Friday breaks with a small plane striking Beijing’s tallest tower, Hormuz shipping jitters after a fresh vessel attack, and markets still digesting the AI-infrastructure hangover—while John Bolton’s guilty plea adds a sharp political footnote overnight.
John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to unlawfully retaining sensitive defense information, resolving charges with a $2.25 million fine. Prosecutors said the former national security adviser kept classified material he was trained to safeguard.
Utah tightened fireworks restrictions as the state’s largest active wildfire spread under red-flag warnings, with officials urging residents to avoid sparks that could accelerate an already fast-moving blaze.
Gov. Gavin Newsom pitched a national tax on extreme wealth even as he campaigns against a California ballot measure that would levy billionaires locally, framing inequality as a federal fight while trying to block the state proposal.
Tanker traffic through Hormuz has more than tripled since the interim U.S.-Iran deal but a fresh vessel attack is rattling shippers; empty supertankers entering the strait Friday will signal whether companies trust the fragile truce.
Beijing’s 528-meter China Zun tower showed broken glass Friday after footage appeared to show a small plane hitting the skyscraper; emergency units surrounded the site while authorities stayed silent and many online images vanished.
The U.N. maritime agency halted ship evacuations through Hormuz after another vessel attack, underscoring continued peril in the critical oil chokepoint even as more tankers attempt transits following the ceasefire framework.
Brent crude fell toward pre-strike levels as Hormuz traffic doubled in a day, with analysts citing inventory releases, softer Chinese demand, and tankers sailing with transponders back on.
Rescuers pulled an infant alive from collapsed rubble after powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela, among several dramatic saves as crews pressed searches amid a rising death toll.
Enterprise buyers are pushing OpenAI and Anthropic away from brute-force token use toward leaner deployments, pressuring pricing and the labs’ heavy infrastructure spending.
Researchers sharpened Paul Erdős’s probabilistic method, improving the randomness technique that proves exotic combinatorial objects exist without explicit construction.
ON Semiconductor fell about 20% after its $7 billion Synaptics acquisition as investors questioned strategic focus; the CEO argued the deal bolsters physical-AI and sensing bets.
OpenAI has not started formal pre-IPO investor meetings or fixed a listing timeline, sources told CNBC, suggesting any public debut may still be months away.
WTI dropped back under $70 as traders weighed Hormuz security risks against signs Gulf exports are normalizing, extending this month’s war-premium unwind.
Investor Jeremy Grantham warned U.S. stocks look more overvalued than any prior American peak, citing speculative AI multiples as indexes wobble.
Vesuvius Challenge researchers read an entire Herculaneum scroll with AI imaging—a first for charred Roman libraries.
Tech writer and GigaOM founder Om Malik died; HN threads collect remembrances of his startup-era voice.
EFF argues age-verification mandates are ushering in a papers-please internet that will crush privacy.
IBM announced research toward sub-one-nanometer chips, claiming a new scaling milestone.
Akrites letter rallies open-source maintainers to defend shared infrastructure together.
Show HN: OpenKnowledge offers an AGPL, AI-first notes stack positioned against Obsidian.
Fernando documents what broke when two thousand people tried to hack his public AI assistant.
Jeff Geerling explains USB-C headaches behind Framework's 10G Ethernet module.
Oxide's 3D explorer walks through its integrated rack-scale cloud appliance.
Chess-piece roguelike mixes tactical movement with dungeon runs.
The Garbage Collection Handbook returns to the front page for systems nerds.
Essay on the doorman's fallacy in security and AI moderation.
Un-0 generates images via coupled oscillators rather than diffusion.
Mozart's teenage handwritten notebook surfaced in a Paris archive discovery.
Satirical CVE-2026-LGTM incident report roasts security theater.
HN debates whether a founder stole a competitor's data-room workflow.