‘Meta owes us an explanation,’ group says as organizers fear censorship after account goes dark for several hours

The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy protests that have drawn millions of Americans to the streets in recent years were frustrated when its Instagram account was temporarily shut down during its latest demonstration on Saturday.

The No Kings movement’s account went dark for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout were underway, sparking censorship fears.

Ex-president urges Americans to defend congresswoman, saying ‘there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her’

Former US president Barack Obama condemned comments by Donald Trump’s “border czar” that the Republican presidential administration could “of course” strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.

Obama wrote Sunday morning, on X, that “the full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president.”

Judge orders government to notify her by 8pm ET Sunday whether its position changed from Friday’s court filing

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday that “restoration work will begin” on 15 November to a historic public golf course in Washington DC despite a federal judge’s court order to pause his plans over environmental and historic preservation concerns.

US district judge Ana Reyes had ruled earlier this year that the federal government must give notice before any substantive construction work on the East Potomac golf course could proceed, and last week issued an order halting the removal of trees at the site, which she called “inexcusable”.

The petition to Sundar Pichai, the CEO, included more than 4,500 signatures and included calls for buyout options

Google workers on Thursday delivered a petition calling for layoff protections as tech giants continue to slash their workforces while pouring billions into AI.

“Make no mistake: this is a company that is enjoying massive, unprecedented success,” Parul Koul, Google software engineer and Alphabet Workers Union president, said outside the company’s California headquarters after delivering the petition to the office of the CEO, Sundar Pichai’. Koul pointed to Google’s $4tn valuation, which has quadrupled over the last six years: “These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”

Instagram users should check privacy settings after rollout of new Meta AI image generator, advocates warn

Meta has sparked blowback from privacy advocates for allowing its new AI image maker to generate photos of users with public profiles by default.

Users of Meta’s Muse Image AI tool, released Tuesday, can tag public Instagram profiles and generate pictures that pull from faces of people featured in these social media posts. Instagram users are not notified when their posts are integrated into what the company describes as its “most advanced image generation model yet”.

Falling shares push tech mogul back down to billionaire ranks after SpaceX IPO made him world’s first trillionaire

Elon Musk was no longer a trillionaire by the time markets closed on Wednesday. Plunging shares in Tesla and SpaceX dragged the tech magnate down to billionaire status. As of 4pm ET, Forbes listed Musk’s net worth as $970.2bn.

Musk reached trillionaire status on 12 June after SpaceX’s historic initial public offering. The rocket, satellite and AI company’s debut on the stock market made Musk the first person with a net worth of more than $1tn. His fortune continued to hover around that gigantic figure in the weeks following the initial public offering (IPO).

Depending on AI can also potentially decrease the ability to discern misinformation, research says

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves.

As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content – but there’s a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests. An over-dependence on AI to help figure out what’s real on the internet can lead to trouble making those judgments.

He’s now the world’s first trillionaire, after his rocket and AI company broke IPO records on its way to a $2.1tn valuation

Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX’s historic debut on the stock market on Friday launched the CEO to unprecedented levels of wealth; his personal fortune now amounts to $1.1tn, an increase of more than $62bn since the previous day, according to Forbes.

The rocket, satellite and AI company raised $75bn from its record-breaking initial public offering (IPO), and is now valued at $2.1tn after its first day of public trading.

Congress has failed to reauthorize section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amid questions over its future

Donald Trump’s bid to install a controversial ally as the country’s leading intelligence official has shone a light on the wide reach of a powerful surveillance law, and raised questions over its future.

Privacy advocates say it deserves scrutiny, and reform, regardless of who the US president appoints as director of national intelligence (DNI).

At his final WWDC keynote, Tim Cook highlights AI-forward upgrade to the voice assistant to be widely released in fall

After years of anticipation, user frustration and false starts, Apple announced a major upgrade to Siri at its annual developer conference on Monday. The voice assistant will come integrated with Apple’s artificial intelligence tool, Apple Intelligence, and has been rechristened “Siri AI”.

The new Siri, which will be widely released in the fall, will more closely resemble AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, than a question-and-answer tool that draws from the web.

Breach of high-profile accounts raises concerns about reliance on AI for security measures such as passwords

Hackers used Meta’s AI-powered support chatbot to infiltrate high-profile Instagram accounts, the company has confirmed, saying it resolved the problem after researchers exposed it.

The targets ranged from Barack Obama’s White House account to the beauty retailer Sephora and the US Space Force chief master sergeant, John Bentivegna, according to reporting from 404 Media. Everyday users complained of similar hijackings on Reddit and X over the weekend.

Company asks US government to release army of sterile male mosquitoes to lower number of illness-spreading bugs

Google wants to “stop bad bugs with good bugs”, and it’s not talking about coding. The tech company has asked the US government for permission to release up to 32 million sterilized mosquitoes in California and Florida.

As part of its successful “Debug” program, Google is tapping into its tech expertise to raise an army of sterile male mosquitoes to lower the number of illness-spreading bugs. Mosquitoes – the world’s deadliest animal – kill more people than any other creature in the world every year by spreading lethal diseases such as dengue, West Nile virus, Zika, chikungunya and malaria.

Experts say AI firm’s engagement with Vatican risks creating ‘feelgood’ discourse that lacks critical examination

Why did Anthropic’s founder sit beside the pope during a warning about AI?

In the first major written teaching of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV took artificial intelligence to task. The pontiff delineated the technology’s most concerning threats to humanity: replacing workers, accelerating war and exploiting the environment. At a ceremony honoring the holy teaching the day of its release at the Vatican, the pope was flanked by an unusual guest speaker: Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, one of the people behind the AI boom so worrying Leo.

Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects

When Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State University this spring, predictions about artificial intelligence already had him questioning the value of his degree. Then a music executive started preaching about AI’s transformative power during a commencement speech.

“This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the last 10 years than in the 50 years prior … AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” said Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine. After a few stray boos from graduates, he doubled down: “Deal with it.”

Many analysts view company’s financial performance as a broader referendum on AI buildout

Nvidia continued its years-long streak of beating Wall Street’s expectations for growth on Wednesday, reassuring most investors that the AI boom, particularly the global explosion of datacenters, will continue apace.

“The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” said Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, in a statement. “Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value, and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”

Police forcibly broke up protest outside hospital where federal immigration agents took detainee for evaluation

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New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and other local officials on Monday condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after federal officers dragged a man out of a hospital building where he had been taken following an arrest, prompting a crowd of protesters to gather outside, where they clashed with police.

The incident over the weekend has also drawn scrutiny from critics questioning the New York police department’s response at the scene, in relation to New York City’s sanctuary laws, which bar local police from assisting federal immigration authorities in civil immigration enforcement.

PocketOS was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business

It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

Meta said it would cut 10% of it employees while Microsoft will offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of workers

Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies’ productivity needs.

Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees– to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000.

Outgoing CEO took stood up for users in battle with FBI but concessions abroad undermine claims of protecting ‘fundamental right’

In his 15 years as Apple’s top executive, Tim Cook has projected an image of the company as a champion of privacy rights. As he prepares to leave that role in September, that legacy has come back into focus. Cook trumpeted the iPhone maker’s commitment to privacy at home in the US and the EU, calling privacy “a fundamental right” but his acquiescence to government demands abroad call his dedication to protecting users into question.

Cook cemented Apple’s pro-privacy reputation in 2015 when he resisted the FBI’s demands to unlock the iPhone of a mass shooter in San Bernardino, California. The company played up that public image in 2019 with playful ads that read, “Privacy. That’s iPhone”, positioning Apple as the obvious choice for people who cared about privacy. In 2021, Apple added a feature, App Tracking Transparency, that allowed iPhone owners to limit an app’s ability to track their mobile activity. Apps that tracked users without permission would be removed, Cook said.

Verdict in states’ case says concert giant stifled competition in ticketing industry, raising pressure for changes

Concert giant Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had a harmful monopoly over big concert venues, a Manhattan federal jury has found, dealing the company a loss in a lawsuit over claims brought by dozens of US states.

The jury deliberated for four days before reaching its decision on Wednesday in the closely watched case, which helped peel back the curtain on a business that dominates live entertainment across much of the world.