"People are scared, says one federal worker. "Is WIRED hiring?" jokes another. Federal workers have grown accustomed to a specific kind of dread over the past year . As of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their roles since president Donald Trump took office for the second time, according to . Tens of thousands were also fired. For the past few months, it seemed like this bloodletting was over--but that all changed on Friday. Thousands of employees at eight government agencies were subjected to RIFs, or reductions in force--the government's formal process of laying off federal workers. According to a court filing from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday, this latest round of firings has affected more than 4,000 federal employees. The court filing also claimed that the administration targeted the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services the hardest, hacking away at a combined 2,500 jobs across the two agencies and the entire Washington, DC, office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The Department of Education culled nearly its entire team handling special education, CNN reported on Tuesday . At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cuts ranged from a few dozen to several hundred jobs, according to the same filing. Who says their goal is to traumatize people?" says one IRS worker, referencing private speeches given by Russell Vought, the head of OMB and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 who has been the public face of the job-cutting.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Poland has briefly closed part of its airspace southeast of capital Warsaw, citing "unplanned military activity", as Russia launches a new wave of strikes against Ukraine. The deployment on Sunday of Polish and allied aircraft in the country's airspace comes as the transatlantic security bloc NATO announced that it is upgrading its mission in the Baltic Sea in response to drone incursions in Denmark and reported drone sightings in Norway. In the latest incident, the Polish armed forces said it scrambled aircraft to ensure the security of its airspace after Russia launched strikes on Ukraine.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Unidentified drones have flown over Denmark's military sites, including its biggest base, the latest in a slew of incursions near airports and critical infrastructure this week, which officials have called a "hybrid attack" and hinted at possible Russian involvement. "The Danish Defence can confirm that drones were observed at several of the Danish Defence's locations last night. Several capabilities were deployed," an army spokesperson said on Saturday, without specifying where the drones were observed.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? EU to develop'drone wall' amid regional airspace violations European Union defence ministers have agreed to develop a "drone wall" along their borders with Russia and Ukraine to detect, track and intercept violations of their airspace, according to the bloc's defence chief. Friday's announcement comes after rogue drones entered Polish airspace on September 10, rattling eastern EU members. Although Danish authorities have not concluded their investigations, Frederiksen stressed that Russia was currently the primary threat to European security. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the drone incidents in Poland and Denmark.

Ukraine has reported dozens of civilian deaths from Russian attacks over the past week, including three killed in a late-night assault on Wednesday in the southeastern city of Dnipro. A child was among the victims of the drone attack, which came hours before high-stakes meetings in Paris due to take place later on Thursday, during which United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are to meet French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials to discuss the conflict. Ukraine's defence and foreign ministers, as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, are also in the French capital for talks with US and European Union delegations, though Kyiv's delegation has not specified who it plans to meet. But as Moscow's self-imposed 30-day ceasefire on energy infrastructure approached its close, talks to achieve a broader ceasefire so far have showed little sign of progress. Russia has stuck to its hardline positions while accusing Ukraine of violating the energy ceasefire, to which Kyiv never agreed.

President Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt touted him as "the most transparent and accessible president in American history," particularly compared to former President Biden. President Trump said on Friday that the first physical examination of his second term went well, and overall he feels he's in "very good shape." The president told reporters on board Air Force One while en route to his home in West Palm Beach Friday evening that the yearly presidential physical at Walter Reed Medical Center showed he has a "good heart, a good soul," and "overall, I think I'm in very – I felt I was in very good shape." He also took a cognitive test. "I don't know what to tell you other than I got every answer right," the president told reporters.

One person was killed Sunday as Russian air strikes hit the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while the death toll from Friday's deadly attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih continued to rise. The Kyiv victim was found close to the strike's epicenter of the attack in the city's Darnytskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A further three people were injured in the strike, which saw fires break out in several nonresidential areas, damaging cars and buildings. In a statement on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the intensifying Russian attacks showed that there is still insufficient international pressure on Moscow. US WILL KNOW IN'MATTER OF WEEKS' IF RUSSIA IS SERIOUS ABOUT PEACE OR USING'DELAY TACTIC': RUBIO He said Russia has launched more than 1,460 guided aerial bombs, nearly 670 attack drones and more than 30 missiles at Ukraine in the past week alone.

A pro-Palestinian protest by Microsoft employees has interrupted the company's 50th anniversary celebration, the latest backlash over the tech industry's work to supply artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military. The protest began on Friday as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was presenting product updates and a long-term vision for the company's AI assistant product, Copilot, to an audience that included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. "Mustafa, shame on you," shouted Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad as she walked towards the stage and Suleyman paused his speech. "You claim that you care about using AI for good but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region."

At least 14 people, including six children, have been killed in a Russian missile attack on a residential area of the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, making it one of Moscow's deadliest strikes this year. Friday's attack on Zelenskyy's hometown, which comes as United States President Donald Trump is pushing for a ceasefire in the war, damaged residential blocks and caused fires, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. The dead and wounded could be seen lying on the pavement, one of them by a playground, in unverified videos circulating on Telegram as grey smoke rose into the sky. At least 50 people were wounded, the emergency services said, adding that the figure was growing. More than 30 people, including a three-month-old baby, were admitted to hospital, Lysak said.

We look at reasoning on GSM8k, a dataset of short texts presenting primary school, math problems. We find, with Mirzadeh et al. (2024), that current LLM progress on the data set may not be explained by better reasoning but by exposure to a broader pretraining data distribution. We then introduce a novel information source for helping models with less data or inferior training reason better: discourse structure. We show that discourse structure improves performance for models like Llama2 13b by up to 160%. Even for models that have most likely memorized the data set, adding discourse structural information to the model still improves predictions and dramatically improves large model performance on out of distribution examples.