Alan Herrera via Comic Sands:

‘The Trump administration’s attempt to cover up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as it undergoes repairs following alleged “vandalism” backfired when high winds revealed the sad sight of it, now drained and surrounded by a fence with a tarp on it.

The renovation of the Reflecting Pool has become a debacle, marked by recurring algae blooms, workers resorting to pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to combat the problem, and a political blame game in which some Republicans have attempted to pin responsibility for the mess on Democrats….’

Dan Mangan via CNBC:

‘A senior U.S. Secret Service official said the “threat environment” for the agency’s protectees, who include President Donald Trump, “is the highest we’ve ever seen.”

There have been about 10,000 cases involving threats to government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026, the official said. That represents a 40% increase in such cases over the same period last year.

The briefing came ahead of Friday’s rescheduled annual dinner for the White House Correspondents’ Association at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington. Trump is set to attend.

The WHCA dinner in April was interrupted when a gunman stormed through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton. The man, Cole Tomas Allen, faces charges of trying to assassinate Trump….’

Emily Mullin via WIRED:

‘The cyclospora diarrhea outbreak isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a pattern of leafy greens wreaking digestive havoc….’

Chris Lee via Ars Technica:

‘A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can’t be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object.

So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists, turns out (arxiv.org link) to be more complex than I expected….’

Kyle Orland via Ars Technica:

‘OpenAI says an agent powered by its LLM models escaped its sandboxed testing environment to infiltrate Hugging Face’s servers as part of an overzealous attempt to obtain solutions to a benchmark test. The company says it considers the unintended infiltration an “an unprecedented cyber incident” and is working with Hugging Face on new protections to prevent a recurrence….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘The Orange Menace offered a fallen service member’s grieving family a ride on his special Air Force One, and proudly reported their response: “They said wow.” What Trump remembers about a family in mourning is that they like his plane.

There is no human tragedy so large that Trump cannot crawl inside it and find a flattering anecdote about himself. Their son was dead, but the presidential aircraft tests well….’

Madison Malone Kircher via The New York Times:

‘This is the darling… Kiana Hall’s video of the unusually round raccoon has gone viral, making the animal a celebrity in Seattle and beyond….’