Feed aggregator

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doesn’t understand how health insurance works.

Speaking on Fox News Monday in front of the president’s desolate fairgrounds, Oz presented his proof that the Obamacare marketplace was plagued by fraud—and in the process revealed how little he actually knows about health insurance.

Oz claimed that of 23 million people who were signed up for the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—40 percent of enrollees had never actually used their insurance.

“It raises, again, the reality that there are many people who are signed up who are getting paid for, but don’t believe they have the insurance, don’t know they have insurance, don’t want the insurance,” Oz said.

Dr Oz on ACA "fraud" -- "Of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. Let me ask you, John, you have health insurance -- do you use it once a year? In Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance ... we have a lot of fake people… pic.twitter.com/UsN5fGbyP8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

Of course, that’s not really how health insurance coverage works: just because you have it doesn’t mean you actually use it. The only “reality” that Oz’s statistics raised was that health care in this country is way too expensive.

“Over 50% of insured Americans struggle to afford seeing a doctor, and 1 in 4 insured Americans skip medical treatments because of out-of-pocket costs,” Melanie D’Arrigo, director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on X. “The actual fraud is Americans being price gouged on healthcare.”

Many Americans on Obamacare marketplace plans struggle to pay their deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs, which have surged to record highs in 2026 and increase by more than $1,000 on average year over year. Still, more Americans are now choosing high-deductible plans after Trump stripped essential health care subsidies.

Over the weekend, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration had uncovered more than one million people who were enrolled in Obamacare without Social Security numbers on file. Oz claimed that it was part of a plot by shady insurance agents to enroll unsuspecting—and potentially fake—Americans for Obamacare plans in order to collect “millions of dollars” in improper fees.

“The reality is we have a lot of fake people on the policies. We want them off because they don’t want the insurance, they’re covered elsewhere, or at least they never wanted to be in the program,” Oz told Fox News Saturday.

Civic partner content: A collaborative initiative amplifying nonprofits’ missions, expanding community engagement and driving meaningful impact. Learn more here.

At Lookout Santa Cruz, our Civic Partnerships are rooted in a shared commitment to community care. We’re proud to partner with the Santa Cruz SPCA, an organization that has spent decades supporting both pets and people across Santa Cruz County through rescue, adoption, education and outreach.

Since 1934, the Santa Cruz SPCA has served Santa Cruz County with the mission of caring for animals and the people who love them. As an independent nonprofit animal shelter and welfare organization, the SPCA relies entirely on community support, volunteers and donations to sustain its work, which touches thousands of lives across the county every year.

The SPCA is much more than a shelter. It provides pets and humans with a second chance and is a space of belonging and care through its many programs. Every day, the organization rescues and rehomes dogs and cats, helping connect animals with loving families through thoughtful adoption and fostering programs. Their team supports new pet owners with vaccinations, microchipping, spay and neuter services and medical care, ensuring pets and people can begin their new lives together with confidence and support.

Through humane education programs, classroom visits, camps and youth volunteering opportunities, the organization helps cultivate a new generation of compassionate animal guardians. Its senior outreach program ensures that older adults living on fixed incomes can continue experiencing the companionship of pets, with waived adoption fees and veterinary care assistance for senior pet owners.

And every Sunday, the SPCA’s pet food pantry distributes hundreds of pounds of dog and cat food to Santa Cruz County residents who need a helping hand – a reminder that caring for animals also means caring for the people behind them.

In many ways, the SPCA embodies something essential about Santa Cruz County: the belief that community care matters. That kindness matters. That every life has value.

Through this civic partnership, Lookout Santa Cruz is excited to help share the SPCA’s stories, amplify its mission and connect our readers to opportunities to volunteer, foster, adopt, donate and support the organization’s work. Together, we hope to celebrate the people and institutions building a more compassionate community for both animals and humans alike.

As a civic partner, the SPCA represents the kind of community-centered work we’re proud to spotlight at Lookout Santa Cruz: practical, compassionate and deeply rooted in service. We’re excited to work together to share their mission and help connect more residents to the many ways they can get involved.

The post Supporting pets, people and community: Santa Cruz SPCA joins Lookout’s Civic Partner program appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Not everyone is willing to follow responsible disclosure of vulns. An anonymous researcher has dumped what they say is working exploit code for zero-day vulnerabilities across 15 software products and open source projects without notifying any vendors or maintainers prior to publishing - and attackers are already exploiting at least two of these. The first is CVE-2026-55200, a critical, pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in libssh2, a popular client-side C library that implements the SSH2 protocol. Remote attackers can send crafted SSH packets with excessively large packet_length values to corrupt heap memory and achieve remote code execution. A fix has been merged into the libssh2 mainline development source control branch, and maintainers are still preparing a libssh2 release containing the patch. The second is CVE-2026-20896, a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting self-hosted Gitea Docker deployments that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to impersonate any user and fully take over the Git server. It’s fixed in Gitea 1.26.3. The researcher, who goes by bikini, dropped the exploit code and vulnerability write-ups in a now-removed GitHub repository called exploitarium. They remind us of Nightmare Eclipse - the zero-day bug hunter who has been publishing Microsoft exploits over the past couple of months. Unlike Nightmare Eclipse, however, bikini doesn’t appear to hold a grudge against any one vendor, publishing purported vulnerabilities across multiple products and projects including libssh2, Splunk, RustDesk, 7-Zip, VLC, AnyDesk, OpenVPN, c-ares, Gitea, and Floci. Bikini claimed - and, to be clear, The Register has not verified these claims or that the code works - that none of the exploits in the repo have been reported. “Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz,” the anonymous researcher wrote, as shown in this screenshot posted on X by Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet. “Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field.” Other researchers, including Federal Signal analyst Ethan Andrews, suggested that bikini used advanced AI models - specifically GPT-5.5 Codex - to automate fuzzing and vulnerability discovery, in yet another indication that the AI-induced vulnpocalypse is nigh. In response to bikini’s data dump, Andrews built 44 KQL detection rules covering the full exploitarium repo with language translation available for non-KQL stacks. “The most technically significant findings - libssh2 pre-auth heap write and Gitea default Docker auth bypass - have been independently verified as high-risk with active exploitation observed,” Andrews wrote, noting that some of the exploitarium disclosures “have been dismissed by the community as low-impact AI-fuzzing noise.” While the repository has since been removed by GitHub, nothing ever truly dies on the internet, and it’s safe to assume that attackers are now also using AI to scan for vulnerable instances. In many cases, bikini’s PoCs mean they don’t even have to spend time developing an exploit. ®

President Donald Trump still won’t say whether he’ll sign a bipartisan housing bill that’s coming to his desk Monday, declaring it “a big yawn” compared to his voter suppression bill.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Monday, Trump brushed aside mention of the legislation, which aims to boost housing supply and address affordability issues.

“Big deal. It’s a yawn,” Trump said. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn,” Trump said.

Trump on Housing Bill: To me, compared to the Save America Act, everything is a big yawn! pic.twitter.com/Z49vLFK1WP

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a photo ID when voting. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizens voting is incredibly rare. Plus, the bill as written doesn’t have enough support to pass the Senate; making it law before the housing bill, like Trump wants, is essentially impossible.

“I think it’s so unimportant by compared to the SAVE America Act. I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says—it’s saving America from crooked elections. And the housing bill is a bill that can get approved, they worked on it long and hard. It’s very bipartisan—that means the Democrats like it,” Trump said, seemingly insinuating that the bipartisanship of the housing bill was a flaw.

Reporter: What are your plans for the housing bill?

Trump: I don’t know. I think it's so unimportant compared to the Save America Act. Democrats like it. They are getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. I made a lot of money with housing. pic.twitter.com/8aQYHfEPs0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

“They’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to,” he continued. “Nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody did well like me in housing. I made a lot of money with housing. But when I look at that bill, it’s a bill. But when I look at the SAVE America Act, it’s about saving America,” Trump said, demonstrating his ability to read.

Republicans and Democrats alike are looking to the passage of the housing bill for a pre-midterm reputation boost. Republicans have a lot riding on this in particular. However, it seems like Trump would rather talk about his glory days as a slumlord than help out the vulnerable members of his own party—not to mention the millions of Americans who can’t afford homes.

⚡ Quick Take

• Critical Role Campaign 4 hit us with a major death, and we are breaking down all the details and questions behind it.

Between the sprawling scope of Critical Role Campaign 4’s story and its massive 13-player cast, the cards have always been on the table regarding potential player character deaths. Anyone could go at any time. We came eerily close in the opening moments of the campaign with Alexander Ward’s Occits Tachonis, but this time, there were no nat 20s or stones of nightsong to save the day in the eleventh hour, and *massive spoiler alert* in the final moments of episode 30, Teor Pridesire (Travis Willingham) became the first PC to die in Critical Role Campaign 4. 

With Willingham absent from the table entirely in episode 31, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it; Teor Pridesire is gone. But he didn’t leave without giving posthumous parting gifts to two of his fellow adventurers. What is a Death Boon, and what does it mean for Wick (and Thimble)? We break it down. 

How Do Teor and Talcydimir Pridesire Die in Critical Role Campaign 4? 

Converging in the city of Dol-Makjar and exchanging key resources and information, the Soldiers, Seekers, and Schemeres tables reshuffle in episode 28 of Campaign 4, forming three new groups to peel off and pursue new goals: Team Theatre, Team Spy, and the ill-fated Team Bird Watching. While Team Theatre attends opening night at the Hallowed Round and Team Spy attempts to sit in on a meeting of the sundered houses, the Pridesire brothers and the rest of Team Bird Watching Julien Davinos (Matt Mercer), Thimble (Laura Bailey) and Occtis) journey to Occtis’ family home of Obrimus Manor in an effort to find and rescue Mara the Wing, a druid ally of Thjazi Fang. 

Unfortunately for Team Bird Watching, House Tachnois’ many dark bargains and arcane secrets mean Obrimus Manor is a literal haunted house, and as Occtis and Co. plunge deeper into the crypts in search of answers (and Mara), they inadvertently awaken the hoards of the undead, and the encounter becomes a desperate fight to escape the manor. Though Julien and Occtis successfully rescue Mara the Wing and escape with their lives, Teor and Cyd find themselves face-to-face with one House Tachnois’ many horrific experiments: the monstrous, re-animated corpse of General Raimond Davinos.

The once-noble general has been transformed into an unrecognizable, shambling creature, and though Teor and Cyd fight tooth and claw to escape Raimond and his zombie hoard, the brothers are overwhelmed, and the newly-reunited Pridesires die side-by-side in battle. 

RELATED ARTICLE

The Biggest Changes VOX MACHINA Season 4 Made From the Critical Role Campaign What Is a Death Boon, and Who Did Teor Will His To? (Wick’s Buff)

As GM Brennan Lee Mulligan has repeatedly emphasized, there are no resurrection or revivify mechanics in the world of Aramán. Instead, when a character dies, they can grant another character a Death Boon, a magical transference that grants the recipient some semblance of the deceased’s power. In his final moments, Teor chooses to give his Death Boon to Wicander Halovar (Sam Riegel), honoring their shared belief in a higher power and affinity for the divine. 

The moment Teor dies, a lion head talisman appears in Wick’s hand, which Mulligan lets us know in the next episode, is symbolic of the boon Teor granted Wick: a permanent +2 buff to his charisma score, bringing Wick from an 18 to a maxed-out charisma of 20. 

What Happens to Teor’s Killer, General Raimond Davinos?

Unwilling to leave her friend behind and unaware he’s already dead, Thimble rushes to Teor’s aid instead of fleeing with Julien and Occtis, and arrives to find the undead General standing over Teor and Cyd’s bodies. Risking certain death, Thimbles moves in for the kill and (thanks to the damage Teor and Cyd had managed to get in last session) successfully downs General Davinos with a single blow. 

In destroying the zombified general, Thimble isn’t just avenging her fallen friend: after the encounter, Brennan tells the table that House Tachonis had intended to use their new undead abomination to hunt down and kill his own son – a cruel fate for both Julien and the General, averted thanks to Thimble’s impulsive act of bravery.

Critical Role What Happens to Teor’s Body?

With General Davinos laid to permanent rest, Thimble was able to get to Teor and Cyd’s bodies, prompting Brennan to reveal the other half of the Death Boon. In addition to granting one character an ability, the dead can also will one item to a player character of their choice, and Travis chose to will Teor’s Bracers of Oak and Birch to Thimble. 

Created by House Royce, the Bracers set the wearer’s strength score to 19 and give them the benefits of the Barkskin spell, while also allowing the wearer to carry/lift/pull one size larger than their normal carrying capacity. As a four-inch-tall pixie, the strength buff is particularly massive for Thimble, taking her from a -4 strength modifier to a +4.

In a heartbreaking first use of her newfound strength, Thimble uses her new carrying capacity to effortlessly lift both Cyd and Teor, moving them safely out of Tachnois territory so they can be laid to rest without worry of future re-animation. 

Is Travis Willingham Gone From Critical Role Campaign 4? 

Though Teor may be the first permanent departure from the Campaign 4 tables, that doesn’t mean Willingham is leaving with him: in the Critical Cooldown for episode 30, Travis confirmed he has a backup character prepared; due to the lethal nature of the campaign, Brennan had asked the entire cast to have a backup ready. 

The question isn’t so much *if* Travis will come back to Campaign 4 with a new character, but *when*. Spoilers for Critical Role: Bell’s Hells, but the last time one of Willingham’s characters died, there was a four-month gap in real time between Chetney’s death and the introduction of Braius, his new PC. 

Similarly, Campaign 4 has a break coming up soon: as of right now, there are no new episodes scheduled July 9 through August 13, which is when a new six-part mini Daggerheart campaign, Age of Umbraw: Sallowlands, is set to air. Between his absence from episode 31 and his historical propensity for taking some time away from the table between characters, it’s plausible we won’t meet Travis Willingham’s new character until mid-August when the campaign returns in full. 

The Daggerheart premiere and Travis’ temporary departure from the table coincide eerily well; the six-week break from Critical Role Campaign 4 gives fans time to grieve the first fallen party member while Willingham and Mulligan work on the perfect way to slot this new character into the tangled web that is the world of Aramán.

The post Let’s Breakdown That Massive Critical Role Campaign 4 Death appeared first on Nerdist.

Google is expanding Gemini’s personalized AI image generation to eligible free users in the U.S., allowing the chatbot to create images based on your interests and data from connected Google apps.

The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to mobile phone geolocation data, a decision privacy advocates have sought for years. The Court's ruling in Chatrie vs. United States [PDF] concluded, "Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information." Police did so through a so-called geofence warrant. The warrant required Google to provide mobile phone Location History collected from within a 150-meter radius of a credit union during the hour around when it was robbed. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by requiring authorities to obtain a warrant based upon probable cause. The Court's conclusion does not resolve Chatrie's case, which has been remanded to the US Court of Appeals to assess the disputed warrant's validity. But it does make clear that Location History data requires a warrant. And it amplifies the impact of Carpenter v. United States [PDF], a 2018 ruling that limited warrantless searches of cell-site location information (CSLI). In a social media post, Stanford Law School professor Orin Kerr expressed surprise that Justice Kavanaugh joined the majority in the 6-3 decision. "If you're a privacy advocate, Chatrie is just about the best possible outcome you could have expected," said Kerr, who in 2024 argued Chatrie had no Fourth Amendment right to his location data because Chatrie had opted in to Google's Location History. Privacy advocates, who have been asking US courts for at least two decades to affirm that the Fourth Amendment protects location data, are thrilled with the decision. EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker, who co-authored the EFF amicus brief in the case, said, "We applaud the Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie vs. United States. The Court reaffirmed that you have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and that even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment." Crocker said that in recent years police have come to rely on geofence warrants and have violated the privacy of many innocent bystanders. He said while the Court stopped short of disallowing geofence warrants entirely, the EFF intends to push for their elimination in lower courts. The US government argued that the Fourth Amendment didn't apply because Chatrie had opted into sharing his Location History with Google. But the Court found that argument "meritless." "That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on Location History: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not 'work correctly' otherwise … while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users’ location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government," the Court's majority said. Eden Heilman, legal director of the ACLU of Virginia, told The Register in a statement that the Court's decision confirms that law enforcement cannot use new technology to conduct warrantless surveillance. "We do not lose our right to privacy simply because we use a cellphone," said Heilman. Google in 2021 reported that geofence warrants began taking off around 2018 and by 2020 represented about 25 percent of all US warrants it received. Two years later, in an effort to reduce its role as a law enforcement data dispenser, the search biz announced changes to its handling of location history data by storing the data on-device instead of on its servers. Alas, there's an entire data broker industry that has been selling notionally private data to customers, whether that's the government or businesses. Purchase histories, browsing history data, chatbot logs, and the like continue to be bought and sold. In March, a bipartisan set of US Senators attempted to close the so-called data broker loophole with the introduction of a bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act. It was designed to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) "with necessary Fourth Amendment protections to block the federal government from buying Americans’ private data from shady sources." Yet events have overtaken the bill. In June, Section 702 of FISA, a law that has allowed the warrantless collection of information, was allowed to expire – a decision that can be read as a vote of no confidence in the current administration. There's now an opportunity to rethink how personal data is collected, stored, and sold. Come August in California, data brokers will be required to process opt-out requests from the state's Data Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP). That's the way forward for privacy: Minimize data collection and storage, and provide a privacy enforcement mechanism. ®

President Donald Trump is attempting to portray his celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary as a resounding success, but reports from the National Mall, site of the “Great American State Fair,” show a low turnout. “Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people…

Source

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected three ballot measures that would have allowed Democrats to redraw the district map in their favor before the 2028 elections, dealing a blow to national party efforts in the gerrymandering race kick-started by President Donald Trump.

The decision blocks Democrats from securing a map that would have likely given them three more seats in the House of Representatives. Under the proposed new map, the only safe Republican district would be that of Representative Lauren Boebert.

The Supreme Court rejected the ballot measures on the basis of the state’s constitutionally mandated “single subject” policy, which requires measures to only handle a single issue.

“Changing long-settled law by modifying the timing, frequency, criteria, and entity responsible for congressional redistricting represents a significant change beyond the proponents’ stated central purposes [of] … congressional redistricting by adopting a new temporary map,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez said in one of her opinions.

Now, Colorado is out of the redistricting wars. So far, the only blue states that have approved a redistricting measure are California and Utah. But the groundwork has been laid for other states to do the same before 2028.

On Monday, officials in 25 states and Washington, DC sued Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz over the interim final rule for Medicaid work requirements established by President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The new rule, their lawsuit contends, “will create unnecessary bureaucracy and lead people who are either already working or eligible for an exclusion to lose or be denied coverage.”

As I previously reported, the rule released near the beginning of June was even more onerous than many state officials feared. It was a surprise to states that individuals already on Medicaid with serious health conditions would have to jump through further hoops to prove that they were unable to work:

State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me. “We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”

The lawsuit specifically raises the point that CMS “provided no indication
that it intended to place specific limits on States’ ability to rely on self-attestation” rather than requiring health care workers’ certification in all circumstances.

In a press release, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who helped lead the suit, said that the “abrupt changes in [federal] implementation of the statute leave states insufficient time to adjust…or effectively communicate to members what is required.”

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha, who is also joining the suit, in a press release.

The lawsuit asks that a federal judge stay the interim final rule and vacate parts of it. The rule would otherwise go into effect in states with Medicaid expansion by January 1.

⚡ Quick Take

• Backrooms just came to theaters in May 2026, but it is already getting a re-release in July 2026.
• The new release is titled Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition and it has 15 more minutes of footage.
• This release will arrive on July 3 for the holiday weekend.

A24 found itself with another big hit thanks to Backrooms. The film from director Kane Parsons took this infamous creepypasta tale and brought it to the big screen. We followed a furniture store owner who discovered some seriously creepy liminal spaces in the store’s basement, and we really enjoyed the journey. Backrooms came out at the end of May 2026, but there’s already a re-release hitting theaters less than two months later in July with 15 more minutes of footage. 

A24

According to Variety, this version of the film is cleverly titled Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition and will have a “theatrically exclusive post-credit.” Very interesting, indeed. It appears that the Backrooms re-release will come to AMC theaters but it is not clear if that’s true for other big names like Regal. If it doesn’t come to a theater near you, hopefully that footage will appear as a special feature on a future 4K UHD release.

RELATED ARTICLE

The 8 Scariest Levels of the BACKROOMS

This may seem like a wild choice, but when you spend a cool $10 million on a film and it makes $330 million globally, you’d want to find ways to keep it in theaters, too. If there’s footage that fans haven’t seen yet, they might want to go back to the movies and check it out. Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition will arrive at theaters just in time for the holiday weekend on July 3 for an unspecified amount of time.

The post BACKROOMS Will Get Theater Re-Release With Brand New Footage appeared first on Nerdist.

The Supreme Court has issued a raft of recent decisions benefiting Donald Trump. But on Monday, the justices rejected his latest effort to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll millions of dollars a jury awarded her after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll successfully sued him in 2023, after he not only denied the allegation—calling it a “hoax” and a “conjob”—but mocked Carroll as “not my type.”

A federal jury found Trump liable for $5 million in damages in May of 2023, after which Trump immediately denied the assault and once again mocked Carroll, leading to a second similar lawsuit, in which a jury quickly found that Trump owed an additional $83.3 million.

Trump appealed both jury decisions, but a federal appellate court ruled against him in 2024. He took the initial case to the Supreme Court last summer. On Monday, the court declined to hear the case, leaving the initial judgment in place.

Theoretically, the much larger second judgment could still be taken up by the Supreme Court. But today’s decision suggests the president is running out of legal avenues to avoid paying Carroll the money the juries said he owes.

Trump posted an angry message on Truth Social following the Court’s decision. He insisted he would keep fighting the case—he didn’t explain how—and tried to reframe Carroll’s lawsuit against him as an attack on America.

“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump wrote.

Trump specifically cited the fact that Carroll had sued him under New York State’s Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits in which victims allege they were sexually assaulted. Previously, the statute of limitations had been only three years.

In his post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the law had been written specifically to target him, which is not true. The law was modeled on a similar law that temporarily allowed lawsuits by victims of child sexual abuse, who otherwise would have been prevented from suing because of the statute of limitations. Nor was he the only defendant sued under the law—besides Carroll’s lawsuit, the law also enabled lawsuits against Bill Cosby and Sean Combs.

During the 2023 trial, Carroll testified, in sometimes graphic detail, about the incident, her confusion over how to handle it, and her eventual decision to write a book that included the allegation.

Asked on the stand if she regretted going public with her accusation, she said, “I regretted it about 100 times, but in the end”—she paused as she broke down into tears—“being able to get my day in court…I’m crying, but I got to tell my story in court.”

DOGE may be dead, but its employees are still alive and kicking—and they’ve been quietly rebuilding sensitive federal websites in a way that may violate federal law, The Guardian reports.

The National Design Studio (NDS) is a governmental agency established via executive order last August, and is full of former DOGE employees. It operates four federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpacounts.gov.

The sites are used for passport applications, getting prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, and voter registration. Until The Guardian contacted NDS about their operations, all four websites ran visitor-tracking software configured to evade traditional privacy tools. And they still don’t have the public filings required by federal privacy laws.

In its investigation, The Guardian also found that NDS’s spending isn’t listed on the federal contract database, making its contracting opaque.

In the meantime, the group is potentially giving the White House access to information about Americans that it normally wouldn’t have: NDS’s passport application site bypasses the State Department’s site, and the agency has built a copy of vote.gov.

Altogether, these sites route sensitive information through a system that the White House apparently controls, and they’re doing it without oversight.

Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and Trump supporter, leads the agency, which is staffed by the same hiring authority that ran DOGE. Gebbia was at DOGE himself for six months in the first half of 2025, and at least two other former DOGE staffers work with him: Greg Hogan and Akash Bobba, one of DOGE’s original engineers.

According to The Guardian, several photos and a video on the NDS website also appear to show none other than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the young DOGE-er who allegedly exposed millions of Americans’ Social Security data.

Once again, the Trump administration is giving people with a “move fast and break things” mentality access to incredibly sensitive data on the American people—and seems like it’s trying to do it all in secret.

The end has come for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but it’s not being turned off for fear of the world being sucked into some sort of cosmic anomaly - it’s getting a major upgrade. Physicists at CERN are still bidding goodbye to the LHC, per a Monday announcement from the lab, but this is very much a “the king is dead, long live the king” sort of moment, as the four-year shutdown will result in the completion of the High-Luminosity LHC, or HiLumi LHC, not a full-fledged replacement. In essence, a younger, fitter model with much better eyesight and most of the same genes will be taking the throne as the world's largest particle accelerator, or human-made machine, for that matter, when it comes online in 2030 after what the lab is calling Long Shutdown 3. HiLumi LHC will feature a number of upgrades. As its name suggests, increased luminosity is the biggest difference between the new model and the old LHC, which was first switched on in 2008. Luminosity, as CERN explains, is proportional to the number of collisions produced in a given time. Those collisions are detected in the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC (the pair were responsible for the world’s first detection of the Higgs boson in 2012), which will be getting some major upgrades that, per CERN, will effectively make them into entirely new detectors. In their current incarnation, ATLAS and CMS can detect somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 proton-proton collisions per firing cycle, in what’s known as a “bunch crossing” where particles fired in opposite directions come in contact with each other. Once the upgrade to HiLumi LHC is complete, the hope is that they’ll be capable of detecting between 140 and 200 collisions per cycle, a luminosity increase of a factor of 10, the lab said. Those collisions are picked out of a massive amount of data (more than five billion interactions per second), and the more collisions the experiments can detect, the greater potential they have of spotting something of interest to CERN particle physicists - like the Higgs boson. To turn the LHC into the HiLumi LHC, ATLAS and CMS will have their trigger systems that select events for closer examination completely replaced, new detector technology will be installed, and timing detectors able to measure things at a resolution of “a few tens of picoseconds” will be installed. The end result of this upgrade, a CERN spokesperson told The Register, is to enable more physics discoveries like the Higgs identification and other firsts the LHC has produced over the years when it wasn’t shut down for repairs or other upgrades. “Over its lifetime, the HiLumi LHC could produce about 380 million Higgs bosons, compared with roughly 55 million Higgs bosons produced since the start of the LHC,” the CERN spokesperson told us, adding that the hope is to eventually see two Higgs bosons produced together and interacting with each other. “This process is extraordinarily rare and is one of the flagship goals of the HL-LHC. Measuring this self-interaction will teach us about the Higgs field itself and may provide clues about how our Universe evolved shortly after the Big Bang.” A number of renovations are being conducted in the next four years along with the luminosity upgrades. Per CERN, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a 7 kilometer circumference ring that accelerates particles and beams them into the LHC, will be consolidated; the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) target area, which shot a beam out of the SPS through the Earth’s surface toward a laboratory in Italy 732 km away, will be dismantled; and new target facilities will be established in Experimental Cavern North 3, along with other safety, electrical, and technical upgrades. “In the LHC alone, 1.2 km of magnets and components will be removed and replaced with new equipment,” Jean-Philippe Tock, CERN deputy engineering lead and coordinator for the shutdown, said in the lab’s statement. As for whether the refurbished LHC will increase the chance that humanity ends the world, CERN assured us the new one will be just as safe as the old 27-kilometer machine that’s stirred up controversy and conspiracy theories over the past couple of decades. “The Universe as a whole produces more than 10 million million LHC-like experiments per second,” the lab spokesperson explained. “If such phenomena were dangerous or destructive, it would contradict what we see: stars, galaxies and the Earth still exist.” ®

Microsoft's support policy for its .NET runtime and development platform is too short for enterprises, according to a developer who has revived a long-standing complaint in a new GitHub issue. The current release lifecycle for modern .NET, formerly known as .NET Core, is an annual major release, with even-numbered versions being long-term support (LTS) for three years, and odd-numbered versions maintained for two years. The legacy and Windows-only .NET Framework, which is in maintenance, is defined as a component of Windows and therefore supported for much longer. Breaking changes are rare, but it is old and many libraries and application frameworks do not support it, including Microsoft's ASP.NET Core. Earlier this month, a developer opened an issue in the official .NET repository arguing that the LTS support window is "too short for upgrade and adoption cycles." The problem with the current three-year cycle is that by the time the next LTS release appears, two of those years have already elapsed, leaving just one year to upgrade. Even when they can get the upgrade done in time, potential customers "are hesitant to adopt software which is soon to run out of the defined EOL [end of life] window." Another developer commented: "I've got telemetry showing about 50 percent of the deployed versions of my software are running EOL versions." They also complained about the one-year upgrade window, saying: "I try to use netfx [.NET Framework] as much as I can because of the ten-year support tied to OS life but that's getting harder and harder as the ecosystem drops FX support." The problem is not new, but is becoming more pressing as .NET Framework ages. A similar complaint in 2023 drew comment from program manager Richard Lander, who said: "We chose the support time frames to enable a balance between stable deployment time for users and enabling the team to spend most of their time innovating." He said that Microsoft had discussed longer support time frames and extended paid support offerings but has "opted to continue with only the free support plan." Microsoft's free support period is shorter than that offered for some other platforms including Java (five years plus extended support for LTS versions) and Python (five years security fixes for all releases). Upgrading from one .NET version to another can sometimes be done easily, but complications include breaking changes, third-party dependencies that may also need updating, the usual testing and deployment cycle, and in some cases paying external developers for the upgrade. "The .NET Framework only incurs costs for functional modifications and bug fixes, but .NET tries to add to that the non-negligible cost of version upgrades at relatively short intervals," said a comment to the 2023 issue. In March, Microsoft principal software engineer Shay Rojansky requested feedback on dropping .NET Framework support in the Microsoft.Data.Sqlite library, drawing the comment that "right now .NET Standard 2.0 and framework 4.8 are the only .NET targets with reasonable support timelines available for enterprise." The .NET Standard 2.0 specifies a common set of APIs implemented by .NET Framework and modern .NET releases, including .NET 10. Rojansky said the comment was off-topic, yet it is a factor in the enduring use of .NET Framework, which in turn may explain why the proposal was closed as "not planned." ®

Kobo users can now automatically sync their reading progress to StoryGraph, making it easier to track books, reading stats, and challenges without relying on Amazon’s Goodreads.

⚡ Quick Take

• The Angry Birds Movie 3 dropped its first trailer.
• The movie will follow Red as he takes on the challenge of parenthood.
• Beloved characters like Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride) return for part 3.

The trailer for The Angry Birds Movie 3 came out today, and it managed to encompass all of the chaos of the prior two movies — but in a family-comedy-shaped package. Angry Birds 3 will follow Red as he raises his three kids. They take after their father, to his dismay, and get into various hijinks of their own. 

The first two movies, based on the popular mobile game, followed Red as he saved the birds from the villainous green pigs and then allied with the same pigs to defeat the eagles. Now, the story will become more family-centered.

This holiday season, one angry bird will face his greatest challenge yet, surviving fatherhood… while saving the world!

The trailer definitely focused on the fatherhood aspects far more than the “saving the world.” There was a short clip of an arena, a menacing-looking pig, and Red wearing a jersey. Otherwise, it was comprised of clips of Red dealing with two teens with the classic “I hate my parents” attitude, and visual gags involving his infant son. Silver, his wife, only appears once in the trailer.

Beloved characters from the first two movies, like Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride), return for more fun. These two comic relief sidekicks serve as fun-uncle characters and help Red with his fatherly duties. The trailer shows them attempting a diaper change with Red’s youngest son.

Paramount Pictures

It is unclear how balanced the plot will be between family comedy and a larger mission. Based on the trailer, they definitely spent more time on introducing Red’s children as characters. It seems to be a very different plot structure than the first two movies, which were more about the mission/adventure aspect. It is unclear what, exactly, the imminent threat is—besides the challenges of parenthood.

The Angry Birds Movie 3 will come out this December.

The post THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 3 Trailer Shows Red as a Parent appeared first on Nerdist.

The companies confirmed to TechCrunch that their unusual partnership in Phoenix recently ended after nearly three years..

The chief attraction at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair made people sick on Monday.

One of the events at the country’s semiquincentennial was a pancake-eating competition that had its four participants gagging and heaving after they’d stuffed themselves with the batter-rich flapjacks. An intern at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Douglas Ford, won the competition, though footage of his success didn’t make it look easy.

Fox News noted that the eating contest was made more difficult by a heat wave that has gripped Washington. The conservative network also ironically referred to the all-you-can-eat competition as a celebration of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in a chyron.

the marquee attraction at Trump's fair today was a pancake eating contest where the contestants were gagging and nearly puking. 'Murica! pic.twitter.com/KQyoRk7fWD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive celebration has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae, a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be canceled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program, and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The state fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the festivities, yet even it is more of a Potemkin village than a sincere reverence. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his “Triumphal Arc” proposal sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “The president is bringing down the mood.”

Buckle up, because President Donald Trump has taken his whitewashed historical account of U.S. history on the road. Across the nation, six extremely patriotic, federally funded “Freedom Trucks” are making stops at schools, public events, and elsewhere to share a Trump administration-approved version of history. The trucks are fitted with a “Wall of Heroes” and intertwined with Christian…

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