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Kennedy Center to close for two years for renovations, Trump says

BBC News

The Kennedy Center in Washington DC will be closed for a two-year renovation beginning in July, President Donald Trump has announced. In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump said the centre would close on 4 July this year in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country. The move follows several artists cancelling performances at the storied institution after it was recently renamed as the Trump Kennedy Center. Shortly after taking office, the president fired several of the board members at the centre and replaced them with allies, who then voted to make Trump chairman of the board. The new board renamed the institution the Donald J Trump and the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in December.


'Melania' buried with low critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, scores 99% with verified audience

FOX News

Melania Trump documentary sparks controversy with stark divide on Rotten Tomatoes as critics panned the documentary as "propaganda" despite it scoring 99% with the "verified audience."


Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game

The New Yorker

He catches nascent changes in the political weather. "During early, he kept telling me, 'Crime--there's something here,' " DeBoo told me. DeBoo studied the latest crime statistics and saw nothing unusual. He brushed off the worry. Then new numbers came out, showing a large pandemic spike in shoplifting and car theft, and concerns about crime exploded into the headlines. Last March, judging the winds, Newsom launched a podcast, "This Is Gavin Newsom."


The Information Networks That Connect Venezuelans in Uncertain Times

WIRED

The people of Venezuela have spent years learning resilience in the face of censorship, disinformation, and repression. They now rely on those tools more than ever. In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3, the roar of bombs dropping from the sky announced the US military attack on Venezuela, waking the sleeping residents of La Carlota, in Caracas, a neighborhood adjacent to the air base that was a target of Operation Absolute Resolve. Marina G.'s first thought, as the floors, walls, and windows of her second-story apartment shook, was that it was an earthquake. Her cat scrambled and hid for hours, while the neighbors' dogs began to bark incessantly.


'Trauma does not define us': Living with loss in wartime Ukraine

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' 'Trauma does not define us': Living with loss in wartime Ukraine She pauses, looking up at the photograph fixed to the gravestone. His face bears a striking resemblance to hers.


Major US shipping platform left customer data wide open to hackers

FOX News

Bluspark Global shipping platform vulnerabilities exposed decades of freight data after researcher Eaton Zveare discovered five critical flaws in the Bluvoyix system.


Amazon Prime settlement could put money back in your pocket

FOX News

Amazon agrees to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC allegations over Prime enrollment practices and difficult cancellation processes, with $1.5 billion for consumer refunds.


Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI trade secrets to benefit China

Los Angeles Times

A federal jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding, 38, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets after an 11-day trial in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.


Driverless Waymo vehicle strikes child in California

FOX News

An autonomous vehicle in California hit a student near an elementary school, but there were no injuries reported, according to the Santa Monica Police Department.


Inside the marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women

MIT Technology Review

New research details how Civitai lets users buy and sell tools to fine-tune deepfakes the company says are banned. Civitai--an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz--is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana University, looked at people's requests for content on the site, called "bounties." The researchers found that between mid-2023 and the end of 2024, most bounties asked for animated content--but a significant portion were for deepfakes of real people, and 90% of these deepfake requests targeted women. The debate around deepfakes, as illustrated by the recent backlash to explicit images on the X-owned chatbot Grok, has revolved around what platforms should do to block such content.