But people in China certainly seem to think this is an example of AI. China Digital Times reports that it wasn’t just the same-sex image that was altered, but the distributor did also cut out some straight sex scenes from the film... As one user implies, the AI is a more sophisticated and “terrifying” form of censorship because smart viewers have figured out ways to get around obvious censorship or can tell the difference, but that’s much harder with AI. Here’s a smattering of some of the comments, sarcasm implied on the last one:

...in the future, we won’t even be able to tell if we’re watching the original film or not.

...This is nauseating because it not only interferes with the integrity of the plot, it disrespects the sexual orientation of the actors....

...Awesome! Next, let’s use one-click AI to re-release “Brokeback Mountain,” “God’s Own Country,” “Lan Yu,” and “Happy Together” as “restored” hetero romances...

Authorities are investigating whether Tyler Robinson, suspected of killing Charlie Kirk, believed Kirk's views on gender identity were "hateful" to people like Robinson's transgender roommate, six sources familiar with the case tell Axios.

• The latest: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) confirmed Sunday on ABC News' "This Week" that Robinson lived with a romantic partner who was undergoing a gender transition.

• Robinson's roommate is cooperating with authorities, Cox said, but Robinson is not and has not confessed to Kirk's killing.

• The roommate was "aghast" at the slaying when speaking to investigators and shared electronic messages sent by Robinson, one of the sources said.
• "That's what happened? Oh my God, no," the roommate said, according to the source. "Here are all the messages."

Edit: archive: https://archive.ph/tA3jp

I'm pretty sure the largest contribution to whatever greatness the U.S. ever had was due to lack of competition after WWII with the side benefit of imported talent (like Nazi rocket scientists) at that time.

That said, even before WWII we had things like the Civilian Conservation Corps that spent government money to create jobs for erosion control, parks improvement, and the like as a means of mitigating the Great Depression. We taxed the wealthy's income at 63% (later 90%) and paid government employees well.

So WWII ended and U.S. factories were intact while those in Europe were in ruins, but here come the returning G.I.s, getting government support to go to college and buy suburban homes (if you were white). The U.S. got a jump start on industry, science, and technology. We still had the awful state run institutions that hid orphans, disabled, and mentally ill away from the public, so it wasn't a paradise, but I'm not sure abandoning these people to live on the streets is much better, it simply costs less.

All this time, white collar workers tended to work for one company for their whole career, but getting a government job was a good deal. The government wanted to offer competitive salaries (plus paid vacation time, pension, and health care) to attract talent. Industry could outbid a government job, but some people might object to one company or another for personal or ethical reasons, while feeling like the government was a good cause to do good work. I'm not sure, but I feel like Vietnam-era stuff hurt the public opinion of the government.

Anyway, somewhere around the time people started job switching and pensions became less stable, it feels like the government became less interested in setting a standard wage that would let people thrive. Am I wrong? Am I looking at the past with rose tinted glasses?

It feels like better public projects got done when it was government employees rather than subcontractors. It feels like the government went from paying people a fair wage to announcing they were going to cut costs by hiring contractors, but then paid the same amount to have 3rd party workers get much less money while the contractor took a nice slice for themselves.

I distinctly remember NAFTA coming into being and politicians talking about how much cheaper things would be when we could import more easily, and I was thinking "Who wants 'cheap' when this will close your factories?" Turns out, people love 'cheap' more than a decent job or a fair wage.

Meanwhile, I'm wishing the government was investing in more stuff and in its struggling citizens. I don't want the government forcing children into career paths, but I think it'd be nice if it said, "Hey! We think we'll need more doctors soon, so we'll pay for your school if you want to do that." It'd be nice if the government paid a good salary to do things like trash disposal, street cleaning, or whatever. More well paid government jobs would make for better wage competition in the rest of the market, would it not? And would it not work better the more government employees there were?

I'm obviously not an economist nor historian, so feel free to shoot me down where I've got things wrong.

Excerpts:

Gopaulchan and colleagues selected three women-owned farms in Colombia that grow similar strains of cocoa. Two of the farms produced fine chocolate while the third made bulk chocolate. The researchers measured temperature and pH changes in the fermenting beans and took molecular snapshots of microbes present at each stage of the process.

The researchers put together combinations of bacteria and yeasts and fermented small batches of beans in the lab. Ali and a panel of other expert tasters confirmed that the lab-fermented beans had notes of orange blossom, citrus, berry, tropical fruit and flowers characteristic of fine chocolates from the two Colombian farms and a sample from Madagascar. The lab mix was missing caramel, nut and light wood flavors, and had more grassy notes than the fine chocolates did.

Artificially constructed microbe communities might make too much of the aromatic compounds that flavor the fine chocolates, Dudley says. “Humans have a very sharp boundary for what tastes really good and what tastes awful. And the yeast make the amount of those compounds at exactly that boundary of what humans think is palatable.” Messing with the mixes could cross the line.

Scientists tested lab-grown Escherichia coli biofilms in various environments, including on microplastics, on tiny glass fragments and in cell culture media. They found that pathogens in the plastisphere not only grew faster—reconfirming earlier research—but, importantly, were harder to kill when treated with several different antibiotics. The effects “were significantly larger than what we were expecting,” says Zaman, who was senior author of the study.

So how do antibiotic resistance genes arise on microplastics in the first place? A July study in Scientific Reports investigates one theory: antibiotics can cling to microplastics, too. The study’s authors showed that common antibiotics, such as amoxicillin and tetracycline, stuck to microplastics—and that, the older the microplastics were, the more readily the antibiotics attached to them. As they age, microplastics become rougher and more electrostatic, which makes them even better at trapping antibiotics. The combination of antibiotics and pathogenic bacteria biofilms on microplastics could theoretically drive the evolution of antimicrobial resistance.

While the firing may be challenged in courts, even going up to the Supreme Court, Trump’s firing of Cook puts the central bank of the world’s largest economy in uncharted waters.

For example, it’s unknown whether Cook would have to leave the Fed’s board immediately, and if so, will Trump have the opportunity to nominate someone else to fill her seat.

Per Rachael Maddow, the President does not have the legal authority to fire Cook, but of course we'll have to see who does what.

If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

Trump is defunding the police.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, "Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?" Instead, I say, "Mr. President, do not come to Chicago."

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Techspot has a table of some known bad VPNs, and concludes:

The report does not speculate heavily on Qihoo 360's motives for concealing ownership of so many free VPN apps, an approach that likely helped boost downloads while avoiding reputational risks. The company, which has well-documented ties to Beijing's communist regime, may have pursued this strategy to minimize costs and maintain deniability.

For more details on the security issues, this is about the same paper: https://cyberinsider.com/vpn-apps-used-by-millions-contain-shared-keys-and-hidden-backdoors/

House Speaker Dustin Burrows told lawmakers that members who broke quorum could only leave the House chamber upon agreeing in writing to be released into the custody of a Texas Department of Public Safety officer tasked with ensuring their return when the House reconvenes at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Collier, in a text message to the Star-Telegram, said she “did not agree to sign their permission slip to have a DPS officer assigned to follow me around” and said she is not free to leave the Capitol.

"President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from UNESCO – which supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes that are totally out-of-step with the commonsense policies that Americans voted for in November," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

UNESCO was one of several international bodies Trump withdrew from during his first term, along with the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement global climate change accord and the U.N. Human Rights Council. During his second term, he has largely reinstated those steps.

The techdirt article is NOT neutral. It is full of loaded language and obvious partisanship, but... dammit, its seems more accurate than what I'm seeing elsewhere. Please add better links if/when found.

Excerpt 1:

The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:

We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.

What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.

The report also noted that:

Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.

Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.

Excerpt 2:

All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.

But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.

(archive) I'll edit this to include better links once better sources post them.

Raw Story cites and basically just restates a Reuters piece (archive), which is just a blurb (in both posts):

U.S. President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp (NWSA.O), Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters, raising claims under federal libel law, court records show. A copy of the complaint was not immediately available. The case was filed in Miami federal court.

BBC has a live feed covering this and all sorts of Epstein related news.

Besides the Wall Street Journal's parent company and owner Rupert Murdoch, the two reporters who broke the story yesterday are also listed as defendants: Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo.

According to their staff profile on the paper's website, Safdar is an enterprise reporter based in New York while Palazzolo is an investigative reporter.

Palazzolo has won three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently this year, while Khadeeja Safdar was a finalist in 2020.

Here are a more complete stories and I'll leave it at that: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/trump-sues-epstein-murdoch-wsj.html

“To attempt and inextricably link President Trump to Epstein, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely claim that the salacious language of the letter is contained within a hand-drawn naked woman, which was created with a heavy marker,” the suit alleges.

“Worse, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely represent as fact that President Trump drew the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name ‘Donald’ below her waist, ‘mimicking pubic hair.’ ”

“Despite the glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting, Defendants Dow Jones and News Corp — at the direction of Defendants Murdoch and Thomson—published to the world the false, defamatory, and malignant statements authored by” the reporters, the suit says.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/18/trump-sues-wall-street-journal-over-alleged-epstein-letter-00464191

Trump filed the suit Friday, seeking at least $20 billion, in federal court in Miami, before announcing it in a post on Truth Social.

“This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media,” he wrote.