After criticism from a federal judge, the Department of Justice yesterday withdrew demands for phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times reporters who wrote about security concerns related to the Air Force One jet donated to Trump by Qatar.

It was a setback in the Trump administration's attempts to unmask journalists' confidential sources. US District Judge Arun Subramanian "grilled Justice Department lawyers for nearly an hour over their handling of the subpoenas" during a hearing on Thursday, The New York Times wrote .

“Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas,” Subramanian reportedly told Sean Buckley, chief counsel for the US attorney in New York's southern district.

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The European Union has begun delaying the release of satellite images showing shipping lanes near the Strait of Hormuz by 24 hours. The move comes in response to an earlier US government request and coincides with the Trump administration ramping up the war with Iran once again.

The unusual change in the free and open data policy for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program was revealed by Space News , which reviewed a copy of the decision made by the Council of the EU on July 13. The ordered delay applies to images taken by Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites and covers the Gulf of Oman region that includes shipping lanes leading to and from the contested Strait of Hormuz.

The US government first requested that the European Union restrict Copernicus satellite imagery on May 26, according to the decision document seen by Space News. That request occurred during a shaky ceasefire period for the war that began on April 8 and ended on July 8, when the US military resumed a broader campaign of military strikes following an announcement by President Donald Trump.

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A couple of decades after the discovery of systems that could selectively target DNA, we're starting to see the first therapies based on gene editing. One challenge these developments have faced is safety. While we can make them pretty specific to the gene we want edited, the human genome is very large, and even rare DNA sequences can appear a couple of times by chance.

As a result, all the original gene-editing systems had known rates of what are called off-target effects, in which they simply edit the wrong sequence. This may be a low-probability event, but edit enough cells—and therapies generally have to edit many—and errors become inevitable.

A lot of effort has gone into finding ways to minimize or eliminate off-target edits. In a recent issue of Nature, researchers described modifying the AI protein-folding software AlphaFold to help identify key areas of gene-editing proteins responsible for off-target effects. Those areas were then modified to reduce the problems.

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LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from a controversial app that some of its monitors have stealthily installed on connected computers.

The app, LG Monitor App Installer, installs itself through a Windows Update alongside monitor driver updates. LG Monitor App Installer then pushes ads for a 30-day free trial for McAfee, as well as other software, via a pop-up on affected systems, multiple users have reported.

This has drawn negative attention recently, with complaints surfacing on Reddit and a subsequent video from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus . In the video, editor-in-chief Steve Burke said that the publication paid $1,200 for an LG UltraGear 3GX900A-B gaming monitor (the monitor’s price dropped to $600 two days later, Burke said) for testing and replicated the behavior “several times” across “multiple” Windows 11 systems.

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The Food and Drug Administration announced on Wednesday that it's investigating yet another outbreak of Cyclospora , the unicellular foodborne parasite behind a nationwide surge in explosive watery diarrhea illnesses. The FDA said 72 cases have been identified in this outbreak, but the agency provided no details on the situation.

This announcement marks the sixth Cyclospora outbreak investigation the FDA has opened this year. Overall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has gotten reports of more than 11,500 cases (including 4,173 confirmed and over 7,400 probable) from 41 states. Among the cases, there have been 308 hospitalizations and no deaths.

This year's tally so far—just in July—greatly exceeds the normal number of cases the US sees in a whole year. In recent years, the US has reported between 2,000 and 5,000 cases in a year, according to CDC data . With a new outbreak announced, the tally of cases is likely to continue climbing. Nevertheless, when asked about the national surge in cases earlier this week, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the situation was " under control ."

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Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face . You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love.

You will have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won't be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program.

Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google's selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won't use it for any other purposes unless you opt in.

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A proposed law called the AI Kill Switch Act would let US government officials order the shutdown of AI systems "that can cause catastrophic harm," the bill's sponsors said today.

If approved by Congress, the bill would let the Trump administration and future administrations decide when an AI company must block user access, disable or restrict a particular capability, or shut an entire AI system down completely. The bill would require AI makers to deploy technical capabilities allowing them to throttle or shut down the systems when ordered to do so by the government.

The bill would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with authority for the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to order the suspension or shutdown of AI systems. AI developers that refuse to shut systems down could face fines of up $20 million for each day on which a violation occurs.

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San Diego Comic-Con has kicked off strong, and we've got a couple of new trailers to show for it: the final trailer for Coyote vs. Acme , and the full trailer for director Zach Cregger's fresh take on Resident Evil . Some lucky folks were also treated to a screening of Resident Evil' s first 18 minutes.

Coyote vs. Acme

We were thrilled when the first trailer for Coyote vs. Acme dropped in April. The film had been shelved for years and is finally getting the broad theatrical release it deserves thanks to Ketchup Entertainment, which acquired it from Warner Bros. The concept alone is sheer brilliance: Wile E. Coyote, after decades of ACME equipment failing him in his efforts to catch that darned Road Runner, decides to sue the corporation. It’s based on a well-known satirical piece by Ian Frazier (also titled “Coyote vs. Acme”) published in The New Yorker in 1990.

Per the official premise:

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A 63-year-old woman arrived at a hospital in pain. She had abruptly lost vision in her right eye. As doctors got to work, the series of findings that followed revealed not just bad news for her, but an alarming revelation of how infections can evolve within a patient.

The woman's remarkable case was reported this week in the New England Journal of Medicine . According to her doctors, initial magnetic resonance imaging scans of her brain quickly identified the key problem. The imaging indicated inflammation in her right eye, but also picked up lesions in her brain. Specifically, the imaging suggested problems in her parietal lobe, which is a hub for processing sensory information.

The doctors suspected she had a brain abscess. Laboratory results of her blood and urine samples suggested an infection as well as kidney problems. Doctors decided to open up her skull for a brain biopsy. Inside, the surgical team was met with pus. Meanwhile, doctors worked to identify the bacteria found in two urine samples.

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