Tuesday, 22 September 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Beach of Cape Fiolent during the storm at sea. Cape Fiolent in Crimea is of ancient Jurassic origin. Upper Miocene lava and carbonate intrusions on heavily eroded Jurassic foundation.
Contractors hired to grade and improve OpenAI's models are barred from using AI on the job, and several have been fired for submitting AI-written answers.
A child who hears the news is already trying to work out what it means about people like them; saying nothing hands the answer to the news, and repeated, explicit affirmation is what actually protects them.
An employee number ten who takes 0.25% equity in a startup can expect roughly $35,800 once every probability and cost is counted, which is less than the salary they gave up to be there.
US respiratory vaccines were supposed to be free this fall, but a stalled federal advisory process has cut orders for infant RSV antibodies, held up childhood Covid shots, and left some states without pharmacy access.
Washington treats the AI contest with China as a benchmark scoreboard, while Beijing is already governing how the technology lands on users.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta cleared Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. with a settlement whose every condition is unenforceable, handing the American film and TV industry to Trump's oligarch friends.
Nearly half of the human genome consists of DNA fragments that can move and copy themselves, once dismissed as junk and now recognized as raw material for evolution.
A 1926 silent film cut the narrator, invented an evil brother named Derek for Captain Ahab, and turned an unread novel into the Great American Novel.
US curbs on chip and equipment exports to China since 2020 were meant to slow China down, yet China's share of the global semiconductor industry rose 18% between 2017 and 2023, with Europe, Japan and Singapore taking the orders.
You cannot measure one being's suffering against another's, but utilitarianism has to pretend you can — and AI is making the pretence impossible to hold.
Manufacturing fell from 26% of US jobs in 1970 to 13% by 2000 while the headcount barely moved — and the long-run cause is that young workers stopped entering the sector.
In 1999 a young engineer near Tsinghua said he would open a restaurant back in Shandong once he had saved enough; two decades on, Chinese coders do often end up in food service, while their Silicon Valley peers turn to venture capital, real estate or renting out houses.
