David Huerta was arrested while protesting against an ICE operation during crackdown in Los Angeles
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has moved to dismiss charges against a prominent California union leader who was arrested while protesting an immigration raid in Los Angeles last year, in the latest US government case against protesters to fall apart.
David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West, was arrested at a June 2025 demonstration and has been fighting the charges ever since. On Monday, the US attorney’s office in LA filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him.
Continue reading...Los Angeles prosecutors give detailed account of Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s last night
Prosecutors on Monday gave a moment-by-moment account of the last night of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, showing that after a stream of text messages with the singer D4vd, her phone went permanently silent when she arrived at his home.
The texts were shown in court on the fifth and probably final day of a Los Angeles hearing to determine whether he will go to trial in her killing.
Continue reading...Authorities say teenage suspect arrested and search for second suspect continuing after Bite of Seattle shooting
Three people were killed and four others including a toddler were wounded in a shooting on Sunday evening at a food festival near the Space Needle in Seattle.
A suspect aged 15 was arrested. A search for a second suspect continued into Monday, according to authorities.
Continue reading...Today show host says her family ‘will always ache for’ mother Nancy, who has been missing for nearly six months
Savannah Guthrie has posted a new video asking those responsible for her mother’s unsolved disappearance to “do the right thing” and point her family to their matriarch’s location after nearly six months.
In a new Instagram video posted on Monday, captioned “Bring her home” alongside a yellow heart emoji, the NBC Today host issued an emotional public plea, saying: “It has been months since our mom was taken from us. Our family is in agony. We are in a nightmare that will not end. Nothing about our situation has changed. We have done our part. We will never stop looking for her.”
Continue reading...According to The Information (paywalled), a state-backed Shanghai company has begun mass-producing China's first homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, with about five units expected this year for SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT. Roughly 20 more units are expected in 2027. Tom's Hardware reports: The Information didn't name the manufacturer, but its sources described the operation as having pulled DUV development teams from several Chinese companies, one of them the state-backed startup Shanghai Yuliangsheng Technology. SMIC has been testing a Yuliangsheng immersion tool since September 2025. Most components in the new systems are domestic, though some critical parts still come from Japan, and delays at local suppliers have held back output this year. [...] China accounts for around 20% of ASML's net sales this year, down from 33% in 2025, driven mainly by mainstream logic demand... Independent analysis from the AI Futures Project in June put commercial-scale Chinese immersion DUV in the mid-2030s, with ASML holding 98.7% of the immersion market. Qualifying the new machines for production lines could take many months, and they trail ASML's tools on performance and build quality. China's domestic EUV effort, which Reuters first reported as a working prototype in December, remains years away.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kentucky senator has been absent and not seen in public since mid-June after he was hospitalized due to a fall
US senator Mitch McConnell is still not cleared to return to work, his office confirmed on Monday, six weeks after he was hospitalized after a fall at his home.
An update released alongside a new photograph of the Republican lawmaker – one of the highest-profile figures in Congress, as former Senate majority leader – said he was undergoing “intense physical therapy” and is “working hard” to get back to his duties.
Continue reading...Trump said he thinks his defense secretary ‘has done a great job’
Donald Trump said today that he had paused US strikes on Iran to give diplomacy another chance, but he was ready for “strong military action” if diplomacy fails.
Washington was in “very deep talks with Iran”, the president told Axios, but, he added: “If they don’t work out, we will be go back to very strong military action.”
I am going to talk to Bibi about the fact that if I weren’t president, Iran would have had nuclear weapons by now and Israel would have been destroyed.
Without me, there would be no Israel.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example. This morning, Ars received the following response to a test prompt asking for a story introduction in the style of Stephen King: "I can definitely write with the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread, but I can't write in Stephen King's exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice. Here's an original opening that captures a similar feeling while remaining its own..." In testing, ChatGPT generated similar dodges for other authors both living (J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan) and dead (Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway). An analysis published by No Latency earlier this month (PDF) found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors. In refusing to directly copy the "exact style" of various authors, ChatGPT offered instead to capture an overall "feeling" by incorporating some of the common features found in those authors' work. That may seem like a distinction without a real difference at first glance. But the slight alteration could be legally important as OpenAI continues to fight a number of lawsuits brought by book authors alleging large-scale copyright infringement by models trained on their work. One of those suits specifically cites ChatGPT's "uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials," for instance. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica. In the US, copyright law generally protects only a specific expression of an idea, not the more intangible style of an author. But an AI-generated stylistic imitation could become infringing if it becomes "substantially similar" to the work of the original author. "We've never had a situation in which this personal style of individual creators could be imitated as well and as inexpensively as we now have with AI," George Washington University Law School Professor Robert Brauneis told Bloomberg Law.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An attending physician says the Republican senator ‘has maintained a strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation’ but ‘he is not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility and return to the office’
Donald Trump said today that he had paused US strikes on Iran to give diplomacy another chance, but he was ready for “strong military action” if diplomacy fails.
Washington was in “very deep talks with Iran”, the president told Axios, but, he added: “If they don’t work out, we will be go back to very strong military action.”
I am going to talk to Bibi about the fact that if I weren’t president, Iran would have had nuclear weapons by now and Israel would have been destroyed.
Without me, there would be no Israel.
Continue reading...Julie Masino faced criticism as restaurant chain was called ‘woke’ and ‘soulless’ after unveiling modernized logo
Cracker Barrel’s CEO, Julie Masino, is stepping down, the restaurant announced on Monday, nearly a year after the company was swept into a political maelstrom over proposed modernizations to its branding.
Critics on social media denounced the Tennessee-based rustic restaurant chain as “woke” as well as “sterile and soulless” after it unveiled an updated logo that removed Uncle Herschel, the overall-clad man leaning against a barrel in the restaurant’s original logo, last August. Donald Trump weighed in on the updates soon after, posting: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” and demanding on social media that the company “admit a mistake”.
Continue reading...