"After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority," writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. "As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers." According to the New York Times, the administration has now begun accepting refund requests, "surrendering its prized source of revenue -- plus interest." From the report: For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president's trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers. By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs.

In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court's ruling. But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump's policies -- including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought -- are not able to apply for direct relief.

The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout. Many business owners said they weren't sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump's stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds. The money will mostly go to importers and companies, since they were the ones that directly paid the tariffs. While individual refunds with interest could take around 60 to 90 days to process, the overall effort will probably move much more slowly because of how large and complicated it will be.

There are also legal questions around whether companies would have to pass any of that money on to consumers. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo commented: "This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and not pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels. You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal," one of the 22 points states. "It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

The book is billed as "a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality," and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: "Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public"; "National service should be a universal duty"; "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone"; and "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive."

The statement criticizes the West's resistance to "defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity," as well as the treatment of billionaires and the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surprising frenzy on Wall Street, where shares of Allbirds soared 582% last Wednesday before dropping the next day. [...] Of course, the absurdity of Allbirds' situation echoed familiar Silicon Valley tropes -- from the endless startup pivots of the 2010s to the more recent boom-and-bust cycles of arbitrarily valued crypto coins. But it immediately reminded me of the marketing ploys of the dot-com crash. After all, some of the more iconic fails ended up being retailers such as Pets.com, Webvan, etc., riding the web wave with little to show for it beyond terrible margins.

One particular comparison from that period stands out as relevant to Allbirds: Zap.com. The holding company behind it, Zapata Corp., had a long and convoluted history, but was essentially selling fish-oil products by the time it decided to reinvent itself as an internet portal. It amassed a variety of web properties -- in media, e-commerce, gaming and so on -- and even once tried to acquire the search engine Excite. Spoiler alert: Zap flopped. Jen Heck, then a young employee at one of Zap's up-and-coming portfolio entities, remembers how quickly the hype of that web 1.0 turned to hell. As absurd as Zapata's pivot sounds today, it seemed feasible during the excitement of the internet revolution. "We went from like, 'Wow, this life thing is just so easy,' to it all ending so suddenly," Heck recalls. The ones who survived that tech bubble, she says, actually had differentiated products and the right creative thinkers building them -- and weren't just cynically jumping on the latest hot trend. "'Internet' was the magic word then, and 'AI' is the magic word now," Heck says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Installation and pre-approval without consent looks dubious under EU law

One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic's Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors' applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent.…

De Franse autoriteiten onderzoeken onder meer de seksuele beelden die gebruikers via Grok kunnen genereren. Musk noemde het onderzoek eerder „achterlijk”.

Het Amerikaanse tijdschrift publiceerde vrijdag een uitgebreid artikel over onder meer het alcoholgebruik van Patel, dat mogelijk een gevaar voor de nationale veiligheid zou vormen. Patel eist een schadevergoeding van 250 miljoen dollar.

Salmon exposed to cocaine swim farther and behave differently than unexposed fish, according to the first study to observe the effects of cocaine on fish in the wild rather than a laboratory setting.

Many waterways around the world are contaminated with a host of legal and illegal substances that are consumed by humans and then excreted into sewage systems. As global demand for cocaine skyrockets, traces of the drug—including its main metabolite, benzoylecgonine—are flowing into lakes and rivers where they can be absorbed by wildlife, such as Atlantic salmon.

Previous research in laboratory conditions has already linked cocaine exposure to behavioral changes in aquatic species, but this connection has never been explored in fish in the wild. Now, scientists have demonstrated that cocaine and benzoylecgonine “can accumulate in the brains of exposed Atlantic salmon—an ecologically and economically important species of high conservation concern—and disrupt the movement and space use of these fish in the wild,” according to a study published on Monday in Current Biology.

“We were motivated by a major gap in the scientific literature: almost everything that was known about the impacts of cocaine pollution on animal behaviour relies on data that has been collected in laboratory settings,” said Michael Bertram, an author of the study and an associate professor in the department of wildlife, fish, and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in an email to 404 Media. 

“We wanted to know whether environmentally realistic exposure to cocaine and its major metabolite, benzoylecgonine, actually changes how fish move in the wild under real ecological and environmental conditions,” he continued.

To fill this knowledge gap, Bertram and his colleagues obtained more than a hundred Atlantic salmon “smolts”—the term for young fish—that were raised in a hatchery until they were two years old. The team divided them into three groups of 35 fish each and equipped every fish with an implant and tracking tags. The “cocaine group” received a slow-release chemical implant of cocaine, the “metabolite group” received a slow-release benzoylecgonine implant, and a third “control group” carried a dummy implant with no chemicals.  

The three groups were released simultaneously on April 12, 2022 at the same site on the south-western side of Lake Vättern in Sweden, alongside 200 other smolts that were not involved in this experiment. Over the course of roughly two months, the exposed groups moved much more than the control group, especially the metabolite group; they traveled 1.9 times farther per week than the unexposed smolts.

“We expected an effect of contaminant exposure on the movement of salmon, but the scale of the changes seen still surprised us,” Bertram said. “The strongest response was close to a two-fold increase in movement, and the most unexpected result was that benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine, produced the clearest effect rather than cocaine itself.”

Indeed, the study found that the metabolite group swam almost nine miles farther per week than the control week in the final two weeks of the 8-week experiment, whereas the control group was more settled down by that point.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that environmental levels of a cocaine metabolite that is commonly found in aquatic ecosystems can alter the space use and swimming activity of fish in the wild,” the team said in the study. 

It’s not clear why the metabolite group was so restless, given that benzoylecgonine is considered psychoactively inactive in humans. The compound is a long-lived byproduct of cocaine made by the liver and excreted in urine, which makes it the easiest biomarker to look for in a typical drug test. The possibility that this metabolite may have a greater impact on some species in the wild is disturbing, in part because it is frequently found in higher concentrations in natural environments than its parent compound (cocaine).

“The results suggest that benzoylecgonine may be more biologically important than it is often assumed to be,” Bertram said. “Our findings raise new questions about whether metabolites can sometimes be as disruptive as, or even more disruptive than, the parent compound in aquatic wildlife.”

The team emphasized that much more research is required to understand the pressures that cocaine and other substances might be introducing both to individual species and to whole ecosystems. 

“The next steps are to work out the mechanisms by which cocaine and its metabolite disrupt behaviour and movement in fish in the wild, test how general this effect is across other species and systems, and use higher-resolution tracking to see whether these movement changes affect predation risk, migration, reproduction, or survival,” Bertram said. “That is really the key question now: not just whether behaviour changes, but what those changes mean ecologically.”

For example, this particular study focused on hatchery-raised smolts that were released into the wild, but future studies could test out the effects of these contaminants on fully wild populations as well, which have their own unique behavioral characteristics. Unraveling the effects of these human-sourced substances is even more urgent given that the global use of illicit drugs increased by roughly 20 percent over the last decade, suggesting that “the environmental impact of these substances is likely to grow,” according to the study.

“The behaviour and movement of wildlife underpin habitat use, feeding, predator exposure, and population connectivity, so altering these processes could have wider consequences for food webs and population dynamics,” Bertram concluded. “For species already under pressure, an added stressor like this could be highly detrimental, although the long-term effects on fisheries and ecosystems still need to be tested directly.”

Criminals paid on behalf of Iran are believed to be behind attacks against Jewish targets, say detectives

Detectives are investigating whether the series of arson attacks in London were planned for weeks with suspects carrying out reconnaissance on the Jewish targets to be firebombed.

The series of attacks against synagogues and other Jewish targets, as well as one premises linked to Iranian dissidents, are believed to be carried out by criminals paid on behalf of Iran, police said.

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Musician charged after the dismembered and decomposing body of Celeste Rivas Hernandez found in abandoned Tesla

The singer D4vd has been charged with the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, the teenage girl whose dismembered and decomposed body was found in the artist’s apparently abandoned Tesla in September.

The Los Angeles county district attorney’s office said the 21-year-old, whose legal name is David Burke, was charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Rivas Hernandez, who was reported missing by her family in 2024, when she was 13. Authorities say she was 14 when she died.

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ANKARA (ANP/AFP) - Turkije gaat de vuurwapenwetgeving aanscherpen na de schietpartijen op twee scholen in het land. Het gaat volgens president Recep Tayyip Erdogan onder meer om het beperken van vuurwapenbezit en hogere straffen voor mensen die hun wapens niet goed opbergen.

Hij beloofde de maatregelen na de wekelijkse kabinetsvergadering. Het vuurwapengeweld op de scholen heeft geleid tot zorgen in het land waar massaschietpartijen zelden voorkomen. In Turkije gelden al strenge vuurwapenwetten, bijvoorbeeld met betrekking tot vergunningen en controles.

Een 14-jarige jongen doodde woensdag acht medeleerlingen en een docent, voordat hij zelf omkwam. Hij had vijf vuurwapens bij zich. De jongen was de zoon van een oud-politiemedewerker, die nadien is opgepakt. Een dag eerder vond op een andere school ook een schietpartij plaats. Een oud-leerling verwondde zestien personen voordat hij zelfmoord pleegde.

MÜNCHEN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Het Duitse industriële concern Siemens waarschuwt dat de EU ernstig achterop raakt in de race rond kunstmatige intelligentie. Het concern zegt dat Brussel ingrijpende verbeteringen moet doorvoeren om het gebruik van de technologie te versnellen.

Topman Roland Busch stelt dat Siemens AI-investeringen liever in de Verenigde Staten en China doet als de EU de regels niet versoepelt. De huidige Europese regels vindt hij te streng en zorgen voor onnodige bureaucratie. "Ik kan mijn aandeelhouders niet uitleggen waarom ik geld investeer in een omgeving waarin ik word afgeremd", zei hij.

Blijven verbeteringen uit, dan verplaatsen groei en vooruitgang zich volgens hem naar elders en neemt onze afhankelijkheid van buiten Europa toe. Volgens Busch moet Brussel zowel de ontwikkeling als de implementatie van AI in bedrijven beter ondersteunen.

Siemens is een van de grootste en invloedrijkste industriële technologiebedrijven ter wereld.

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Dusk, Litchfield Park Road, Northern Territory, Australia

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Dusk, Litchfield Park Road, Northern Territory, Australia

Ghost world, Yuta Arima

City prosecutor Marcus McDowell said it wasn't a free speech case but argued "no one has a Constitutional right to dress up as an erect penis and stand on the side of the road."

He called Gamble's husband as a witness to testify that he had withdrawn bail money before they attended the protest, as if she knew she was going to break the law in advance.

"I always make sure we got bail money on us," Larry Fletcher responded, to laughter from the gallery. "I have bail money on me now. Whenever there are this many cops around I have bail money on me."

There were no fewer than 16 uniformed police officers standing around the perimeter of the courtroom. [...]

Outside the courtroom, Mary Kay Smith was dressed up in an eggplant costume waving a "NO KINGS - NO DICK-TATORS" sign. "I am here for the Constitution," she said. "The arrest was violent, abusive and uncalled for. It was not even civilized behavior."

Shelly Welch was standing alongside Smith, with a sign depicting a half-peeled banana with a bite taken. "FREE SPEECH SHOULDN'T BE HARD TO SWALLOW," it read.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

At Long Last, InfoWars Is Ours:

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you'll die if you don't buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

Previously, previously.

FD: Voor sommige kunstenaars is ondernemerschap geen vies woord meer [interview Anook Cléonne, Vouch]

Ho. Stop en wacht. Voordat u in het medicijnkastje gaat ritselen ter voorbereiding op een gezellig avondje met man- of vrouwlief even aandacht voor het volgende: De NVWA waarschuwt voor GEVAARLIJKE STOFFEN in 'libidoverhogende middelen'. Het gaat daarbij om de online verkrijgbare lustopwekkers, zeg maar erectiepillen voor mensen die geen Viagra kunnen krijgen en geen Kamagra willen kopen op de zwarte markt, waarvan wij altijd dachten dat het een soort homeopathisch verdunde afrodisiaca waren zonder enig effect. MAAR. De middelen van LibiForMe, Mr Stiff, Night Longer Mixed Herbal Blend en Ayibogan Natural zijn dus GEVAARLIJK volgens de NVWA, want wat blijkt daar dus in te zitten?? Sildenafil, tadalafil en morphardenafil; Chemische stoffen waar je EEN STIJVE van krijgt. HOE DURVEN ZE!! NVWA, dank voor de waarschuwing.

Libidoverhogend plaatje zonder gevaarlijke stoffen

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in 2004 truck driver Joe Macken started making a model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He then spent the next twenty years creating a model of all of New York's five boroughs and more, including every building, street and bridge, now on display at the Museum of the City of New York.