Game 7 in the NBA playoffs: a chance to kick back, enjoy the drama of a winner-takes-all shootout between basketball’s big beasts, and … switch over from your regular TV provider to Amazon Prime? The excitement drains from the occasion at the first touch of the remote. Amazon no doubt imagined it had landed a real coup when the Eastern Conference semi-final series between Detroit and Cleveland extended to its maximum length, thereby handing the retail giant’s streaming arm, Prime Video, the right to air a Game 7 in the first season of its partnership with the NBA. In the event, Sunday’s game was a dud: a blowout win for the Cavs, playing on the road, that had all the electricity and charm of a stint in the doctor’s waiting room. Fortunately for viewers, Prime Video did its best to match the moment by producing a broadcast that was every bit as dull and juiceless as events on the court.

The pre-tipoff highlight was an interview with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, on the occasion of his coronation as this season’s MVP, in which the Oklahoma City star appeared to be speaking from a movie theater for some reason. Blake Griffin, the house beefcake on Prime Video’s studio set, chided ESPN insider Shams Charania for leaking this year’s MVP announcement hours earlier: “It’s Sunday, Shams – go to brunch, you nerd.” If Hillary had won and Shams had kept his trap shut, we’d all be at brunch! The game got under way, and things did not improve. During the half-time show, Dirk Nowitzki rambled Germanly about various topics, while fellow former MVP Steve Nash delivered lines like “That decisiveness in isolation is so important” with all the conviction of a hostage recording a ransom video. Host Taylor Rooks tried valiantly to compensate for the lack of chemistry on set by laughing at even the slightest hint of a joke from any of her panellists. Awkward laughter delivered over dead air on a platform it feels like a punishment to access: that’s the Prime Video NBA playoffs guarantee.

These have been a difficult debut playoffs for Prime as it muscles in on the broadcast territory once ruled by what the media analysts call “linear TV”. The feed dropped out for several minutes during overtime in the play-in game between the Hornets and the Heat; buffering, the nightmare we all thought we outlived in 2006, has plagued the stream in several games; and video has frequently been mistimed with audio, producing delays and mismatches. There’s primetime, which is when the bulk of these playoffs are taking place, and then there’s Prime Video time, which comes in around three seconds later. The audio itself in many games has often, in my experience at least, been strangely soft, requiring a trip all the way to the top of the volume scale to hear what the analysts and announcers are saying.

“It’s a TV show that almost expects and anticipates people that have only just met each other will have to become really quite intimate with each other,” she said. “They’re expected to share a bed and a life together within minutes of meeting – it almost feels like an accident waiting to happen.”

You don’t need to go on TV for that.

As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it’s radically changing some employees’ jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that’s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.

Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been “selected” for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI – at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: “Transfers aren’t optional.”

“Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,” wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. “The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”

A Meta employee referenced last month’s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose’s announcement, writing: “Does ‘selected’ imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?”

Further proof the Meta doesn’t know what the Zuck it’s doing. The rebrand has gone swimmingly, given all the time we spend in the legless metaverse.

AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed.

Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash. Hyperscalers have invested over $800 billion in the last three years, with plans to add another $700 billion or so in 2026 and another $1 trillion in 2027, meaning that they need to make at least three trillion dollars in AI specific revenue just to break even, and $6 trillion or more for AI to be anything other than a wash. I went into detail about this (albeit at a lower, pre-2026/2027 capex number) in a premium piece last year.

To give you some context, Microsoft made $281 billion, Meta $200 billion, Amazon $716 billion, and Google $402.8 billion in revenue in their most-recent fiscal years for every single product combined, for a total of $1.599 trillion. None of them will talk about their actual AI revenues. Yes, yes, I know Microsoft said that it had $37 billion in AI revenue run rate ($3.08 billion a month or so) and Amazon had $15 billion, or around $1.25 billion a month, but both of these are snapshots of single months that are meant to make it sound like they’re going to make that much in a year but in the end, you don’t actually know anything about how much money they’ve made from AI.

The Justice Department confirmed on Monday that it is creating a $1.776 billion fund to send taxpayer money to “victims of lawfare and weaponization.”

According to a statement from the DOJ to MeidasTouch, the fund would “consist of a Commission of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership” and “the President can remove any member.”

Hours before the announcement, President Donald Trump withdrew a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, paving the way for the creation of the fund in an attempt to skirt concerns about the president’s attempts to use taxpayer funds to compensate himself. Last week, ABC News and CNN reported on internal White House discussions regarding the president’s desire to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the massive fund to compensate allies and other individuals he feels have been wronged by past administrations — particularly former President Joe Biden. According to CNN, the settlement would also kill any existing IRS audits on Trump, members of his family, or associated businesses.

I’m getting really sick of all his winning.

The terms “blindingly obvious,” “logical consequence,” and “that is not how it works” appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what.

As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical “digital age of consent” technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law.

This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox.

I’d not go online without a VPN. There’s absolutely no reason my ISP needs my browsing history. And at about $6/month, it’s not exactly breaking the bank.

What I’d not use is any VPN provider that sponsors YouTube content. A free VPN has to make their money from somewhere.

Netherlands police’s scheme to unmask and shame scammers into submission is proving highly successful, with 74 of its 100 most wanted now known to investigators.

The country’s “Game Over?!” campaign involved releasing the blurred images of fraudsters into the public domain and threatening to unmask them within two weeks if they did not turn themselves in.

True to its word, after two weeks, the Dutch police unblurred the alleged offenders’ faces via social media and advertising boards across the country, including at gas stations, shopping centers, and train stations.

The result? Thirty-four handed themselves in, and revealing the remaining faces led to the identification of a further 40 individuals.

The police said it received more than 500 tips from the public after it unblurred the faces. Its website was viewed more than two million times, and its campaign images were seen nearly 90 million times on social media.

Of the 74 now known to the police, more than half (38) have been questioned, and the interrogations for the rest are already scheduled.

Behold this utter bullshit, uttered by the Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan:

White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”

Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”

“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”

This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.

Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.

It is difficult to see through the dust inside the cramped, low-roofed tent on the eastern edge of Khan Younis. Ibrahim al-Aloul works alongside four others, with a piece of fabric tied over his mouth and nose as his only shield against the toxic grey powder as he sifts and grinds.

Outside, a skinny donkey waits with a cart to carry the finished product to the next tent along, where it will be mixed with gypsum, calcium and binding agents before being bagged in flour sacks and sold.

This is Gaza’s cement industry, improvised out of desperation and for now the only construction operating in the besieged Palestinian coastal strip. The health risks of these compounds are severe, but in Gaza, where the death toll of the past two years of Israeli bombardments has reached more than 71,000 and a steady toll of killings continues despite the eight-month ceasefire, options are limited.

“We work long hours and the dust is suffocating,” Aloul says, stepping outside into the street of tents to breathe – endless rows that have become the only homes Palestinians can find. “But there is no other work, and no other cement. We have no choice.”

An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is a “public health emergency of international concern”, the World Health Organization has said.

The WHO made its declaration on Sunday after more than 80 deaths and 246 suspected cases linked to the outbreak of the Bundibugyo virus, prompting Africa’s top health official to say he was “on panic mode”.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, announced the decision before convening a formal emergency committee at the organisation. Experts said the speed was likely to reflect the gravity of the situation.

The Bundibugyo virus is one of three strains that can cause Ebola virus disease, and the least common. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the strain, or specific tests.

I’m just going to leave this here. Linked by my college roommate.

Mr Xi called the Beijing meeting a “milestone”. That’s better understood as a marker on a long journey than a major achievement. China believes it is on the path to restored greatness, while Chen Yixin, minister for state security, wrote scathingly in December that US hegemony is “increasingly unsustainable … At home, its democracy is mutating, its economy decaying, and its society fracturing … abroad, its credibility is rapidly going bankrupt, its hegemony is crumbling, and its myth is collapsing.”

Don’t mince words … what do you really think?

This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from “stealth mode” to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That’s right: a startup has gotten serious backing to develop sources of perpetual free energy. The people behind this fantastic new energy generator also brought us the wildly successful WTF thruster EM-drive that could supposedly directly convert electricity into a propulsive force.

(Its one practical application was in the show Salvation, where it was treated with the same detailed attention to physical laws as Galaxy Quest’s Omega-13.)

With that success, who are we to be skeptical?

Casimir Inc. is convinced it can squeeze energy from the vacuum via the Casimir force (hence the subtle reference in the name). The Casimir force is a real thing, arising from the fact that a vacuum is not actually nothing. Instead, it is filled with a froth of virtual particles becoming real in pairs, waving to us, annihilating each other, and sinking back into the soup of virtual particles. The Casimir force emerges when we create an imbalance in the spatial distribution of these virtual particles, leading to a pressure as the Universe seeks to equalize the distribution.

Cement production alone currently accounts for about 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, so considerable effort is going into lowering that number. Efficiency can be increased, and energy sources can be swapped for cleaner ones, but a stubborn reality remains: The byproduct of turning limestone into lime during cement production releases CO2 gas. These “direct process emissions” are actually slightly larger than the emissions from burning fuel to heat the kilns and drive this process.

A new paper in Communications Sustainability suggests a route to eliminating direct process emissions by removing a bedrock assumption. What if we don’t have to use limestone cement?

The material we call “Portland cement” was developed in the 1800s. It simply requires heating limestone (calcium carbonate) and adding something like clay or coal ash. This gives you the calcium oxide (lime) you’re after but also releases the CO2 that results when you pull an oxygen atom from carbonate.

The authors of the new paper include the CEO and an engineer from a company that says it has made Portland cement from silicate rocks like basalt—at the lab scale. Basalt contains a mix of minerals that include calcium, aluminum, iron, magnesium, sodium, silicon, and oxygen. (Note the absence of carbon from that list.) The basic idea is that you don’t need limestone to get calcium oxide.

Psychologists have found that two common questionnaires for assessing depression don’t work for comparing people of differing intelligence—and the problem may extend to other conditions and traits.

For a recent study in the journal Intelligence, Stanisław Czerwiński of the University of Gdańsk in Poland and his colleagues investigated how intelligence correlates with mental health. They hypothesized that the association between intelligence and better mental health starts out positive as it approaches the high end of the IQ scale, then turns negative.

The data revealed the curved relation the researchers were expecting: the highest intelligence levels seemed to be associated with declines in mental health. But then the scientists found a problem. To make sure their results were valid, they ran statistics tests to determine whether the mental health measures work the same for people at different intelligence levels, in part by calculating whether responses to individual questions reflect depression to the same extent for everybody. Both scales failed this test, meaning they can’t be used to compare people with differing intelligence—and conclusions like this study’s can’t be trusted.

This is a dry run for any new or known pathogen with pandemic potential. And today, the people who would be in charge of managing such a pandemic are the worst possible people: from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services, to Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to Russell Vought in the White House.

Together, these men have left the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy vacant; have shuttered 10 of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases meant to study zoonotic pathogens that jump from animals to humans, like hantavirus; gutted the STOP Spillover Project, a USAID-funded network that tracked “menacing animal viruses across seven countries”; put a hold on research at the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, which studies high-risk pathogens; left key posts at CDC with acting directors including the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens; wound down mRNA vaccine research, which is one of the platforms under consideration for a hantavirus vaccine; refocused infectious disease research away from novel pathogens at NIH toward more common infections; proposed cutting funding for state and local preparedness grants to health departments and hospitals around the country; canned the CDC’s full-time cruise ship inspectors and port health workers; and we have left the World Health Organization, leaving us flying solo without a key source of international collaboration and coordinated planning.

If you’ve ever swallowed an aspirin, put milk in your coffee, fed your pet, or filled a prescription, then you’ve relied on the lifesaving oversight of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Long viewed as the world’s gold standard in regulating food and medicine, the FDA is a behemoth that oversees products comprising roughly one quarter of the U.S. economy.

Even on the best of days, the FDA commissioner — a Senate-confirmed position — must wander a pitiless wilderness of excruciating judgement calls, whether the record-speed approval of Covid-19 vaccines or the minefield of mail-order birth control pills, all while fending off powerful companies expecting VIP treatment.

Doing the job well, or even at all, is not a friend-building exercise.

After days of being dangled like a cat toy between warring parties in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees FDA, news broke on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s embattled FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, was resigning.

Attention immediately turned to the question of which towering medical figure might step into the job. Soon after Trump posted Makary’s resignation text to Truth Social, Kyle Diamantas, 38, an obscure Florida lawyer who first landed at the FDA in 2025 as director of the human foods program, following his previous role as Don Jr.’s hunting buddy, was named acting FDA commissioner.

Come for the grift, stay for the nepotism.

In the ramshackle lanes of a south Delhi slum, Afshana Khatoon crouched wearily on her haunches and began lighting a small pile of firewood.

She had only just returned from six hours spent trudging through the urban forests and dry parks of India’s capital looking for kindling to turn into a makeshift stove. As the unforgiving summer heat soared above 40C, she had walked for miles, piling the sticks and fallen branches into a bundle on her head while sweat ran down her face.

Just a few weeks ago, the 35-year-old had been preparing meals for her four children on a small gas stove with little fuss. But as the crisis in the Middle East has choked India’s vital supplies of imported liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) – used by more than 60% of the country’s population for cooking – refills have been scarce and prices have risen far beyond what is widely affordable.

Khatoon, like growing numbers of people in India and more widely across Asia, has been forced to cook with crude, dirty fuels such as firewood and coal in order to survive. “It already feels like hell,” she said, as she bustled about, filling a pot with water. “I’m not eating properly, and I have to work much more than before. My whole day now is about collecting firewood and cooking.”

After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of course, responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that promptly removed about 11% to 13% of all petroleum from the world market, day after day, week after week, setting off a cascade of steeply rising prices for diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas.

Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the U.S., despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök — the Norse “twilight of the gods” — of petroleum.

As Hungary’s Péter Magyar took office, ousting Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power, the daylong event on Saturday was laced with symbolism, from the return of the EU flag to parliament to the ringing out of the European anthem, Ode to Joy.

But it was the 56-year-old tipped to be the new health minister – and more specifically, his dance moves – that may have become the most potent symbol of Hungary’s new political era.

In the lead up to Saturday’s inauguration, as Magyar and his Tisza party prepared to be sworn in, Zsolt Hegedűs’s phone began buzzing.

Many of the messages were from people wanting to know the same thing, said Hegedűs, an internationally recognised orthopaedic surgeon who spent more than 10 years working for the NHS in the UK.

“There were tons of messages saying ‘Dr. Hegedűs, you’re going to get this celebration started, aren’t you?’ or ‘There’s going to be dancing?’” Hegedűs told the Guardian.