Fireworks by Grucci has been in the pyrotechnics business for six generations. For America's 250th, Grucci fired dozens of shows, including one that covered the entire three-and-a-half-mile Vegas Strip. A few days before the Fourth of July, I was on the rooftop of a casino in Las Vegas, where I ran into the head electrician of the Eisenhower Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which is in Washington, D.C. The electrician, Thomas Benya, who is also a licensed pyrotechnician, had come to Vegas with a swarm of other pyrotechnicians, to set up, and set off, what was being billed as the nation's largest fireworks show. Back in D.C., President Donald Trump was claiming that show, around the National Mall, would be bigger, and that he would be giving a "really long" speech. Trump had been trying to muscle his name onto the Kennedy Center, and then, amid a series of staff departures and cancellations by performers, closed the place down for a "comprehensive revitalization project"; Benya, who enjoys "building art with people," and who has worked at the Kennedy Center for twenty years, since he was eighteen, told me, "It's been traumatic." Vegas seemed unlikely to offer respite. Three hundred and twenty-nine thousand visitors were in town, to celebrate America's two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, and all of them were on my elevator. It was a million degrees outside. On a different rooftop, on another day, a gloved woman whose T-shirt read " " paused while loading orange-strobe fireworks shells into three-inch mortars and told me, "When you've been around one hundred and twenty and above, this doesn't even feel like anything." The best sweaty person I saw in Vegas was an older woman with upswept black hair and bangs, wearing a lime-green fake chrysanthemum as plump as a grapefruit tucked behind her right ear, and carrying a Spanish fan. This was at a coffee shop in the Arts District, miles from the Strip. At the next table was a woman who also had black bangs, plus lip piercings and a tattoo on both wrists. She was engrossed in a book called "Fool's Errand," a fantasy novel about an assassin named FitzChivalry Farseer who, per a quick Google, has abandoned "self-imposed exile to rescue a missing prince and navigate perilous political waters." The woman wore an "Invader Zim" T-shirt: " " Belowground was the Vegas Loop--Elon Musk's idea.

Chick-fil-A customers in 10 states and D.C. experienced a data breach where hackers accessed accounts using stolen credentials from other sites through "credential stuffing." The attack exposed names, email addresses, and partial payment details, but wasn't due to Chick-fil-A's security being compromised directly. PCWorld recommends affected users change passwords immediately and use password managers to create unique, strong passwords for preventing future credential stuffing attacks. Sometimes you want a quick bite to eat. So you hop online, create an account for your favorite joint, and get to ordering. But a lot of people make a major mistake while doing this--which some Chick-fil-A customers just found out the hard way. On Wednesday, news broke about a Chick-fil-A data breach, with customers in ten states and the District of Columbia affected.

Palm Beach County authorities ask women to come forward after a man allegedly used the dating app Hinge to meet victims before a sexual battery arrest.

Tesla Says It's Building a Wheelchair-Accessible Robotaxi A Tesla representative at a DC hearing said the vehicle is "an active product being built." The Tesla Cybercab is not wheelchair accessible, but the company says it's actively developing a wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle. Tesla is building a wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a Tesla representative told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday. "We are in development for a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle," Tesla senior policy advisor India Herdman told members of the DC City Council on Monday, during a hearing focused on a controversial bill that could allow robotaxi services to operate in the District. "We know that paratransit can be very difficult, and people who are confined to wheelchairs permanently should still be able to move around freely, so that is an active product being built by Tesla in Texas," she said.

Power grid operators in the United States are warning that a dangerous heatwave could put more strain on an electric grid already under pressure from surging energy consumption. A stretch of extreme heat is expected to intensify across much of the central and eastern parts of the country this week, peaking from Tuesday through Thursday. Temperatures this week are forecasted to climb above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) from Boston to Washington, DC, pushing up demand for air conditioning. The heatwave coincides with two major events on the US calendar. Saturday's holiday marks the 250th anniversary of the US's independence, and millions are expected to gather for barbecues, parades and fireworks.

For America's 250th birthday, the U.S. government is hosting two major events hosted by rival groups. One got Trump, the other got bigger stars.

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Why the Reflecting Pool Is Full of Algae After Trump's Renovation Warm weather has fueled a bloom that US National Park Service workers are trying to kill using everything from hydrogen peroxide to nanobubbles ahead of July 4 celebrations. On Wednesday morning, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. The treatment is the latest attempt by the Interior Department to control an algae bloom that has turned the pool bright green, despite President Donald Trump's costly renovation to make it "American flag blue" in time for the nation's 250th anniversary . Hot temperatures and climate change are among the risk factors that could be driving the outbreak. The Trump administration spent more than $14 million to update the pool ahead of celebrations across the US capital .

Anthropic leaders flew to Washington, DC, to meet with White House officials on Monday. Trump administration officials concluded talks with Anthropic on Monday without lifting export controls that were imposed last week on the company's most advanced AI models in response to jailbreaking concerns, according to three people briefed on the matter. The administration continues to believe that there are ways to disable some of the guardrails on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, effectively allowing users to access the more powerful cybersecurity capabilities of the company's Mythos model, the people said. Anthropic has said for days that the administration's concerns are overblown, a position it reiterated in working group meetings held at the Commerce Department with government researchers from Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) and the Office of the National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, one of the people said. The meetings were also attended by Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who dialed in by conference call from the G7 summit in Evian, France.