Grinding Streets

Disney and Lucasfilm announced Thursday that a restored version of the original 1977 Star Wars returns to theaters February 19, 2027 , for the first time in IMAX . It is the version audiences saw in 1977, before the Special Edition changes, with a new John Williams score for the anniversary logo. Fifty years on, Han still shoots first, and this time you can see it on a screen taller than a house. Read it here

Rosalía took album of the year at the Latin Grammys Thursday night in Las Vegas for Lux , beating Karol G , Anitta , and Jorge Drexler . She also won song of the year, best pop song, best alternative album, and short-form music video. Five trophies in one night, and the classical-inspired art pop record that critics loved turns out to be the one the industry loved too. Read it here

HHS announced Thursday it will spend up to $4.9 million over five years to develop ibogaine as a PTSD treatment for veterans, plus a $20 million research network for ketamine, esketamine , and psilocybin. The drugs remain unapproved, and the money funds groundwork rather than patient treatment. A decade ago this idea was fringe; now it has a federal budget line . Read it here

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen announced Thursday he will challenge Chuck Schumer to lead Senate Democrats, days after the party won back the Senate. Schumer says he has the votes, and the secret ballot is set for December 1 . Winning the majority was the easy part; deciding who runs it is where the real fight starts. Read it here

After 33 years as the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, Jensen Huang resigned Thursday, and CFO Colette Kress steps in as interim chief five days before earnings. The stock fell as much as 14 percent during the day before recovering some of the loss. The man who built the AI chip empire leaves in a cloud of scandal, and the market now has to price a company without its founder at the wheel. Read it here

Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia. China's quest for American AI isn't over. — The Christian Science Monitor

SpaceX will try catching its massive Starship rocket for the first time — Axios

Blackstone is becoming a biotech bank — Axios

Compartmentalization And Compromise - by Boyd Campbell

Listening to America : The M Is for Marvelous

GALLERY - Jerk City Grill recognized local military veterans with a Veterans Day appreciation event offering free Classic Jerk Chicken Plates to veterans – Jackson Advocate

The Day Old Dixie Died - by Dan Rather and Team Steady

Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2 on Wednesday, a model that predicts how a DNA variant changes gene activity in one specific cell type at a time instead of a tissue average . Trained on more than 100 million cell profiles , it found nearly twice as many gene-changing variants as its predecessor , and it is open to non-commercial researchers now. Read it here

OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT this week, letting companies claim a verified profile, feed in live prices and stock, and run their own sales agent inside the chatbot . It is free for now, the agents cannot take your money yet, and 1.2 billion people a week is a lot of foot traffic for a shop with no checkout. Read it here

A three-story building in Brooklyn 's Flatbush neighborhood fell into the excavation next door Wednesday afternoon, killing eight people and injuring 17. More than 250 firefighters worked through the night with dogs and drones , and the cause is still under investigation. Read it here

Grand Theft Auto VI does not come out until November 19, and Sensor Tower already estimates more than 10 million pre-orders worth over $1 billion. No game has ever done a billion before release day, and the last one took three days after launch to get there. Read it here

Democrat Scott Colom beat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday, becoming Mississippi 's first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction and the first Democrat to win a Senate seat here since 1982 . It took more than a week of counting absentee and provisional ballots, and it came down to fewer than 5,000 votes out of more than 950,000 cast. Read it here

Are Democrats ready to be a big-tent party again? Lawmakers from red states will find out. — The Christian Science Monitor

Jensen Huang, an architect of the AI boom, resigns as Nvidia CEO — Axios

Defense-tech group UForce valued at $6 billion — Axios

An excavation at a Soviet gulag camp just discovered what Russia didn’t want the world to know

British counterterror police arrested a 41-year-old U.S. Army officer near Gloucester on suspicion of spying for Russia . He served with NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps , he has not been charged or named, and the Kremlin says it has nothing to do with it, which is exactly what you would expect everyone to say at this stage.

October prices came in hotter than expected, up 0.4%, and the Fed now looks all but certain to raise rates in December. The only question left is whether it is a quarter point or a half point , and either way it is the last inflation report the Fed will see before it votes.

Google finally put its own item tracker on sale today: the Pixel Tag , $29.99 for one or $99.99 for four, built for Android's Find Hub network . Apple has had the AirTag for years, so the real question is whether a billion Android phones make this one better at finding lost keys than the copycats that came before it.

Stacy Keach died Tuesday at 85, after a long fight with heart trouble. Most people knew him as Mike Hammer, the fedora-and-trenchcoat detective, but he was also one of the great stage actors of his generation, a Hamlet and a Hemingway, and that range is what made the tough-guy roles work.

Anthropic put a price on the AI boom: $70 to $78 a share, up to $64.4 billion raised, and a valuation near $1.4 trillion when it starts trading next week under the ticker ANT . A few months ago the talk was $2 trillion, so the market is getting its first real chance to say what all this AI excitement is actually worth.

America's farmers are harvesting a bounty. Why are they struggling? — The Christian Science Monitor .

Amazon's Ring introduces security drone and robot — Axios .

The AI industry's week from hell — Axios .

James Gunn and Peter Safran are out as co-heads of DC Studios after four years, replaced by former Marvel executive Jeremy Latcham. The man who rebuilt DC is going back to making movies, and the man who helped build the Marvel machine now runs the other side. Source

Boeing told staff it will trim roughly 2,500 jobs from its commercial airplanes division as 737 production ramps up more slowly than planned, with layoff notices starting in December. A company with a record order backlog cutting jobs before Christmas is a strange kind of recovery. Source

Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth more than a billion dollars, went down 52.8% to 47.2% after opponents spent roughly ten times what supporters did. The idea was supposed to fund health care; the money, it turns out, had other plans. Source

France blames Iran's Revolutionary Guard for remotely turning up the heat on refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets last month, spoiling tons of food. Cyberwar used to mean stolen secrets; now it means warm milk and empty freezer aisles. Source

M. John Harrison took the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything , becoming the oldest winner in the prize's history after six decades of writing. It is his first Booker nomination, his 13th novel, and the shortest book on the shortlist — proof that a late-career first can still be the biggest one. Source

The conservationist who’s building bridges between bats and people — The Christian Science Monitor

Google touts AI breakthrough, path to "unhackable" software — Axios

The story of Sequoia Capital's reinvention — Axios

(5) Federal investigation challenges Coast officials’ account of electrician’s death

The Financial Times reports Anthropic agreed to pay about $3.4 billion for 1.7 gigawatts of Caterpillar gas generators — taking over orders a Texas supplier placed two years ago — to power its data centers . The AI race 's scarcest resource, it turns out, isn't chips or talent . It's electricity , and the company behind Claude just bought a power plant's worth of it. Source: The Neuron

Meta is rolling its AI age-estimation system out globally on Instagram , moving accounts it suspects belong to teens into stricter Teen Account protections even if they signed up with an adult birthday. Millions more teens get the limits; the trade-off is an algorithm deciding how old you are, with parents getting a notification when it gets it wrong. Source: 9to5Mac

Lando Norris dominated a rainy São Paulo Grand Prix from pole, leading 47 of 71 laps, while Max Verstappen charged from 21st to second. The bigger prize went to Mercedes , whose ninth constructors' title — its first since 2021 — completed the title double a week after 20-year-old Kimi Antonelli became the youngest drivers' champion ever . Source: Reuters

The U.N. climate talks opened Monday in Antalya, Türkiye , with more than 190 countries in the room and the U.S. federal delegation absent for a second straight year. The hosts are pitching it as the " implementation COP ," with a flagship goal of getting electricity to 35% of global energy demand by 2035 — the pledges are made, now somebody has to do them. Source: Phys.org

Nvidia 's board opened an independent investigation into CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with a tech executive U.S. officials reportedly suspect of feeding intelligence to China . The stock fell 6% Monday, and the man who has said he wants to die at his desk may have to learn what Nvidia looks like without him. Source: CNN

Even AI couldn't replicate this year's breakout band — The Christian Science Monitor

Elon Musk's empire braces for Democratic crackdown — Axios

Nvidia's "key man risk" now in the spotlight — Axios

Christopher Nolan , now president of the Directors Guild , says it's 'down to the studios' to stop AI companies training on their films, since directors don't own the copyrights and can't sue themselves. His own film The Odyssey now carries a credit-line warning that it can't be ingested as AI training data — a small line of boilerplate that might be the start of a much bigger fight. Source

After voters privatized the country's public broadcaster and it shut down last year, a newspaper publisher filled the gap with Radio Vaterland — an AI station that writes the news from the paper's articles and reads it aloud in cloned voices of the paper's editors, at a tenth to a twentieth of the old cost. It occasionally mispronounces U2 and Lynyrd Skynyrd , which honestly sounds like a human DJ problem too. Source

NASA opened applications Saturday for its next astronaut class , the first since 2024, with a Dec. 3 deadline and selections expected in late 2027. The pitch this time isn't the space station — it's living and working on the Moon , and eventually Mars . Last round drew more than 8,000 applicants for 10 spots, so the odds are long, but the job description has never sounded better. Source

Binance chief financial officer Kaiser Ng is leaving after more than five years, barely a week after hackers stole a record $6.3 billion from the exchange's users — a theft Binance and the FBI blame on a North Korean group . The company insists the handover was planned six months ago, which may be true, but the timing is doing it no favors. Source

Berkshire Hathaway bought back $9.6 billion of its own stock last quarter even as profit fell 28% and operating earnings slipped about 6%, with Geico's numbers softening as it spends again on ads. The cash pile, meanwhile, is back up to $377.4 billion — Greg Abel's first earnings report as CEO, and the company still can't find anything big enough to buy. Source

Anthropic's falling IPO valuation raises stakes for broader AI trade — Axios

UN climate summit opens in Turkey with modest goals — The Christian Science Monitor

Nvidia CEO under growing scrutiny amid reported ties to Chinese spy — Axios

Godzilla Minus Zero took ¥910 million (about $5.7 million) on its opening day in Japan, the biggest opening day ever for a live-action film there, more than double what its Oscar-winning predecessor managed. It opened in the U.S. on Friday and is tracking toward a record opening for a foreign-language film . Seventy-two years in, the big lizard still draws a crowd. Source

Pope Leo XIV arrived in Uruguay on Friday to begin a 12-day, three-country South American tour — his longest trip yet, and his first since lung cancer surgery last month removed part of his right lung . The schedule includes 36 speeches, a dozen flights, and a stop in Cusco, Peru , at 11,000 feet , where there's a third less oxygen per breath. His doctors say he's fine. That's quite a way to prove it. Source

OpenAI released GPT-6 Cyber on Thursday, a model built to find software flaws and write working exploits — it reportedly produced 948 working exploits for Linux kernel bugs and found 81 previously unknown Firefox vulnerabilities . The company rates it "Critical," its top cybersecurity tier, and is only letting vetted security customers near it. The same tool that patches the internet can also break it. Source

Fox closed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku on Friday, months ahead of schedule, putting the company that sells Tubi and FOX One in charge of the streaming platform in more than 100 million homes. Roku built its business on not taking sides — now we'll see how long that lasts when the referee owns one of the teams. Source

Elon Musk announced Friday that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production around the middle of next year to make room for the driverless Cybercab — four years after the angular pickup finally reached buyers, with sales down sharply and fewer than 100,000 sold in the U.S. The truck that was supposed to look like the future is being retired to build the future.    Source

The big questions for Elon Musk's wireless dreams — Axios

Midterm voters tell politicians: Tackle corruption — The Christian Science Monitor

It's sunset for Tesla's divisive Cybertruck — Axios

Texas’ “Big Three” set to all be women for the first time

After 23 years, 234 caps, and a record 146 goals, Cristiano Ronaldo announced his Portugal retirement in a social-media video — no stadium farewell, just a quiet goodbye after a falling-out with his coach. Even the greats don't always get to pick their ending. Source: NBC Sports

CERN physicists finally found evidence of a meson decay so rare it happens about once in every 10 billion decays, a search that began more than 40 years ago. The result matches the Standard Model exactly — a triumph, and a little disappointing for anyone hoping for new physics . Source: Phys.org

The Nasdaq fell 5.5% on Thursday and chip stocks cratered — Nvidia down about 9%, AMD and Micron about 15% each — as investors decided a new Democratic Congress might put the brakes on the AI data-center boom . Wednesday the market cheered the election; Thursday it read the fine print. Source: Reuters

Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted all 548 death sentences in California to life without parole, the largest mass commutation in U.S. history — though the death penalty stays on the books and some cases still need the state Supreme Court's sign-off . Source: USA Today

Paraguay's president offered his resignation Thursday after the collapse of digital lender Ueno froze the accounts of some 3 million people — nearly half the country — and Congress , instead of accepting it, pressed ahead with an impeachment trial . Source: BusinessWorld

As the US seeks uranium sitting under Navajo land, a historical tension resurfaces — The Christian Science Monitor

How AI is enabling faster, more dangerous cyber war — Axios

It's going to be tough to tap the brakes on the AI race — Axios

The Red Wall Falls: Democrats Shatter Decades of GOP Dominance Across the South - WSJ

Solar-powered tags weighing about 60 milligrams are following individual monarchs on their 3,000-mile migration to Mexico , and the public can watch each butterfly on an app — turns out some of them aren't even headed to Mexico. Source

Peking University researchers built bristles that generate their own electric charge as they bend, killing bacteria without a battery — the manual toothbrush 's first real redesign in a thousand years. Source

Three people with drug-resistant epilepsy saw seizures fall by more than 90% after gene-carrying viruses were infused into their brains — tiny trial , enormous if it holds. Source

NASA's Swift Observatory , which spent two decades chasing the universe's biggest explosions , burned up over Indonesia on Wednesday after a rescue mission failed — a two-year mission that lasted eleven times as long. Source

Brent crude fell nearly 9% overnight and is down about 20% this week, while the S&P 500 had its best day in three months — Wall Street 's way of saying divided government might be the cheapest policy of all. Source

Does MAGA have a future? After anti-Trump backlash in midterms, it may not. — The Christian Science Monitor

Big Tech scrambles to offer voters a new AI deal — Axios

Nasdaq plummets toward correction territory — Axios

Mexico City 's Day of the Dead centerpiece is a 109-foot La Catrina in a purple gown, ringed by 70,000 marigolds — a new world record , and a reminder that some holidays only get bigger. Source

DNA from more than 4,500 ancient Europeans , published in two new Nature studies , traces a previously unknown migration into Scandinavia and the spread of the Germanic and Celtic languages . Source

A brass padlock from a 1583 treasure-ship wreck kept its four-letter combination for four centuries — until a micro-CT scan cracked it: ANCE . Source

Voters in 18 Ohio municipalities passed bans or restrictions on data centers on Tuesday, with some bans winning 80% of the vote — the AI buildout just met the ballot box. Source

The votes are in, and it's a rout — Democrats flipped the House and at least seven Senate seats , including firsts in Texas , Kansas , and South Carolina not seen in decades. Source

Democrats take the House and Senate, with sweeping victories on GOP turf — The Christian Science Monitor

SpaceX plans to build its own nationwide cell network — Axios

Palantir loses its wow factor — Axios

New Albany’s claim to cake fame: Sugaree’s Bakery - Magnolia Tribune

Ilhan Omar: “Trump Has an Unhealthy and Creepy Obsession With Me” | The Nation

Angoulême returns in January as ' Angoulême Bande Dessinée ,' under new directors , after the 2026 edition was scrapped amid accusations against its former organizers . Source

My Chemical Romance's 2006 album lost its first chart race, then waited two decades — the longest wait ever — for its anniversary reissue to take the top spot. Source

A 115-million-year-old Brazilian fossil shows structures that look like red blood cells , plus chemical traces of heme — not Jurassic Park , but a remarkable echo of ancient biology. Source

Marvell is buying optical maker Lumentum in one of the largest tech deals ever — a sign that moving data with light, not just copper, is now central to the AI buildout . Source

More than 57 million ballots were already cast before today, and now the rest of the country votes on all 435 House seats , 35 Senate seats , and 36 governorships . Source

Does Tehran want the bomb? Some in DC say war has shifted Iran's thinking. — The Christian Science Monitor

Exclusive: Meet "sovereign agents," AI that keeps itself alive — Axios

AI debt: Can't stop, won't stop — Axios

After talks collapsed in August, Trump and Carney both sounded upbeat Sunday, with negotiators set to work in the coming weeks. Source

Nintendo declared a new annual holiday for its tiny plant creatures — because 11.1 looks like three Pikmin standing in a row. Source

Marty Erlichman , who discovered Barbra Streisand and managed her career for six decades, has died at 97. Source

Google's Suncatcher satellite ran its first AI prompt in orbit and answered with a poem — a small test, but a real step toward data centers in space. Source

Southwest flash floods : Pagosa Springs and Sedona under evacuation orders as the San Juan River threatens a crest beyond its historic 1911 flood . Source

EPA watchdog launches audit of agency's AI practices — The Christian Science Monitor

Apple's iPhone Duo offers a glimpse of the future — Axios

Marvell and Lumentum to merge in $115 billion blockbuster — Axios

Biloxi MS Breaking News, Sports & Crime | Biloxi Sun Herald

Democrats Show Strength in Final Days of Race for the Senate, New Polls Find - The New York Times

Nashville chef's date night with football scout turns deadly

A new study finds children are turning to AI with questi ons about peopl e — not just homework. Says something about where trust is heading.

ACA open enrollment is here, with bench mark prem iums up about 13%. If you buy your own coverage, this is the number to watch.

Early voting has already topped 51 mi llion. Whatever the outcome, that's a turnout story in itself.

The first Olympic event e ver held on African soil . Long overdue, and worth marking.

An expansion team winning it all in year two, in the first Game 7 a WNBA Finals has ever seen. That's a hell of a story.

Technology is reshaping Chinese farms – and boosting its national security — The Christian Science Monitor

Behind the Curtain: OpenAI's post-election power play — Axios

  Judge tosses Trump lawsuit against WSJ, Murdoch over Epstein story — Axios