Vladimir Putin closed Russia's St Petersburg International Economic Forum by rejecting a peace proposal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, even as Ukrainian drones struck the city hosting the event. Leningrad region governor Alexander Drozdenko said air defenses downed more than 140 drones over the week, part of a sustained campaign that has hit an oil terminal and a naval base over 600 miles from Ukrainian launch sites. Zelensky published an open letter noting that drones had "visited" the forum Putin calls Russia's answer to Davos, an apparent jab at the Kremlin's claims of normalcy. Putin called the letter's tone "inappropriate and insolent" and dismissed its proposals outright. The exchange capped a week in which direct talks between the two leaders again failed to materialize. Zelensky said he plans to meet British, French, and German leaders Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz on Sunday to coordinate a unified response and press allies for further military and economic support against Moscow.
The St Petersburg forum is Putin's showcase event for courting foreign investors and projecting economic stability despite sanctions. Drones struck the same oil terminal on the forum's opening day. Zelensky has repeatedly proposed direct negotiations with Putin since 2025; the Kremlin has rejected or ignored each offer, insisting Ukraine cede territory first.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth marked the 82nd anniversary of D-Day at the Normandy American Cemetery by telling the crowd that "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies" today, naming Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria as examples and asking, "When will European capitals do something about that invasion?" The remarks echo language from the Trump administration's national security strategy released in December, which described mass migration as a form of "civilizational erasure" facing the continent. French villagers near the cemetery told reporters they considered Hegseth's framing of the liberation anniversary unwelcome, with some local officials reportedly treating him as persona non grata for the remainder of his visit. The speech lands days after a separate rebuke from Downing Street over comments Vice President JD Vance made about European speech laws, adding to friction between Washington and European capitals just as NATO allies prepare for a contentious summit on Ukraine funding and defense spending later this month.
D-Day, June 6, 1944, was the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France that opened the war's Western Front. The Trump administration has repeatedly cast European migration policy as an existential threat, a framing that allied governments reject and that has strained transatlantic relations over the past year.
An Israeli airstrike on a vehicle traveling between the towns of Kfar Tebnit and Khardali in southern Lebanon's Nabatieh province killed a Lebanese army brigadier general, a captain, and a soldier on June 6, the first time the conflict has killed an officer of general rank in the Lebanese military. The Israeli military said the vehicle had been moving "suspiciously" near the border and that the incident is under investigation. Lebanon's army has stayed out of the broader fight between Israel and Hezbollah even as a fragile ceasefire between the two sides keeps collapsing into renewed strikes on both sides of the border. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the strike as "a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty and international law" and summoned the United Nations peacekeeping mission stationed in the south to demand an explanation. The deaths add pressure on Aoun's government, which has been negotiating with Washington over a US-brokered framework meant to disarm Hezbollah and stabilize the border region.
Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire in late 2024 after over a year of cross-border fighting tied to the Gaza war. Both sides have repeatedly accused each other of violations, and Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon have continued on a near-weekly basis despite the formal truce.
Senate Republicans passed a measure early Friday morning providing about $70 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, splitting roughly $38 billion for ICE and $26 billion for CBP. The 52-47 vote fell along party lines except for Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the lone Republican to vote no. Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to bypass the Senate filibuster, which let the bill pass with a simple majority. Democrats had pushed amendments responding to the deaths of detainees Renee Good and Alex Pretti in ICE custody and sought to bar a $1.8 billion fund Senator Elizabeth Warren's office flagged as designed to shield the agency from legal settlements; both efforts were blocked. Senator Andy Kim said ICE has refused lawmakers routine access to inspect detention facilities, calling the lack of oversight "unacceptable" for an agency about to receive its largest budget increase in history. The bill now heads to the House.
At least 30 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the highest annual total in two decades, fueling congressional scrutiny of detention conditions. Reconciliation lets the Senate pass certain budget-related bills with 51 votes instead of the 60 normally needed to overcome a filibuster.
NASA's experimental X-59 aircraft flew faster than the speed of sound for the first time on June 5, reaching Mach 1.1, about 713 miles per hour, at 43,400 feet during an 81-minute flight from Edwards Air Force Base. Pilot Jim "Clue" Less guided the plane through the milestone test, which NASA designed to validate the aircraft's central premise: that a long, needle-shaped nose can break up the shockwaves that cause sonic booms, replacing the boom with what engineers describe as a quiet "thump" audible only on the ground below. Commercial supersonic travel over land has been effectively banned in the United States since 1973 because of noise complaints, a restriction that helped end the Concorde's run in 2003 alongside its high operating costs. NASA says it plans to push the X-59 to its full "mission conditions" of Mach 1.4, roughly 925 miles per hour, at about 55,000 feet within days, then begin flying over US communities to measure how people on the ground actually perceive the sound.
The 1973 US ban on supersonic flight over land effectively confined faster-than-sound passenger travel to ocean routes, which doomed the Concorde's economics. NASA's Quesst program is gathering community noise data it hopes regulators will use to write new rules permitting quiet supersonic flight over land.
Sriram Krishnan, the White House's senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, confirmed Saturday that he will leave his role at the end of the month after roughly 18 months in the position. Krishnan helped write the administration's AI Action Plan, which favored building infrastructure and cutting regulation over imposing new federal rules, and pushed back against state-level AI laws that the administration argued would fragment the national market. Before joining the White House, he held roles at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, and Snap, and worked as a general partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. "It has been an honor to serve under President Trump and Vice President Vance," Krishnan said in a statement, adding that he plans to start an outside organization focused on AI policy. His departure leaves a vacancy in one of the administration's most consequential tech roles as Congress debates how aggressively to regulate the industry ahead of the midterm elections.
Krishnan came to the role from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture firm with major stakes in AI startups. The administration has favored a light-touch approach toward the industry, including reported discussions about the federal government taking equity stakes in companies like OpenAI in exchange for support.
Atmospheric scientist Jianhao Zhang, who works with NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory and the University of Colorado Boulder, reported in Nature that Earth carries a previously unrecognized symmetry: a meridian near 27 degrees east longitude appears to split the planet into eastern and western halves that reflect nearly identical amounts of sunlight back into space. Zhang's team found that the two halves also match closely in ocean coverage, cloud cover, and overall energy balance, a pattern drawn from 25 years of satellite measurements collected by NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System instruments. The team says it cannot rule out the possibility that the alignment is simply a coincidence of how land and ocean happen to be arranged, and current climate models cannot reproduce the pattern, which suggests something about the planet's energy balance remains poorly understood. The finding follows an earlier, separate observation that the Northern and Southern Hemispheres reflect similar amounts of sunlight, a north-south symmetry researchers say may now be fading as both hemispheres grow darker.
Albedo, the fraction of sunlight a surface reflects rather than absorbs, is a key variable in how scientists model Earth's temperature and climate. Researchers have linked small shifts in hemispheric albedo balance to El Nino cycles, but a stable east-west split of this kind has no accepted explanation in current climate theory.
Treating AI chatbots as conscious beings would do more cultural damage than simply overestimating how smart they are, neuroscientist Erik Hoel argues in an essay that stakes out a middle position between two camps he sees as equally mistaken. On one side, he places thinkers like Pope Leo XIV and author Ted Chiang, who dismiss any talk of machine consciousness outright; on the other, people eager to declare large language models sentient based on how fluently they converse. Hoel calls the rush to grant chatbots inner experience a "dethroning" of consciousness as a meaningful category, and points to a recent survey in which 23% of respondents attributed some consciousness to chatbots while 72% attributed it to chickens, a gap he argues reflects confusion rather than insight. As evidence that fluency does not equal understanding, he notes that today's models can win math olympiad medals while struggling with simple text-adventure games like Zork, and compares confident chatbot self-reports to the confabulated explanations produced by patients with split-brain syndrome.
Hoel trained under Giulio Tononi, originator of Integrated Information Theory, a leading framework for measuring consciousness mathematically. Split-brain patients, whose hemispheres are surgically disconnected, are known to generate confident but fabricated explanations for actions driven by the hemisphere that cannot speak.
The federal government cannot seize half the stock of major AI companies just by labeling the seizure a tax, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argues against a proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders has framed AI as built on the "collective knowledge of humanity" and proposed that the government claim large equity stakes in AI firms to redistribute the resulting wealth. Somin counters that the same logic would justify seizing stock in any company that benefits from publicly funded research, education, or infrastructure, which he says "proves too much" because it would make virtually every business expropriable. He points to the Supreme Court's ruling in Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., which held that even minor permanent government intrusions on property count as takings requiring compensation, and calls Sanders' plan "a pretty obvious case of confiscation" that the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause would block without full compensation to shareholders.
Sanders has built his career around proposals to redistribute corporate wealth toward workers and the public. The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause requires the government to pay "just compensation" when it seizes private property, a standard the Supreme Court has applied even to small or partial intrusions on ownership.
A growing faction of K-pop fans is publicly calling out other fans who use AI image generators to create sexualized pictures and videos of idols, including images depicting Keonho, a minor member of the group CORTIS. Communities such as r/kpop_uncensored and r/kpopthoughts have become organizing hubs where fans compile examples, identify the accounts responsible, and pressure platforms to remove the content. OA Entertainment, the agency representing performer Jennie, has said it is pursuing legal action against people who create or distribute sexualized deepfakes of its artists. For now, social pressure from fellow fans functions as the primary check on the practice, since platforms have been slow to build systems that catch AI-generated sexual content of real performers before it spreads. The pushback marks a shift in fan culture, where communities that once focused on promoting idols are increasingly devoting energy to policing how those same idols are depicted by other members of their own fandoms.
Talent agencies in the K-pop industry tightly control how idols are portrayed and have a history of pursuing legal action over unauthorized images. The same generative AI tools fueling the deepfake problem are simultaneously being adopted by agencies themselves to cut production costs in music videos and promotional material.
