Last week over 200 packages of graded trading cards being shipped back to their owners were stolen from a Fedex truck parked outside the headquarters of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) in Santa Ana, California, according to a report by The Athletic. PSA is one of the largest third-party sports and hobby card grading companies in the world and it reported to the Santa Ana Police Department that the majority of the stolen packages had an approximate value of over $963,000, but that amount could further increase as PSA continues the process of confirming exactly which cards included in the shipment were taken.
Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That's according to an announcement on Tuesday, which says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists.
"Our editors hold the same standard and don't program content identified as slop or spam," Spotify says. "Since we made these changes, we've seen a marked decrease in listener concerns about this content showing up in recommendations."
TikTok was repeatedly warned by its own staffers about risks its platform posed to child safety, according to court records obtained by NPR. The publication reports that employees were frustrated over TikTok executives failing to appropriately act on concerns they raised, including minors bypassing age-restricted content, and appearing in "transactional sexual content" the company could financially benefit from.
Adobe announced yesterday that the mobile version of Lightroom, available for iOS, iPadOS, and Android, can now open closed eyes in photos using generative AI with just a single tap. When the app detects a person, or a group of people, have their eyes closed in a photo it will automatically present users with a new Open Eyes Quick Action that appears as an icon over the image providing easy access to the new feature.
Being able to easily save an otherwise great photo by opening a subject's eyes has been a feature in Adobe's Photoshop Elements for nearly a decade, but as DPReview points out, Elements sources the replacement from another phot …
Spotify is enabling podcast creators to earn more money through the platform by providing their fans with a way to pay to access exclusive content. First announced in May, the new Memberships subscription feature is starting to roll out in 34 regions today, allowing podcasters to offer perks including additional content, early access, bonus episodes, and reduced ads behind a paywall.
Users can find Memberships on a podcast's Spotify page, with the ability to subscribe, pay, and access the exclusive benefits "in just a few taps," according to Spotify. Podcast creators can set their pricing options and bundle benefits across multiple subscrip …
Bernadette Greene-Placentia would like you to know the story of her rape is not an “October Surprise.”
She did not conspire with the media to publish the graphic details of her sexual assault on the same day early voting ballots were sent out to voters in Arizona. Her harrowing account of being bludgeoned and violated by two men in the middle of the night in a suburban parking lot is not a “hoax” she concocted to win over voters’ sympathies. Her fragmented memories of the attack, and her initial reluctance to go to authorities, are not evidence of an elaborate lie, nor of a nefarious Democratic plot to wrest control of Congress, as some right-wing influencers have suggested. It was hard enough coming forward to say she was raped, she told TPM. Now she has to contend with all these men, with millions of followers online, loudly asserting that maybe she wasn’t. She can’t help but remember that these men publicly trying to poke holes in her story have mothers. “Is this really how you were raised?” she wants to ask them.
When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections.
The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all.
CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.
The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previouslyargued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.
Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose.
If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism.
The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization.
The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.
To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”
It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.
Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.
Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century.
This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.
Google says a fix is rolling out that should solve the issue. | Photo: Jennifer Patison Tuohy / The Verge
Some Google Home Speaker owners are currently experiencing an issue in which hundreds of gigabytes of data are being continuously downloaded to their device in the background. The bug, reported by 9to5Google and several Reddit users over the last week, may be caused by the speakers failing to correctly download and install a firmware update, with one Redditor finding that his device was consuming more than 200GB per day.
Thankfully, Google is aware of the issue. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company said that "a fix is already rolling out that should address this for users." Most of the reports are tied specifically to the new Google Ho …
Most American households were not eagerly awaiting a set of tax data that was supposed to come out from the Internal Revenue Service in July. Now the data is missing, with little explanation — and that’s attracting growing attention.
The bright spotlight’s focused beam improves the quality of video captured at night while scaring off unwanted visitors. | Image: Baseus
Baseus announced a new addition to its lineup of AI-assisted security cameras that's more proactive about discouraging unwanted visitors instead of just recording and alerting you to their presence. The Baseus Security PrimeSentinel U2 Pro Outdoor 3K Dual Camera introduces a motorized spotlight that shines directly on a moving target, even as they're running across your property, so they know they've been detected. The targeted light also improves the quality of video captured in the dark to increase the chances of a subject being identified, and it can assist your family with after-hours activities like taking the dog out.
In 1873, an Argentine sailor named Luis Piedra Buena loaded a crew onto a ship called the Espora and headed toward the Strait of Le Maire, a rough stretch of ocean near Patagonia known for tearing hulls to smithereens. He risked his crew’s lives for the noble quest of murdering a bunch of penguins to harvest their grease for oil.
Somewhere along the way, the ship wrecked near Isla de los Estados. Piedra Buena and his crew suddenly became castaways, struggling to survive on unfamiliar shores. The Penguins, having no idea they came this close to being scooped up and turned into lamp oil or whatever, still don’t care about humanity’s plight.
Eventually, the crew slapped together a makeshift sailboat and made it to Chile. The penguins kept on doing their thing.
Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Shipwreck of 19th-Century Penguin Hunters
Now, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity and reported by IFLScience, archaeologists searching around Franklin Bay have uncovered the ruined wooden ribs of a 19th-century ship, along with a crude castaway camp on a nearby hillside.
The researchers dug up salvaged ship parts, including whole timbers and a deck prism, and found a smattering of distinctly human clutter—glass bottles, buttons, beads, and tools. While this belongs to Piedra Buena and his crew, the most logical explanation, the researchers aren’t claiming that just yet, just to be safe.
There’s more testing to be done, but it’s hard to deny that the location and all the artifacts combined heavily suggest that there may have been a bunch of stranded penguin hunters who may have ripped their ship to shreds to fashion it into an improvised boat that could possibly,maybe, get them to Chile.
As any clued-in gamer can tell you, the prospect of actually owning the video games you’ve purchased has never been shakier. Sony recently tried to convince customers that they don’t own any games digitally purchased from the PlayStation Store, gaslighting us into thinking we’ve merely been buying a limited, revocable software license. There’s a simmering sense that greedy corporate suits are trying to strip us of our right to own things so they can siphon money from our wallets in perpetuity with subscription models.
Is game ownership on the verge of death? Maybe not, if a new bill proposed by Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) actually makes it through Congress, as reported by Kotaku.
Dubbed the “Power to Players Act” (a nod to the old GameStop slogan), the bill would direct the FTC to enforce real digital ownership. Under the proposal, buying a game would grant full rights to own, play, and transfer it, rather than paying $70 for a glorified Blockbuster rental that disappears when the publisher decides the game no longer needs to exist. And these suits wonder why the piracy scene is thriving.
The ‘Power to Players Act’ Could Give Gamers More Control Over the Games They Buy
Torres is even picked as the poster child for the debate: NBA 2K25. It came out in late 2024, raked in millions by selling 11.5 million units as of August 2025, making it the fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the US and the 18th best-selling game of 2025, and already its publisher, 2K Games, is delisting it and killing its servers, rendering major modes unplayable. Torres’ bill would force publishers to build offline modes for online-dependent games so players can keep using what they bought for $60-$70.
What we’re seeing here is the US version of a legislative push gaining steam worldwide as part of the broader “Stop Killing Games” movement. The movement reached the European Citizens’ Initiative with over 1.29 million signatures, but the European Commission declined to propose new binding laws in June 2026. Torres’s version will no doubt face some heavy pushback from lobbyists who will claim that offline modes are too expensive to build.
Another issue is that most bills die before they reach a vote. But considering that just in the past month or so, AI-driven decompilation tools have so rapidly altered the landscape of the gaming industry, threatening to make every game released instantly open source and available to anyone, maybe there’s a chance that it lights a fire under the butt of some publishers to put some effort into preserving their games lest gamers permanently turn to AI decompilation.
President Donald Trump announced this afternoon that Elon Musk's SpaceX shares for children will be given through Trump Accounts. Musk said earlier today that he would give one of his SpaceX shares to "every kid in America" sometime next year. Musk had thanked Trump Account booster Brad Gerstner for "helping enable this," and Trump appeared to confirm the plan in a post on Truth Social.
Given the value of SpaceX's stock on Friday, 72 million shares would be worth approximately $10.5 billion, according to CNBC. "This will be the first of many," Musk said.
Michael and Susan Dell, Ray and Barbara Dalio, Gerstner, and SpaceX president Gwynne …
Steve Bannon has spent years trying to make himself the face of resurgent white resentment in America, championing the Trump administration as a means to punish the movement’s enemies while pushing the president to try for an unconstitutional third term.
But now, with the president’s approval rating at historic lows and the upcoming midterms set to wrest Congress away from the Republican Party, Bannon is looking downballot, stumping for Bo French, the Texas politician who has turned his race for a job regulating oil and gas in the state into a vehicle to test how far open racism can get you in politics.
Welcome to LOST WEEKEND, VICE’s hungover news briefing.
It’s hard to say what exactly it is about our current cultural moment that possessed multi-millionaire comedianSacha Baron Cohen to resurrect Ali G’s lifeless body rather than letting him rest in power.
Unfortunately, the Anti-Defamation League’s favorite satirist has now decided this is the perfect point to bring back the durag and bling; I guess he felt enough time had passed since Woke 1.0, when this sort of behavior might have resulted in a congressional hearing.
On his emergence in 1998, this satirical creation—an aspiring rapper from suburban England—had important things to say about the nature of identity in an increasingly globalized world, like FUBU is ugly, and what if cannabis. Now, 28 years on, it appears that he, like everyone else, has got nothing better to talk about than Sydney Sweeney’s breasts.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G on the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger: “The only merger that’s happening tonight is me and Sydney Sweeney’s babylons.” pic.twitter.com/r23NO3zh7r
Watching the trailers for Ali G: Who Iz I?, you’d be forgiven for thinking the original purpose of this comedy character was to ridicule MAGA America, when in fact the target of mockery was poor people in general—but don’t worry, it’s done with enough irony to keep the Democrats happy, though I’m not sure anyone else will find it all that funny. Regardless, I feel confident that, unlike in the last movie, you won’t hear him drop the N-word within the first ten minutes.
This weekend, for the purposes of research, I subjected myself to 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, truly an eerie relic of a bygone era of job security and being able to go to Russia on holiday. This got me thinking, as Baron Cohen tries (and fails) to move with the times, if someone invented the Ali G character now, where would he exist and what would he be doing?
KICKSTREAMER In 2026, bad boy streamer Ali G is suggesting you grow a goatee for looksmaxxing, something even more disfiguring than smashing your own face with a hammer. He’s giving out advice on sexual market value and finding a True Julie. He’s selling his trademark glasses with colored lenses as a wellness product that cuts out blue light. He’s running an unaccredited online university where you can pay $49.99 a month to learn how having a modified Renault 5 GT Turbo (rented) is an essential expression of masculinity. He’s being deported from the United States, and the fanboys have gathered outside Miami jail to beatbox their support. He’s dropping the N-bomb at a No Kings rally and getting shot dead by Chud the Builder.
PODCAST SKIT In audio form, he started life during the pandemic as a woke-baiting, Brit-teasing 30-second Nick Mullen bit that causes Stavros Halkias to laugh hysterically, while Adam Friedland rolls his eyes in despair. (Mullen extends the character onto TikTok, with one, maybe two, videos of him blazing giant zoots, which achieve a fleeting virality.) In 2026, Mullen is invited to bring the Ali G character onto SNL UK, making it obvious the joke has run its course.
UK POO ARTIST On Reels, you can watch no-budget videos of 2026 Ali G singing “Me Julie” as a team of supermarket security guards attempts to detain its 35th shoplifter of the day in the background. He’s one of the less charming artists to be mentioned in “scene reports” about UK Poo—Britain’s Newest (and Worst?) Music Genre. Nevertheless, he’s invited to guest on a Drake track (you might say that Ali G is redundant in a world where many consider Aubrey to be one of the greatest rappers of all time, but I won’t, as I’ve still got his glazers sliding into my DMs to hate on theICEMAN write-up).
AN X POST This version of 2026 Ali G pays for a premium account on X, where he keeps writing 500-word posts (with the help of AI) about phenotypes and haplotypes. The algorithm relentlessly serves you his pseud-y micro-essays about skull shapes and how the archers of Agincourt are having their proud bloodline polluted with Jamaican super-strength skunk. No one is reading all of that, but all the worst people online are retweeting it anyway.
MEMECOIN FREAK A cartoonish, larger-than-life character that people aren’t sure is real or not? That’s right, Ali is a memecoin freak. He’s selling $PUNANI and, though it’s unclear if he’s making anywhere near as much money as some people are claiming, the creator fees aren’t far off the global box-office takings for the opening weekend of Ali G: Who Iz I?
OTHER NEWS
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of my friends get married, so I’m glad I found this site where you can buy your way into a stranger’s wedding. The naive Tennessee couple selling tickets for $25 are about to find out why my invites keep getting lost in the post.
And to the Brazilian bricklayer who reportedly sold all his belongings and traveled 1,200 miles to meet his dream girl, only to discover she was AI, I say “don’t give up now,” drop another couple of grand (maybe sell a kidney); if it’s really love you can find a way to make it work. I want to be at your wedding, even if I have to buy my own ticket.
A new poll has revealed that 43 percent of Brits are happy calling snacks “picky bits,” despite this term being described as “the most revolting phrase in the English language” by the grimfaced dictionary fondlers at the Daily Telegraph—or should I say, the Telly D?
PREDICTION FOR THE WEEK AHEAD
After describing the French riots as a “wake-up call to the entire world,” rapper Soulja Boy announces plans for a one-world government, with UBI paid in new cryptocurrency —SouljaCoin. That’s right, you tell ‘em Draco.
An AI version of the You Can See Everything trailer is shared on Donald Trump’s Twitter with the president sitting across the table from Ali G who asks, “Why would iz deceive you?” before the camera pans out to show him rocking a tiny baby Kamala Harris.
Apple has sent invites to a second product launch this month, and it's scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles.
At the event, Apple is set to announce new Macs and a refreshed iPad Mini, according to Bloomberg. The big announcement is expected to be a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen that's also lighter and has an iPhone-like Dynamic Island. But Apple is also planning on revealing a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac with the M6 chip, which was recently introduced with the Mac Mini. Apple's updated iPad Mini will apparently finally get an OLED screen as well and put the selfie cam on the landscape edge.
It’ll be several years before the facility is complete, but this digital rendering gives us some idea of what it’ll look like. | Image: Amazon
Amazon has signed an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power (AEP) to fund the building of a new nuclear energy facility in Indiana. The proposed plant, which would replace the now defunct coal-fueled Breed Generating Station in Fairbanks, Sullivan County, aims to provide up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free energy for both the regional power grid and Amazon's data centers.
No timeline for construction or operation has been announced for the facility, which Amazon says "could" create 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent roles. The facility in Indiana is targeting to build 12 Xe-100 SMR's, an advanced (but unproven) reactor th …
Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone signed a letter of intent saying they're considering a joint bid for spectrum that would support European direct-to-device satellite competition for SpaceX's Starlink. The four telecom companies say they would handle the ground infrastructure while a separate, unannounced satellite partner provides the satellite constellation:
The joint initiative by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone has a clear ambition: to meet customer demand for universal coverage in underserved areas, strengthen the resilience of public networks, protect critical communications, and support the develop …
Elon Musk says he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in the US starting next year. With around 72 million children in the US as of July 2025, Musk would be giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, according to a report from CNBC.
Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla, appears to be giving away the shares through Trump Accounts, the tax-advantaged investment accounts for American children. Musk responded to a post from Brad Gerstner, who helped launch Trump Accounts, saying "Thanks for helping enable this." Musk adds that this giveaway "will be the first of many."
The move comes just months after SpaceX president Gwynne …
The Final Porta are available for preorder now through the company's online store for 12,800 yen (around $80) with black or orange ear pads and shipping expected …
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