What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? 'A corruption scandal may well end the Ukraine war' Russian drones attacked targets in Ukraine hours after the US and Kyiv announced revisions to a controversial peace plan proposed by Donald Trump. Speaking after talks in Geneva, US and Ukrainian officials agreed any deal should "fully uphold" Ukraine's sovereignty.

You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and builders developing what they call the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). It's a set of 50 machines--everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit maker--that are capable of building civilization from scratch and can be reconfigured however you see fit. It's all part of his ethos that life-changing technology should be available to all, not controlled by a select few. What it's like to find yourself in the middle of a conspiracy theory Last week, we held a subscribers-only Roundtables discussion exploring how to cope in this new age of conspiracy theories.

DoorDash confirmed a data breach exposing names, email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses of customers, delivery workers and merchants.

Eli Lilly's experimental obesity drug works differently than Ozempic and Wegovy, targeting amylin receptors for significant weight loss in a recent study.

Poisoning is a term most often associated with the human body and natural environments . But it is also a growing problem in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) - in particular, for large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude. In fact, a joint study by the UK AI Security Institute, Alan Turing Institute and Anthropic, published earlier this month, found that inserting as few as 250 malicious files into the millions in a model's training data can secretly "poison" it. So what exactly is AI poisoning? And what risks does it pose?

Google's Gemini Deep Research now scans Gmail, Drive and Chat content to support AI research, but users can disable these privacy features through Gmail settings.

Are tech companies using your private data to train AI models? Leading tech companies are in a race to release and improve artificial intelligence (AI) products, leaving users in the United States to puzzle out how much of their personal data could be extracted to train AI tools. Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp), Google and LinkedIn have all rolled out AI app features that have the capacity to draw on users' public profiles or emails. Google and LinkedIn offer users ways to opt out of the AI features, while Meta's AI tool provides no means for its users to say "no, thanks." Anthropic's AI hacking claims divide experts Posts warned that the platforms' AI tool rollouts make most private information available for tech company harvesting .

Earlier this year, I attended a shooting competition for queer, often trans, very online misfits. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. This isn't the story I set out to write. I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you're not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there--like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay--wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources--gun-loving trans people in Trump's America--in danger.

Megalithic monuments in the otherworldly Orkney Islands remain a fundamental part of the landscape. Sheep linger at the Stones of Stenness, the remnants of a ceremonial circle. The Stones of Stenness, a brood of lichen-encrusted megaliths in the far north of the British Isles, could be mistaken for a latter-day work of land art, one with ominous overtones. The stones stand between two lochs on the largest of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland. Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space. The monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" inevitably come to mind. Given that the stones were erected five thousand years ago by a culture that left no trace of its belief system, it is unwise to project modern aesthetics onto them. Still, they can be seen only with living eyes. During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky.

After the rapper's 1979 hit "Christmas Rappin'," his song "The Breaks" was the first rap single to go gold. In a rehearsal studio in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, Kurtis Blow was limbering up and getting loose. Earlier this year, his left arm swelled up abruptly, requiring four surgeries to resolve what was eventually diagnosed as deep-vein thrombosis. Blow usually holds the mike in his right hand when he raps, but he had to get his left arm going, he said, "because it's my'Throw your hands in the air' arm." Lithe at age sixty-six, Blow was dressed in leather cargo pants, a track jacket, and a black baseball cap with the words " above its brim. He was whipping himself into shape for a "Legends of Hip-Hop" concert to be held just after Thanksgiving at the Peacock Theatre, in downtown L.A. He will be on a stage that will also feature such foundational rappers as Big Daddy Kane, Doug E. Fresh, and two members of the Furious Five, Melle Mel and Scorpio. Blow's youngest son, Michael, the studio's owner, manned the d.j. The rapper's eldest, Kurtis, Jr., nodded his do-ragged head to the beat and offered counsel alongside his mother, Kurtis, Sr.,'s wife of forty-two years, Shirley. It has been forty-five years since the release of Blow's song "The Breaks," the first rap single to be certified gold. Blow had already scored a novelty hit, "Christmas Rappin'," at the end of 1979, the watershed year in which rap transitioned from clubs in the Bronx and Harlem to singles pressed on vinyl, chief among them "Rapper's Delight," by the Sugarhill Gang. "I had a singles deal with escalating options," Blow recalled. "I had to sell thirty thousand records in order to do another single.