One minute he insists that Iran must permit tankers to pass, and the next he advises allies to figure it out independently. “Head to the strait and simply take it, safeguard it, utilize it for your own purposes,” he declared on Wednesday. “The difficult part has been accomplished, so it ought to be straightforward.”
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and a Canadian soared into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, riding the most powerful rocket ever crewed, on the opening leg of a nine-day trip around the Moon.
Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the quartet climbed away from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).
Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters ignited to lift the nearly 6 million-pound vehicle off its pad at Launch Complex 39B. Together the engines and boosters produced about 8.8 million pounds of thrust, exceeding the power of NASA’s Saturn V used during the Apollo era.
Moments later, waves of sound rolled toward onlookers several miles away as the rocket roared upward, trailing a brilliant plume of fire and smoke.
Commander Reid Wiseman, a 50-year-old Navy captain and former test pilot, delivered calm radio reports from the Orion spacecraft’s cockpit perched atop the SLS. He was accompanied by pilot Victor Glover (also a Navy captain), mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
The launch of Artemis II represents a significant milestone for NASA. The agency has poured nearly $100 billion into components of the Artemis program over the past 20 years and now finds itself racing against China to return people to the lunar surface. The mission is historic: humans last left the Moon in 1972 and have not been back since.
This flight will not touch down on the Moon; a landing is slated for a later mission, currently planned as Artemis IV in 2028. NASA is collaborating with SpaceX and Blue Origin to create crewed landers to transport astronauts between Orion and the lunar surface, while Axiom Space is developing new suits for moonwalks.
Artemis II is validating the transport system NASA intends to use to carry crews to the Moon and back. Wednesday’s successful liftoff was the first major milestone, paving the way for manual piloting demonstrations, trajectory correction burns, life-support system checkouts and, ultimately, a loop that will swing thousands of miles past the Moon’s far side.
The Artemis team has officially embarked on a groundbreaking 10-day mission around the Moon, which may take them farther from Earth than anyone has ever ventured.
During this 10-day mission, the crew will not set foot on the Moon, but they intend to orbit it while journeying further from Earth than anyone has ever ventured. Building on the unmanned Artemis I mission in 2022, Nasa’s Artemis initiative is gearing up for deep-space explorations – with a primary objective of reaching Mars in the 2030s.
Stay updated with the BBC’s live coverage of the launch here.
If you’re a PC gamer tired of seeing “compile shaders” pop up during load times, you may want to try out Nvidia’s newest beta App. Along with additions to DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, the beta introduces a feature that can automatically compile new shaders while your PC is idle.
Nvidia’s Auto Shader Compilation feature aims to “reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates” for systems running Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When enabled and the machine is idle, the app will begin rebuilding DirectX shader files for your games so they’re ready the next time you launch them.
The option is off by default when you first install the Nvidia App, but you can enable it via Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. From there you can reserve disk space for precompiled shaders and choose how much system resources the compilation should use. You can also force shader recompilation manually through the app instead of waiting for idle time.
His endeavors seem to have been successful. China’s Foreign Ministry mentioned that both parties were making “new strides towards promoting peace.” The collaborative statement confirmed that communication and diplomacy were “the sole viable means to settle disputes,” and it emphasized the necessity to safeguard waterways, including the obstructed strait.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump enacted an executive order aimed at tightening restrictions on mail-in voting, a step that advocates for voting rights argue will disenfranchise millions of citizens.
The measure mandates that the Department of Homeland Security create a list of validated U.S. citizens eligible to vote in every state, which is likely to face legal challenges that could prevent it from being implemented before the November midterm elections.
“We are committed to ensuring genuine voting in our nation, because without authentic voting, it’s impossible to truly have a country,” Trump stated in the Oval Office after signing the order.
A fact sheet from the White House indicates that DHS will collaborate with the Social Security Administration to fulfill this task.
The compiled list will be distributed to each state, and the order instructs the Attorney General to focus on investigating and prosecuting “election officials, individuals, and other entities that breach the law by issuing or distributing Federal ballots to those ineligible to vote.” The Attorney General is also directed to deny federal funds to states that do not comply, according to the fact sheet.
The Postal Service will be mandated to “send ballots solely to individuals listed on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List,” the fact sheet notes. It’s standard practice for election officials in each state to provide mail ballots to voters, not the Postal Service.
The order additionally stipulates that the Postal Service must ensure all ballots it sends are “enclosed in secure ballot envelopes labeled as Official Election Mail with unique Intelligent Mail barcodes for tracking purposes,” as per the fact sheet.
Recently, Trump cast his vote by mail in Florida. While the Constitution assigns election management to the states, Congress has the authority to legislate on election matters. The executive branch does not play a formal role in modifying election laws or executing the elections.
Advocates for voting rights assert that Trump’s proposed voting limitations would disenfranchise millions. The executive order is expected to encounter legal action that could impede its enforcement ahead of the midterms.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, stated her office is “examining this order and will take appropriate legal measures to guarantee that every eligible voter in Massachusetts can participate and have their vote counted.”
“The Trump Administration cannot obstruct the right to vote, nor may it supersede state election authority,” Campbell emphasized.
The NAACP released a statement indicating that the “order will not prevail.”
“Not only is his order unconstitutional, but it lacks seriousness,” commented NAACP president Derrick Johnson. “His attempts to silence us will only amplify our voices and votes.”
The Daily Caller was the first to report that Trump would formalize this order.
Trump has consistently pushed for limitations on mail-in voting since his defeat in the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden. He has made unsubstantiated claims that the election was taken from him due to fraudulent mail-in voting.
This order follows extensive pressure on Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, a proposal that would necessitate voters to provide photo identification and proof of U.S. citizenship. The U.S. House approved this proposal in February, and the Senate discussed it this month but has not yet voted.
Trump has warned Republicans that they risk losing the November midterm elections if they do not pass the legislation and tighten mail-in voting regulations.
The operation will encompass 36 states and territories managed by the federal government, over 7,000 sub-districts, in excess of 9,700 towns, and almost 640,000 villages, with data collection conducted by enumerators and supervisors – generally schoolteachers, government personnel, and local authorities.
Ollama, a runtime for running large language models on a local machine, has added compatibility with Apple’s open-source MLX machine-learning framework. Ollama also reports better caching performance and now supports Nvidia’s NVFP4 model-compression format, which can considerably reduce memory use for certain models.
Taken together, these changes should deliver noticeably improved performance on Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later)—and the timing is apt, since local models are starting to gain momentum beyond the research and hobbyist spheres.
OpenClaw’s recent breakout—which surged past 300,000 stars on GitHub, grabbed attention with experiments like Moltbook, and became a particular phenomenon in China in particular—has pushed many people to try running models locally.
As developers grow frustrated with rate limits and the high prices of premium plans for services such as Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex, experimentation with local coding models has intensified. (Ollama has also recently expanded its Visual Studio Code integration.)
The new capability is available in preview (Ollama 0.19) and currently supports only one model—the 35 billion-parameter variant of Alibaba’s Qwen3.5. The hardware requirements are steep for typical users: besides an Apple Silicon Mac, you need at least 32GB of RAM, according to Ollama’s announcement.
The leaked code, exceeding 512,000 lines, seems to reveal unannounced functionalities, guidelines for Claude, and additional insights.
The leaked code, exceeding 512,000 lines, seems to reveal unannounced functionalities, guidelines for Claude, and additional insights.
Following the release of Anthropic’s Claude Code’s 2.1.88 update, individuals rapidly noticed that it housed a package with a source map file showcasing its TypeScript foundation, with one user on X highlighting the leak and sharing a document containing the code. The disclosed information is said to encompass more than 512,000 lines and offers a glimpse into the functioning of the AI-driven coding tool, as earlier reported by Ars Technica and VentureBeat.
Individuals who examined the code assert that they have unveiled upcoming functionalities, directives from Anthropic regarding the AI bot, and details about its “memory” structure. Among the findings reported by individuals is a Tamagotchi-like companion that “sits beside your input box and responds to your programming,” according to a Reddit post, in addition to a “KAIROS” function that may allow for a constant background agent. Users also encountered a remark from one of Anthropic’s developers, who confesses at one point that the “memoization here increases complexity significantly, and I’m not convinced it actually enhances performance.”
Although Anthropic subsequently resolved the issue, it did not deter users from duplicating the code to a GitHub repository, which has now accumulated over 50,000 forks (or replicas of the repository). Anthropic introduced Claude Code in February 2025, and the tool gained traction following the addition of agentic capabilities that execute tasks on behalf of the user.
“Earlier today, a Claude Code release featured some internal source code. No private user data or credentials were at risk or revealed,” Anthropic representative Christopher Nulty mentions in an emailed statement to The Verge. “This was a packaging error due to human mistake, not a security lapse. We’re implementing measures to ensure this does not reoccur.”
Arun Chandrasekaran, an AI analyst at Gartner, informs The Verge that while the leak of Claude Code presents “risks including providing malicious actors with potential means to circumvent precautions,” its long-term effect might be confined to motivating Anthropic to enhance its tools and processes for improved operational maturity.
On March 22, The Wall Street Journal said Kennedy was “poised” to carry out his proposal to remove FDA limits on peptides. Two days later, The Washington Post’s editorial board denounced Kennedy’s proposal as “hypocritical quackery.” Today, The New York Times reported that the FDA is moving toward permitting compounding pharmacies to produce 14 peptides that are now restricted. The Times added that senior FDA officials have “reservations” about the shift and worry the agency could be accused of deciding on political grounds rather than on scientific evidence.
Which 14 peptides might be included hasn’t been made public. Observers expect several well-known compounds to appear on the list, such as BPC-157 (Body Protection Compound-157), originally isolated from gastric secretions and promoted for tissue repair. Growth-hormone–releasing peptides like CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin are also likely candidates.
Specialists point out there are no randomized controlled trials proving the effectiveness of these peptides. Furthermore, experts warn of a range of safety issues, including contaminants from gray- or black-market sources, inconsistent dosing, and mixtures of unproven peptides known as “stacks.” Some peptides that stimulate growth could increase cancer risk, and others may disrupt hormonal balance. Last year, two women fell critically ill after receiving peptide injections at an anti-aging event in Las Vegas.
The evidence for these peptides is “just woefully minuscule,” Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told the Times. “It’s a mess, because we don’t have any data that these work,” he added. “Maybe one of them actually does something good. But right now, we just know that they’re a liability.”
