Saturday, 25 April 2026

Politics

Trump extends Israel–Lebanon ceasefire by three weeks, threatens Hormuz mine-layers. Third US carrier now in theatre; the Iran posture is moving from squeeze to ultimatum. Al Jazeera
Senate opens reconciliation work on $70bn for ICE and Border Patrol. The enforcement build-out gets its funding rail — the structural piece behind the headline raids. Just Security
DOJ moves to add firing squads to federal execution methods. Acting AG Blanche also revived the first-term lethal injection protocol. The aesthetic of the second term, in policy form. Washington Post
Breivik begjærer seg løslatt på nytt. Tredje forsøk; lovpålagt toårsvurdering, men mediestøyen kommer uansett. VG
Regjeringen vil ha 16-årsgrense for sosiale medier. Lovforslag varslet i år, gjelder fra 1. januar det året barnet fyller 16 — relevant lenge før Leonora når dit. Pravda Norway
Holbæk-borgere reagerer på nyt datacenter der vil sluge 6× kommunens strøm. Energipolitik møder hyperscaler-virkelighed i dansk forstad. Politiken via EU-rep.

Google to put up to $40bn into Anthropic ($10bn now, $30bn milestone-gated). Plus 5 GW of compute via Google + Broadcom — Anthropic is locking in the substrate ahead of an OpenAI showdown. CNBC
OpenAI CRO memo calls Anthropic “elitist,” accuses revenue inflation. The IPO-eve knife fight is now in writing. Axios
DuckLake 1.0 ships production-ready in DuckDB 1.5.2. Sorted tables, bucket partitioning, 8×–258× COUNT(*) speedups; dbt Fusion now supports DuckDB locally. The lakehouse-on-a-laptop story just got real. MotherDuck
dbt Labs and Fivetran agree to merge. The modern data stack consolidates from both ends of the pipeline. dbt Labs

Levin & Rouleau preprint: “Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments.” Uses IIT, GWT et al. to ask why brains specifically — exactly the framing you’ve been chasing. Levin on X

Park Chan-wook will preside over the Cannes 2026 main jury. Lineup includes new Farhadi, Almodóvar and Kore-eda; festival runs 12–23 May. Your director shortlist, basically the program. Variety

Alisson back in contention vs Crystal Palace today; Mamardashvili out for weeks. Slot’s keeper crisis flips just in time — top-five push hangs on this run-in. This Is Anfield