Namely, Bird, whose upcoming animated film “Ray Gunn” is set to be released on Netflix this December, made it clear he has no interest in whipping up “Ratatouille’s” next course.

“No. I don’t,” Bird said point-blank when asked by Collider if he was interested in making a “Ratatouille 2.”

He continued: “They’ve made little feints towards that to see how I would react. They’ll, like, crack a joke, but the joke will be a little bit serious, like, ‘Would you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we told that story.’”

Per Bird, he faces the same issues when discussing “The Iron Giant” with people, which he admitted was surprising given the Jennifer Aniston-led animated movie for Warner Bros. was not a box office success.

“Any time you do something that ends up connecting with people, they automatically think, ‘How about another?’” he noted. “People have mentioned it about ‘The Iron Giant,’ which is hilarious to me because the film didn’t succeed at all in its initial release. It’s caught up in time, but what would you do to follow that up? He’s lumbering around, still undiscovered? In other words, to me, that story is told.”

While Bird may be against the idea of a sequel to “Ratatouille,” Oswalt, who voiced Remy the food-loving rat for the 2007 Pixar film, said he’d “love” to be involved if a part two happened. Though, Oswalt said his involvement would be entirely on Bird’s vision for the project.

“There was never gonna be an ‘Incredibles’ sequel until he thought, ‘Wait a minute. There is a story to tell,’” Oswalt said of Bird, who also directed Pixar’s “The Incredibles” and “Incredibles 2”. (“Incredibles 3” is also in the works, and Bird told Collider that he “could see another ‘Incredibles’ film” coming to fruition.)

“So if he gets an idea, that’s the one I wanna do. I don’t wanna be the guy going, ‘Hey, what if Remy did this?’ I want it to be one of those ideas that happens that you cannot get away from,” Oswalt added on the “Obsessed” podcast last week. “I don’t want it to come from us going, ‘All right, let’s get out the legal pads and let’s break down a sequel.’ There are a lot of movies where that’s how they’re done, and it always feels inorganic.”

The post ‘Ratatouille 2’: Director Brad Bird and Star Patton Oswalt Want Different Things for a Sequel appeared first on TheWrap.

The Daily Mail reported comments from an anonymous White House insider who responded to attacks by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) against Trump’s Iran deal.

Cruz has criticized the Trump deal to end a war with Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters this month that “the president is receiving some very poor advice on this deal,” The Mail noted. The criticism is seen as “an obvious attempt” to position himself for a future presidential run with a “non-interventionist” stance, according to The Mail, which also highlighted his failed bids against Trump.

“Cruz has no shortage of ambition,” The Mail wrote, citing White House sources. “The Texas senator has long felt that Trump robbed him of the presidency in 2016 and that he could have easily beat the unpopular Democrat Hillary Clinton.”

However, the White House insider responded to The Mail’s request for comment on Cruz’s criticism and the idea that he could be setting himself up for a 2028 presidential run.

“Ted is an instrument of the donor class,” the White House insider told the Daily Mail. “A very unlikable instrument, who unbeknownst to him will never be president.”

The White House insider also shot down rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance had “gone rogue,” as The Mail put it. Another White House official summed up criticisms of the Iran war deal as part of “handwringing and bedwetting” from Republicans that has no effect on Vance’s alignment with Trump.

“There is no pearl clutching in this White House,” the White House official told The Daily Mail. “Everyone, including the vice president, is following the president’s lead on the peace deal, and no amount of handwringing and bedwetting from Washington, D.C. Republican ‘panic-ans’ will change that.”

The post MAGA rift erupts as White House insider bashes ‘unlikable’ GOP hopeful’s ‘bedwetting’ appeared first on Raw Story.

The Daily Mail reported comments from an anonymous White House insider who responded to attacks by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) against Trump’s Iran deal.

Cruz has criticized the Trump deal to end a war with Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters this month that “the president is receiving some very poor advice on this deal,” The Mail noted. The criticism is seen as “an obvious attempt” to position himself for a future presidential run with a “non-interventionist” stance, according to The Mail, which also highlighted his failed bids against Trump.

“Cruz has no shortage of ambition,” The Mail wrote, citing White House sources. “The Texas senator has long felt that Trump robbed him of the presidency in 2016 and that he could have easily beat the unpopular Democrat Hillary Clinton.”

However, the White House insider responded to The Mail’s request for comment on Cruz’s criticism and the idea that he could be setting himself up for a 2028 presidential run.

“Ted is an instrument of the donor class,” the White House insider told the Daily Mail. “A very unlikable instrument, who unbeknownst to him will never be president.”

The White House insider also shot down rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance had “gone rogue,” as The Mail put it. Another White House official summed up criticisms of the Iran war deal as part of “handwringing and bedwetting” from Republicans that has no effect on Vance’s alignment with Trump.

“There is no pearl clutching in this White House,” the White House official told The Daily Mail. “Everyone, including the vice president, is following the president’s lead on the peace deal, and no amount of handwringing and bedwetting from Washington, D.C. Republican ‘panic-ans’ will change that.”

The post MAGA rift erupts as White House insider bashes ‘unlikable’ GOP hopeful’s ‘bedwetting’ appeared first on Raw Story.

Police identified the suspect as Harmunie Heaven Church of Los Angeles. She has been booked on suspicion of felony battery with great bodily injury and is being held in lieu of $50,000 bail, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The attack, which was captured on video and shared on social media, led to condemnation of the perpetrator and an outpouring of support for the food vendor, who was identified by her family members as Arabelia Martinez, 62.

On June 15, LAPD officers were called to the 700 block of Figueroa Street around 4 p.m. to investigate reports of a battery. Police said the dispute involved a hot dog street vendor and a pedestrian.

A video of the attack shows a woman pouring something over the vendor’s food, prompting Martinez to throw what appeared to be powdered spices at the woman, who then goes around the cart and begins to assault Martinez.

The video then shows the woman throwing Martinez to the ground, grabbing her by the hair and repeatedly attacking her as bystanders try to step in and help.

At one point, Martinez is helped up from the ground and tries to walk away but the woman continues the attack, beating her head and face, causing Martinez to fall to the ground again.

An unidentified woman on TikTok, using the username Ladydope6, posted several videos this week in which she spoke off camera as she discussed the incident, suggesting she’s the woman seen in the video attacking the vendor.

In one video, she said she poured a Mexican condiment — chimoy — on the street vendor’s hot dogs because the vendor refused to serve her due to racial discrimination.

“When I walked up to her I had money. She told me: ‘Me no serve your people,’” the woman claimed in the video. “So, yes, I retaliated. I put chimoy on her hot dogs but I did nothing physical to her.”

The woman claimed that the street vendor had thrown the Mexican seasoning — Tajin — on her face.

“That s— do feel damn near like pepper spray, damn near,” she said in the video. “You thought that I was just gonna sit there and let her throw Tajin at me? How do I know what’s coming next, how do I know after I can’t see that you’re going to do something else?”

The TikTok user did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Martinez has shared a different version of what happened. In an interview with Univision, Martinez said the woman was asking for free food. She told the Spanish news station that she’s shocked by what happened to her.

“Never in my life did I think I would go through something difficult like this,” she told the station.

A GoFundMe page created by Martinez’s daughter to raise money for therapy and to replace the damaged items so far has raised a little more than $120,000.

“My mom has dedicated herself to her work every single day, rain or shine, to provide for our family,” according to the page. “She is one of the most resilient and loving people I know, and no one deserves what happened to her. The assault not only left her physically and emotionally shaken, but also resulted in damage to the items she works so hard to maintain.”

The post Woman accused of attacking hot dog street vendor in downtown L.A. is arrested appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Ohtani locked down the starting DH spot for the National League squad, with 3,341,257 votes. The top vote-getters in each league bypass Phase 2. Second baseman Ernie Clement of the Toronto Blue Jays was the top vote-getter in the Amlerican League, with 3,232,932 votes.

Ohtani was the expected choice, despite a slow offensive start. His red-hot June boosted him up the leaderboards. He entered Thursday with the second-highest OPS in the National League (.963), barely trailing Mets outfielder Juan Soto (.965).

Pitchers aren’t chosen through the fan vote — hurlers and reserves have to wait for the player ballot (which includes votes from players, coaches and managers) and commissioners picks. But Ohtani has been just as impressive on the mound this year.

He has a 1.58 ERA, the fourth-best mark among NL pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings this season.

Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman (2,666,008 votes), third baseman Max Muncy (2,890,181) and outfielder Andy Pages (2,158,664) also led their respective NL position groups in voting. Other Dodgers finalists, who advance to voting Phase 2, include catcher Will Smith (1,871,805), shortstop Mookie Betts (1,762,343 ) and outfielder Teoscar Hernandez (1,569,932).

The vote totals reset for Phase 2, which runs from next Monday through Thursday. The remainder of the All-Star starters are set to be announced on July 4 on Fox Sports.

The post Shohei Ohtani is the first Dodger to be named 2026 All-Star appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

A labor union spent $31 million gathering signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot in an effort to offset federal healthcare funding cuts that will affect millions of California’s most vulnerable residents. A representative for the campaign supporting the ballot measure pushed back at opposition to the effort as self-entitled wealthy Californians and entrenched Sacramento interests.

“While a few morally bankrupt billionaires and their buddies in Sacramento want to see California’s hospitals close, and tax breaks for billionaires protected — I assure you, the vast majority of voters do not,” said Debru Carthan, a spokesperson for the Billionaire Tax Now Coalition, which is funded by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the sponsor of the proposal.

The California secretary of state is expected to officially certify the measure for the Nov. 3 ballot on Thursday evening.

Carthan said their effort has support in public opinion polls, and from lawmakers, unions, community organizations and volunteers across the state, “something the billionaires and their buddies will never have.”

However, a coalition of healthcare, education, public safety, housing, business and labor leaders opposed to the proposal warned that it would make the state’s notoriously unstable budget even more unpredictable.

“The dangerous wealth tax directly threatens vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects by making California’s revenue even more volatile,” the leaders of the California Medical Assn., the California Primary Care Assn. and the California School Boards Assn. said in a statement. “That’s why so many leaders – both Democrats and Republicans – are joining us and saying NO. We look forward to ensuring voters have the facts, know the stakes, and resoundingly reject this reckless experiment in November.”

Supporters of the one-time proposed 5% tax on the assets of the state’s wealthiest residents pitched the effort as a stop-gap measure to offset devastating federal healthcare funding cuts passed by the GOP-led Congress and signed by President Trump nearly one year ago. The federal legislation is expected to result in $100 billion in cuts that would affect California’s most vulnerable residents.

The proposed tax, which would be retroactive to billionaires who lived in the state as of Jan. 1, drew predictable opposition from the wealthy, notably Silicon Valley tech leaders.

But it notably divided liberals. While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) supported the proposal, Gov. Gavin Newsom was among the Democrats who opposed it because of fears about the potential impact on the state’s volatile budget.

Despite being the fourth largest economy in the world — the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley — California’s budget is extremely dependent on the state’s most prosperous residents.

Newsom and others who generally support increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans also argued that the proposed billionaire tax in California was poorly crafted and that any such levies ought to be enacted nationally, because varying state policies would be ineffective.

Opponents also argued that the political priority in the 2026 midterm election should be squarely focused on efforts to make sure Democrats regain control of Congress to serve as a counter balance during the final two years of Trump’s presidency.

“It’s disappointing. This is a critical election where we need to concentrate on flipping the house and undoing the damage that was done” by Trump’s legislation that led to the healthcare funding cuts, said Jodi Hicks, chief executive and president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. The wealth tax “is short term and doesn’t address what is the long-term problem. And I’m not even sure the policy is a viable solution. It’s so critical to be sending the right message — holding Congress accountable and how we need to find long-term solutions to make sure Californians have access to healthcare.”

Rob Lapsley, co-chair of Californians Against Tax Increases and president of the California Business Roundtable, argued that the proposed wealth tax would ultimately affect every Californian.

“Strip away the spin, and this measure forces every California taxpayer, not just billionaires, to file a sworn declaration of their net worth with the Franchise Tax Board under penalty of perjury,” Lapsley said in a statement. “And it hands the Legislature the power to extend the wealth tax to all Californians and every kind of property, including home equity, retirement savings without ever returning to the voters – effectively gutting” voter-approved caps on property tax increases.

Supporters of the tax submitted nearly 1.6 million signatures in April to qualify the proposal for the ballot, roughly double the number required. However, support for the effort has grown increasingly shaky. Newsom’s team created a broad coalition of opponents, including healthcare and education activists, that undercut the foundational argument for the tax.

The union that crafted the proposal responded last week by proposing a legislative alternative that would create a 2% tax on billionaire’s assets. It was flatly refused by the Newsom administration. No deal was reached by the Thursday evening deadline for the union to withdraw the proposal from the November ballot.

Two efforts that were crafted to sink the proposed billionaire tax — dubbed as poison pills — also qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot, according to the California Secretary of State’s office. One would bar new state taxes on personal property, while the other prohibits any new taxes being exempted from existing state spending rules and to be regularly audited. If the billionaire tax proposal is approved by voters but either of the other proposals receives more votes, the tax measure would be voided.

The proposed billionaire tax would apply to more than 200 Californians, some of whom proactively left the state or moved their companies out of California because of the proposal.

The prospect of the wealthy fleeing the state is among the reasons that prominent Democrats such as Newsom opposed it, given California’s budget being so reliant on the state’s most prosperous residents.

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, is among the billionaires who have reportedly moved out of California because of the tax proposal. He donated at least $82 million to an organization that is funding efforts to invalidate the proposed billionaire tax.

Ballot measure proponents had a Thursday evening deadline to withdraw their proposals.

Other policy proposals that will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot include:

• Requiring government-issued voter identification to cast ballots in elections.
• Reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, once a third-rail in Democratic politics that has become increasingly scrutinized in the rebuilding in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton wildfire.
• Creating a $11.3-billion affordable housing bond.

Two notable proposals were pulled off the ballot after negotiations between the California Hospital Assn. and labor unions:

• An effort to limit healthcare executives’ compensation.
• A union proposal by the same union backing the billionaire tax that would have required many healthcare clinics to spend 90% of their revenue to serve low-income and underserved residents.

The post Controversial billionaire tax will appear on November ballot appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Donkey, voiced by the iconic Eddie Murphy, is an integral character in the Shrek universe. Lord Farquaad wants to banish creatures like Pinocchio, the Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf to Shrek’s swamp. By doing so, it would create a functioning human-only society. We learn that this mule speaks, and soon, he accompanies Shrek on all his adventures. He later falls in love with Dragon, and they have dragon-donkey hybrid babies.

Donkey, slated for release on June 30, 2028, is an origin story for the beloved animated character. We will finally learn how Donkey became Donkey. I’m not quite sure what that means, but if it gives us more hilarious quips from Eddie Murphy, I’m in. Puss in Boots has several spin-off films, so it’s only right that Shrek’s best friend gets his time to shine.

“Donkey‘s going to be like how Puss in Boots had his own movie, Donkey’s going to have his own movie, own little story with his dragon wife and his kids that are half-dragon and half-donkeys. They’ve written this funny story. We’re doing that, starting that in September,” Murphy told ScreenRant last summer.

DreamWorks Is Finally Giving Donkey His Own ‘Shrek’ Spinoff Movie

Donkey is being directed by Charlie Bean (The Lego Ninjago Movie, and the live-action Lady and the Tramp), co-directed by Matt Flynn—who worked on The Wild Robot, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish—and produced by Rebecca Huntley (Kung Fu Panda 4 and The Bad Guys).

While Donkey isn’t releasing until 2028, fans can take another dip in Shrek’s swamp when it opens back up in 2027 for the fifth installment in the franchise. Shrek became a global hit, taking in over $500 million globally and earning a first-ever Oscar nomination for an animated film.

Three sequels followed: Shrek 2 in 2004, Shrek 3 in 2007, and Shrek Forever After in 2010. Mike Myers, Murphy, and Cameron Diaz are returning to voice their iconic characters, Shrek, Donkey, and Fiona, respectively. Zendaya, Marcello Hernández, and Skyler Gisondo are joining the cast as Shrek and Fiona’s now-grown children.

The post It Took 26 Years, but Donkey Is Finally Getting the ‘Shrek’ Spinoff He Deserves appeared first on VICE.

• The DOT is pushing for regulatory changes to enable the development of autonomous vehicles.
• NHTSA proposes allowing the removal of brake pedals and steering wheels for AVs.
• Safety advocates are concerned about the lack of clarity on vehicle operations.

The idea of riding in a car with no steering wheel or pedals is one step closer to becoming reality, thanks to Donald Trump and the Department of Transportation.

The Trump administration is considering a regulatory change that could help accelerate the rollout of purpose-built robotaxis, including vehicles without steering wheels or brake pedals.

On Thursday, the DOT proposed updating federal vehicle safety rules to no longer require brake pedals in vehicles designed to operate exclusively with automated driving systems. If adopted, the change would remove a hurdle for companies such as Tesla and Zoox, which are developing autonomous vehicles without traditional driver controls.

The proposal is now open for public comment for 30 days.

The move is part of a broader effort by federal regulators to modernize vehicle rules for the autonomous era. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has previously proposed eliminating requirements tied to features such as windshield defoggers, wipers, and tire placards for certain self-driving vehicles. During the Biden administration, regulators finalized a rule allowing autonomous vehicles to operate without steering wheels.

At the moment, companies that want to deploy vehicles missing federally required equipment must obtain government exemptions, and those exemptions come with limits on how many vehicles can be put on the road.

The new regulations would allow companies like Zoox to scale quickly. At present, Zoox is waiting on an exemption on driver-control requirements so it can produce 100 robotaxis a week.

NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said in a statement that the latest proposal is an effort to tear down “pointless barriers to innovative designs.”

Philip Koopman, an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said that removing “historically unintended restrictions on autonomous vehicles” is generally a good idea.

“It is appropriate to modify the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to remove unintended barriers to driverless vehicle deployment by removing dependencies on the presence of a human driver, which this latest proposal does,” Koopman said.

“Another equally important point is that while NHTSA is busy removing unintended barriers, there are no FMVSS parts that are specific to autonomous vehicles,” Koopman added of the regulations. “It is long past time to see movement in adding new safety standards relevant to this new technology as well.”

The proposal could be especially significant for Tesla’s Cybercab and Amazon-owned Zoox, both of which are developing robotaxis without conventional driver controls. Multiple AV companies have voiced their support for the NHTSA proposal through public comment filings.

Both Waymo and Zoox wrote in April that the revised regulations would reduce their compliance costs, while Tesla wrote that it would like the agency to consider adding more vehicle types to the pedal exemption.

Safety complexities remain

The American Automobile Association said in its public comment to NHTSA that while it supports easing regulations for fully autonomous vehicles, transparency is key, especially for passengers and emergency responders who may not know how to operate a vehicle without such controls.

The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety echoed these concerns.

“NHTSA presents no research or analysis of the potential safety impacts of removing the display and provides no discussion of the possible concerns not only for passengers but also potentially for first responders who may need to know the potential for the vehicle to be in gear following a collision or other system failure,” the advocacy organization wrote in its public comment.

Dan O’Dowd, founder of The Dawn Project, an AV safety advocacy group, told Business Insider that robotaxis should be required to meet certain reliability standards before they can have no physical controls.

“Tesla’s ‘Robotaxis‘ are nowhere near the reliability level required to remove the brake pedal,” O’Dowd said. “The removal of physical controls should only be granted to robotaxi companies who have conclusively proven their software is safe for autonomous, unsupervised driving.”

Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post Trump’s DOT proposes new rules for driverless vehicles appeared first on Business Insider.

At first glance, Anthropic’s stark messaging and its actions seem fundamentally at odds.

But inside the company, many people don’t see a contradiction. To understand why, you first have to understand that Anthropic operates based on two core beliefs. The first is that artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology in human history, and its arrival is inevitable. The only real question is whether it leads to catastrophe or extraordinary prosperity.

The second is that Anthropic believes the world will be better off if it remains at the frontier of the AI race, according to several former employees who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity. Internally, leaders and employees at the company often refer to themselves as the “good guys,” meaning the ones being responsible stewards of AI technology, two of the sources said. The company sees accumulating power—whether in the form of capital, compute, research talent, or political influence—not as an end in itself, but as the price of fulfilling its mission: “to ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.”

Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, uses an analogy to describe Anthropic’s worldview. She compares powerful AI to a forest filled with both magical treasures and dangerous monsters. All the villagers nearby are rushing in, lured by the treasure. In her telling, Anthropic wants to venture farther into the forest than anyone else while investing heavily in taming the monsters—that is, capturing AI’s benefits while containing its catastrophic risks.

“What’s distinctive about Anthropic is they’re like, ‘People are going in the forest anyway, we have to do it first.’ This is very explicitly their strategy: build cutting-edge AI in order to be a serious player at the table who can talk about what cutting-edge AI systems should look like, what risks they pose, and pushing for reasonable safeguards,” Toner tells me. “They’re very straightforward about this. It’s just a weird enough strategy that people have a hard time hearing it.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei outlined this approach plainly in a conversation with his cofounders posted on the company’s career page: “You have to find a way to actually be competitive, to actually lead the industry in some cases, and yet manage to do things safely,” he says. “If you can do that, the gravitational pull you exert is so great.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees who defected after losing faith in the ability of the company’s leadership—particularly CEO Sam Altman—to safely bring transformational AI into the world. That sentiment still shapes the company today. Two of the former employees I spoke with say that, in internal discussions, Anthropic executives often describe Altman and OpenAI—and, to a lesser extent, Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI—as cautionary examples that help define Anthropic’s own sense of responsibility.

In many regards, Anthropic is just like any other Silicon Valley company. Many startups market themselves as David fighting the outdated, entrenched Goliaths of the industries they want to disrupt. Google, Facebook, and Apple were all founded upon idealistic principles, which later became muddied or were abandoned altogether as they became richer, larger, and more influential.

But former employees say that Anthropic is unusual in how intensely it believes in its mission, and how explicitly it tells employees that technological and commercial power are a means to achieve it. One former employee says that in job interviews, Anthropic stresses to applicants that it’s not a typical company shaped by market forces: It’s governed by a public benefit structure that allows it to prioritize the “long-term benefit of humanity” above profits. But the company sees achieving financial success and building the most powerful AI models as being in service of that goal—a prerequisite to its obligation to lead the industry on safety.

“None of us wanted to found a company, we just felt like it was our duty,” Sam McCandlish, cofounder and chief architect of Anthropic, said in the same conversation on the company’s career page. “We have to do this thing. This is the way we’re gonna make things go better with AI.”

Anthropic declined to comment for this story.

The Good Guy Problem

Anthropic touts on its website that it’s a “high-trust, low-ego organization,” without much in the way of internal politics, a characterization former employees tell me is largely accurate. They say that compared to leaders at other AI labs, Anthropic employees generally have faith in Amodei to tell them the truth about the company’s technological progress, its interactions with government officials, and views on geopolitics.

But a diversity of thought can be good for accountability. Shazeda Ahmed, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA who has studied the ideological origins of the AI safety movement, says that organizations like Anthropic tend to struggle with a lack of pluralism. Her research in this area has found that the AI safety movement—which is rooted in subcultures like effective altruism, among other communities—suffers from homogeneity of thought, and tends to lean towards self-governance.

“You’re not being challenged on these ideas when you surround yourself with other people who believe them,” says Ahmed. “And when your metrics of success are, ‘To what extent did I act upon these ideological beliefs?’ they’re not really thinking about, well, this can go wrong if we’re not the right people to have this much power—they don’t always examine their own blind spots.”

One former employee I spoke to says there’s a lively culture of internal debate at Anthropic, and critiques from staff will often provoke lengthy responses from leadership.

But another former employee describes a grimmer picture, in which more candid criticism remained confined to private group chats and rarely evolved into direct challenges to Amodei’s decisions. They described the company’s regular all-hands meetings with Amodei, which they call Dario Vision Quests, as akin to “going to a sermon to hear a priest.”

One of biggest internal controversies at Anthropic happened in the fall of 2024, when it became the first AI lab to partner with Palantir to provide AI services to US intelligence and defense agencies. Some of the former employees I spoke to said that questions about the deal were raised internally, but those debates didn’t result in changes to the company’s policies.

In a post on the online forum LessWrong at the time, Anthropic employee Evan Hubinger wrote that the company was “extremely forthright” about the Palantir deal with staff, and while there were probably some lines that shouldn’t be crossed without careful consideration, it was overall a positive development. “If you take catastrophic risks from AI seriously, the U.S. government is an extremely important actor to engage with, and trying to just block the U.S. government out of using AI is not a viable strategy,” he wrote.

Less than two years later, the Pentagon has reportedly started using Claude to do things like identify strike targets in the Israel-Iran war. When asked in a recent interview with Bloomberg whether Anthropic’s models were used in an attack on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 120 people, Amodei said he did not know, but that it would have been an approved use of the company’s technology so long as a human made the final call. It’s a stark example of how Anthropic’s vision for responsible AI might not always line up with that of the broader public.

Anthropic’s strong views about how Claude should and shouldn’t be used have come up in other contexts as well.

Earlier this month, Anthropic released a cutting-edge AI model, Claude Fable 5, with a uniquely unfriendly safeguard built in: If researchers tried to use it for frontier AI development, which would violate the company’s terms of service, Anthropic would effectively secretly sabotage their work. The move was immediately criticized by researchers across the AI industry, and Anthropic walked it back a few days later, saying it would make the safeguard visible. In a statement at the time, Anthropic said it didn’t get the balance right, and that its intention was to thwart US foreign adversaries.

Power Struggles

Amodei himself has publicly acknowledged the dangers of allowing too much power over AI to become concentrated in the hands of a few labs, including his own. “It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves,” he wrote in an essay earlier this year. But the remedies he suggests—that AI companies “be carefully watched” and perhaps make public commitments to “not take certain actions”—would do little to fundamentally redistribute that power.

In longer parts of the essay, Amodei contemplates the sheer magnitude of his own influence and the responsibility that comes with it. But he largely skirts framing those things in personal terms, instead positioning them as a species-wide problem: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” he writes. He goes on to say it’s the responsibility of “those closest to the technology to simply tell the truth about the situation humanity is in, which I have always tried to do.”

A common criticism of Anthropic’s position is that the company thinks it knows the “truth about the situation humanity is in” better than others. It sees AI as both extraordinarily powerful but ultimately governable, provided the right people lead its development. But the truth is that no one knows exactly how AI will change the world—some people just get more say in it than others.

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

The post Anthropic Thinks Its Own Success Is Key to Making AI Safe appeared first on Wired.

The Washington Post recently published a bombshell investigation revealing that Gabbard may be under the influence of a cult-like guru named Chris Butler. Butler, who founded the Science of Identity Foundation, an organization that former members have described as a cult, was in frequent contact with Gabbard throughout her career, according to the report. There were also instances in which Gabbard repeated the exact talking points Butler had sent her in other communications.

Mary Trump, a psychologist and author, argued in a new Substack essay that the report raised questions about who was influencing the former intelligence professional. While the allegations against Gabbard are disturbing in their own right, Trump argued that they also fit into a larger pattern that her uncle, President Donald Trump, capitalized on to ascend to power.

“The central issue is not whether Tulsi Gabbard belongs to a particular religion,” she wrote. “Nor is it whether Chris Butler’s organization should accurately be described as a religious movement or as a cult. Reasonable people may disagree about those characterizations. The issue is whether the head of a private religious organization exercised influence over somebody who was making decisions on behalf of the American people.”

“The allegations surrounding Tulsi Gabbard fit into that larger pattern,” Trump continued. “They raise questions not simply about one individual, but about the integrity of the institutions Americans rely upon to safeguard democracy. Public officials are entitled to their religious beliefs. They are entitled to spiritual guidance. They are entitled to worship as they choose. What they are not entitled to do is obscure the extent to which unelected private figures may be shaping decisions that affect the entire country.”

The post Psychologist flags ‘deeply troubling’ pattern behind ex-Trump official’s departure appeared first on Raw Story.

The attack came hours after Iran, demonstrating its control over the strait, had warned ships that the only route through the vital pathway for oil and natural gas was through its waters. Many ships had been using a route on the southern side of the strait, hugging the Omani coast.

The strike halted traffic through the crucial waterway, contradicting President Trump’s claim they’re Iran did not control the stair and his assurances that it was open once again to shipping. Oil prices jumped after the attack, with the price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rising over 2 percent to about $75 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, also rose over 2 percent, to around $72 a barrel.

A U.S. official, who spoke anonymously in order to share details of the strike, said the vessel had been hit by a drone. The attack prompted the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, to suspend its plan to evacuate the seafarers from hundreds of ships that had been stranded in the Persian Gulf.

It was not clear how the strike would affect the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran over control of the strait and over Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Thursday with Gulf Arab leaders in Bahrain to try to allay their security concerns.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had warned ships earlier on Thursday that they must coordinate with its navy and said that they should not take an alternative route, in an apparent reference to Omani territorial waters. The threat came just as shipping in the waterway was surging this week after months of paralysis.

“This route is unacceptable and extremely dangerous,” the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy said early on Thursday in a statement carried by Tasnim, an Iranian news agency tied to the Guards. “We warn all vessels to strictly refrain from any movement outside the designated routes,” it added, warning that action would be taken against vessels that did not heed its instructions.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations organization, which is administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, reported that a cargo vessel had been hit by an “unknown projectile,” damaging the bridge. The episode happened 7.5 nautical miles southeast of Dahit, Oman, where vessels taking the Omani route were transiting.

The ship struck, the Ever Lovely, is owned by Evergreen Marine, a shipping company based in Taiwan, according to Equasis, a ship data base.

Arsenio Dominguez, the secretary general of the International Maritime Organization, did not name the attacked ship in a news release on Thursday, but said it had not been part of the agency’s evacuation.

The Wall Street Journal initially reported the strike on the vessel in the strait.

Jakob Larsen, the chief security officer at BIMCO, the world’s largest shipping association, said in a statement on Thursday that the attack underscored the importance of having clear agreements between the United States and Iran on the resumption of shipping through the strait. The current agreement is “not sufficiently clear,” he said.

The Iranian official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said Oman’s providing an alternative route to vessels for transiting the strait had angered Iran and undermined its control over the passageway, therefore it had decided to take action.

The official said Oman was in a difficult position, working with Iran to create a management system over the strait and under pressure from the United States to reject all monetization and open the waterway. He added that Oman did not have the ability to provide security guarantees to vessels without Iran on board, and that Iran, which was insisting on maintaining its control over the area, would not tolerate a second or third party intervention.

Though Iran agreed last week to let vessels pass through the strait safely, it is also seeking to gain more influence over shipping traffic in the waterway, said an analyst, Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Iran wants this navigational order to be according to its own terms,” she said.

Traffic through the strait — a vital energy route that Iran and the United States blockaded during the war — had jumped this week as vessels stranded for months in the Persian Gulf began leaving. Shipping companies are seeking to take advantage of a temporary two-month window to move Middle East crude oil.

About 70 vessels transited the waterway on Wednesday, including 29 tankers, making it the busiest day since March 1, according figures offered on Thursday by Kpler, a maritime data company. Before the war, 130 or more ships passed through the strait every day.

Bahrain is the final stop of a three-country tour for Mr. Rubio, which also took him to the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. At a meeting with representatives of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council in the Bahraini capital, Manama, he sought to allay concerns among regional allies over a framework peace agreement with Iran that has left some of their central security questions unaddressed.

“We want to ensure that in any decisions that are made throughout this negotiating process, the interest of our partners and our allies in the region are always taken into account,” Mr. Rubio told the council’s representatives on Thursday.

The deal should not undermine “the security, the stability, or the prosperity of any of our partners in the Gulf region,” he added.

Gulf Arab states have broadly welcomed efforts to end the war but remain uneasy about provisions of the preliminary agreement. The deal does not address Iran’s missile and drone programs, which Tehran used to attack Gulf countries — some of which host American military bases — after the conflict with the United States and Israel began in late February.

The crucial question of how shipping will be managed through the Strait of Hormuz also remains unresolved.

The naval arm of the Revolutionary Guards, in its latest threat, repeated that coordination with the guards was “mandatory” for vessels seeking to transit the strait. Iran has insisted on this since the framework U.S.-Iran peace deal was announced last week.

Several container ships, some of which were stranded for more than three months, have been able to leave the Persian Gulf.

The Danish shipping giant Maersk said two of its vessels had left the Gulf between late Wednesday and early Thursday after “security assessments” and consultations with regional security partners. Three Maersk vessels remain in the Gulf and are expected to leave later, the company said.

Since early May, the U.S. military has helped ships sail through the strait on routes close to Oman. More than 500 ships and 250 million barrels of crude have been moved under that effort, according to U.S. Central Command, the part of the military behind the operation.

Mr. Rubio, during his meeting with Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers on Thursday, rejected Iran’s continued claim to control passage through the strait.

“International waterways do not belong to any nation state,” he said. “This is a foundational principle in the world today, without which the world would be in total chaos.”

Leily Nikounazar and Rebecca F. Elliott contributed reporting.

The post Iran Strikes Ship in Strait of Hormuz, Undermining Efforts to Restore Traffic appeared first on New York Times.

According to reports by the Wall Street Journal, Iranian officials estimate charges for security, safety, and environmental services could generate $40 billion annually for participating states. The scheme represents a dramatic reversal of pre-war conditions, with Iran now controlling the global shipping chokepoint it effectively seized when the war began.

Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, declared during a visit to Oman, “management of the strait will never return to the way it was before.”

Ship crossings have declined significantly, with 70 crossings on Wednesday compared to 130 oil tankers daily before the war.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio opposed the toll idea during a Middle East trip, calling it an unacceptable precedent that would “spread like a contagion.”

However, a 60-day ceasefire deal gives Iran control of demining and a say in future strait management.

Watch the video below.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

The post The Strait of Hormuz might be entering a new era: report appeared first on Raw Story.

According to reports by the Wall Street Journal, Iranian officials estimate charges for security, safety, and environmental services could generate $40 billion annually for participating states. The scheme represents a dramatic reversal of pre-war conditions, with Iran now controlling the global shipping chokepoint it effectively seized when the war began.

Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, declared during a visit to Oman, “management of the strait will never return to the way it was before.”

Ship crossings have declined significantly, with 70 crossings on Wednesday compared to 130 oil tankers daily before the war.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio opposed the toll idea during a Middle East trip, calling it an unacceptable precedent that would “spread like a contagion.”

However, a 60-day ceasefire deal gives Iran control of demining and a say in future strait management.

Watch the video below.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

The post The Strait of Hormuz might be entering a new era: report appeared first on Raw Story.

The order does not involve new federal funding, and does not call for new regulations or legislation. Critics contended that it did little to meaningfully address the consequences of pesticide use. Two White House officials, speaking anonymously to preview the order before it was announced, said it was timed to coincide with a dinner Mr. Trump was hosting for farmers.

Titled “Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience,” the president’s action amplifies an earlier order, issued in February, that committed $1 billion to invest in farm modernization and “regenerative,” or pesticide-free, agriculture.

It instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to “prioritize” the approval of alternatives to pesticides, and asks the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a “research and evaluation framework” to study chemicals in the food supply.

It also instructs Mr. Kennedy to issue “a grand prize challenge from the National Institutes of Health for researchers to identify creative solutions for evaluating the exposure, diagnosis and treatments of cumulative chemical exposures on individual health.”

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Kennedy said the order reflected Mr. Trump’s “commitment to working alongside America’s farmers to strengthen our food system while advancing research that will deepen our understanding of how agricultural practices, nutrition, environmental exposures and human health are connected.”

But the timing was unfortunate for the president. Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and the maker of the weedkiller Roundup in a case brought by a patient who said the pesticide’s key ingredient, glyphosate, caused his cancer.

The outcome infuriated leaders of Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, who held a rally outside the Supreme Court to protest the administration when the case was heard. They spent the day railing against the Trump administration, and the executive order, released at 7:30 p.m., did little to mollify them.

“This executive order stops short of requiring meaningful action,” said Vani Hari, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy’s who led the protest, adding, “Americans deserve more than another study — they deserve a clear plan with accountability to reduce unnecessary chemical exposures in our food supply.”

The post Trump Issues Order to Reduce Pesticides in Food as Kennedy Allies Fume appeared first on New York Times.

The royals were scheduled to return to the London estate in March 2027 when the revamp was completed, but will instead continue to stay at the nearby Clarence House, Privy Purse James Chalmers told the Sun.

“Their Majesties will, however, have access to private rooms within the Palace where they can retire during the course of a working day, and which could be utilised as potential residential accommodation in times ahead,” Chalmers said.

According to the outlet, Buckingham Palace has an estimated 700,000 visitors per year, and the royals want to give the public more access.

“It will remain a working home but we are seeking to widen public access precisely to maximize the national benefit of a publicly funded building,” a spokesperson for the palace told the outlet.

Charles plans on hosting events, such as receptions, garden parties and meetings with new ambassadors at the Palace.

“The Palace will continue in every traditional way to be the beating heart of the Monarchy, just not its resting head,” the rep continued.

“It will be a buzzing hive of activity in every other way,” the rep added. “His Majesty retains huge affection for Buckingham Palace and a deep respect for its role in royal and public life.”

Additionally, Prince William reportedly has no plans to move with his wife, Princess Kate Middleton, and their three kids to the palace once he takes over as king.

The family of five will allegedly continue to stay at their “forever home” at Forest Lodge in Windsor.

A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace wasn’t immediately available to Page Six for comment.

Members of the British monarch have resided in Buckingham Palace since 1837, with Queen Victoria — who reigned for 63 years from 1837 to 1901 — being the first.

Following Victoria were King Edward VII from 1901 to 1910, King George V from 1910 to 1936, King Edward VIII in 1936, King George VI from 1936 to 1952 and Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to 2022.

Charles, meanwhile, is choosing to stay at Clarence House with Camila, whom he wed in 2005, amid his ongoing cancer battle.

The monarch announced he was diagnosed with cancer in February after he underwent surgery for benign prostate enlargement the month prior.

In December, he gave an update on his journey, sharing that his “schedule of cancer treatment” was being “reduced in the new year” and he has “responded exceptionally well to treatment.”

The post King Charles and Queen Camilla unlikely to ever live in Buckingham Palace again despite nearly $500K revamp appeared first on Page Six.

The royals were scheduled to return to the London estate in March 2027 when the revamp was completed, but will instead continue to stay at the nearby Clarence House, Privy Purse James Chalmers told the Sun.

“Their Majesties will, however, have access to private rooms within the Palace where they can retire during the course of a working day, and which could be utilised as potential residential accommodation in times ahead,” Chalmers said.

According to the outlet, Buckingham Palace has an estimated 700,000 visitors per year, and the royals want to give the public more access.

“It will remain a working home but we are seeking to widen public access precisely to maximize the national benefit of a publicly funded building,” a spokesperson for the palace told the outlet.

Charles plans on hosting events, such as receptions, garden parties and meetings with new ambassadors at the Palace.

“The Palace will continue in every traditional way to be the beating heart of the Monarchy, just not its resting head,” the rep continued.

“It will be a buzzing hive of activity in every other way,” the rep added. “His Majesty retains huge affection for Buckingham Palace and a deep respect for its role in royal and public life.”

Additionally, Prince William reportedly has no plans to move with his wife, Princess Kate Middleton, and their three kids to the palace once he takes over as king.

The family of five will allegedly continue to stay at their “forever home” at Forest Lodge in Windsor.

A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace wasn’t immediately available to Page Six for comment.

Members of the British monarch have resided in Buckingham Palace since 1837, with Queen Victoria — who reigned for 63 years from 1837 to 1901 — being the first.

Following Victoria were King Edward VII from 1901 to 1910, King George V from 1910 to 1936, King Edward VIII in 1936, King George VI from 1936 to 1952 and Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to 2022.

Charles, meanwhile, is choosing to stay at Clarence House with Camila, whom he wed in 2005, amid his ongoing cancer battle.

The monarch announced he was diagnosed with cancer in February after he underwent surgery for benign prostate enlargement the month prior.

In December, he gave an update on his journey, sharing that his “schedule of cancer treatment” was being “reduced in the new year” and he has “responded exceptionally well to treatment.”

The post King Charles and Queen Camilla unlikely to ever live in Buckingham Palace again despite nearly $500K revamp appeared first on Page Six.

And that was just yesterday.

For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.

At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.

[Read: Trump in defeat]

This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.

Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court decisions and even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in the national consciousness. “The midterms are months away,” one official told us. “We’ll have lots of plot twists by then.”

But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.

Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the Senate GOP leadership, and the party’s campaign arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his candidacy before Trump undercut them.

Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance as the GOP’s prospects in this year’s midterms worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.

On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in particular, has trashed some of Trump’s ideas and appointees with a newfound zeal—he called Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, “an incompetent sycophant.” And Cassidy decried the administration’s deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill]

The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major housing bill—a rare example of significant bipartisan legislation—and demanded that Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved from there. During a meeting with Senate Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for allowing (through a combination of defections and absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy confronted him over the deal he had struck, and the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at one point reportedly told the senator to sit down. “I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told reporters afterward. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway. “We had a really great meeting,” he told reporters. “We like our leader. We like our party. We like, really, everybody in the room—I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay.” The president was flanked by three of his loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his blue tie appearing—intentionally or not—like a small declaration of independence. By nightfall, the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans seemed to ease a bit—at least for the moment. The chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy. White House officials pointed to that as a sign of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.

When we reached out to the White House for comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded with a list of the president’s accomplishments and added: “President Trump is the leader of the free world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the United States of America has never been stronger.”

In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.

But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.

[Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.]

He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.

Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.

The post The Chaotic President appeared first on The Atlantic.

Moriarty’s encounter with Wright did not take place at the Energy Department’s headquarters just off the National Mall in Washington, or at any of its many facilities around the country. Rather the men met at Lumen Field in Seattle, at last Friday’s crucial World Cup match between their countries, where Wright led the U.S. delegation — an auspicious occasion for an envoy to make connections in a new post.

“The United States is a very sports-mad country, so is Australia, so [it’s] a great opportunity to get to know them on a different level, because you might touch on one or two items of business,” Moriarty said in an interview. “But it’s generally just so that you can both enjoy the spectacle and the connection that we both have through sports.”

Moriarty also introduced himself to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a figure of particular fascination in Australia given that country’s embrace of harsh Covid-era lockdowns, as well as members of Congress in attendance. Moriarty, a former defense secretary and national security adviser, will work to keep Washington’s foreign-policy establishment focused on the Indo-Pacific in a year when its attention has drifted alternately to the Arctic, Caribbean and Persian Gulf.

“The United States is a superpower. It clearly has global commitments and global responsibilities,” said Moriarty. “But Australia, we think that the United States’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific is very solid.”

In Seattle, however, business was front of mind for Moriarty, who finds himself fighting a new 12.5 percent tariff that the Trump administration has imposed on countries accused of not doing enough to prevent slave labor in their supply chains. At the waterfront Edgewater Hotel, Moriarty joined corporate leaders — including Microsoft’s Australian-raised Deputy General Counsel Antony Cook, who has taken a leading role in the company’s approach to AI regulation, and Mikaël Limapalaër of heavyweight pension fund Australian Super — to discuss the future of the bilateral trade relationship.

Moriarty is unusual among Australia’s ambassadors to Washington for not having been a politician — his immediate predecessor, Kevin Rudd, previously served as the country’s prime minister — but he already shows a deft instinct for intertwining economic ties, military alliances and cultural affinity. At one point, he linked a coming National Football League game in Melbourne to the arrival of nuclear submarines as part of the AUKUS security partnership.

“We’re really keen to sort of see how we can use American football to grow an audience in Australia, that will again be really good for the business connections and the people-to-people connections,” said Moriarty.

“Australia will be ready to host the first rotation of U.S. submarines by the end of next year, and we’re hoping that all the Americans who come down to and live down in Western Australia bring their own love of football.”

The post Australia lost. Its ambassador still won. appeared first on Politico.

After months of hearings that included public and expert testimony, the Rent Guidelines Board handed down its decision amid cheers from audience members, who chanted “fight together, win together.” The vote passed 7 to 1 in favor of the freeze, which applies to one- and two-year leases.

The decision caps rent on about 40 percent of the New York’s housing stock — generally apartment buildings that were constructed before 1974. Landlords and real estate representatives panned the decision, saying it could devastate already meager profits and drive some apartment buildings into bankruptcy.

Mamdani called the vote “a historic victory for New York City tenants.”

“I’ll continue working to deliver a more affordable city by building and preserving affordable housing, lowering building operating costs like insurance, and ensuring tenants know their rights,” he said in a statement after the vote.

Mamdani made freezing the rent a key pillar of his mayoral campaign last year, arguing that cost of housing was stifling New Yorkers’ ability to pay their bills.

Before the vote in an East Harlem auditorium, hundreds of people gathered and chanted slogans in English and Spanish in support of the rent freeze. The boisterous chants included: “Fight Fight. Housing is a human right.”

Renette Bradley, 65, who rents a $2,300 per month one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, said if landlords keep raising tenants’ rent, they could be forced to leave the city.

“They are pushing us out,” Bradley said. “We were promised a rent freeze and fought for a rent freeze, and now we are getting what we were promised.”

During the vote, audience members shouted over board members.

The power to accomplish Mamdani’s goal rested with the independent board, but New York mayors appoint its members. Mamdani was able to appoint six of nine board members during his first several months in office.

The decision also represents a major victory for both Mamdani and the democratic socialist movement, which also swept several high-profile congressional and state legislative races in New York City on Tuesday.

Last week in Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George, another democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary to become that city’s mayor. Lewis George also anchored her campaign around affordability issues, including the cost of housing.

Sumathy Kumar, director of New York State Tenant Bloc, an advocacy organization, said the board’s decision will be “life changing” for an estimated 2.4 million city residents who live in rent-stabilized apartments. Those tenants have faced rent increases of about 3 percent each year since 2022.

“It is going to mean they are going to have basic stability, can buy groceries without worrying, can care for children, buy medicine,” said Kumar, a former co-chair of New York City Democratic Socialists of America, adding: “this is one less cost that New Yorkers have to worry about.”

But the board’s vote followed a day of drama in which one of its members resigned, telling others on the board they were “ignoring” evidence of landlords struggling to keep pace with inflation.

“Please understand me when I tell you that a freeze does not help the people it claims to protect,” Christina Smyth, who had been appointed by former mayor Eric Adams (D), said in her resignation letter. “It widens the gap between what a building costs to operate and what it is allowed to collect. … When these buildings fail, it is not the people who cast these votes who pay the price.”

Kenny Burgos, the head of the New York Apartment Association, said tenants of rent-stabilized units will suffer because apartment building owners will no longer be able to afford to properly maintain their properties. Many building owners are facing crushing costs, including high utility bills, insurance premiums and property tax bills, he said.

“When you tack on a zero percent increase, with no knowledge of what costs will be over the next one or two years, you absolutely will have more buildings fall into financial distress and subsequently foreclosures and bankruptcies,” Burgos said.

The issue of maintenance is so dire that the New York Apartment Association estimates the city has 50,000 rent-stabilized “ghost apartments” that landlords decide to leave vacant because they don’t believe they can recoup their costs if they rent them out.

About 100,000 rent-stabilized apartments are already in financial distress, according to Rent Guidelines Board data.

Kumar, with the New York State Tenant Bloc, said the city has programs to help struggling landlords recover their losses and even pay for upkeep of rent-stabilized apartments. But Kumar said some landlords “might face consequences” for holding too much debt.

“There are too many landlords that have been engaged in extremely risky business practices, have taken out extremely over leveraged mortgages,” Kumar said.

Before the board’s vote Thursday evening, the New York Apartment Association highlighted the plight of one building owner in East New York.

The woman, who inherited the seven-unit building from her parents, said she charges tenants between $1,191 and $1,412 per month for their apartments.

The woman, who asked not to be identified so she could speak frankly about her finances, said those monthly rents equal about $104,000 annually. But the woman says her costs, including a $14,000 water bill, now total about $105,000 annually.

“If they do this rent freeze, my building my go into foreclosure and this is sad,” the woman said, her voice quivering with emotion. “I am trying to keep my parents’ legacy alive and I feel I may fail due to a rent freeze. ”

The post New York City passes rent freeze, in line with Mamdani campaign promise appeared first on Washington Post.

In 1951, after failing to follow direct orders from President Harry Truman and publicly criticizing the administration’s China policy, General Douglas MacArthur was relieved of his command and forced to retire. On April 11, 1951, Truman issued a public statement explaining exactly why he had fired MacArthur.

In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, with the approval of President George W. Bush, fired both the secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, and the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Michael Mosely, for their failure to properly oversee the Air Force’s nuclear mission. On June 5, 2008, Gates held a press conference to explain his decision.

Every president and secretary of defense has the right and, moreover, the responsibility to remove officers who are failing to meet the high standards expected of senior leaders. But when crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made.

In recent months, President Trump, upon advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has relieved or forced the retirement of some of the finest officers that have ever served this nation. I have personally worked with most of them in combat. I can tell you from experience that Generals C. Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J. P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through. And this week, in an egregious decision, the president forced General Chris Donahue to step down from his position in command of U.S. Army Europe. Donahue is without question one of the most brilliant officers I know. He is strategically focused, tactically aggressive, personally courageous, exceptionally thoughtful in his planning and execution, and compassionate with his troops. He has the respect of every man and woman who ever served with him—and you can put me at the top of that list.

What is particularly concerning about these firings is the effect the dismissals will have on the officer ranks. Throughout my time as a senior officer, I never hesitated to provide my best military advice to the secretary or the president even when that advice ran contrary to their stated position. Never once did I fear that by providing my advice I would be fired or asked to retire early. Not only was it my obligation to be forthcoming, but it was also the expectation of those leaders that I would be brutally candid. Hopefully, that level of honest engagement kept the secretary and the president from making poor military decisions. However, these recent firings raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.

If Secretary Hegseth is trying to “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military,” as he has said, then the unplanned departure of these senior leaders will do just the opposite and may leave the president and the secretary without the experienced voices they need to make the best military decisions. Members of Congress should demand answers. The American people should demand answers. The future of our national security depends on it.

The post Americans Deserve Answers From Hegseth appeared first on The Atlantic.

Miller claimed during an interview with Fox News anchor Will Cain that immigrants in cities like New York City come from countries that “would have never developed the combustion engine or airplanes” if it weren’t for contact with “the West.”

His comments were part of a rant about democratic socialists who are running for congressional seats and recently won Democratic primaries. Fox News displayed “Is Socialism the Future of the Dem Party?” under Miller while he spoke. Although Cain told Miller his comments were “very well said,” the response from online critics struck a different tone.

“Stephen Miller talks like America was built by pure-blood geniuses instead of generations of immigrants doing the work MAGA now looks down on,” wrote progressive news personality Alex Cole on X.

“When Stephen Miller’s own family came here, his intellectual predecessors saw them as backward [and] shifty Jews who were unable to ever assimilate to this country, and who would never be real Americans,” immigration policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick reacted.

Former pro tennis player turned political commentator Martina Navratilova attacked Miller, writing, “He really is such a pompous, ignorant f—”

Progressive blogger Matthew Shochat simply pointed out, “the combustion engine was not developed in the US.”

The post Stephen Miller ridiculed after ‘pompous’ rant about immigrants on Fox News appeared first on Raw Story.

Its flashy new MacBook Neo is up $100, now at $699. Meanwhile, the MacBook Air gets a $200 price hike, now starting at $1,299. That still gets you a meaty configuration, with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, but it hurts coming just a few months after the refresh of this laptop.

The MacBook Pro’s increase is the most substantial. It’s up nearly $400 with a starting price of $1,999, which is a 20 percent increase. That comes with twice the storage of the MacBook Air, but remember: it uses the same M5 chip under the hood. There hasn’t been such a wide price gap between the Pro and Air models in many years.

But there’s a bright spot in all the doom and gloom. The announcement landed right in the middle of Amazon Prime Day (which is now four days), and there are a few discounts that are now looking even more tantalizing. As of now, you can still buy the 13-inch MacBook Air for $949 on sale, which is now $350 off the price Apple is selling it for. Even the $590 MacBook Neo is looking mighty attractive now that it’s $110 off the full price.

The craziest deal, though, is on the base MacBook Pro. It’s not even marked as on sale on Amazon, but at $1,549, it’s $450 off Apple’s price. I don’t suggest you automatically buy this for the savings alone, but if you already had your eye on this model, now’s the time.

I should mention that MacBooks aren’t the only products being affected by Apple’s price increases. While iPhones haven’t been affected yet, iMacs and Mac Studios have gone up in price, as well as the entire iPad lineup. Here are the new prices:

• Base iPad: $449 (up from $349)
• iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)
• iPad Air (11-inch): $749 (up from $599)
• iPad Air (13-inch): $949 (up from $749)
• iPad Pro (11-inch): $1,199 (up from $999)
• iPad Pro (13-inch): $1,499 (up from $1,299)

Similar to the MacBook, there are few really solid iPad deals to counteract these price increases. The base iPad is $299 on Amazon right now, while the iPad mini is $500.

The context for all these higher prices is the component shortage that has been rocking the tech industry through most of this year.

In line with the rest of the economy, memory manufacturers have moved to fully supporting AI data centers, leaving the consumer tech market scrambling for access to chips. It was originally presumed that Apple, which produces devices in very high volumes, might have enough sway there to force memory manufacturers to play ball. But clearly even Apple eventually had to succumb to the skyrocketing prices.

We don’t know how long these deals will stick around. Amazon typically sells some Apple products for slightly less than what they cost at Apple’s retail website. But it’s possible that corresponding price spikes could come to these Amazon listings in the near future as well. It’s also possible that they may stick around for a bit longer. Either way, Amazon prices will eventually adjust to match Apple’s.

The post This Is Probably Your Last Chance to Buy a Cheap MacBook for a While appeared first on Wired.

Venezuela was struck with a pair of deadly earthquakes Wednesday evening and Thursday morning that brought significant shaking to the northern coast of Japan. Earlier in the week residents in the U.S. state of California experienced a moderate earthquake, and at the start of June, 37 people in the Philippines died in a quake near Mindanao.

Many nations have developed systems for alerting people seconds before shaking begins. Even in countries like Venezuela that do not have such systems, Google Android Earthquake Alerts can send warnings.

Here’s what to know:

Warning systems are used around the world

Several countries have Early Earthquake Warnings — sometimes shortened to EEW — including the United States, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Romania, China, Italy and Taiwan, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Venezuela does not have a national EEW. Wednesday evening’s back-to-back 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes were among the strongest to strike the country in more than a century.

Still, some people in Venezuela received warnings seconds or even minutes before the shaking began through Google’s Android Earthquake Alerts system.

The warning system relies on crowdsourced data from the sensors in individual cellphones to detect seismic events and send warnings to other phone users in the area. It has greatly expanded since it rolled out in 2020 with 250 million people receiving alerts in 2020, to over 2.5 billion today, according to Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab.

It alerts about 60 earthquakes each month to an average of 18 million phones, according to Allen’s website.

Pericles Sánchez, a 39-year-old Venezuelan writer in Caracas, received an earthquake warning on his Android phone minutes before the earthquake reached his home, allowing him time to run outside. Sánchez said his family’s house was not damaged.

“It wasn’t until we were already outside that we started to feel it,” Sánchez said.

Diogenes López, 36, a Venezuelan migrant, said an earthquake alert app on his phone alerted him of the quakes in his homeland even though he now lives in Bogota, Colombia. Having previously lived in Chile, where earthquake warning systems are widely used, he immediately zoomed in on the map and realized the epicenter was near his hometown.

“My mind went straight to the worst,” López said. “All my family is there.”

His sister eventually managed to send a message saying the family was safe.

“Venezuela doesn’t have the earthquake culture you see in countries like Chile or Japan. People aren’t used to these kinds of events and don’t always know how to react,” he said, adding that he worried Venezuela’s deteriorating buildings would not withstand much.

Earthquake warning systems are fairly new

On the U.S. West Coast, the USGS operates an early warning system called ShakeAlert for California, Oregon and Washington that alerts in multiple ways, including through a California-run app called MyShake. Launched in 2019, it has since sent 6.8 million alerts for 194 earthquakes.

Over 4 million people were alerted to Wednesday’s quake, said Robert de Groot, a USGS scientist.

“It’s always good to have more than one way of getting alerts. It’s the reason why you carry a spare tire in your car or carry some small bills in your wallet because the ATM may not work,” he said.

The first public EEW was launched in 1991 in Mexico, and today people are warned of large quakes through broadcast stations, phone apps and public alarm systems. Mexico City also holds earthquake drills to practice how to respond to an earthquake.

Japan expanded its earthquake warning system to cover the ocean floor after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that killed more than 22,000 people and triggered a catastrophic meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Japan’s Seafloor Observation Network for Earthquakes and Tsunamis, or S-Net, uses thousands of miles of underwater cables and sensors to directly monitor the offshore subduction zone where tectonic plates meet. The system is considered the most sophisticated in the world, and it has increased warning times for earthquakes by about 20 seconds, and made tsunami warnings as much as 20 minutes faster.

Most systems rely on sensors and cellphones or public alarms

Earthquakes generate a few types of movement “waves:” P-waves travel fastest and cause smaller vibrations in the earth. Larger, slower S-waves come next, creating more dangerous earth-shaking movements. L-waves come last and are the most destructive.

Google’s Android earthquake warning system relies on the accelerometers in individual cellphones, which are the same sensors that flip the screen when a phone is turned sideways. If a stationary Android phone detects a P-wave, it sends a signal to Google’s detection center, which then analyzes data from other phones in the region. That crowdsourced data is used to confirm the earthquake and send alerts.

Most EEWs use seismometers and other sensors to detect those waves, and then transmit that information to regional networks where the data is used to determine an initial location and estimated magnitude within seconds. If the intensity of the earthquake reaches a certain threshold, alerts go out to the areas likely to be affected.

In the U.S., those alerts are sent through multiple means including the public Wireless Emergency Alert system, various phone apps or regional public warning systems.

Some people might get multiple alerts for the same event, and others — particularly those in rural areas — might not get any.

The closer to the quake, the shorter the warning time

The electronic signals used to detect the shaking and transmit the warnings move at the speed of light, much faster than seismic waves can travel through the ground. It’s sort of like a rainstorm — the further away someone is from a lighting strike, the longer it will take before they hear the accompanying thunder.

People closest to the epicenter will get the shortest warning times, or may not even get the warning until heavy shaking has already begun. People farther away may have more time to prepare — though it’s typically only seconds.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters

California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn California Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X California Post Opinion California Post Newsletters: Sign up here! California Post App: Download here! Home delivery: Sign up here!Page Six Hollywood: Sign up here!

The post Inside California’s early earthquake warning system as NorCal, Japan, Venezuela rattled appeared first on New York Post.

It was part of a scheme to “squeeze every drop of value” from Red Lobster for the benefit of its then-owner, seafood giant Thai Union Group Pcl, according to a previously unreported lawsuit. The suit against Thai Union and certain executives, brought on behalf of creditors that were owed about $295 million when the chain filed for bankruptcy in 2024, demands a jury trial to determine monetary damages.

Thai Union pushed Red Lobster to purchase more and more of its shrimp on terms that “made no economic sense” for the chain, the suit alleges. That turned its shrimp promotion, “a successful legacy Red Lobster strategy” to pull in customers, into “a car crash.”

Thai Union, which has faced accusations of mismanagement ever since Red Lobster’s bankruptcy, has denied wrongdoing. But the lawsuit, filed last month in a Florida court by a creditor-owned trust, contains new claims of how the Bangkok-based seafood giant allegedly bungled the chain’s operations. Some of those details are based on interviews with Red Lobster employees, the suit says.

Neither Thai Union nor its U.S.-based lawyers responded to requests for comment. In 2024, the company said it disputed all statements about itself and its relationship to Red Lobster. Red Lobster didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Thai Union catches, processes and sells about $4 billion worth of seafood annually under brands including Chicken of the Sea. In 2016, it bought a minority stake in Red Lobster to start building a direct-to-consumer channel. Four years later, it led a buyout of the chain and obtained majority control, according to the lawsuit.

‘Losing Money’

Red Lobster had suffered for years from mounting competition, and forced closures during the pandemic decimated its business. “It soon became clear that Red Lobster was losing money faster than it could turn a profit for its new owners,” the lawsuit says.

Thai Union dispatched several representatives to Red Lobster’s headquarters in Orlando, Fla. One of them was Paul Kenny, a restaurant executive and Thai Union shareholder, who made clear to Red Lobster’s senior management that he, not Chief Executive Officer Kelli Valade, was in charge, the lawsuit claims.

Valade soon resigned, citing Kenny’s alleged interference, the complaint says. Kenny was named interim CEO in August 2022. He was assisted by Scott Solar, a Thai Union employee who was Kenny’s “right-hand man,” the suit says.

Kenny and Solar didn’t respond to requests for comment sent via LinkedIn and email.

Under their supervision, “Thai Union took control of shrimp purchasing in part by embedding its own operatives in Red Lobster’s decision-making process,” the suit says. Kenny interfered with the “cadence and process for awarding supplier contracts” and would “often remark that Red Lobster ‘owed’ it to Thai Union to purchase its products exclusively.”

During a 2023 review, Kenny banned a longtime Red Lobster supplier for a year, leaving Thai Union as the chain’s sole provider of nearly half of all types of shrimp, the suit says. The decision ran counter to Red Lobster’s policy of having multiple suppliers and “enabled Thai Union to charge Red Lobster significantly more for shrimp than the going market rate.”

Bloomberg has previously reported that Red Lobster started buying from Thai Union at above-market rates, bypassing normal procurement procedures and without securing a backup supplier.

Temporary Promotion

For years, Red Lobster had run temporary bottomless-shrimp promotions. In May 2023, Kenny unilaterally decided to make it permanent and include premium shrimp, and directed marketing staff to promote it, the suit says.

Customers clamored for the offer. But that didn’t offset “the losses incurred by offering premium shrimp at such a low price,” and the deal was implemented too quickly, causing shrimp shortages at many restaurants, the suit claims.

The promotion helped shift “customers away from more profitable, higher-ticket menu items, which resulted in customers spending less money during each visit,” all for the benefit of Thai Union, the suit says.

Later that year, Red Lobster defaulted on a loan from Fortress Investment Group, which then effectively took control of the chain’s board. Thai Union declined to put additional money into the chain and said in January 2024 that it would divest from the company. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024 and is now owned by an investment group led by Fortress. Fortress declined to comment.

Many of these allegations echo earlier claims made by Jonathan Tibus, a turnaround specialist who served as CEO of Red Lobster from early 2024 until it exited bankruptcy later that year. In court filings, he alleged that the decision to make the $20 “Ultimate Endless Shrimp” permanent cost the company $11 million and saddled it “with burdensome supply obligations,” particularly with Thai Union.

The trust filed the suit on behalf of vendors, food distributors and other unsecured creditors. It seeks redress for Thai Union’s “self-dealing and exploitation of Red Lobster.” It’s also looking to unwind $32 million in transactions it claims Thai Union and other entities forced Red Lobster to enter into in 2023.

Red Lobster is now roughly two years into a turnaround effort under CEO Damola Adamolekun. It revived the shrimp promotion in April, with insiders citing its benefits on a limited-time basis as the struggling chain looks to lure diners.

This time, the company is using a different set of vendors to source the shrimp.

Ronalds-Hannon, Randles and Melin write for Bloomberg.

The post Endless shrimp deal was scheme to squeeze Red Lobster, suit says appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Those who received IV infusions in the morning had their cancer kept at bay for twice as long as those who got it in the afternoon, according to the results from a clinical trial in China and published in the journal Nature Medicine in February. The study also reported that the patients lived nearly twice as long.

Several oncologists said that in recent months they and their hospitals had received a flurry of calls from patients inquiring about switching to morning infusions.

But on Wednesday, Nature Medicine retracted the study, citing a list of inconsistencies and irregularities in the trial’s design and results.

“It was too good to be true,” said Dr. Toni Choueiri, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who helped conduct the post-publication review that led to the retraction.

Among the issues that the journal cited in its retraction notice: Records that were supposed to be locked before the study started were changed midway through. There were discrepancies between the Chinese version of the study’s plan and the translated version. Every patient remained treated and tracked in the study’s first year, and no one dropped out because of side effects — highly unusual in an oncology study. And unusual patterns were found in the timing of follow-up scans.

“Due to the amount and nature of the problems identified, the editors no longer have confidence in the integrity of the results,” the journal said.

Most of the study’s 28 authors were in China, with several collaborators in Europe. The study was funded by the Chinese government.

China has been pumping money into its hospitals and drug companies, fueling a surge of patents, publications and new clinical trials. In just a few years, the country has rapidly transformed into a powerhouse in drug development, a shift that some U.S. officials, doctors and executives see as a threat to longstanding American dominance in the field.

China’s critics often question the reliability of its biomedical research. Experts said that, similar to studies in the United States, China’s research output spans a wide range in quality: Some Chinese scientists run their studies at the most meticulous standards. Others were said to cut corners.

Dr. Yongchang Zhang, the study’s senior author, said in a statement that an internal review had “confirmed that part of the study execution and manuscript preparation might not reach the standards for publication in a high-impact journal.”

Dr. Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese hospital where the study was conducted, added: “We acknowledge these shortcomings and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to the journal and its readers.” He did not provide an explanation for the problems cited by the journal.

The study had enrolled 210 patients with advanced lung cancer at Hunan Cancer Hospital in Changsha, a city in south-central China. Patients were randomly assigned to receive infusions of an immunotherapy — Merck’s blockbuster drug Keytruda or Tyvyt, which is not approved in the United States — either before or after 3 p.m.

The study reported that tumors did not progress for 11 months in patients who received the earlier infusions, compared with six months for those given the later infusions. Patients receiving the earlier infusions lived for 28 months, compared with 17 months for those infused later in the day.

Those “were numbers we usually associate with new blockbuster drugs, not scheduling decisions,” wrote Dr. Gilberto Lopes, an oncologist at the University of Miami. And rescheduling a patient “costs nothing,” he noted.

Dr. Anil Makam, an epidemiologist and health services researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said such a drastic benefit, if real, would have prompted infusion clinics to overhaul staffing and scheduling to shift appointments to earlier in the day.

“If we believed the effects, it would be malpractice not to,” he said.

But within days after the study’s publication in Nature Medicine, online sleuths and physicians like Dr. Makam began raising concerns on social media and in blog posts. Less than three weeks after the study was published, the journal published an editor’s note saying it was investigating the issues.

In a statement on Thursday, Dr. João Monteiro, chief editor of Nature Medicine, which is published by Springer Nature, said, “We are grateful to the research community for bringing these concerns to our attention.”

Some scientists have long been intrigued by the idea of harnessing the body’s circadian rhythms to try to make drugs more effective or less toxic. For example, enzymes that the body uses to break down certain medicines are more abundant at certain times of day.

But critics of the Chinese study argued that immunotherapy works very differently from fast-acting drugs like Tylenol. The drug Keytruda lingers in the body and takes effect over several weeks. The study did not identify a biological reason for a difference in treatment timing that would produce such a significant benefit.

“There wasn’t any sound scientific rationale behind it,” said Dr. Roy Herbst, the incoming director of the Dartmouth Cancer Center in New Hampshire and Vermont.

In March, a team led by European researchers reported the findings of an analysis that looked at whether more than 3,000 cancer patients across eight studies had received immunotherapy in the morning or the afternoon. Their study, funded by the drugmaker Roche, which sells a number of cancer drugs, concluded that timing was “unlikely to be a critical determinant” of how well patients did.

Other studies looking back at outcomes have found an association between the time of day that patients receive a cancer immunotherapy and how well they fare. But the why remains unclear.

Doctors said it was possible that more energetic, healthier patients might opt for morning slots. Poorer or rural patients who live far from an infusion center — and tend to fare worse — might ask for afternoon slots because they need to spend the morning traveling to their appointment.

The post ‘Too Good to Be True’: A Chinese Study on Timing Cancer Therapy Is Retracted appeared first on New York Times.