x01 Archives

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BEIJING — China’s government said Afghanistan and Pakistan have agreed not to escalate their conflict and to “explore a comprehensive solution” after several weeks of cross-border fighting between the two countries that has left hundreds of people killed.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Wednesday that after seven days of peace talks in the western Chinese city of Urumqi under China mediation, all the parties also agreed to keep the dialogue.

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The FBI Cyber Division warned organizations and companies that Iran-affiliated hackers are targeting U.S. critical infrastructures.

The warning comes hours before the 8 PM ET deadline President Donald Trump gave Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iran-affiliated cyber actors are targeting operational technology devices across US critical infrastructure, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs),” the division wrote on X. “These attacks have led to diminished PLC functionality, manipulation of display data and, in some cases, operational disruption and financial loss.”

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Chris Taylor, a liberal Wisconsin judge, won a seat on the state Supreme Court on Tuesday in the latest strong election for liberals since President Donald Trump’s return to office.

Taylor, a former Democratic state representative and current state appellate judge, defeated conservative appeals court judge Maria Lazar in the race for the ten-year term. Taylor’s win expands liberals’ majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a 5-2 split.

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Canada has taken a major step toward enforcing chilling restrictions on religious expression after lawmakers passed controversial legislation that will criminalize quoting parts of the Bible under the globalist government’s “hate speech” laws.

Members of Parliament approved Bill C-9, dubbed the “Combatting Hate Act,” in a 186–137 vote.

The ruling Liberal Party and left-wing Bloc Québécois MPs are pushing the measure through.

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WASHINGTON, April 8. /TASS/. Iranian representatives offered the United States a revised proposal that has been taken as a basis for negotiations on a potential settlement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told a press briefing.

“The Iranians originally put forward a 10-point plan that was fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded. It was literally thrown in the garbage by [US] President [Donald] Trump and his negotiating team. Many outlets in this room have falsely reported on that plan as being acceptable to the United States, and that is false,” she noted.

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Iranian-Canadian communities in Vancouver and Toronto say a temporary ceasefire has brought some relief, but deep concern remains for loved ones in Iran following threats from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire after Trump’s latest warnings raised alarms internationally.

Human rights advocate Soushiant Zanganehpour said the rhetoric marked a sharp escalation.

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Cornell University scientists have taken a major step toward developing a safe, reversible, long-acting and 100% effective nonhormonal male contraceptive, considered the holy grail of male contraception.

In a proof-of-principle study conducted in mice over six years, the team showed that interrupting a key step in meiosis, the process that produces sex cells, can temporarily halt sperm production without causing lasting harm.

The findings were published today (April 7) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Brussels would rather “paralyze” the member state or stage a coup than allow Viktor Orban to stay in power, Karin Kneissl has told RT

The US and EU are engaged in a political “proxy war” in Hungary, with Washington and Brussels backing rival sides ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections, according to former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl.

Kneissl made the remarks in an interview with RT as US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Budapest on Tuesday in a show of support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

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Federal immigration officers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot a man on Tuesday morning during a law enforcement action in Stanislaus County, California, authorities said. The shooting occurred during a vehicle stop along Interstate 5 near Sperry Avenue in Patterson.The Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the incident involved ICE agents and that no local law enforcement officers were directly involved in the shooting.

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Modern electronics power everything from smartphones to satellites, but they all share a major limitation. Heat. Once temperatures climb above roughly 200 degrees Celsius, most devices begin to break down. For decades, this thermal barrier has been one of the toughest challenges in engineering.

Researchers at the University of Southern California now believe they have found a way past that limit.

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Donald Trump’s ceasefire appears to be in the brink of collapse after Iran launched a series of “blatant” missile and drone attacks on Gulf neighbours. The US President had last night boasted there was no question the US had won a “total and complete victory” in the war against the Islamic Republic which America launched alongside Israel on February 28.

Trump and Washington had come under mounting pressure after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz by threatening to attack shipping. The vital waterway usually carries around 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies.

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This week, Planned Parenthood released its 2025 annual report. In recent years, these reports have taken on additional significance. That is because congressional Republicans have demonstrated their willingness to stop federal taxpayer dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. Indeed, this year’s report should bolster pro-life efforts to defund Planned Parenthood for the upcoming fiscal year. That is because, once again, this report provides very solid evidence that Planned Parenthood continues to prioritize abortion at the expense of real health-care services.

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Bill Gates is officially preparing to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee as Congress continues to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and powerful connections.

Gates, 70, will answer questions from members of Congress on June 10, according to multiple outlets, which note that the Microsoft cofounder is not being accused of any wrongdoing after he was named in the so-called Epstein Files.

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The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:

OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.

Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.

Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)

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We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart.

From the time I began work on AI in 2010 to now, the amount of training data that goes into frontier AI models has grown by a staggering 1 trillion times—from roughly 10¹⁴ flops (floating-point operations‚ the core unit of computation) for early systems to over 10²⁶ flops for today’s largest models. This is an explosion. Everything else in AI follows from this fact.

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Shippers looking to revive the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz were seeking clarity on the logistics on Wednesday, while refiners inquired about new crude loadings, in response to a ceasefire deal between the U.S. ‌and Iran.

Most stranded oil and gas tankers remained inside the Gulf, LSEG shipping data showed, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the two-week ceasefire and said the U.S. would help with the traffic build-up.

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NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are capturing the future of human spaceflight on their iPhones.

Fifty-eightyears ago, NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts photographed the famous Earthrise image. This image of our “pale blue dot,” as famed astronomer Carl Sagan referred to Earth several decades later, forever changed humanity’s relationship with both space and Earth. Today, astronauts are seeing Earth from space through a new lens: the iPhone.

 

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Underscoring the precarity of the situation, Iranian state media announced fresh “missile and drone attacks” Wednesday on US-allied Gulf states UAE and Kuwait in retaliation for airstrikes against its oil facilities.

Kuwait said its oil facilities and power and desalination plants were damaged in “an intense wave” of strikes that lasted hours, and demanded Iran cease its attacks.

The UAE said it was intercepting Iranian attacks while Bahrain also said its capital Manama had been hit.