House Speaker Mike Johnson convened a vote in the dead of night on Friday, calling lawmakers back to the floor after midnight in a push to preserve a surveillance program that allows federal agents to read the communications of Americans without a warrant. Twenty Republicans broke ranks and sank it, a sharp rebuke of both Johnson and President Donald Trump, who had spent the week personally working holdouts to back the bill.

The failed vote caps weeks of bipartisan resistance to a clean reauthorization of the surveillance program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The 702 program permits wiretaps of communications ostensibly belonging to foreigners overseas, but is also known to intercept vast amounts of Americans’ emails, texts, phone calls, and other data—private messages that the FBI and other agencies routinely access without a warrant.

Congressional authorization for the program will expire on Tuesday. The White House and GOP leadership have spent weeks pressing for a “clean” reauthorization, fending off a bipartisan alliance of House Freedom Caucus Republicans and progressive Democrats demanding, variously, that the FBI obtain warrants before searching Americans’ messages and that Congress ban the government from buying Americans’ personal data from commercial brokers.

A handful of Democrats led by Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have joined the White House in lobbying against new restrictions.

House Republicans revolted twice in the small hours of Friday morning, ultimately sinking the bill. Shortly after 1 am ET, a dozen Republicans joined nearly every Democrat to kill a leadership-backed amendment that would have extended Section 702 for five more years.

The amendment contained a provision that was in essence a fake warrant requirement. It would have prohibited government officers from “intentionally” targeting Americans’ communications without a warrant—conduct that is already banned by the statute. It also offered the government a warrant path if agents had probable cause to suspect the subject is an agent of a foreign power—an authority that already exists independent of the Section 702 program and adds functionally nothing new to the law.

The final blow came after 2 am, when the 20 Republicans voted again to block the original version of the bill, which seeks a shorter 18-month extension. Those 20 votes were drawn almost entirely from the House Freedom Caucus and the party’s libertarian wing, including Andy Harris of Maryland, the caucus chair; Thomas Massie of Kentucky; Chip Roy of Texas; Warren Davidson of Ohio; and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

In a rare defeat on a procedural vote that typically passes along party lines, GOP leaders walked away with only a 10-day extension, pushing the fight to the end of the month. The House’s failure leaves the Senate to sort out what comes next, starting with whether to approve the extension next week.

The vote’s collapse followed a week of hard effort by the Trump administration to assuage Republicans who’ve objected to the FBI’s warrantless access and its documented history of querying that data for political purposes. Trump hosted Freedom Caucus holdouts at the White House on Tuesday, trying to close the deal. Democrats, meanwhile, were briefed Monday by two former senior Biden officials urging them to back the extension, according to a person familiar with both events.

The FBI has used Section 702 data to run warrantless queries on a US senator, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, Black Lives Matter protesters, and both sides of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to declassified court rulings and government transparency reports.

TCL introduced its new flagship X11L SQD-Mini LED TV at CES 2026, and now a few months later, the company is ready to expand its lineup with more SQD-Mini LED models and its first RGB-Mini LED TV. All sizes of the TCL QM8L SQD-Mini LED TV are available now. Meanwhile, both the TCL QM7L SQD-Mini LED TVs and the RM9L RGB-Mini LED TVs are available to pre-order.

SQD-Mini LED panels are TCL’s latest iteration of its Mini LED display technology, where “SQD” stands for “Super Quantum Dot,” a layer of tiny crystal dots that help filter the light from the LEDs in the company’s panels. TCL claims its SQD-Mini LED screens are more color accurate than its previous models without losing out on HDR contrast. The TCL QM8L has an anti-reflective SQD-Mini LED panel, up to 4,000 discrete dimming zones, up to 6,000 nits of peak brightness and support for Dolby Vision 2 Max after a software update. The TCL QM7L also has an anti-reflective SQD-Mini LED panel, up to 2,100 discrete dimming zones, up to 3,000 nights of peak brightness and support for Dolby Vision IQ. Both TVs feature Audio by Bang & Olufsen and run the latest version of Google TV with support for Gemini.

Like other TV makers at CES 2026, TCL also capitalized on the growing trend of Micro RGB or RGB Mini LED panels. Rather than use a layer of white or blue LEDs that are transformed with quantum dots and color filters, TCL’s RGB-Mini LED starts with discrete red, green and blue LEDs to produce richer color. The TCL RM9L features the company’s new RGB-Mini LED display with an anti-reflective layer, over 3,800 discrete local dimming zones, up to 6,000 nits of peak brightness and support for Dolby Vision 2 after a software update. The TV also features Bang & Olufsen audio and Google TV with Gemini support.

TCL says the QM8L is available to order now starting at $2,500 for the 65-inch model, $3,000 for the 75-inch model, $4,000 for the 85-inch model and $6,000 for the 98-inch model. The TCL QM7L, meanwhile, is available to pre-order starting at $1,200 for the 55-inch model and goes as high as $4,000 for the 98-inch model. If you’re curious about TCL’s new RGB-Mini LED displays, the TCL RM9L is available to pre-order starting at $8,000 for the 85-inch model and up to an eye-popping $30,000 for a 115-inch model.

Hogan Assessments explored the role of the leader in the workplace and the importance of aligning goals with the expectations of the modern workforce.

New global research from HR consulting platform Hogan Assessments has shown that the characteristics and behaviours often displayed by leaders in the workplace are out of touch with the qualities many employees say they want and expect from those in a leadership role. 

The ‘Leadership Divide: Global Insights on Who Leads versus Who Should’ report gathered data from more than 21,000 executives and 9,794 full-time employees, across 25 countries. What was discovered is that there is a “clear misalignment between what organisations reward and what employees value”.

To that point, it was found in the report that there is zero overlap between the top five competencies frequently demonstrated by executives and the five characteristics that employees said they wanted for their organisations’ leaders. 

Participating executives were found to better stand out in their company by inspiring others, competing with their peers, presenting their ideas publicly, taking initiative and driving innovation. By comparison, the employees who took part in the research explained that they prioritise an entirely different set of qualities in a leader: communication, integrity, accountability, sound decision-making and the ability to lead effectively.

“Organisations have long tended to reward visibility, confidence and ambition in leaders,” said Allison Howell, the CEO of Hogan Assessments. “But employees are telling us they want something more fundamental: leaders they can trust, leaders who communicate clearly, and leaders who create the conditions for teams to succeed.”

Growing divide

According to Hogan Assessments’ research, and indeed the stance many organisations take, leadership is a resource for teams and should be treated as such. However, the data finds that often executives come in with their own agendas that may not be in line with the viewpoints of the wider workforce. 

The report said, “Today’s leaders often focus on their own individual vision, ambition and careers. These behaviours and characteristics tend to get people promoted. But, in contrast, our survey respondents told us they want leaders who focus on accountability, team achievement and other behaviours that support the team.”

By modelling the competencies most appreciated by employees, the report suggested that those in leadership can create a culture of trust. Because leadership is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team, trust is foundational to leadership effectiveness; in turn, the report found that “leaders who earn trust create the conditions for teams to perform at their best, giving the organisation a sustainable competitive advantage”. 

Of those who participated, 72pc of respondents confidently said emotional volatility and unpredictability have a negative impact, while passive aggression (62pc), arrogance and entitlement (59pc), and extreme caution (56pc) were also identified as qualities that damage trust, increase disengagement and weaken team performance.

Despite this, executives often stood out for assertiveness and self-assurance, with the report noting that the confidence that can help leaders advance “may, when overused or left unchecked, be experienced by teams as arrogance, weakening trust and contributing to disengagement”.

Ultimately, Hogan Assessments’ report found that many of the behaviours that enable leaders to step out in front have the potential to alienate the wider workforce and create a culture of mistrust. With that in mind, organisations may benefit from looking beyond the more obvious, visible, charismatic attributes that denote leadership ability and instead place a greater emphasis on behaviours that build confidence. 

“That shift should be reflected in how leaders are selected and developed, with greater emphasis on coaching, feedback and performance systems that reward accountability, transparency and follow-through.”

Howell said, “Leadership pipelines are strongest when organisations align how they identify and develop leaders with what employees actually value. These findings show that trust, accountability and sound judgment are not secondary qualities. They are central to team effectiveness and long-term performance.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.

On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummelling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.

In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”

Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.

The network’s status page is also currently not working.

When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.

Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.

Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.

For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”

Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional. Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.

Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight.”

Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities running their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network appear to be functioning for the time being.

It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”