The Israeli military ordered residents of Tyre, a southern Lebanese city, to evacuate on Wednesday, warning it would "act forcefully" against Hezbollah targets. The order came after a new wave of airstrikes across south and eastern Lebanon that killed at least three people in Choukine. Israel says Hezbollah has violated the US-brokered ceasefire that began April 16 and has been extended twice. Hezbollah, which accuses Israel of breaching the truce, said its fighters were battling Israeli troops north of the Litani River, about 30 km from the border. The escalation threatens to derail US-led talks to end the broader war with Iran, which insists any deal must cover Lebanon. Since Hezbollah entered the war on March 2, retaliating for an Israeli strike that killed Iran's supreme leader, over 3,200 people have died in Lebanon, according to the health ministry.
The ceasefire began April 16 after weeks of Israeli air campaign and ground invasion. Both sides have continued exchanging fire. The conflict is intertwined with the US-Iran war that started in February.
An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in central Gaza City killed Mohammed Odeh, the newly appointed commander of Hamas's military wing, along with his wife and two children, Hamas confirmed Wednesday. The strike, which hit the al-Kayali building on Tuesday, also injured dozens in a busy market area ahead of the Eid al-Adha holiday. Israel's military and Shin Bet said they tracked Odeh for months and targeted buildings used as his hideout. Odeh had been chosen just days earlier to replace Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, killed in a similar strike earlier in May. The attack continues near-daily Israeli strikes during the ceasefire that began in October, with over 900 Palestinians reported killed since then. Hamas accuses Israel of breaching the truce; Israel says it retains the right to target Hamas members and faults the group for not disarming.
The Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect October 10, but violence persists. A US-led peace plan's later phases, including disarmament and reconstruction, remain stalled. Hamas has reactivated its police force in Gaza.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows invalidated a proposed ballot referendum that would have barred transgender students from playing on sports teams matching their gender identity, after finding that two out-of-state petition circulators failed to follow legal procedures. The decision leaves the Protect Girls' Sports in Maine campaign 532 signatures short of the 67,682 needed for the November ballot. Bellows, a Democrat running for governor, said her office invalidated more than 12,500 signatures following a court-ordered review triggered by a lawsuit from Maine residents. The referendum would have also required schools to maintain separate locker rooms and restrooms by birth sex. Opponents, including the Campaign for Free and Fair Schools, praised the ruling, while supporters have 10 days to appeal. The initiative emerged after state lawmakers repeatedly declined to change Maine's policy allowing participation based on gender identity.
Maine currently allows students to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. The ballot campaign hired firms to gather signatures after legislative efforts failed. A judge ordered the secretary of state to review signature validity after residents sued.
Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Biohub have released ESMFold2, an open-source AI model that predicts protein structures and has generated an atlas of 1.1 billion predicted structures, over 800 million more than the AlphaFold database. The model, described in a preprint, outperforms AlphaFold3 on tasks like predicting how antibody proteins bind to their targets. ESMFold2 was trained on metagenomic sequences from soil, ocean, and other environments, capturing proteins absent from existing databases. The team used it to design new antibodies and binding proteins, and lab tests confirmed a high proportion worked as intended. The atlas also includes sequence data for 6.8 billion proteins, helping scientists connect known and unknown parts of the protein universe. The fully open-source release marks a shift in a field where proprietary models have recently dominated.
AlphaFold, from Google DeepMind, revolutionized protein structure prediction but its latest version is not fully open. ESMFold2 builds on a protein language model unveiled in 2024. The atlas is freely accessible.
A new study published in Nature reports the mass of a "little red dot" (LRD), a mysterious ancient object seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, at 50 million times the mass of the sun, using a novel direct measurement method. LRDs, glimpsed just 700 million years after the Big Bang, have divided astronomers: some think they are supermassive black holes that formed before galaxies, while others argue they are a new class of "black hole stars" with smaller, growing black holes at their cores. The new mass estimate, if correct, would support the "heavy" side and imply black holes predate the galaxies around them, challenging standard models of cosmic evolution. Skepticism remains because earlier indirect mass estimates were disputed due to the dense gas clouds obscuring LRDs.
JWST discovered LRDs in 2022. They appear as tiny red dots but may harbor enormous black holes. The debate centers on whether black holes or galaxies came first. The new paper uses a method less reliant on assumptions about surrounding gas.
Users of the AI companion app Character.AI are in open revolt after a series of changes they say have gutted the experience. The company replaced several popular chat models with a new one called Pipsqueak 2, which users describe as "lobotomized" and generic, prone to narrating action rather than engaging in dialogue. Free users now face usage limits, more ads, invasive age verification, and new content filters. The r/CharacterAI subreddit is flooded with posts declaring the app dead, and multiple splinter subreddits have formed to organize alternatives or resistance. CEO Karandeep Anand acknowledged the frustration but said the changes are necessary as AI remains expensive to run, and told TIME he's willing to accept user churn. The backlash illustrates the broader tension across AI apps between unsustainable economics and user expectations set during the free-money era.
Character.AI lets users create and chat with virtual characters. It has faced lawsuits over user suicides and unlicensed medical advice. The company is under pressure to monetize and comply with increasing regulation.
When a Chicago fire truck's ladder failed during a 2025 arson fire, killing four people, the malfunction traced back to a business model. Private equity firms have consolidated the fire apparatus industry from over two dozen manufacturers to just three controlling 80% of the market. The essay walks through the mechanics: PE firms buy companies using leveraged buyouts, load them with debt, cut costs, and aim to exit in 3–7 years. In essential services with inelastic demand, such as fire trucks, ambulances, and funeral homes, this "buy, strip, and flip" approach degrades quality in ways that become visible only after catastrophe. The piece cites a Senate report finding PE-acquired companies go bankrupt at ten times the rate of comparable firms. It's a concrete case study in how financial engineering reshapes physical infrastructure.
Private equity manages $9.4 trillion globally. The model can improve underperforming businesses but creates perverse incentives when applied to services where customers can't opt out. The fire truck industry consolidation is a documented example.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether mass layoffs at the Education Department's Office of Federal Student Aid have weakened oversight of colleges and left students vulnerable to fraud. The FSA lost about 46% of its staff during last year's cuts, including employees who monitored compliance with federal aid rules and investigated institutions suspected of misleading students. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, expressed particular concern about for-profit colleges, which were the target of most FSA enforcement actions under the Biden administration. She noted that Trump administration policies, such as expanding Pell Grant eligibility to short-term programs, could fuel growth in that sector. The GAO probe would examine the financial cost of reduced oversight and whether the cuts have led to fewer investigations. The Education Department has also struck deals to offload some duties to other agencies.
The Trump administration has made dismantling the Education Department a priority, though full elimination requires Congress. The FSA oversees the federal student aid system. Warren's request follows a recent GAO report on the layoffs.
South Korean authorities detained Chinese dissident Dong Guangping after he crossed the Yellow Sea in a rubber boat, spending over 30 hours at sea before being rescued off the western coast on Monday. The 68-year-old former police officer and human rights activist had been jailed multiple times in China for commemorating the Tiananmen Square crackdown and other activism. He had escaped China three times previously, to Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam, but was deported back each time. Human Rights in China urged Seoul not to return him, citing risk of persecution and torture, and called for asylum or safe passage to Canada where his family lives. Dong set out from Weifang in Shandong province with an outboard motor. South Korea's coast guard said he is under investigation for immigration violations and his case will be referred to prosecutors.
Dong was fired from the police in 1999 for signing a Tiananmen anniversary petition. He later served prison terms for "inciting subversion." In 2015, Thailand deported him despite UN refugee status. Another dissident, Kwon Pyong, fled to South Korea by jet ski in 2023 and later resettled in the US.
Three months into the war with Iran that he started, President Trump finds himself trapped by his own governing style, argues Mike Nelson in The Dispatch. Trump sold his leadership as a unitary executive who could act decisively, but now faces a mutually imposed blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with no clear exit. The administration's go-it-alone approach has left allies reluctant to share the burden and Congress sidelined, while the president appears frustrated that the conflict hasn't yielded a quick win. Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer, contends that the very concentration of decision-making power Trump championed is now isolating him politically and strategically, making it harder to negotiate a way out or escalate further without owning the consequences alone.
The US began strikes on Iran in late February after a drone attack killed an American contractor. The conflict has since expanded to include Hezbollah in Lebanon and disrupted global oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
