Overnight the Nepal-Tibet flood death toll climbed past 538 with nearly 1,900 still missing as rescuers race a second-flood warning, Norway's King Harald V died at 89 amid an already turbulent succession, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole keynote to warn inflation isn't cooling — sending short-term Treasury yields spiking and rate-hike odds to 55%; watch today whether markets keep digesting Warsh's hawkish turn, whether GTA 6's blockbuster preview (it broke Netflix and Twitch) keeps rippling through gaming stocks, and whether Salesforce's Marc Benioff has actually silenced the “AI will kill SaaS” narrative for good.
US investigators seized digital infrastructure behind a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as QTFY that the Justice Department says targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Senate, HHS, NIH and the Energy Department since 2018. Experts call the scale and persistence of the campaign evidence of "classic espionage" and a reminder that US infrastructure remains vulnerable.
About 60% of occupied Michigan homes -- roughly 2.5 million units -- were built in or before the 1970s, and the median home there is significantly older than the national norm, concentrated around Detroit and Grand Rapids. Housing advocates call the aging stock "a huge problem" the state will have to reckon with while trying to fix an ongoing housing crisis.
Streams of Dolly Parton's catalog jumped 2,109% in the US and 1,280% worldwide the day after her death, according to Luminate, climbing from 1.2 million to 26.3 million daily US streams. "Jolene," "9 to 5," and her Kenny Rogers duet "Islands in the Stream" led the surge as fans revisited her songwriting legacy.
Icelanders vote today on whether to resume talks on joining the EU, a referendum that's taken on new weight amid Trump's Arctic ambitions and threats toward Greenland. Polls show the tiny, armed-forces-free nation nearly evenly split between EU-membership backers who want economic and security cover and sovereignty-minded critics.
The Red Cross says at least 93,000 people may have been affected by Wednesday's Nepal-Tibet flash floods, which have now killed more than 540 and left roughly 1,900 missing. Rescuers fear the toll will keep climbing as some of the hardest-hit areas remain cut off after roads and bridges were destroyed, with new-flood risk still complicating the search.
King Harald V of Norway, Europe's oldest reigning monarch, has died at 89 and is immediately succeeded by his son. The death comes at a turbulent moment for the royal family, which has been grappling with fallout from Crown Princess Mette-Marit's associations tied to Jeffrey Epstein.
Families are rushing to Nepal to search for 33 British nationals still missing after Wednesday's flash floods swept away entire villages, as fears grow of a second wave of flooding in the region.
Amid tariff war with Canada, Trump has signed an executive order renaming the shared lake.
A federal judge ruled the Pentagon's attempt to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk was unlawful, a major win for the AI company in its standoff with Washington. The Defense Department tried to blacklist Anthropic in February after it refused to lift restrictions on using its models for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance -- a move widely read as retaliatory -- even as the government kept using and collaborating with Anthropic's products.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote avoided committing to forward guidance but made clear inflation still worries him, saying "this summer's readings were better than expected" but don't show underlying trends have meaningfully improved. He warned the Fed "has work to do" if progress stalls, sending the 2-year Treasury yield up nearly 8 basis points to 4.31% and traders' odds of a September rate hike jumping to 55.7%.
The AI spending boom is straining what used to be Big Tech's biggest edge: pristine balance sheets. Capital spending has climbed above 100% of operating cash flow at some hyperscalers, pushing Amazon, Alphabet and Meta into debt markets and "off-balance sheet" financing deals, and analysts warn continued leverage could start denting credit ratings and raising borrowing costs.
After a year of Wall Street predicting AI would gut Salesforce's SaaS business, Thursday's beat-and-raise earnings sent shares up almost 23% -- their best day since 2020 -- following the rehiring of key executives who'd left for OpenAI. "This SaaSpocalypse narrative has been such nonsense," Benioff told CNBC's Jim Cramer, capping a stretch that saw the stock slump over 20% earlier this year.
The first official Grand Theft Auto 6 preview overwhelmed Netflix and Twitch with demand Thursday, sending Take-Two shares higher in premarket trading. Global preorders already total an estimated $260 million, and analytics firm Newzoo projects the November 19 launch could hit $4.5 billion in sales by launch week -- 13 years after the previous installment.
Quanta explores a quietly strange fact: the theoretical core of computer science -- complexity classes, computability, algorithmic proofs -- doesn't actually require a physical computer to exist, even though the field's biggest questions would likely never have been posed without one.
A blog post dissects why apps constantly nag you to leave mobile web and "use the app" — and why that's mostly about tracking, not UX.
A US judge ruled the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk was unlawful, capping months of legal wrangling.
Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency is putting €500k into hardening Flatpak, the Linux app-sandboxing format, as public funding for open infrastructure keeps expanding.
New Scientist digs into how doctors are only now developing real protocols for antidepressant discontinuation syndrome, which can be severe and long-lasting.
Google Play pulled the open-source voxel game Luanti after an automated DMCA claim falsely flagged it as AI-generated, reigniting fears about copyright bots nuking legitimate open-source projects.
A grassroots project is helping Windows users claim refunds for licenses they never wanted, riding frustration with forced upgrades and telemetry.
New EPA guidance lets data centers sidestep certain pollution-permitting rules, a Trump-administration move critics say prioritizes AI buildout over air-quality enforcement.
A GPU-driver engineer shows off a surprisingly elegant trick: computing 3D volumes fast using the divergence theorem instead of brute-force voxel counting.
A demo reimagines turn-by-turn navigation with Inception-style bending, curved maps instead of flat top-down views — a genuinely different way to show a route.
OpenAI's Python SDK is migrating from httpx to a new httpx2, and the migration guide itself became a small case study in library-breaking-change design.
A founder's postmortem on AWS Cognito for a startup's auth system reads like a cautionary tale about hidden complexity in "managed" identity services.
Someone built a fully interactive, zoomable galaxy map for the Warhammer 40k universe, fan cartography taken to an impressive extreme.
Autistici/Inventati, a longtime European digital-rights hosting collective, saw its main .org domain go dark after a US terrorism designation, alarming activists who relied on it.