The near-unanimous vote came after President Donald Trump -- Epstein's one-time close friend -- walked back months of opposition to the release, endorsing legislation that now moves to the Senate for approval.
Called Project Prometheus, the company is focusing on artificial intelligence for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has landed the booster of its New Glenn mega-rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on just its second attempt — making it the second company to perform such a feat, following Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
It’s an accomplishment that will help the new rocket system become an option to send larger payloads to space, the moon, and beyond.
Thursday’s launch wasn’t just about the landing attempt, though. Roughly 34 minutes after takeoff, the upper stage of New Glenn successfully deployed the rocket’s first commercial payload: twin spacecraft for NASA that will travel to Mars to study the red planet’s atmosphere.
On Sunday, Senate leadership inserted a hemp-recriminalization clause into the must-pass funding bill that would end the longest shutdown in American history, reported Marijuana Moment. On Monday, Cannabis Business Times confirmed that intoxicating hemp is being targeted as part of the three-bill spending package tied to reopening the government.
Not a standalone bill. Not a debate on cannabis reform. A shutdown ransom note.
Sixteen years ago, engineers working on the Google self-driving project conducted their first autonomous vehicle tests on the freeway that connects Silicon Valley to San Francisco.
The company would eventually become Waymo, autonomous vehicle testing would expand — fanning out to other cities. Eventually, the company launched commercial robotaxi services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Other cities soon followed.
But freeways, despite some of that early testing, would remain out of reach. Until today.
Blue Origin stands ready to help NASA achieve its goals with regard to landing humans on the Moon as soon as possible, the company’s chief executive said Saturday in an interview with Ars.
“We just want to help the US get to the Moon,” said Dave Limp, CEO of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. “If NASA wants to go quicker, we would move heaven and Earth, pun intended, to try to get to the Moon sooner. And I think we have some good ideas.”
The world’s largest cargo sailboat, Neoliner Origin, completed its first transatlantic voyage on 30 October despite damage to one of its sails during the journey.
The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail after the aft sail was damaged in a storm shortly after departure.
The French-built roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) cargo ship, which has two semi-rigid sails, first stopped at Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French overseas territory near Canada, before continuing its journey to Baltimore in the United States.
IKEA is launching 21 new smart home products focusing on lighting, sensors, and control — all built to work with Matter, the universal smart home standard. The launch marks a significant step in making smart home technology easier to use, more affordable, and better adapted to real-life needs in the home.
Apple on Tuesday released the first beta of iOS 26.2 to developers, and it appears that the software will allow users in Japan to install alternative app marketplaces on their devices when it is released to the public in December.
Democrat Zohran Mamdani has won New York’s mayoral race, NBC News projects, after the 34-year-old democratic socialist energized progressives in the city and across the country while generating intense backlash from President Donald Trump and Republicans, as well as some Democratic moderates.
In his victory speech after vanquishing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani claimed a broad mandate and set himself up in direct opposition to Trump, who made a late endorsement against him. "In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light," Mamdani said.
The hot sand around the Sudanese city of El Fasher is stained red with the blood of more than 2,000 massacred civilians.
The pools of blood are so thick, the piles of bodies so exposed, that the ethnic purge allegedly committed by Sudanese paramilitary rebels is visible from space.
The United States military is upgrading a long-abandoned former Cold War naval base in the Caribbean, a Reuters visual investigation has found, suggesting preparations for sustained operations that could help support possible actions inside Venezuela.
The construction activity at the former Roosevelt Roads naval base in Puerto Rico — shuttered by the Navy more than 20 years ago — was underway on September 17 when crews began clearing and repaving taxiways leading to the runway, according to photos taken by Reuters.
Until the Navy withdrew from the facility in 2004, Roosevelt Roads was one of the biggest U.S. naval stations in the world. The base occupies a strategic location and offers a large amount of space for gathering equipment, one U.S. official said.
To the south of the Monte Cristo mountain range and west of Paymaster Canyon, a vast stretch of the Nevada desert has attracted modern-day prospectors chasing one of 21st-century America’s greatest investment booms.
Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses.
“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.
After kicking off an unpopular pilot test last month, Samsung made the practice of having its expensive smart fridges display ads official this week.
The ads will be shown on Samsung’s 2024 Family Hub smart fridges. As of this writing, Samsung’s Family Hub fridges have MSRPs ranging from $1,899 to $3,499. The ads will arrive through a software update that Samsung will start issuing this month and display on the fridge’s integrated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen. The ads will show when the fridges are idle and display what Samsung calls Cover Screens.
Apple Maps could feature integrated ads as soon as next year, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.
In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Gurman said that Apple's plan to bring more ads to iOS is moving "gaining traction," with the Maps app being next in line. The project will apparently give restaurants and other businesses the option to pay to have their details featured more prominently in search.
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
In the midst of a federal government shutdown, the U.S. government’s gross national debt surpassed $38 trillion Wednesday, a record number that highlights the accelerating accumulation of debt on America’s balance sheet.
It’s also the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic — the U.S. hit $37 trillion in gross national debt in August this year.
The $38 trillion update is found in the latest Treasury Department report, which logs the nation’s daily finances.
Nicolas Sarkozy has become the first French ex-president to go to jail, as he starts a five-year sentence for conspiring to fund his election campaign with money from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Not since World War Two Nazi collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain was jailed for treason in 1945 has any French ex-leader gone behind bars.
NASA may sideline SpaceX and choose a different company to land its astronauts on the moon later this decade, acting space agency chief Sean Duffy suggested during TV appearances Monday.
Duffy emphasized that he believes SpaceX, which has a $2.9 billion contract to provide the lunar lander astronauts would ride to the moon’s surface, is lagging behind schedule, potentially thwarting NASA’s efforts to return humans to the moon before China amid a new space race.
AI-generated images of extreme poverty, children and sexual violence survivors are flooding stock photo sites and increasingly being used by leading health NGOs, according to global health professionals who have voiced concern over a new era of “poverty porn”.
“All over the place, people are using it,” said Noah Arnold, who works at Fairpicture, a Swiss-based organisation focused on promoting ethical imagery in global development. “Some are actively using AI imagery, and others, we know that they’re experimenting at least.”
A Polish judge has refused to extradite a Ukrainian citizen – suspected by Germany of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022 – arguing that if Ukraine was responsible for the attack, then it was a "just" act.
Volodymyr Zhuravlyov, who was brought to Warsaw District Court in handcuffs, was detained in Poland last month on a European arrest warrant.
Judge Dariusz Lubowski ordered his release, after a ruling that was met with a ripple of surprise from the crowd in court and a smile from the man in the dock.
China announced it has begun mass producing the world’s first ultra-low noise, single-photon detector featuring four channels, suggesting that powerful applications loom in everything from daily communications to national defence.
Dubbed the “photon catcher”, the device can detect a single photon – the smallest unit of energy – making it a core component in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum communication and quantum radar for stealth aircraft detection and tracking.
Scientists have repaired a natural gateway into the brains of mice, allowing the clumps and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease to be swept away.
After just three drug injections, mice with certain genes that mimic Alzheimer's showed a reversal of several key pathological features.
Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.
News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Today’s test flight marked the end of a short but stunning redemption arc for this version of Starship — dubbed Version 2 or V2.
“Every major objective of the flight test was achieved, providing valuable data as we prepare the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy,” a recap of Monday’s mission on SpaceX’s website reads.
After thrice exploding mid-flight earlier this year, Starship soared through its key goals today — including deploying mock satellites and relighting its engine while in space, repeating feats first achieved during V2’s first fully successful test run in August.
Several leading news organizations with access to Pentagon briefings have formally said they will not agree to a new defense department policy that requires them to pledge they will not obtain unauthorized material and restricts access to certain areas unless accompanied by an official.
The policy, presented last month by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been widely criticized by media organizations asked to sign the pledge by Tuesday at 5pm or have 24 hours to turn in their press credentials.
Ofcom, the UK's Online Safety Act regulator, has fined online message board 4chan £20,000 ($26,680) for failing to protect children from harmful content.
The fine could rise by a further £6,000 – £100 per day for a maximum 60 days – if it continues to ignore its duties to comply with the regulator's request for information regarding two separate matters.
- Nvidia, Amazon and Tesla all fell by about 5% on Friday, pushing the Nasdaq down 3.6%, its worst day since April.
- The slide came after President Trump threatened to slap a “massive increase of Tariffs” on Chinese products imported into the U.S.
- Trump later declared that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and, on Nov. 1, would apply export controls “on any and all critical software,” pushing the technology stocks lower after hours.
A wave of deals and partnerships are escalating concerns that the trillion-dollar AI boom is being propped up by interconnected business transactions.
Two weeks ago, Nvidia Corp. agreed to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI to help the leading AI startup fund a data-center buildout so massive it could power a major city. OpenAI in turn committed to filling those sites with millions of Nvidia chips. The arrangement was promptly criticized for its “circular” nature.
This week, undeterred, OpenAI struck a similar deal. The ChatGPT maker on Monday inked a partnership with Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to deploy tens of billions of dollars’ worth of its chips. As part of the tie-up, OpenAI is poised to become one of AMD’s largest shareholders.
The world’s fastest production car is now electric, BYD’s Yangwang U9 Extreme blasting to a Bugatti-beating 308mph.
A fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS)'s Daejeon headquarters destroyed the government’s G-Drive cloud storage system, erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said Wednesday.
The fire broke out in the server room on the fifth floor of the center, damaging 96 information systems designated as critical to central government operations, including the G-Drive platform. The G-Drive has been in use since 2018, requiring government officials to store all work documents in the cloud instead of on personal computers. It provided around 30 gigabytes of storage per person.
However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost.
Sweeping strikes and nationwide protests seized parts of Italy on Friday as pressure mounts on Giorgia Meloni’s government to take a stronger stand against Israel over its war in Gaza.
Trade unionists, students, activist groups and families blocked highways and transport hubs in cities across the country, carrying Palestinian flags and banners calling on Israel to “stop the occupation.” Over 2 million people attended the protests, Italy’s biggest union, CGIL, said.
OpenAI generated US$4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, according to financial disclosures to shareholders.
The artificial intelligence firm reported a net loss of US$13.5 billion during the same period, with more than half attributed to the remeasurement of convertible interest rights.
Research and development expenses were its largest cost, totaling US$6.7 billion in the first half.
Just hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a fiery, politically charged speech at Quantico, one of the Air Force’s most powerful commanders—Gen. Thomas Bussiere—called it quits.
“After much reflection and with a full heart, Barb and I have made a difficult decision to request retirement from the United States Air Force for personal and family reasons,” Bussiere, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, announced Tuesday in a Facebook post.
The timing, however, has raised eyebrows across the Pentagon.
- “Super stem cells” improve the memory of monkeys while protecting against neurodegeneration.
- The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed.
- Treatment with stem cells reduces inflammation and senescent cells (cells that accumulate to promote aging).
While small in number, our adult stem cells play a crucial role in regenerating our lost or damaged tissues, rebuilding our body cell by cell. However, with age, our bodies become riddled with inflammation, hardly providing an environment capable of keeping our stem cells healthy. Eventually, our stem cells lose their regenerative capacity, contributing to degenerative aging.
Israel’s nearly two-year war pushed parts of Gaza into “man-made” famine, according to a report published in August by a United Nations-backed initiative, deepening the Palestinians’ struggle for survival under relentless bombing, mass displacement and the spread of disease.
The death of Hunter S Thompson is set to be reviewed, more than 20 years after it was ruled a suicide.
The journalist and author was believed to have killed himself on 20 February 2005 at the age of 67 and while there isn’t any new evidence to suggest otherwise, his widow Anita Thompson has requested that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation conduct a review. Thompson died at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.
Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday ordered all remaining Palestinians to leave Gaza City, saying it was their “last opportunity” and that anyone who stayed would be considered a militant supporter and face the “full force” of Israel's latest offensive.
Boeing is planning a new single-aisle airplane that would succeed the 737 MAX, according to people familiar with the matter, a long-term bid to recover business lost to rival Airbus during its series of safety and quality problems.
Congress seems to be careening toward a government shutdown, as Democratic and Republican leaders remain at an impasse over funding negotiations and expiring health care subsidies. Lawmakers have less than 24 hours to reach a deal before a midnight deadline.
Senate Democrats have refused to back the spending bill, in an effort to force Republicans to negotiate on federal health care subsidies. They are pushing for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year in exchange for their support. Democrats also want to repeal cuts to health care programs that were enacted by the GOP's tax and spending bill passed earlier this summer.
Videogame maker Electronic Arts EA 4.48%increase; green up pointing triangle said it would go private in a $55 billion deal with a group of investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, private-equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners.
Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal.
Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said.
According to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri, an anonymous U.N. official said the escalator in question was actually stopped prematurely by someone from Trump’s group, who ran ahead of the group and accidentally triggered a stop mechanism. The official added that the teleprompter that Trump was so upset about was also being operated by his White House.
A roster of high-profile conservative voices could soon return to YouTube.
YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, said in a letter published Tuesday that it intends to "provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform" whose accounts had been terminated over repeated violations of its COVID-19 and election integrity policies.
Pope Leo XIV has rejected the idea of an AI Pope, saying in an interview with biographer Eloise Allen that "if there's anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the Pope is high on the list" (first spotted by The Register). Pope Leo, who is forthright about his views on the new technology, also said that he had been asked for his authorisation to create an AI Pope.
The Supreme Court said Monday it will consider expanding President Donald Trump’s power to shape independent agencies by overturning a nearly century-old decision limiting when presidents can fire board members.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court also allowed the Republican president to carry out the firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, while the case plays out.
NVIDIA and OpenAI today announced a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence.
To support this deployment including datacenter and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.
The network pulled the show after the Federal Communications Commission chair threatened to revoke ABC affiliate licenses after the host's comments about Charlie Kirk's death.
Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show will return to ABC's airwaves on Tuesday, nearly a week after it was suspended amid criticism of the host's remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
"Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country," the Walt Disney Company said in a statement Monday. "It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive."
A wave of Israel’s allies are announcing their recognition of the state of Palestine, as part of a wider manoeuvre designed to ostracise Hamas and challenge attempts by the Israeli government to erase the chance of a Palestinian homeland.
But the delicate and partly symbolic move by as many 10 states, pioneered largely by the French government, has the potential to lead to a negative spiral of further confrontation amid fears Israel will respond by annexing parts of the West Bank, leading in turn to European trade sanctions and further political isolation for Israel, including an ultimate possible suspension from the UN.