Friday, 23 October 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Vodno Telecommunication Tower under construction in Skopje, North Macedonia. Today is the Day of the Macedonian Revolutionary Struggle, a national holiday in North Macedonia celebrated on the occasion of the formation of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.
A writer who once recommended a long list of supplements stopped taking all of them after concluding that he had mostly hunted for evidence that confirmed his views, and that around 90 percent of nutrition research is nearly worthless.
After PHP disclosed a remote-code-execution flaw, an unpaid Czech engineer packaged the fix overnight and kept much of the internet standing.
AI software agents are driving the cost of execution toward zero, but people who know what they actually want, can judge the output and will own the consequences are getting scarcer, not more common.
A Pennsylvania woman who has never used CashApp was arrested on a warrant from a thousand miles away, after a scammer opened an account in her name with her Social Security number.
New Mexico took Meta to trial alone, a jury found nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection law, and a judge ordered $25 billion — the largest fine the company has faced. Meta will appeal.
What began as a school strike over three unfilled teaching posts became nationwide riots, and the real culprit is that a third of France's education budget never reaches a classroom.
Fear-based political ads reliably grab attention, but whether that fear turns into votes depends on whether the ad also tells viewers what they can do about the threat.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology recruited 27 federal forensic facial examiners; on average they needed to reveal only one or two facial features to pick a hidden face out of two lookalikes, scoring about 90 percent.
After touring Intel's most advanced fab, its CTO said the world's existing chipmaking equipment can at most double leading-edge output, while AI demand has been tripling every year for a decade.
Research finds that populist leaders tend to hurt the economy, and a professional, independent bureaucracy can delay the decline by about four years — long enough to vote them out.
