Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced onetime trillionaire Elon Musk, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and right-wing entrepreneur Palmer Luckey as the new heads of “Project Meridian”—a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare.”

Hegseth made the announcement at his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday afternoon, describing the trio of Trump loyalists as “the best forecasters of future conflict.”

“There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them. So today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage—one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists. Big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution to tomorrow’s conflicts,” Hegseth said. “And that’s why today … I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.”

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Iraqis have taken to the streets of Baghdad to celebrate the withdrawal of US troops from the country, as Iraqi forces also marked the occasion with military parades.

On Wednesday, thousands of people gathered along Palestine Street in the capital to celebrate the end of the US military presence in Iraq.

Iraqi security forces also held parades in Najaf and Baghdad to mark Iraq’s National Sovereignty Day and the withdrawal of US troops.

Earlier in the day, the US military completed its withdrawal from Iraq, with the last troops leaving a base in Erbil under an agreement between Baghdad and Washington to end the US-led military occupation.

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.

A decade after the Stanford rape trial that saw Brock Turner sentenced to a few months in county jail, a young woman is suing Cornell University and seven fraternity members she says raped her in 2024. The most overtly vile facets of this case have sparked viral, rightful outrage: the men allegedly gang raped Jane Doe for hours after pressuring her to take debilitating drugs, then advertised “free pussy” in their fraternity group chat. Cornell responded by barring the fraternity chapter from campus, then expelling two of the students and suspending the others; Doe’s lawsuit alleges that the male students “were afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.”

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Party and state leaders attended a ceremony to present flower baskets to fallen national heroes at Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing on Wednesday morning.

The event was held to mark Martyrs' Day. Observed on Sept. 30, one day before National Day, the day commemorates those who gave their lives for national independence and prosperity.

Since Martyrs' Day was established in 2014, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has maintained the tradition of paying homage to fallen heroes on the day.

At 10 a.m., all attendees sang the national anthem, followed by a moment of silence in tribute to the heroes who sacrificed their lives for the liberation of the Chinese people and the development of the People's Republic of China.

“Oppositional Defiance Disorder” is a diagnosis that can get a student an IEP.

So a disruptive, violent child can show up to school every day - throw chairs, bring drugs to school - then get mom or dad to take them to the doc to diagnose them with ODD. It’s a manifestation of their disability.

“Inclusion” also means that these children need to be placed in the same classroom as all the other children. So 29 children are subject to the violence of 1.

Far right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cabinet have voted to designate the U.S.’s leading Muslim civil rights group as a “domestic terrorist organization,” threatening to shutter and impose severe penalties on the group and its state affiliate simply to serve the GOP’s political crusades, critics said.

The 427-page document recommending “terrorist” designations for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Florida chapter was approved over the course of just 30 seconds at DeSantis’s cabinet meeting on Tuesday, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Contained within the approved packet, submitted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, were also recommendations for “antifa” and dozens of other groups already named as foreign terrorist organizations by the federal government to be listed as “terrorist” groups.