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74 killed in Gaza as Israeli forces strike a cafe and fire on people seeking food

NPR News Headlines - Tue, 07/01/2025 - 01:52

The cafe, one of the few businesses to continue operating during the 20-month war, was a gathering spot for residents seeking internet access and a place to charge their phones.

(Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi)

Categories: News

Today's NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, July 1

CNET News - Tue, 07/01/2025 - 00:34
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for July 1.
Categories: Technology

Cartel violence in Sinaloa, Mexico, leaves 20 dead, including 4 decapitated bodies

NPR News Headlines - Tue, 07/01/2025 - 00:16

A bloody war for control between two factions of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel has turned the city of Culiacan into an epicenter of cartel violence.

(Image credit: AP)

Categories: News

Apple Music is celebrating 10 years with a personalized ‘All Time’ Playlist, and there’s a way for Spotify listeners to get in on the action

TechRadar News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 21:30
  • Apple Music has turned 10 and is letting users take a look back
  • The Replay All Time playlist lets you see your top 100 tracks since you joined Apple Music
  • It's a nice throwback treat, and there's a way for Spotify users to get a taste

Time flies when you’re listening to some good music, right? Well, Apple Music has officially turned ten today, and since Apple got into the streaming music game, a lot has changed. We’ve seen design changes and new features – remember its annual replay functionality arrived in 2019 – but marking ten years of streaming is a new playlist that lets you look back.

Rolling out for Apple Music subscribers now is a ‘Replay All Time’ playlist, which gives you your top 100 most played tracks since you joined the service. That could be a very long way back if you’ve been streaming since 2015, or a more recent look, but either route, it’ll likely be a journey through taste.

I found the ‘Replay All Time’ playlist right on my home tab in the Music app on my iPhone and my Mac. The description for the playlists reads, “In honor of Apple Music’s first decade, take a look back. Relive your all-time favorite tracks, all in one playlist.” And as with any playlist on Apple Music, you can play it in sequence or shuffle it, as well as save it to your library and download for offline listening.

(Image credit: Apple)

My All Time playlist did have a few surprises, and I expected that as I joined the service back on day one, June 30, 2015. There were plenty of previous songs of the summer – anyone remember Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop This Feeling’ or ‘I Lived’ by OneRepublic? – but also many of my favorite tracks that I opt for quite a bit.

So, yes, for me, that means a lot of Bruce Springsteen, and I noticed some appearances that were used as a wake-up alarm on my HomePod and HomePod mini. It’s a neat walk down memory lane, though, and at an unexpected time of the year. Usually, Apple Music rolls out Replay towards the end of the year, offering a look back at your year in music.

Spotify also rolls out Wrapped yearly and adds in a lot more social elements, as well as categorization based on your music taste. And if you’re a Spotify user who wants a similar look back at the decade or since Spotify launched in your region – it was July of 2011 for the United States – you’ll need to look to a third-party to get the experience … though the service might end up copying a bit of Apple’s celebration here.

Stats.fm is always a good choice for learning a bit more about your listening habits and what you’re streaming the most on various cadences, and this would be an excellent route. If you sign in with your Spotify account and grant permissions, you can select for a “lifetime” look at your top genres, tracks, and artists – all of this without needing to subscribe to the “Plus” tier.

It will provide your top 50 tracks, and you can easily select one of those to play. You can opt to subscribe to Stats.fm to unlock more statistics and more than just your 50 top tracks from Spotify.

(Image credit: Apple)

It’ll be interesting to see if Spotify rolls this out in a formal way, but it’s great that you can use a third-party to accomplish this. Still, Apple Music’s rollout of an All Time playlist is a nice touch, and it comes ahead of the music service debuting the top 500 most-streamed songs. That process will begin on July 1, 2025, and will announce a set of 100 tracks daily, days before dropping a full playlist for listeners to enjoy.

Apple’s also rolling out other playlists to celebrate the anniversary and some new Apple Music Radio specials. And there’s a new, over 15,000-square-foot Apple Music studio location opening in Los Angeles, California, which includes listening rooms kitted for immersive Spatial Audio playback. It’ll have larger stages and studios for artists to record and perform on.

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Categories: Technology

How to Watch Man City vs. Al-Hilal From Anywhere for Free: Stream FIFA Club World Cup Soccer

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 18:00
The English Premier League behemoths take on Simone Inzaghi's Saudi team for a place in the last eight.
Categories: Technology

This Lenovo Chromebook uses a CPU not found in any other laptops - and it should give AMD and Intel a run for their money

TechRadar News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:28
  • MediaTek’s Kompanio Ultra makes a rare appearance, challenging the usual CPU suspects in laptops
  • Lightweight and long-lasting, but ChromeOS limits serious work beyond web and Android apps
  • Lenovo Chromebook Plus’s $649 price tag puts it alongside Windows laptops with broader software support and faster chips

Lenovo’s latest Chromebook Plus (14", 10) has introduced something unusual: a MediaTek Kompanio Ultra processor.

This is not a name typically seen in the business laptop world, especially not in premium machines aiming to balance performance and portability.

But Lenovo seems confident this unique CPU, paired with Google’s newest AI tools, can stand up to more familiar silicon from AMD and Intel.

Uncommon power in a familiar shell

The Lenovo Chromebook Plus promises an all-in-one experience tailored for professionals, students, and creators.

It supports up to 16GB of memory and 256GB of internal storage, but the real story lies in the chip powering it - the Kompanio Ultra processor features MediaTek’s NPU 890 and Arm Immortalis-G925 GPU, delivering 50 TOPS of AI performance.

While impressive on paper, the broader market has yet to demonstrate what this actually means for everyday users in real workflows.

The laptop also features an OLED 2K display with 100% DCI-P3 coverage, quad speakers with Dolby Atmos, and a battery life that reportedly reaches up to 17 hours.

At just under 1.17kg, it qualifies among the lightest laptop models with this much hardware inside, though real-world usage may paint a more tempered picture.

Lenovo and Google are pushing the AI story hard. Features like Smart Grouping, AI-assisted image editing in the Gallery app, and optical character recognition across documents aim to streamline digital life.

There’s also Gemini support directly on the shelf, allowing text summarization and tab management.

"The Lenovo Chromebook Plus (14", 10) delivers the most powerful AI capabilities ever on a Chromebook… this premium device is your perfect everyday companion," said Benny Zhang, Executive Director and General Manager of Chromebooks in Lenovo's Intelligent Devices Group.

The machine includes Chrome Enterprise Upgrade for IT control and the Chrome Education Upgrade for schools, both allow admins to manage updates, policies, apps, and security from the cloud.

Still, users comparing this device to more traditional options in the same price range might hesitate.

Starting at $649, it overlaps with more established Windows and macOS devices - so those looking for the best laptop for engineering students may find the limitations of ChromeOS, especially with software compatibility, a deal breaker.

And while its portability is a strength, the MediaTek processor still needs to prove itself under demanding professional use.

Via TechPowerUp

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Categories: Technology

Best Internet Providers in Orange, California

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:23
These are CNET's top picks for the best internet service providers in Orange, California.
Categories: Technology

T-Mobile Is Bringing Starlink to Your Phone. Check If You’ll Get It for Free

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:16
Are dead zones a thing of the past? T-Mobile and Starlink's new satellite cell service thinks so. Here’s what you need to know.
Categories: Technology

These Rumored iPhone 17 Pro Max Features Make Me Want It Now

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:04
The largest iPhone model could be taking advantage of its size in several ways in the next incarnation.
Categories: Technology

This touching viral AI video of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s mom hugging him is also sparking a fiery debate

TechRadar News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:00

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian posted a short video of his late mother hugging him, which soon garnered tens of millions of views. Not because the video was a time capsule of a long-ago moment, but because it created it based on what had only been a still image.

Ohanian used the new AI video generation feature from Midjourney to create the video based on a single photo. To him, it's a time machine to six seconds from decades ago. Millions of other viewers shared that interpretation of the clip, but a significant number of dissenting voices warned that it was a fake memory that could mess with Ohanian's real remembrance of his mother.

Regardless of how people felt about the video, it seemed clear that most people felt something visceral about the facsimile of a speculative moment. Ohanian wrote, “This is how she hugged me.” And in that sentence alone is the entire heartbreak and hope of the digital age: the ache to remember more clearly, to hold tighter to someone who’s gone, to use machines not for profit or surveillance, but for something intimate. Human.

There’s no shortage of AI tricks floating around right now. You can generate an image of your cat as an Olympic diver, your family picnic as an animated cartoon, or your child in their future profession. Mostly, these are lightly entertaining fads that also illustrate larger issues surrounding AI. But this is not a disposable video to Ohanian. This is a clip he has made clear he will treasure. And whether he's simply leveraging AI to keep his mother's memory alive or constructing false memories because he feels the real ones slipping away, he's not the first and has undoubtedly brought the idea more attention than ever.

There’s a strange vulnerability in inviting a machine to guess at your memories. It feels a little like asking a stranger to finish your dream. AI doesn’t know your mom. It doesn’t know how she laughed or how tightly she hugged you. It just knows pixels. But sometimes pixels are all we’ve got.

If you’ve lost someone, especially before smartphones and camcorders tracked our every moment, you know what it’s like to wish you had more videos and photos of that person. Ohanian said his family couldn’t afford a camcorder. He doesn’t have any video of himself with his mom. That photo of a hug in the meadow is it. But with the help of a few prompts and a sophisticated AI model, that hug lives again.

I lost my mom almost 20 years ago. Trolls can rest assured I’ve grieved sufficiently. My family couldn’t afford a camcorder and using tech to generate few seconds of animation from a still is the equivalent of using AI to stabilize a poorly recorded video — or fill in the gaps of…June 23, 2025

I don’t think the discomfort many expressed is solely about Alexis Ohanian's video or why he chose to make and share it. I think it’s about what having this option might mean in the worst scenarios. It's easy to see this moment as the beginning of a dark and gloomy trend.

I think if it helps Ohanian feel closer to his mother, that's just fine. It's not like the image was itself a fiction; it just externalized his own memory of a hug. It's like a more tactile version of saving your parents' last voicemail to you, or keeping around their favorite scented candle because it makes you smile. Ohanian isn't pretending the video is anything but a memory aid. Using AI to make false memories may or may not become a real problem, but that's not the case here.

AI video remembers

After Ohanian’s post went viral, people began sharing their own AI-animated family photos. For now, these are just fragments, silent and brief. But judging people's grief and how they handle it, no matter how long it's been, is not something I would ever want to do as long as it's not hurting anyone. A fair assessment has to be personal.

So I did the same thing as Ohanian. I found a photo I've always liked of my mother, who passed away 13 years ago, celebrating Hanukkah with me in the early 1990s. I used Hailuo (of Olympian cat fame) to make a video based on the grainy image from my childhood. For what it's worth, I know my mother would have been thrilled to participate, as she was always looking for ways to assist in any facet of my life, so I didn't have any qualms on that front.

The video is okay. It's not quite matching how she and I look in the photo, though I think the quality of the image is at fault there as much as the vagaries of AI. I could put that aside and imagine the moment from my own younger perspective, thanks to the video, and that was an interesting sensation. But, whether it's because of the quick-and-dirty prompt or just my own circumstances, I didn't feel like it evoked a deeper connection to my late mother. I suspect there will be plenty who feel the same way if they make the attempt.

Just because it was a little hollow to me doesn't mean it can't benefit others without fraying their understanding of their own past. I don’t believe Ohanian is trying to replace his mother's memory with an AI filmmaker. I think he’s relatably trying to feel a little closer to her.

Of course, our love of those who have passed away isn’t the only thing AI amplifies. It can also amplify our fear, our longing, our capacity to deceive ourselves. This technology is powerful, especially when it gets personal. But for now, it's just a way for Ohanian to surface a fond memory of a hug from his mom, and there are much worse uses for AI models.

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Categories: Technology

Why a GOP senator says the budget bill breaks Trump's promise

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 16:36

The massive budget bill that Senate Republicans are debating pays for some of its tax cuts by slashing hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid spending. The latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates nearly 12 million people will lose health insurance if the Senate version of the bill becomes law.

Trump insists the cuts come from eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Democrats have said they break Trump's promise not to touch Medicaid — and over the weekend, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina agreed. "What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore?"

We asked Sarah Jane Tribble, the chief rural correspondent for KFF Health News, what the cuts will mean for rural residents of states like North Carolina — and the hospitals that serve them.

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)

Categories: News

70% of new hires click on phishing links within the first 3 months of employment - here's how to stay safe

TechRadar News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 16:26
  • Most phishing incidents happen before new employees even understand how internal systems work, report claims
  • Security awareness should begin on day one, before the first email is even opened
  • Hackers target uncertainty, and onboarding is full of it for eager, confused new hires

The first few months of employment are now one of the riskiest periods for enterprise cybersecurity, new research has claimed,

Keepnet’s 2025 New Hires Phishing Susceptibility Report found nearly three-quarters (71%) of new hires fall for phishing or social engineering attacks within their first 90 days on the job.

Often overlooked in onboarding workflows, this shortcoming suggests many organizations are not doing enough to prepare new staff for the reality of modern cyber threats.

Inexperience, urgency, and confusion drive early mistakes

The report, based on data from 237 companies, reveals new employees are 44% more likely to be deceived by phishing attempts than their longer-tenured colleagues.

Most incidents stem from a combination of inexperience, lack of familiarity with internal processes, and a desire to comply with instructions.

Common attack types include CEO impersonation, fraudulent HR portals, fake invoice requests, and technical support scams, many of which exploit this period of onboarding confusion.

The study also found phishing emails impersonating executives led to a 45% higher success rate among new hires compared to tenured staff.

This gap demonstrates how even basic social engineering tactics can be disproportionately effective against employees who are still navigating organizational systems and norms.

Without dedicated and structured training, these early errors can create long-lasting security risks.

To tackle this issue, Keepnet recommends that organizations adopt a layered defense strategy tailored specifically for onboarding periods.

Organizations that adopted adaptive simulations and behavior-based training programs saw phishing risk drop by 30% after onboarding.

Traditional tools like the best endpoint protection, best FWAAS, and best FWAAS solution remain essential, but they are not enough on their own.

“Phishing attacks don’t wait for your employees to feel ready. Our research shows that organizations must invest in onboarding-specific cybersecurity awareness training. We’re proud to offer adaptive, scalable solutions that protect businesses from day one,” said Ozan Uçar, CEO, Keepnet.

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Categories: Technology

The Supreme Court has created an endless summer of work for itself

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 16:11

The court closed its latest term on Friday, but it will still be working on a steady stream of emergency appeals in the coming weeks and months.

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan)

Categories: News

Apple to Release Cheaper MacBook Air Powered by iPhone Processor, Analyst Says

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 16:00
The new laptop might also feature more color options, including pink and yellow.
Categories: Technology

Russia's Largest Bombardment of Ukraine

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:54

Russia attacked Ukraine with over 500 drones and missiles over the weekend, it was the largest air assault since the Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine over three years ago. The barrage included targets in Western Ukraine, a region far from the front lines that doesn't often see bombardments. We get the latest from our correspondent in Kyiv.

(Image credit: OLEKSANDR GIMANOV)

Categories: News

DOJ announces a record-breaking takedown of health care fraud schemes

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:39

The Justice Department announced charges in what officials describe as the largest health care fraud bust in DOJ history.

(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)

Categories: News

Samsung just launched a new 32-inch 4K smart OLED monitor with AI and Microsoft 365 access, but why is it so expensive?

TechRadar News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:31
  • Samsung Smart Monitor M9 merges OLED clarity and AI intelligence in a sleek, hybrid workspace device
  • With Pantone certification and QD-OLED tech, the M9 is built for color-critical creative work
  • Samsung M9 gives all there is to give, but that $1,599 price tag feels overly ambitious

Samsung has unveiled the Smart Monitor M9, which adds QD-OLED technology and artificial intelligence to the company’s monitor lineup for the first time.

With its 32-inch 4K panel, the M9 blends work, gaming, and entertainment into a single device, aiming to serve as both a productivity tool and a media hub.

But at $1,599, it raises the question of how much users should really pay for a monitor, even one this rich in features.

A hybrid screen for work and play

Samsung’s M9 OLED panel is paired with features like Glare-Free coating for better visibility in bright rooms and OLED Safeguard+, a thermal management system to reduce burn-in over time.

The display is Pantone Validated, meaning it can replicate over 2,100 colors and 110 SkinTone shades, a mark of visual precision that creative professionals may appreciate.

On paper, the specs are impressive. AI Picture Optimizer, 4K AI Upscaling Pro, and Active Voice Amplifier Pro all promise to adjust visuals and audio in real time based on content and surroundings.

The monitor also includes a 165Hz refresh rate, a 0.03ms response time, and Nvidia G-SYNC compatibility, offering some gaming credibility without needing a dedicated console or PC, thanks to Samsung Gaming Hub and built-in streaming apps.

However, it’s worth questioning whether this justifies the asking price - comparable smart monitors, like LG’s 32LQ6300 or even the previous Samsung M8 Smart Monitor, offer 4K panels with smart features for hundreds less.

For many users looking for the best business monitor or the best monitor for Mac Mini, the AI enhancements and integrated entertainment platform may simply be unnecessary.

Likewise, those wanting the best monitor for MacBook Pro may already rely on Apple’s own display ecosystem, making features like Microsoft 365 integration and Tizen OS redundant.

The M9 clearly pushes technical boundaries, but its price positions it closer to a luxury item than a practical everyday monitor.

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Categories: Technology

Senate considers ditching the EV tax credit even earlier than planned

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:26

As the Senate debates the giant tax and spending bill, lawmakers are weighing a Sept. 30 end date for the EV tax credits. The bill still needs to pass the Senate and then go through reconciliation.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan)

Categories: News

After Glastonbury, Bob Vylan faces U.K. criminal investigation and U.S. visa revocation

NPR News Headlines - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:10

British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan led chants against the Israeli military in a live BBC broadcast on Saturday. Irish-language rappers Kneecap also are being investigated.

(Image credit: Leon Neal)

Categories: News

Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for July 1, #485

CNET News - Mon, 06/30/2025 - 15:00
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 1, No. 485.
Categories: Technology

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