Category: Tech

• A French warship intercepted at least three Houthi ballistic missiles on Thursday.
• Intense footage shows the moment a surface-to-air missile launched and hit one of the threats.
• It marks the latest engagement between Western navies and the Houthis.

Newly released footage from a French frigate operating in the southern Red Sea shows the warship shooting down a Houthi ballistic missile on Thursday. 

The frigate, which is deployed to the region as part of the European Union security mission Operation Aspides, destroyed three ballistic missiles during the incident, marking one of the latest engagements between Western navies and the Iran-backed Houthis. 

In the video, shared to social media by the French military, sailors can be seen working on the bridge. A surface-to-air missile is then fired from a launcher. A short time later, it intercepts a target in the air. 

France is one of several countries working alongside the US Navy to protect international shipping lanes from the Houthis, who have spent months relentlessly firing drones and missiles at vessels sailing off the coast of Yemen.  

Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of US Central Command, or CENTCOM, told lawmakers on Thursday that French forces destroyed two Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles earlier in the day, likely referencing this incident, which at the time had yet to be confirmed by Paris. 

The Houthis started firing anti-ship ballistic missiles at the end of 2023, marking the first time that such weapons have been used in combat. The rebels have since fired these missiles regularly, recently using them to sink their first vessel and stage their first fatal attack — both occurred within the past few weeks.

Beyond anti-ship ballistic missiles, the Houthis have also launched anti-ship cruise missiles, one-way attack drones, and unmanned surface vehicles, or USVs, which are essentially drone boats packed with explosives.

While the Houthis have not managed to hit US or coalition warships, engagements between the two sides are happening on a near-daily basis.

Alongside the French action on Thursday, for example, German and American forces each destroyed a Houthi drone boat, Kurilla said during testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.  

US forces also routinely conduct preemptive strikes in Yemen, destroying Houthi missiles and drones before the rebels have a chance to launch them into the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden.

Meanwhile, the EU’s Operation Aspides — which has now been active for more than a month — said on Wednesday that a French helicopter shot down a Houthi drone that posed a threat to commercial ships.

“A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents,” Trump’s team wrote.

Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly pushed that their claimed immunity shield protects the former president from criminal charges related to his conduct on and before the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Justices previously agreed to hear Trump’s case, pushing back special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the former president.

Trump’s team has claimed immunity so sweeping that it has stunned some observers.

One notable example is when D. John Sauer, one of Trump’s lawyers, refused to deny that a president could hypothetically avoid criminal prosecution for ordering Navy SEALs to assassinate a political rival. Sauer argued that the president would have to be impeached for ordering the killing first, but left the door open if Congress were to decline to bring charges against the president.

Numerous legal experts have rejected the immunity argument, pointing out that accepting such a claim would increase the power of the presidency to almost imperial standards.

Sauer, who is also listed on the Supreme Court brief, and Trump’s team have argued that the former president can’t face criminal charges related to January 6 because the US Senate did not convict him of inciting the riot during an impeachment trial.

It is worth pointing out that some Republican senators refused to convict Trump because they felt that Congress does not have the power to impeach presidents who have left office. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said at the time that the chamber’s failure to convict Trump did not mean the former president was getting off scot-free.

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “He didn’t get away with anything yet.”

Elsewhere in the Supreme Court brief, Trump’s lawyers point to examples of recent presidents whose political rivals or critics suggested they could face criminal charges. The former president’s team points to President Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich, President George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq held “weapons of mass destruction,” and President Barack Obama’s drone policy that led to the death of American citizens.

Interestingly, Trump’s team also points to conservative commentators who have argued that President Joe Biden should face charges for his immigration policy. Left unmentioned is that Trump himself has suggested that he would have Biden indicted.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case on April 25.

• An AI-generated image of a rat with a towering phallic appendage went semi-viral last month.
• The nonsense diagram appeared in a now-retracted scientific paper, published in a Frontiers journal.
• This rat is a symptom of a crisis of fakes in the career-driven business of research publishing.

This rat has an enormous “dck,” and it’s a symptom of a bigger problem.

You don’t need to be a scientist to know that rats don’t have bulbous, sky-high penises, or that words like “testtomcels,” “retat,” and “dissilced,” are total gibberish.

And yet, the bogus diagram below appeared in a paper published last month by the scientific journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology.

To its credit, the journal quickly retracted the paper. But its AI-generated images had already gone viral in online science communities. They even got their own page on Know Your Meme.

But this rat’s towering phallus is just one symptom of a crisis of fake science.

“If it’s the first time you’ve seen a really weird paper get published, I can see why it would capture your attention,” Ivan Oransky, a co-cofounder of the watchdog journalism site Retraction Watch, told Business Insider. But for him, he said, “it’s all sort of mind-numbingly routine at this point.”

How bad science and weird AI get through the ‘Swiss cheese’ of peer review

Frontiers is an influential, open-access publisher with a peer-review process. So how did this paper make it to publication?

When a publisher like Frontiers accepts a scientist’s manuscript, the paper passes through the critical eyes of a series of peer reviewers who are experts in the subject matter, as well as editors who assess the peer review. Usually, study authors must make changes based on the reviewers’ feedback before publication.

Think of the peer review process like a stack of Swiss cheese. Each step has holes in it that bad science could squeeze through, but the overlapping steps tend to cover each other’s holes, making it difficult to squeeze all the way through the whole process.

Still, bad science does make it through sometimes, and over the years more holes have opened up. Scientists can now buy made-up papers from paper mills.

There’s even precedent for AI slop in science publishing. In 2014, publishers Springer and IEEE retracted more than 120 articles that were gibberish generated by computers. The publishing giant Springer Nature retracted 44 gibberish papers in 2021.

Then there are more traditional forms of scientific fraud — bribing journal editors, falsifying data, or manipulating real images or data.

These bad practices can have real consequences. Early trials that found ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to be promising COVID-19 treatments were later retracted for signs of fraud, but the word was already out and a wave of ill-informed self-treatment ensued, Vox reported. Even beyond COVID, fabricated studies can end up in databases used for drug research, The Guardian reported.

The mysterious case of the ‘retat’ ‘dck’

In the case of the rat with “testtomcels,” Frontiers says that one of the peer reviewers raised concerns about the images and requested that the paper authors revise them.

“The article slipped through the author compliance checks that normally ensures every reviewer comment is addressed,” Fred Fenter, chief executive editor of Frontiers, said in an additional statement emailed to Business Insider, calling it a “human error.”

He said that Frontiers has added “new checks to catch this form of misconduct,” revised its AI policy to be clear about what’s not allowed, and is developing “AI to detect AI-generated content and images.”

“Those bad faith actors using AI improperly in science will get better and better and so we will have to get better and better too. This is analogous to cybersecurity constantly improving to block new tricks of hackers,” Fenter said.

In January, Frontiers announced plans to lay off 30% of its staff, cutting 600 jobs.

“Quality is our highest priority, and the recent restructuring does not affect the peer review process and/or author compliance checks,” Fenter said.

The retracted paper’s corresponding author, Dingjun Hao, did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

Why some scientists publish bad papers

Journals are businesses, and scientists have careers. Both are under intense pressure to publish often.

Most hiring and tenure committees, Oransky says, evaluate researchers based on how many papers they’ve published, whether they’ve been published in prestige journals, and how much other scientists cite their work.

“People are desperate to publish and will do anything they have to do in order to publish and keep their jobs or get promoted,” Oransky said. “That’s the real problem here.”

Last year, research journals retracted over 10,000 scientific papers, more than ever before, according to a report in the journal Nature.

Retractions aren’t all bad. In fact, they’re necessary for the times when peer review fails to catch data errors or irresponsible practices.

But the record retraction rate comes alongside a rise in sham papers that some scientists hastily fabricate or generate with the help of AI.

“It’s salacious,” Oransky said of the rat and its “dck.” But, he continued, “there’s sort of nothing new under the sun.”

To Oransky, the solution is obvious. Science institutions across the planet should evaluate scientists based on the quality, not the breadth, of their work. His suggested evaluation metric? Show three good papers.

“What we need to do is stop using publications and citations as the metric of everything,” he said. “All of that’s game-able. Three good papers is not game-able.”

Pence said he disagreed with Trump’s positions on various policy issues.

“As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt. I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life,” Pence said.

Pence also criticized Trump for flip-flopping on TikTok, which he considered banning in the last year of his presidency.

Trump has now expressed support for the app as the House of Representatives passed a bill that could force its parent company, the Chinese company ByteDance, to sell TikTok or face a ban.

“Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign,” Pence said.

Pence refused to say who he would vote for in November but said he would “never” vote for President Joe Biden.

Trump and Pence’s relationship soured after the then-vice president certified the results of the 2020 election.

During the January 6 Capitol riot, some rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” and Trump later defended them.

After Pence’s short-lived presidential campaign, Trump called on Pence to endorse him.

Trump became the GOP’s presumptive nominee on Tuesday, hours after Biden won his party’s presumptive nomination, confirming that the election will most likely be a rematch between the two.

• Cabinet Alberto Pinto is the design firm behind the interior of one of the world’s largest private jets.
• Owned by a Middle Eastern businessman, this BBJ 747-8i likely costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Designing and implementing the interior of the ultra-luxurious Boeing jet took the firm four years to finish.

The 747-8i Boeing Business Jet, which is a VIP-configured variant of the civilian jumbo plane, is the world’s largest private aircraft in active operation.

The dual-level jumbo takes private flying to the next level as a flying palace capable of traversing time zones in the absolute pinnacle of luxury air travel.

Marketed to governments and the world’s elite, these giant jumbo planes cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

For example, the US government paid about $325 million each for its two specially modified presidential Boeing 747-200B aircraft, more commonly known as Air Force One. 

Famed French interior design firm Cabinet Alberto Pinto was tasked with creating the interior of one multi-million BBJ 747-8i, which was purchased for private use by a Middle Eastern businessman. The list price of the -8i model went for about $400 million, according to the Business Jet Traveler, but the sale cost was undisclosed.

Take a look inside the flying mansion.

• “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” called out Elon Musk over his drama with Don Lemon.
• In a parody video, Musk has a conversation with himself asking softball questions.
• Musk canceled X’s partnership with Lemon after being asked about ketamine use, Trump, and moderating X.

Stephen Colbert mocked Elon Musk reportedly bristling at the interview questions that Don Lemon said led to the end of his partnership deal with X.

The late-night host posted a video about “the Elon interview of Elon” that includes a parody clip of Musk interviewing himself. The video points out that Musk is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” but reportedly was angered at the subject matter Lemon asked during their real-life interview.

“Coming soon: The only interview style that meets Elon Musk’s approval,” Colbert captioned a post on Threads.

The clip depicts the parody Elon Musk sitting across from himself asking softball questions.

“Coming soon to X, Elon Musk sits down with the only person on the platform that can be trusted with free speech: Elon Musk,” a narrator says. “Elon asks Elon the tough questions.”

The parody Musk then asks if the Tesla CEO is good at his job, works hard, and has high integrity. The other Musk answers affirmatively to each question.

The narrator closes out the Colbert video joking that X is “where everyone named Elon can speak Freelon.”

Former CNN host Lemon announced on Wednesday that the deal he’d announced with X for “The Don Lemon Show” had been terminated by Musk hours after he’d interviewed the owner of the platform. Lemon said Musk had grown “upset” and “mad” at questions about his reported ketamine use, recent meeting with Trump, and whether he held a responsibility to moderate antisemitism and hate speech on the platform.

Musk invited Lemon to work with X on his show after he and CNN parted ways. In his statement on his canceled partnership, Lemon said the X owner had gone back on his word.

“His commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas can be shared seems to not include questions of him from people like me,” Lemon said.

Following his announcement, the official X Business account put out its own statement on the issue. It emphasized the company’s support of free speech and assured that “The Don Lemon Show” would be allowed to post its content to X — but that its partnership with Lemon wasn’t happening.

“However, like any enterprise, we reserve the right to make decisions about our business partnerships, and after careful consideration, X decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the show,” the statement said.

Lemon’s interview with Musk is still set to premiere as part of the “The Don Lemon Show” on Monday.

Defense lawyers, meanwhile, are demanding “dismissal of the Indictment and severe sanctions,” against Manhattan prosecutors as punishment for this late production of evidence, they said in a motion made public Thursday. Short of that, the defense is asking that the trial date be delayed by at least 90 days.

Meanwhile, as they wait for Merchan to calm the chaos and pick a new trial-start date, lawyers for Trump and for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are filing dueling court documents that blame each other for the delay.

Bragg’s side said it has shown only “diligence” in seeking evidence relating to Cohen’s federal prosecution. The defense has only dragged its feet in seeking the same evidence, prosecutors said.

But in his own filing, Trump attorney Todd Blanche countered that Bragg’s lawyers “have engaged in widespread misconduct” by attempting to “suppress” the federal evidence in an effort to improve their chances at trial.

“The People should have collected all of these documents long ago,” Blanche claimed in his motion.

“Instead, they collected some materials but left others with the federal authorities, in the hope that President Trump would never get them,” his motion says.

Both sides appear to agree that the delay was triggered by some 73,000 pages of records — sought for months by both the DA’s office and the defense — that have been turned over in tranches throughout this month by the US Attorney’s Office.

Of that massive evidence dump, some 31,000 pages were turned over only Wednesday, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote in a letter to the trial judge on Thursday.

More pages are expected to be turned over by federal prosecutors next week, Colangelo wrote.

But each side is accusing the other of footdragging in pursuing this last-minute evidence, which includes federal grand jury minutes, tapes, witness lists and other documents relating to Cohen — the former Trump fixer who is now a key hush-money prosecution witness.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to charges that included making an illegal campaign contribution on Trump’s behalf, namely the same $130,000 hush money payment at the center of Trump’s upcoming state trial.

The 2016 payment, which purchased porn star Stormy Daniels’ silence just 11 days before the presidential election, was made “at the direction of” Trump, Cohen said. He is expected to repeat that account at Trump’s upcoming trial.

At the time of the payment, Daniels was about to go public with her account of having slept with Trump during a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2008. The alleged tryst was shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron Trump.

So far, Manhattan prosecutors have confirmed that only 176 pages of the newly-produced materials appear to be relevant to Trump’s case, Colangelo said in his letter to Merchan, the hush-money judge.

The evidence turned over Wednesday appears to include additional material related to the state case, Colangelo added.

The assistant prosecutor blamed the late, ongoing evidence dump — and the resulting need for a delay — on federal prosecutors and the Trump defense.

The materials turned over Wednesday included evidence that Manhattan prosecutors requested from federal prosecutors “more than a year ago and that the USAO previously declined to provide,” Colangelo complained in his letter to the judge, using the acronym for US Attorney’s Office.

The materials are being produced in response to a subpoena that defense lawyers first served on the US Attorney’s Office back in January, Colangelo also wrote.

“Defendant waited until January 18, 2024, to subpoena additional materials from the USAO and then consented to repeated extensions of the deadline for the USAO’s determination,” the assistant prosecutor wrote.

“The timing of the USAO’s productions is a result solely of defendant’s delay despite the People’s diligence.”

Manhattan prosecutors remain ready to start trial on March 25, but would agree to a delay of up to 30 days “in an abundance of caution,” Colangelo wrote.

Merchan has not indicated when he will decide on the dismissal request or the trial date.