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While some rent-stabilized tenants are treating the news like a citywide lottery win, others fear the deterioration of their building.

Tom Brady thinks Argentina's two goal comeback over Egypt tops his 28-3 Super Bowl win.

Each day of LeBron James’ free agency sweepstakes seems to bring another interesting twist or insider update. This has certainly been the case when it comes to which team ESPN NBA insider Brian Windhorst is hearing LeBron will land with. ESPN NBA insider Brain Windhorst talks during a panel. Last week, Windhorst asserted that the...

California's dreamiest housing markets are turning into an insurance nightmare.

"These owners panic when they see a city official,” said Fernando Mateo, spokesman for the United Bodegas of America. “They feel threatened by them walking in to ask questions.”

"The latest update is the site of concern remains a safety risk, indicating the evacuation order will not be lifted anytime soon and will last well into the night, at the earliest.''

The Los Angeles Dodgers have the most star-studded roster in Major League Baseball, but that doesn't stop their MVPs from complimenting each other.

“He would pull condoms off,” Lyndsey Fifield said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”

China Test-Launches Nuclear-Capable Ballistic Missile In Pacific, Alarming Neighbors

Via The Cradle

The Chinese navy on Monday test-launched a strategic missile from a nuclear submarine in the Pacific Ocean in the framework of its annual military exercises.

"At 12.01pm on July 6, a strategic nuclear submarine of China's People's Liberation Army Navy successfully launched a... strategic missile carrying a training simulation warhead into the relevant high seas of the Pacific Ocean," spokesperson Wang Xuemeng said in a statement posted on WeChat.

via Reuters

"This missile test launch is a routine arrangement of China's annual military training, and relevant countries were informed in advance," Wang stated, adding that the missile "accurately" landed in the designated area.

China's official Xinhua News Agency said that the test was a "routine arrangement" within the framework of China's annual military exercises.

Papua New Guinea's foreign minister and a New Zealand government source told AFP that China was preparing to test-fire a nuclear-capable ballistic missile.

"Yes, China has briefed me. I was personally called by the Chinese ambassador," Papua New Guinea Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko stated.

After Japan was notified, it strongly urged China to reconsider moving ahead with the test launch.

"We strongly requested a reconsideration of this test launch of the ballistic missile to ensure that it does not pose a threat to Japan's security, particularly by passing through its airspace," according to a joint statement issued before the launch by Japan's ministries of defense and foreign affairs.

The test launch came as China and Russia officially began their annual "Joint Sea-2026" naval exercises on Monday. The exercises are scheduled from 6 to 13 July and are taking place in the waters and airspace off the eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (#PLA) Navy's test launch of a strategic missile by a submarine was a routine military training exercise. It was not targeted at any specific country or target. China notified relevant countries in advance, which is in line with international… pic.twitter.com/Jo7u9ti5P5

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) July 6, 2026

The bilateral maneuvers aim to address regional security challenges and elevate military cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.

Russian state media reported that a cruiser, a corvette, a diesel-electric submarine, and a rescue vessel from Russia's Pacific Fleet will participate in the drills. China's Northern Theater Command said that two destroyers, a frigate, a submarine, a supply ship, and a rescue vessel will participate.

During a visit to Beijing in May, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Chinese and Russian military and economic cooperation "demonstrate strong momentum."

Chinese President Xi Jinping praised the strong relationship between Beijing and Moscow.

China and Russia on Monday launched the "Joint Sea-2026" exercise at a military port in Qingdao in east China's Shandong Province. #XinhuaNews pic.twitter.com/l6t3PNk3iD

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) July 6, 2026

"We have been able to continuously deepen our political mutual trust and strategic coordination with a resilience that remains unyielding despite trials and tribulations," Xi said.

Both leaders warned against a global return to the “law of the jungle,” referring to the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran.

Tyler Durden Tue, 07/07/2026 - 17:40

The Los Angeles Lakers are looking to make the finishing touches on an incomplete roster, but there's one free agent the team likely isn't signing.

Argentina waited until the final moments to deliver one of the wildest betting swings of the World Cup.

The US military launched “powerful strikes” against Iran on Tuesday in response to Tehran’s attacks on three commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours.

The "Wicked" pop star will call the Nets' arena her home from July 13-19.

Not everything stays in Vegas.

California has solved all of its other problems, of course, so now it has gone to war against high school mascots. 

VAR takes center stage at the World Cup once again. 

Lamar Odom was arrested Jan. 17 and later charged with driving under the influence, speeding and failure to stay in a driving lane.

Outstanding auto loan debt has surged 57.3% over a decade to nearly $1.7T, per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Anthropic Removes "Scary" Secret Claude Tracker After Developer Stumbles Across It

Anthropic has removed hidden detection code from its Claude Code tool after a developer reverse-engineered the binary and exposed how the company was subtly monitoring users in China.

The code, which Anthropic described as an experiment launched in March, used a form of prompt steganography to signal information about a user's environment back to Anthropic's servers. It was designed to help detect unauthorized resellers and attempts by other organizations to distill Claude's capabilities into their own models.

How The Detection Worked

The mechanism was first spotted by a Reddit user known as LegitMichel777, who stumbled on it while trying to restore a disabled feature in Claude Code. A separate developer known as Thereallo independently confirmed the finding the same day, June 30, publishing a technical breakdown of exactly how it worked.

The checks only ran in one specific situation: when a user pointed Claude Code at a different server instead of Anthropic's own - something companies commonly do when they route their traffic through internal systems or third-party gateways. From there, it checked two things:

• Whether the user's computer was set to a Chinese time zone (Shanghai or Urumqi).
• Whether the new server address matched a hidden list of Chinese AI companies (including well-known names like DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot) or known resale and proxy services.

If either check came back positive, Claude Code would quietly tweak a line of text called the "system prompt" - background instructions the app automatically sends to the AI model with every request, invisible to the person typing. Specifically, it changed how the date was written in that line:

• If the user was in a Chinese time zone, the date switched from using dashes to slashes (e.g., 2026/06/30 instead of 2026-06-30).
• The apostrophe in the phrase "Today's date is..." was swapped for one of three lookalike characters, each one a different signal, depending on which combination of checks the session had triggered.

None of this was visible to users, or likely even to the AI model itself in normal use - the characters look identical on screen. But Anthropic's servers could read the difference instantly. The lists of flagged domains and keywords were also scrambled inside the app's code using a basic encryption trick, so they wouldn't show up if someone just opened the file and searched for them.

Thereallo called the approach "prompt steganography" - hiding a signal inside ordinary-looking text - and noted it let Anthropic sort and flag sessions without needing any separate, visible tracking system.

Anthropic's Explanation

Last Tuesday, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar, who works on the Claude Code team, confirmed the feature on X:

"This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation. The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we've actually been meaning to take this down for a while. We merged the PR and this should be fully rolled back in tomorrow's release."

Anthropic has stated that unauthorized resellers have been selling access to Claude accounts and subscriptions at steep discounts in certain markets. The company has also publicly documented large-scale efforts by Chinese AI labs to distill its models by querying them at high volume through proxies and fraudulent accounts.

Anthropic removed the detection logic shortly after it became public.

Alibaba Bans Claude Code For Employees

The disclosure prompted a swift response from Chinese technology giant Alibaba. According to internal documents reported by the South China Morning Post, Alibaba added Claude Code to its list of high-risk software and instructed employees to stop using it for work, effective around July 10. The memo cited "back-door risks" following the discovery of the hidden markers.

Alibaba has not publicly commented on Anthropic's earlier accusations that its Qwen models benefited from large-scale distillation of Claude.

The Wider Context: Distillation And Geopolitical Competition

Model distillation - training a new model on the outputs of a more capable one - is a common technique in AI development. However, Anthropic and other U.S. frontier labs argue that industrial-scale distillation campaigns by foreign entities, particularly Chinese labs, undermine export controls and intellectual property protections.

Anthropic has previously published details of what it described as distillation operations targeting its models by labs including DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. Chinese researchers have also published work showing that many leading Chinese models carry detectable signatures consistent with distillation from U.S. systems.

In this environment, companies like Anthropic face pressure to protect their models while maintaining user trust - especially in tools like Claude Code, which are granted significant access to users' local machines, files, and command execution.

Thereallo's analysis raises obvious questions about transparency. While the feature wasn't designed to steal user data or take control of anyone's computer, hiding this kind of tracking inside the system prompt without telling anyone erodes the trust these coding tools depend on.

"Coding agents already live on the wrong side of a scary boundary," Thereallo wrote. "Hiding the signal in the system prompt makes every other privacy claim harder to believe."

Anthropic has not issued a detailed public postmortem on the experiment. The company has emphasized that distillation attacks and account abuse pose risks to model safety standards and U.S. technological leadership, and that it continues to work with government and industry partners on mitigation strategies.

Tyler Durden Tue, 07/07/2026 - 17:20

Activists Push California To Recognize 'Black English' In Preschool Classrooms

Via American Greatness,

Progressive California education activists are urging the state to recognize “black English” in preschool classrooms, claiming the approach would strengthen literacy development and affirm the language spoken by many black children.

Black Californians United for Early Care & Education (BlackECE), a nonprofit advocacy organization, is promoting what it describes as an effort to challenge “harmful language hierarchies and affirm black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in black history, culture, and community.”

The group also seeks to “address how language bias shows up in early learning spaces–and how it can be dismantled.”

Ashley Williams, a co-founder of BlackECE, said the initiative is intended to ensure children feel their voices are respected regardless of how they speak.

“I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it one way or the other,” Williams told PBS.

Williams also reflected on her own experiences, saying speaking black English came with embarrassment because of its slang and grammatical differences.

She said she often felt pressure to “talk white” instead of speaking in the way that felt most natural to her.

BlackECE has developed a 10-point policy agenda focused on black children, families and educators, including proposals related to reparations and early childhood education.

The organization’s campaign follows California’s 2020 plan encouraging early dual-language learning and support for bilingual children. BlackECE argues that black English should also be recognized as part of those efforts.

“We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include black children who may be African-American English speakers,” Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project, said.

According to research cited from the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of American children and 44 percent of California children ages 5 to 17 are bilingual. The information also states that 89 percent of African Americans speak only English at home.

Tyler Durden Tue, 07/07/2026 - 17:00