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On Tuesday, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, announced that a major climate research center will be “broken up.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, is a significant contributor to research on the weather, climate, and other atmospheric phenomena. The move will be a crippling blow to climate research in the US and is being widely decried by scientists.

Vought initially gave a statement regarding NCAR to USA Today and later confirmed the outlet’s reporting on social media. Calling it “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought also decried what he termed “woke” activities at NCAR. These appear to be fairly typical efforts made to attract underrepresented groups to the sciences—efforts that were uncontroversial prior to the current administration.

Four House Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday to force a House vote on a straight three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare tax credits that will expire Dec. 31, delivering a sharp rebuke to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania signed the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — hours after House GOP leaders rejected attempts by Fitzpatrick and other Republican moderates to seek a floor vote on extending the subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans.

ChatGPT’s crawler GPTBot, which spiders the internet to capture information and turn it into knowledge, is the most-blocked bot on the internet, according to Cloudflare’s 2025 year in review. Meanwhile its biggest rival, Google, is the No. 1 most-allowed crawler. And perhaps even more interestingly, while ChatGPT is the most-blocked bot, it’s actually Anthropic’s Claude AI engine that is the least reciprocally beneficial service for website owners.

Every year internet infrastructure company Cloudflare publishes an analysis of what’s happening on the internet.

Archive: http://archive.today/xvW1Q

Cite: https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2025

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40254758

The Trump administration said Monday in a court filing that the president’s White House ballroom construction project must continue for reasons of national security.

The filing came in response to a lawsuit filed last Friday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation asking a federal judge to halt the project until it goes through multiple independent reviews and wins approval from Congress.

In its filing, the administration included a declaration from the deputy director of the U.S. Secret Service saying more work on the site of the former White House East Wing is still needed to meet the agency’s “safety and security requirements.” The administration has offered to share classified details with the judge in an in-person setting without the plaintiffs present.

A series of events in the past few weeks has undercut what little power Johnson ever had among his fellow Republicans in the House. GOP representatives – the group that he theoretically leads – are so angry that they publicly call him names. Republicans are using parliamentary procedures to get votes on bills that Johnson doesn’t want to bring to the floor.

Incumbents panicking over the potential to lose their seats, in a Democratic landslide, are blaming Johnson for their problems. He has to make promises he must know he can’t keep to get bills passed. And Donald Trump is doing nothing to help Johnson in his time of need.

Imagine a free and open source software (FOSS) developer seeking to distribute an application on Apple’s iOS or iPadOS. The developer aims to have the software curated within a non‑profit, free software‑oriented repository, similar to F‑Droid on Android. This matters not only for the developer but also for users who want to avoid a distribution model where Apple controls how software is made available.

This is, indeed, only an imaginary scenario, since this isn’t possible on iOS or iPadOS. Apple offers no option for a non-profit or community-driven FOSS app store. The company actively blocks such initiatives through steep financial requirements and tight restrictions, preventing users from freely installing software. This issue was discussed during the 2024 Article 19 Digital Markets Act (DMA) Enforcement Symposium and even led to a formal complaint submitted by civil society groups in 2025.

We’ve known for some time that the rise of anti-trans politics in the Republican Party was likely an intentional tactic devised by political strategists in backrooms. But the recent events in Washington, D.C., and the eventual passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bring the craven nature of those moves out into the light.

In the wake of same-sex marriage being legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court in 2015, Republicans needed another minority rights issue to get their base angry over. The growing mainstream awareness of trans people at the time played perfectly for those goals, and that move is evident in the escalation of anti-trans bills since 2015.

Sweeping Democratic victories in off-year elections seem to be foreshadowing a very good midterms for the party, and one expert believes it’s even bigger than that.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to statehouses, told Mother Jones.

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

So of course Disney has announced it signed a deal with OpenAI today that will soon allow fans to make their own officially licensed Disney slop using Sora 2. The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.

Archive: http://archive.today/fau2g

The Democratic National Committee will run ads Thursday on the home pages of newspapers in a quartet of Republican senators’ hometowns, calling on the incumbents up for reelection next year to support a Democratic bill to extend health care subsidies.

The digital ads target Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Husted of Ohio and John Cornyn of Texas on the day the Senate is expected to vote on a Democratic proposal to extend enhanced subsidies for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes and a group of Democratic members of Congress are asking for an independent review of the Epstein case files to determine whether any of the records have been "tampered" with or concealed, ahead of the release of those files by next week.

In a letter Thursday to the Justice Department's inspector general, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the internal watchdog to undertake a formal review to check for any "chain of custody" problems with the Epstein files.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.

Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Archive: http://archive.today/R7zCt