April 16, 2025 at 1:27 AM EDT
Inside the shocking parallels between Trump's moves and Viktor Oban's playbook

A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orban took over Hungary's democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state. When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orban, and Orban started attacking universities -- forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.

April 15, 2025 at 10:40 PM EDT
Astronomers listened to the 'music' of flickering stars - and discovered an unexpected feature

The "music" of starquakes - enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars - can reveal far more information about the stars' histories and inner workings than scientists thought. In new research published in Nature, we analysed the frequency signatures of starquakes across a broad range of giant stars in the M67 star cluster, almost 3,000 light years from Earth.

April 15, 2025 at 10:37 PM EDT
ChatGPT just passed the Turing test -- but that doesn't mean AI is now as smart as humans

There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test. These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four large language models (LLMs) were put through the Turing test. One model - OpenAI's GPT-4.5 - was deemed indistinguishable from a human more than 70% of the time.

April 15, 2025 at 10:34 PM EDT
Scientists capture first confirmed footage of a colossal squid in the deep

The colossal squid was first described in 1925 based on specimens from the stomach of a commercially hunted sperm whale. A century later, an international voyage captured the first confirmed video of this species in its natural habitat - a 30-centimetre juvenile, at a depth of 600 metres near the South Sandwich Islands. Colossal squid can grow up to seven metres and weigh as much as 500 kilograms, making them the heaviest invertebrate on the planet. But little is known about their life cycle.

April 15, 2025 at 9:54 PM EDT
Senator warns America on a 'very short road to tyranny'

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) says he's not just traveling to El Salvador tomorrow to save a legal U.S. resident: He's trying to save the U.S. legal system. "At the end of the day, what they're trying to do is play politics and to scare the American people, and if " bullies can get away with this with vulnerable people, it is a very short road to tyranny for the rest of us," Van Hollen told MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes of "All In With Chris Hayes."

April 15, 2025 at 9:53 PM EDT
'Need for chaos' powers Trump voters support for destroying government: psychologists

A video of a Las Vegas Tesla dealership that had been set on fire by anti-Elon Musk protesters was posted on March 18, 2025, by an account on X called EndWokeness. The next day Musk replied to the post, "Some people just want to watch the world burn," an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film "The Dark Knight." Alfred, the Wayne family's faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne - Batman - to describe the motivations behind the Joker's chaotic acts of violence.

April 15, 2025 at 6:10 PM EDT
'You lost': Judge orders Trump DOJ to go under oath in case of wrongfully deported man

The federal judge overseeing the case of a man the U.S. government admitted was deported to El Salvador by mistake put Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys on notice during a Tuesday hearing. ABC News reported that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis -- an appointee of former President Barack Obama to the District of Maryland -- announced during the hearing that she was ordering "expedited discovery" in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Under that process, DOJ officials will have to go under oath in sworn depositions and testify under penalty of perjury about the details of Abrego Garcia's wrongful incarceration in a notorious maximum security mega-prison.

April 15, 2025 at 4:54 PM EDT
'This is a big deal': Top Hegseth advisor 'escorted' out of Pentagon during leak investigation

Editor's note: This headline has been updated. A top advisor to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly was escorted out of the Pentagon after being identified in a leak investigation into an "unauthorized disclosure."

April 15, 2025 at 4:37 PM EDT
Judge slams Trump's 'shocking abuse of power' in decision halting his executive order

Legal journalist Chris Geidner reports U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan agreed to temporarily block a Trump administration directive, while describing the directive as against the ideals of the nation's founding fathers. "Frankly, I think the framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power," AliKhan said, according to Geidner. "While I wish other firms were not capitulating ... I admire Susman [and others challenging Trump's acts]."

April 15, 2025 at 4:21 PM EDT
Director calls famous Trump cameo a 'curse' that he 'can't cut' for fear of being deported

Before he was the 45th and 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump was a New York real estate tycoon who reportedly insisted on a brief cameo in a highly anticipated film. Now, that movie's director is elaborating on why he's hesitant to cut out Trump's cameo. The Hill reported Tuesday that director Chris Columbus -- who directed the 1992 comedy "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" -- is now saying Trump's seven-second cameo in the film has "become this curse" that he feels powerless to remove despite his own personal feelings about the administration. Columbus said that despite calls to issue a new version of the film that doesn't include Trump, he's not rushing to do so.

April 15, 2025 at 3:44 PM EDT
'Need to be locked up:' Trump's AG doesn't rule out putting US citizens in foreign prisons

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny Tuesday if President Donald Trump's proposal to hold U.S. citizens in offsite prisons was illegal, reports The Guardian. "These are Americans who he is saying have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again," Bondi told Fox News host Jesse Watters. "These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows. We're not going to let them go anywhere, and if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it."

April 15, 2025 at 12:14 PM EDT
Trump agenda mirrors founders' grievances against 'mad king': legal experts

President Donald Trump's key signature policies""the ones that will define his second administration's early and perhaps entire tenure""echo the very abuses America's founders listed in the Declaration of Independence as grievances against King George III, legal experts are warning. "On Thomas Jefferson's birthday, let's recall the grievances he wrote in the Declaration of Independence against the abuses of the Mad King," wrote George Mason University Professor of Economics Alex Tabarrok on Sunday.