Don't Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything Americans increasingly fantasize about a divorce between red and blue states--but they dread the thought of civil war. You can't have one without the other. It's become almost like a histamine response: After a shocking national event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or Donald Trump's deployment of the military to Los Angeles last June, mentions of the term " civil war " and calls for secession surge online. This kind of talk flared again in January, when two citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis, and governor Tim Walz mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to support local law enforcement. "I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?" Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic, invoking the battle that sparked the Civil War.

As the prediction market boom continues, backlash is growing, too, with Arizona filing criminal charges against Kalshi and public outcry after Polymarket traders threatened a journalist. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour posted a video on Wednesday of six men decked out in business casual doing push-ups on the sidewalk. "This is how Kalshi Q1 board meeting ended," he wrote on X. The board members are laughing and smiling in the video after their impromptu cardio session, and the mood is jubilant. The next day, it became clear that the team had ample reason to celebrate: Kalshi had just raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, making the company worth on paper roughly double what it was only a few months ago.

Last year, as FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, a civil servant overseeing West Coast stations privately pledged support, according to emails obtained by WIRED. A senior Federal Communications Commission official overseeing ABC-owned California stations privately offered to assist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's campaign last year against the Walt Disney Co. and, according to internal emails obtained by WIRED. On September 17, Carr threatened Disney with regulatory action regarding the Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prompting major station affiliates to drop the broadcast and forcing ABC to temporarily suspend the show. The email, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, was titled "personal note of support re Charlie Kirk ABC/Disney issue" and quoted Carr's remarks from an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr said during the interview.

The reported use of Claude in recent military operations has shifted the Overton window around A.I. in warfare--and sparked a battle between Anthropic and the Department of War. The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the escalating standoff between the A.I. company Anthropic and the Department of War. They consider recent reporting on the use of Claude--Anthropic's family of large language models--in military operations in Venezuela and Iran, and how that news has pushed the company's relationship with the Pentagon to a breaking point. They also explore how the tech industry is responding to the conflict between the Trump Administration and Anthropic, and the thorny question of whether A.I. should be subject to greater safeguards and more oversight than previous technological innovations. " The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. " The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil," by Bill McKibben " How Should We Remember the Hippies?

Machine unlearning (MU) empowers individuals with the'right to be forgotten' by removing their private or sensitive information encoded in machine learning models. However, it remains uncertain whether MU can be effectively applied to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly in scenarios of forgetting the leaked visual data of concepts.

Trump's new world order has become real and Europe is having to adjust fast Downtown Munich is best-known for chic shops and flashy fast cars but right now its streets are bedecked with posters advertising next generation drones. Europe's security under construction boasts the slogan on an eye-catching set of sleek black-and-white photographs, festooned across a scaffolding-clad church on one of this town's best known pedestrian boulevards. Such an unapologetic public display of military muscle would have been unimaginable here just a few years ago, but the world outside Germany is changing fast, and taking this country with it. The southern region of Bavaria has become Germany's leading defence technology hub, focusing on AI, drones and aerospace. People here, like most other Europeans, say they feel increasingly exposed - squeezed between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China to the east, and an increasingly unpredictable, former best pal, the United States, to the west.

Chris Christie claimed Sen. Lindsey Graham privately criticizes President Donald Trump despite publicly praising him, during a Friday appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher."

Russia has launched its most powerful blow against Ukraine's energy sector so far this year, according to the private energy company, DTEK. The combined missile and drone strikes which targeted power plants and infrastructure in Kyiv and multiple locations left the system operating with serious restrictions, it said. The strikes were launched as temperatures dropped to -20C (-4F) and left more than 1,000 tower blocks in the capital without heating once again and damaged a power plant in the eastern city of Kharkiv beyond repair. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia was choosing terror and escalation rather than diplomacy to end this war and called for maximum pressure on Moscow from Ukraine's allies. The attack comes after a so-called energy truce agreed by Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin expired at the weekend.

We'll link all the stories we spoke about today in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode, Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode, Mark Leyda was our San Francisco studio engineer, Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

Trump Admin's Plans for $500 Million USIP Building May Violate Court Order, Say Former Workers The State Department is poised to take over a building DOGE seized from the US Institute of Peace, former staffers claim--possibly for Donald Trump's "Board of Peace." Last year, the Trump administration and members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) forcibly took over the US Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent nonprofit. Since then, the organization's fired board and employees have been fighting to regain control of the USIP building in Washington, DC and for the reinstatement of their jobs in a drawn-out court battle. Now, in a letter sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ), representatives for the USIP's fired board and employees argue that the administration is violating a court-issued stay by making physical changes to the building and, to their understanding, moving ahead with new agreements. Specifically, the letter asks for information on whether the State Department has signed an agreement to use the building for the "Board of Peace," a new international organization under the personal lifetime control of President Donald Trump that seeks to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.