America's 250th closed under record heat with Trump delivering a Mount Rushmore-tinged address and fireworks over a country still arguing with itself — Tehran buried Khamenei amid huge mourning crowds as Trump held his fire, an Iraq-war veteran fought deportation despite three tours in uniform, and NASA scrambled a robotic rescue for a falling telescope, while white nationalists marching in Washington and a small fire on the Brooklyn Bridge were reminders of how much stayed unresolved beneath the celebration.
President Trump closed America's 250th birthday with a long address and a fireworks display after a day of extreme heat that pushed Washington past 100 degrees and forced organizers to cancel the morning parade. Thousands still lined the National Mall for the Great American State Fair, with medics treating dozens for heat-related illness the day before and water stations working overtime to keep crowds safe.
A five-day preliminary hearing opened in Provo, Utah, with prosecutors trying to convince a judge they have enough evidence to try Tyler Robinson, 23, for the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It marks the first time Kirk's parents and widow will be in the same courtroom as the man accused of killing him, as prosecutors seek the death penalty.
Hundreds of masked members of the neo-fascist group Patriot Front marched near the National Mall on Independence Day, parading a Confederate flag as the city celebrated America's 250th anniversary under record heat.
A fire broke out on the Brooklyn Bridge during New York City's July Fourth fireworks display, sending up a plume of smoke before two fire engines extinguished it with no injuries reported; officials said such flare-ups are routine and why crowds are kept at a distance.
Massive crowds turned out for a second day of state funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed alongside family members in a US-Israeli strike in February, while President Trump signaled he would hold off further military action during the mourning period. Khamenei's son and successor Mojtaba, 56, has not appeared in public since the strike and will skip the six days of ceremonies entirely, citing continued assassination threats against him.
Ezra Jin, founder of China's Zion Church, landed in the United States on Friday and reunited with his family after being freed from prison, in a rare case of Beijing releasing one of its own citizens following US lobbying. Jin was among dozens of church members detained in an October crackdown on Christians, and his family credited Trump administration pressure for the release.
Benito Miranda Hernandez, brought to the US from Mexico as a baby, completed three tours of duty with the Navy during the Iraq war expecting military service to secure his citizenship. Instead he sits in an immigration detention facility fighting removal, one of a group of immigrant veterans that advocates say the government is now trying to deport.
Pope Leo XIV spent July Fourth on Lampedusa, one of Europe's busiest migrant landing points, praying alongside migrants and honoring those who died attempting the Mediterranean crossing to Europe.
NASA enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies to launch its Link spacecraft on an emergency mission to intercept the aging Swift Observatory, whose orbit recent solar storms have dragged down to 224 miles, risking atmospheric burn-up as soon as this year. Link aims to physically grab the propulsion-less satellite and boost its orbit roughly 150 miles higher, a maneuver rarely attempted at this scale.
A new movement swept fanfiction communities this week aiming to root out writers using generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, but the detection methods being deployed, including an anonymous X account promising a reliable AI-detector, are shaky enough that human writers are getting falsely accused in the crossfire.
Researchers estimate up to 22 percent of people live with some degree of smell impairment, from partial hyposmia to total anosmia, a condition often linked to brain health that patients say doctors still frequently dismiss as untreatable. One woman who lost her sense of smell after a viral infection described the loss as catastrophic to her sense of self, spurring new research into treatment and retraining therapies.
The Department of Energy quietly deleted roughly 6,000 web pages related to energy conservation just as a record heatwave strained the country's grids, a deletion timed suspiciously close to Republican backlash over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's request that residents set their air conditioning to 78 degrees to ease grid strain.
New financial disclosures show the first known instances of sitting members of Congress buying SpaceX stock following the company's record-setting IPO, raising fresh questions about lawmakers trading shares of companies they help regulate.
James Patten, the third defendant to be sentenced in the bizarre Hometown International stock manipulation scheme built around a company that owned a single New Jersey deli, will get a reduced prison recommendation from prosecutors for reasons that remain partly sealed from public view.
A researcher details how a flaw let anyone pull supposedly private, unlisted YouTube videos straight off creators' own channels.
A field guide to every number htop throws at you, still getting new readers seven years later.
One developer used Claude to port a 2003 RTS engine to Apple hardware it was never built for.
Anna's Archive is offering a six-figure bounty for anyone who can extract Google's entire book-scanning corpus.
Users report Claude Code sessions bleeding context between separate workspaces, and the thread is getting long.
Developers are pinpointing a specific mechanism behind Codex's recent quality slide.
Zig strips package management out of the compiler itself in a significant architectural cleanup.
The scooter that rebuilt postwar Italy's image is still rolling eight decades later.
A carrier network shutdown is about to brick a whole category of kids' tracking watches.
A twelve-year-old argument for skipping the abstraction and just writing the query is still drawing a crowd.
A developer got Claude to invent a new representation for splatting objects through time, not just space.
An argument that smarter models are quietly making the tooling built around them worse, not better.
Astronomers warn that orbital reflectors and mega-constellations are pushing naked-eye sky brightness past a hard scientific limit.
A from-scratch breakdown of the actual physics that keeps a quadcopter in the air.
A community project resurrects and modernizes Windows CE for the Sega Dreamcast.