The latest photo dump from Democrats in the House Oversight Committee includes more famous men and upsetting quotes written on a woman's body. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform published additional photos they received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous financier and convicted sex offender. The release follows another one from last week, which committee Democrats said were pulled from a set of over 95,000 photos. The photos include more candid shots of powerful and famous men, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks, film director Woody Allen, professor and author Noam Chomsky, and Steve Bannon . The release did not include information about where or when the photos were taken.

Instacart settles Federal Trade Commission's claim it deceived US shoppers Instacart has agreed to pay $60m in refunds to settle allegations brought by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the online grocery delivery platform deceived consumers about its membership programme and free delivery offers. According to court documents filed in San Francisco on Thursday, Instacart's offer of "free delivery" for first orders was illusory because shoppers were charged other fees, the FTC alleged. "The FTC is focused on monitoring online delivery services to ensure that competitors are transparently competing on price and delivery terms," said Christopher Mufarrige, who leads the FTC's consumer protection work. An Instacart spokesperson said the company flatly denies any allegations of wrongdoing, but that the settlement allows the company to focus on shoppers and retailers. "We provide straightforward marketing, transparent pricing and fees, clear terms, easy cancellation, and generous refund policies -- all in full compliance with the law and exceeding industry norms," the spokesperson said.

That would have been nice from the start. Several LG smart TV owners, including some staff, were surprised to find what looked like suddenly installed on their devices earlier this week. After all the raised eyebrows, a representative from LG has reached out to say that the company will take steps to allow users to delete the shortcut icon if they wish. According to the spokesperson, the Copilot icon is a shortcut for launching the AI chatbot in the TV's web browser rather than an application embedded in the appliance. We've asked for more specifics about when people will be able to get rid of the Copilot prompt, but have not received a response at this time.

China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. As early electric cars age out, hundreds of thousands of used batteries are flooding the market, fueling a gray recycling economy even as Beijing and big manufacturers scramble to build a more orderly system. In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand.

Though the two countries are now in a race to develop atomic technology, China's most advanced reactor was the result of collaboration with American scientists. This April, in a speech given at the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physicist Xu Hongjie announced a breakthrough. For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel. The reactor, which went online two years ago, was a feat in itself. It is still the only one of its kind in operation in the world, and has the potential to be both safer and more efficient than the water-cooled nuclear plants that dominate the industry. Now, Xu explained, his team had been able to refuel the reactor without shutting it down, demonstrating a level of mastery over their new system. As dazzling as that was, the timing of Xu's speech also freighted the topic with geopolitical import. Only a few months earlier, DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial-intelligence company, had set alarms ringing through the U.S. tech world when it became clear that the relatively small Chinese startup, operating under U.S. export controls, had created a large language model that rivalled anything devised by the behemoths of Silicon Valley.

Aston Villa have won nine games in a row in all competitions, but can they reach double figures by beating Manchester United on Sunday? Villa have gone behind in three of those games and haven't kept a clean sheet in their past four matches, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. But they have been so attacking and Morgan Rogers is absolutely flying. They just never seem to lie down. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 17, he takes on Zambian musician and rapper Sampa the Great. Sampa the Great's new single, Can't Hold Us, is out now and is included in the EAFC 26 video game. Do you agree with their scores?

It used to be just a sci-fi nightmare scenario, but today, AI phishing is real, and it's costing companies millions. We've already touched upon this one, but the Hong Kong phishing scam that targeted an employee at Arup deserves a deeper dive. The employee was tricked by deepfake versions of her CFO and colleagues into transferring HK 200 million across 15 transactions. The case has been widely reported and confirmed by the Hong Kong police. Every face and voice was AI-generated.

Has Trump failed to sell the Iran war to the world? Are US-Israeli attacks against Iran legal? Why did Trump fire Kristi Noem as DHS secretary? United States President Donald Trump is getting into the fusion power business through a $6bn merger of his social media firm and Google-backed TAE Technologies, just days after industry representatives urged federal funding. The all-stock deal, announced on Thursday, is an ambitious bet on the power boom spurred by artificial intelligence (AI) data centres and adds to the Trump family's growing roster of diverse ventures from cryptocurrency to real estate holdings and mobile services.

Capable of creating "nearly perfect" face swaps during live video chats, Hoatian has made millions, mainly via Telegram. But its main channel vanished after WIRED's inquiry into scammers using the app. The Chinese-language artificial intelligence app Haotian is so effective that it's made millions of dollars selling its face-swapping technology on Telegram . The service integrates easily with messaging platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat and claims that users can tweak up to 50 settings--including the ability to adjust things like cheekbone size and eye position--to help mimic the face they are impersonating. But while Haotian is a robust and versatile platform, researchers and WIRED's own analysis have found that the service has been marketing to so-called "pig butchering" scammers and those running online fraud operations in Southeast Asia.

The UK government says it will ban so-called nudification apps as part of efforts to tackle misogyny online. New laws - announced on Thursday as part of a wider strategy to halve violence against women and girls - will make it illegal to create and supply AI tools letting users edit images to seemingly remove someone's clothing. The new offences would build on existing rules around sexually explicit deepfakes and intimate image abuse, the government said. Women and girls deserve to be safe online as well as offline, said Technology Secretary Liz Kendall. We will not stand by while technology is weaponised to abuse, humiliate and exploit them through the creation of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes.