Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Why are fans boycotting Neutrogena after Hayden Panettiere's death? Panettiere said the skincare brand tried to drop her after she spoke publicly about postpartum depression. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.

FEMA's'Shadow Administrator' Was Paid by a DOGE Member's Startup for Months Details from recent court filings show that DOGE's influence within government--and potential conflicts of interest--extend further than previously known. An outside contractor once described as the "shadow administrator" of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was actually working, for at least part of her time in government, for a company owned by a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, according to recent court filings. The filings show that from fall 2025 to spring of this year, Kara Voorhies, a special government employee and contractor whose work at FEMA has drawn scrutiny from Congress as well as the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, was subcontracted by a company owned by Kyle Schutt, a DOGE operative whose own company was contracting with DHS. The documents were filed in a lawsuit contesting President Donald Trump's vast cuts to the federal workforce. Previous filings have indicated that for several months, authority over some of the spending operations of FEMA, a constituent agency of DHS, was seemingly illegally influenced by Voorhies.

Why $370bn tech group Palantir pays 1.4 percent tax rate: Report Palantir Technologies, the United States data analytics and artificial intelligence company which has contracts with the country's military and intelligence apparatus, has "engineered its corporate structure" to pay no US federal corporate income tax, according to a new report. The study by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) comes as Palantir reports soaring revenues, driven partly by government contracts, while it faces continued criticism for providing technology to the Israeli military amid the genocide in Gaza. What does the report show? Earlier this week, Palantir reported second-quarter revenue of $1.94bn, up 93 percent from a year earlier. But despite its rapid growth, CICTAR said its global effective tax rate was just 1.4 percent in 2025.

Last month, more than a hundred Stanford students left their own graduation to protest Google's military contracts and deals with ICE. Two organizers, Amanda Campos and Eva Jones, tell us why. Are the kids all right? The answer to that question probably depends on your criteria. At the very least, I can tell you that some of them are most definitely very mad. The anger percolating among America's youth was on display this graduation season, as college students across the country booed and jeered several high-profile commencement speakers who dared discuss--let alone extol the benefits of-- artificial intelligence . While AI use among college kids is widespread, so too is the fear and mistrust about what the technology might mean for the future. A recent Gallup poll found that Gen Z sentiment toward AI has significantly declined, with only 22 percent of respondents expressing excitement about the tech--and anxiety around AI affecting 42 percent of them. Among the commencement speech chaos, though, one school stood out to me: Stanford University. The California-based institution, long a key hub for Silicon Valley recruiting and a pipeline into elite tech gigs, this year saw more than a hundred students walk out of Google CEO Sundar Pichai's remarks to graduates. Ironically, Pichai didn't explicitly mention AI in his address at all.

He studied drones for three months - and yet they still threw him into a frontal assault, into the meat grinder, said Valery Averin's foster mother Oksana Afanayeva. The 23-year-old is among the first Russian students known to have been killed in Ukraine after signing up as part of a new large-scale drive to recruit young people from universities and colleges into Russia's drone forces. He had never even served in the army, Afanasyeva complained. The campaign to encourage students at universities, technical colleges and vocational schools to sign army contracts began early this year, as Russia sought to sustain its war effort into a fifth year. It has focused particularly on those struggling academically or considering taking a break from their studies.

Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast You can't get a breath of fresh air ... without us knowing. Thanks to the rise of AI, a new kind of surveillance camera has rapidly proliferated across the United States. Typically referred to as automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, they're most often mounted along roadways, where they log the movements of cars which pass through their field of vision. Though various companies offer them, the most well known come from Flock Security, and the company has consequently been a lightning rod for public opinion. Shocking exactly nobody, there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.

The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates. If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it's like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom's Met Office. Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America's 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation's capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.

ICE agents detain a suspect during a targeted enforcement operation in Lyons, Illinois, on 26 January. ICE agents detain a suspect during a targeted enforcement operation in Lyons, Illinois, on 26 January. 'We should be worried': report sheds light on ICE's booming arsenal of hi-tech surveillance tools Spending on government contracts with tech firms that use AI-powered tools to track immigrants has soared to record levels under Trump 2.0, report says A new report sheds light on the unprecedented growth of the US government's immigration surveillance arsenal, revealing fresh details about how spending on technology and AI tools to find and track migrants has soared to record levels during Donald Trump's second term. They found the money awarded to these firms doubled from 2024 to 2025, to just over $310m - and in 2026, that number soared to a record $513m. Researchers traced these contracts as far back as 2013, when they hovered under $50m, and found a steady increase over time - with a bigger jump over the last two years.

The ability to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs is highly desirable. However, existing methods often struggle with balancing unlearning efficacy and retain model utility, and lack controllability at inference time to emulate base model behavior as if it had never seen the unlearned data. In this paper, we propose LUNAR, a novel unlearning method grounded in the Linear Representation Hypothesis and operates by redirecting the representations of unlearned data to activation regions that expresses its inability to answer. We show that contrastive features are not a prerequisite for effective activation redirection, and LUNARachieves state-of-the-art unlearning performance and superior controllability. Specifically, LUNARachieves between 2.9 and 11.7 improvement in the combined unlearning efficacy and model utility score (Deviation Score) across various base models and generates coherent, contextually appropriate responses post-unlearning. Moreover, LUNAR effectively reduces parameter updates to a single down-projection matrix, a novel design that significantly enhances efficiency by 20 and robustness. Finally, we demonstrate that LUNARis robust to white-box adversarial attacks and versatile in real-world scenarios, including handling sequential unlearning requests.

Crowding the gates of a major health care conference, protesters called for Palantir to be booted out of the UK's National Health Service over privacy concerns and political grievances. Protesters wearing hospital gowns and wielding signs gathered outside a UK health care conference on Thursday to object to a deal between the country's National Health Service and American software company Palantir . At 8 am local time, the group, around 80 people in total, crowded the entryway to the NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester. They wanted to appeal to NHS leadership to terminate a contract worth up to $440 million over concerns around national security, data privacy, and the company's political affiliations . The contract, which includes access to Palantir's data analytics and artificial intelligence services, is intended to run until 2031 but includes a break clause that permits the government to withdraw the agreement next February.