FCC accused of hiding Chairman Carr's messages with DOGE and Musk

FCC accused of hiding Chairman Carr's messages with DOGE and Musk

fivenewscrypto    juin 29, 2026   

An advocacy group trying to investigate DOGE's influence on the Federal Communications Commission accused the FCC of failing to comply with a public records request and of concealing Chairman Brendan Carr's use of the Signal messaging service.

"The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request," journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward said in a filing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia. "The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business."

Burleigh and Frequency Forward sued the FCC last year, alleging that it violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. In August 2025, a federal judge ordered the FCC to produce documents and criticized it for a “vague and uninformative” response to the lawsuit.

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Netflix now requires every user profile to be tied to unique email address

Netflix now requires every user profile to be tied to unique email address

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Recently, my father called me in a panic.

There were just a few minutes until Netflix would start streaming a live MMA event, and he couldn’t get into my account. For a while, he had accessed Netflix as an add-on member with his own profile through my household’s account. That day, however, he was logged out and couldn’t use my login credentials to watch Netflix. Instead, he saw a prompt asking him to “add an email address to your profile” to continue.

A Reddit user shared this image of the notification that affected profile owners are seeing. Credit: Scotti_Dev/Reddit/Netflix

After some frantic phone troubleshooting and a couple of password resets, we realized that my father had to create his own login to continue using the extra profile I paid for. Although I was able to get him set up in time (for some disappointing bouts), the situation was confusing and inconvenient.

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Antibiotic "megacluster" discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs

Antibiotic "megacluster" discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Antibiotic resistance has loomed over humans since the moment we started using antibiotics. In the 20th century, the drugs downgraded potentially life-threatening bacterial infections to mere inconveniences—a miracle of modern medicine, it seemed. But the drugs aren't really a human invention; we mostly swiped them from microbes, which have been locked in an arms race with each other for centuries. Microbial evolution has crafted both deadly molecules and clever tricks to dodge death as the wee organisms endlessly battle over turf and resources. More than 80 percent of the antibiotics used in clinics today are based on those turf-war weapons, which scientists refer to as "natural products."

For decades, humans mined antibiotic molecules from microbes and tweaked them to develop new drugs, staying ahead of evolution's cunning countermeasures. But in recent times, new natural products have been harder to find, and the pipeline of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, existing antibiotics have been overused, and resistance has mounted to critical levels. Most antibiotics are single bioactive molecules, and some can be thwarted with single mutations. While the current situation is dire, a study in Nature this week reports a compelling discovery that not only points to a potentially new antibiotic regimen, but also an entirely new strategy to once again get ahead in the microbial arms race.

Exciting find

The study, led by biomedical researcher Eric Brown at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, reports the discovery of a large block of genes—dubbed a "megacluster"—that codes for four molecules that appear to work in concert to derail a single essential metabolic pathway.

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Ars Live: What's the latest in the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe?

Ars Live: What's the latest in the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe?

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Nearly a month has passed since the New Glenn rocket exploded on its launch pad in Florida, creating a massive fireball. It was likely the largest ever rocket explosion at the historic Florida spaceport, and we are still dealing with its implications today.

The rocket's explosion took out its only launch pad, LC-36A. So even if Blue Origin can quickly diagnose the cause of the failure, it has nowhere to launch the New Glenn rocket from. Company officials, including founder Jeff Bezos, have said the vehicle will return to flight at LC-36A before the end of this year, though there is widespread skepticism about that timeline.

Meanwhile, we have more questions than answers about a rocket that had become increasingly central to the needs of NASA and commercial customers. What does this failure mean for the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon? What do we know about the timing of Artemis III and the lunar landing mission, Artemis IV? What about the Moon base?

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VW may close four factories to adapt to the future, report says

VW may close four factories to adapt to the future, report says

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Volkswagen Group is considering what was previously unthinkable: closing up to four factories in Germany and instituting layoffs that would shrink the workforce by 15 percent.

2025 was a bad year for Europe's largest automaker. Its sales were essentially flat, but profits were anything but, dropping 44 percent to just 6.9 billion euros ($7.9 billion) as operating margins more than halved. The red ink looks set to continue bleeding through 2026, and in March, the company announced it would cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as part of a plan to adapt. Now, according to a report in Manager Magazin, those job losses may double.

The automaker did well selling EVs in Europe last year, but sales in North America and China fell and continue to fall, and tariffs have had a significant effect.

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Feedbacks upon feedbacks: Rock weathering and the climate

Feedbacks upon feedbacks: Rock weathering and the climate

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Since the early 1980s, Earth scientists have understood that erosion and weathering of rock slowly removes CO₂ from the atmosphere, regulating Earth’s climate on geological timescales. But recent studies have shown that erosion can also emit CO₂ by oxidizing organic carbon contained in eroding sediments. It hasn’t been clear how this competition between removal by rock weathering and emission by organic carbon weathering ends up affecting Earth’s climate.

A new study in the journal Nature Communications uses the geological past to test how these competing effects added up. Doctor Madeleine Stow of the University of Oxford, with colleagues from across the UK and France, examined a volcanically triggered episode of global warming that happened in the early part of the Jurassic period, 183 million years ago, known as the “Toarcian Ocean Anoxic Event.”

They found that eroding organic carbon amplified climate warming at the time, suggesting that the same process may apply to modern climate change. But the extent to which the past is prologue is uncertain.

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SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the US

SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the US

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has told investors that it plans to launch a new Starlink mobile service for US consumers, in a move that would upend the country’s multibillion-dollar phone network market.

The company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The move would require Starlink to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers, competing directly with the three big US network operators Verizon Wireless, AT&T. and T-Mobile.

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