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California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls

Wealth tax criticized by billionaires and Gavin Newsom would levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth over $1bn

A popular proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.

The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor union backing the measure.

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© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

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The midterms are going to be a data security nightmare

Graphic photo illustration of a voting sign that reads “Vote here”.

One messy database is threatening to disenfranchise thousands or even millions of registered voters, while leaving even more at risk of intimidation or data breaches, in the name of solving a problem that barely exists.

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, election and privacy experts are sounding alarms about the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program, which President Donald Trump's administration has expanded to ostensibly catch noncitizens voting. Experts say that amounts to a dangerous, error-prone effort to centralize voter data. "The federal government doesn't have the author …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Blair’s Encyclical Labor Imbecilis

Everyone knows that Tony Blair and the Pope issued encyclicals in the last week or two. The Pope's was entitled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’; by analogy, Blair's should have been called ‘Labor Imbecilis’, says James Alexander.

The post Blair’s Encyclical Labor Imbecilis appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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What the satellite servicing economy can borrow from carbon credits

Artist rendition of ESA’s Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (DRACO), a spacecraft loaded with sensors that will break up in orbit in order to gather data on uncontrolled reentry.

In January 2026 alone, the Federal Communications Commission authorized 15,000 Starlink Gen2 satellites. Starcloud has filed for 88,000 orbital data center satellites. SpaceX has filed for 1 million. There is […]

The post What the satellite servicing economy can borrow from carbon credits appeared first on SpaceNews.

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My Kamikaze Attempt to Beat Ed Davey’s Wife in the Local Elections as a Reform Candidate

Standing for Reform against Ed Davey's wife in a Lib Dem heartland, Chris Larkin found shy supporters, hostile middle-class lecturers and an unexpected guardian angel in a tower block.

The post My Kamikaze Attempt to Beat Ed Davey’s Wife in the Local Elections as a Reform Candidate appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Vibe-decoding the White House-Anthropic fight over Fable

CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17th, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France. | Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that's going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send 'em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

Back when I was covering Donald Trump's first presidency, it was incredibly common to read three different versions of the same story. His administration had split into several factions, all of which had different interests, and all of which hated each other. There was the Reince Pr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Swiss decision to not contribute to Copernicus tests program’s value model

View of the Fagradalsfjall volcano on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, acquired by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite less than 10 hours after its eruption began on Feb. 8, 2024, with the lava flow and smoke plume clearly visible near the city of Grindavík. Credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery.

MILAN — Switzerland’s decision not to participate in the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program during the 2028–2034 funding cycle has revived a broader debate over the value of contributing […]

The post Swiss decision to not contribute to Copernicus tests program’s value model appeared first on SpaceNews.

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All the news about Anthropic’s new AI fight with the White House

Anthropic logo on an orange background.

Anthropic was already navigating one dispute with the government in its standoff with the Pentagon, and then came an order on June 12th to block off foreign access to its most recently released AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. When they launched on June 9th, Anthropic said “Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available,” and that Claude Mythos 5 had the same underlying model, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.”

According to reports, the order came after conversations between Amazon and the White House about researchers saying they found ways to get Fable 5 to serve information that could be used in cyberattacks.

Anthropic responded by shutting access to both models for all customers, saying, “We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

Read along below for all of the latest updates

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Big Tech’s desperate last push at AI regulation

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive for a news conference with bipartisan senators on passage of the Online Privacy Protection Act at the Capitol on July 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. | Kent Nishimura/Getty Images.

For months, Big Tech's Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them.

But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an ent …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Happy birthday to the Trump phone

Photo of a sheet cake featuring a man holding the Trump Mobile phone.

From the day it was announced, on June 16th, 2025, the Trump phone sounded ridiculous. The T1 Phone 8002 (gold version), as it was officially called, was a combination of contradictory specs, product images that were clearly not photographs of a real phone, and the worrying requirement of a $100 deposit to secure a preorder of a $499 phone with no release date. But none of Trump Mobile's outlandish announcements were as bold as the claim that the phone would be "designed and built in the United States."

The US has next to no phone manufacturing infrastructure, few engineers with the required expertise, and little of the affordable, flexible …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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