The US Trade Department announced new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on goods from 60 countries, covering nearly all American imports, citing those nations' failure to block products made with forced labour. The move marks the second time President Trump's administration has imposed broad import taxes since the Supreme Court struck down many of his earlier duties in February. Canada, the EU, the UK, and several other trading partners face a 10 percent levy; China, India, and 43 others face 12.5 percent. The tariffs have not yet taken effect and require further administrative steps. The UK said it is tackling forced labour in supply chains; China denied the practice exists and called the tariffs political manipulation. Human rights groups acknowledged forced labour in some countries but questioned whether broad tariffs are an effective remedy. The announcement follows a March investigation by US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer into whether the 60 partners had legally prohibited imports of forced-labour goods.
In February 2026, the US Supreme Court invalidated many of Trump's earlier tariff actions, forcing the administration to find new legal justifications. The forced-labour rationale draws on a 1930 trade law and an earlier executive order targeting human rights abuses in supply chains.
Ukraine struck oil storage facilities and a naval base near St Petersburg with long-range drones, hours before the opening of Russia's premier investment forum. The attack sent black smoke over Russia's second city and temporarily closed Pulkovo Airport. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov promised a "systemic" response. President Zelensky confirmed the strikes, calling them part of Ukraine's "long-range sanctions" campaign to pressure Moscow. The St Petersburg International Economic Forum, once dubbed the "Russian Davos," is hosting thousands of guests from 130 countries, including a low-key US delegation. Ukrainian officials mocked the timing, noting the presence of pro-Putin figures like Steven Seagal and Candace Owens. The strike is the latest in Ukraine's expanding campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, which Kyiv argues fuels the war machine.
Ukraine has developed a domestic long-range drone industry since Russia's 2022 invasion, regularly hitting targets deep inside Russia. The St Petersburg forum, a showcase for foreign investment, has seen Western participation plummet since the war began.
The US Supreme Court's conservative majority late Tuesday blocked a lower court order that had barred Alabama from using a congressional map found to intentionally dilute Black voting power. The unsigned opinion, issued just weeks after the justices' Louisiana v. Callais decision weakened the Voting Rights Act, said the three-judge panel had failed to presume legislative good faith. That panel, with two Trump appointees, had unanimously ruled that Alabama Republicans deliberately defied a prior court order to create a second majority-Black district, evidence of intentional discrimination. The high court's intervention means Alabama's seven-district map, which gives Black voters—27 percent of the population—a realistic shot in only one district, will stand for the 2026 elections. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that the ruling "debases the democratic process" and rewards Alabama's "outright defiance of court orders."
In 2023, the Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld a lower court order requiring Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. After the legislature resisted, the court's new conservative majority in Callais (May 2026) reinterpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making racial gerrymandering claims harder to win.
At its Build conference, Microsoft unveiled its first in-house reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1, alongside six other AI models for image, voice, and coding tasks, signaling a decisive break from its former reliance on OpenAI. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told The Verge that Microsoft aims to become a top-four AI lab alongside Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and that renegotiating its OpenAI contract allowed it to train models from scratch without distillation. The company also announced Scout, an always-on personal agent built on OpenClaw, and MDASH, a cybersecurity tool that uses 100 AI agents to find bugs. CEO Satya Nadella framed the flurry as Microsoft "coming to grips with the new opportunity" after the partnership with OpenAI effectively ended in April. The moves put Microsoft in direct competition with its former ally across reasoning, agents, and enterprise AI.
Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI starting in 2019 and exclusively hosted its models on Azure. The relationship frayed over governance disputes and competing ambitions, culminating in a separation in April 2026, though Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud provider for now.
Physicists have long known that quantum entanglement can give rise to the structure of space-time, but a new set of papers identifies a second quantum ingredient needed to produce gravity: "magic," a measure of how far a quantum state departs from classical simulation. In holographic theories that treat space-time as emerging from quantum particles on a boundary, entanglement alone produces a rigid geometry—matter moves but doesn't curve space. Adding magic, researchers including Charles Cao of Virginia Tech and John Preskill of Caltech found, makes space-time pliable, allowing matter to tell space how to bend, as in Einstein's general relativity. The work connects quantum information theory to the long-standing puzzle of how gravity emerges from quantum mechanics, offering a concrete mathematical bridge between the two pillars of modern physics.
The holographic principle, proposed in the 1990s, suggests that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum theory on its boundary. Entanglement between boundary particles was shown to weave the spatial fabric, but the origin of curvature—gravity—remained elusive until these studies.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) imposed a new conduct rule requiring Google to give website owners the ability to prevent their content from appearing in AI-generated search features like AI Overviews and from being used to fine-tune Google's AI models. The ruling, which the CMA called a world first, also mandates clear attribution and links in AI search results. Google has begun rolling out a Search Console toggle for a subset of UK publishers and plans to expand it globally. Publishers that opt out entirely will lose traffic from generative AI features, but Google says the choice won't affect traditional search rankings. News Media Association CEO Theo Bamber welcomed the move as a step toward fair compensation for premium content, while cautioning that robust enforcement will be critical.
Publishers have complained that AI-generated summaries siphon traffic and revenue without consent. Google had previously resisted opt-out mechanisms, viewing AI search as a monetization space. The CMA's ruling stems from a broader investigation into Google's market power in digital advertising and search.
Moderators of the r/biohackers subreddit say peptide and hormone therapy companies are spamming the community with promotional posts designed to be scraped by AI chatbots, a practice known as AI-engine optimization (AEO). The subreddit banned new posts on those topics after detecting coordinated efforts to influence ChatGPT and Google's AI search results, which frequently cite Reddit content. One AEO firm, RedRover, advertises "an army of agents publishing blog content & reddit posts" to rank in AI outputs. The moderators described the influx as part of a broader erosion of human discourse, where commercial interests exploit Reddit's reputation as an authentic source to manipulate AI-generated answers. The health context adds risk: unregulated peptide vendors could use the tactic to reach vulnerable users, including teenagers seeking growth treatments.
Reddit's content is heavily used by large language models because it contains informal, human-written discussions on niche topics. Google and OpenAI have licensing deals with Reddit, but the platform's open nature makes it susceptible to coordinated manipulation campaigns.
The Verge profiles Sage, a 17-year-old nonbinary teen in Los Angeles, whose access to gender-affirming care evaporated after Children's Hospital Los Angeles stopped treating trans patients under pressure from the Trump administration. Sage had been receiving testosterone to manage a hormonal disorder and later to support their gender exploration, but was told abruptly that the hospital would no longer see patients like them. The piece weaves in the story of Sage's girlfriend Brooklyn, who had an easier path to estrogen, and documents the broader chilling effect: Kaiser Permanente suspended surgical pediatric trans care, and families now scramble to find providers who can handle both hormones and mental health. The article argues that public debate rarely centers the actual experiences of trans kids, instead filtering their lives through adult anxieties and political agendas.
Since summer 2025, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors, prompting many institutions to shutter their programs. California law protects such care, but hospital systems have nonetheless retreated.
Noah Smith questions whether the explosion of AI-generated code, driven by tools like Anthropic's Claude Code, is producing software that people actually want. He notes that companies are encouraging employees to "spend their salary in tokens," with one firm reportedly burning half a billion dollars on Claude Code, yet visible new features or useful apps remain scarce. Smith contrasts this with the early smartphone era, when compelling apps appeared weekly. He suggests that much of the current token consumption may be internal tooling, refactoring, or outright waste, and warns that the AI industry's hypergrowth could face a demand ceiling if the output doesn't translate into consumer value. The essay connects the coding-agent boom to Anthropic's impending IPO, valued near $1 trillion, and asks whether that valuation assumes a software appetite that may not exist.
Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have enabled non-programmers to generate software, fueling a 'tokenmaxxing' trend where firms maximize AI usage. Anthropic's revenue has surged to an annualized $45 billion, largely from coding agents, ahead of its planned IPO.
CBS News fired longtime 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley on Tuesday, days after he accused new leadership of "murdering" the program at a staff meeting. The dismissal is the latest in a sweeping overhaul under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, installed after Trump ally David Ellison bought Paramount last year. Weiss had already fired the show's executive producer and two correspondents, and brought in Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist with no broadcast news experience, to run 60 Minutes. Pelley said in a statement that he was told to "inject falsehoods and bias" into his work. Bilton's termination letter cited Pelley's "remarkable incivility" and refusal to cooperate. The shakeup has sparked alarm among journalists who see it as an effort to politicize America's longest-running news program.
Paramount, CBS's parent company, was acquired in August 2025 by David Ellison, a Trump supporter. Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, was named editor-in-chief in October 2025 and has pushed to remake CBS News for digital audiences, arguing that mainstream media has lost public trust.
