Five for Fighting 06/18/2008

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

Seven of 16 planetary vital signs are in their most extreme state ever recorded, and El Niño is here to make matters even worse.

The US government’s Tradewinds initiative has made it easier to throw millions of dollars at “nontraditional” defense contractors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Tropical Storm Isaias is set to become the basin’s first hurricane of the season, bringing life-threatening rain and storm surge to the Gulf Coast.

Warhound came out of stealth on Wednesday with $200 million in funding and a mission to create “elite working dogs” equipped with "advanced body armor."

The company says an unnamed third-party provider was compromised. Trading has resumed, and Polymarket says affected traders will be made whole.

Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.

The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.

Despite the agency's human resources department saying he hadn’t even been onboarded, Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It’s not clear he had the legal authority to do so.

As coastlines change, so do surf breaks. That may spell the end for premier waves and the tourist economies that depend on them.

The Justice Department is considering a perjury and obstruction-of-justice case against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who testified against Donald Trump to the January 6 committee.

Here’s what we know about the record-setting El Niño on a record-hot planet, and the most important questions scientists are trying to answer.