After serving a federal prison sentence for violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions, former crypto exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao has been pardoned by US president Donald Trump. US president Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. Zhao, widely known as CZ, pled guilty in November 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions. The plea formed part of a sweeping deal with the US Department of Justice, under which Binance was required to pay a record-breaking $4.3 billion penalty. Zhao ultimately spent four months in federal prison.

Andrew Barto (barto@cs.umass.edu) is Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a co-recipient of the 2024 ACM A.M Turing Award.

Ukraine's president has urged the European Union to back a plan to release billions of euros in frozen Russian cash to help fund the country's defence. As EU leaders met in Brussels, Volodymyr Zelensky said he hoped they would make a positive decision about using €140bn (£122bn) in Russian assets currently held in a Belgian clearing house. The controversial move would would be on top of sanctions the block has imposed on Russia - the latest on Thursday targeting the Kremlin's oil revenues. They followed US measures against Russia's oil industry earlier - the first time President Donald Trump has sanctioned Moscow as he grows frustrated over President Vladimir Putin's refusal to end the war. On Wednesday evening, the US president confirmed that a planned meeting with Putin in Budapest had been shelved indefinitely.

"Not affecting me at all, to be honest," a White House aide tells WIRED. WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 20: The facade of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. The demolition is part of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to build a ballroom reportedly costing $250 million on the eastern side of the White House. White House staffers don't appear to care all that much about the ongoing demolition of the East Wing occurring in the middle of the government shutdown . "Not affecting me at all, to be honest," a White House aide tells WIRED.

Mars may have a network of liquid water flowing through the frozen ground. All buried permafrost, on Earth and beyond, is expected to host narrow veins of liquid, and new calculations show on Mars, they could be big enough to support living organisms. "For Mars we always live on the edge of maybe habitable, maybe not, so I set out to do this research thinking maybe I can close this loop and say that it's very unlikely to have enough water and have it be arranged so that it's habitable for microbes," says Hanna Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. She and her colleagues used measurements of the soil composition on Mars to calculate how much of the icy soil could actually be liquid water and the size of the channels that water would run through. It is tricky to keep water liquid on Mars, because temperatures can get as low as -150 C (-240 F) on the planet.

With the NYC mayoral race coming to a close, Andrew Cuomo is courting right-wing creators. With only 13 days left before the New York City mayoral election, former governor Andrew Cuomo is partnering with some of the same influencers who helped President Donald Trump win the White House last year. Over the past week, right-wing creators like Logan Paul, the former vlogger turned podcaster and WWE wrestler, and Emily Austin, an influencer and sports commentator, have published content featuring Cuomo as a guest on their shows. The appearances have marked a new investment by Cuomo's team into cultivating attention online as a means of competing against the social media-savvy Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani . But instead of trying to cleave off Mamdani's online support, Cuomo appears to be trying to siphon off support from GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.

Early frameworks like the EU's AI Act focused on highly visible applications - banning high-risk uses in health, employment and law enforcement to prevent societal harms. But countries now target the underlying building blocks of AI. China restricts models to combat deepfakes and inauthentic content. Citing national security risks, the US controls the exports of the most advanced chips and, under Biden, even model weights - the "secret sauce" that turns user queries into results. These AI regulations are hiding in dense administrative language - "Implementation of Additional Export Controls" or "Supercomputer and Semiconductor End Use" bury the ledes. But behind this complex language is a clear trend: regulation is moving from AI applications to its building blocks.

Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pi...

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How much of Europe's oil still comes from Russia? A Russian drone has killed two Ukrainian journalists and wounded another in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, according to their outlet and the regional governor of the Donetsk region. Freedom Media, a state-funded news organisation, said on Thursday that Olena Gramova, 43, and Yevgen Karmazin, 33, had been killed by a Russian Lancet drone while in their car at a petrol station in the industrial city. Another reporter, Alexander Kolychev, was hospitalised after the attack. Freedom Media said that Gramova, a native of Yenakiieve in the Donetsk region, had originally trained as a "finance specialist", but turned to journalism in 2014, the year when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, and started arming a separatist movement in Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas.