The Python Software Foundation has rejected a $1.5 million government grant because of anti-DEI requirements imposed by the Trump administration, the nonprofit said in a blog post yesterday. The grant would have been the largest in the organization’s history.

Hoping to “address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI,” the foundation submitted a grant proposal in January 2025 to the National Science Foundation’s Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program . After a “multi-round proposal writing process” and a “months-long vetting process,” it appeared the foundation was close to obtaining a two-year grant worth $1.5 million.

But what at first seemed like good news quickly turned sour due to rules against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, the foundation said:

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Earlier this year, Slate Auto emerged from stealth mode and stunned industry watchers with the Slate Truck , a compact electric pickup it plans to sell for less than $30,000. Achieving that price won’t be easy, but Slate really does look to be doing things differently from the rest of the industry —even Tesla. For example, the truck will be made from just 600 parts, with no paint or even an infotainment system, to keep costs down.

An unanswered question until now has been “where do I take it to be fixed if it breaks?” Today, we have an answer. Slate is partnering with RepairPal to use the latter’s network of more than 4,000 locations across the US.

“Slate’s OEM partnership with RepairPal’s nationwide network of service centers will give Slate customers peace of mind while empowering independent service shops to provide accessorization and service,” said Slate chief commercial officer Jeremy Snyder.

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Social media platforms have agreed to comply with Australia’s social media ban for users under 16 years old, begrudgingly embracing the world’s most restrictive online child safety law.

On Tuesday, Meta, Snap, and TikTok confirmed to Australia’s parliament that they’ll start removing and deactivating more than a million underage accounts when the law’s enforcement begins on December 10, Reuters reported .

Firms risk fines of up to $32.5 million for failing to block underage users.

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As newer, more efficient silicon manufacturing processes have gotten more expensive and difficult to develop, chipmakers like Intel and AMD have repeatedly rebranded some of their older processors with new model numbers. This has allowed both companies to release “new” products that aren’t actually new at all, muddying the waters for people trying to buy lower-end and midrange laptops.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware , AMD has quietly rebranded a swath of its Ryzen laptop chips with new model numbers without changing the silicon. The rebranded processors use either Rembrandt-R silicon with Zen 3+ CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores or Mendocino silicon with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores. Both of these architectures first launched in 2022, but Mendocino’s Zen 2 CPU architecture dates all the way back to 2019. During the company’s model number decoder ring era , these designs had been sold as Ryzen 7035- and Ryzen 7020-series chips, respectively.

This is actually AMD’s second rebranding for the Rembrandt-R silicon, which was launched as the Ryzen 6000 series in 2022. These chips will compete most directly with Intel’s non-Ultra Core 100 series processors , most of which use 2022-vintage Raptor Lake silicon.

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On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a revised partnership agreement that introduces an independent expert panel to verify when OpenAI achieves so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), a determination that will trigger major shifts in how the companies share technology and revenue. The deal values Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI at approximately $135 billion and extends the exclusive partnership through 2032 while giving both companies more freedom to pursue AGI independently.

The partnership began in 2019 when Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. Since then, Microsoft has provided billions in cloud computing resources through Azure and used OpenAI’s models as the basis of products like Copilot. The new agreement maintains Microsoft as OpenAI’s frontier model partner and preserves Microsoft’s exclusive rights to OpenAI’s IP and Azure API exclusivity until the threshold of AGI is reached.

Under the previous arrangement, OpenAI alone would determine when it achieved AGI, which is a nebulous concept that is difficult to define. The revised deal requires an independent expert panel to verify that claim, a change that adds oversight to a determination with billions of dollars at stake. When the panel confirms that AGI has been reached, Microsoft’s intellectual property rights to OpenAI’s research methods will expire, and the revenue-sharing arrangement between the companies will end, though payments will continue over a longer period.

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On Friday, the California Supreme Court ordered the University of California system to release the details of a proposed deal from the federal government that would restore research grants that were suspended by the Trump administration. The proposed deal, first issued in August, had remained confidential as a suit filed by faculty at UCLA made its way through appeals. With California’s top court now weighing in, the university administrators have released the document , still marked “draft” and “confidential attorney work product.”

Most of the demands will seem unsurprising to those familiar with the Trump administration’s interest: an end to all diversity programs and those supporting transgender individuals, plus a sharp crackdown on campus protests. The eye-opening portion comes at the price tag: nearly $1.2 billion paid out, with UCLA covering all the costs of compliance. And, as written, the deal wouldn’t stop the Trump administration from cutting the grants for other reasons or imposing more intrusive regulations, such as those mentioned in its university compact .

Familiar concerns

In many ways, the proposed deal is much more focused than the odd list of demands the administration sent Harvard University earlier this year, in that it targets issues that the administration has focused on repeatedly. These include an end to all diversity programs at both the faculty and student levels. It demands that UCLA agree to “remove explicit or implicit goals for compositional diversity based on race, sex, or ethnicity, including eliminating any secretive or proxy-based ‘diversity’ hiring processes.”

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As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.

From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.

“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.

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Porsche provided flights from Albany, New York, to Malaga, Spain, and accommodation so Ars could drive the 911 Turbo S. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Turbochargers have been injecting more power into engines for over 100 years, but never before have they been so prevalent in our cars. A little boost can add a lot of power and efficiency, too, making a turbocharger a great solution to eke maximum performance out of today’s engines. Usually, though, that comes with the penalty of throttle lag: You put your foot to the floor, and nothing much happens for a beat or two.

As we’ve recently seen in our review of the new 911 GTS , Porsche’s engineers have worked some magic to create a turbocharger that provides all the power and fun of forced induction but with none of the throttle response penalty. If adding one high-tech, high-voltage turbocharger is good, surely two would be better, right? Indeed, it is, if you can afford the cost of entry. Meet the 701 hp (523 kW) 2026 911 Turbo S, Porsche’s new most powerful 911 ever.

Twinning the T-Hybrid

For Porsche’s first hybrid 911, the GTS, the company didn’t simply add an electric motor and bigger battery into the mix and call it a day. It also inserted another high-speed motor into the turbocharger, enabling it to spin up to maximum speed in less than a second, nearly eliminating turbo lag.

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Since last year’s disastrous rollout of Google’s AI Overviews , the world at large has been aware of how AI-powered search results can differ wildly from the traditional list of links search engines have generated for decades. Now, new research helps quantify that difference, showing that AI search engines tend to cite less popular websites and ones that wouldn’t even appear in the Top 100 links listed in an “organic” Google search.

In the pre-print paper “ Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI ,” researchers from Ruhr University in Bochum and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems compared traditional link results from Google’s search engine to its AI Overviews and Gemini-2.5-Flash . The researchers also looked at GPT-4o’s web search mode and the separate “GPT-4o with Search Tool,” which resorts to searching the web only when the LLM decides it needs information found outside its own pre-trained data.

The researchers drew test queries from a number of sources, including specific questions submitted to ChatGPT in the WildChat dataset , general political topics listed on AllSides , and products included in the 100 most-searched Amazon products list.

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