President Trump probably can't get rid of her yet, but FCC commissioner Anna Gomez still checks her email every day to see if he has. Until then, she wants to stand up for the First Amendment. If you've given much thought to the Federal Communications Commission in recent years, it probably had something to do with Brendan Carr . The group's chairman since 2025, Carr has been on an ongoing, public rampage against freedom of speech: he's gone after late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, and targeted networks for their DEI policies. Disturbing as Carr's rhetoric and actions have been, he does count at least one opponent within the agency: Commissioner Anna Gomez, currently the lone Democrat among three FCC commissioners, has been vocal about the damage she thinks the agency is doing to American press freedom--and has repeatedly urged the public and the press, namely major networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, to fight back. In May, Commissioner Gomez penned a stunning public letter to Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, wherein she warned that the company--which owns ABC--was being subjected to "a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC's authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press." Gomez urged D'Amaro to fight the actions her own agency was taking, adding that "this is a fight worth having, and one that I am confident you will win." I wanted to talk to Commissioner Gomez about that bold letter, the risks she sees for the media and the American public under the Trump administration, and how she works alongside a chairman with whom she disagrees so fiercely. Gomez, whose FCC term ends this month, was generous enough to sit down and talk about all of it. You can read our conversation below, or listen to it on the podcast platform of your choice. KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Commissioner Gomez. Thank you for being here. It's great to be here. I want to start, before we talk more about Disney and your letter and all the rest of it, with a very basic question for our listeners. What is your agency's basic role?

We analyse how the sampling dynamics of distributions evolve in score-based diffusion models using cross-fluctuations, a centered-moment statistic from statistical physics. Specifically, we show that starting from an unbiased isotropic normal distribution, samples undergo sharp, discrete transitions, eventually forming distinct events of a desired distribution while progressively revealing finer structure. As this process is reversible, these transitions also occur in reverse, where intermediate states progressively merge, tracing a path back to the initial distribution. We demonstrate that these transitions can be detected as discontinuities in nth-order cross-fluctuations. For variance-preserving SDEs, we derive a closed-form for these cross-fluctuations that is efficiently computable for the reverse trajectory. We find that detecting these transitions directly boosts sampling efficiency, accelerates class-conditional and rare-class generation, and improves two zero-shot tasks-image classification and style transfer-without expensive grid search or retraining. We also show that this viewpoint unifies classical coupling and mixing from finite Markov chains with continuous dynamics while extending to stochastic SDEs and non Markovian samplers.

Why was El Paso airspace shut down? US president's son Eric Trump invests in drone maker with gov't contracts United States President Donald Trump's son Eric is investing in an Israeli drone manufacturer, prompting renewed conflict-of-interest concerns as the Trump family expands its business holdings during its patriarch's second term as president. Eric Trump is investing in a $1.5bn merger between Israeli drone maker Xtend and Florida-based JFB Construction Holdings, a small construction company, in a deal aimed at taking Xtend public this year, JFB said in a news release on Tuesday. Drone maker Unusual Machines, which tapped Eric's brother Donald Trump Jr in November 2024 as an adviser, is also investing in the merger, JFB said. JFB builds commercial and residential properties, including multifamily communities and shopping centres.

We develop a general mathematical framework to analyze scaling regimes and derive explicit analytic solutions for gradient flow (GF) in large learning problems. Our key innovation is a formal power series expansion of the loss evolution, with coefficients encoded by diagrams akin to Feynman diagrams. We show that this expansion has a well-defined large-size limit that can be used to reveal different learning phases and, in some cases, to obtain explicit solutions of the nonlinear GF. We focus on learning Canonical Polyadic (CP) decompositions of high-order tensors, and show that this model has several distinct extreme lazy and rich GF regimes such as free evolution, NTK and under- and over-parameterized mean-field. We show that these regimes depend on the parameter scaling, tensor order, and symmetry of the model in a specific and subtle way. Moreover, we propose a general approach to summing the formal loss expansion by reducing it to a PDE; in a wide range of scenarios, it turns out to be 1st order and solvable by the method of characteristics. We observe a very good agreement of our theoretical predictions with experiment.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is already one of the world's most valuable private companies. Elon Musk's SpaceX is already one of the world's most valuable private companies. Aerospace business and artificial intelligence firm to unite for IPO as world's most valuable private company Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX has acquired his artificial intelligence business xAI, in a $1.25tn (£910bn) merger that consolidates part of Musk's empire as SpaceX prepares to go public later this year. The two companies announced the deal on Monday in a statement on SpaceX's website, saying the merger would form "the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform". SpaceX, one of the world's most valuable private companies, will gain xAI properties such as its Grok chatbot and the social media platform X.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has acquired his AI company xAI as part of an ambitious scheme to build space-based data centres to power the future of artificial intelligence. The billionaire, who is also the CEO of Tesla, announced the merger in a statement on Tuesday on the SpaceX website. AI demand will require "immense amounts of power and cooling" that are not sustainable on Earth without "imposing hardship on communities and the environment," he said. Space-based data centres that harness the power of the Sun are the only long-term solution, according to Musk. "In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun's energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilisation currently uses!" he wrote.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is taking over his artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, as the billionaire continues to unify some of his many business interests. SpaceX confirmed the deal to acquire xAI, a smaller firm known for its Grok chatbot, posting a memo from Musk about the merger on its website. In the note, Musk said the combination would form an innovation engine putting AI, rockets, space-based internet, and media under one roof. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, a source familiar said it valued xAI at $125bn (£91bn) and SpaceX at $1tn, making it the most valuable private company ever.

Elon Musk is making a big bet on his future vision - will it work? Reports suggest that Elon Musk is eyeing up a merger involving SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, but what does he hope to achieve by consolidating his business empire? Elon Musk is a busy man, heading up multiple billion-dollar companies. While he is increasingly a divisive figure, there is no doubt that Tesla and SpaceX, his two most important ventures, have done much to advance the future of electric cars and spacecraft, respectively. But a series of corporate moves this week suggests Musk has a new vision of the future - and he may be combining all his companies to get there.

The home secretary has announced a blueprint for reforming what she called the broken policing model in England and Wales. Shabana Mahmood confirmed the shake-up will create a new National Police Service (NPS) to fight the most complex cross-border crime and could also see the number of local forces in England and Wales cut by around two-thirds. She told the House of Commons she also intends to make better use of technology - including the largest-ever rollout of facial recognition. This government's reforms will ensure we have the right policing in the right place, Mahmood said. I set out reforms that are long overdue and define a new model for policing in this country, with local policing that protects our communities and national policing that protects us all.

This paper presents a systematic evaluation of racial bias in four major commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using the Pacific Northwest English (PNWE) corpus. We analyze transcription accuracy across speakers from four ethnic backgrounds (African American, Caucasian American, ChicanX, and Yakama) and examine how sociophonetic variation contributes to differential system performance. We introduce a heuristically-determined Phonetic Error Rate (PER) metric that links recognition errors to specific linguistically motivated variables derived from sociophonetic annotation. Our analysis of eleven sociophonetic features reveals that vowel quality variation, particularly resistance to the low-back merger and pre-nasal merger patterns, is systematically associated with differential error rates across ethnic groups, with the most pronounced effects for African American speakers across all evaluated systems. These findings demonstrate that acoustic modeling of dialectal phonetic variation, rather than lexical or syntactic factors, remains a primary source of bias in commercial ASR systems. The study establishes the PNWE corpus as a valuable resource for bias evaluation in speech technologies and provides actionable guidance for improving ASR performance through targeted representation of sociophonetic diversity in training data.