Case involves a former prosecutor removing nearly all Black jurors in a 2006 capital murder trial, raising legal questions
The US supreme court appeared skeptical on Tuesday of whether jury selection in a trial was conducted appropriately when they heard oral arguments in a death penalty case about racial bias in jury selection stemming from Mississippi.
Doug Evans, a now-retired prosecutor, removed all but one Black person from a jury that convicted Terry Pitchford of capital murder in 2006. The judge, Joseph Loper, allowed the juror strikes, despite objections from the defense counsel, and Mississippi’s supreme court upheld the conviction.
Continue reading...Australia is preparing possible court action against major social media platforms that are failing to enforce the country's social media ban on under-16s. "Three months after the ban came into effect, the eSafety Commissioner said it was probing Meta's Instagram and Facebook, Google's YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok for possible breaches of the law," reports Reuters. From the report: Communications Minister Anika Wells said the government was gathering evidence "so that the eSafety Commissioner can go to the Federal Court and win." "We have spent the summer building that evidence base of all the stories that no doubt you have all heard ... about how kids are getting around that," Wells told reporters in Canberra. The legal threat is a striking change of tone from a government which had hailed tech giants' shows of cooperation when the ban went live in December. Under the Australian law, platforms must show they are taking reasonable steps to keep out underage users or face fines of up to $34 million per breach, something eSafety would need to pursue in a civil court. The regulator previously said it would only take enforcement action in cases of systemic noncompliance. But in its first comprehensive compliance report since the ban took effect, eSafety said measures taken by the platforms were substandard and it would make a decision about next steps by mid-year. "We are now moving âinto an enforcement stance," said commissioner Julie Inman Grant in a statement. The regulator reported major compliance gaps, including platforms prompting children who had previously declared ages under 16 to do fresh age checks, allowing repeated attempts at age-assurance tests until a child got a result over 16 and poor pathways for people to report underage accounts. Some platforms did not use age-inference, which estimates age based on someone's online activity, and some only used age-assurance measures like photo-based checks after a user tried to change their age, rather than at sign-up. That made it "likely many Australian children aged under 16 have been able to create accounts on age-restricted social media platforms by simply declaring they are 16 or older", the regulator said. Nearly one-third of parents reported their under-16 child had at least one social media account after the ban took effect, of which two-thirds said the platform had not asked the child's age, it added.
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The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System was due for completion in 2016. Ten years later, the software for controlling the military’s GPS satellites still doesn’t work.
The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System was due for completion in 2016. Ten years later, the software for controlling the military’s GPS satellites still doesn’t work.
In lone dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson says majority ‘has failed to appreciate crucial context’ of constitutional claims in the case
Donald Trump confirmed that King Charles and Queen Camilla, will travel to the US for a state visit from 27 to 30 April.
The president said that the trip will include a banquet dinner at the White House on 28 April. “I look forward to spending time with the King, whom I greatly respect. It will be TERRIFIC!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Continue reading...Tabloid outlet has covered Republicans and Democrats relaxing at places like Disney World as shutdown drags on
When US federal workers were missing paychecks and the partial government shutdown entered its seventh week, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was doing what any responsible lawmaker would do: riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand at Disney World in Florida.
Naturally, TMZ had photos of the vacationing senator on its homepage a few days later.
Continue reading...Grady Martin writes: A security researcher has leaked a complete repository of source code for Anthropic's flagship command-line tool. The file listing was exposed via a Node Package Manager (npm) mapping, with every target publicly accessible on a Cloudflare R2 storage bucket. $ du -hs .35M .$ find -type f | sed 's/^.*\.//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -bVr 1332 ts 552 tsx 18 js There's been a number of notable discoveries as people continue examining the code. The DEV Community has highlighted some of the most interesting findings so far: The Tool System (~40 tools): Claude Code uses a plugin-like tool architecture. Each capability (file read, bash execution, web fetch, LSP integration) is a discrete, permission-gated tool. The base tool definition alone is 29,000 lines of TypeScript. The Query Engine (46K lines): This is the brain of the operation. It handles all LLM API calls, streaming, caching, and orchestration. It's by far the largest single module in the codebase. Multi-Agent Orchestration: Claude Code can spawn sub-agents (they call them "swarms") to handle complex, parallelizable tasks. Each agent runs in its own context with specific tool permissions. IDE Bridge System: A bidirectional communication layer connects IDE extensions (VS Code, JetBrains) to the CLI via JWT-authenticated channels. This is how the "Claude in your editor" experience works. Persistent Memory System: A file-based memory directory where Claude stores context about you, your project, and your preferences across sessions. Key Technical Decisions Worth Noting Bun over Node: They chose Bun as the JavaScript runtime, leveraging its dead code elimination for feature flags and its faster startup times. React for CLI: Using Ink (React for terminals) is bold. It means their terminal UI is component-based with state management, just like a web app. Zod v4 for validation: Schema validation is everywhere. Every tool input, every API response, every config file. ~50 slash commands: From /commit to /review-pr to memory management â" there's a command system as rich as any IDE. Lazy-loaded modules: Heavy dependencies like OpenTelemetry and gRPC are lazy-loaded to keep startup fast.
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Marine told investigators he found the round ‘in the field’ about a year ago and kept it, thinking it wasn’t live
A US marine was detained at a California airport after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel found a live 25mm explosive round in his checked baggage, police said.
The round was found during the screening process of checked luggage at the Palm Springs international airport on Monday, the Palm Springs police department said in a news release.
Continue reading...As calls for restrictions on under-16s’ online activities gather pace, some are urging curbs on online gaming. The idea is a mess from top to bottom
Last week, Meta and YouTube were found liable for creating intentionally addictive products that affected the wellbeing of young social media users. The ruling has supercharged an already growing movement from governments and regulators to restrict or ban social media use for under-16s, as has been done in Australia, to protect children from potential harm.
But there is another way that about 85% of kids and teens congregate online – and that is through video games. It has been suggested that curbs on online gaming should be considered alongside social media restrictions in future legislation. There is some precedent: in 2021, China restricted young people’s online gaming time to one hour a day on weekends and holidays. But I have a lot of questions about how such curbs would work, and whether they should be attempted.
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