Blog

DOGE Announces Deactivation of 500,000 Federal Credit Cards

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said on May 7 that it has canceled about half a million “unneeded” credit cards used by federal agencies.

In a post on social media platform X, DOGE wrote that over the past 10 weeks, its program to audit “unused” or “unneeded” credit cards has been expanded to 32 federal agencies.

DOGE, led by tech billionaire and Trump administration adviser Elon Musk, said that more than 500,000 agency credit cards were deactivated in that time period, out of roughly 4.6 million active cards and accounts used by the government.

“So, still more work to do,” the organization wrote in the post, which included a screenshot of a spreadsheet showing the canceled agency cards.

The spreadsheet showing what cards were canceled included ones used by the Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration, Labor Department, Small Business Association, Treasury Department, Commerce Department, Interior Department, Education Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development Department, Defense Department, Health and Human Services Department, State Department, and others.

The May 7 statement means that DOGE has canceled another 30,000 credit cards used by agencies since mid-April, when it provided the last update on the effort.

At the time, Musk reposted DOGE’s comment and claimed that “twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees.”

DOGE’s website says that it has saved about $165 billion, or $1,000 per taxpayer, since it was established through an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in January.

Days before that, top congressional Democrats alleged that DOGE, the Trump administration, and Musk were holding up some $430 billion in funds that they said were appropriated by Congress.

Trump’s drive to downsize and reshape the federal government has already led to the dismantling of entire agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

DOGE has been a major part of that effort, and the White House has said it is responsible for tackling what it calls fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government, while streamlining operations.

Keep reading

‘Dark photon’ theory of light aims to take down the famous double-slit experiment, upending quantum physics

For centuries, most scientists have shared the belief that light behaves as both a wave and a particle. This idea, then, became the central component to quantum theory, sprouting the field of science known as quantum mechanics.

The double-slit experiment supported the idea, showing bright and dark bands that indicated wave-like interference. But now, a new study suggests that this experiment might not lock us into seeing light as a wave.

According to the experts, we can interpret those interference bands using quantum particles alone.

The research was led by Gerhard Rempe, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. He teamed up with collaborators at Federal University of São Carlos and ETH Zurich for the study.

Modern physics and our view of light

In 1801, Thomas Young introduced an experiment by shining light through two narrow openings to produce intersecting fringes on a screen. His findings led many to conclude that light must be a wave.

A century later, quantum mechanics began to take shape, revealing that quantum particles like electrons could mimic wave-like light interference too.

Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect showed that light travels in discrete packets called photons. Niels Bohr then elaborated on wave-particle duality, ushering in one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

Dark and visible photons

The new approach from the research team explores the concept of bright and dark modes.

In their view, interference patterns can emerge from combining “detectable” and “undetectable” photon states. These bright states interact with an observer, while dark states remain hidden.

Such hidden photons might linger at places where we would normally think the light cancels out. Observers who try to track the path of these photons alter the state, flipping what was dark into bright or vice versa.

From this perspective, the light pathways can be viewed as quantum superpositions, rather than purely classical wave interference.

Keep reading

Israeli Government Approves Plan for Full Military Occupation of Gaza

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said once the new offensive begins, it will not end until the Strip is ‘conquered’

The Israeli government has approved plans to expand the genocidal war on Gaza that Israeli officials say will lead to the full Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territory.

The plan involves capturing more territory in Gaza, expanding the so-called “buffer zone” where the IDF has demolished virtually every structure, and forcibly displacing Palestinian civilians to move them all to a small area of southern Gaza.

Axios later reported that the Israeli plan involves flattening every single building that remains in Gaza, forcing the entire civilian population into one single area, and pressuring them to leave as part of an ethnic cleansing plan, though it’s unclear what countries are willing to take them.

An Israeli official told Haaretz that the plan is different from previous Israeli military operations because it will lead to “the occupation of territory and a sustained Israeli presence in Gaza.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel is “finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip” and that it was “no longer afraid of the word ‘occupation.’”

Keep reading

When Joe Biden’s Brain Melted on ‘The View,’ Something Unexpected Happened: A Democratic Star Was Born

If you haven’t seen the video, it’s absolutely worth watching, because in a (slightly) different timeline — i.e. Biden’s presidential debate with Trump was scheduled closer to November (or canceled altogether) — and the Democrats were capable of keeping those 2020 COVID-era voting restrictions — there’s at least a 45% chance Joe Biden would’ve won a second term.

Seriously. Had he not been unmasked on national TV as an invalid, it’s revisionist history to assume that Biden was a no-hoper. Even after humiliating himself in his one and only debate (“We finally beat Medicare!”), he had a 58% approval rating after dropping out of the race, and trailed Trump by just one point (47% to 46%).

Donald Trump wasn’t the only one who dodged a bullet in 2024: our whole country did. 

Because there’s just no way Joe Biden could’ve handled the rigors of the presidency for another term. He couldn’t even handle the yapping yentas on “The View”.

It was sad. At the 22:58 mark, Biden lacked the cognitive abilities to answer a question about his lack of cognitive abilities. So he rambled. And by the end of his rambling, disjointed response, it’s pretty clear he had forgotten what the original question was, so his wife jumped in and answered for him.

The contrast between the steady clarity of “Doctor” Jill Biden’s voice — and the ex-president’s raspy, meandering performance — was considerable. For all of Joe Biden’s shortcomings and limitations, there was a time when he was an above-average public speaker. He was never on-par with someone such as Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, but he built his brand by looking, sounding, and playing the part of a liberal’s idea of a working-class hero.

That time is over. At this point, trotting him out on the public stage is borderline elder abuse. 

It’s cruel.

Keep reading

Former Defense Officials Raise Concerns About Unexplained Drone And UAP Threats To U.S. Airspace

Former senior defense officials issued stark warnings to lawmakers Thursday about intensifying threats posed by unattributed drone incursions and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) reported around the U.S. — particularly over military bases, assets, and nuclear facilities.

“I don’t think the public is aware of the extent of our airspace vulnerabilities and failures, and the degree to which they’ve already been exploited and are being exploited today, and the challenge that we face in trying to sort this out,” Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, said during an event hosted on Capitol Hill by the UAP Disclosure Fund and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Across multiple sessions at the hourslong summit, Mellon and other national security and research experts — including Dr. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor, and retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, former oceanographer of the Navy — spotlighted recent incidents involving UAP and drones impacting military and civilian infrastructure. 

They also called on Congress to introduce new investments and proposals to help confront challenges associated with the Pentagon’s detection capabilities and what they view as the over-classification of certain UAP records and data.

The U.S. government has a long, complicated history dealing with technologies observed to perform in ways that seem to transcend what’s possible with contemporary capabilities. But with mounting pressure from the public and high-profile proponents over the past decade, Congress has made a series of recent moves to destigmatize the UAP topic, and more strategically investigate perplexing encounters with unidentifiable craft — including by requiring the Pentagon to launch the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) via the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

At the event Thursday, Mellon and other expert panelists praised that recent progress, but argued that further coordination and accountability measures are needed.

“One of my career frustrations in the intelligence community has been that we have incredible sensors that are far more than $1 billion dollars, and we have a great many of them, and they are collecting information today which is directly pertinent to this topic,” Mellon said. “But that information is not reaching Congress. It’s not reaching the scientific community. In many cases, I don’t think it’s reaching AARO, which is the office that Congress established to study and evaluate this phenomenon.” 

He recommended that the lawmakers in attendance consider mandating a U.S. government- and military-wide assessment of sensor systems collecting data that could support ongoing UAP examinations — as well as an evaluation of classification issues that are preventing the release of unclassified data.

Mellon noted that shortly after he provided three unclassified videos of reported UAP incursions captured by military personnel to the New York Times in 2017, “somebody created the classification guide” inside the government and “we suddenly said, ‘in contradiction to the executive order on classification signed by the president, that essentially, anything having to do with UAP is now suddenly mystically classified because it might damage national security.’”

Keep reading

Why did 30 Met officers kick the door down at a teenage tea and biscuits meeting in a Quaker house?

When six young women gathered in central London to discuss the climate crisis and the war in Gaza, the setting could not have been more appropriate. The building in which they sat was a Quaker meeting house, the home of a movement whose centuries-long history is rooted in protest and a commitment to social justice. On the table were cups of jasmine tea, ginger biscuits and a selection of vegan cheese straws.

But the events that brought this apparently convivial gathering to an abrupt end have sparked protests of a different kind and raised questions about how justice is administered by the UK’s largest and most embattled police force.

Talk among the youth activists that evening had turned to the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama, when a flash of blue light interrupted the chatter. Seconds later up to 30 Metropolitan police officers, some armed with stun guns, smashed down the door of the Grade II-listed building and arrested the young women inside.

One of the six, 18-year-old Zahra Ali, was held in a cell for 17 hours. Another was “rear stacked”, hands cuffed behind her back and held against the wall in what she described as an hour-long ordeal. Phones were seized and laptops bagged as evidence.

The raid, described as “intelligence-led”, was targeting the protest group Youth Demand. The members in attendance were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. Five remain under investigation.

Six weeks on, the operation has drawn criticism from religious groups, politicians and activists. The need for such a severe course of action, meted out in a place of worship, remains a concern, not least for those who were targeted.

“I was the last one to be taken into custody,” said Ali, the youngest of the six women. “I got to the station about 10pm-ish and I had to wait two hours to be booked in. I was taken to a freezing cold cell for hours. I wasn’t allowed a personal call. I didn’t get to speak to my solicitor until he came in person.

“We saw the blue lights a second before they marched in. We were just a bunch of young people talking about our government, about protesting, and they arrested us for that.

“I think had they rung the bell we would have let them in, obviously … They didn’t have to raid us. It’s six young women in a room, in a place that we hired, that we publicly advertised, and they could have just sat in and listened to us. I don’t really see any conspiracy in that.”

Keep reading

FDA To Deploy Artificial Intelligence Across Agency

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to roll out artificial intelligence across the agency following a successful pilot program.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has directed all FDA centers to immediately start using artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrate it by the end of June, the FDA said in a May 8 statement.

By June 30, all centers will use what the agency described as a “common, secure generative AI system integrated with FDA’s internal data platforms.”

“I was blown away by the success of our first AI-assisted scientific review pilot,“ Makary said in a statement. ”We need to value our scientists’ time and reduce the amount of non-productive busywork that has historically consumed much of the review process. The agency-wide deployment of these capabilities holds tremendous promise in accelerating the review time for new therapies.”

AI refers to computer systems that can carry out complex tasks typically performed by humans.

“AI can be generally described as a branch of computer science, statistics, and engineering that uses algorithms or models to perform tasks and exhibit behaviors such as learning, making decisions, and making predictions,” FDA officials said in 2023.

Makary said on Thursday that past years have featured discussions on utilizing AI and that it’s time to start using it to save time, with some tasks that once took days now taking mere minutes.

“We at the FDA now have to ask big questions that we’ve never asked before. Why does it take over 10 years for a new drug to come to market? Why are we not modernized with AI and other things? We’ve just completed our first AI-assisted scientific review for a product and that’s just the beginning,” he said earlier in the week on social media platform X.

The rollout across the FDA is being coordinated by Jeremy Walsh, Booz Allen Hamilton’s former chief technologist, who was recently appointed as the agency’s chief AI officer, and Sridhar Mantha, who previously led the Office of Business Informatics at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Keep reading

Pope Leo Warns Over AI As MIT Researcher Finds 90% Probability Of ‘Existential Threat’

In his first formal audience as the newly elected pontiff, Pope Leo XIV identified artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the most critical matters facing humanity.

“In our own day,” Pope Leo declared, “the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” He linked this statement to the legacy of his namesake Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and the moral dimensions of capitalism.

His remarks continued the direction charted by the late Pope Francis, who warned in his 2024 annual peace message that AI – lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness – is too perilous to develop unchecked. Francis, who passed away on April 21, had called for an international treaty to regulate AI and insisted that the technology must remain “human-centric,” particularly in applications involving weapon systems or tools of governance.

Keep reading

FBI Has Launched 250 Probes Tied To Online Networks That Prey On Minors

The FBI has been investigating at least 250 subjects allegedly tied to violent online networks that prey on minors.

The networks, under investigation by all of the FBI’s 55 field offices, are known as “764” but have other names.

“The FBI is growing increasingly concerned about a loose network of violent predators who befriend minors and other vulnerable individuals through popular online platforms and then coerce them into escalating sexual and violent behavior,“ the FBI said in a May 8 statement to The Epoch Times, noting this includes ”pushing victims to create graphic content, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), harm family pets, cut themselves with sharp objects, or attempt suicide.”

“Some of these predators even watch live-streamed self-harm and other violent content.”

The FBI had issued a public service announcement on March 6, warning about “a sharp increase” in the activity of “764” and other such online networks.

In targeting minors, the bureau said, these networks “use threats, blackmail, and manipulation to coerce or extort victims into producing, sharing, or live-streaming acts of self-harm, animal cruelty, sexually explicit acts, and/or suicide.”

“The footage is then circulated among members of the network to continue to extort victims and exert control over them,” it said in the March announcement.

The platforms exist on social media, gaming platforms, and mobile applications, with the victims usually being between the ages of 10 and 17, though some aged 9 have also been targeted, according to the FBI.

“These violent actors target vulnerable populations to include children, as well as those who struggle with a variety of mental health issues, such as depression, eating disorders, or suicidal ideation,” the bureau said.

Predators, they said, usually “groom their victims by first establishing a trusting or romantic relationship before eventually manipulating and coercing them into engaging in escalating harmful behavior designed to shame and isolate them.”

Keep reading

Massachusetts Lawmakers Consider Bills To Set Tighter Controls On Intoxicating Hemp-Derived Products

Massachusetts legislators this session are looking to take hemp-derived intoxicating products—which contain the same active ingredient as marijuana but are not regulated the same way—off shelves in gas stations, convenience stores and vape shops across Massachusetts.

The hemp products, which are generally edible and intoxicating like gummies or candies, have already been declared illegal in the state by several state agencies but continue to pop up in certain stores outside of dispensaries. Most of these products come from out of state.

Some business owners who sell the intoxicating products argue that the state agencies haven’t settled the matter because hemp is legal federally—through a loophole in the 2018 federal Farm Bill which legalized hemp. Hemp and marijuana are the same plant, but this law removed hemp from the classification of marijuana as long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC— the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis—by volume.

Four bills have been filed on Beacon Hill to bring any consumable hemp-derived products like edibles, concentrates, tinctures, oils and capsules, under the purview of the Cannabis Control Commission or give local boards of health oversight to remove these products from stores other than dispensaries. Hemp products that are sold in dispensaries like CBD gummies are already regulated by the commission. These bills would specifically target intoxicating products being sold outside of dispensaries.

“[Hemp products] face no additional tax impositions, no host community agreements, no recall process, no FDA testing requirements, no age limits,” said Rep. Dawne Shand, a Newburyport Democrat, at a Joint Committee on Cannabis Policy hearing on Wednesday. “The intoxicating hemp industry makes a mockery of cannabis laws.”

Shand, a member of the committee, is pushing a bill that would prohibit intoxicating hemp products from being sold without an endorsement from the Cannabis Control Commission.

Rep. Michael Soter, a Republican from Bellingham, has two bills that would address hemp-derived products.

Keep reading