Rodney Greer accused of securing unauthorized prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs and selling them to customers
An Illinois man allegedly impersonated doctors – and evidently referred to himself online as “$hotboy1” – is facing criminal charges that he secured unauthorized prescriptions for Ozempic and Mounjaro pharmaceutical drugs that facilitate weight loss and are taken by some for cosmetic rather than legitimate medical reasons.
Rodney Greer purportedly launched the allege scheme in early 2023, according to court filings from federal prosecutors and a US justice department news release issued on Monday.
Continue reading...From the manager’s divorce to tension with the club hierarchy, new documentary is an honest portrayal of his difficult last two seasons
Having occupied a front-row seat for the final two seasons of Pep Guardiola’s gilded Manchester City tenure, the subject of Amazon’s A Beautiful Obsession, the surprise to me is how unfiltered the four-part series is.
Particularly, the telling of the torrid 2024-25 campaign when the wheels came clattering off in the bleakest of mid-winter plunges that featured nine defeats and one victory in 13 aura-shattering games.
Continue reading...1892 Holdings has first refusal if FSG opts to sell
Group paid more than £2bn for initial 38% slice of club
1892 Holdings, the new investor in Liverpool, has first refusal to become the majority shareholder in the next 12 months should Fenway Sports Group decide to sell.
The consortium led by Amit Bhatia and including the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was believed to have bought 30% to one-third of Liverpool when the deal was announced on Friday. However, the agreement is for 38% of the Anfield club, meaning 1892 has paid FSG just over £2bn to become a minority shareholder. The increased stake, first reported by the Athletic, still values Liverpool at about £5.5bn.
Continue reading...Almost 45m acres of national forests could be potentially opened to road construction, drilling and logging
The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45m acres of national forests to road construction, drilling and logging.
Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.
Continue reading...Migration minister asked how he intends to stop deportations of people ‘who had lived in Sweden for decades’
The deportation and removal of British citizens from Sweden over Brexit residency rights is damaging relations with the UK amid efforts to improve links with London, a Swedish MP has said.
Håkan Svenneling, representative for Värmland, where a 78-year-old British widow, Joyce Thomas, has been given four weeks to leave Sweden after 21 years of residency, has written to the migration minister, Johan Forssell, asking what he “intends to do to stop the deportations”.
Continue reading...Patrons at two of the chain’s London pubs were all for Tim Martin’s ban on playing music or taking calls on speaker
The terrace of the Moon Under Water Wetherspoons pub in Leicester Square was full of people enjoying the warm weather and chatting between tables – without a TikTok video or speakerphone call in earshot.
At Wetherspoons, the convivial atmosphere can no longer be punctuated by rude customers taking phone calls on blast, or playing videos without headphones after Tim Martin, the owner of the pub chain, banned both on his premises.
Continue reading...Migration minister asked how he intends to stop deportations of people ‘who had lived in Sweden for decades’
The deportation and removal of British citizens from Sweden over Brexit residency rights is damaging relations with the UK amid efforts to improve links with London, a Swedish MP has said.
Håkan Svenneling, representative for Värmland, where a 78-year-old British widow, Joyce Thomas, has been given four weeks to leave Sweden after 21 years of residency, has written to the migration minister, Johan Forssell, asking what he “intends to do to stop the deportations”.
Continue reading...IFA points to ‘unprecedented crisis of confidence’
Premier League chief says Infantino ‘hit self-destruct’
Gianni Infantino’s decision to sack his chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, after the Frenchman’s criticism of the World Cup sell-off plan has hardened some opposition to the Fifa president, with the efforts to force him out expected to intensify over the next few days.
On Tuesday Israel became the latest Fifa member to officially withdraw their support for Infantino’s re-election in a letter sent by the head of the Israel Football Association (IFA), Moshe Zuares.
Continue reading...Twenty-nine US states are seeking huge damages, claiming Meta’s platforms were addictive by design
In 1994, more than 40 US states came together to sue one of the most powerful industries on Earth: big tobacco.
The suits brought together diverse claims centred on tobacco companies’ misleading advertising and contribution to a mounting public health crisis. They ended in a negotiated settlement with the US government, in which the companies agreed to pay more than any industry ever, and the states agreed to drop a large portion of their claims.
Continue reading...“I think it is a good time to slow down,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last week, describing the company’s decision to halt the development of its most powerful, unreleased models.
The company announced Tuesday that it’s implementing new safeguards that will slow its future AI development. The company recently paused training on its next set of models, codenamed Astra, for a little more than two weeks, according to executives, and its largest planned frontier training run remains on hold while the new guardrails are put in place.
It is the first time OpenAI has made such a move. The extraordinary decision comes as OpenAI gears up for an anticipated IPO amid a highly competitive race with arch-rival Anthropic, and as researchers grapple with rapid advancements in AI capabilities that have left industry leaders worried about their ability to control them.
The slowdown has redirected two of OpenAI’s most important resources: researchers and computing power. Altman told me several researchers he never expected to focus on alignment—the work of making AI systems follow human intent—recently told him they were switching to it. “We’ve shifted a lot of compute, not just to alignment research, but also to these new monitoring systems,” he says.
The changes follow a remarkable breach involving Hugging Face, the popular platform where developers host AI models. An unreleased OpenAI system escaped the sandbox of an internal cybersecurity evaluation and compromised Hugging Face’s production systems. It took OpenAI researchers roughly one week to discover the incident. Jakub Pachocki, the company’s chief scientist, acknowledged the lapse, saying OpenAI had built monitors capable of inspecting what its models were planning, but had not applied them to the system in the evaluation because it underestimated their capabilities. “For AI, you should expect the unexpected,” he told me.
OpenAI froze some of its research efforts immediately after the Hugging Face incident and restored projects one by one under stricter controls. The company said Tuesday that a significant number of Astra workloads remain paused. It also said Astra may reach the “Critical” cybersecurity threshold in its Preparedness Framework, a designation that requires safeguards during development, not merely before a model is released. Executives have not given an estimate for how long the new safety processes could delay the release of Astra.
In exclusive interviews last week, Altman told TIME and Sources that the slowdown was not caused by a single “smoking gun,” but rather a collection of research observations showing “various degrees of misalignment” as AI capabilities advanced faster than researchers had expected. The decision to tap the brakes should not be interpreted as evidence of any imminent catastrophe, he said. “Getting AI safety right,” Altman told me, “is more important than any company’s momentum.”
OpenAI says it is now expanding safety monitoring across reinforcement-learning training and evaluations, the phase of development in which advanced models are given the ability to use the internet and control software. The approach uses other AI systems to examine models’ internal reasoning and behavior for unauthorized access, data theft, or attempts to defeat safeguards.
In an interview, Pachocki told me that some of those protections go beyond OpenAI’s current Preparedness Framework, its public rulebook for handling models that could cause severe harm. “We don’t have a date yet,” he says, “but we definitely believe we will need to evolve the Preparedness Framework.” OpenAI said it plans to involve outside organizations as it revises the framework and will publish a detailed postmortem of the Hugging Face breach in the coming days.
The company’s decision to decelerate creates a contrast with Anthropic. In February, TIME reported that Anthropic had weakened its commitment to stop training models when it could not guarantee adequate safeguards in advance. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan told TIME that unilateral commitments did not make sense “if competitors are blazing ahead.”
Like OpenAI, Anthropic is now preparing for an expected IPO. Figures recently reported by Bloomberg showed the company generated more than $11.5 billion in revenue in the second quarter, pushing its annualized revenue run rate above $65 billion at the end of July. OpenAI’s latest reported run rate is approaching $40 billion. One effect of OpenAI’s decision to slow down could be ratcheting up pressure on its rival to do the same.
“I don’t like the whole thing in this field of ‘we have to race’ or ‘we have to do this because somebody else is going to do it,’” Altman says. “I think that’s a very dangerous dynamic.”
Aside from the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI has not disclosed the results of its frontier research that led to the decision to slow down training, and company leaders said the evidence behind Astra’s risk classification will likely not be available until the model’s technical report is released.
“We are very far from everything running back to normal,” Mia Glaese, who leads safety and alignment work at OpenAI, said Tuesday.
This story was reported in partnership with Sources.
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani shows Britain’s Andy Burnham that confronting billionaires need not mean the end of cooperation with Donald Trump
In November, Californians will vote on a one-off 5% levy on residents worth more than $1bn. The union-backed plan could raise $100bn, more than enough to replace federal healthcare funding stripped away by Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. About 200 very rich people would pay. But the referendum is becoming a test of whether extreme wealth can buy the political power to defeat a popular redistributive policy. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face. Other billionaires are joining him. Whether voters can impose costs on the super-rich once their fortunes are big enough to shape the political process is now an open question. That alone should trouble any democracy.
It’s a long way from Mr Brin’s west coast lair of Mountain View to Andy Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. But the prime minister should heed the call from prominent progressive academics – led by the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz – urging Britain to join a new global push to tackle inequality. Prof Stiglitz wants help creating a new UN International Panel on Inequality (IPI). This stems from the G20’s first-ever inequality report, which warned that the yawning gap between rich and poor was a human-made crisis corroding democracy and social cohesion while blocking efforts to tackle the climate emergency.
Continue reading...Marco Rubio targets ICC’s Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye, who was investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza
The US has sanctioned the president of the international criminal court (ICC) and a prosecutor tasked with investigating crimes committed by Israel during its war on Gaza.
The new sanctions designations were unveiled by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement.
Continue reading...Family says Venezuelan has pending asylum claim
DHS says 34-year-old faces removal proceedings
San Diego Padres minor-league catching coordinator Oswaldo Pirela remained in federal immigration custody on Tuesday after being detained at an airport in El Paso, Texas, while returning from a work trip.
Pirela’s family said the 34-year-old Venezuelan has a pending asylum claim and has continually renewed his work authorization. The Department of Homeland Security said he does not have legal status and will face removal proceedings.
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