The US just launched its biggest effort yet to compensate victims of human trafficking, setting up a process to dole out $200 million from seizures related to shutting down the notorious online escorts ad service Backpage.com .

In an announcement on Thursday, the Department of Justice confirmed that "this marks the largest remission process to date to compensate victims of human trafficking."

Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti said the effort to redistribute millions of ill-gotten gains "underscores the Department’s unwavering commitment to use forfeiture to take the profit out of crime and to compensate victims." It comes after Backpage's "owners and key executives and businesses related to the platform" were found guilty of facilitating crimes including money laundering and "unlawful commercial sex using a facility in interstate or foreign commerce," the DOJ said.

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The mid-engine sports car is an increasingly rare breed, but Lotus still carries the torch with its Emira, which is available with a choice of supercharged V6 or turbocharged inline-four cylinder engines. Between its steering, compact dimensions, standard manual transmission, and low mass, it’s a breath of fresh air, and it's ready to capture the hearts of enthusiasts. Pricing starts at $102,250 for the V6, which is in direct competition with the Porsche 718 Cayman GTS while it lasts, and a sea of mostly cosmetic options inflated this example to $116,950.

Like many Lotuses before it, the Emira’s foundation is a bonded aluminum chassis with Bilstein passive damper-equipped double-wishbone suspension at all four corners and the engine mounted right behind the seats. Curb weight isn’t as low as you’d think at 3,187 lbs (1,445 kg), but it’s contained within an overall length, width (sans mirrors), and height of 173, 75, and 48 inches (4,395 mm, 1,905 mm, 1,220 mm), respectively.

Mid-engine layouts generally put the same components like radiators in the same places, and the Emira's shape follows its predecessors (as well as cars from McLaren or Ferrari) with large intake ducts straked across its doors and rear fenders, a low nose, and little overhang past the axles. In fact, these are key in its sense-of-occasion appeal; climbing over its door sills and into its driver position is teeming with "let’s go" energy, and the view out the windshield—fenders, short nose, and all—is more exotic than anything else at its price.

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Microsoft says it plans to stop providing updates for Windows 11 SE, the special Windows 11 variant intended to compete with Google's ChromeOS in schools. The change was announced quietly via this Microsoft support document (spotted by the German-language site Dr. Windows ), which says that Windows 11 SE will not be getting a version of this year's Windows 11 25H2 update. Security updates for Windows 11 SE will end in October of 2026, when Windows 11 24H2 stops receiving updates.

"Support for Windows 11 SE—including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes—will end in October 2026," the document reads. "While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security."

Microsoft has fielded multiple would-be ChromeOS competitors over the years, looking to prevent, suspend, and/or reverse Google's success in selling the laptops to schools and price-conscious laptop buyers.

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This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal , the former commander of the Space Force's Space Mission Delta 2.

If it seems like there's a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up.

The US Space Force's Mission Delta 2 is a unit that reports to Space Operations Command, with the job of sorting out the nearly 50,000 trackable objects humans have launched into orbit.

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The United States added 22,332 megawatts of power plant capacity in the first half of this year, and the vast majority of it was utility-scale solar, batteries, and onshore wind.

Natural gas was next, and there was zero new coal or nuclear, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Through 2030, the US energy landscape looks a lot like these last six months in terms of the mix of new power plants, with solar and batteries leading the way, according to the EIA’s list of planned power plants.

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Welcome to Edition 8.05 of the Rocket Report! One of the most eye-raising things I saw this week was an online update from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center touting its work on cryogenic propellant management in orbit. Why? Because until recently, this was a forbidden research topic at the space agency, as propellant depots would obviate the need for a large rocket like the Space Launch System. But now that Richard Shelby is retired...

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Australian launch goes sideways . Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle, Ars reports . The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia, but the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia's northeastern frontier.

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As satisfying as a successful real-time strategy game campaign can be, dealing with a complex RTS map can often be overwhelming. Keeping track of multiple far-flung resource-production bases, groups of units, upgrade trees, and surprise encounters with the enemy requires a level of attention-splitting that can strain even the best multitaskers.

Then there's The King is Watching , which condenses the standard real-time strategy production loop into an easy-to-understand single-screen interface, complete with automatic battles. The game's unique resource management system—combined with well-designed, self-balancing difficulty and randomized upgrades that keep each run fresh—makes The King is Watching one of the most enjoyable pick-up-and-play strategy titles I've encountered in a long time.

What is the king watching, exactly?

The bulk of the action in The King is Watching takes place on a small, 4x4 grid of squares representing your castle. That's where you'll place blueprint tiles from your hand that then start producing the basic and refined resources necessary to place even more blueprints. Those resources also power the factories that crank out defensive units that automatically fight to protect your castle from periodic waves of enemies (in adorable pixelated animations that take place on a battlefield to the right of your castle).

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AI tools are widely used by software developers, but those devs and their managers are still grappling with figuring out how exactly to best put the tools to use, with growing pains emerging along the way.

That's the takeaway from the latest survey of 49,000 professional developers by community and information hub StackOverflow, which itself has been heavily impacted by the addition of large language models (LLMs) to developer workflows.

The survey found that four in five developers use AI tools in their workflow in 2025—a portion that has been rapidly growing in recent years. That said, "trust in the accuracy of AI has fallen from 40 percent in previous years to just 29 percent this year."

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A 20-year-old man in China may be anxiously reassessing his chances of eternal damnation after the cross he had tattooed on his neck inexplicably vanished after five months and was replaced by an aggressive necrotic ulcer and grave inflammation. The case is so strange that doctors say it "expands the spectrum of tattoo-associated pathology."

In an uncanny case report published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, the man's doctors noted the multiple ways in which his lesion was striking. First, they could find no trace of an infection. The pigment used for the tattoo, which was red, had disappeared from his skin, leaving just scarring behind in places not yet covered by the ulcer. This isn't entirely unusual; in normal cases of people having a bad reaction to a tattoo, pigment has been known to migrate into lesions or lymph nodes. But in this case, there was no sign of the red ink, even with deeper digging.

When people's bodies reject tattoos, the abnormal immune reactions usually stay in the upper layers of tissue, and they almost never cause tissue death. But the man's lesion went deep and was clearly an invasive, crusty, bleeding necrotic ulcer. Moreover, doctors could also see that his neck was swollen on either side of the lesion. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that large masses had formed on both sides of the ulcer and below it. The masses were all in the ballpark of 4 cm by 3 cm, and they were eclipsing his jugular veins. Subsequent scans with enhanced computed tomography showed the internal jugular veins on both sides of his neck had formed clots.

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