More than 200,000 people flee raging wildfires in France and Spain, some escaping by boat

About 1,500 people who fled France's Cap Ferret peninsula arrived by sea in Arcachon, some aboard small water taxis.

France and Spain fires force more than 200,000 to flee homes

At least one person has died in a fire in Spain, according to officials.

Trump tariffs come back to haunt GOP as elections near

President Trump’s newly announced tariffs could put Republican candidates at risk going into the midterms as Democrats seek to go on the offensive over the economic impact of Trump’s trade agenda.  The Trump administration announced Thursday it will impose double-digit tariffs on imports from 60 trading partners over forced labor violations. Those duties went into…

‘Trump was entranced’: Staggering security lapses traced back to Trump’s vanity deadline

President Donald Trump's insistence that a Qatari-donated jumbo jet be ready to serve as a temporary Air Force One in time for the nation's 250th birthday led to the omission of several key security features found on the current presidential fleet, a New York Times investigation revealed Friday.Trump demanded the retrofitted 747-8 be ready by July 4, compressing what would normally be a multi-year security overhaul into just eight months, according to the Times. Trump personally signed off on the plane's features and security measures, according to people familiar with his role who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity.“President Trump was entranced,” the Times’ report reads, referencing the president’s deep and personal involvement in the project, which the outlet found he gave “final approval on features and security measures that would be included.”Missing from the retrofitted jet: a lower-level exit door used for high-risk situations, a second auxiliary power unit and the infrared countermeasure system designed to detect and jam incoming missiles, according to public Air Force records and photographs reviewed by the Times.Frank Kendall, who oversaw the Air Force One modernization program as both Pentagon acquisition chief and Air Force secretary under President Joe Biden, said the omissions carry real risk."People need to be aware it has a lot of shortfalls compared to Air Force One; they do add a measure of risk," Kendall said.The Pentagon has also worked to obscure the project's true cost – including from Congress – by drawing funds from a classified nuclear modernization budget known as Sentinel, the Times found. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) accused the administration of using the maneuver to dodge oversight."They have declared this work to be a national security secret that cannot be divulged even to appropriators," Murphy said. "That is absolutely unacceptable."White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the aircraft, calling it "fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today."

Brainless humans? Backup bodies? Inside biotech's depraved new world

Social media's magicians spent decades perfecting the art of slicing human attention into advertising revenue. Is the next step on the corporate road map farming human tissue for spare parts?The tech is there, or almost there. The ideas have percolated for decades. All it takes, it seems, is the will.The concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.An early pitch deck for R3 Bio, a quiet biotech startup operating out of California, laid out a vision that makes classic horror fiction look rather mild. The company’s leadership, reports suggest, engaged in internal discussions regarding the production of brainless, nonsentient human bodies designed for the explicit purpose of organ harvesting, pharmaceutical testing, and eventual commercial deployment.They christened these biological monstrosities "organ sacks."The terminology speaks volumes to the moral framework seizing imaginations in the contemporary tech executive class. When a team of researchers and engineers looks at the human form and sees an inconveniently conscious container for marketable kidneys, the line between medical innovation and factory farming disappears completely.Executives at R3 Bio floated plans to reprogram monkey cells, cultivate complete organ systems, and engineer these living biological constructs to be intentionally primitive enough to bypass federal ethical guidelines.But this isn't some sudden Silicon Valley obsession. The ambition to redesign human biology has been gathering momentum worldwide for years.They have a dreamIn October 2022, biotech investors gathered in Zurich to debate the commercial viability of synthetic biology, openly celebrating the day human biology would be fully decoupled from traditional ideas of personhood. The attendees viewed the human body as an inefficient piece of legacy software requiring a total architectural overhaul. It was only a matter of time before the idea caught on.Scientists at R3 Bio defended their research behind the usual wall of righteous PR speak, insisting their work aims to end the chronic shortage of donor organs and cure terminal illnesses. They publicly insist that full-scale human organ fabrication remains outside their current operational scope and that their public website reflects a commitment to safe, traditional cell therapy.But the problem runs deeper than what R3 Bio says it is or isn't doing today. It's what history tells us can happen when scientific ambition outruns consent, oversight, and basic human dignity.The playbook never changes. In 1951, researchers extracted cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent, creating the HeLa cell line that generated billions in profit for pharmaceutical giants while her family struggled to pay medical bills. The medical establishment transformed a living human being into a self-sustaining corporate product, establishing a precedent that today's biotech firms are eager to scale up to the entire human torso. There is an enormous amount of money to be made. And where the fevered dreams of high-tech immortality are concerned, human morality has a troubling habit of turning negotiable.RELATED: Anti-aging mogul's next act? He'll harvest organs from his own clone L-R: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Aldara Zarraoa/Getty ImagesA society grounded in the belief that human life possesses inherent dignity treats the human body as an inherently sacred structure rather than a machine assembled from interchangeable parts. The secular technocracy reigning in Northern California views the human body as a collection of meat components that can be optimized, monetized, and swapped out.Death of the selfThe transition from healing the sick to manufacturing customized human vessels happened while everyone was distracted by social media algorithms. Engineers want to replace a failing heart, grow an artificial liver in a vat, construct a brainless body to house the spares, and call the whole process market efficiency. The language of human medicine was completely swallowed by the inhumane jargon of auto repair.This mechanistic worldview demands that every biological boundary be erased in the name of efficiency and infinite growth. If a brainless body exists as a legal product, the entity owning the patent exercises total property rights over a human biological shell. If a corporation can copyright the genetic sequence of a custom-grown torso, the concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.Tech elites frequently talk about death as a minor coding error awaiting a software upgrade. They invest billions in longevity protocols, upload schemes, and cellular rejuvenation, completely convinced that their wealth entitles them to bypass mortality itself.

Trump's insufferable shtick finally hit with contempt — and he's reeling

Thirty years ago, I had my first job in PR, at a small Midtown Manhattan firm. This was before HR complaints were really a thing, which was lucky for the managing director, because his behavior would have gotten him fired a dozen times over.He was also one of the most offensive human beings I have ever met, and the fact that I'm still thinking about him three decades later tells you he left a nasty mark in my memories..He thought he was hilarious. In meetings, he'd riff on the size of his own anatomy, brag about his sex life with his wife in raunchy details, and disparage women in the room, all while chuckling at his own material. It was grotesque. But everyone reporting to him laughed, because that's what you did back then. And that laughter did exactly what you'd expect: it convinced him he was the funniest man alive.I thought about that atrocious boss when I watched Donald Trump's hour-plus “bomb after bomb” performance at Friday night's White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. There he was again.If Trump had been a contestant on Chuck Barris's old game show "The Gong Show," he would have been gonged in the first 30 seconds. That show existed to publicly end bad performances. Trump went on for more than an hour, only because there was no gong to stop him..The reason Trump thinks he's funny is the same reason my old boss did. He surrounds himself with people who laugh because they feel they have to, not because anything is funny. At his rallies, 90 minutes of obscenities and insulting tangents get cheered by a crowd that showed up already believing he's a comic genius. On Truth Social, his posts get flooded with laughing emojis from followers who treat everything he types as the epitome of comedy. Trump has built an entire ecosystem that reflects his own ego and inflated narcissism back at him, and he's never had to sit with the silence that follows a joke that simply isn't funny.Friday night, he got that silence. The Correspondents' Dinner crowd wasn't a rally audience or a Truth Social feed. And it wasn’t a room full of yes men like Howard Lutnick and Stephen Miller. It was a room of journalists, people who, for the most part, cover Trump rather than worship him, and who don't laugh on command. And don’t find him funny in the least.And it showed. As CNN put it, Trump's jokes mostly fell flat, and by the network's own account, "even he could tell, in real time, that many of his jokes were bombing."The clearest example was when he tried to tell a joke about aging lawmakers. Trump told the room about a senator who got a text from his wife asking him to "come up the stairs and make love to me,” to which the senator supposedly replied, "I can't do both." No laughs. No laughing emojis. No praise. Just total silence. Trump tried to explain the joke — that’s when you know you’ve told a dud — then explained it again, then gave up and told the crowd, "That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole, frickin' stupid speech they wrote." An 80-year-old man, mocking other aging men for being past their prime, using a joke ultimately about his own stamina and assumed lack of libido, and nobody in the room found it funny but him.Then there was Kaitlan Collins. About 10 minutes into the speech, Trump used her CNN award to needle her, again, for supposedly never smiling. "You're at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan! Just smile,’ before bizarrely and incomprehensibly comparing her to trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. Watching that elicited a loud, “what the ...?” from me.It’s always been his way of telling a woman her job is to perform pleasantness for him, as misogynistically as possible. What's almost too ironic to invent is that he delivered that riff to a room of reporters who sat there largely stone-faced themselves. Trump complained about a woman not smiling enough, to a crowd that wasn't smiling at him — at all.So, Friday night was revelatory in so many ways — well, let’s say redundantly revelatory because we all know Trump stinks at being funny, except when he’s not trying to be funny.Take Trump out of the sycophantic loop that he's built for himself, the rally crowds, the Truth Social replies, the aides who write his material and the aides who laugh at his vulgarity, and what's left is a joke of a man whose jokes flat out stink, just like him.Trump is someone who's spent his entire life, even before the presidency, basically being laughed at on command. That’s why he seems incapable of recognizing the difference between real laughter and fake laughter. My old boss had the same blind spot. He never learned it, because nobody with power over him — at least as long as I had to suffer through him — ever let him feel the silence. Trump felt it Friday night, and the only thing that would have interrupted that silence would have been the bang of a gong.

Kaitlan Collins fires back at Trump after being singled out at WHCD

CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins responded Saturday after President Donald Trump mocked her looks and demeanor during his White House Correspondents Dinner speech, posting a pointed message paired with an Eleanor Roosevelt quote on social media.Trump told the crowd, "I wanna personally congratulate CNN's Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award; was all about me, it's a fake, she shouldn't get the award." He then added that Collins is "a young, attractive woman" who "never smiles," telling the audience, "I said, 'Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You're at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. Just smile, Kaitlan.'" Trump then compared Collins to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, joking that he'd mistakenly thought she'd landed "a major new sponsorship" before realizing "it wasn't her on the Bud Light can."It wasn't the first time Trump has told Collins she doesn't smile enough, having made a similar remark earlier this year after she pressed him on what he would say to Jeffrey Epstein survivors. Collins won her WHCA award for her coverage of the 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.In response, Collins shared an image on Instagram Saturday featuring an Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."Alongside the image, Collins wrote that the second-best part of the night was receiving her award from "my friend and mentor," CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. The first, she said, was "reminding everyone why the First Amendment – and asking uncomfortable questions that people in power don't like – matters." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins)

Whitmer Endorses Stevens Over Socialist El-Sayed in Michigan Senate Primary