To the public, science is like sports – a meritocracy. The best win. The reality is more like politics. It helps to have friends, and it’s important that you say you will do what they want you to do. After the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives and got a Nobel Prize, for example, both the NIH and the University of Pennsylvania attached themselves to it. Both were blatantly lying. The NIH had refused to fund the mRNA work of Katalin Karikó, Ph.D. Penn not only refused her tenure, they demoted her because she believed in mRNA but the federal government did not. She quit academia specifically because she knew the private sector funded nearly all actual basic research(1) while government often wanted to engage in cultural agendas or fund ‘safe’ studies guaranteed to show a positive result before the grant was up.
x01 Archives
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Japan’s Self-Defense Forces fired a Type 88 anti‑ship missile during a joint maritime exercise with U.S., Australian, and Philippine forces on Wednesday, hitting a decommissioned Philippine Navy ship in waters facing the South China Sea.
The drill took place as Manila and Tokyo began talks on a potential defence equipment transfer, made possible by Japan’s decision to scrap restrictions on military exports.
Discussions include the possible early transfer of Abukuma class destroyers and TC-90 aircraft to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said.
Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and Koizumi witnessed the live missile firing on the ground, while Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr watched the exercise from military headquarters in Manila via a live video feed, the president’s office said.
“The exercise showcased coordinated maritime strike operations among allied forces and highlighted the AFP’s growing capability to operate alongside international partners in promoting regional security and freedom of navigation,” it said in a statement.
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Ryan Bruce Gaither Jr., 37, of Eugene, has been charged with assault on a federal employee involving physical contact and aggravated assault on a federal employee causing bodily injury.
An Oregon man has been indicted by a federal grand jury for an alleged physical attack against federal officers during an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstration in January. The incident occurred outside the Eugene federal building.
Ryan Bruce Gaither Jr., 37, of Eugene, has been charged with assault on a federal employee involving physical contact and aggravated assault on a federal employee causing bodily injury. The defendant was arraigned in federal court on Tuesday and pleaded not guilty, the Oregon US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
On January 27, 2026, Gaither allegedly spat on a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer on the Special Response Team (SRT) and bit a second officer, according to court documents.
Video footage of his arrest shows Gaither struggling with two CBP SRT officers while he lies on the ground, handcuffs tied behind his back. He can be observed shouting with an angry facial expression before being taken into custody. As he gets whisked away, an aggressive mob of protesters surrounds federal officers, screaming and hurling projectiles, video shows. A sign stating “ICE kills” was seen being waved in the air.
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The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
Anthropic on Wednesday said it had reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a détente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race.
Under the agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tenn., which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month.
The deal gives the IPO-bound SpaceX a marquee customer as it looks to sell investors on its AI ambitions, while helping Anthropic ease capacity constraints following a surge in demand for products such as its AI coding tool, Claude Code.
The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day in San Francisco on Wednesday, where it unveiled a new Claude AI feature called “dreaming,” meant to help its AI systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns and updating files that store user preferences and other context.
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Scientists in Sweden have developed a more reliable way to create insulin-producing cells from human stem cells, bringing new momentum to efforts to treat type 1 diabetes. The research, published in Stem Cell Reports, shows that these lab-grown cells can effectively control blood sugar in tests and even reverse diabetes in mice.
Type 1 diabetes develops when the immune system attacks and destroys the pancreas’s insulin-producing cells. Without insulin, the body cannot properly absorb glucose from the bloodstream, leading to dangerous blood sugar levels. Replacing these lost cells has long been seen as a promising solution, but earlier attempts to grow them from stem cells have produced inconsistent results.
“We have developed a method that reliably produces high-quality insulin-producing cells from multiple human stem cell lines. This opens up opportunities for future patient-specific cell therapies, which could reduce immune rejection,” says Per-Olof Berggren, professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, and corresponding author alongside Siqin Wu, researcher at Spiber Technologies AB
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As AI mints new millionaires, billionaires, and even trillionaires, it’s also threatening to replace entry-level workers and sparking fearful chatter of the “permanent underclass.” There’s no place that’s more evident than in the Bay Area, at the heart of Silicon Valley, where technology is wedging a deeper divide in the K-shaped economy, especially in the housing market.
A new Redfin report found that since the launch of ChatGPT’s first model in Nov. 2022, luxury home prices in the region—classified as those selling between $3.1 and $7.6 million—have jumped 13.4%. At the same time, home values for lower-end properties in the Bay Area—those $535,000 to $615,000—have fallen by 3.8%.
“Some owners of lower-end properties have missed out on the AI boom, with home prices in the most affordable Bay Area zip codes declining over the past two years,” Yingqi Xu, Redfin senior economist, said in a statement. “It’s another sign of the K-shaped economy taking shape in the Bay Area, with AI lifting the fortunes of some households and neighborhoods much more than others.”
Many Americans today are grappling with the sobering reality of high mortgage rates, inflated home prices, and a housing stock shortage. Many are delaying homebuying by a near decade from just a few years ago, as the median age of the first-time homebuyer hit 40 in 2025, up from just 33 in 2021.
Iran reviews U.S. proposal for deal to end war as Trump issues new threats – National– globalnews.ca
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Iran said it was reviewing the latest American proposals on ending the war, as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened the country with a new wave of bombing unless a deal is reached that includes reopening the crucial Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
Hope that the two-month conflict could soon end buoyed international markets on Thursday, even as the U.S. military fired on an Iranian oil tanker attempting to breach an American blockade of Iran’s ports hours earlier. The developments followed days of mixed messaging from the Trump administration over its strategy to end the war.
Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that he did not detail.
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.
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A new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA suggests that using an AI chatbot for just 10 minutes could negatively impact your ability to think and problem-solve. And honestly, the findings are a little alarming.
As reported by Wired, the researchers asked participants to solve problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension tasks. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant that could solve the problem for them.
When the AI was suddenly removed, those participants were far more likely to give up or get the answer wrong. In other words, the moment the AI crutch was gone, people struggled.
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“Operation Trust Me Bro failed,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has said, after the US president suspended efforts to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz
Iran’s top negotiator has mocked US President Donald Trump after he abruptly suspended American efforts to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Washington was again spreading falsehoods about ongoing talks.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf ridiculed Trump with a sarcastic one-liner: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”
Ghalibaf’s comments came after Trump paused ‘Project Freedom’, an operation aimed at clearing a path through the strait for more than 1,500 commercial vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf, just two days after its start. The US president, however, insisted that the decision was made based on what he described as “great progress” in negotiations and a request from Pakistan.
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Ukraine accused Russia of flouting a Kyiv-proposed ceasefire on Wednesday by carrying out dozens of battlefield assaults, air strikes and drone attacks in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described…
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During a White House small business summit, President Donald Trump said the economy is strong and his policies are satisfying Americans.
“Consumer confidence is way up,” Trump said at the May 4 event.
Three standard measurements of consumer satisfaction — from the University of Michigan; a business group called the Conference Board; and an aggregation of public polling data — show the opposite. They reveal that people are less satisfied with the economy now than at the end of President Joe Biden’s tenure, and at least one of the metrics puts consumer confidence near an all-time low.
The White House pointed to retail spending data to support his statement, but that isn’t a clear-cut measure of consumer confidence when other economic factors are at play.
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The market for Treasury debt is challenging to interpret even when the environment is calm, much less when multiple geopolitical and technological disruptions are present simultaneously. Two papers released in the past year offer differing perspectives on a consequential unknown in the current market, which is the expected effect artificial intelligence (AI) will have on future productivity growth.
The first of the two relevant papers, co-authored by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi, examined market signals in 2023 and 2024 around the releases of updated AI models from five leading developers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Deepmind, xAI, and DeepSeek). A main finding was that the nominal interest rates for long-term Treasury and corporate debt fell after these models became public by a statistically significant 12 basis points.
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You knew this was going to happen, despite evidence that contradicts the story about the FBI raid being politically motivated: federal agents searched the home of Louise Lucas, President pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, who was strongly supporting the gerrymandering effort that gave her party a 10-1 advantage in congressional apportionment.
So, you can see where the idiots would go with this, even though The New York Times reported that the investigation into Lucas started under the Biden administration. It is related to her involvement with a cannabis business. It’s a corruption probe. Yet, when you invite disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe and Adam Kinzinger to weigh in, you know a mountain of BS is coming. Curtis Houck of Newsbusters clipped this exchange:
Tapper: “The FBI will not say on the record why they executed the search warrant at the offices and businesses of the Virginia state Senator, Louise Lucas. What was your reaction to the news?
McCabe: “You know, it’s shocking, Jake. And it — it raises a couple of really interesting points. First, of course, this is a search warrant. It’s not an indictment. She hasn’t been charged with anything. She certainly hasn’t been convicted of any wrongdoing. Every search warrant is accompanied by an affidavit. That’s the facts that are presented to the judge, upon which the judge determines that there’s probable cause to believe there’s evidence of a crime inside that location. We don’t see those facts. We don’t typically see those affidavits. They are sealed until that person is — is charged and brought to court.
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was not pleased with the Louisiana v. Callais decision. She filed a dissenting judgment, which enforced the ruling with immediate effect because it relates to the upcoming elections. Ms. Jackson’s dissent was ripped apart by Justice Samuel Alito, who academically called her a moron—this is becoming a common occurrence. Even liberal justices have sought to steer clear of attaching their names to her opinions.
Alito called her dissent on the judgment utterly irresponsible. And now, after all that bellyaching from Ms. Jackson, she denied a motion to recall the Callais judgment. No justices dissented.
The Supreme Court has denied this motion. No justice noted a dissent. https://t.co/dlMLv4VHyh pic.twitter.com/ajQ6cDYgb2
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 6, 2026
This case is settled. It involved Louisiana creating a majority-black congressional district after the initial map was invalidated under VRA. Now, this map was struck down as unconstitutional, with the court limiting its interpretation of Section II of the Voting Rights Act, which allows congressional apportionment based on racial quotas.
🚨 The Supreme Court has immediately issued its judgment striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander. pic.twitter.com/AQJjA5Sw2P
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 4, 2026
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a sweeping new congressional map into law on May 4 that could increase Republicans’ advantage in Florida’s House delegation from 20-8 to 24-4.
Louisiana delayed its congressional primaries while lawmakers begin work on a new map. Tennessee Republicans have released a proposal that could eliminate the state’s only Democratic-held congressional district, while Alabama and other Southern states are weighing how far the Callais ruling allows them to go. But this is by no means just a red-state story.
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Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have worked very hard to claim they don’t give taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal immigrants. Or, any taxpayer-funded benefits, really. They do a lot of arguing semantics and nitpicking over rhetoric, and doing both in bad faith. AKA “independent” “fact” checking. Well, California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter just treated the op as if it were her ex-husband and she was holding a pot of mashed potatoes.
There was a debate this week with Porter and the other candidates running for California governor. The question of giving free healthcare (aka, paid for by taxpayers) to illegal immigrants came up. Porter, like the other Democrats on stage, was all about it.
Yes. And that’s what I think Californians deserve as answers to these questions.
She has a point. If I were a Californian, I would want to know a clear “yes” so I knew not to vote for that person.