Powderhorn

What the country is really clamoring for is a useless monument. Cancer cured! Mideast at peace! Now, let's build an arch!

I'm going to break with policy and provide the full story, because it's so short that doing my usual excerpt thing wouldn't be useful.

The Trump administration on Friday released new renderings of the triumphal arch the president wants to install in Memorial Circle at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

As part of Donald Trump’s legacy-building quest during his second term in office, the so-called “Arc de Trump” would stand 250ft tall, feature a 60ft golden Lady Liberty, and include a viewing deck. The phrase “One Nation Under God” would stretch across the top of the structure, according to the latest plans from Harrison Design.

The mock-up was submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), who are next due to meet on 16 April to consider the proposal.

Trump dismissed all six commissioners last year and replaced them with loyalists. The panel is one of two bodies responsible for signing off on his proposed White House ballroom. Although the CFA approved that project in February, a federal judge halted construction weeks later. The president, however, had already demolished the historic East Wing to make room for it.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which ​is chaired by one of Trump’s former lawyers, also greenlit the building project days later, but the status of the work remains in limbo following the district court ruling.

The administration believes the arch will be “one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington DC, but throughout the world”, said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, in a statement.

He added that the positioning of the arch, near Arlington National Cemetery would serve as “a visual reminder of the noble sacrifices borne by so many American heroes throughout our 250-year history so we can enjoy our freedoms today”.

A White House official also told the Guardian that the estimated cost of the triumphal arch was “still being calculated” and would be shared in the near future. The White House anticipates “some combination of public and private funds” to be used to pay for the project, according to the official.

A 20-year-old man allegedly tossed a molotov cocktail at the home of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, before the sun rose on Friday, according to statements from San Francisco police.

The suspect, who allegedly threw the fire bomb at the $27m North Beach residence around 4.12am, has been arrested but not identified. The same person allegedly threatened to torch OpenAI’s headquarters in the city. No injuries were reported.

The San Francisco police wrote in a statement on X on Friday morning that the agency responded to a “fire investigation” after the man allegedly threw a molotov cocktail at Altman’s residence. Law enforcement said there was a “fire to an exterior gate”, after which the suspect fled on foot. There were no injuries, the agency said.

About an hour later, just after 5am, police responded to reports from a business in the Mission Bay neighborhood, where OpenAI’s headquarters are located, about a man “threatening to burn down the building”. Officers said they recognized the man as the suspect from the earlier incident and immediately detained him.

Funny that when you threaten an entire society, some will break. That he was only 20 suggests a sense that he will never have a seat at the table for the rest of his life.

And he's not wrong.

Oh, for fuck's sake ... this again? Even a grocery store knows that when a product doesn't sell, it's time to put it on clearance and take it off the shelf.

I have no personal issue with Harris, but promising to continue the status quo was not what voters wanted in 2024. So she's now in the position of the GOP stance of "if we roll back the clock, everyone will be happy."

Which is obviously poppycock.

Unless you're proposing single-payer healthcare and concrete solutions to the housing crisis, as well as ending all fossil-fuel subsidies and pulling the U.S. out of needless wars (corollary: stop spending on the military when citizens are suffering), you've lost the Zeitgeist.

Anyway, enough ranting ... here's a snippet:

Kamala Harris said she is “thinking about” running in the 2028 presidential election.

“I might, I might. I’m thinking about it,” the former vice-president and 2024 candidate told the crowd at a gathering of the National Action Network (NAN), a civil rights organization founded by Al Sharpton, on Friday in New York City.

Expanding on her response to Sharpton’s question about a potential presidential bid, she added: “I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States … I know what the job is and I know what it requires.”

She said: “I’ve been traveling the country the last year, spending a lot of time in the south and many other places, and the one thing I’m really clear about is … the status quo is not working and hasn’t been working for a lot of people for a long time."

Speaking about the presidency, Harris added: “It’s got to be about the American people and that’s how I think of it. I am thinking about it in the context of … who and where and how can the best job be done for the American people. I’ll keep you posted.”

Oh, you almost got there. Thing is, you're the status quo.

Pope Leo XIV on Friday offered a new criticism of war, in a social media post that named no names but appeared to hint at the Trump administration leadership harnessing Christian nationalism to glorify the US and Israel’s war against Iran.

“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” Leo wrote on his official X account. “Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”

The pope, who was born in Chicago and is the first American to lead the Catholic church, has consistently spoken out against the fighting in the Middle East since the US and Israel began strikes on Iran in February.

Leo’s post on Friday appeared to be an oblique response to the Trump administration’s repeated references to God while conducting Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has especially portrayed the conflict in religious terms, describing it as a holy war carried out “in the name of Jesus Christ”.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) is surely hoping that Donald Trump will take a more diplomatic tone later this month when he makes his first appearance as president at the organization’s glitzy dinner in Washington DC, an annual event meant to honor and celebrate journalists and press freedom.

On Monday, Trump threatened to imprison a journalist if they refused to reveal the source of information that a second US airman was still missing after being shot down by Iran last Friday, which he claimed put the service member at risk.

“The person who did the story will go to jail if he doesn’t say,” Trump told a packed room of White House reporters, without specifying which reporter and which outlet he was referring to. The comment shocked watchdogs even at a time when the White House has become increasingly hostile to the media.

While some journalists and news organizations have long questioned the optics of the press mingling with the administration officials they cover, those questions have only grown louder after Trump’s threats and actions. In the first 14 months of his second term, Trump’s government has overseen a multi-pronged effort seemingly aimed at curbing news organizations that have been deemed hostile to his administration, threatening (and in some cases filing) lawsuits against media companies, cutting off access at the Pentagon by creating onerous new regulations, and even raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter.

In June 2024, a cyber-attack on a pathology services company caused chaos across London’s hospitals. More than 10,000 appointments were cancelled. Blood shortages followed and delays to blood tests led to a patient’s death.

Lethal cyber-attacks like this are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that – plunging us into a terrifying new world of chaos and disruption to the digital systems that we rely on.

This week Anthropic, a leading AI company in San Francisco, announced “Claude Mythos Preview”, an AI model that the startup says is too dangerous to publicly release, thanks to its exceptional cybersecurity – and cyber-attacking – capabilities. Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software.

“This is Y2K-level alarming,” one security expert said. Already, Mythos has found a 27-year-old bug in a critical piece of security infrastructure and multiple vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, essential for computer systems worldwide. These weak points could threaten almost everything on the internet from the streaming services you relax with to the banking systems you rely on.

From the "racism is totally within our rights under the First Amendment" dept.:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado over a new AI law set to take effect in June.

The suit seeks to block the state from enforcing the law, which would impose new requirements on AI systems to protect state residents from “algorithmic discrimination” in sectors such as education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services.

Colorado was the first state to pass a comprehensive bill to regulate AI.

The company claims the law infringes on its first amendment free-speech protections and would force xAI to “promote the state’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular”, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the state of Colorado dislikes.”

The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it.

Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store.

Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.

Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable.

Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working.

One wonders whether these old devices just don't have enough telemetry built in for Amazon's liking.

This is only a ~7-minute video, but there's a lot packed into it.

Inside a teaching kitchen south-east of Seoul, I coat a whole chicken – cut into eight parts – in batter and dip the pieces carefully into a bowl of powdered mix until covered in a light, fluffy layer.

A chef watches intently. “Don’t rub it,” he says. “Keep it delicate.”

The chicken, already brined in what I’m told is a secret marinade, goes into a fryer filled with an olive oil blend, heated to 165C. I slowly lower the pieces a third of the way, then drop them in away from myself to avoid splashing. I set a timer for 10 minutes.

This is Chicken University, a sprawling campus with a giant chicken statue at the entrance. It exists to train would-be owners of the BBQ Chicken franchise chain through a two-week residential programme. More than 50,000 people have passed through its classrooms.

This humble dish is relatively simple, and is not even traditional Korean cuisine, but it is part of a national obsession that has gone global, both physically and culturally as part of the K-food wave. The country has been only half-jokingly dubbed the Republic of Fried Chicken.

South Korea has around 40,000 fried chicken restaurants – just a few thousand short of the number of McDonald’s branches worldwide. Most are small, family-run operations. But now, Korean chicken brands operate more than 1,800 stores in around 60 countries, nearly double the number of stores a decade ago. From London to Los Angeles, Korean fried chicken appears on the menu.

In April 1975, Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor whose efforts to track down Nazi war criminals had earned him the title of “Nazi hunter”, wrote a letter to Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal. Wiesenthal thanked him for a psychology book Speer had sent him, and forwarded a copy of the French edition of his own memoir. Their decade-long correspondence also includes holiday postcards and birthday wishes. It ends with a personal note from Speer’s widow Margarete on her husband’s death in 1981, telling Wiesenthal how important their friendship had been to him.

Wiesenthal’s friendship was a private echo of the extraordinarily warm international welcome that Speer received as a public intellectual after his release from Spandau prison in 1966. Speer had served as minister of armaments in wartime Nazi Germany, and was found guilty of crimes against humanity; yet when he died, he was in London to promote his new book on the BBC.

Speer’s rehabilitation was a masterpiece in duplicity. In his defence at the Nürenberg trials – and in later books and interviews – he was the only high-ranking official to take on full responsibility for the Nazi crimes; and this seeming moral clarity allowed him to credibly lie that he had not known about the extermination camps. The evidence for that would emerge only after his death, prompting Wiesenthal, among many others, to admit he had been duped. Until then, the lie allowed Speer to become an authority on the endlessly fascinating topic of Adolf Hitler’s personality and psyche.

OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities, citing high energy costs and regulation.

Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for institutions and individuals.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Or maybe it's as simple as "shit, we actually don't make any money, and people have caught onto the grift."