A comment by White House science adviser Michael Kratsios has gone viral after a speech in which he claimed U.S. technology can "manipulate time and space," prompting online speculation.

Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, made the remark during a policy address at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas on April 14.

"Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity," Kratsios said during prepared remarks published on the official White House website.

While the statement was likely intended as aspirational language about technological progress, it has since circulated widely online, with some interpreting the comment literally.

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The Trump administration has doubled down on its position that Hamas is to blame for Israeli troops executing 15 Palestinian medical workers in Gaza, even after a video showed that the Israeli military was lying about the incident.

The Israeli soldiers tried to cover up the crime by burying the 15 medics and their ambulances in a shallow grave. The army has since changed its story, acknowledging the lights were flashing and that they opened fire on unarmed men but claiming six of them were linked to Hamas while offering no evidence.

Despite the clear evidence of a war crime, the US is still backing the Israeli army’s conduct. “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told Reuters. “President Trump understands the impossible situation this tactic creates for Israel and holds Hamas entirely responsible.”

Only now, having reached the age of 80, is Tom Segev ready to admit that he was brought up on a lie. In recent years, the longtime historian and journalist who published numerous books and articles about the lives of others, has reexamined his own biography and discovered a few intriguing details. Ever since his father was killed, during the War of Independence, Segev believed that he was the son of one of the fallen in Israel's wars – Pvt. Heinz Schwerin, who was "struck by a murderers' bullet while on guard duty" in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood. That's the text that appears on the Defense Ministry's Izkor commemoration site.

One person knew the truth all those years but kept it to herself: his older sister, Jutta, who left Israel in 1960 and moved to Germany – the country from which their communist parents had fled the Nazis, in 1935. Jutta, who went on to become a member of the Bundestag in The Greens party, was 7 during the 1948 war. On February 3, 1948, her father was assigned

France has awarded a top human rights prize to two broadcasters who have been accused of anti-Muslim racism and discrediting critics of Israel by labelling them as antisemites.

Sophia Aram and Jacques Essebag, who is better known by his stage name "Arthur", received the Jean Pierre-Bloch Prize from President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace on Wednesday.

In recent years, Aram has increasingly hit back at "woke" and branded leftists and pro-Palestinian campaigners as antisemites or Hamas supporters.

Florida has been working for years to crack down on employers that hire undocumented immigrants. But that presented a problem for businesses in the state that are desperate for workers to fill low-wage and often undesirable jobs.

A senior White House official has hinted at the possibility of the U.S. utilizing its gold reserves to acquire more Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC).

"If we actually realize the gains on the U.S. gold holdings, that would be a budget-neutral way to acquire more bitcoin," Hines said adding that there's been "countless ideas" and the “best ideas" will be enacted by President Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, was apparently included in a Trump administration group chat on Signal in which top officials debated and then discussed details of attacks against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In the stunning report, Goldberg claimed Waltz connected with him on Signal on March 11 and, two days later, he was invited to join a chain called the “Houthi PC small group,” in which they discussed strikes against the Houthi militant group in Yemen — seemingly unaware of the journalist’s presence in the group.

He wrote that he initially had strong doubts the text group was real, “because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans.”

Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives. When you opt in, Cloudflare will automatically deploy an AI-generated set of linked pages when we detect inappropriate bot activity, without the need for customers to create any custom rules.

And it's "free"! (visibility in to all of that traffic is more than sufficient payment for them 🤑)

Here are some perhaps-contradictory highlights from their blog post (emphasis mine), which I'm pretty sure was itself written with LLM assistance:

No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense.

When these links are followed, we know with high confidence that it's automated crawler activity, as human visitors and legitimate browsers would never see or click them. This provides us with a powerful identification mechanism, generating valuable d

At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said. “Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”

Lithuanian prosecutors have blamed the Russian military intelligence service for being behind an arson attack on an Ikea store in Vilnius last year, calling it “an act of terrorism”.

Lithuania, a Nato member, has been a staunch ally of Ukraine since Moscow invaded in February 2022, and has frequently warned of Russian sabotage attempts.

On Monday, the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office attributed the arson attack in Vilnius in May 2024 to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

There were no casualties, but the prosecutor Arturas Urbelis told reporters: “We regard this act as an act of terrorism with serious consequences.”

Two Ukrainian citizens were suspects in the Ikea arson case, with one being detained in Lithuania and the other in Poland, he added.

“It has been established that through a series of intermediaries … the organisers of these crimes are in Russia and this is connected to military intelligence and security forces,” Urbelis said.

WASHINGTON - Radio Free Asia (RFA) was informed today by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) that its federal grant agreement, which makes possible RFA’s operations in Asia and globally, has been terminated. RFA’s President and CEO Bay Fang issued the following statement:

The termination of RFA’s grant is a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space. RFA has been foundational in helping U.S. policymakers understand the reality of what’s happening in China and other closed countries, bringing transparency and accountability where there is none. RFA’s breakthrough reporting in Xinjiang led the first Trump Administration to make its declaration of genocide against the Chinese government.

Today’s notice not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, b