When China's leader Xi Jinping hosts his American counterpart in Beijing this week, Donald Trump will be reminded of his last visit in 2017 - he was wooed hard, complete with dinner inside the Forbidden City, an honour no US president before him had received. This week's reception promises to be just as grand, including a stop inside Zhongnanhai, the rarefied compound where China's top leadership lives and works. The agenda too will be just as thorny, with Iran being a new source of tension, alongside trade, technology and Taiwan. But a lot has changed as Trump returns to a stronger and far more assertive China. Now well into an unprecedented third term, an ambitious Xi has been pushing forward with plans for new productive forces with heavy investments in renewable energy, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Donald Trump is heading to China this week, and if his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping. Donald Trump is heading to China this week, and if his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping. Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran. On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president.

The Institute for Primary Facts has compiled more than 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files for public display at the newly opened Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. It's an early 2016 email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a woman whose name is redacted by the Department of Justice . In the thread, Epstein asks the unidentified woman for a "naughty selfie" and later sends her a camera. In late February, he replies with a different ask: "Do you have any friends that might want to work for me?...I will give you money if you find someone willing to travel, 22-25, educated. The exchange carries extra resonance when you consider that Epstein is accused of sex trafficking minors, with the Department of Justice estimating that he had more than 1,200 potential victims.

The Iran war has strengthened Ukraine in surprising ways. Could a ceasefire with Russia be closer? When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, serious-faced and clad in black, strolled down a lilac carpet in Saudi Arabia in March, it marked a moment in the US-Israeli war in Iran. In a post on X, he said his visit was to strengthen the protection of lives. Zelensky, who carries the weight of Ukraine's own war with Russia on his shoulders, has been seizing the moment, flying to the Gulf to publicly showcase the international value and marketability of Kyiv's learned-on-the-battlefield military nous in drone warfare. Ukraine says it has now signed deals with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar - all hit by Iranian missiles and drones in recent weeks - to share drone expertise and technology, tightening alliances and benefitting from business - and it hopes defence deals - with wealthy US-allied countries.

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.