Curated stories and original journalism across science, psychology, history, arts, screen, sports, business, and the amusing corners of the web.
Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammad Akraminia told the state news agency IRNA that the change took shape across what Iran calls the 12-day and 40-day wars. An offensive doctrine does not necessarily mean preemptive strikes, he said — though Iran struck a US base in Jordan before the US entered the last conflict — but any attack now draws an immediate response that may be broader than the original action. The statement has so far been carried mainly by outlets relaying IRNA rather than independently confirmed.
The Justice Department calls it one of the largest recoveries ever under COPPA, the law requiring parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. TikTok and ByteDance pay $300 million now and another $100 million once a 2019 consent decree against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly, is vacated — with no admission of wrongdoing and no further litigation. The suit was filed in 2024. This is the Justice Department's own announcement, and it lands the same week Meta stands trial in federal court over whether Instagram was built to hook children.
The cosplayer took the podium at a Public Safety committee meeting to deliver a satirical case for the license-plate-reading surveillance cameras — they would help "find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth," he said, and follow children "from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium." He suggested the council practice its Jedi mind trick on the public, proposed defunding parks, libraries and shelters to pay for Storm Troopers, and added a personal reason for wanting the cameras: "I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend."
LandSpace's Zhuque-3 lifted off from the Dongfeng commercial launch zone on August 19, delivered the Honghu 03 satellite to orbit, and six minutes later set its first stage down on landing legs at a site in Gansu province — the first propulsive booster recovery on land by any Chinese rocket, and the first by a Chinese commercial company. It came eight months after LandSpace's first attempt ended in an explosion on the pad. The landing puts LandSpace alongside SpaceX and Blue Origin as the only private firms to have pulled it off.
Sinner has not played since winning Wimbledon and said after returning to the court in Monte Carlo this week that his right knee needs more recovery time than the August 30 main draw allows. Last year's runner-up and the 2024 champion will stay in Europe with his medical and performance teams and aim to be ready for the Asian swing in Beijing and Shanghai. This is the tournament's own announcement.
A hundred thousand people, smashed windows, a fiancée collapsing on the coffin, and a press agent named Harry Klemfuss paying for a good deal of it. A century on from August 23, 1926, the hired Blackshirts are still in every retelling.
Members of SPEEA, Boeing's largest white-collar union, voted down four-year contracts on Friday — 64% against among engineers and scientists, 72% against among technical workers, on 96% turnout. The same ballot authorized a strike by 88% and 90% respectively, clearing leadership to walk out from October 7, when the current agreements expire. Members told Reuters the sticking point was a 3% cap on inflation-linked raises, which they said would all but guarantee pay falling behind prices. The union says it will survey members on what a revised offer needs before talks resume.
Six years after Punisher, Bridgers returns with an album that treats memory as something recording technology can manipulate — her late father's voicemail woven into an arrangement, her own voice run through the same machines, and a surprising debt to a 1988 computer-music composition.
Julie Angelicola was drying her hands with toilet paper aboard an NJ Transit train, crumpled it up, threw it in the toilet and flushed — then realized her wedding ring had gone with it. She reported it, and NJ Transit pulled the train from service, raised it on jacks, removed the toilet tank and opened it up. The ring was sitting on top. It dates to about 1905, bought from an antique store, and she only discovered afterward that the initials engraved inside matched the nicknames she and her husband use for each other.
Prime Air currently flies out of 11 US locations. Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026 — a sixfold expansion — starting with Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Syracuse and Boise. Each site covers roughly 175 square miles, packages must weigh five pounds or less, and delivery runs half an hour to an hour. The company reports hundreds of thousands of drone deliveries so far this year and thousands a day, with an executive projecting a million by year end. This is Amazon's own announcement rather than a writeup of it.
The device is called Aletta, and it is the first standalone robot cleared to draw blood from a patient's arm without hands-on intervention. It is authorized for adults in outpatient settings and must run under the oversight of someone trained in phlebotomy — but a single phlebotomist can supervise three machines at once. That ratio is the point: blood draws are among the most common procedures in American medicine, and a shortage of trained phlebotomists has been adding delays. This is the FDA's own announcement.
NPR's Starting 5 for August 21: Jorja Smith's What Are The Odds, Brandon Flowers' THRASHER, Squirrel Flower's Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, Westside Cowboy's It Goes On, and a self-titled debut from Brennan Wedl. The lightning round adds Rapsody, Julia Holter, Elanor Moss, OK Cowgirl and a posthumous Cramps collection. Host Stephen Thompson is joined by Celia Gregory of WNXP Nashville.
The clay tablet, incised and impressed with geometric markings, emerged from a charcoal-rich layer during the third week of this year's excavation at Lucone di Polpenazze, a Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement in northern Italy. It is the first found at the site since 2019 and the 21st from the Lucone plain, more than any other location. It belongs to a class Italian archaeologists call tavolette enigmatiche — enigmatic tablets — whose purpose remains unknown. Similar combinations of lines and impressions turn up hundreds of kilometres away, raising the possibility of a shared set of signs circulating through a society that left no conventional writing.
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing follows Kennedy's 2022 film Downfall: The Case Against Boeing and centers on the death of John Barnett, the quality manager who spent years reporting safety problems on the 787 line. It gathers testimony from other whistleblowers who say they raised defects with managers and were told to overlook them. It premiered on Netflix on August 19 after a world premiere at the DC/DOX festival in June.
Narragansett police said the tractor-trailer was hauling thousands of pounds of squid for processing when it overturned at the intersection of Point Judith and Galilee Escape roads, spilling what the department's news release called "a substantial portion" of its load onto the roadway. Nobody was hurt. The intersection stayed closed about eight hours on Sunday while crews scraped up the seafood with skid steers. The driver was cited for an unsecured load.
A law that made animal tests optional, a headline that said they were over, and the quiet regulatory machinery that actually decides what counts as proof.
The Mary Rose served in Henry VIII's fleet for 34 years before going down in the Solent off Portsmouth in 1545, and it stayed there until it was lifted on October 11, 1982. The salvage took 28,000 dives and brought up 19,000 artefacts along with the partial or complete remains of 179 crew. Among them were more than 8,300 weapons and pieces of ordnance — 172 longbows, close to 4,000 arrows, and an assortment of firearms and blades — a Guinness World Record for medieval weaponry recovered from a single shipwreck. The ship is now displayed at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, where it was built.
A study of more than 15,000 moderate and severe injuries in a national trauma database for England and Wales found traumatic brain injury about 3.5 times as common among e-scooter riders as among motorcyclists, and 1.7 times as common as among cyclists. More than a third of injuries to adult e-scooter riders involved a brain injury. Helmet use tracks the gap: 6% of e-scooter riders wore one, against 45% of cyclists and 76% of motorcyclists. Children made up roughly 16% of injured e-scooter riders. The researchers had no data on distances travelled, so the finding is that the pattern of injuries differs — not that a given e-scooter trip is riskier. Published in Scientific Reports.
The epidemic is driven by Bundibugyo, a rare Ebola strain behind only two previous known outbreaks, in 2007 and 2012 — and unlike the Zaire strain responsible for the West African epidemic, it has no approved vaccine and no recognized therapeutic drugs. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that at its current rate the outbreak would eclipse the 2014-16 West African epidemic, which killed at least 11,000 people. Cases have accumulated far faster than in that outbreak. Two vaccines designed for the strain have entered early human safety trials.
Initial claims for the week ending August 15 came in at 206,000, a decrease of 6,000. But the previous week was revised up from 209,000 to 212,000 — the figure reported a week earlier — and the four-week moving average climbed 4,250 to 204,000. Continuing claims rose 18,000 to 1,799,000 for the week ending August 8, with the insured unemployment rate unchanged at 1.2%. The headline number fell while the underlying trend moved the other way. This is the Labor Department's own release, not a summary of it.
A day after the 30-year yield hit a 19-year high, Treasury said it will at least double its liquidity-support buybacks in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors, raising the cap from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. The change takes effect September 9 and runs through November 4, the date of the next quarterly refunding. Treasury framed it as a response to the "significant volume of high-quality offers" it already receives at the long end rather than as an intervention in yields — though long-dated yields fell on the news. This is Treasury's own announcement, not a summary of it.
Storms that began August 11 brought damaging straight-line winds, at least two tornadoes, large hail and flash flooding across the state, killing seven and displacing more than a thousand people. A week on, tens of thousands remain without power. The federal declaration lets FEMA fund water rescues, sandbagging, evacuations and shelters, but is capped at $5 million — which is why the governor is now seeking a major disaster declaration to get money to homeowners directly.
A former No. 1 pick working for scraps, a retired legend circling the practice field, and the question underneath both of them.
Four states argue in federal court that Facebook and Instagram were engineered to addict minors and that Meta concealed what it knew about the mental-health costs. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has cited the company's own internal documents as supporting the claim that its screen-time tools amounted to a public relations exercise, and separate allegations hold that Meta knew under-13s were on its platforms and collected their data without parental consent. The trial is expected to run about six weeks.
The long bond topped 5.33% on Tuesday, its highest since June 2007 and within striking distance of that year's 5.44% peak. The driver is not the Fed but the term premium — the extra compensation investors want for lending across three decades — which has climbed from near zero to roughly 0.8 points as the deficit widens and Treasury issuance competes with corporate borrowing to fund AI infrastructure. Long yields are rising globally: Japan's 10-year hit a 30-year high, France's 30-year a post-2008 high, Germany's the highest since 2011.
A study in Addiction tracked calls to US poison centers: 19 kratom cases in 2010, 1,242 in 2023. Severe outcomes — life-threatening events, lasting disability, death — went from zero to 158. Hospitalizations involving kratom alone climbed more than 1,150% over the decade, and nearly 1,300% when it was combined with other substances. It is sold in gas stations as a mild herbal supplement, and remains largely unregulated at the federal level.
In 1936 Heisenberg and Hans Euler predicted that a sufficiently violent magnetic field would make the vacuum itself bend light, because empty space is not empty but a churn of virtual particles flickering in and out of existence. Nobody could build a field strong enough to check. Observations of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 — spinning once every 2.1 seconds, its field a trillion times Earth's — may be the first detection of the effect, ninety years after the prediction.
Every central bank on Earth defends a 2% inflation target as if it were a law of nature. It began as a New Zealand finance minister's offhand remark on a 1988 TV broadcast — the Reserve Bank governor later admitted the figure was "plucked out of the air." How an improvisation became the world's monetary constitution, and why nobody can change it now.
Housing starts came in at a 1,239,000 annual rate, down 12.4% from June and 13.5% from a year ago, with single-family starts off 9.9%. Permits moved the opposite way: 1,443,000, up 5.0% on the month and 3.1% on the year. Builders are filing the paperwork for homes they are not yet willing to begin — a gap between intention and shovel that usually says more about financing costs and confidence than about demand.
Sixty years ago the biggest band on Earth played a half-empty stadium and never performed again. No farewell, no reunion, no tour — and it made them permanent. The screaming, the death threats, the cracks already forming, and how close John and Paul came to walking back on stage for $3,000.
The Finnish PANIC study followed 260 children into adolescence, measuring activity with heart-rate and movement sensors and testing learning, attention and working memory with the CogState battery. Teenagers who had spent more time on screens tended to score better — a result that inverts the assumption behind a decade of parenting advice. The researchers are careful about why: what matters is what the screen time consists of, and whether physical activity sits alongside it.
OpenRouter runs an AI gateway that picks among more than 400 models based on what a task needs and what it should cost — plumbing rather than product, with 8 million users. Its Series B in May valued it at $1.3 billion, making this a 5.4x markup in roughly ninety days. The price says less about one startup than about what the market currently believes routing between models is worth: a toll booth on every AI request, and Stripe already owns the one for payments.
The epicenter sat about 68 kilometers north-northwest of Ende, and the damage is being compounded by geography: landslides have buried or cut off remote villages across six regencies, leaving rescuers unable to reach the places most likely to be worst hit. Around 5,000 people have been displaced and officials expect the toll to climb. Nearly a thousand aftershocks have followed, which is its own kind of cruelty for anyone deciding whether it is safe to go back inside.
Security cameras caught Billy the Kid and Billy the Goat stepping onto a TriMet bus at a Portland station, thinking better of it, and wandering off. Both got home safely. TriMet allowed that some questions may never be answered, including whether they "had valid fare."
Brand New Day held the top spot again, while The End of Oak Street — J.J. Abrams and Warner Bros' original monster picture with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor — landed at roughly $20 million, the bottom of its projected range, on a B CinemaScore. The weekend still totals around $158 million, the strongest 33rd weekend since before the pandemic. Both facts are true at once: moviegoing is healthy, and almost none of that health is reaching films without a franchise behind them.
Russia's defense ministry says it destroyed 822 drones overnight, with roughly 600 detected heading toward Moscow and about a third downed over the Moscow region itself. At least six people were killed, including an 83-year-old man when a drone struck a private home outside the capital, and a warehouse belonging to the retail giant Wildberries burned in Podolsk. The scale is the story: strikes this deep and this numerous were not possible for Ukraine a year ago.
A newly opened 1,500-square-meter excavation zone north of the main site has exposed rectangular buildings sitting just below the surface — structures with few of the monumental T-shaped pillars, which excavators read as possibly domestic. If people lived here, the tidy story of Göbeklitepe as a purely ceremonial mountain sanctuary built by visiting hunter-gatherers gets considerably more complicated, and considerably more interesting.
Streams, VODs, clips, chat logs and channel images now feed Amazon's generative models unless a creator finds the opt-out toggle buried in their dashboard settings. Twitch's Chief Product Officer explained the default with unusual candor: "If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." Opting out doesn't fully help, either — your chat messages in someone else's channel follow that channel owner's setting, not yours.
The Constitutional Council ruled the ban an "inadequate, unnecessary, and disproportionate" violation of minors' freedom of expression — too generic, it said, to account for any child's age, maturity or the risks of any particular platform. Platforms were set to stop under-15 signups on September 1, and France would have been the first EU country with such a limit. Macron has already ordered a redraft, so the fight is postponed rather than settled.
Luigi Mangione told a federal judge "I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan," pleading guilty to two stalking charges that each carry a possible life sentence in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. There is no plea agreement — he affirmed he was promised nothing. Sentencing is set for December 18, and his lawyers immediately moved to dismiss the state murder charges on double jeopardy grounds, with that trial scheduled to open September 8.