7 stories
Ukrainian drones set a Moscow refinery ablaze in a major attack on the Russian capital AP News Ukraine Strikes Moscow Refinery in Large-Scale Drone Attack The New York Times Ukraine Brings the War to Moscow as Huge Blasts Shake Refinery U.S. News & World Report Moscow hit by largest Ukrainian attack since start of Russia's full-scale war Yahoo News Canada Ukraine hits Moscow refinery in major attack on Russian capital Reuters
In the middle of New York City’s Times Square, a massive, inflatable effigy of billionaire Elon Musk towered over tourists and commuters earlier today. It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging “Grok makes AI child porn” and “SpaceX owns Grok,” referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image-generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out flyers with additional information, but they would not speak with the media.The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as “a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens,” ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering on Friday. The location was strategically chosen—right in front of the Nasdaq and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO.SpaceX is currently valued at $1.77 trillion, making it the largest company ever to debut on the stock market, with a starting price of $135 per share. Though the public is able to buy shares in the company, Musk will retain the majority of voting power, giving him the ability to almost unilaterally make decisions for the company. The IPO could also make him the world’s first trillionaire.But a SAIN representative, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from Musk, told WIRED that this structure represents a real threat to the company that investors and banks backing the IPO are not taking seriously.“This IPO is a liability shift,” they say. “Elon is responsible for all of this. It's all the decisions that he's made. All of those litigation expenses, regulatory fines, investigations, all of that is basically being shifted to the shareholders.”SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In February, Musk announced that SpaceX was buying xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk founded and the developer of Grok. The announcement came just as xAI was facing scrutiny both in the US and abroad for the chatbot’s ability to generate nude photos of women and children. In January, the European Commission announced it would be investigating the company to “assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks” to prevent the creation of nonconsensual sexual imagery. In March, three girls filed a class action lawsuit against xAI because its technology was allegedly used to generate nudes of them, and in January, 35 state attorneys general signed an open letter to the company, demanding that it take action to remove nonconsensual sexual imagery and put guardrails in place to prevent the tool from doing so in the future. Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, also filed suit against xAI for allegedly creating sexually explicit images of her.Today, WIRED reported that Grok is hosting nonconsensual, explicit sexualized images of women, including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and celebrities.In a February post on X, which Musk also owns, he wrote that “Grok must win or we will be ruled by an insufferably woke and sanctimonious AI.”“It's really easy to get distracted by the shiny IPO news. And I think that's what they're kind of hoping will happen,” the SAIN representative says. “But there's real harm, real risk. I think if we are normalizing everywhere—from the banks that are underwriting it to the NASDAQ that's listing it to the shareholders who are buying into it—a company that has this really toxic platform in Grok, normalizing that type of explicit imagery, there’s a real problem.”Most people passing by seemed unfazed by the massive, shirtless image of Musk, which sported a shoulder tattoo shaped like a heart and reading “ketamine” and another showing an image of the billionaire’s Nazi-like salute shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with a few stopping to take photos before moving on.
After you’ve worked on rockets that find their way to outer space, it can be hard to come up with a second act. For SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd, it meant looking deep in the ocean. Redd, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a region affected by uncharacteristic heat waves and catastrophic fires in recent years, knew he wanted to tackle something in renewable energy. “But the experience at a very hardcore company like SpaceX made me realize that I can’t just come up with an incremental solution. It actually has to be brand new and it has to be approached from first principles,” according to Redd, who was an engineer on Dragon and Starship at SpaceX. Redd left SpaceX and founded Endurance Energy, a startup that has raised a $54 million Series A to eventually harness terawatts of geothermal energy deep in the ocean, TechCrunch has learned. Founders Fund led the round with participation from 72 Ventures, Construct Captial, Felisis Ventures, First Round Capital, Riot Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. The new funding will allow the company to develop its plans for power plants at a time of surging energy demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and heavy industry. Since founding the company last year, Redd has grown the team to 21 employees, 11 of whom used to work at SpaceX. The company’s vice president of engineering previously worked at Helion Energy, the fusion startup. Geothermal energy isn’t a new idea — humans have been using the Earth’s heat for millennia, whether it be from spa-like hot springs or geothermal power plants. But Redd, drawing on his experience at SpaceX, figured there was another opportunity people were overlooking. Here’s how he distilled the problem: Any future energy source should be renewable, or at least non-polluting, in his opinion. “That’s my non-negotiable,” said Reed, who is CEO of Endurance. It should also be available 24/7 — or baseload power, as the industry calls it — and it should quickly deployable and able to generate tens or hundreds of gigawatts of electricity, according to Redd. He quickly ruled out nuclear power because regulatory and construction timelines can stretch on for years. Solar and wind aren’t available 24/7 without batteries, and hydropower is limited in where it can be built (plus all the good spots have been taken). That left geothermal. “Geothermal is the only real deployable, baseload renewable,” he said. “But why is it only 0.4% of U.S. energy?” There are other startups pursuing geothermal, including Fervo and Zanskar. But those companies need to drill thousands of feet into the Earth’s crust to access temperatures hot enough to drive a power plant. So far, the best opportunities for many geothermal startups has been in the Western U.S., far from large population centers. The best places to drill, where the crust is thin and magma flows close to the surface, like in Iceland or California, have long been claimed. More recently, startups like Fervo Energy, XGS Energy, and Sage Geosystems have found other sites, but to find rocks that are hot enough to drive a power plant, they need to drill thousands of feed deeper. Those locations have so far been away from large population centers. But no one has tapped the oceans. At several points around the globe, the Earth’s tectonic plates are spreading apart, allowing hot magma to flow to the surface. The U.S. West Coast, Japan, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia are near the so-called Ring of Fire, the geologically active zone that encircles the Pacific Ocean. Heading out to sea poses several challenges. Operating underwater, at the depths Endurance is proposing, isn’t easy. Robots will need to do much of the work. Saltwater is famously corrosive, so anything placed down there will have to be hardened against both water pressure and corrosion. But Redd said those are surmountable hurdles, pointing to the oil and gas industry’s decades of experience drilling in the ocean. Endurance’s work should pose less risk to th
A strong earthquake struck the southern Philippine island of Mindanao on Monday, triggering tsunami warnings, damaging buildings and prompting evacuations on the first day of school.Strong Quake Strikes South Philippines; Tsunami Waves Possible(Bloomberg) -- A strong earthquake struck the southern Philippine island of Mindanao on Monday, triggering tsunami warnings, damaging buildings and prompting evacuations on the first day of school.The USGS estimated it at 7.8 in magnitude, as did the Philippines. The quake had a magnitude of 8.1 and was at a depth of 10 kilometers, according to the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. Hazardous tsunami waves are possible within three hours along some coasts of Indonesia, Philippines, Palau, Taiwan and Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a 7:51 a.m. Manila time alert.“Move to higher ground now. Do not wait. Your life is more important than anything left behind,” Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said in a statement. He ordered relevant government agencies to act immediately, and suspended classes across affected areas in Mindanao until further notice.Indonesia issued tsunami warnings for some areas including Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, as well as stretches of Sulawesi island, cautioning of waves of up to three meters high, according to a tweet from the national weather agency.The extent of damage from the earthquake remains unclear. A portion of a building in the southern city of General Santos collapsed, according to local radio DZRH. Students evacuated on the first day of school, and a hospital took patients out beside the street.“We have coordinated with our municipalities in coastal communities to do emergency evacuation,” Rene Punzalan, head of Sarangani’s provincial disaster office, told DZBB radio station. “There’s no electricity and phone signal is intermittent.”He described the earthquake as strong. “Like being rocked in a cradle,” he said. Van Ruiz, a staffer at a beach resort in Sarangani Bay, said by phone that all their guests are being checked out and that the hotel building has suffered some damage.Government work in several areas including in Davao City have been suspended, according to media reports. Flights to General Santos City have been suspended, according to DZMM radio.“I couldn’t even stand, it was so strong. Everything in my house fell down,” Tomas Alon, resident of General Santos City, told DZBB. “It probably took me one minute before I got down from the second floor.”--With assistance from Mary Hui, Ditas B Lopez, Manolo Serapio Jr., Zoe Ma and Cliff Venzon.(Adds more magnitude estimates, quote from president, details of damage throughout.)More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com©2026 Bloomberg L.P.Stay updated with the latest Trending, India , World and US news. HomeNewsStrong Quake Strikes South Philippines; Tsunami Waves PossibleMore
A new AI weather forecasting tool released today by the startup Windborne Systems offers more frequent and accurate predictions on key variables than the world-leading system developed by European governments, thanks to advancements in how sensor readings are fed into deep learning models. Founded by a group of Stanford students in 2019, Windborne began by building a better weather balloon, with the idea of selling weather data. But the arrival of the weather-forecasting deep learning models in 2022, the team realized they could capture more value by building their own model as well. Today marks the release of the sixth version of that model, WeatherMesh, which the company says is more accurate than traditional and AI forecasts produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), the European intergovernmental organization seen by meteorologists as the leading provider of accurate weather prediction today. Windborne says the new version of its model offers a more accurate forecast than the ECMWF’s traditional and AI systems across several variables. One simple way to understand it, Windborne’s chief product officer Kai Marshland says, is that WeatherMesh 6 “is as accurate five days out as a traditional forecast is the day before,” particularly on surface temperature measurements. WeatherMesh 6 produces a forecast every hour, as opposed to every six hours, as traditional models do. Its resolution is now down to 3 km in Europe and the continental US, where the quality of data is highest. Traditional weather forecasts are generated by complex physics models that require expensive super computers to run, and take a long time to do it. AI models — being built by startups and major labs like Google DeepMind—tend to move faster than physics models, but for now don’t have as high a resolution, as many variables and or predict as accurately over longer time horizons. Still, weather AI is improving rapidly and already being used at major government agencies around the world. Researchers are working to integrate it into the systems used to aggregate weather data and produce public forecasts. Windborne’s benefits from its unique combination of model-building and data collection. The company now has about 400 balloons in flight gathering sensor readings at any given time, launched from 15 sites around the globe. The advances in its current model come from improvements in how the data collected by the balloons is fed into the models. “I don’t understand, personally, the business model of being [an] AI based weather company without a data set advantage,” Windborne CEO John Dean told TechCrunch. The ECMWF’s superiority is attributed to the organization’s skills at “data assimilation,” the work of turning disparate sensor readings into a comprehensive, machine-readable picture of the world. For now, AI weather models depend on data sets produced by the ECMWF and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But Windborne and other organizations are working to feed data directly into the models, and the company’s head of AI, Joan Creus-Costa, says the direct ingestion of data from their balloons and other sources is the key reason for improvement in the new version of WeatherMesh. It’s taken a year of tuning and re-architecting the transformer-based model for the model to deliver these forecasts without losing stability. “When we started doing [data assimilation] we were still very heavily reliant on ECMWF,” Dean said. “I predict today, if we removed ECMWF’s initial conditions, we would actually still do pretty good.” The company suffered a scare last year when a United Airlines jetliner ran into one of its balloons. While the plane suffered minor damage, no one was hurt, in part because Windborne followed US regulations about how large its sensor package could be. Now, however, the company has added transponders to its balloons that report their location through the global aviation surveillance sy
The Rajdhani Express was heading to Delhi from Thiruvananthapuram.
Price of lemons has increased between ₹280 and ₹300 per kg Published - April 29, 2026 08:29 pm IST - IDUKKI Lemons displayed at a shop in Idukki. | Photo Credit: Sandeep Vellaram Soaring temperatures have triggered a massive surge in demand for thirst quenchers, causing the price of lemons to skyrocket. Local vendors said the price of lemons has more than tripled compared to earlier months.Previously, lemons were priced between ₹60 and ₹80 per kg. Today, the price has jumped between ₹280 and ₹300 per kg. Published - April 29, 2026 08:29...
You’ve read everything. Check back for new stories.
