The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday it had advised drugmakers to update the Covid vaccines to target the KP.2 strain, a descendant of the highly contagious JN.1 variant that began circulati
Arturo Casadevall is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has spent four decades investigating how fungi can both improve and
There is not enough testing for bird flu among people and animals in the US, says Dr Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – but he is wary o
In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH…
The climate cost of the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine was greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 175 countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency in addition to the mounting death toll and widespread destruction, research reveals. Russia’s…
The enormous loss of Palestinian life attendant to the Israeli military’s 8 June rescue of four hostages held by Hamas cries out for investigation. Hamas’s abduction and detention of these four civilians was a clear war crime, but that does not exempt the Israeli military from the duty to comply…
Samuel Alito, the US supreme justice at the center of a flag controversy that has called his impartiality into question, has said one side of the US’s bitter left v right ideological conflicts has to
South Korea’s military has said it fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers briefly crossed the border this week, amid rising tensions after Pyongyang sent rubbish-carrying balloons into the South and Seoul retaliated with a loudspeaker propaganda campaign. “Some North Korean soldiers working…
Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamenta
U.S. officials recently warned about pro-Russian hackers targeting poorly secured water systems around the country. While the U.S. was issuing this notice, the Russian government was advancing its own cyber measure: a final-stage bill to legalize white hat hacking. White hat hacking, sometimes…
People walk through cooling misters on June 4, 2024 in Las Vegas. Tens of millions of people from California to Texas are experiencing intense heat. New data shows that the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has hit a new record. John Locher/AP The amount of planet-warming…
Major news and tech media that have run fossil-fuel ads were largely staying quiet after the UN’s secretary general called for governments and companies to place bans on advertisements for coal, oil and gas. “Stop taking fossil-fuel advertising,” António Guterres implored in a major speech on…
New York state took novel legislative steps on Friday to limit children’s exposure to computer algorithmic social media feeds, passing two laws to protect children from social media content and to protect their privacy. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids Act requires social media…
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned that the spread of artificial intelligence technology multiplies the threat of nuclear war, and that humanity is now “on a knife’s edge” as dangers to its existence coalesce. Guterres’s warning is due to be shown on a recorded video to be played…
June 7 (Reuters) - The bird flu virus strain that infected a Texas dairy farm worker in March was lethal to ferrets in experiments designed to mimic the disease in humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease
The US economy added 272,000 jobs in May, a sign the labor market remained strong amid high interest rates, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday. The number of May jobs was far higher th
A notable chunk of people say they don't want to vote for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden in November, according to recent polling. Brendan Smialowskijim Watson/AFP via Getty Images With the November
The United Nations has added Israel to the global list of states and armed groups who have committed violations against children, according to the country’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan. News of Israel’s inclusion on the list follows eight months of war on Gaza, in which more than 13,000 children are…
Following massive customer pushback after it announced the new AI-powered Recall for Copilot+ PCs last month, Microsoft says it will update the feature to be more secure and require customers to opt in to enable it. To further improve the feature's privacy and security, the company will also require…
Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency. But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things: It has gotten big stuff right…
When Microsoft named its new Windows feature Recall, the company intended the word to refer to a kind of perfect, AI-enabled memory for your device. Today, the other, unintended definition of “recall”—a company's admission that a product is too dangerous or defective to be left on the market in its…
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The outbreak of avian flu in US cattle herds was reported to have reached Minnesota on Thursday when the state’s board of animal health said a farmer had reported more than 40 cows with signs of fever
Serial tech and digital privacy critic Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) laid into UnitedHealth Group's (UHG) CEO for appointing a CISO Wyden deemed "unqualified"– a decision he claims likely led to its ransom
In January, a man living on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula died of Alaskapox. Pictured is Bear Glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park on Sept. 1, 2015, in Seward, Alaska. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
A leading federal scientist in Canada has alleged he was barred from investigating a mystery brain illness in the province of New Brunswick and said he fears more than 200 people affected by the condition are experiencing unexplained neurological decline. The allegations, made in leaked emails to a…
Donald Trump has been found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The verdict came after a jury delibera
An ex-OpenAI board member disclosed new details about Sam Altman's brief ousting as CEO. Helen Toner said Altman lied to the board "multiple" times and was "withholding information." She said he didn't tell board members about ChatGPT's release, adding that they found out on Twitter. The former…
Just a few days after arriving at a hospital outside Rafah in the Gaza Strip, Dr Omar El-Taji – a urologist who usually works in Manchester – was woken up at 2am to operate on an urgent case. “A man in his 30s was brought in after his entire building was bombed,” he says. “He had an open wound to…
The former head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pre
Five members of Letzte Generation, Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil, have been charged with “forming a criminal organisation”, a move civil rights campaigners say could in effect criminalise futu
Google has released a new emergency security update to address the eighth zero-day vulnerability in Chrome browser confirmed to be actively exploited in the wild. The security issue was discovered int
Big tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned. Speaking with the Guar
These two links deserved highlighting beyond just being plonked into my normal list of links. They are both describing some of the chaos caused by the ongoing AI Bubble. One tackles what it’s doing to
Since its inception, the international criminal court (ICC) has charged 50 people, 47 of whom were African. Its investigations have also been overwhelmingly focused on war crimes and crimes against hu
The Cycle The history of AI goes in cycles, each of which looks at least a little bit like this: Scientists do some basic research and develop a promising novel mechanism, N. One important detail is that N has a specific name; it may or may not be carried out under the general umbrella of “AI…
Keith Hoodlet