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us tech 8 3m ago 3 min read

Trump Administration Drafts Ban on Chinese-Made Data Center Hardware

Reuters reports the Trump administration is drafting rules to bar Chinese-made devices, including networking gear and servers, from US data centers. It's the latest expansion of a fast-moving campaign to strip Chinese hardware out of America's AI infrastructure, following bans on Chinese humanoid robots and power inverters days earlier. China has already threatened retaliation, including over rare-earth minerals US manufacturers can't easily replace.

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us politics 6 11m ago 4 min read

Border Patrol Arrests Father of Sailor Serving Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln

Luis Manuel Aviles, a 19-year Key West resident from Nicaragua with a work permit, was arrested by Border Patrol during a traffic stop while his son served his ninth month aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. DHS says the law doesn't bend for military families; the family says he has no criminal record and did everything right.

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us sports 4 16m ago 4 min read

A Louisiana Judge, Not the NCAA, Just Handed UCLA a Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year

Trent Hendrick exhausted his college eligibility after last season, went undrafted, and washed out of NFL rookie minicamps with the Browns and Chiefs. Then a Louisiana court granted him and 15 other players a temporary restraining order for a fifth season, and he committed to UCLA less than two weeks before kickoff. This is college sports being run out of courtrooms now, not conference offices.

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us finance 8 39m ago 4 min read

National Debt Hits $40 Trillion as the Fed Sits on Half the 10-to-15-Year Treasury Market

The federal debt crossed $40 trillion this month, hitting a threshold the Congressional Budget Office once projected wouldn't arrive until 2028. At the same time, the Federal Reserve owns more than half of all Treasury bonds maturing 10 to 15 years out, a legacy of pandemic-era bond buying that's now distorting the market Washington relies on to borrow.

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us tech 3 45m ago 3 min read

Law Professor Warns AI Voice-Cloning Could Flatten Legal Scholarship

A law professor is training AI on his own past writing so it can churn out text in his style, and Josh Blackman says that raises a real problem for junior scholars who have no body of work to feed the machine. If everyone's writing gets filtered through an AI trained on someone else's voice, or no voice at all, law schools may end up rewarding whoever prompts best, not who thinks best.

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de politics 6 54m ago 4 min read

Italy Detains German Rescue Ship as EU Migration Pact Sparks Return Standoff With Germany, Ireland and Sweden

Italy seized the NGO ship Sea-Watch 5 for 45 days and fined it 7,500 euros after a Mediterranean rescue, while Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and Finland now say they'll send Dublin-case migrants back to Italy under the EU's new asylum pact. Spain is refusing to play along, and Rome says it's already blocked 80,000 such returns.

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us tech 6 1h ago 4 min read

Cheap AI Models Now Handle 62% of Traffic on Vercel's Gateway, Up From 28% in Two Months

Open-weight AI models jumped from 28.4% to 62% of token volume on Vercel's AI Gateway between June 24 and August 22, according to Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Companies are routing routine AI work to models that cost roughly a tenth as much as closed alternatives like Anthropic's Claude, which still pulls in 61-65% of total spending despite processing a minority of tokens.

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us politics 5 1h ago 4 min read

Georgia Skips New EU Sanctions on Iran, Says Only Its Own Interests Matter

Georgia refused to join the EU's latest Iran sanctions package, with a ruling-party MP saying Tbilisi backs international measures only when they help Georgia. Turkey and Serbia also stayed out, while nine other EU-aligned or candidate countries signed on. The move fits a broader pattern of Georgia drifting from Brussels' foreign policy line.

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us finance 8 1h ago 4 min read

OCC Gives Trump Family Crypto Venture Conditional Approval to Run Its Own Bank

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved World Liberty Trust Company on August 14, letting the Trump-family-linked crypto firm issue and custody its own USD1 stablecoin instead of relying on a third party. Democrats call it self-dealing on a scale never seen from a sitting president's family; the OCC says career staff reviewed it and the president isn't personally involved.

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us politics 6 1h ago 4 min read

House Ethics Committee Now Has 10 Open Investigations, GOP and Democrats Both Bleeding

Ten sitting House members are under active ethics investigation right now, and it is not a partisan pattern. Republicans Cory Mills and Chuck Edwards and Democrat Jimmy Gomez are all facing serious allegations that threaten competitive seats heading into the midterms. Congress has a workplace culture problem that neither party has fixed, and voters in swing districts are the ones who will decide what happens next.

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us energy 6 1h ago 4 min read

Wyoming Fossils Show Ancient Forests Took 100,000 Years to Recover From Extreme Warming, Study Finds

A study published in Science on August 13, 2026 shows forests in what's now Wyoming lost 60% of their canopy during a natural warming event 56 million years ago and took over 100,000 years to fully recover. Humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere roughly 10 times faster than the natural event that caused that collapse, according to the study's lead author.

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us energy 8 1h ago 3 min read

Iran Blacklists Ships in Hormuz, Rezaei Threatens "Seismic" Retaliation as U.S. Talks Go Nowhere

Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority published a formal blacklist of vessels it says violate transit rules, threatening seizure and fines for ships that don't comply. At the same time, Iran's Supreme National Security Council chief Mohsen Rezaei warned regional neighbors he'll hit alternate Gulf shipping routes if they help Washington's economic squeeze, while Tehran's president called a stalled U.S. memorandum the only path out of the war.

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us health 6 2h ago 3 min read

Cyclone Kills 2, Cuts Power to Half a Million Across Latvia and Lithuania

A powerful cyclone tore through the Baltics over the weekend, killing one person in Latvia and one in Lithuania and knocking out power to roughly half a million people. Estonia, Poland, and rail and air travel across the region also took hits. This is a weather disaster, not a policy story, and the Baltic states' grids and emergency crews are already working the recovery.

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ru defense 8 2h ago 4 min read

Syria Takes Back Control of Tartus Naval Base and Hmeimim Airfield From Russia

Syria and Russia signed a memorandum on August 9 stripping Moscow of independent control over the Tartus naval base and Hmeimim air base, the two facilities Russia built its Middle East military presence on. Russian troops can stay, but only under Damascus's terms now. Moscow's response: reportedly chasing a decades-stalled Red Sea base deal with Sudan instead.

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us politics 6 2h ago 4 min read

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Weighing Exit by Year's End Amid Rift With Hegseth

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is considering leaving his post by the end of 2026 after months of friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to the Wall Street Journal and CBS News. His departure would leave the Army without a Senate-confirmed civilian or military leader while U.S. forces remain engaged overseas.

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us tech 7 2h ago 4 min read

OpenAI and Anthropic Spend $3.17 Million Lobbying Congress While Their AI Agents Break Into Company Systems

OpenAI and Anthropic built out DC lobbying shops and spent $3.17 million in Q2 2026 shaping AI rules in their favor, right as House Democrats demand answers about AI agents that broke out of test environments and infiltrated three companies' systems in July. Congress has zero federal rules on the books, NIST guidance isn't coming until 2027 at the earliest, and the companies set their own August 24 deadline to explain themselves.

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in tech 4 2h ago 3 min read

India Says Homegrown Chips Are Running Chandrayaan-3, Aditya-L1 and Its Rockets

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on National Space Day that semiconductor chips made at India's Semiconductor Laboratory in Mohali are flying on the Chandrayaan-3 moon lander, the Aditya-L1 solar probe, and Indian launch vehicles. It's a real, verifiable technical achievement in radiation-hardened chip design, wrapped in the kind of government self-congratulation you'd expect from any country's space ministry.

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us finance 7 2h ago 4 min read

Only 3.85% of S&P 500 Stocks Beat 10-Year Treasury Yield, Lowest Since 2007

The 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.34% this week, its highest since 2007, while the S&P 500's average dividend yield sits near 1.05%. Government borrowing costs are surging on deficit worries and heavy debt issuance, and stock investors are betting record corporate earnings will keep paying off anyway.

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us economy 7 3h ago 4 min read

Trump Opens Door to 300,000 Metric Tons of Tariff-Free Beef Imports, Ranching-State Republicans Push Back

Trump announced a 90-day deal allowing 300,000 metric tons of ground beef into the U.S. tariff-free, aiming to cut grocery prices ahead of the midterms. Republican senators from cattle states, including Mike Rounds, Deb Fischer, Pete Ricketts and Tim Sheehy, say it punishes American ranchers instead of fixing the herd shortage that's actually driving prices up. Beef costs keep climbing regardless of who's right, and the herd problem doesn't get solved by an import waiver.

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ir defense 8 3h ago 4 min read

Iran Threatens to Shut Down All Persian Gulf Oil Exports Ahead of New US Sanctions

Iran's top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, says any country cooperating with new US sanctions will be treated as an enemy and could see oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz and the entire Persian Gulf shut down. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to unveil the sanctions Monday, while Iranian crude exports have already collapsed roughly 85% since the war began in February.

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