In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.
The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.
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In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.
But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.
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Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.
The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.
In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”
The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
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The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.
The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.
Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.
“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.
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The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.
Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.
“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.
A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”
The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.
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The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.
Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.
The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.
“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”
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Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.
“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”
Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.
Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
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Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.
Drugs
As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”
He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.
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“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”
The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.
National Security
Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.
The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.
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“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.
Labor
The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.
Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.
A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”
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The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.
White-Collar Crime
The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.
The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.
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Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.
The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.
Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.
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Promises Kept
The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.
Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.
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The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
“Anthropic has unveiled Claude Mythos, a new AI model capable of discovering critical vulnerabilities at scale,” writes Slashdot reader wiredmikey. “It’s already powering Project Glasswing, a joint effort with major tech firms to secure critical software. But the same capabilities could also accelerate offensive cyber operations.” SecurityWeek reports: Mythos is not an incremental improvement but a step change in performance over Anthropic’s current range of frontier models: Haiku (smallest), Sonnet (middle ground), and Opus (most powerful). Mythos sits in a fourth tier named Copybara, and Anthropic describes it as superior to any other existing AI frontier model. It incorporates the current trend in the use of AI: the modern use of agentic AI. “The powerful cyber capabilities of Claude Mythos Preview are a result of its strong agentic coding and reasoning skills… the model has the highest scores of any model yet developed on a variety of software coding tasks,” notes Anthropic in a blog titled Project Glasswing — Securing critical software for the AI era.
In the last few weeks, Mythos Preview has identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities with many classified as critical. Several are ten or 20 years old — the oldest found so far is a 27-years old bug in OpenBSD. Elsewhere, a 16-years old vulnerability found in video software has survived five million hits from other automated testing tools without ever being discovered. And it autonomously found and chained together several in the Linux kernel allowing an attacker to escalate from ordinary user access to complete control of the machine. […] Anthropic is concerned that Mythos’ capabilities could unleash cyberattacks too fast and too sophisticated for defenders to block. It hopes that Mythos can be used to improve cybersecurity generally before malicious actors can get access to it.
To this end, the firm has announced the next stage of this preparation as Project Glasswing, powered by Mythos Preview. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. “Project Glasswing is a starting point. No one organization can solve these cybersecurity problems alone: frontier AI developers, other software companies, security researchers, open-source maintainers, and governments across the world all have essential roles to play.” Claude Mythos Preview is described as a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model from Anthropic that has nevertheless completed its training phase. The firm does not plan to make Mythos Preview generally available. The implication is that ‘Preview’ is a term used solely to describe the current state of Mythos and the market’s readiness to receive it, and will be dropped when the firm gets closer to general release.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim’s internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and government authorities warned on Tuesday. […] The hacking group targeted unpatched routers made by MikroTik and TP-Link using previously disclosed vulnerabilities according to the U.K. government’s cybersecurity unit NCSC and Lumen’s research arm Black Lotus Labs, which released new details of the campaign Tuesday.
According to the researchers, the hackers were able to spy on large numbers of people over the course of several years by compromising their routers, many of which run outdated software, leaving them vulnerable to remote attacks without their owners’ knowledge. The NCSC said that these operations are “likely opportunistic in nature, with the actor casting a wide net to reach many potential victims, before narrowing in on targets of intelligence interest as the attack develops.” Per the researchers and government advisories, the Russian hackers hacked routers to modify the device’s settings so that the victim’s internet requests are surreptitiously passed to infrastructure run by the hackers. This allows the hackers to redirect victims to spoof websites under their control, then steal passwords and tokens that let the hackers log in to that victim’s online accounts without needing their two-factor authentication codes.
Black Lotus Labs said that Fancy Bear compromised at least 18,000 victims in around 120 countries, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, and email providers across North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft, which also released details of the campaign on Tuesday, said in a blog post that its researchers identified over 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices affected by these hacking operations, including at least three government organizations in Africa. The Justice Department said Tuesday it neutralized compromised routers in the U.S. under court authorization. As the DOJ put it, the FBI “developed a series of commands to send to compromised routers” to collect evidence, reset settings, and prevent hackers from breaking back in.
Product designer Matty Benedetto discovered some clips of passengers stranded in airport security lines and clogged airport terminals. He determined that his next trip needed to be less of a nightmare, so he set out to design a carry-on suitcase that would make the entire experience a little less stressful. More specifically, he decided to create one from scratch using his 3D printers.
He tailored the dimensions of his carry-on to normal sizes so that it would pass through security inspections without a second thought. Then he divided the bag’s main body into two parts with overlapping edges to provide strength, and printed a few test copies with some colorful leftover filament to check how the pieces fit together. Putting it all together was like snapping a load of large plastic bricks into place, except he added metal hinges for the lid and a telescoping handle constructed from off-the-shelf components. During a print halt, ball bearings were inserted into the wheels to ensure that they roll smoothly without the need for any additional equipment.
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After determining the basic shape, he went on to the details that would make a long wait more bearable. A flat panel folds out from the front and includes a little latch to secure it in place, allowing you to prop up your laptop during a layover. A MagSafe mount appears next to it to hold your phone, allowing you to watch shows or check your messages without taking your hands off the wheel. When you’re stuck waiting for a delayed flight, it’s usually a good idea to have some food with you, so he included a little jar that twists open easily from the side, allowing you to access your goodies without having to unzip the main zipper.
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On a long journey, coffee can pose a serious security issue, spilling all over the place and causing a huge mess. To avoid this kind of disaster, he created a cup holder with a sophisticated gimbal inside that maintains your drink level even when the bag tilts. On the outside, he incorporated a rotating dial that displays the flight number, weather prediction, destination details, and a few emergency contacts at a glance. And for further peace of mind, he designed the feet to detach so you can put an AirTag inside each one, which is entirely out of sight but provides some extra protection against losing your luggage.
The first major test was security, when his luggage breezed through the X-ray machine with no one blinking an eyelash about its printed design. Next, he had to get it into a regional flight, which proved difficult until he gave it a gentle nudge into the overhead bin, where it slipped in without incident. The smooth rolling was due to the ball bearings, and the entire setup weighed about the same as a conventional carry-on.
However, when he arrived at his destination, things became a little more problematic. There were hairline cracks all along the main seam, one of the wheels had broken free during the journey, the snacks in the jar had turned to crumbs, and a couple of the smaller attachments had vanished; not a bad outcome, all things considered.
The Russian military is once again hacking home and small office routers in widespread operations that send unwitting users to sites that harvest passwords and credential tokens for use in espionage campaigns, researchers said Tuesday.
An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik and TP-Link, located in 120 countries, were wrangled into infrastructure belonging to APT28, an advanced threat group that’s part of Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, researchers from Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said. The threat group has operated for at least two decades and is behind dozens of high-profile hacks targeting governments worldwide. APT28 is also tracked under names including Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, Tsar Team, Forest Blizzard, and STRONTIUM.
A small number of routers were used as proxies to connect to a much larger number of other routers belonging to foreign ministries, law enforcement, and government agencies that APT28 wanted to spy on. The group then used its control of routers to change DNS lookups for select websites, including, Microsoft said, domains for the company’s 365 service.
“Known for blending cutting-edge tools such as the large language model (LLM) ‘LAMEHUG’ with proven, longstanding techniques, Forest Blizzard consistently evolves its tactics to stay ahead of defenders,” Black Lotus researchers wrote. “Their previous and current campaigns highlight both their technological sophistication and their willingness to revisit classic attack methods even after public exposure, underscoring the ongoing risk posed by this actor to organizations worldwide.”
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To hijack the routers, the attackers exploited older models that hadn’t been patched against known security vulnerabilities. They then changed DNS settings for select domains and used the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol to propagate them to router-connected workstations. When connected devices visited the selected domains, their connections were proxied through malicious servers before reaching their intended destination.
From ancient lunar lava to personal tributes, the new images released from the Artemis II space mission capture fresh perspectives of our celestial neighbour.
Yesterday (7 April), NASA released the first images of the moon captured by the Artemis II astronauts during their historic test flight.
The Artemis II mission took off last week (1 April) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning an approximately 10-day mission for NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Yesterday’s images were taken on 6 April during the crew’s seven-hour pass over the lunar far side – the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years – and provide a fresh look at Earth’s closest celestial neighbour.
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From an eclipse to ancient lava, here is just a handful of some of the most interesting images captured by the Artemis II crew so far.
Near and far
A picture capturing two-thirds of the moon. Towards the bottom of the image, the Orientale basin can be seen. North-east of the Orientale, seen as a dark spot, is the Grimaldi crater. Image: NASA
One of the crew’s most striking images captures two-thirds of the moon, showcasing the “intricate features of the near side”, according to NASA. The 600-mile-wide impact crater, the Orientale basin, lies along the transition between the near and far sides and can be seen at the bottom of the image.
The round black spot north-east of Orientale is the Grimaldi crater, known for its exceptionally “dark mare lava floor and heavily degraded rim”.
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In-space eclipse
The moon fully eclipsing the sun, as taken by the Artemis II crew. Image: NASA
One of the most unique images taken by the Artemis II crew captures the moon fully eclipsing the sun. The corona of the sun forms a glowing halo around the moon, while light reflected off Earth forms a faint, glowing outline of the near side of the moon.
Nearly 54 minutes of totality – when the moon completely blocks the bright face of the sun – was observed by the crew.
Stars are also visible around the spectacle, which are typically too faint to see when imaging the moon, but are readily visible with the moon in darkness.
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“This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity’s return to deep space,” according to NASA.
A different perspective
Earth in a crescent phase showing the cutoff between day and night on the planet, as seen from the Artemis II spacecraft as it conducted the lunar flyby. Image: NASA
Another image captured during the lunar flyby shows Earth split between daytime and nighttime.
Earth can be seen in a crescent phase, with sunlight coming from the right of the image. On the day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region.
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Meanwhile, the lines of small indentations seen on the moon’s surface to the left of the image are secondary crater chains. These structures are formed by material ejected during a violent primary impact.
Ancient lava
A close-up snapshot of the moon as the crew approached for the flyby. The Aristarchus crater is the bright white dot in the middle of a dark grey lava flow at the top of the image. Image: NASA
In one close-up shot of the moon’s surface, taken as the NASA Orion spacecraft approached for the lunar flyby, an interesting ancient remnant can be observed.
According to NASA, dark patches visible on the top third of the lunar disc represent ancient lava.
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Meanwhile, the bright white dot in the middle of a dark grey lava flow at the top of the image is the Aristarchus crater, which measures at a depth of 2.7km – making it deeper than the Grand Canyon.
A personal tribute
A picture of the Orientale basin, seen in the middle right of the image. The first crater named by the crew, called Integrity, lies just above the centre of the image. North of the Orientale at the top right corner of the image is the Glushko crater. To the north-west of that is the second crew-named crater, seen as a bright white spot, which the crew has called Carroll. Image: NASA
During the mission’s lunar flyby observation period, the Artemis II crew snapped an image showing the rings of the Orientale basin, one of the moon’s youngest and best-preserved large impact craters.
According to NASA, these concentric rings offer scientists a rare window into how massive impacts shape planetary surfaces, “helping refine models of crater formation and the moon’s geologic history”.
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At the 10 o’clock position of the Orientale basin, two smaller craters are visible. The Artemis II astronauts submitted names for these two craters for approval by the International Astronomical Union: the first being Integrity, named after the crew’s spacecraft; and the second being Carroll, named after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife.
“A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one,” said mission specialist Hansen to mission control at the time of the proposal. “And there is a feature in a really neat place on the moon, and it is on the near side/far side boundary. In fact, it’s just on the near side of that boundary, and so at certain times of the moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth.
“And so we lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko, and it’s just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as Ohm, and it’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.”
‘A human story’
Eight days into the Artemis II mission, and a number of remarkable moments have been observed in humanity’s latest major space voyage, including the crew surpassing the record for human spaceflight’s farthest distance at 248,655 miles from Earth.
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But for many, the human side of the voyage – such as the crew’s sentimental proposal to name a crater – have stuck as dually important alongside the mission’s technical feats.
This rings true with award-winning Irish scientist Dr Niamh Shaw, who was present on the Kennedy Space Center’s media lawn for the historic launch.
“Space has always been a kind of compass in my life,” she told SiliconRepublic.com. “It has a way of stripping everything back, reminding me of what matters, of how small we are and how extraordinary it is that we are here at all.
“It keeps me grounded in my questions. In curiosity. In wonder. And also in responsibility. Because one of the things space teaches us, very clearly, is that there is no rescue mission coming for Earth. No one arriving to solve our problems.”
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Shaw told us that what struck her just as much as the launch itself was “what happened afterwards”.
“The level of interest, the appetite for connection … People want to understand, to feel part of it, to ask questions,” she explained.
“I haven’t stopped: media calls, messages, Zooms with my Town Scientist families.
“And I found myself trying to share it in a way that made it personal for them – sending photos, describing moments, answering questions,” she added.
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“Because I genuinely believe that’s where the real impact lies. Not just in the engineering achievement, extraordinary as it is. But in how it reaches people.
“In how it shifts perspective, even slightly. In how it reminds us that we are all part of something much bigger and that the story of space exploration is, ultimately, a human story.”
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Microsoft has pushed a server-side fix for a known issue that broke the Windows Start Menu search feature on some Windows 11 23H2 devices.
In a Windows release health update (WI1273488) seen by BleepingComputer, Microsoft said these problems have affected only a small number of users since April 6 and are caused by a server-side Bing update aimed at improving search performance.
While the company says these problems are recent, there have been reports of similar issues surfacing online for months, including claims that the Start Menu displays blank search results that are still clickable.
To address this known issue, Microsoft has pulled the buggy Bing update and expects the search issues to subside as the fix rolls out to affected customers.
“An investigation determined that the problem coincided with a server-side Bing update designed to improve search performance. To mitigate the issue, the server-side Bing update was rolled back, and reports of search failures are steadily decreasing,” Microsoft said.
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“This issue will resolve automatically as the server-side fix is gradually rolled out to affected devices. To receive this fix, make sure the device is connected to the internet and that Web Search has not been disabled by Group Policy.”
More Windows Start Menu issues
This isn’t the first known Start Menu issue to impact Windows customers in recent years. In November, Microsoft shared a temporary workaround for another bug that was causing the Start Menu, File Explorer, and other key system components to crash when provisioning systems with cumulative updates released since July 2025, due to XAML packages not registering in time after installing the update.
On impacted systems, affected users experience a wide range of problems, including Start menu crashes and critical error messages, missing taskbars even when Explorer is running, crashes of the core ShellHost (Shell Infrastructure Host or Windows Shell Experience Host) system process, and Settings app silently failing to launch.
Microsoft is still working on developing a permanent fix, but hasn’t provided a timeline for when a solution will be available. Meanwhile, affected customers must manually register the missing XAML packages.
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This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.
I’ve always been an Ikea fan. I lived in nine different apartments over 15 years before moving into my home, and every single one of those places had an abundance of Ikea furnishings. But the latest thing from Ikea that’s been catching my eye isn’t the new bold blue shade for the Billy bookcase, but the brand’s expanded and upgraded smart home gear.
Ikea announced last year that its new lineup of smart home gadgets would be entirely Matter-compatible. That’s a big deal, as the open source interoperability standard has Amazon, Apple, and Google signed up, meaning these devices will play well with Alexa, Siri, and Google’s nameless voice assistant. While some of this gear has been available for a little while, much of the lineup—like the newest light bulbs and smart plugs—is new. These are now some of the most affordable smart home gadgets available, and from my experience, they also some of the best when it comes to ease of setup and price.
Ikea is still using its Dirigera Hub ($110) that launched a few years ago, so if you’re already an Ikea smart home user, you won’t need a new hub to start using these gadgets. But new users should pick one up if they don’t have a Thread-enabled, Matter-compatible smart home hub in their home.
Here’s what gear I’ve tried from Ikea’s new smart home collection, and how it went.
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The Kajplats Bulb
Photograph: Nena Farrell
One of Ikea’s key new products, just launched this April, is a new light bulb. Smart light bulbs are one of the most-used items in my home, and this is one of the most accessible and useful smart home products out there.
The Kajplats bulb was easy to set up around my house, and because I’m an iPhone user, it also used Matter to sync to my Apple Home app as well as my Ikea app. I wish these came in more packs of bulbs rather than having to always buy them a la carte, but it’s a solid bulb for a good price. Just check the lumens before you check out to make sure you’re not accidentally buying the cheap, dim one when you need something bright enough to fill a room.
Rolling out from April 7 on desktop Chrome (download here), the vertical tabs feature gives users the option to move the browser’s tab strip from the top of the window to a sidebar on the left. Read Entire Article Source link
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” — so said [Frank Herbert] in his magnum opus, Dune, or rather in the OC Bible that made up part of the book’s rich worldbuilding. A recent study demonstrating “cognitive surrender” in large language model (LLM) users, as reported in Ars Technica, is going to add more fuel to that Butlerian fire.
Cognitive surrender is, in short, exactly what [Herbert] was warning of: giving over your thinking to machines. In the study, people were asked a series of questions, and — except for the necessary “brain-only” control group — given access to a rigged LLM to help them answer. It was rigged in that it would give wrong answers 50% of the time, which while higher than most LLMs, only a difference in degree, not in kind. Hallucination is unavoidable; here it was just made controllably frequent for the sake of the study.
The hallucinations in the study were errors that the participants should have been able to see through, if they’d thought about the answers. Eighty percent of the time, they did not. That is to say: presented with an obviously wrong answer from the machine, only in 20% of cases did the participants bother to question it. The remainder were experiencing what the researchers dubbed “cognitive surrender”: they turned their thinking over to the machines. There’s a lot more meat to this than we can summarize here, of course, but the whole paper is available free for your perusal.
Giving over thinking to machines is nothing new, of course; it’s probably been a couple decades since the first person drove into a lake on faulty GPS directions, for example. One might even argue that since LLMs are correct much more than 50% of the time, it is statistically wise to listen to them. In that case, however, one might be encouraged to read Dune.
Google Photos has finally caught up with a feature that iOS has had for years. A new Copy button is now rolling out in the Google Photos share sheet. It lets you copy an image straight to the clipboard, without having to download it to your device first (via Android Authority).
Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends
What exactly does the new Google Photos feature do?
Until now, sharing a photo from Google Photos wasn’t as straightforward. First, you had to store the picture locally on your phone, which meant waiting for it to download before you could actually send it anywhere.
Now, you can argue that a second of waiting doesn’t sound like much. However, Google Photos users had to go through the same process every single time. That’s a second multiplied by the number of times you try to share a photo each day.
The new Copy button, spotted across multiple devices running the latest Google Photos version (7.71.0.895417930), eliminates that friction. You can simply tap Share on any image, hit the new Copy button, and the photo lands on your phone’s clipboard, good for pasting into a messaging app, a notes app, or wherever you want it to be.
Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends
Does the new Google Photos feature have a catch?
Unfortunately, yes, and I’d prefer you know it upfront rather than realizing it later. The copied image isn’t a pixel-perfect copy of the original one. To keep things quick and efficient, Google Photos copies a compressed version of the picture, with a slightly reduced resolution.
So, for casual sharing, the new Copy button does perfectly fine. However, I wouldn’t suggest relying on the feature for professional use or printing something. You’re better off spending those few extra seconds and downloading the entire file.
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On the brighter side, the new Google Photos Copy button works for videos too. Furthermore, if you’re using Gboard, copied media appears in the keyboard’s clipboard, remaining there even after you’ve copied something else.
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