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Guardian USA

What made Haley Stevens turn on el-Sayed? | Judith Levine

Endorsing his opponent while the US risks plummeting into fascism, she reveals the one issue that triggers her to take destructive action

“Did you talk to anyone? Did you have a long night of the soul? Were you up all night? ... Did you have a dream?”

Interviewing the Michigan US representative Haley Stevens on CNN on Sunday, Anderson Cooper was casting about for explanations. What caused the Democrat’s radical change of heart between a Saturday night promise to her House colleague Debbie Dingell that she would stand with the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed and a public endorsement Sunday morning of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers?

Guardian USA

Officials investigate fire at Mississippi police department tied to fatal shooting of Black toddler

Person arrested after fire at police department where officer who shot and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley had worked

In the early hours of 31 October, a fire broke out at the Senatobia police department in Mississippi, which has been embroiled in controversy recently after one of its officers shot and killed Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old. Though the cause of the fire has not been reported, it is being investigated as arson by agents with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In June, then Senatobia police sergeant Hunter Foster shot Kohen as he sat in his mother’s arms in a Walmart parking lot. Foster, who is white, was responding to a report of an alleged shoplifting; Kohen, his mother and the driver of the vehicle, are Black.

Guardian USA

Trump says US will end military aid to Israel by the end of this year

US president makes surprise election day announcement, saying country does not ‘need’ $4bn annual payment

Donald Trump has said that the US will end military aid to Israel at the end of this year in a surprise election day announcement that appeared to be targeted at voters sceptical of US support for Israel and the war in Gaza.

In a phone interview with Fox News as voting began on Tuesday morning, Trump said the US would cut nearly $4bn (£2.96bn) in military aid to Israel because “they don’t need it.”

Chinese Dictionary

收费 [收費] shōu fèi

to charge a fee (HSK 3)

Guardian USA

Datacentres are deeply unpopular – so the geniuses at OpenAI are rebranding them | Arwa Mahdawi

These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them

Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.

Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When he’s not golfing or commenting on senators’ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to people’s lives.

Slashdot

SUSE To Cut One In Ten Employees Because of AI

SUSE plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen saying "automation and AI" are reducing the need for some roles and allowing the open source software company to operate with less overhead and flatter management structures. "We are announcing a reduction of SUSE's global workforce of approximately 10 percent," said Van Leeuwen in an email. "These decisions are painful for our people, our culture, and our open source community, but they are necessary for us to adapt and build a sustainable, resilient SUSE for the long term." The Register reports: Van Leeuwen says the business, bought by Swedish private equity provider EQT, decided to cut jobs after scrutinizing its "future strategy, required capabilities, and team structures." The rest of the organization will get a look at the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16. He said in the message to staff: "What is clear is that automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate. AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work. We have seen this trend already both inside our sector and in the wider economy. This means that the organizational design and cost base that SUSE is built on today will not carry us forward successfully. "We are adapting. Across SUSE, modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Other roles will evolve over the next few years. This means we are accelerating investments in high priority areas, and deprioritizing others. These are hard, painful decisions to make, but necessary for our future." [...] The specific roles at risk of redundancy were not outlined but SUSE claims it has considered where the people in those positions are "able to evolve, what they can stop doing, what they need to do more of - and decisions have been made on that basis." Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives nominated the following day, and one to one meetings will begin at the start of next week. Van Leeuwen says in the internal memo that the job cuts are a "reflection of shifting organizational needs, not your talent or commitment. You have tackled hard infrastructure and open source challenges that power critical enterprise systems around the world. "Any organization will be fortunate to have your expertise."

HACKADAY

ToothPaste Goes Where Your Password Manager Doesn’t

One of the easiest ways of improving security and privacy when using the Internet, and computers in general, is to use strong passwords unique to each site or service. A …read more

Guardian USA

America has been witnessing the worst speeches in presidential history | Ted Widmer

The US has seen plenty of terrible speeches over the centuries. But Trump’s midterm rallies are a new low

In a sense, history has already been made. We do not know the result of the election yet, but over the last two months, Americans have endured the worst speeches ever given by a president of the United States.

It is far from a simple matter to adjudicate – there have been so many bad speeches over the years, going back the founders, some of whom dreaded speaking in public. George Washington’s inaugural address did not begin promisingly, with a halting first sentence: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.”

Guardian USA

Christian voters in Washington state divided by common religion: ‘I don’t think the US is God’s kingdom on Earth’

Christians in the south of the state seek to vote their values – but a common faith does not mean a common politics

A few days before the Fourth of July, Ron Peterson, the 38-year-old pastor of Longview United Pentecostal church, stood beneath a large white tent in a parking lot in Longview, Washington.

Surrounded by church members selling fireworks for a fundraiser, Peterson remembered watching area residents rally after an industrial accident at the local paper mill killed 11 people in May. “We can all come together,” he said. “There’s not going to be sections in heaven.”

Guardian USA

US midterm elections 2026 live: Americans go to the polls in referendum on Trump’s agenda

Polls open across the US where key Senate and House races will decide which party controls Congress for remainder of Donald Trump’s second term

It has just gone past 06:30 in North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia where polls have now opened.

Here are some of the key voter issues shaping the US midterm elections:

The economy: Despite Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to tackle affordability issues, the economy consistently ranks as voters’ top concern.

Iran: Trump’s decision to go to war with the Tehran regime has exacerbated economic worries. Iran’s retaliatory decision to close the strait of Hormuz has driven up gasoline prices for US motorists. It also represents a breach of his pledge to end the US’s supposed addiction to “forever wars”.

Immigration: Enforcement and closing the border remains a signature issue for Trump. He repeatedly boasts of the impact of his closure of the southern border as one of his biggest achievements, making comparisons with the performance of Joe Biden.

AI and datacenters: AI has emerged as a key campaign issue, with surveys showing a majority of voters holding negative views on it, even as Trump champions its development and attempts to rename it “super intelligence”.

Guardian Tech

Binance battles to save its brand after record $6.3bn crypto hack

World’s largest crypto exchange faces fallout from angry customers, and Lula wins with WhatsApp

This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here

This week in tech, we’re discussing the fallout from the multibillion-dollar hack of Binance and the significance of Lula’s political mobilization on WhatsApp.

And if you’ll be at Web Summit in Lisbon next week, drop me a line! I’ll be there moderating panels on open-source AI and human agency in the age of AI agents.

Tell us: have you been affected by the Binance hack?

Polymarket temporarily suspends trading on international platform due to security incident

How crypto hacking funds isolated North Korea’s nuclear programme

Ghost in the machine: how AI is haunting the search for the supernatural

Computerized clairvoyance: psychics push back against AI-generated readings

The staggering $446m Elon Musk has spent on the US midterms – visualized

Billionaire tax: how a union leader’s ‘crazy’ idea became the defining issue of California’s midterms

How tech became the villain of the US midterms

The ultra-rich are spending one million dollars a day fighting California’s proposed billionaire tax

Slashdot

MIT Researchers Used GPT-6 Astra To Edit Qwen's Open Weights Directly, Boosting Math Scores

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) reported today that they used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra language model to raise a small, open source Qwen model's math score roughly sixfold by directly editing its weights -- the numerical parameters that govern its behavior. Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab described their work in a research blog post published November 2. They call the approach "weight-space programming" and tested Astra's ability to interpret and alter networks without using conventional training procedures to generate the edits. In the strongest language-model example, Astra's intervention raised Qwen3.5-0.8B's MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% while touching approximately 0.016% of its weights. The improvement came primarily from correcting repetitive reasoning—a distinction that shaped both the technical findings and the debate over their implications. Their experiments explored a broader possibility: AI systems that inspect, repair and construct other neural networks by working directly on their internal machinery. "This is cool as heck!" wrote Yuchen Jin, a technical staffer at Databricks and former co-founder and CTO of Hyperbolic Labs who was unaffiliated with the research, on X. "Imagine using a large LLM to directly edit a smaller model's weights and dramatically improve its capabilities. It's like gene editing for neural networks. Even cooler than distillation!" Voyage AI staff researcher Chandan Singh, formerly of Microsoft AI, also reacted to the findings: "For anyone questioning whether this post is overhyped, I think they are actually *underselling* the approach."

Leif Ames