June 20, 2026

x01 Archives

Blurb:

Modern electronics power everything from smartphones to satellites, but they all share a major limitation. Heat. Once temperatures climb above roughly 200 degrees Celsius, most devices begin to break down. For decades, this thermal barrier has been one of the toughest challenges in engineering.

Researchers at the University of Southern California now believe they have found a way past that limit.

Blurb:

Donald Trump’s ceasefire appears to be in the brink of collapse after Iran launched a series of “blatant” missile and drone attacks on Gulf neighbours. The US President had last night boasted there was no question the US had won a “total and complete victory” in the war against the Islamic Republic which America launched alongside Israel on February 28.

Trump and Washington had come under mounting pressure after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz by threatening to attack shipping. The vital waterway usually carries around 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies.

Blurb:

This week, Planned Parenthood released its 2025 annual report. In recent years, these reports have taken on additional significance. That is because congressional Republicans have demonstrated their willingness to stop federal taxpayer dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. Indeed, this year’s report should bolster pro-life efforts to defund Planned Parenthood for the upcoming fiscal year. That is because, once again, this report provides very solid evidence that Planned Parenthood continues to prioritize abortion at the expense of real health-care services.

Blurb:

Bill Gates is officially preparing to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee as Congress continues to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and powerful connections.

Gates, 70, will answer questions from members of Congress on June 10, according to multiple outlets, which note that the Microsoft cofounder is not being accused of any wrongdoing after he was named in the so-called Epstein Files.

Blurb:

The Wall Street Journal, which famously floats trial balloons for corporate behemoths, is carrying water for the poor AI companies who are so, so disliked:

OpenAI this week published a populist wish list of policy proposals that zero in on worries like job replacement and wealth concentration, floating such ideas as a four-day workweek and an AI-invested public-wealth fund distributed to citizens.

Those proposals come as its rival Anthropic has been signing partnerships and building tools for such sectors as consulting and software, where share prices have been whacked by investor worries that they will be replaced by AI. Anthropic’s efforts have helped push back up shares of tech companies including LegalZoom.com LZ 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle.

Anthropic and OpenAI are each pursuing ventures to help private equity, a big owner of companies in sectors ripe for disruption, with AI transformation. (Those efforts could also yield lucrative new business customers.)

Blurb:

We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart.

From the time I began work on AI in 2010 to now, the amount of training data that goes into frontier AI models has grown by a staggering 1 trillion times—from roughly 10¹⁴ flops (floating-point operations‚ the core unit of computation) for early systems to over 10²⁶ flops for today’s largest models. This is an explosion. Everything else in AI follows from this fact.

Blurb:

Shippers looking to revive the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz were seeking clarity on the logistics on Wednesday, while refiners inquired about new crude loadings, in response to a ceasefire deal between the U.S. ‌and Iran.

Most stranded oil and gas tankers remained inside the Gulf, LSEG shipping data showed, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the two-week ceasefire and said the U.S. would help with the traffic build-up.

Blurb:

NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are capturing the future of human spaceflight on their iPhones.

Fifty-eightyears ago, NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts photographed the famous Earthrise image. This image of our “pale blue dot,” as famed astronomer Carl Sagan referred to Earth several decades later, forever changed humanity’s relationship with both space and Earth. Today, astronauts are seeing Earth from space through a new lens: the iPhone.

 

Blurb:

Underscoring the precarity of the situation, Iranian state media announced fresh “missile and drone attacks” Wednesday on US-allied Gulf states UAE and Kuwait in retaliation for airstrikes against its oil facilities.

Kuwait said its oil facilities and power and desalination plants were damaged in “an intense wave” of strikes that lasted hours, and demanded Iran cease its attacks.

The UAE said it was intercepting Iranian attacks while Bahrain also said its capital Manama had been hit.

Blurb:

Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, on Tuesday denounced online claims that he had inappropriate relationships with young congressional staff members.

“It’s false,” he told reporters after an evening town hall at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center in Sacramento.

When asked, Swalwell said he never behaved inappropriately with female staff members or had a sexual relationship with a staff member or an intern.

Swalwell, 45, added

Blurb:

ROME — Pope Leo XIV said Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization was “truly unacceptable” and said any attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law.

In some of his strongest comments yet against the war, Leo urged Americans and other people of good will to contact their political leaders and congressional representatives to demand they reject war and work for peace.

“Today as we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable,” he said as he left his country house in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.

He was referring to Trump’s threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran fails to meet his latest deadline to strike a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Blurb:

If there is one country that can ill-afford a prolonged Strait of Hormuz closure, it is France, the Eurozone’s second-largest member country. Even before the Strait’s closure, France had unsustainable public finances. Those finances were proving difficult to correct in the context of its sclerotic economy, its fragmented politics, and its being stuck in a Euro straitjacket. The energy and fertilizer price spike resulting from the Strait’s closure will substantially exacerbate France’s public finance problem. In turn, that raises the real risk of another round of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, especially given the French government’s high dependence on external borrowing to finance its gaping budget deficit.

Blurb:

As Virginia voters take part in a closely contested redistricting referendum, Gov. Abigail Spanberger is heading toward the final tally with historically low approval numbers.

For the first time since the 1990s, a sitting Virginia governor is polling below historical norms.

According to Washington Post polling, Spanberger’s approval rating stands at 47%—13 points lower than the average approval rating for Virginia governors and below a majority.

Blurb:

Far-left activists shouted through bullhorns on Easter Sunday as part of their ongoing harassment campaign against a St. Paul, Minnesota, church that allegedly employs an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official as a minister. The Easter Sunday campaign concluded in one arrest, although a judge already threw out the charges.

Anti-ICE protesters have targeted Cities Church in the Twin Cities since January, when a mob, joined by former CNN personality Don Lemon, disrupted the church worship service at the Baptist church. The activists disrupted the service because they alleged an assistant pastor is also a local ICE official who is overseeing efforts to remove violent illegal immigrants from the area.

Blurb:

The left won’t hesitate to bend over backwards for a man who was killed after he resisted arrest and took enough fentanyl to kill a horse. You would expect, at the very least, that they would honor an innocent woman killed after obtaining refuge in this country as a result of the war in Ukraine. The problem with doing that, though, is that they would have to admit leftist “restorative justice” policies allowed a psycho with a painfully long rap sheet to enter back into society, where he then, subsequently, killed an innocent woman riding on the bus. So, rather than do the morally superior thing, the mayor of Providence has called to take down the mural honoring this victim, because he claims it is divisive.

Blurb:

“We are also aware of reports that Ms. Castillo expressed hesitancy to undergo euthanasia in her final hours, but that these indications were ignored.”

The Trump administration is set to investigate the euthanasia death of 25-year-old Noelia Castillo, who was a sexual-assault survivor. After she was placed in a group home as a teenager she was gang raped by African migrants, leading her to try to take her own life by jumping from a building. She ended up paralyzed and eventually sought suicide. Her family tried to stop her and when that failed they took legal action.

The State Department directed the US Embassy in Madrid to probe how Spanish law enforcement handled repeated sexual attacks against Castillo before her death, according to a report from the New York Post citing a leaked diplomatic cable. “We are deeply concerned by allegations that Ms. Castillo was repeatedly sexually assaulted while under state care and that no perpetrators have been brought to justice,” the cable read.

“We are also aware of reports that Ms. Castillo expressed hesitancy to undergo euthanasia in her final hours, but that these indications were ignored,” the cable added. “This case raises serious concerns about the application of Spain’s euthanasia law, particularly in cases involving psychiatric conditions and non-terminal suffering.”

Blurb:

 

This is a spectacular screw-up—and it implicates the The New York Times newsroom top to bottom. A The New York Times headline ignorantly called NATO the “North American Treaty Organization,” triggering widespread online ridicule and criticism of editorial standards. The error spread quickly on social media, with users calling it embarrassing and questioning newsroom competence. The paper acknowledged the mistake and said a correction would appear in the next print edition.

Blurb:

Critical minerals are mined all over the world but the majority of the supply ends up passing through China. For a broad range of key metals and minerals, China is either the largest miner, the dominant refiner, or both. This is true for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and many other metals and minerals that are essential to defense, energy and high-tech applications.

It is less about where ores are dug out of the ground and more about where they are turned into usable components. In other words, Chinese processing plants are essentially the gatekeepers of global supply.

Blurb:

The Israeli government instituted a policy prohibiting Christian Palestinian teachers who live in the West Bank from working in any of the 15 Christian schools in Jerusalem in a move that threatens to weaken the two-millennia presence of Christians in the Holy City.

School principals in Jerusalem recently received letters from the Israeli Ministry of Education stipulating that beginning in September they are required to only hire teachers who reside in the city and hold Israeli-issued qualifications.

The March 10 directive comes in the wake of a bill approved last July by the Education Committee of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) aimed at prohibiting Palestinian teachers who earned their degrees at institutions in the West Bank from teaching in Israel or the occupied East Jerusalem.

Blurb:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a measure into law Monday that gives him along with other Florida leaders the ability to label groups as domestic or foreign terrorist organizations and expel state university students who support them.

The law, criticized by free speech advocates, allows a top official at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to designate a group as a domestic or foreign terrorist organization, with the governor and three other members of the Florida Cabinet approving or rejecting the designation. Besides the governor, the Cabinet is made up of the state attorney general, the chief financial officer and the agriculture commissioner, all of whom are elected separately.

Blurb:

26 Christian worshippers slaughtered in Easter Sunday attacks across Nigeria.

Churches burned.
Women and children abducted.
The world stays silent.

Wholesale slaughter. Muslims butchering mon-Muslims. No news. No coverage. It’s expected. Silent affirmation and sanction of Islamic brutality.

Noticing the Muslim slaughter of Christians is ‘Islamophobic’ says the United Nations

Blurb:

The US vice-president JD Vance has just repeatedly criticised allegedly unprecedented and “disgraceful” foreign interference in the Hungarian parliamentary election, while effectively strongly endorsing Viktor Orbán to win the vote on Sunday in what critics will no doubt see as his very own interference with the country’s electoral process.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and US vice-president JD Vance hold a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/AP

Without skipping a beat, he smoothly moved from lambasting European “bureaucrats” for “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” he has ever seen (14:09) and accusing them of trying to “destroy the economy of Hungary” to saying he is “here to help him in this election campaign” and that and he was expecting him to win the vote on Sunday (14:26).

Lavishing praise on the embattled prime minister, he argued that he sees in Orbán someone who “ferociously advocated” for his country, “stands up for the values of western civilisation” (14:04), and is generally right on all sorts of things from energy (14:01) to Ukraine (14:05, 14:15).