SEOUL — As China shows greater willingness to strong-arm its neighbors and President Donald Trump injects waves of unpredictability into global affairs, Japan and South Korea are banding together as smaller nations redraw the geostrategic balance in Asia despite their complicated history. Source link
We got this. That was the Trump administration’s message to European allies in the early days of its war with Iran. Washington hadn’t warned its NATO partners about the military campaign, jointly undertaken with Israel, much less consulted with them about the war’s objectives. Instead, American officials told Europeans to look after their own interests. Specifically, the Pentagon advised counterparts in Berlin to concentrate on NATO’s eastern flank—the part of the alliance closest to Russia—while the United States managed Iran and the rest of the Middle East, two German officials told me. “They were really confident,” one of the officials said, referring to U.S. war planners. But that confidence was short-lived, and after President Trump’s hope for a swift victory faded, he began lashing out at NATO for not doing enough to help the United States. Inside the Pentagon, meanwhile, the team helping manage the military’s relationship with NATO allies was about to take a hit. In March, the director of NATO policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense was abruptly reassigned, current …
On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.” Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI. It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have …
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The Trump administration is scrambling to replace Claude, the chatbot embedded throughout the Pentagon’s entire scaffolding, with Elon Musk’s pet AI system, Grok. On paper, xAI’s Grok makes sense: the AI model is already used in select parts of the Department of Defense, not to mention other parts of the federal government. Musk should also be deeply familiar with the contours of the federal government, given that he spent the better half of 2025 gnawing the wires out of its walls. In practice, however, Grok also carries some deep flaws. It performs notably lower on AI benchmark tests than other leading models, and it’s garnered a rather infamous reputation for erratic, disgusting, and outrageous outbursts. It’s also decidedly not the choice of federal insiders, who told the Wall Street Journal there are significant concerns about the safety and efficacy of Grok. Per the WSJ, multiple officials said Grok is more susceptible to “data poisoning” than other AI systems, …
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As Elon Musk tries to sweep his Mars ambitions under the rug like an embarrassing teenage phase, he’s now shifting focus to the Moon — with no less eye-brow raising ideas. According to new reporting from the New York Times, Musk told employees at xAI — his AI company recently acquired by SpaceX — that it needs to construct a factory on the Moon to churn out AI satellites. And to launch the satellites into space, he says, it needs to build an enormous electromagnetic catapult. Sci-fi readers already know where this is going: Musk is thinking about building a mass driver, which is essentially a coilgun for launching payloads instead of deadly projectiles. Paired with the lunar facility, Musk views it as a necessary step in building out computing power for his AI empire, which must not be bound by the finitude of terrestrial real estate. “You have to go to the Moon,” Musk said at an all-hands meeting, per the NYT. “It’s difficult to …
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressed concern about President Trump’s behavior Wednesday, after the president confused Greenland and Iceland multiple times during a speech earlier in the day. “The president has been acting in increasingly erratic ways,” Ocasio-Cortez told Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manríquez on Capitol Hill. Earlier Wednesday, Trump mistook the two islands for each… Source link
