An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water.

While regulators have focused on reining in Pfas in water, the chemicals are widely used throughout the food system, and there was hope that the agency under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously. Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone. [...] The November 2023 petition called on the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in a range of produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread. The agency did not respond within the six-month timeframe required by law, but TEJTF scaled back its petition in 2025 to ask the agency to set advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos, two of the most common and dangerous Pfas compounds, in seafood and milk.

Recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, while independent milk testing found it in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands. The FDA rejected the revised petition, stating it plans to take action on setting standards for Pfas, and there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said it plans to set less non-binding "action levels" that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. "Tolerance levels," or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.

Apple says it will spend $30 billion to design US-made Broadcom wireless connectivity chips, part of its broader push to diversify its supply chain and support domestic chip production. CNN reports: The agreement with Broadcom will lead to the production of 15 million chips in United States and allow Broadcom to invest $1.5 billion to expand and modernize its manufacturing facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is part of Apple's commitment in August to invest $600 billion as part of its "American Manufacturing Program" which it said is dedicated to bringing even more of the company's supply chain and advanced manufacturing back to the US.

New Zealand startup Zenno Astronautics has completed the first orbital test of its "Supertorquer," a shoebox-sized superconducting magnet system that uses solar power and Earth's magnetic field to help control a satellite without fuel. The company says the technology could eventually support fuel-free satellite maneuvers, docking, deep-space trajectory changes, and even magnetic radiation shielding for astronauts. Space Magazine reports: The tests began shortly after Mira's launch in November last year aboard the SpaceX Transporter 12 mission and saw the shoebox-size device perform with flying colors, Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky, told Space.com. "It's a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction," Arshavsky said. "The unit has multiple super-conducting magnets that are positioned in different axes. When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth's magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth."

Superconducting magnets are made of coils of superconducting wire that have zero electrical resistance and can therefore conduct much larger currents than normal wires. That larger current translates into a greater magnetic force. There is, however, a catch: Superconducting materials need to be cooled to extremely low temperatures to gain their wonder properties. [...] The unit housing the superconducting magnets is wrapped in layers of insulation and fitted with a heat pump that removes all the excess heat from the system. Every time the satellite needs a push, the superconducting coils power up, drawing energy from a battery charged by the satellite's solar panels.

"It's converting solar energy straight into useful work," Arshavsky said. "Energy is the one thing that is abundant in space, and you can use it to energize the magnet to create a magnetic acceleration device. It gives you acceleration without fuel." In the future, Zenno Astronautics plans to launch larger systems that could enable spacecraft to dock in space or conduct close proximity operations using just the power of their solar-powered superconducting magnets. Arshavsky envisions powerful magnets that could, in the future, propel spacecraft on missions to the moon and Mars using only solar power.

The FCC plans to roll back broadband label rules that require ISPs to itemize all passthrough fees. Under the proposal, providers could instead list a single "up to" amount for location-based charges. It would also allow ISPs to link to pricing labels rather than display them prominently, while eliminating machine-readable pricing files. Ars Technica reports: ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments. ISPs would be well within their rights to advertise accurate monthly prices and charge those exact prices on monthly bills. But because ISPs rarely do that, the FCC has required them to make specific price disclosures to consumers for the past decade. The Biden-era FCC updated the broadband-label rules to require that ISPs "itemize on the label (PDF) all discretionary monthly fees that the provider passes through to the consumer." The change drew protest from Comcast and other ISPs that complained bitterly about the complexity of listing all the hidden fees they had chosen to charge.

Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the Trump FCC has steadily whittled away at requirements imposed under Democrats. An order (PDF) released in draft form last week would eliminate the requirement to itemize passthrough fees and let ISPs list them in a single "up to" amount. The "up to" amount can include both government fees and fees charged by non-government entities such as owners of utility poles. "Rather than continuing to require providers to itemize 'passthrough fees' that can vary by location, we allow providers to display such fees in the aggregate, either as a maximum or 'up to' amount for the total fees applicable in any location where the service plan is offered, or as the exact total of such fees assessed in a particular location," the FCC draft order said.

The order to be voted on later this month includes a few other changes that will please ISPs and their lobby groups. ISPs will be allowed to provide links to price labels instead of displaying the full labels prominently on ordering pages and account portals, and will be allowed to stop making the price-label information available in machine-readable spreadsheets. The FCC is also relaxing the requirement that price information be available over the phone. The FCC said the change will "allow phone sales representatives to present label information conversationally, as a summary of key label fields, rather than require verbatim recitation."

The changes have been in the works since October 2025, when the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to let the public submit comments on the proposals. The outcome of that process is the draft order, which will be voted on at the FCC's July 22 meeting and take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register. There are many types of passthrough fees that ISPs will be able to stop listing individually and roll into the "up to" amount. The FCC defined the fees as follows, saying they include just about anything that isn't a tax [...]. Another planned change will eliminate a requirement that providers archive all labels for at least two years after a service plan is no longer available. The Utility Reform Network, an advocacy group, told the FCC that the archived labels provide crucial data about how prices and services change over time, and that machine-readable labels are important for affordability research and information accessibility.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees over a bank-owned network, however. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Capital One Financial bought Discover Financial in a $50.6 billion deal, it got a network that cut out the need for a middleman in card transactions and allowed it to deal more directly with merchants. Now, big banks are looking on with envy because owning a network can mean exemption from a federal law that caps debit-card fees. Those fees collectively amount to billions of dollars each year across the industry, but banks have long complained the government-defined cap limits their ability to offer customers debit-card rewards and other services. Some have been exploring a small deal that could upend the rules, though they are worried about political backlash if they try.

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation's capacity to produce new science could be diminished. The decline is driven, in part, by a chaotic and unpredictable federal funding environment under the Trump administration, as federal cuts are promised and then reversed, and budgets remain unclear.

A reduction in doctoral students could mean fewer scholars at universities to teach and mentor undergraduates. Higher education leaders also worry that, if the declines continue, there will be fewer researchers to power a rapidly evolving scientific work force. The data showing the decrease comes from 55 universities, all of them members of the Association of American Universities, an invitation-only organization that includes 69 of the most prestigious research institutions in the United States. The data collection was conducted by another group, the Association of American Universities Data Exchange.

Schools in A.A.U. confer half of the nation's research doctorates, according to the association. "We are at risk of losing a whole generation of new talent because of the reduction in the capacity to support those students," said Toby Smith, a senior vice president at the A.A.U. University leaders and research advocates cite many reasons for the declines in new doctoral students. Key federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, have been funding fewer research grants. The wealthiest institutions also face a new federal tax on their endowments.

But the most cited reason in interviews was the unreliable nature of federal funding under the Trump administration. The administration proposed major cuts to federal research agencies last year, but Congress restored the funding. It is again proposing big cuts. While Congress may again reverse the administration's proposed reductions, the uncertainty makes it hard for schools to make multiyear commitments to doctoral students. The administration also abruptly ended thousands of research grants last year, arguing that they did not align with the government's priorities. The administration restored many of the grants after judges deemed the eliminations illegal and arbitrary, but research advocates say the whiplash was damaging.

SK Hynix is launching a Nasdaq listing expected to raise about $28 billion, giving US investors easier access to one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI memory-chip boom. Reuters reports: The company will sell 17.79 million new shares in the depository receipt listing on the Nasdaq. Ten ADRs will represent one common share and the stock will be sold in a price range that is due to be revealed on Monday, based on SK Hynix's Seoul trading price. SK Hynix's share price was down 4% at 2,327,000 won each on Monday, but the stock is up about 273% this year, as it rides surging global investor demand for AI stocks. Korea's KOSPI was down 2.2% on Monday. [...]

SK Hynix has been among the world's largest beneficiaries of the AI boom as it outperformed its major rivals Samsung and Micron. "This is more than a liquidity event," said Dave Mazza, the chief executive officer of Roundhill Investments in New York, which manages an exchange-traded fund tracking DRAM manufacturers, which is one of the most popular ways for U.S. investors to trade SK Hynix's stock. "SK Hynix has been one of the most important companies in the world that most U.S. institutions could not easily own." "The listing removes an accessibility discount, not a quality discount."

[...] SK Hynix said the proceeds from the listing of the American Depositary Receipts will be used to build chip factories in South Korea and buy chipmaking equipment including an extreme ultraviolet scanner made by Dutch equipment maker ASML. The final price of the New York listing is due to be set on Thursday, ahead of the stock starting trade on Friday, regulatory filings showed. The company's management will meet global investors on a roadshow this week. The deal is expected to be the second-biggest share sale after a record $85.7 billion initial public offering by SpaceX last month, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion IPO in 2019 and Alibaba's similar-sized offering in 2014.

Americans now spend an average of 35 minutes a day socializing, down from 45 minutes two decades ago, according to American Time Use Survey data. The decline spans all age groups but is sharpest among 15- to 24-year-olds, whose daily socializing has fallen from about an hour to 35 minutes. Axios reports: Sociologists and psychologists point to several trends driving this phenomenon, which Substack writer Derek Thompson dubbed "The Anti-Social Century" in the Atlantic last year. We're all on our smartphones, often interacting through screens instead of face to face -- even though social media is no substitute for spending time together in person.

Teens, in particular, spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to Gallup. The shift to remote work -- and life -- during the pandemic has persisted, keeping more of us homebound. Longer-term trends are reshaping daily life in ways that make isolation easier. Homes are bigger and more comfortable, with larger TVs. Virtually every restaurant is on a food delivery app, making it easier than ever to stay in.

Also contributing to the trend is the decline of gathering spaces, Axios' Avery Lotz writes. A 2025 report from CU Boulder researchers uncovered widespread closures of all kinds of hangout spots -- from libraries to coffee shops to museums -- in the last decade or so. Churches are also shuttering at unprecedented rates, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.

Australia plans to double fines for social media platforms that fail to keep under-16s off restricted services, after regulators found 70% of children with accounts remained active three months after the ban took effect. The government says the changes will also give the eSafety Commissioner more power to demand information from platforms and age-assurance providers as teens continue finding ways around the law. Euronews reports: The government said Sunday it would introduce draft legislation this week doubling the maximum penalty to 99 million Australian dollars (63 million euros) for platforms -- including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok -- that do not take reasonable steps to comply with the ban, which became law on 10 December. Communications Minister Anika Wells blamed the platforms directly. "We can all agree we would like the scheme to work better than it is currently, but that is on Big Tech taking the Mickey," she said, speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corp on Monday. Wells added that she had received monthly updates from the online safety regulator since March and "we are not seeing improvements."

The amendments would also expand the powers of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to demand information and documents from platforms -- and from third parties such as age assurance technology providers -- to test claims made by companies about how under-16s continued to circumvent the ban. The government had initially reported more than 5 million children had accounts removed, deactivated or restricted after the legislation passed. But eSafety found in March that 70% of children who held accounts on restricted platforms on the day the ban took effect remained active on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

Inman Grant said in April she was considering court action against those platforms and YouTube, alleging they were not taking reasonable steps to exclude children. She said she was satisfied with progress made by the remaining restricted platforms: X, Kick, Reddit, Threads and Twitch. Senior opposition lawmaker Jane Hume said her party would consider supporting the reforms, but pinned blame on the original legislation. "The legislation was clearly undercooked in the first place. The eSafety Commissioner wasn't given the powers to be able to pursue these Big Tech companies," she said.

South Carolina's pine forests "have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself," reports CBS News: In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smith have been studying the site for decades, but recently, they made a shocking discovery: The sandy soil was home to several sets of remains buried in shallow graves. Metal buttons suggested the men had been Continental soldiers, but there was no other identification... About 2,000 Continental soldiers were killed, wounded or captured, and some men never returned home.

Their families could only guess at their fates. But Legg and Smith's discovery, paired with an explosion in DNA technology, is changing what's possible. A set of remains, previously known only as 9B, has been identified as John Pumphrey, a young man from Maryland who enlisted in the Continental Army's 7th Maryland Regiment as young as 13...

Pumphrey likely marched more than a thousand miles with the regiment. The unit fought in battles with then-Gen. George Washington in New Jersey and Pennsylvania... The Pumphrey family still exists today. The DNA that helped identify Pumphrey's remains came from three women: Pam Donahue, Karen Pumphrey Etchison, and Nancy Pumphrey White... In late June, members of the extended Pumphrey family came together to hear his story and say his name for the first time in centuries. His remains are interred in South Carolina, where he and the other soldiers were discovered, but the tombstone, once marked "Unknown," will soon have his name carved on it.

As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat. That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending with a heatwave that is blanketing much of the country, including in Philadelphia where the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade that had been set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to Philadelphia ABC station WPVI. Elsewhere, America's Independence Day Parade, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on July 4 in downtown Washington, D.C. was canceled by organizers late Friday evening due to the extreme heat in the District of Columbia... Amtrak announced it will be canceling a number of trains due to heat-related conditions.
The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages).

CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.

At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update: We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phones supported by the Lineage project, an Android-based volunteer-led mobile phone operating system with much free software already in it. Our current, primary focus is on the radio blobs that control WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and cellular communications.

The software freedom issues with mobile computing have been around for a long time, with the most challenging issue being the baseband/modem firmware that relies heavily on proprietary software. This creates a technical and legal maze that is nearly impossible to break free from, but that doesn't mean we should ever stop working to create free systems. It certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't liberate the software that we know can be free software. Now, half a year into this project, lead developer Rob Savoye has extracted firmware from over 200 Lineage install packages, processed 85GB of files, and imported the results of these analyses into a PostgreSQL database for cross-device comparison... [M]uch of the software and blobs we need to work through are shared across multiple devices; this means even greater strides for mobile phone freedom...

As insurmountable as it may seem at times, every blob we manage to free up will be progress. The FSF has proven time and time again that it can bring the free software philosophy to life, not just by advocating for it, but by making it so.
The bulletin also describes how waves of botnets from "aggressive LLM scrapers, vulnerability scanners, poorly optimized CI/CD servers" inspired the FSF to create a new free-as-in-freedom automated monitoring tool: In our efforts to combat the botnets, we optimized several detection rules to ban abusive behavior. We found the upper limit of fail2ban and replaced it with reaction, an efficient alternative with our configuration that uses ipset. We also split several monolithic machines into many separate machines so that when a web service is overwhelmed the other functions of the service do not go down with it... We found quite a few ways to respond to and prevent botnet attacks, but still faced a significant related challenge: communicating when a website or service is down...

Uptime Kuma is a human-readable, automated monitoring addition to our systems... You can check out our recently-launched self-hosted Uptime Kuma instance at https://status.fsf.org/. When you see the page, you will also likely say, "Wow! The FSF and GNU sure do run a ton of services!" and you would be right... If you maintain websites and services, and are looking for a simple way to communicate publicly with your users, consider using Uptime Kuma or another free software solution instead of choosing a proprietary monitoring solution."
There's also an article on the state of free-as-in-freedom videogame console emulators.

Valve has open-sourced the design for a customizable e-ink front panel for the Steam Machine, dubbed the "Inkterface." "All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, which goes over everything you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine," reports GamingOnLinux. From the report: They're now calling it the "Inkterface" and there's a good few things you'll need to make it including:
1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM.
1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend.
1 x Adafruit 5.83" Monochrome eInk Panel.
13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws.
4 x 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/16" Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT.

Valve even provided a video on the GitLab showing it being put together [...].

The US age-adjusted death rate fell to a record low in 2025, likely pushing life expectancy to a record high as overdose deaths declined and mortality improved across all age groups. CNN reports: There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking. The age-adjusted rate has fallen 22% since 2021, landing about 4% lower than it was just before the pandemic in 2019. [...] The top causes of death in the US in 2025 followed longstanding patterns: Heart disease led with nearly 695,000 deaths, followed by cancer with nearly 623,000 deaths.

Unintentional injuries, which includes drug overdoses, were the third leading cause of death. Overdose deaths are still high -- about 70,000 people died from an overdose in 2025, preliminary CDC data shows -- but experts say that sharp declines probably played a large role in bringing the age-adjusted death rate down in the US.

The US unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in June largely because 720,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to 61.5%. Excluding the Covid-era jobs market, that's the lowest participation rate since June 1976. CNBC reports: The decline in the labor force marks a "massive exodus" driven by multiple factors, said Mike Reid, head of U.S. economics at RBC. "The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% as both the number of unemployed workers and the size of the labor force pulled back," Reid wrote in a post-report commentary. "This may well be a story of retirements but could also be a story of prior job seekers dropping out of the labor force."

[...] [T]he rolls of those counted as not in the labor force, a group that includes the unemployed and those not looking for work, jumped by 832,000. And while the establishment survey, which counts jobs filled, showed growth for the month of 57,000, the survey of households, which counts the actual level of those working, tumbled by 507,000. On a year-over-year basis, the labor force is down by just over 1 million, while the level of the employed also has fallen by 1.06 million and the ranks of the unemployed have risen by 40,000. The employment-to-population ratio slipped to 59% in June, the lowest since October 2021. All that has happened while the unemployment rate has risen by just one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.2%.

The drop in participation is sometimes attributed to a shrinking immigrant population and retiring baby boomers and Gen Xers. However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as "prime age" workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023. "Looking at the statistics now, that argument doesn't hold up so well," North said of the retirement and immigration rationale. "I hate to use the word 'alarming,'" he added, but said the numbers are cause for concern.