He could seem judgmental, even moody. But the whole neighbourhood mourned when this remarkable moggy went to meet his maker
When my cat Eric passed away from stomach cancer in 2001, I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready to have a pet again. But a few months later I was given another cat, Karl, by an old friend from Camberwell College of Arts in south London, who was moving back to Germany. I had known Karl when I was a student there, where he had been mates with Eric. Karl, an unassuming brown tabby with a judgmental glare, took me back to living in student halls in the 90s.
Karl was perhaps the most average-looking tabby in south London, but on my quiet street he became a legend of sorts. He accompanied my children and me on school runs. He would walk ahead with his belly swinging and take us to the top of the road. There he would wait until I dropped off the children and escort me back home.
The president’s methods, from ‘flooding the zone’ with scandals to prioritizing loyalty over competence, could ultimately weaken rather than strengthen him
The pattern is by now all too familiar: with every power grab Trump tries – from a fraudulent speech about voter fraud to appeals to his supreme court to let him rig the midterms – a debate kicks off about whether these moves are signs of strength or of desperation. Maybe we keep getting caught in this debate because the question is badly posed. So much of what is distinctive about Trump’s governance during his second term can serve the consolidation of an autocratic regime and at the same time create particular vulnerabilities for the regime. We have to become better at identifying these weaknesses, as opposed to being shellshocked by Trump’s brazenness every single time.
Aspiring autocrats operate differently in the 21st century; in previous eras, they had little hesitation about unleashing violence and committing massive human rights violations. Today, they try to fool both domestic and international audiences into thinking that democracy and the rule of law still exist. The recently deposed Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was a master of this technique; he spent many years performing what he called “the peacock dance” to convince the European Commission (and Chancellor Angela Merkel) that he wasn’t creating a kleptocratic autocracy.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
Вы изменили или удалили TypeScript-тест, но в dist остался старый JavaScript. node:test честно запускает найденный файл — и зелёный прогон может проверять уже не тот код, который открыт в редакторе.
В статье разбираю fwa — небольшой защитный слой между tsc и node:test: детерминированный поиск тестов, проверку устаревших артефактов, безопасный --prune и API для оркестрации тестовых наборов.
Бот на Telegram Bot API + Google Apps Script проходил все мои тесты, но иногда молчал у реальных пользователей. Разбираюсь, почему Apps Script может отвечать 302-редиректом вместо 200 на вебхук — и почему это невозможно поймать через HTTP-клиент, который сам следует за редиректами.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination appears to be back on track after he announced a key decision to satisfy two Republican holdouts in the Senate who said they could not support his confirmation until the “anti-weaponization” fund was rescinded in writing. Now, Blanche posted an order establishing, “Beyond any doubt, there is no fund.” NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for TODAY.
Rep. Max Miller (R, Ohio) attends the Ways and Means Committee hearing on the priorities of the Treasury Department in Longworth building on June 4, 2026 —Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R, Ohio), whose daughter has leveled allegations of domestic and child abuse against her former husband Rep. Max Miller (R, Ohio), argued that Miller should not serve in the House and should “seek professional help.”
“If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them,” Moreno posted on X Sunday. “He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
Moreno’s statement came after Miller, in a Sunday livestream, defended himself again against allegations from Moreno’s daughter Emily following their contentious divorce. Miller married Emily Moreno in 2022, had a daughter with her in 2023, and filed for divorce in August 2024, which was finalized last year.
The Ohio Senator, however, had largely refrained from commenting publicly on the matter or on his former son-in-law’s reelection campaign amid the fallout. But in his statement, Moreno said that while he had hoped to keep the matter private for the safety of his family, Miller’s “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior has made that impossible,” adding that “it has been horrific to watch this play out in full public view, all while knowing an innocent two-year-old girl is caught in the middle.” Moreno also said that he believes Miller needs professional help “to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake.”
U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R, Ohio) in Capitol Hill n Washington, D.C., on July 29, 2026. —Anna Moneymaker—Getty Images
Miller, 37, is running for reelection in Ohio’s 7th district, facing Democratic nominee Brian Poindexter in the November midterms, where the GOP would have to defend its razor-thin majority in the House.
But while Miller has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, the allegations and the ongoing court proceedings concerning Miller’s private life have become a political opportunity for Democrats. Last week, some of Miller’s Democratic House colleagues called for an ethics probe in light of the allegations.
Asked by reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday whether Miller should resign, Trump said that “so far it’s accusations,” and that he’ll be “looking at it.” Earlier this year, as the allegations against Miller surfaced, Speaker Mike Johnson told NBC News: “I don’t get involved in the personal lives of members and those things. You know, he’s refuted some of these allegations, and he’s got to work that out.”
While Moreno’s office has previously said the Senator “will not litigate these matters in the media,” he has been under pressure from critics and other observers to break his relative silence on his daughter’s legal debacle.
Miller responded to Sen. Moreno’s statement on X: “If my daughter said the same thing to me, I personally wouldn’t wait two years before holding him accountable. You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus. This is all political.”
Miller continues to deny accusations
Miller used a nearly 20-minute livestream on Sunday to once again dispute the allegations his ex-wife has made, including that he abused her and their daughter, saying that they have damaged his reputation.
“Just want to be clear: no court, no agency has ever substantiated any allegation of abuse against me, no criminal charge has ever been filed against me,” Miller said. “Every single one of these allegations were already investigated, and I cooperated fully every single time because I had nothing to hide and I have nothing to hide now.”
Emily Moreno had previously told investigators that Miller threw hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head, according to court filings. Reports also surfaced of their two-year-old daughter also suffering a collarbone fracture, though the cause of the injury hasn’t been clearly determined.
Miller, in his livestream, claimed that his former spouse was facing “significant” mental health challenges, which he believes have “contributed” to her allegations. The Ohio lawmaker also posted online a public folder containing documents, video, and audio recordings that he claimed would support his account.
Miller wrapped his livestream with a vow to stay in the congressional race. “I’m winning in November, and I’ll be back in the 120th [Congress],” he said.
Emily Moreno’s spokesman Stefan Mychajliw said in a statement on social media that it was “shameful” for Miller to “go on a bizarre and lie-filled rant about his ex-wife to desperately try to save his political career.”
Miller’s previous controversies
Before being elected to the House in 2022, Miller spent six years in the Marine Corps Reserve. He also previously served in Trump’s first-term Administration, including as a senior advisor to the President.
Politico and the Washington Post have previously reported on Miller’s run-ins with the law as a young adult, including charges, which were later dismissed, for underage drinking, assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.
From 2019 to 2020, Miller dated Stephanie Grisham, a White House press secretary during Trump’s first-term Administration. Grisham has also accused Miller of abuse: she wrote in a 2021 op-ed for the Post and in a memoir the same year, without naming Miller, that her relationship with a White House staffer had “turned abusive” and that she had told Trump himself about her former partner who had “anger issues and a violent streak.”
The partner was later identified as Miller, who then sued Grisham for defamation, though he voluntarily dropped the suit in 2023 as part of a confidential settlement agreement.
This year, Grisham filed a new lawsuit against Miller for allegedly breaching that settlement. Grisham pointed to statements he made during a Spectrum News interview, and she claimed that as part of their agreement, they were not allowed to make disparaging comments about each other.
Когда-то я всерьез занялся изучением темы согласий на рекламу и обнаружил, что Федеральная антимонопольная служба (ФАС) ведет открытый реестр дел. Это супер ценные данные для меня как исследователя, но они совсем не структурированы и анализировать их можно только вручную перечитывая каждое дело. Меня это не очень устроило, поэтому я сделал общедоступную карту дел ФАС и хочу рассказать о том, как она работает. Надеюсь, кому-то будет полезным.
Smart mowers are an expensive alternative to old-fashioned yard work, but they’re finally good enough to consider if you’d rather sip an iced tea and watch a robot tame your lawn.
UK manufacturers ramped up production last month for the fourth consecutive month and at the fastest pace in almost two years, according to a leading survey of the industry.
The S&P Global poll of manufacturers found them in upbeat mood in July, though anxious about the prospect of a long war in the Middle East that would block supplies of oil and gas, and raise the cost of production.
Chucky pig. Slater. Monkey pea. Roly-poly. Boat-builder. Butchy boy. Cheeselog. Hobbling Andrew. Wood pig. If there were a prize for the range and joyfulness of a creature’s English-language names, the humble woodlouse would undoubtedly triumph over its million-plus invertebrate rivals.
Over centuries of easy cohabitation with humans, it has acquired more than 300 regional names in Britain alone, and many more in other languages (such as Gwrach y Coed, “witch of the wood”, in Welsh).
Rupert Lowe says no talks have taken place after the Reform UK leader said he was ‘open to conversation’ on some sort of electoral deal
Zia Yusuf said under the plan Reform will create an “integrated surveillance command”, which he claims will “unify” military and intelligence surveillance, making “ours the most surveilled maritime border in the world”.
“Any vessel attempting to cross illegally will be intercepted by our armed forces who will return them back to France,” he said, adding that emergency legislation would be given to the armed forces to equip them with the “necessary powers”.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds up bananas labeled with a 30 percent off sticker during an announcement on municipal grocery stores at a Campaign for Hunger community food distribution center in Brooklyn, New York, on July 27, 2026. | Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
New Yorkers will soon enjoy a 30 percent discount on their meat, seafood, milk, and bread — so long as they shop at a city-owned store.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted such bargains this week at a press conference detailing his plans to launch five public grocery stores, in a bid to lower New Yorkers’ food costs. Under the proposal, the city would own each supermarket and dictate its pricing and labor practices, while private grocery companies would handle the day-to-day operations.
Key takeaways
• Mamdani plans to open five city-owned grocery stores offering steep discounts on staple foods. • Public stores can help where private grocers are absent, but that is not the main problem in New York City. • The stores are unlikely to sell food more efficiently than large private retailers. • The same public money could reach more low-income New Yorkers through direct food assistance.
While stimulating, these grand philosophical arguments have often overshadowed more banal but pressing questions: Would public grocery stores do more to advance Mamdani’s stated goals than other things the city could do with the same money? Has New York’s mayor discovered a way to sell groceries more efficiently than Costco does — or an approach to nutritional relief more effective than simply giving poor people more cash and food?
The answer to both of these questions appears to be “no.” And that should concern more than just New Yorkers. Mamdani’s vision is already inspiring imitators, with San Francisco and Boston both exploring their own public grocery store proposals. And in national discourse, the mayor’s policy is widely understood as an experiment — one testing a bold new theory of how governments can make food more affordable.
Unfortunately, although public grocers have merit in some circumstances, the theory underlying Mamdani’s specific plan is not merely unproven but incoherent.
Grocery socialism makes more sense for small-town Republicans
Public grocery stores have historically aimed to solve a problem that New York City does not have — a total absence of private supermarkets.
In 2018, the small town of Baldwin, Florida lost its only grocer. With only 1,600 residents — and a median income of $44,271 — the community no longer generated enough business to be worth the local IGA’s while. And no other national chain rushed in to fill the gap.
So, the municipality opened its own grocery store, the Baldwin Market.
This attracted national media attention. And not without reason. A deeply conservative small-town trying its hand at socialism was a fun story. And it turned out that Baldwin wasn’t an aberration: Other agingrural communities in red America had turned to government grocers once private supermarkets had left them in the lurch.
Progressive policy thinkers took inspiration from these examples. In the ensuing years, proposals for using public grocery stores to combat urban food deserts — impoverished neighborhoods without convenient and affordable supermarkets — began to circulate. The merits of such plans can be debated. But their logic was straightforward: Where the market fails to provide residents with healthy food options, the government should step in.
When post-COVID inflation sowed outrage over food prices, however, some on the left reconceived the purpose of public supermarkets: In their telling, such stores weren’t merely a means of eliminating food deserts, but also a way to make groceries more affordable.
Mamdani’s plan is principally animated by the latter goal. With more than 1,100 grocery stores and 10,000 bodegas, most of New York City is well-provisioned by private food vendors. And although parts of the municipality are under-served, the mayor is not actually concentrating his stores in such areas; his planned East Harlem location lies just blocks from an Aldi, Costco, and many other grocers.
In a report detailing its policy, the mayor’s office makes clear that its primary aim is to drive down New Yorkers’ food bills. Yet there’s little reason to think that public grocery stores are a cost-effective way to do that.
New York City probably won’t provide groceries more efficiently than Costco
Without question, a government store can make groceries more affordable for its own customers: All it has to do is charge below-market prices.
And yet, if that store manages this feat by operating at a loss, then its shoppers’ savings will come at the broader city’s expense.
That might not be too troubling, if one pictures rich taxpayers footing the bill. But for a city like New York — which faces a structural budget deficit — revenue is a scarce resource. A tax dollar spent on public grocery stores is one that can’t be spent on nutritional assistance for low-income people. And all else equal, the latter will do more to enhance affordability: If you have a limited pool of food subsidies — and want to minimize the number of New Yorkers who can’t afford groceries — then you should spend your funds on the poor, not on whoever happens to show up at your city-owned store.
Thus, for Mamdani’s supermarkets to be cost-effective, they can’t just subsidize low prices with taxpayer money. Rather, they need to deliver groceries more efficiently than private retailers do.
Public ownership can unlock efficiencies in certain contexts. For example, America’s private health insurance system generates massive administrative redundancies. By one estimate, if the US replaced its sprawling insurance industry with a single government payer, it could cut our health system’s annual administrative costs by $500 billion. In other words, a Medicare For All program could theoretically provide more healthcare-per-dollar than the current system does, by eliminating excess bureaucracy.
But there are no comparable inefficiencies in the grocery sector. True, a government retailer could generate some savings by declining to take a profit. But margins in the industry are slim; the average profit rate among food retailers was just 2.1 percent in 2025. Therefore, Mamdani’s stores can’t finance 30 percent discounts merely by dispensing with shareholder returns.
Meanwhile, the city actually wants its stores to be less cost-efficient than private grocers in some respects. According to its policy brief, the government grocers will pay their workers higher wages than most retailers and may also favor “local and regional suppliers,” rather than automatically contracting with whichever food producers offer the best rate.
The city suggests that its stores will have some cost advantages: Unlike private competitors, they will pay no rent or property taxes on their facilities. But these are merely additional subsidies, not actual efficiencies: By providing free real estate to its grocers, the city is forgoing revenue that it could otherwise collect and spend on nutritional assistance or other public goods.
It is not yet clear how much money the city is prepared to lose each year on these stores. If Mamdani’s celebrity — and heavily advertised bargains — lure large masses of people to his markets, their steeply discounted goods will quickly sell out. In that circumstance, to avoid long stretches with empty shelves, or some complex rationing system, the city would need to rapidly restock money-losing items, compounding the stores’ operating losses.
In theory, there is one way that government stores could benefit consumers throughout a city without being especially efficient enterprises in themselves: They could force other retailers to cut prices by accepting lower profits or discovering new efficiencies. But with grocery margins already thin, squeezing private markets further could lead to closures, thereby reducing shoppers’ options. Further, Mamdani himself insists that his stores will go out of their way to avoid harming private competitors (which, in New York, consist primarily of the sorts of small businesses that Mamdani has promised to help).
In any case, five stores won’t substantially impact pricing citywide. And so long as each government grocer operates at a loss, scaling up the program will only deepen its costs — and thus, the tradeoff between funding public supermarkets and anti-hunger programs.
Aldi for all
At present, Mamdani’s grocery store experiment looks fairly cheap. The city estimates the stores will require $70 million in capital costs. As already noted, it’s unclear precisely how large each store’s annual operating budget will be. But even if each supermarket loses many millions each year, it still won’t make that big a difference, in the context of the city’s $125 billion budget.
Still, the opportunity costs of Mamdani’s policy are real. New York City currently plans to spend $3.1 million next year on a program called Get The Good Stuff (GTGS), which essentially gives SNAP recipients up to $10 off each time they purchase fruits and vegetables from 25 participating grocery stores. With the money slated for its public supermarkets, New York could dramatically expand the program, while also investing more money into its food banks. Alternatively, the city could modestly increase cash transfers to its lowest-income residents.
To be sure, none of that would offer much benefit to middle-class shoppers. And the mayor is quite reasonably concerned with increasing grocery affordability for the typical New Yorker. But the city can advance that aim — while actually increasing its revenue — by easing zoning and permitting rules that currently make it difficult for large, low-cost retailers like Costco and Walmart to operate in many parts of the city. Happily, to Mamdani’s great credit, his administration’s paper on public grocery stores does briefly mention the need for permitting reforms.
Maybe public grocery stores are an end in themselves
All this said, there may still be a reasonable case for Mamdani’s stores or others like them. For example, a city’s residents might come to see such retailers as a kind of attraction, public amenity, or community space, akin to a park or library.
Further, public grocers could theoretically increase the public’s faith in the government. While the grocers are unlikely to be efficient in reality, they may appear to be. After all, their low prices will be far more visible to consumers than their operating costs. If Americans come to associate the public sector with cheap, ostensibly well-run supermarkets — rather than dreary DMV lines — that could aid the left’s broader efforts to expand the government’s remit. (Although, if the public grocers end up being characterized by overcrowding and empty shelves, the policy could further erode Americans’ confidence in the public sector.)
As a means of maximizing affordability, however, Mamdani’s program makes little sense. It will mostly just transfer income from the city’s broad population to the small subset of New Yorkers who happen to live near — or work at — one of its five stores.
Where private markets fail to provide any grocery options, public stores may be the best way for municipalities to meet their residents’ nutritional needs. But in other contexts, governments can make a bigger difference by simply putting more money in poor people’s pockets.
Надёжная работа любого сервиса опирается на возможности системы журналирования. С помощью логов можно решить широкий спектр задач: решение проблем, аналитика поведения пользователей, расследование инцидентов безопасности, мониторинг состояния системы и другие. В этой статье посмотрим на возможности и практические приёмы для работы с логами сервера Angie.
Бывший лидер Мьянмы и лауреат Нобелевской премии мира Аун Сан Су Чжи, которая с февраля 2021 года находится под стражей, встретилась с делегацией Международной федерации Красного Креста. Это ее первая за последние четыре года подтвержденная встреча с кем-либо, помимо представителей властей Мьянмы.
Мои знания по системному администрированию предназначены для начинающих специалистов, студентов и всех, кто хочет разобраться в устройстве серверной инфраструктуры.
В статье рассматриваются основы работы ЦОДов, серверных шкафов, серверного оборудования, RAID, BIOS, BMC, оптоволоконных и медных кабелей. Отдельные разделы посвящены DNS, Active Directory, групповым политикам, аутентификации и другим базовым службам корпоративной среды. Материал объясняет технические понятия простым языком, дополняется схемами, таблицами и практическими примерами.
Цель курса — сформировать целостное понимание инфраструктуры, дать базовый профессиональный словарь и подготовить читателя к дальнейшему изучению Windows Server, сетей, виртуализации и систем хранения данных, а также к уверенному выполнению первых практических задач системного администратора в организации.
A dispute over the chapter between the author and the Democratic National Committee has added to the party’s turmoil as it tries to look forward, not backward.
С того момента как свет увидел первую машину на ДВС, в мир вышло несчетное количество дизайнов разных мастей. Мы знаем ревущие мощью маслкары, элегантные седаны, лупоглазые малолитражки в духе неоретро, многие-многие другие автомобильные «фасоны».
Но эта машина превзошла их всех — её концепт считается по праву самым странным и даже идиотским в истории автомобилестроения. Но действительно ли идея в основе её конструкции была столь уж глупой?
The secretary of state said progress has been made in the Iran-Oman talks but that no final agreement has been reached, adding, "We're hoping that will happen very shortly."
Когда метрики, логи и трассировки живут в разных системах, поиск причины сбоя превращается в ручное сопоставление фрагментов.
В статье разберём, как OpenTelemetry объединяет телеметрию распределённых систем, где в этой архитектуре находится Collector и какие ошибки чаще всего мешают получить действительно полезную наблюдаемость.
New Zealand sailing team combine racing with campaigning for environmental and social impact
“Sailing on the Solent was awesome, but our racing … not quite perfect,” says Blair Tuke, co-chief executive of the Black Foils, New Zealand’s SailGP team, after finishing fifth at last month’s Great Britain Sail Grand Prix. It was only the team’s second competitive outing of the season after the boat had to be “pretty much rebuilt” following a big crash in Auckland in February, which forced them to miss four races.
But the team’s work off the water hasn’t stopped in the boatyard. Before the race in Portsmouth, which coincided with the beginning of National Marine Week in the UK, the Black Foils were awarded the Better Planet award in SailGP’s Impact League that rewards teams for environmental and social impact alongside racing.
At last! It’s time for our invertebrate of the year competition as voted for by you. Today, the immortal jellyfish – come back on Wednesday to find out who else made the top 10
After another massacre of smallholders – who are subjected to violence from palm oil firms and drug traffickers – the country’s new Trump-backed government has criminalised community leaders
Sitting on the back of the motorcycle, 15-year-old Orlean* heard gunshots. A moment later, the bike crashed. His uncle and two cousins fell to the ground dead. Orlean fled into the dense green forest of the palm oil farm and rushed along the dirt road until he was home.
He survived a massacre, one of only three who did.
Руководитель болезненно реагирует на критику, избегает неприятных разговоров или принимает все задачи, которые приходят сверху. Как сотруднику общаться с ним так, чтобы не усиливать проблему? Во второй части разбираю нарциссический, избегающий и альтруистический стили управления: какие реакции команды их закрепляют, чего лучше не делать и какие формулировки помогают сохранить рабочий диалог.
An FDA advisory panel recently voted to green-light some popular peptides. The decision brought enormous attention to the market for these products — and concerns about the unregulated supply.
The communication-free form of breaking up has become ubiquitous. “I no longer had to bear her energy,” a man who ghosted his partner of four years tells WIRED.
We’ve come a long way since exclusively $1,000+ OLED gaming monitors. Alienware’s latest display brings the price down to a shocking $350, though it comes with some important compromises.
Привычный график обновлений Java меняется. Теперь к релизам в январе, апреле, июле и октябре Oracle планирует добавить промежуточные релизы — CSPU (Critical Security Patch Update), чтобы не откладывать исправление критичных уязвимостей до следующего квартала. О чём эти релизы и что это всё значит?
Вижу большое количество новостей о налоговом контроле, многие из которых содержат спорные или противоречивые выводы, а отдельные публикации скорее создают мифы о работе ФНС, чем помогают понять, как эта система устроена на практике.
Ещё во время работы в ФНС мне хотелось показать налоговый контроль таким, каким он существует в действительности. Но оставаясь сотрудником налоговой службы, публично комментировать внутреннюю логику работы контрольного блока было затруднительно. Сейчас, когда я уже не работаю в ФНС, у меня появилась возможность высказывать свою позицию и рассказать о тех механизмах, которые я наблюдал на протяжении почти 12 лет.
В этой статье я разберу как появляется и развивается налоговый риск. А если вам это окажется интересным, и вы заходите узнать больше о том как работает ФНС, то в следующих статьях я разберу и другие аспекты работы налоговой службы.
In this photo illustration, a smartphone displays the Kimi K3 logo in front of a screen showing the Chinese national flag on July 18, 2026, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. | Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
The release of the new AI model, Kimi K3, has reignited concerns in Washington and Silicon Valley that China’s AI capabilities are catching up fast to the United States.
US concerns about Chinese AI can be separated into three general buckets: cybersecurity vulnerabilities, military capabilities, and the future of democracy.
While there’s wide consensus that China’s growing AI dominance is cause for concern, there’s less about what to do about it, and some potential policy options may be counterproductive.
The latest round of consternation was triggered this month when a little-known Chinese AI startup called Moonshot released a new large language model called Kimi K3. The conventional wisdom had been that the leading AI models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were between six to 12 months ahead of their Chinese competitors. Kimi dashed those assumptions: now, analysts say American companies may be as little as two to three months behind.
Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official now with OpenAI, warned in a bleak post on X that models like Kimi K3 could lead to a world of “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” of AI under full government control.
Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including blocking the export of the most advanced US semiconductors.
The White House is already reportedly considering taking steps to ban “open-weight” models — models that are easier to adapt for a user’s own purposes — like Kimi K3 in the United States. The Trump administration has also accused Moonshot of using the unauthorized “distillation” of one of Anthropic’s models — basically using another model’s outputs to train itself rather than raw data — as well as gaining access to blacklisted Nvidia chips in Thailand.
But often lost in the debates about what to do about China’s accelerating AI capabilities is the question of why the US cares about this at all. Obviously, the American companies developing the latest frontier models care about maintaining their edge, but why should it matter to Americans if the chatbot in their pocket was developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai? And perhaps even more so, why should it matter what chatbots people in Nairobi or Brussels are using?
The concerns in the US about Chinese AI generally fall into three broad buckets: cybersecurity concerns; military and national security concerns; and human rights or democracy concerns.
For the moment, concerns about who is winning the AI race can feel a bit abstract, but as AI becomes more embedded into governments, militaries, and ordinary people’s lives, the difference will start to be felt in a much more material way at both a national and personal level. In general, there is a growing sense that it matters which of the world’s vastly different superpowers builds the technology that could transform everything.
“People’s relationship with AI is becoming foundational to how they live their lives, so the choices people make about whose model they use and where they are physically hosted, as they share some of their most intimate secrets and ask for life advice and business guidance, and run an increasing share of their life — those are incredibly important,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a former State Department technology adviser now at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a contest between the United States and China to define the operating systems through which people live and work.”
Here’s what else America loses if it loses that contest.
Chinese AI could be more vulnerable to cyberattacks
The concerns about using Chinese AI are in some ways a repeat of the concerns over Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm that built much of the world’s 5G internet infrastructure, but which the US government banned from operating in the United States during the first Trump administration over concerns that the Chinese government could intercept information transmitted over these networks.
Today, the concern is that many firms are increasingly integrating Chinese AI models into their systems, both because they are often cheaper and because they are “open-weight.” (“Weights” refer to the setting an AI model uses to process a user’s inputs. “Open-weight” models make these publicly available for users to tinker with, rather than charging for access.)
There are some indications that Americans using Chinese AI models are already vulnerable. A Booz Allen study from earlier this year tested four Chinese models commonly used by US developers and found that three of them generated software with far more “hidden vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by hackers than their US counterparts. There’s no proof that the models were doing this intentionally, but the study did find that the models were “changing their behavior depending on who the user seemed to be or what country the request referenced.”
AI can also be used to carry out cyberattacks. Although nearly all the leading models have safety protocols meant to prevent this, they’re not bulletproof. Even Anthropic’s Claude, generally considered one of the most secure models, was adapted by Chinese hackers last year to engage in cyber espionage. The open weights of the leading Chinese models could make it even easier to strip out the safety protocols.
AI could give China a military edge
The simplest and most obvious argument for why AI matters for American national security is that it’s all too conceivable that the US and China could be at war in the years to come, and AI could be a major factor in determining who wins.
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have shown that modern militaries are already extensively using AI for intelligence collection and targeting. Semi- or fully-autonomous drone swarms are a major component of US plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then there’s the risk of AI being used to generate new bioweapons or other dangerous threats.
US experts believe China has pursued a “military-civil fusion” strategy, encouraging the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese defense contractors to collaborate closely with civilian technology companies and research institutions in order to gain an edge in military AI applications like intelligence analysis and drone swarms. It’s difficult to know exactly which of these capabilities China is focusing on, but procurement data suggests leading Chinese technology firms like Deepseek and Alibaba are involved in work with potential military applications. Analysts also accuse China of using outputs from US models like ChatGPT and Claude to train AI systems that could help develop China’s defense capabilities.
And that’s just conventional weapons. The US government has alleged that Chinese labs have “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” amid concerns that artificial intelligence could help make such weapons more sophisticated and deadly.
China could export digital authoritarianism
Last year, it was reported that Miiloo, a fuzzy children’s plush toy with a built-in AI chatbot, would, if prompted, happily tell users Chinese Communist Party talking points like “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.” The hubbub over Miiloo reached the US Senate floor. While it’s hard to imagine that many users were really asking Miiloo to help clear up East Asian territorial disputes, the affair illustrated much larger concerns about the dangers of letting AI models built by an authoritarian government with one of the world’s strictest censorship regimes become the global standard.
Chinese generative AI tools are legally required to uphold the country’s “core socialist values,” according to a document published by its national cybersecurity standards committee. So it’s little surprise that DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that sent shockwaves through the US tech industry in 2025, politely declines to answer when you ask it what happened on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square.
It’s not just that Chinese AI could help shape the political narratives absorbed by billions around the world, at a time when US soft power is ebbing and surveys show people in many countries already now have a more positive view of China than the United States.
The fact that under Xi Jinping, China’s government was centralizing power and becoming more, not less, authoritarian in the years leading up to the recent advances in AI are a major factor driving the mistrust in its technology.
“I think many of the sincere arguments about the risks of these models and what China would do with them stems from the coercive authoritarian approach of China’s current leader,” said Mieke Eoyang, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. “I don’t think we would be having this conversation in the same way with someone like [China’s previous leaders] Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.”
It is a serious concern if models built to conform to the values and political priorities of China’s current government become the global standard. But some are skeptical of the idea that human rights and democracy should be the goal of AI competition, worrying that the damage has already been done. The premise of that idea has gotten “shakier in recent years,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of the book The Rise of Digital Repression. Under this administration, the US has cut support for democracy and human rights programs overseas, and often allied itself with authoritarian governments. Then there’s the fact that at least one leading chatbot often seems to mimic the racist and antisemitic views of the world’s richest man who is also an ally of the current president.
While it’s still true that Chinese AI reflects the authoritarian values and priorities of China’s leaders, Feldstein notes, “this idea that the US is standing at the forefront of protecting and advancing democracy, human rights, that we’re not sort of there to manipulate information or to push a narrative agenda that reflects the ideological preferences of its leaders, has started to fray.”
The race to AGI
There’s also a set of concerns around the topic of “artificial general intelligence,” the hypothetical point at which AI exceeds human capabilities and is able to improve itself. The concern, expressed by both US government commissions and senior officials in both administrations, is that China is “racing” toward AGI and that whichever country achieves it first will have a massive geopolitical advantage. This is the type of thinking behind invocations of the nuclear-era Manhattan Project to justify massive government investments in AI development.
Chinese leaders do not appear to view AI competition this way. “The US conversation around this is much more ‘AGI-pilled’,” says Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University and expert on US-China technology competition. “The concern here is that we are very much on the brink of this explosion of more and more powerful AI that leads to it dominating everything.” Chinese leaders, on the other hand, “generally see AI as a productivity tool.”
If Chinese AI is a problem, what should we be doing about it?
This is not just a Beltway or Silicon Valley concern. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent Americans believe it is very important for the US to remain the leader in AI development, versus 22 percent who said it was not that important. Interestingly, the survey also found that most Americans believe China is already ahead on AI, though the expert consensus is that it’s still slightly behind.
“We’ve gotten so used to the fact that the US has been the leading player in technological revolutions from like mobile internet to the internet era, so it’s worrying to feel we may no longer have that dominant strength,” said Selina Xu, China and AI policy lead in the office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Even if there’s some consensus that AI competition is a priority, there’s less agreement on how to go about it. The challenge, Xu says, is “How do you manage the very concrete national security risks that come from competing with China on AI, but not turn technological competition into blanket protectionism?”
Often, the policy responses to this challenge have been contradictory.
The Trump administration, in its first term, pioneered the policy of restricting the export of the most advanced semiconductor chips to China, but Trump undermined that policy last year by permitting Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips there. The move flummoxed China hawks in Washington and went against the preferences of AI developers like Anthropic, but probably had a lot to do with lobbying by chip maker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company.
In some cases, the US may be inadvertently making China’s models more appealing. In June, the Trump administration placed export controls on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. This move prompted the company to take the model down for all users and led to the first time that AI capabilities meant for the global public took a step backward.In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, “We will not buy any model made by [US AI] companies if from one day to the next you can just turn off the switch.” Chinese models are hardly immune from concerns about kill switches or back doors, but if both governments involved in the AI race are seen as meddling, customers may just opt for whichever one is cheaper.
The latest flashpoint in the debate concerns the reports that the administration is considering banning open-weight models. This prompted an open letter from dozens of leading tech companies including Nvidia and OpenAI defending access to these models as necessary for helping the US maintain AI leadership. Advocates note that open-weight models can help respond to vulnerabilities as well as create them: When a rogue OpenAI model recently hacked into the startup Hugging Face’s systems, Hugging Face’s engineers used an open-weight model developed by China’s Z.ai to analyze the attack.
Despite the frequent comparisons, AI is not a national security competition like the early days of nuclear weapons or the space race. It’s a technology with potentially grave national security implications, that’s also used by millions of people around the world to plan their Tuesday night dinner or help with their homework. The log-in for Claude is not carried by a military officer at the president’s side. And much of the important work on developing these new technologies is being done by private tech companies, not government labs or defense contractors.
It may be that AI capability will help determine which country has the edge in the 21st century. It may also be that the benefits of these capabilities will be shared: Chinese companies might be no less capable than their American counterparts when it comes to developing new medications or clean energy technology.
The challenge of crafting technology to prevent a “dystopian hellscape” is to not accidentally make the existing world worse.
Exclusive: court records reviewed by the Guardian show medical procedures included force-feeding, intravenous forced hydration and involuntary blood draws
Homeland security officials under the Trump administration have quietly attempted to subject at least 10 hunger strikers in US immigrant detention to involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding, a Guardian investigation has found.
In 2025 and 2026, officials had definitely performed the procedures on at least three detained immigrants and probably subjected two more to the forced treatment – widely considered torture by human rights groups. The other five people gave in and broke their hunger strike at the last minute as force-feeding procedures loomed.
One Kurdish asylum seeker and hunger striker detained at the privately run Port Isabel service processing center in Los Fresnos, south Texas, was subjected to force-feeding for nearly eight months, according to a series of filings in the southern district of Texas federal court, beginning in May 2025 and ending only when he was deported.
Another hunger striker at the same facility was subjected to involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding, for nearly six months between September 2025 and March 2026, filings in the same court show.
Someone detained at the Krome service processing center in Miami, a privately run ICE jail, was subjected to forced medical procedures for nearly three months, filings in the southern district of Florida federal court show. DHS seemingly began the forced practices three days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration for a second term, then continued.
Two other hunger strikers, one at the Northwest ICE processing center in Washington state and another inside the Montgomery processing center on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, were probably subjected to forced medical procedures, according to filings in the western district of Washington and in the southern district of Texas federal courts.
In at least five cases, hunger strikers detained in Texas, Arizona and Florida, ended their hunger strike right before officials began with the forced medical procedures, filings in the southern district of Texas, district of Arizona and southern district of Florida federal courts show.
The forced procedures were performed inside the detention centers.
In six cases reviewed by the Guardian, detained immigrants did not have any legal representation during the court proceedings granting the involuntary medical procedures.
The DHS and ICE have conducted these procedures throughout the years, regardless of which presidential administration is in power. In 2024, under Joe Biden, the Guardian found that the DHS attempted to subject at least 10 hunger strikers in ICE detention to forced medical treatment. It definitely proceeded with at least two people, and probably subjected at least four more people to them. However, since the return of Trump to the White House and the dramatic increase in immigration arrests and detention, medical experts and advocates worry more hunger strikes will occur and strikers will be subjected to the practices.
Look out for Force-fed by ICE parts two and three in the coming days
Текст написан по мотивам интервью с Дмитрием Бусовым, CEO проекта LeaderChat.
Разбираю историю LeaderChat — сервиса, который начинался как обычный онлайн-чат с живыми операторами, а после появления современных LLM-моделей полностью изменил подход к работе. Спойлер: главным изменением стало даже не внедрение ИИ, а полный пересмотр того, как вообще должна работать автоматизация общения с клиентами.
От проблем PostgreSQL к скорости ClickHouse. Рассказываем, как переработали архитектуру кеширования для AI-тестов, чтобы выполнять более 2 млн запросов и обрабатывать 20 млрд записей в день, сохранив среднюю задержку поиска элементов на уровне 250 мс.
President Trump cited progress in the negotiations when canceling a threatened attack on Iran over the weekend. Iran said there were no current talks with the United States.
Когда говорят про оптимизацию под ИИ, обычно представляют работу с текстом на сайте. Но у меня раз за разом всплывает более базовая проблема: модель вообще не понимает, что за компания стоит за названием. Путает её с иностранной компанией с похожим названием, приписывает чужие продукты, называет не тот город. Это провал не контента, а цифрового следа компании (entity footprint), и его можно измерить.
Открываешь банк в одной вкладке, случайный сайт в другой — почему второй не может стащить твой баланс? Разбираемся, как работают Same-Origin Policy и CORS, с самого нуля и на простых примерах.
Историю про чувака, который забыл кошелёк в нью-йоркском ресторане и от стыда изобрёл кредитную карту, пересказывают все. Придумал её пиарщик. Разбираемся, что было на самом деле: почему первая карта была картонной, зачем Bank of America разослал 60 тысяч активных карт незнакомым людям, при чём тут утюг из IBM и как «Интурист» стал членом Visa, не будучи банком.
Russia has blamed Ukraine for a bombing at a restaurant in central Moscow that killed five people, amid growing speculation that a senior Russian military commander was the intended target.
The explosion occurred on Saturday evening near the entrance to an upmarket Italian restaurant in one of the city’s seven Stalin-era skyscrapers on Kudrinskaya Square.
