Hard Pass

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators headed for the exits in the predawn hours Saturday, ending for now a crushing standoff over President Donald Trump’s demands that they stay in session to pass a strict proof-of-citizenship voting bill before the summer recess.

While they wrapped up many key priorities in the overnight votes, advancing Trump’s SAVE America Act was not among them.

Instead, Republican senators who had brought the chamber to a standstill spoke to Trump late in the evening about an alternative plan: They would try again to approve elements of the voting bill as part of a broader GOP budget package to fund the Iran war and replenish the Pentagon when they return to work in September.

Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found.

These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.

One receiving payouts from Meta was Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups. Lennon was taken away by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi during his stay at a Melbourne hotel, and is believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year.

Lennon, in other words, was a known quantity, and Meta should’ve been under no illusions about who they were paying to drive engagement on the platform. Still, the investigation found that he’s been receiving payments from Facebook since September 2025.

Meanwhile, the Facebook page for the Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has been making money through the revenue program since November 2025. Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X — owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil-looking salutes back in 2025 — has banned The Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”

LONDON (AP) — Former U.S. President Joe Biden ’s prostate cancer has spread to other parts of his body and is causing him pain, even as he continues to speak out on public issues, his son Hunter said in an interview.

In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC broadcast late on Friday, Hunter Biden grew emotional as he discussed his father’s condition, describing it as very sad to watch.

“The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” he said. “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects.”

Todd Blanche is confirmed as attorney general, Stephen Miller is backing a new birthright citizenship executive order, and Judge Emily Marks won't dismiss the SPLC indictment.

U.S. Strategic Command increases the likelihood of nuclear war during its annual Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday and Thursday this week, at which “a more aggressive nuclear vision focused on strengthened deterrence and production is front and center,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.

Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, was identified as being behind a change in US nuclear strategy that would place greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, a change that would make them more likely to be used.

Colby’s change would de-emphasize the long-standing requirement for ‘damage limitation’ capabilities, which calls for a massive strategic nuclear attack against a U.S. nuclear adversary to try to destroy as many of their nuclear forces as possible.

Raising a discussion of “damage limitation” at this point is little more than part of the effort to make nuclear war conceivable, and no longer “off limits.”

Adding more tactical nuclear strike options would complicate the tenuous nuclear deterrence relationships the United States maintains with other nuclear-armed states and increase the risk of nuclear war.

Without a firm rejection of the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, and by building and fielding more tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signalling its intention to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a conflict. Once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict involving another nuclear-armed state, there is no guarantee that any use of nuclear weapons, even on the smallest scale, could reliably be expected to remain limited

Senator Chuck Grassley mourned his decades-long cleaning companion, writing on social media: “GOOD BYE BETH. U hv been a real workhorse.”

Lime Bar @limebar@mastodon.social

I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.

Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art

Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos

Writers use it to illustrate their articles

And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.

None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.

Collaborate ffs.

Stop it.

Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM

Conclusion

Over time, SSH Tarpits have continued to be less effective per-connection. The rates at which they see connections has increased, but bots increasingly enforce client-side timeouts and don't remain stuck for very long.

Until mid-last month, my LLM maze was serving a pretty significant number of requests each day. About 0.1% of requests came with a crawler willing and able to execute javascript: a tiny minority but still a fun one to play with.

I haven't been collecting stats for long enough to say for sure, but it seems reasonable to speculate that the trail-off in maze requests is probably a sign of one (or more) AI companies finishing their training run and preparing to release new models.

It'll be interesting to see whether activity picks back up over the next few months.

Full title: Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by 51 percent

President Donald Trump has continued to demonstrate signs of worsening mental "decline," according to one professional psychologist, who detailed the latest "red flags" in a new video.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a licensed forensic and clinical psychologist who specializes in body language. He is also a content creator who has released numerous videos giving his professional insight into the tells for cognitive decline that he has seen Trump exhibiting during public appearances or addresses.

In his latest video, he dug into two recent appearances by Trump, one at an event in Las Vegas and another in the Oval Office, which he said were full of further signs of his worsening condition.

"Over the past several months, I've been frequently analyzing President Trump's behavior because it has gotten more erratic," Garrison explained. "It's gotten more unusual, and we're seeing more neurological hiccups. As I've mentioned for months now, it appears that there are neurological changes from President Trump. Whether it's post-stroke or something else, we have seen distinct changes. The reason this matters so much, and the reason that I'm covering it so much, is that I believe we are seeing this play out on the world stage. I think it is affecting his judgment. I think that it is affecting his ability to make decisions, and it certainly is affecting his behavior, and I'm going to show you in what ways that it affects his behavior."