Leif Ames

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.”

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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.”

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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

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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”.

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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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A constant in film and TV if you work with technology is to continually see wildly inappropriate depictions of it on screen. Whether it’s all those hacking scenes in which …read more

Cybersecurity experts say incidents had minimal effect but may represent the ‘foothills’ of a wider threat

Meat suppliers in the UK have been hit by cyber-attacks after hackers raised the temperatures of supermarket freezers across Europe.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it was working with the affected companies but that the national impact was minimal.

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A decision could reshape the relationship between religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws in the US

The US supreme court will hear arguments on Tuesday over a challenge brought by two Catholic preschools in Colorado, arguing that they should be admitted to the state’s free education system despite their rejection of children with LGBTQ+ parents.

A decision in the case, St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, could reshape the relationship between religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws in the US.

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