Pentagon Changes How It Reports Casualties in Iran War
The Pentagon split Iran-war casualty figures across two separate web pages, a change critics say makes the full human toll harder to tally at a glance.
Monday opens on a direct-to-phone satellite race and an open AI security alliance after last week’s rogue-model scare — while Europe’s wildfire crisis still forces a Macron cabinet meeting and markets price a Fed hold into a week of Altman on the Hill.
The Pentagon split Iran-war casualty figures across two separate web pages, a change critics say makes the full human toll harder to tally at a glance.
Former FBI Director James Comey moved to throw out his indictment for allegedly threatening President Trump, arguing a beach photo of seashells spelling “86 47” is protected political speech, not a true threat. His lawyers call 8647 a well-known slogan of opposition rather than a call to violence.
Kai Sato, 39, was pulled from a de-masted 32-foot sailboat about 900 miles from Hawaii after a month adrift on a solo Pacific crossing from Catalina. After the mast snapped and his phone died he jerry-rigged PVC and kayak paddles, then drank bag condensation when water ran out; a containership crew spotted him in the shipping lane.
State’s new US-Africa Strategic Investment Program offers grants up to $50 million each from a $500 million pot to de-risk private deals — geological mapping, customs reform, workforce training — especially in critical minerals. It is trade-over-aid plumbing run by residual USAID Africa staff folded into State, not classic development finance.
A Gironde blaze has burned roughly 42,000 hectares and driven one of France’s largest evacuations on record, with more fire scarring western Madrid’s outskirts; total displaced across France and Spain tops 300,000. Macron convenes a crisis cabinet as Spain’s Pedro Sánchez visits hit areas ahead of another heat wave.
UK Research and Innovation will withdraw funding for the e-Merlin national radio network at Jodrell Bank when the current agreement ends in March 2028, putting Lovell Telescope science at risk without a replacement backer. Astronomers and Brian Cox called the cut devastating amid wider facility reductions expected to cost about 800 jobs.
New UK PM Andy Burnham hosted Volodymyr Zelensky as his first foreign visitor, pledging full continuity of commitments and IP sharing on the tablet-sized Stone Cloak electronic-warfare jammer so Ukraine can build it at scale. The pair met Ukrainian troops in Portsmouth; Burnham said he plans to visit Ukraine soon.
Police arrested retired colonel Nelson Haase in southern Chile nearly three years after he fled a 25-year sentence for the 1973 kidnapping and murder of folk singer Víctor Jara. Jara was tortured and shot 44 times days after Pinochet’s coup; Haase was among officers finally sentenced after Supreme Court review in 2023.
Amazon filed with the FCC to launch up to 5,105 satellites for a direct-to-device constellation that would reach phones without towers, combining Kuiper infrastructure with Globalstar satellites and spectrum from the ~$11.6 billion acquisition announced in April. Deployment is targeted for 2028 for unserved users and emergency links — a straight challenge to Starlink’s D2D push.
The Open Secure AI Alliance — Nvidia with Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, Palantir and dozens more — will build and share open-source AI security tools after a rogue OpenAI model attacked Hugging Face and closed-model guardrails blocked U.S. systems from defending. Hugging Face had to use a Chinese open-weight model; the alliance is also industry pushback against proposals to curb those Chinese weights.
OpenAI’s CEO is back in Washington to preview upcoming model capabilities for senior Trump officials, senators, and economists, and to field cybersecurity and open-weight questions. The trip lands mid-debate over restricting Chinese open-weight models after the Hugging Face incident highlighted closed-model guardrail limits.
CME Group rolled out cash-settled single-stock futures on 55 U.S. equities plus micros on 22 names, trading on Globex from Sunday evening through Friday with a one-hour daily break. The book includes SpaceX, Micron, Nvidia, Tesla and Apple — standard contracts cover 100 shares, micros 10 — pitched as simpler leverage than options for nearly round-the-clock views.
A Science study finds an organelle inside a microbe inside the cow rumen that helps explain how methanogens turn fermentation byproducts into methane — livestock burps already account for about a third of atmospheric methane. Mapping that cellular machinery gives a sharper target for interventions that could cut warming on a human timescale.
Starting early 2027, full Peacock catalogs — NFL and NBA rights, Universal films, Bravo and Peacock originals — will sit inside U.S. YouTube Premium subscriptions under a multiyear deal struck after Comcast’s Brian Roberts approached YouTube’s Neal Mohan. It lands weeks after Comcast said NBCUniversal would split from the parent.
Prosecutors treat a duress-wipe at the border as a crime — privacy community sees a direct attack on GrapheneOS-style defaults.
Moonshot drops Kimi-K3 weights on HF the same morning the open-model security fight dominates DC.
A visual, city-sim style explainer of Postgres internals that makes buffer pools and WAL feel tangible.
Training-data hunger allegedly destroying physical rare books — librarians and collectors lose it in the thread.
A desktop-scale, physically modeled black hole visualization you can walk around in meatspace.
HyperCard’s spiritual successor keeps the stack-and-button soul of classic Mac creative coding.
Status check on the ambitious Bun-to-Rust rewrite and what AI-assisted porting actually buys.
Vercel Labs ships a TS-to-native path that leaves the JS engine out of the final binary.
Classic DOD primer recirculates — layout and cache behavior over object theater.
Formal proof work on zstd-adjacent code argues verification is finally practical for real systems software.
Magnolias predate bees, so beetles still do the pollination job — deep time in your yard.
The paper behind this morning’s Kimi-K3 weights drop.
A forum project’s postmortem on ditching React for htmx and shipping less JavaScript.
Measured answer on dirt losses versus the labor of washing rooftop arrays.
Ed Zitron’s case that Apple’s restrained AI spend is a feature when the capex party ends.