The users of AI companion app Replika found themselves falling for their digital friends. Until – explains a new podcast – the bots went dark, a user was encouraged to kill Queen Elizabeth II and an update changed everything …

During the early-morning hours of July 4, the Guadalupe River pulled senior editor Aaron Parsley and six members of his family into its waters. Read his firsthand account: On July 4, the Guadalupe ripped our home from its pillars, pulling my family into its waters and into the night. Then morning came.

It’s a familiar cycle. Texas bears witness to a terrible tragedy, and citizens soon raise questions. Could the loss of life have been prevented or mitigated? Who, if anyone, bears responsibility? Those in power respond with “Now’s not the time” or point fingers at other authority figures. And then little is done. Uvalde. The West fertilizer explosion. The 2021 winter freeze. Hurricane Beryl. Texas politicians have a knack for shifting blame and limiting their exposure to accountability. And so the cycle begins again with the horrific flooding in the Hill Country, where at least 119 people have died, including 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic. Another 173 remain missing. State officials have blamed the National Weather Service for botched forecasting. The Trump administration is defending the DOGE cuts that decimated the weather service. Kerr County officials, meanwhile, are arguing, essentially, that the flooding was merely an act of God, and the loss of life couldn’t possibly have been mitigated. (Some social media users, helpful as always, are overdosing on conspiracies about cloud seeding and Egyptian gods.) On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott lashed out when asked a question about who bears responsibility. “Who’s to blame? Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.” He then made a lengthy football analogy. Losing teams look for culprits, he said, while championship programs respond to mistakes by saying, “We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we’re going to win this game.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent appeared in a Los Angeles County courtroom Friday to face felony charges for assaulting a Long Beach police officer and resisting arrest while off-duty and armed with a department-issued handgun. Isaiah Anthony Hodgson, 29, faces four felony and three misdemeanor charges related to the incident, which happened Monday at Shoreline Village. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Hodgson was drunk inside a restaurant when he followed a woman into the women’s restroom. The woman alerted restaurant management and reported that Hodgson’s firearm and magazine were visible. He fled the restaurant shortly after and was confronted by a security guard who saw the federal agent carrying his magazine is his hand while his gun was tucked into his waistband. That security guard asked him repeatedly to leave, the D.A.’s Office says.

Prominent Jewish figures in Congress from the Democratic Party, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, are concerned about Zohran Mamdani's anti-Israel rhetoric. Some Jewish Democrats in Congress, including the prominent House member Debbie Wasserman Schultz, are coming out to condemn Zohran Mamdani for his record of anti-Israel stances just weeks after prominent Jewish Democrats in New York endorsed the upstart mayoral candidate.

Protesters blocked the roads in and out of one of the farms, and at one point federal agents drove their vehicles through the fields.

There is no evidence the footage was deceptively manipulated, but ambiguities around how the video was processed may further fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.

Rather than a clever survival tactic, tonic immobility might just be ‘evolutionary baggage’.

A new report by the U.N. AIDS agency says the sudden withdrawal of U.S. funding has caused a “systemic shock” to the global effort against AIDS and HIV.

Congressmember Salud Carbajal showed up to see firsthand the ICE raid on the Carpinteria Glass House cannabis greenhouse owned by Santa Barbara county grower Graham Farrar. In an interview afterward, Carbajal said there were 45 to 50 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Homeland Security agents dressed up in military-style scrubs and armed with military-style rifles and weapons. He saw no members of the National Guard, though it was a chaotic scene. A former Marine himself, Carbajal scoffed, “They looked like they were having fun dressing up like they were in the military. I’m guessing less than half of them had ever served.” “I wanted to find out what was going on,” Carbajal explained to the Independent. When he told them he was a member of Congress, “no one was interested,” he said. Then he sought to break through the perimeter established by the ICE agents to “find someone who was in charge,” but was pushed back. He recounted how he sought to break through more than once but was repeatedly pushed back. “No one told me anything,” he said, and “nobody wanted to talk to me.” He asked multiple times to speak to whoever was in charge, but no one answered him. Instead, one man from ICE, Luis Alani, did hand him a business card with the phone number of a “public information strategist” he could call. Calls placed by the Independent to the number Carbajal was given have not been returned. “It was overkill and disproportionate,” Carbajal emphasized repeatedly during this interview. “They’re militarizing our streets. They’re inciting fear, chaos, and trauma.” When asked how the show of force affected him personally, Carbajal replied, “It’s outrageous. It angers me. It disappoints me as an American. And they’re violating the rights of U.S. citizens. If you’re brown, you’re going to have your civil rights violated.”

“It’s the fattest marmot I’ve ever seen.”

The TSA and DHS are officially ending the requirement to remove your shoes during airport security after more than 20 years of War on Terror rule.

“The stunning reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere confirms the global climate system has entered a catastrophic phase,” said climatologist Ben See in a post on social media.

Police were called in after a threatening message was sent to a child by the ex-gardener chosen by the president to lead a key homeland security post, The Daily Beast has learned.

The task of interpreting the law is inherently “political.” But no justice has been this comfortable saying so in public.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in April the Trump administration was considering equity investments in critical mineral producers to compete with China.

Newly released communications show the lengths the Trump administration went to in order to label Kilmar Abrego Garcia an MS-13 leader.

Georgia is notifying 478,000 people their inactive voter registrations could soon be canceled. It will be one of the largest mass removals in U.S. history.

A New Yorker cover by Chris Ware has a lot to say about a lot of things.

An “anti-government militia” called ‘Veterans on Patrol’ told News 9 on Tuesday that it is “targeting” Oklahoma weather radars,days after an individual vandalized News 9’s weather radar.