White House press secretary Katie Zacharia held her first press briefing Tuesday. Win McNamee/Getty Images New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is facing questions about her legal credentials. Her answer on Tuesday about where she passed the bar exam added to the confusion. Zacharia earned a law degree from Pepperdine University and has repeatedly called herself an attorney. Newly minted White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has repeatedly described herself as an attorney. The conservative commentator is now facing scrutiny about her legal qualifications after she was pressed to explain them following her first White House briefing with the media. As President Donald Trump spoke to reporters after the briefing on Tuesday, one asked him where Zacharia had passed the bar exam. "What state did she pass the bar exam in? You said she is an attorney. Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?" the reporter asked. Trump then turned to Zacharia, standing behind him, and asked, "Which state?" "When I moved to China," Zacharia answered. Her response added to the confusion over where she may be licensed to practice law in the United States. State bar exams are generally administered in person within the jurisdiction. In a statement, Zacharia said she "practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials." She did not say if she'd passed the bar in any state. "Katie is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team," Steven Cheung, White House communications director, said. "She is uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people about all the great things President Trump and his Administration have been doing, and she will do an incredible job as Press Secretary." Zacharia does not appear to be listed in the State Bar of California's attorney database, despite living and working in the state. She also does not appear to be listed in the D.C. Bar's member directory. The Substack publication, Popular Information, reported earlier on Tuesday that it searched records in all 50 states and Washington, DC, and turned up no evidence that Zacharia is licensed to practice law. President Trump on White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia: "I thought she was very good." Q: "You said she's an attorney. Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?" Zacharia: "When I moved to China." Q: "Where did you pass the bar exam?" https://t.co/5xiwyEsVSs — CSPAN (@cspan) October 13, 2026 Zacharia graduated from California's Pepperdine University in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in political science and government. She then received a law degree from the university's Caruso School of Law in 2011, according to the college. A White House official said after she graduated, Zacharia moved to China with her husband for his job at an American private equity firm. She worked in international transaction law in China, according to the official. Her LinkedIn page says she served as general counsel for the California-based nonprofit Fix California from January 2024 to March 2025. More than a decade earlier, according to her LinkedIn, Zacharia worked as an associate at the Beijing-headquartered Zhong Lun Law Firm. Trump announced Zacharia's appointment to the White House in a Truth Social post last week, saying she has an "unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning." He also referred to her as an attorney in the post. In her own post that followed, Zacharia called serving Trump and the American people the "honor of a lifetime." "I want to thank President Trump for his trust that he has placed in me. I have wanted to work for him for a very long time," Zacharia said during Tuesday's White House press briefing. Read the original article on Business Insider

Advanced humanoid hardware is one of the strategic high-tech fields where China has an early lead over the US.

It's not clear exactly for what purpose the recording device was used, but FBI director Kash Patel said the scheme was to "capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology."

A federal judge on October 13, 2026 granted Apple limited expedited discovery in its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI, ordering the defendants to produce forensic device images, materials used to interview Apple job candidates, and private messages between two figures in the dispute. Discovery the Court Granted Judge Edward J. Davila of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted in part Apple's motion in Apple Inc. v. Liu, the San Jose case naming former Apple…

The author has lived abroad half her life. Courtesy of the author I've lived about half of my adult life either overseas or traveling. It's been more than 13 years since we've lived on the same continent. My perspective on our relationship and the one with my own daughter is shifting in real time. Time is a funny thing, mostly because it's a construct, but it has a way of forcing people to see things differently, even when they might not want to. I hadn't spent long stretches of time with my mom until her recent visit. After she left, I began to reflect on how the years — and distance — have changed us both. The picture I have of her has stayed mostly the same over the years, but this visit shifted something: I'm now more aware of her aging, and of my own. I'm seeing her for who she is It's hard to see your parents one way as a child and then realize, as an adult, that that impression of them was based solely on a child's perspective and only knowing them relationally as a parent, not fully knowing them as an adult from an adult's perspective. The relationship I had with her as a child and teen may be long gone, and the relationship I have with her now has evolved beyond anything my youthful perspective could have imagined. During this most recent visit, I feel like I'm finally seeing the truest version of her from a healed, adult perspective. She's human. I'm human. We all just have to figure out how we relate to one another and engage in one another's lives. I'm in my hinge generation years The phase of life where I am right now as a millennial has sometimes been referred to as the sandwich generation, but I recently read something about it also being called the hinge generation. I'm approaching this thing called "middle age," and I'm reluctant to identify as such. I'm old enough to have aging parents and be a parent myself, but still young enough that middle age simply sounds like a historical time period. Watching my mother's age become more apparent — both as her child and as a parent myself — has me contemplating the reality of standing in the middle as part of the hinge generation. Seeing her differently has also made me profoundly aware that my own daughter is old enough to perceive me differently from how she saw me as a toddler and young child. I'm less infallible and more easily able to be critiqued, as my human nature is more visible to her developing mind. What does this mean for my own daughter, who's watching me age? How does she feel about our relationship, even in her first decade of life? She may be young, but I vividly remember being that age and even recall what I thought about my mom. While I don't know exactly how my daughter sees me, I have to remember that she is her own person, with her own views and perspectives shaped by everything in her life. While my relationship with my mother may never change from what it is now, the memories I have of it from childhood have at least influenced me as a mom. I want to keep the lines of communication open with my daughter and show up — for both her and my son — with emotional availability and empathy." I see myself in my mom and also my daughter Wherever we are in the "line" of time, we can remember all the places we've already been, ages, and experiences survived. We can look at all the people around us and see them as children who have grown up with diverse experiences that have brought them to their current state and status. The author sees herself both in her mom and in her daughter. Courtesy of the author Human beings will never be perfect. Neither will any type of relationship — familial, romantic, friendship, or otherwise. Time changes people, and time changes perspectives. Where we find ourselves in our thoughts and between relationships is only a transitive place, one that is forever changing as we shift across space and time into the future. Who we will be is shaped by our self-talk and how we see ourselves, and further formed by time and life experiences. How we treat ourselves and others actively plays a role in how relationships develop and end — or how they develop and thrive. Looking 30 years into my future, I see both my mom and myself; looking 30 years back, I see myself and my daughter. We're a connected line of women and lives that have interrelated and interdependent on one another. And each new moment of each new day will shape the mutual direction, depth, and desire to continue onwards. As I like to tell my children: They are the final arbiters in their lives, and they can build their reality — and relationships — through their thoughts, behaviors, and actions. What we each build is up to us. Read the original article on Business Insider

Jon Hicks / GamesIndustry.biz: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announces Xbox Labs, a small team to test emerging ideas, citing recent game ports and mashups, many of them built with AI tools  —  New business unit is charged with testing new projects and judging them by user feedback, spurred by recent mashups and ports delivered with AI coding tools

A federal judge ruled that Apple can access OpenAI's interview materials involving former Apple employees, as well as private messages and testimony from key figures in the case.

Anthropic's latest study combined IoT and network tests to explore AI self-replication, which researchers said would be "challenging" to shut down.

Becky DeGrossa spent 20 years in Big Tech before opening her business, CounselingWise. Matthew DeFeo for BI Becky DeGrossa, 66, worked at IBM and then became a therapist before opening CounselingWise. The service helps therapists market their businesses through custom websites, SEO, and Google Ads. She works with 40 to 50 contractors who have great people skills, which has helped her scale. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Becky DeGrossa, a 66-year-old who is founder of CounselingWise from Boulder, Colorado. It's been edited for length and clarity. I earned a degree in computer science from Cal Poly and then spent 20 years in total at IBM, leaving the company in 2003. When I left, I was a consultant and managing principal, and I was supposed to be leading the team up the hill — but I just really wasn't passionate about it at all anymore. I spent a year thinking, "I'm going to go do something else. I've been here forever. What do I know how to do? What do I like doing?" When I thought about what I liked about my Big Tech job, it was being a manager. The most meaningful part of my job was meeting one-on-one with employees to help them out with a problem or coach them along. I'd also been in therapy and had found it extremely helpful, so I thought I'd change careers to become a therapist. I earned a Master's degree in psychology from 2003 to 2006 and then worked as a practicing therapist. While doing this, I started a side gig from my therapy office, organizing little groups of therapists to show them what they needed to do to create their own Google business profile and promote their website. This was the beginning of what became my marketing agency CounselingWise, which helps therapists get found by clients through these services as well as custom websites, SEO, and Google Ads. As I spent more and more time on my business, I didn't have time to be a therapist and build my business. So I closed my therapy practice four years after I started it to pursue my business full time, combining my technical, marketing, and psychology backgrounds. DeGrossa said the most meaningful part of her tech career was meeting with employees to help them out with a problem or coach them along. Matthew DeFeo for BI It was hard to stop my therapy practice — I felt honored to walk alongside my clients through some very difficult things in their lives, and I didn't take leaving lightly. I stopped taking new clients right away, but I gave my existing clients six months' notice. We've been a seven-figure company since 2022 and hit $2 million in June 2026. The business has made approximately $300,000 in profit each year for the past five years. About 99% of our revenue is generated from done-for-you services, including content writing, website development, Google business profile optimization, and Google Ads. Here are the key strategies that helped me build it. 1. I helped people do what they didn't want to do themselves When I started working as a therapist, it took me a while to figure out how to make my website visible. I thought it'd be easy to just put up a business site and get my phone to ring, but I found that Google's local algorithm was actually a specific way of marketing I knew nothing about. So I took classes to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and content writing. I first took a course in copywriting, then learned about ranking in Google Places, and later learned about on-page SEO. Once I started implementing what I learned in these classes for my own website, my phone started ringing. At that time, all my friends were therapists since we went to school together, so I started teaching a class to other therapists about online marketing strategies. I held the classes in my therapy office. We brought in chairs and sat in a circle and I taught them what I was doing with my website. She learned about SEO and content writing before launching her business. Matthew DeFeo for BI I thought they'd do it themselves once I taught them, but most of them didn't feel technical enough or like they were good enough writers, and I realized there was a demand for these services. It was literally one step at a time, realizing, "Oh, people don't want to do this — I could do it for them." 2. I systematized what I learned What helped my business's growth was putting my time equally into learning the technical side, and then focusing on management and systematizing techniques to scale. I learned that in a small nimble market like mine, when I find a good idea, I test it out a number of times to see if it works, and then I systematize it and hire people to do it. And then I go back around — wash rinse, repeat — to find the next hopeful thing that I can test. So I have a little business development team that does all this testing on SEO techniques to become visible in Google and AI search. This consists of on-page optimizations to the website, off-page link-building, and optimizations of Google business profiles. If a particular SEO technique works, then we systematize it, scale it, and roll it out. We're constantly changing our strategy to stay up to date. One example of testing a new idea happened in May 2024, when a major Google Search documentation leak occurred. Based on that documentation and our testing, we added schema to our home and specialty pages. We tested this with several of our clients and it helped them rank better, so we rolled it out as a new part of our strategy. 3. I created a culture where my team cares about my clients. The other part of management I focus on is creating a culture where my team — which fluctuates between 40 to 50 contractors who I pay hourly rates depending on their role and experience level — cares about my clients. In my world, our clients are therapists who are extremely sensitive to human interactions, so we don't just hire smart people who can crank out code. "Our clients are therapists who are extremely sensitive to human interactions, so we don't just hire smart people who can crank out code," she says. Matthew DeFeo for BI We hire project managers, for instance, who have very good people skills. They can work alongside a non-technical client to reassure them the whole way that we have their best interest at heart, and we're going to represent them well on their website. Because of my management experience in corporate, I have a perspective of what it takes to be able to build a really good reputation as a therapist. So I insist on this whole client care piece for our clients, because they do wonderful work in the world, and I want to take care of them. The key is making sure that my technical strategy and systematizing go hand-in-hand with client care, to make sure we take care of our clients in the process and make them feel held by us. Those are the three legs of the stool that have allowed us to continue to grow. Subscribe to the Small Business Insider newsletter. Read the original article on Business Insider

Fusion power startup Cambridge Heavy Industries is building a small, laser-powered fusion device to fuel the coming wave of fusion power plants.

An employee at OpenAI was arrested and charged with using a hidden recording device in one of the company’s San Francisco offices, according to statements from the artificial intelligence company and the US Justice Department.

The author went on a full-moon walk at Iguazú Falls at night. Courtesy of the author My husband and I booked a nighttime tour of Iguazú Falls during the full moon. We walked through the forest in darkness, listening to wildlife and rushing water. The moonlit waterfalls were unlike anything I'd seen during my many daytime visits. I'm originally from Argentina and grew up in Brazil, so I've been to the Iguazú Falls — which sit between the two countries — plenty of times. This year, I decided to take my husband and kids to see the world's largest waterfall system, since they had never been before. And while their minds were blown during our daytime visit, it was the night walk I took with my husband through the falls that, honestly, took my breath away. The full moon tour is small and private The night tour is only available during a full moon, and you can choose different time slots. We were there with friends for a wedding and chose the 9:25 p.m. slot to guarantee it'd be really dark out. While kids are allowed on the full-moon tour, we decided to leave ours at the hotel with my mom so we could fully enjoy the experience. The author walked in the dark through the Iguazú Falls. Courtesy of the author Our tour had 120 people, which is relatively small compared to the thousands you can encounter walking along the metal walkway leading to the falls during the day. The experience felt intimate because we were such a small group, which gave us space and time at every stop. The walk starts right before the falls, with a small performance by the Guaraní, the indigenous people of that part of Argentina. There, our guide also explained what certain words meant, for example, Iguazú means "big water" in Guaraní. The moon guided our way After the performance, we started walking through a thick forest in the dark. The guides told us to use all our senses to experience the national park in a way very few ever do, and they were right. We started noticing different chirps and squawks from insects, birds, and monkeys. There were also different smells coming from the forest. But one sound was undeniable. Even before we reached the falls, the sound they made was so loud that it was hard to ignore, and it grew even louder as we approached. The author heard the waterfalls before she saw them. Courtesy of the author Throughout the tour, we weren't allowed to use flashlights or flash photography. The whole point was to let your eyes adjust to walking in the dark and to let the moon guide you. It was pretty mind-blowing to see how your vision changed the further we went into the park; it didn't feel like nighttime. The waterfalls are breathtaking As soon as we approached the first fall, you could hear everyone gasp and stop to take photos. The enormity of the falls is pretty breathtaking, but also feeling their power at night is indescribable. Even as a writer, I lack the words to explain how powerful it felt. There are two circuits to the falls: top and bottom. Because the water levels are currently so high because of El Niño (so much so that Argentina had to close some parts of the park), we were only able to experience the top circuit during our visit. We missed out on the Devil's Throat, which gets you incredibly close to the falls. Our route let us see the waterfalls from above and the high jumps the water makes before it reaches the ground again. Argentina had to recently close parts of the tour the author took because the water is so high. Courtesy of the author At times, I just stood there, mesmerized by the sounds of the water splashing with all its intensity, surrounded by mist, under a sky covered in stars. My husband, who was experiencing it all for the first time, kept saying "wow" over and over. At one point, it was just him and me on a long metal structure overlooking the river right before the falls. It felt like we had the whole park to ourselves, and it was the most romantic thing we've done after many years of parenting little kids. We made it back to the entrance of the park around midnight. We brought our kids during the day The next day, we took a trip to the Brazilian side of the falls, which offers a panoramic view of this natural beauty. We rode a boat with our kids and friends close to the falls, where we got soaked and saw plenty of rainbows. On the way back to our car, we saw coatís and monkeys. After that, we took our kids to experience the same walk we had taken under the bright full moon, but during the day. Seeing the difference between what a daytime and a nighttime tour offers, I was left wishing we had taken the kids on the full-moon trip. Before we even left Iguazú, my oldest was already asking us when we were coming back. Read the original article on Business Insider

Character.ai enshittified its product but was still burning tons of cash, its bankruptcy documents say.

A federal magistrate judge took Elon Musk to task over a statement he made about a fired federal employee. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A federal judge tore into a February 2025 post Elon Musk made on Twitter about a fired official. The judge wrote that Musk "clearly intended" to make the official feel "afraid." Judge William Fitzpatrick took issue with what federal officials said about the firing of FEMA CFO Mary Comans. A federal judge tore into Elon Musk for reposting a photo of a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official and accusing her of "criminal" conduct. "The fact that Mr. Musk posted a picture of Ms. Comans to his millions of followers while falsely characterizing her government service as a 'criminal action' was clearly intended to make her afraid," Federal Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick wrote in a ruling published on Tuesday. In a blistering eight-page ruling, Fitzpatrick addressed what he described as the reputational damage to Mary Comans, a longtime federal government employee who was fired from her post as chief financial officer of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in February 2025. Musk's February 11, 2025, post, which was made when he was de facto leader of the White House DOGE Office, "served no legitimate governmental interest and was little more than state sanctioned intimidation," Fitzpatrick wrote. Fitzpatrick wrote that federal officials knew at the time that it was false to accuse Comans of trying to circumvent President Donald Trump's executive order that paused federal funding to non-governmental organizations assisting migrants. Nonetheless, Musk and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, among others, made statements that Fitzpatrick wrote impugned "the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans," Fitzpatrick wrote. "For reasons unfathomable to this Court, officials chose to turn the power of the federal government against a singular employee with an impeccable record of public service," Fitzpatrick wrote. "In short, Ms. Comans was professionally targeted and personally attacked by government officials for no legitimate reason." Musk's post on X was one of seven statements Fitzpatrick addressed in the ruling. Musk quote-tweeted a post that posted a picture of Comans and Trump with the text, "FEMA CFO Mary Comans was just fired for funneling $58M to illegal migrant hotels in Manhattan. FA, FO." In his post, Musk added, "A criminal action." Fitzpatrick wrote that it was clear to other federal officials that Comans had no authority to stop specific grants, and that others had decided to continue funding state and local programs like the ones Musk took issue with. Musk and Noem have since left the Trump administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Fitzpatrick wrote that the federal government did not dispute a list of facts about the case, including that federal officials at DHS and FEMA knew that statements about Comans' firing were false when they were made. Tuesday's ruling is just one part of the broader legal fight over Comans' firing. In July, US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff ruled that Comans was unlawfully fired. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling. Read the original article on Business Insider

US attorney apologized to court, said government has stopped running Trump ads.

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AI leaders joined whistleblowers and security leaders at a sweeping parliamentary session, while a few hundred meters away Britain’s spy chief warned AI could be used to create new bioweapons.

Sovereign AI control is becoming a business continuity issue as autonomous agents take on essential enterprise workflows. Keeping data within national boundaries addresses part of the challenge, but organizations also need control over agent behavior, external dependencies and the economics of keeping those systems operational. Regulated enterprises need more than access to powerful models and […] The post Deliverance AI puts sovereign AI control to the continuity test appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Data has always been central to business decision-making, and most analytical workloads...