Artemis II cleared the mission's big threshold on Thursday when Orion fired its engine hard enough to leave Earth orbit and commit four astronauts to a lunar flyby, the first crewed trip beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA said the burn put the spacecraft on course to loop around the far side of the Moon before heading home, turning this from a launch story into an actual deep-space mission. The crew had already spent a tense stretch checking systems, dealing with smaller onboard annoyances, and waiting for the maneuver that mattered. Now the flight becomes a live test of hardware, navigation, and human endurance for the later landing missions NASA wants to attempt later in the decade. If Artemis was still abstract before, it isn't now.
Artemis II is a flyby, not a landing. NASA is using it to prove the Space Launch System, Orion, and crew procedures before trying to put astronauts on the lunar surface again.
Donald Trump removed Pam Bondi as attorney general on Thursday, ending a bruising year in which the Justice Department lurched toward open loyalty politics and still failed to satisfy him. AP reports that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will take over on an acting basis, while Trump has privately discussed EPA chief Lee Zeldin as a permanent replacement. Bondi's fall was driven in part by conservative fury over the Jeffrey Epstein files, but the larger problem was simpler: she upended the department, fired career staff, chased Trump's enemies, and still did not produce the prosecutions or political wins he wanted. That makes the firing less a correction than another ratchet in the same direction. The person stepping in is not some outsider brought in to restore distance from the White House; it is Blanche, one of Trump's own lawyers.
Bondi had become a lightning rod inside Trump's coalition after the Justice Department's handling of Epstein-related records. Her tenure also featured sweeping firings and repeated pressure to use federal law enforcement against Trump's perceived adversaries.
Trump's new pharmaceutical tariff order is not a flat 100 percent tax on every imported medicine. It is a pressure ladder. Under the plan described by the White House and AP, companies that sign the administration's drug-pricing deals and build U.S. manufacturing can get a zero tariff on patented drugs and ingredients, while firms that refuse those terms can face tariffs that rise as high as 100 percent after a transition period. Bigger companies get 120 days before the top rate can hit; others get 180. Generic drugs are mostly outside the blast zone, and there are carve-outs for orphan drugs, fertility treatments, plasma products, some nuclear medicines, and other specialty products. The immediate question is whether this becomes a real industrial policy or just another bargaining cudgel that leaves pricing, supply chains, and patient costs more confused than before.
The order ties tariffs to the administration's 'most favored nation' drug-pricing push, which aims to force lower U.S. prices by linking them to the lower prices charged in other countries.
Pete Hegseth forced Army Chief of Staff Randy George out effective immediately, adding another senior uniformed officer to a growing pile of abrupt Trump-era removals. AP says George was not the only casualty: Army Gen. David Hodne and Maj. Gen. William Green were also fired, with no public explanation. That matters on its own, but it matters more because the United States is now five weeks into a war with Iran. The Army chief of staff is not the battlefield commander for that war, yet removing the service's top officer mid-conflict still sends a message through the whole Pentagon about who is safe, who isn't, and what kind of loyalty is now expected. The pattern is getting hard to miss. Civilian control of the military is normal; sudden purges of top brass during an active war are something else.
George had held the Army's top uniformed post since August 2023. His removal follows earlier dismissals of other senior officers under Hegseth, including high-profile moves at the Navy and the Joint Chiefs.
Meta has told members of its Oversight Board that the company may stop funding it after 2028, according to Platformer, which also reports that the budget has already been cut this year and is expected to shrink again in 2027 and 2028. That would mark a quiet retreat from one of the most ambitious experiments in platform governance of the past decade. The board was pitched as an outside check on Meta's own moderation power, a kind of appellate court for the rules of Facebook and Instagram. Now the company is shifting more trust-and-safety work to automated systems while spending heavily on AI infrastructure, and the board appears to be losing both money and internal importance. Even if some compromise keeps it alive, the message is blunt: when the bill for AI gets bigger, independent oversight starts to look optional.
Meta created the Oversight Board in 2020 as an external body that could review major moderation decisions and issue policy recommendations. It never controlled the company, but it gave Meta's content rules a visible public appeal layer.
via SCMP China, International Air Transport Association
Chinese airlines are in full nickel-and-dime mode as the Iran war drives fuel costs higher. SCMP reports that carriers including China Eastern are tightening weight controls, planning fuel loads more aggressively, taxiing on one engine, cruising higher to reduce drag, and even stripping out nonessential cabin items such as in-flight magazines. Some are also leaning harder on routes over Russian airspace for Europe flights, a structural advantage many European competitors still cannot use. The price pressure is not small. SCMP cites IATA data showing average jet fuel at $195 a barrel for the week ending March 27, roughly double the level a month earlier. This is the sort of story that looks petty until you add the numbers up: save 50 or 100 kilograms on thousands of flights, and suddenly an airline that lives on thin margins has bought itself breathing room.
The Strait of Hormuz carries a large share of the world's seaborne oil. With Iran effectively choking that route during the current war, airlines face a direct hit through higher jet-fuel prices rather than only through passenger demand.
Space Pioneer lost a high-profile shot on Friday when its Tianlong-3 rocket suffered a flight anomaly after launch from Jiuquan, according to SCMP. The vehicle matters because it is part of China's effort to build a heavier-lift private launcher that can support the country's planned internet megaconstellations, a market where SpaceX and Starlink set the pace. That makes this more than a single launch failure. China has spent years trying to grow a real commercial space sector rather than a cluster of startups orbiting state contractors, and Tianlong-3 was supposed to show that at least one private player could move into Falcon 9 territory. A failed mission does not end that ambition, but it does push back a part of the schedule China badly wants: getting more launch capacity online while its satellite race with the United States is speeding up.
China's government space program is still large, but Beijing has also encouraged private launch companies to help carry broadband-satellite and commercial payload demand. Reusable medium-heavy rockets are the hard part of that plan.
A pair of fresh analyses has rattled the people who spend their lives worrying about encrypted systems. Nature reports that one Google white paper and one Oratomic preprint both point to a world in which quantum computers can crack today's widely used security methods well before the end of the decade, not ten or more years from now as many firms had assumed. The more startling number comes from the Oratomic side: the paper argues that breaking a common P-256 key might take as few as 10,000 qubits, far below the old rule-of-thumb estimates in the millions. That does not mean your bank account explodes tomorrow. It does mean the migration clock for post-quantum security just started ticking louder. Cloudflare, which helps carry a huge share of global internet traffic, told Nature it was 'very concerned.' That is not a hobbyist warning.
Post-quantum cryptography is the effort to replace current encryption methods before large quantum machines can break them. The hard part is that upgrades must happen years before the first successful attack, not after.
A big fossil discovery in China is nudging one of evolutionary biology's famous timelines backward. According to AP, researchers found 539-million-year-old fossils that show complex animals living in three-dimensional ways several million years earlier than many scientists had thought, cutting into the idea that complex body plans appeared only once the Cambrian explosion was fully underway. The paper, published in Science, does not just add a few weird creatures to a museum drawer. It helps with the long-running 'rocks versus clocks' argument, where fossil evidence and genetic estimates have often pointed to different dates for when animal groups split and diversified. If these fossils are read correctly, the two clocks line up a bit better. That matters because the story of how modern animal life got started has always turned on a narrow window. This find makes that window less abrupt and more intelligible.
The Cambrian explosion refers to the stretch of early animal history when many major body plans show up rapidly in the fossil record. The puzzle has always been whether evolution truly sped up that fast or whether older evidence was just missing.
A coalition of higher-ed groups is pushing back against a General Services Administration proposal that would force colleges and other federal funding recipients to certify compliance not just with civil-rights law but with executive orders and agency guidance tied to the Trump administration's anti-DEI campaign. Higher Ed Dive reports that the proposed language specifically points to practices such as race-based scholarships and required diversity statements, while the underlying Justice Department guidance also sweeps at things like identity-based spaces and transgender bathroom access. The sector's complaint is not only political. Ted Mitchell of the American Council on Education argues that colleges already certify compliance with federal law, so this proposal turns nonbinding guidance into a new condition for federal money and creates False Claims Act risk on top of that. In plain English: universities are being asked to sign a moving target with legal penalties attached.
The proposal sits inside a wider federal push to treat many familiar campus diversity practices as possible civil-rights violations. That puts grant compliance, campus policy, and culture-war enforcement on the same piece of paper.
