Trump nominates Fox News doctor to be the next surgeon general

Trump nominates Fox News doctor to be the next surgeon general

fivenewscrypto    mai 02, 2026   

In a series of social media posts Thursday, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Make America Health Again influencer Casey Means to be surgeon general, lashed out at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for Means' stalled nomination in the Senate, then announced a new nominee: Nicole B. Saphier, a breast radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a Fox News contributor, and founder of an herbal supplement company who has questioned vaccines.

Trump's abandonment of Means comes as no surprise. The nomination of the Stanford University-trained doctor has been stalled in the Senate since her February confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which Cassidy chairs. Afterward, it became clear that several Republican lawmakers, including Cassidy, had reservations about her nomination.

Doubts about Means

Specifically, concerns centered around her vaccine views and qualifications. Although she has a medical degree, she dropped out of her medical residency and does not hold an active license, which means, if confirmed, she would serve as the country's top doctor without being able to practice medicine. During her hearing, she largely tried to skirt questions about vaccines, avoiding explicitly recommending lifesaving shots or contradicting the views of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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US falls below Ukraine in press freedom as global autocracy takes hold

US falls below Ukraine in press freedom as global autocracy takes hold

fivenewscrypto    mai 02, 2026   

From watching too much Nordic noir, I have learned the key lessons to Scandinavian safety: Stay out of the deep woods, avoid all "rustic villagers," flee every solstice or equinox ritual, and run screaming from any creature (human or otherwise) wearing antlers in the wrong anatomical location.

But assuming you can avoid pagan magic and the "old gods," Nordic countries do well on many other measures of human development. In the most recent World Happiness Report, for example, Finland tops the list while Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are all in the top six. (Costa Rica is the non-Nordic exception here, taking the fourth spot.)

These countries are also near the top in global average life expectancy.

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Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine's sights

Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine's sights

fivenewscrypto    mai 02, 2026   

If you believe official Russian reports, the country's northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months.

The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX's Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine's military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia's Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow.

The Russian space agency's first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

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Elon Musk's 7 biggest stumbles on the stand at OpenAI trial

Elon Musk's 7 biggest stumbles on the stand at OpenAI trial

fivenewscrypto    mai 02, 2026   

Elon Musk seems tired and cranky. On Thursday, he took the stand for the third day in a four-week trial stemming from his lawsuit alleging that OpenAI abandoned its mission and should be blocked from taking the company public later this year. If Musk plays his cards right, Sam Altman could be ousted and OpenAI would remain a nonprofit forever.

But Musk stumbled at least seven times in ways that possibly put his chances at winning in jeopardy. Most notable, 1) OpenAI's lawyer managed to get him to make several concessions over his own lawyer's objections. 2) He also lost a fight to keep xAI's safety record off the table, calling his reputation as a supposed AI savior defending OpenAI's mission into question. 3) He repeatedly appeared dishonest, as OpenAI's lawyer showed documents contradicting his testimony. And he twice appeared disingenuous, 4) first when confronted with calling OpenAI's safety team "jackasses," 5) and then again when admitting that he didn't know what "safety cards" are, even though his own AI firm issues them. Perhaps most embarrassing, 6) he testified that he never loses his temper before raising his voice at OpenAI's lawyer. And finally, 7) his lawyers failed to keep his ties to Donald Trump off the record, with the judge agreeing to hear discussions that might further discredit Musk's testimony.

Musk faced Altman while testifying

Since he was called as the trial's first witness, Musk has spent more than seven hours over the past two days testifying that OpenAI made a "fool" out of him. He repeatedly claimed that OpenAI executives "stole a charity" after accepting $38 million in donations. Musk insists he was conned into giving "free funding" to start a nonprofit that Altman supposedly always intended to turn into an $800 billion company—not for the benefit of humanity, but to enrich Altman and his co-conspirators.

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The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

fivenewscrypto    mai 01, 2026   

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices.

The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security firm Theori, five weeks after privately disclosing it to the Linux kernel security team. The team patched the vulnerability in versions 7.0, 6.19.12, 6.18.12, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254) but few of the Linux distributions had incorporated those fixes at the time the exploit was released.

A single script hacks all distros

The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.

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Researchers try to cut the genetic code from 20 to 19 amino acids

Researchers try to cut the genetic code from 20 to 19 amino acids

fivenewscrypto    mai 01, 2026   

The genetic code is central to life. With minor variations, everything uses the same sets of three DNA bases to encode the same 20 amino acids. We have discovered no major exceptions to this, leading researchers to conclude that this code probably dated back to the last common ancestor of all life on Earth. But there has been a lot of informed speculation about how that genetic code initially evolved.

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could get rid of one of the 20 currently in use. And, as a first attempt, they engineered a portion of the ribosome that worked without using an otherwise essential amino acid: isoleucine.

Changing the code

First off, why would you do this? Most work in the field has focused on altering the genetic code in ways that are useful, such as using more than 20 amino acids to enable interesting chemistry.

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Zack Cregger has his own vision for Resident Evil reboot

Zack Cregger has his own vision for Resident Evil reboot

fivenewscrypto    mai 01, 2026   

The Resident Evil film franchise has grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide since the first film debuted in 2002, but an attempt to reboot it a few years ago floundered. Sony Pictures is trying again, this time tapping Zach Cregger—who wrote, produced, and directed last year's Oscar-winning horror hit Weapons—for the project. The studio showed the first teaser for Cregger's Resident Evil during CinemaCon and just released it to the wider public.

When the first Resident Evil game debuted in 1996, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spawning several sequel games, comics, novels, and a very lucrative film franchise directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. But those films were only loosely based on the games, keeping a few primary characters and the basic concept, but little else. Reviews were mixed, despite the films' massive box office success.

Work on the first reboot started in 2017, eventually producing 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Director Roberts Johannes wanted to bring a very different tone to his film. He wanted to stay closer to the Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 games—even employing the same fixed angles of Spencer Mansion in the first game. Alas, Welcome to Raccoon City was critically panned and had a disappointing box office showing, grossing just $42 million globally against its $25 million budget. The studio nixed its plans for a direct sequel, and a 2022 Netflix series was also canceled after a less-than-stellar first season.

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