Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted Dwight Eisenhower's 30-inch globe—a priceless World War II artifact—moved into his office. The recolation was botched, reports the Washingon Post, which received photos of the now-ruined antique. Hegseth's aides dropped it after deciding to do it themselves after they "eschewed the services of specialist movers."

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A man accused of stealing a flamingo was convicted on two counts of animal cruelty crime yesterday in Las Vegas. Mitchell Fairbarn, 34, "appeared emotionless" in court after jurors deliberated for several hours. In closing arguments, prosecutors made a clear distinction between the two charges: "one stems from what happened in the habitat while the second is for what happened in the hotel." — Read the rest

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The remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro, Kiribati, has been a candidate for the aviator's final resting place since she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared en route to Howland Island, 400 miles to the north, on July 2, 1937. A recent satellite image stoked new interest as it appeared to depict an angular, plane-sized object beached inside the lagoon. — Read the rest

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Kiwibank unveiled its new mascot Buck this year, hoping the adorable cartoon sheep would convince people to move their accounts there. Now the New Zealand-based bank is struggling to contain Buck's success as consumers make deposits of a different kind. — Read the rest

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A man who broke into a tech company in Tempe, Arizona, made off with what he "likely" thought were Apple computers. But the Mac Mini boxes were empty, and he left the computers on the desks there.

"I come in, the window was smashed to pieces," employee Curran Rose told Fox 10 news in Phoenix. — Read the rest

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No longer will Americans have to go without delicious and inexpensive industrial dyes in their foodstuffs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly to allow additives to be added to food without safety review so long as they aren't proven to be carcinogenic and introduced at levels below 0.5 parts per billion. — Read the rest

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Doom, the classic first-person shooter, brought PCs to their knees in 1993. But now it runs on toothbrushes and earbuds and has even been implemented on the Commodore 64. Now it has been ported to SQL, the structured query language used by many relational databases. — Read the rest

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AI detection is a difficult job, made worse for everyone by it being such a delicious ingredient in academic snake oil. But one service has clearly outperformed the others in tests: Pangram. It went beyond obvious characteristics of LLM output such as perplexity and ngram distance, training its own classifiers on large collections of human text and generative imitations. — Read the rest

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