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The Biden administration released rules Friday that protect the rights of LGBTQ students and change the way schools can respond to allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. It's a long-awaited answer to campaign promises made by President Biden to reverse Trump-era regulations he said were silencing survivors.

The Education Department's updates to Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded school programs, are expected to go into effect Aug. 1.

Under the new rules, in-person, court-like proceedings for allegations of sexual assault — including cross-examination of alleged victims — are no longer required. That rolls back Trump administration protections for accused students that victims' advocates say retraumatized survivors and discouraged reporting. Schools will now have the flexibility to question witnesses in live hearings or in separate meetings. If a school chooses to hold a live hearing, alleged victims have the right to attend remotely.

The Biden administration also broadened the definition of what counts as sexual harassment, so more cases might qualify as serious enough to require a school investigation. That reverses Trump-era regulations that had narrowed harassment to what is "objectively offensive."

"Our nation's educational institutions should be places where we not only accept differences, but celebrate them. Places that root out hate and promote inclusion, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because our systems and institutions are richer for it," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on a call with reporters Thursday.

Perhaps most contentious, the new rules also officially broaden the interpretation of Title IX to cover pregnant, gay and transgender students.

The H5N1 bird flu virus strain has been detected in very high concentrations in raw milk from infected animals, the WHO said Friday, though how long the virus can survive in milk is unknown.

Avian influenza A(H5N1) first emerged in 1996 but since 2020, the number of outbreaks in birds has grown exponentially, alongside an increase in the number of infected mammals.

The strain has led to the deaths of tens of millions of poultry, with wild birds and land and marine mammals also infected.

Cows and goats joined the list last month -- a surprising development for experts because they were not thought to be susceptible to this type of influenza.

US authorities earlier this month said a person working on a dairy farm in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to cattle.

"The case in Texas is the first case of a human infected by avian influenza by a cow," said Wenqing Zhang, head of the global influenza programme at the World Health Organization.

A Florida man armed with conspiracy theory “propaganda” flyers set himself on fire outside Manhattan Criminal Court Friday - as former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial was underway, police said.

Max Azzarello, 37, of St. Augustine, Florida, shuffled into the public park across the street from the 100 Centre Street courthouse just after 1:30 p.m. - just as the jury was finalized in the historic case, according to cops.

Once inside the park, which was surrounded by barricades for Trump’s trial, Azzarello took off his jacket, dumped what cops believe was an alcohol-based cleaning accelerant over himself - and then lit himself up.

“He’s on fire and the area in the park where some of the accelerant spilled is also on fire,” NYPD Chief of Department, Jeffrey Maddrey, said as he described the horror.

If Dubai is the ultimate Instagram city, then this was the week the filter came off.

Over an unprecedented 48 hours, the skies over the United Arab Emirates darkened and torrential storms washed away Dubai's picture-perfect image.

About 25cm (10in) of rain - roughly twice the UAE's yearly average - fell in a single day, leaving much of the city's outdoor infrastructure under water.

Jordache Ruffels, a British expat living in Dubai, told BBC News experiencing the storms was like "living through the apocalypse".

He watched from his apartment overlooking the city's usually tranquil marina as furniture was flung from balconies by gale-force winds and Rolls Royce cars were abandoned on roads suddenly transformed into rivers.

A Russian blogger has been jailed for eight years after his newborn son starved to death last year.

Lifestyle blogger Maxim Lyutyi, 44, wanted his baby boy Cosmos to be like Superman, a Russian court heard.

Instead, the infant died of ‘pneumonia and emaciation’ when he was just one month old.

Cosmos was born at home because Lyutyi refused to let his mother Oksana Mironova, 34, go to hospital.

He then demanded that the infant should live on sunlight instead of food and milk - a highly dangerous practice known as breatharianism.

Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”

The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users have to do is pay a “few cents” per article instead of signing up for a subscription to each publication.

After lifting its waitlist in early 2023, Bardin told TechCrunch that around 430,000 people signed up. The platform eventually rolled out a mobile app and later launched a real-time notification system, with plans for more features in the future. However, the cost of keeping the platform running seems to have outweighed user activity.

“We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles,” Bardin writes. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”

SINGAPORE — Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released on Friday.

The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45% of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3 millimeters per year, with 16% at more than 10 mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables but also the sheer weight of the built environment.

With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion of subsiding land in China could therefore translate into a substantial threat to urban life,” said the team of researchers led by Ao Zurui of the South China Normal University.

Subsidence already costs China more than 7.5 billion yuan ($1.04 billion) in annual losses, and within the next century, nearly a quarter of coastal land could actually be lower than sea levels, putting hundreds of millions of people at an even greater risk of inundation.

“It really brings home that this is for China a national problem and not a problem in just one or two places,” said Robert Nicholls at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. “And it is a microcosm of what is happening around the rest of the world.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.

“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care -- this is inconceivable.”

It’s happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.

Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. Medical facilities must comply with the law if they accept Medicare funding.


Can't believe we have to read such headline news, but here we are.

What is a Holographic Wormhole?

A holographic wormhole is a theoretical construct used in physics to simplify some of the most complex problems in the universe, where quantum mechanics (the science of the very small) and general relativity (the science of the very large) intersect. These areas often involve black holes and require a way to merge these two theories, which traditionally do not align well.

How Does Quantum Computing Help?

Quantum computing provides a unique advantage in simulating phenomena where traditional computing fails to capture the nuances of quantum mechanics. Here’s how it aids in simulating a holographic wormhole:

• Quantum Entanglement: Quantum computers use principles like quantum entanglement, where particles become interconnected and the state of one (whether it’s spin, position, etc.) can depend on the state of another, no matter the distance between them.
• Simplifying Complex Systems: By simulating a wormhole, quantum computers allow physicists to bypass the need for general relativity, focusing instead on quantum effects that can act as a substitute for gravitational effects.

The Experiment by Maria Spiropulu and Team

Maria Spiropulu at Caltech, using Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, conducted an experiment to simulate a holographic wormhole. Here are some key takeaways:

• Simulation Details: They simulated a type of wormhole that theoretically could allow a message (in this case, a quantum state) to pass from one black hole to another.
• Quantum Teleportation: The message’s journey through the wormhole was not a literal passage but a quantum teleportation, where a qubit in a superposition state (both 0 and 1) was transmitted between entangled particles.

A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers.

The House Labor and Industrial Relations panel advanced the child labor legislation, House Bill 156, along with House Bill 119, which would slash the amount of time for which people can collect unemployment aid. A third bill the committee approved, House Bill 529, would change how workers' compensation wages are calculated in ways that could reduce benefits received by some injured laborers.

The bills, which head to the full House, are part of a broad effort by Republicans to weaken labor unions and strengthen employers' hands in Louisiana. They are aligned with steps other Republican-led legislatures have taken in recent years, and on Thursday, GOP lawmakers attributed the moves to Gov. Jeff Landry's directive to "reform" the business environment and remove bureaucratic red tape.

First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don't have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill's purpose.

Executives at all Samsung Group units will work six days a week from as early as this week in a shift to emergency mode. The move comes as the won's sharp depreciation, rising oil prices and high borrowing costs aggravate business uncertainties after some of the group's mainstay businesses delivered poorer-than-expected results in 2023.

The executives of Samsung Electronics Co., including those in the manufacturing and sales divisions, will work either on Saturday or Sunday following the regular five-day work week, according to Samsung Group officials.

They will review their business strategies and may modify them to adapt to the changing business environment amid mounting gepolitical risks from the prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine and escalating tensions in the Middle East.

“Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome it,” said a Samsung Group company executive.

A giant prehistoric snake that was longer than a Tyrannosaurus rex has been unearthed in an Indian mine.

The fossil vertebrae have been proven to be the remains of one of the largest snakes that ever lived, a monster estimated at up to 15 metres (49 feet) in length that prowled the swamps of what is now India around 47 million years ago.

Scientists said on Thursday that they have recovered 27 vertebrae from the snake, including a few still in the same position as they would have been when the reptile was alive.

They said that the snake, which they named Vasuki indicus after the snake king associated with the Hindu deity Shiva, would have looked like a modern-day large python and would not have been venomous.

The proposed law change comes after the BBC reported the case of a mother who spent £30,000 in legal fees to stop her paedophile ex-husband getting access to their daughter.

After hearing the story, Labour MP Harriet Harman tabled an amendment to upcoming legislation.

It covers the most serious sexual offence - rape of a child under 13.

Speaking to BBC News, Ms Harman said paedophiles who were guilty of that crime in the future would be "automatically deprived" of their parental rights.

Some stealthy cancers remain undetected until they have spread from their source to distant organs. Now scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that outperforms pathologists at identifying the origins of metastatic cancer cells that circulate in the body1. The proof-of-concept model could help doctors to improve the diagnosis and treatment of late-stage cancer, and extend people’s lives.

“That’s a pretty significant finding — that it can be used as an assistive tool,” says Faisal Mahmood, who studies AI applications in health care at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

To treat metastatic cancers, doctors need to know where they came from. The origin of up to 5% of all tumours cannot be identified, and the prognosis for people whose primary cancer remains unknown is poor.

One method used to diagnose tricky metastatic cancers relies on tumour cells found in fluid extracted from the body. Clinicians examine images of the cells to work out which type of cancer cell they resemble. For example, breast cancer cells that migrate to the lungs still look like breast cancer cells.

Immigrant Prince Harry has finally renounced one of his last links with the U.K.; his residency status.

Prince Harry has publicly renounced his British residency, in paperwork coinciding with his first public appearance since his sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, was diagnosed with cancer.

Harry spoke via video link on Wednesday at the annual general meeting of Travalyst, the sustainable travel organization he founded in 2019, before quitting the royal family.

As part of the organization’s year-end procedures, it also filed company returns in which Harry officially submitted “new details” in which he declared his “new country/state usually resident” was now the “United States.”

The filings with the U.K. regulatory authority, Companies House, are public records. The Mirror said that the change has been backdated to June 29, 2023, when they were evicted from U.K. home Frogmore Cottage by King Charles.

Surprise! Hades 2 is finally here and playable. Supergiant's hack-and-slash, flirt-with-gods roguelike is a brief technical test away from its Steam early access debut. I've slashed my way through its opening area and first boss and now I need more. Even though it's clearly in an unfinished state, it's good. Like, really good.

A small part of me was a little hesitant to see Supergiant do its first direct sequel. Every game since 2011's Bastion has taken us to completely different worlds with new approaches to combat. I wasn't even a huge fan of Pyre, but I respect any game that is brave enough to mix strategic action with sports game elements à la NBA Jam. Bastion was my favorite until Hades grabbed that torch and brought it into the realm of a roguelike action game wrapped in a story about a family of Greek gods and goddesses.

After playing a few hours of Hades 2, that small part of me has been proven wrong. The world absolutely needed another Hades, and Supergiant is already pushing the first game's satisfying loop even further than before.

Zagreus and the rest of his family are gone. In Hades 2, you play as Melinoë, his staunch young sister, as she descends into the underworld hunting for Chronos, the Titan of Time. Melinoë is just as pissed off as Zagreus—you can press a button to brood after every run—but has a much stronger command over combat from the start.

Reclining seats are one of the most controversial airline amenities. For some, it's a necessity for getting comfortable on long flights. But for others, it's a source of broken laptops, spilled drinks, and mid-flight arguments.

No matter which camp you fall into, it's no secret that personal space in economy has slowly, but surely, eroded over the years. And as airlines release new seat designs, some travelers fear they may be stuck sitting upright in the near future.

When Southwest Airlines recently debuted its new cabins rolling out on planes in 2025, travelers were quick to take to social media complaining about the seemingly thin design. The airline has since confirmed that the new RECARO seats will have the same legroom, seat width, and recline capabilities as its current seating options. However, the internet backlash Southwest initially faced underscores just how protective fliers are over their legroom—what's left of it, that is.

While Southwest passengers can rest easy (for now), the recliner still risks an extinction in economy class as airlines increasingly opt for lighter seats, William McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, tells Condé Nast Traveler.

“This trend has been occurring for several years now, and I think it will continue,” says McGee. “Lighter seats are what the airlines want, because with the cost of jet fuel they are always looking to reduce weight onboard.”

“Consumers have been losing much more than seat recline in economy class,” McGee says. “It's just that in this case, losing the ability to recline can be a blessing in disguise for others, because tighter seats have made reclining unfair to fellow passengers.”


Reclining your seats is bad for the fellow passengers behind you, and it can make them unruly. So there is a point where it may be phased out in the future.

It's been a tumultuous few years for Red Lobster. The restaurant shuttered eight locations in 2023, and the investment group that held most of its stakes reported a $22 million loss for the year. Now, the purveyor of Cheddar Bay Biscuits is facing potential bankruptcy.

According to Bloomberg, Red Lobster is considering a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in hopes of restructuring its debts. The company has reportedly received advice from law firm King & Spalding and is hoping to get out of long-term contracts and renegotiate leases in the process.

While Red Lobster's largest investor, Thai Union Group, has yet to sell its majority stakes, the company is seeking an exit route due to "ongoing financial requirements [that] no longer align" with its "allocation priorities."

"After detailed analysis, we have determined that Red Lobster’s ongoing financial requirements no longer align with our capital allocation priorities and therefore are pursuing an exit of our minority investment," said Thiraphong Chansiri, Thai Union Group’s CEO, in a statement earlier this year. He cited the pandemic, labor costs, industry headwinds, rising costs, and high interest rates for Red Lobster's decline.

Even after two back-to-back wet years, California’s water wars are far from over. On Tuesday, state water officials took an unprecedented step to intervene in the destructive pumping of depleted groundwater in the state’s sprawling agricultural heartland.

The decision puts a farming region known as the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin, which includes roughly 837 sq miles in the rural San Joaquin valley, on “probation” in accordance with a sustainable groundwater use law passed a decade ago. Large water users will face fees and state oversight of their pumping.

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The move, which water officials reassured farmers would be lifted if local agencies progress on developing stronger sustainability plans to mitigate issues, is the first of its kind – but has been years in the making. Over-pumping of groundwater in this region has caused the land to collapse faster than in almost any other area in the country, in some places sinking more than a foot every year. Officials say the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin failed for years to provide adequate plans to mitigate their well-known water problems.

Such plans are required under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a landmark law that required local agencies to come up with their own long-term strategies to curb over-extraction and empowers the state to supervise and enforce them. Probation is a compulsory step to set lagging local agencies back on track to achieve sustainability goals that must be met by 2040.

The Tulare Lake subbasin is one of six the state has put up for possible probation due to inadequate plans, all in the San Joaquin valley, the powerhouse of California’s more than $50bn agricultural industry. The crackdown here has been met with a strong backlash.

The decision followed a nine-hour hearing on Tuesday where farmers protested the economic toll it would take on their industry. They cast the expected fees on their pumping as a devastating blow to the work they do and their ability to do it in the future.

For All Mankind is back for season 5 and Star City will explore the Russian side of the story.

The world of For All Mankind was forever changed when the Soviet Union arrived on the moon before the United States. That one event changed the course of the show’s alternate history, and now we’ll get to see exactly how it happened.

Apple TV+ has just announced that not only is For All Mankind coming back for a fifth season, it’s also getting a spinoff called Star City that will tell the story from the Soviet point of view, starting with them beating America to the moon.

“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi said in a press release. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race. We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of For All Mankind with our partners at Apple and Sony.”

Wolpert and Nedivi will showrun the spinoff, but there’s no word on which will come first, season five or the new series.