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FREEDOM, Maine (AP) — Heather Donahue is walking through the woods once again. The star of the successful low-budget horror movie “The Blair Witch Project” has an on-screen history of getting into scary situations in a forest.But this time she is merely picking up an old soda can someone carelessly left on a trail. And she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.“For me, reading fairy tales, I always wanted to live in the forest,” said Donahue, 51, who moved on from acting long ago and now lives in rural Maine. “It is absolutely as magical as it seemed in those…

Moody’s cited rising debt, saying US had repeatedly failed to end the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and interest.Moody’s Ratings has stripped the United States government of its top credit rating, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt. On Friday, Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1. “Successive US administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” it said as it changed its outlook on the US to “stable” from “negative”. But, it added, the US “retains exceptional…

The United States Supreme Court has granted an emergency petition from a group of migrants in Texas, barring the use of an 18th-century wartime law to expedite their removals. Friday’s unsigned decision (PDF) is yet another blow to the administration of President Donald Trump, who has sought to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to swiftly deport undocumented immigrants out of the US. Only two conservative justices dissented: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. While the high court has yet to rule on the merits of Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, it did issue “injunctive relief” to Venezuelan…

OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, dwarfing any existing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (OpenAI has not yet returned TechCrunch’s request for comment, but to put that into perspective, that’s bigger than Monaco.) The UAE project, developed in partnership with G42 – an Abu…

Google I/O, Google’s biggest developer conference of the year, is nearly upon us. Scheduled for May 20 to 21 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, I/O will showcase product announcements from across Google’s portfolio. Expect plenty of news relating to Android, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, and — of course — Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. Earlier this week, Google hosted a separate event dedicated to Android updates: The Android Show. The company announced new ways to find lost Android phones and other items, additional device-level features for its Advanced Protection program, security tools to protect against scams and theft, and a…

A recent United States ambassador to Ukraine has published an opinion column explaining her decision to resign her post, and criticising President Donald Trump for siding with Russia over Ukraine. On Friday, former diplomat Bridget Brink published an article in the Detroit Free Press, a newspaper in her home state of Michigan, expressing concern about current US foreign policy. The US has long been an ally of Ukraine, and since 2014, it has provided the war-torn country with military assistance, as it fends off Russia’s attempts at invasion and annexation. But Brink wrote that there has been a shift since…

United States House Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill”, a wide-ranging tax and spending legislation, is at a crucial moment. The nearly 400-page legislation proposes sweeping changes which include extending the 2017 tax cuts, slashing taxes for businesses and individuals, and enacting deep cuts to social programmes like Medicaid and SNAP. While Republicans tout the bill as a boon for economic growth and middle-class relief, nonpartisan analysts warn it could add trillions to the national debt and strip millions of Americans of medical and food assistance. The bill will be voted on by the House Budget Committee today and, if passed, will…

CANNES, France (AP) — Kazuo Ishiguro ‘s mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of “Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982’s “A Pale View of Hills” was inspired by his mother’s stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family. “A Pale View of Hills” marked the start to what’s become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And,…

Washington, DC – Three days, three countries, hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and a geopolitical shift in the United States’s approach to the region: Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East has been eventful. This week, the United States president visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the first planned trip of his second presidency, after attending Pope Francis’s funeral last month. Trump was visibly gleeful throughout the trip as he secured investments, criticised domestic political rivals and heaped praise on Gulf leaders. The word “historic” was used more than a few times by US…

AI startup Cohere has acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of high-level market research. Sully Omar, one of the founders of Ottogrid, announced the deal Friday in a post on X. He didn’t disclose the terms. Ottogrid will sunset its product, according to Omar, but will give customers “ample notice” and “a reasonable transition period.” “We’re very excited to join the Cohere team and integrate Ottogrid into Cohere’s … platform,” Omar said in a statement. “Through our work with Cohere, we’re [going to] dramatically impact how people can automate their workflows, enrich their data,…