The US military conducted self-defense strikes on Iranian radar and drone command sites near Goruk and Qeshm Island over the weekend, after Iran shot down a US drone over international waters. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps retaliated by targeting an airbase used by US forces, and Kuwait reported its air defenses were confronting hostile missile and drone attacks. The exchanges mark the third escalation in a week around the Strait of Hormuz, as ceasefire negotiations stalled. President Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran 'really wants to make a deal' and urged critics to 'sit back and relax.' Reports indicate Trump requested changes to the deal terms, including reopening the shipping channel and removing enriched uranium. The Strait of Hormuz handles about one-fifth of global oil and LNG shipments, and the trade embargo is pushing fuel prices higher.
A ceasefire between the US and Iran took effect on April 8 after months of war, but negotiations for a permanent deal have repeatedly stalled. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical chokepoint for global energy shipments.
Nvidia announced the RTX Spark, its first complete consumer PC chip, set to launch this fall in laptops and mini-PCs. The chip is based on the same GB10 silicon as the DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer, with up to 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory. Nvidia claims it can render 90GB 3D scenes, edit 12K video, and run AAA games at 100fps on battery. The Arm-based chip will run Windows via Microsoft's Prism emulator, and Nvidia is pitching local AI agents that can control apps autonomously. Almost every major laptop vendor will ship RTX Spark devices, including Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra. Lower-cost variants with as little as 16GB RAM will follow. Nvidia calls it 'the most efficient PC chip ever built,' though it provided no benchmarks to support that claim.
Nvidia previously released the DGX Spark as a desktop AI workstation. The RTX Spark brings the same Arm-based architecture to consumer laptops, competing with Apple's M-series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips.
Health authorities in Brazil are monitoring two patients for possible Ebola infection in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. A 37-year-old man from DR Congo showed fever symptoms, and a Belgian man who arrived from Uganda had cough, chills, and diarrhea. Both have tested positive for other conditions—meningitis and malaria respectively—but officials say co-infection with Ebola is not ruled out. If confirmed, these would be the first Ebola cases outside Africa since the outbreak began in DR Congo, where over 1,000 suspected cases and 246 deaths have been reported. The outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain, which has no proven vaccine and kills about a third of those infected. Médecins Sans Frontières has called the situation alarming. The WHO head is visiting the worst-hit Ituri province, though the agency maintains global spread is unlikely.
The current Ebola outbreak in DR Congo and Uganda is driven by the Bundibugyo strain, for which no licensed vaccine exists. Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids of an infected person.
Security researchers at PromptArmor found that OpenAI's ChatGPT for Google Sheets extension can be manipulated to exfiltrate data from all workbooks in a user's account and display phishing overlays. The attack works by hiding a prompt injection in an imported sheet; when the user asks ChatGPT to help integrate the data, the model runs an attacker-controlled external script that steals workbook contents. The exploit bypasses the setting that requires human approval before edits, because the model can generate and execute Google Apps Script code with the extension's permissions. OpenAI responded after the disclosure by removing the model's ability to generate Apps Script code and is re-evaluating its sandboxing. The extension had over 185,000 downloads since launching less than a month ago.
Prompt injection is a known vulnerability in large language model applications, where untrusted input manipulates the model into performing unintended actions. This attack exploited the extension's ability to run privileged scripts.
The sequel to 'A Minecraft Movie' is titled 'A Minecraft Movie Squared,' and Kirsten Dunst will play Alex, the game's female character option. Matt Berry returns in a larger role, this time as a human character—possibly Herobrine, the infamous creepypasta evil counterpart to Steve, judging by a clip where he dismisses a costume choice. Director Jared Hess and Mojang Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten revealed the title during Minecraft Live and launched a build challenge: players submit their best Minecraft creations, and the winning build appears in the film's end credits. The movie hits theaters July 23, 2027.
The first 'A Minecraft Movie,' released in 2025, starred Jack Black as Steve and became a box office hit, prompting a sequel. Herobrine is a long-running Minecraft urban legend about a mysterious figure haunting players' worlds.
After PSG beat Arsenal in the Champions League final, violence erupted across France, leaving 219 people injured, including 57 police officers. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 780 were arrested, with over 450 in custody. Rioters clashed with police, set flares, burned electric bikes, and smashed shopfronts on the Champs-Élysées. A 24-year-old died in a motorcycle crash on the Paris ring road while rioters attempted to block it. Thousands of officers were deployed, and police used tear gas to disperse crowds. The unrest echoed last year's post-victory violence, which also turned deadly. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen criticized the riots, saying 'only in France' does a football victory spark such chaos. A victory parade at the Eiffel Tower proceeded peacefully later.
PSG won the Champions League final against Arsenal in a penalty shootout. Similar riots broke out after their 2025 victory, resulting in two deaths and hundreds of arrests.
A loud boom and shaking that startled residents across Greater Boston on Saturday afternoon was likely a meteor exploding in the atmosphere. The sound was first reported at 2:11 p.m., but no earthquake was detected. Weather radar captured a flash where there was no thunderstorm activity, a signature of a bolide—a meteor that detonates in the air. Meteorologist Danielle Noyes noted that confirming the event requires NASA analysis and possibly finding fragments. The rumble was felt from northern New England to southern Rhode Island.
Bolides are meteors that explode in the atmosphere, often producing a bright flash and sonic boom. They are not uncommon but rarely cause damage on the ground.
United flight 236 from Newark to Palma de Mallorca returned to the airport an hour after departure on Saturday night after crew discovered a Bluetooth speaker with a suspicious name. Air traffic control recordings indicate the name was a 'certain four-letter word,' widely assumed to be 'bomb.' The crew issued multiple warnings for passengers to turn off Bluetooth, and after landing, security inspected the entire aircraft and evacuated everyone. Multiple Redditors on the flight reported the crew's frustration, with one attendant saying, 'This little joke is ruining it for everyone.' No threat was found, but the flight was significantly delayed. The episode underscores how a prank device name can trigger costly security protocols.
Airlines treat any potential bomb threat seriously, and a Bluetooth device named 'bomb' can trigger a full security response. Similar incidents have occurred with WiFi network names in the past.
PrismML released Bonsai Image 4B, a family of compressed image-generation models that can run on phones and laptops. The models use 1-bit and ternary weights to shrink the transformer portion of the FLUX.2 Klein 4B diffusion model, reducing the deployment payload from 15.97 GB to as low as 3.42 GB. On an iPhone 17 Pro Max, the binary model generates a 512x512 image in 9.4 seconds, while the full-precision original cannot fit in device memory. On a Mac M4 Pro, it is up to 5.6x faster than the stock pipeline. The ternary variant offers better visual quality with a slightly larger footprint. The models are open-weight and represent a step toward practical local AI image generation on consumer hardware.
FLUX.2 Klein 4B is a 4-billion-parameter diffusion model for image generation. Quantization to 1-bit and ternary weights drastically reduces memory usage, enabling on-device inference.
Noah Smith calls the confinement of pregnant sows in gestation crates—cages too small to turn around in—torture. He details how pigs, as intelligent and social as dogs, spend their lives immobilized in their own feces, their tails docked without pain relief. Smith admits he still eats pork, but argues that individual vegetarianism has not stopped factory farming after 150 years; only legislation can. He points to public support for banning crates and the risk that Congress might override state-level reforms. The essay frames industrial pig farming as a moral sin demanding collective action, not just personal dietary change.
Gestation crates are metal cages used in industrial pig farming to house pregnant sows. Several US states have banned them, but federal legislation has stalled. Approximately 73 million pigs are raised in US factory farms.
