 and delay the July 4 start, with emergency personnel treating dozens of people for heat-related illness. Trump had previously cited a different photo, posted August 1, that appeared to show the numbers “86 47,” which federal officials say constitutes a threat against him as the 47th president, embedded in the grass as evidence of vandalism, writing, “there may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” Those numbers are not visible in the new photo he posted Sunday.

An expert witness hired by industrial conglomerate 3M in a $61 million lawsuit over a deadly 2020 Houston explosion used ChatGPT to write substantial portions of his expert report, according to court documents obtained by 404 Media, including a prompt explicitly asking the AI to “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.” The witness, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, was hired by 3M to defend the company’s standard of care in litigation over the January 2020 explosion, which killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes after a “degraded and poorly crimped rubber welding hose” leaked flammable gas, according to the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. Plaintiffs’ attorney Will Moye discovered a suspicious five-page “Citation Overlay” document during discovery, recognized it as ChatGPT-generated, and demanded all of Autenrieth’s prompts, ultimately receiving 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations, including public links to the full exchanges. Court records show 3M paid Knighthawk Engineering roughly $90,000 for the analysis, with Autenrieth billing $475 per hour.

The ChatGPT transcripts reveal Autenrieth’s process in granular detail. He told the chatbot he was “being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them” and needed “to create an expert witness report to defend 3M’s standard of care,” specifically asking it to counter opposing claims and “show how 3M is 0% at fault.” ChatGPT generated a roughly 30-page report stating “3M is 0% responsible for the January 24, 2020 explosion,” but that exact line never made it into the final filed report. When Autenrieth later asked ChatGPT to review the document “as the opposing counsel,” the AI itself flagged that “0% responsible” was “an easy target” and one of several phrases that could let opposing counsel “paint you as an advocate rather than an expert.” Autenrieth also asked ChatGPT to grade his report, which scored a 97 out of 100, and to identify weaknesses in his own qualifications, asking, “will prosecution go after me for never having been [an expert witness] before based on wording and how do I defend that?”

At trial, Moye and Autenrieth agreed the submitted report was “90 to 85 percent ChatGPT.” Autenrieth defended his process, insisting “my opinions were put in there, and AI helped me to draft a straw man to build off of,” and citing his “20-plus years of experience in the industry.” Moye described the situation more bluntly to 404 Media: “This expert relied on AI not as an assistive device, but exclusively relied on ChatGPT to form his opinions and write his report. He acknowledged the prompts he put in were biased toward 3M to help 3M win the case, it’s really egregious.” After 3M unsuccessfully tried to disqualify Autenrieth, Moye took the unusual step of calling him as his own witness instead, telling 404 Media, “I said, I’m calling you to trial because I need a jury to hear from you because this is bad, bad stuff. And that’s exactly what I did.” The jury ultimately awarded the plaintiffs more than $61 million, apportioning 30% of the responsibility to 3M and 70% to Watson Grinding, adding to prior awards of $118 million and $38 million in related cases, with additional lawsuits still pending. Neither Knighthawk Engineering, Autenrieth, nor 3M responded to requests for comment.