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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump plans to slap his face on US passports…

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On Wednesday, FBI agents reportedly raided the office and business of state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the Virginia legislator and prominent leader of the state’s recent redistricting effort that won Democrats four more likely seats in the House of Representatives. 

The senator’s office and cannabis dispensary, located on the same block, were swarmed by armed agents, decked out in camouflage tactical gear, with an armored vehicle on the scene, as they handcuffed and detained several men who were inside the dispensary. Agents carried out several boxes from the senator’s office. And, of course, MAGA’s favorite network, Fox News, was there to break the story.

Local ABC affiliate WSET cited undisclosed sources in claiming that the raid was part of an ongoing bribery and corruption investigation against Lucas initiated under the Biden administration, but several Virginia legislators have expressed skepticism about the political motivations behind the raid. 

“I am deeply concerned by today’s FBI raid,” said state legislator Don Scott, the speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates, in a statement. “Given the politicization of this administration—an FBI led by Kash Patel and a Justice Department run by President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney—I think people should take this with a grain of salt and allow the facts to come out before jumping to conclusions.”

Scott added, “At this point, we simply do not know what this ultimately means. Right now, there is far more theatrics and speculation than actual information available to the public.”

That is, it’s still not clear whether the investigation has produced credible evidence of wrongdoing by anyone, let alone Lucas herself. But Trump’s FBI has given us little reason to believe it is operating in good faith or is choosing its targets without regard for the president’s political whims. 

Since his return to office, Trump has not hesitated to use the Department of Justice as a judicial cudgel against his critics, with Black women in positions of power facing the brunt. Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman at the helm of the successful 2022 civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, was indicted by a federal jury on charges of mortgage fraud. The case against her was eventually tossed out, with grand juries shutting down two attempts by the DOJ to reindict James later in the year.

In August, Donald Trump attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, accusing her of criminal mortgage fraud directly on Truth Social. Cook’s alleged fraud wasn’t just a likely clerical error, it was one that Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte also made—which didn’t stop Pulte from saying he believes Cook will be indicted “no matter what” in a recent interview.

And in June of last year, Rep. LaMonica McIver was charged with forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers after protesting at an ICE facility in her state. The charges, which carry a maximum of seventeen years in prison, have been denounced by her team as politically motivated. 

Don’t get me wrong: The current administration has cracked down on several of the president’s white and male political enemies (just look at James Comey). And so little is known about this case that we have no way of knowing if there’s sufficient evidence that Sen. Lucas has committed any kind of crime.

But it’s important to call out Trump, who’s always worn his misogynoir on his sleeve, and his administration’s blatant and disproportionate targeting of the Black women who speak out against him.

House Democrats are calling for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to resign, accusing him of “evasive, nervous, dishonest” testimony in their Jeffrey Epstein probe. Lutnick testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, where he addressed his ever-changing story on his connection to Epstein. During a podcast in February, Lutnick claimed that he cut ties with Epstein in…

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Businesses deploying AI agents to automate computer usage may be spending far more money than necessary if those agents try to emulate human visual interaction. Reflex, an enterprise application platform, recently set out to compare vision agents with API agents. A vision agent in this context refers to an AI agent that mimics human interaction by relying on image processing and optical character recognition to operate an application. In this instance, that's Claude Sonnet navigating a web app user interface via browser-use 0.12, a tool for automated web browser operation. An API agent here refers to Claude Sonnet interacting with a web app via tools and APIs. The agent calls the same handling mechanisms that the UI calls and receives structured data in response, rather than a web page screenshot that must be analyzed. "Two agents target the same running app: one drives the UI via screenshots and clicks, the other calls the app's HTTP endpoints directly," explained Palash Awasthi, head of growth at Reflex, in a blog post. "Same Claude Sonnet, same pinned dataset, same task. The interface is the only variable." The following task was presented to each agent: "A customer named Smith has complained about a recent order. Find the Smith with the most orders, accept all their pending reviews, and mark their most-recent ordered order as delivered." According to Awasthi, the API agent completed the task in just eight calls. It listed pending customer reviews, accepted them, and marked the order delivered. The vision agent, however, found only one of four pending reviews because it failed to scroll the page where it would have seen the three other reviews hidden off-screen. Analyzing and interpreting a web page visually is fundamentally more challenging for an AI model than interacting with API calls and tools. When the prompt was revised to help the vision model perform better, the vision agent still took ~17 minutes, significantly longer than the API agent at ~20 seconds. The vision agent also consumed a lot more tokens – ~45x more. The company made its test available as a benchmark for those interested in trying to reproduce the results. Awasthi said that the cost difference between the two approaches reflects the architecture – vision agents need to see and seeing is costly – each screenshot demands thousands of input tokens to process. Anthropic estimates that processing a 1000×1000-pixel image with Claude Sonnet 4.6 uses about 1,334 tokens. The vision agent expended around 500,000 input tokens and around 38,000 output tokens to complete its task. The API agent used around 12,150 input tokens and around 934 output tokens. For Awasthi, the lesson is that while vision agents may be necessary for interacting with apps you don't control, inwardly focused agents should target APIs. ®

Workers put up temporary fencing around a section of Watsonville Plaza in preparation for the City Plaza Revitalization project. The project is expected to take about one year. A groundbreaking Ceremony will take place Thursday from 4-5pm. 

A red 1963 Chevrolet Impala (seen above) was one of scores of Impalas and other vintage cars a trucks that lined Main Street May 2 during the 15th-annual Cruise Night put on by Watsonville Impalas. Established in 2011, the local car club welcomes all such clubs to the event where car owners engaged with the community, cruised Main Street and shared stories of surviving and maintaining early-day vehicles. 

A section of Main Street in downtown Watsonville was transformed into classic car showroom Saturday during the annual Cruise Night. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)

The investment comes as Pronto scales to 26,000 daily bookings and the market heads toward a potential $18 billion size.

Well, we’re getting rid of antidepressants, and we’ve already completely kneecapped vaccines. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dares to ask: What if we did more? Sadly, “more” in this instance means making the world safe for teenagers to access tanning beds—because why shouldn’t teens have the same opportunity to get melanoma as their older peers?

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A man suffered major injuries Wednesday when he was struck by a pickup as he drove into its path on an electric scooter. Around 1:50pm, Watsonville Police and Firefighters got a report of a man that was struck by a Dodge Big Horn pickup on Second Street just west of Rodriguez Street.

When emergency officials arrived the man was sprawled on the pavement bleeding heavily in front of Watsonville Fire Station 1. The female driver of the truck remained on the scene.

Police cordoned off the area with yellow tape and closed down Second Street between Walker and Rodriguez streets.

Sgt. Jarrod Pisturino said the man sped out from a sidewalk along Rodriguez Street into Second Street where he was struck. The victim, who was wearing headphones, apparently drove quickly into the path of the truck. The impact hurled him about 20 feet up Second Street while the scooter ended up beneath the truck.

The victim was rushed to an out-of-county trauma center.

No information was available as to his name or age. The incident is still under investigation.

Barry Diller defended OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while warning that AGI remains an unpredictable force needing guardrails.

The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity's AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat.

xAI's real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models. 

President Donald Trump tried to use the death of media mogul Ted Turner as yet another talking point in the right’s long-running crusade against “woke,” claiming Turner was “not all about” it. But a cursory look at Turner’s life reveals someone who supported causes that are about as “woke” as it gets. Following the news of Turner’s passing, Trump referred to Turner as a “friend…

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Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett wants to frame rising consumer debt as good news during President Donald Trump’s second term in office. “I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data,” Hassett said on Fox Business Wednesday. “Credit card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’…

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Who needs power outlets when you can charge off of animal labor? The next time someone asks you if a hamster running on a wheel can produce a measurable amount of energy, you can point them to one inventive young YouTuber who has proven that the answer isn’t just yes - it’s also enough energy to harvest. Flamethrower, a Spanish YouTuber whose channel is full of experiments and DIY projects, most recently took to the video platform to post about his experiment in turning his brother’s hamster’s wheel into a machine he could use to charge his smartphone. “After my parents prohibited me from genetically or cybernetically modifying it,” Flamethrower explained in the video, “I deemed its existence … unacceptably useless. So what did I do? Exploit it for energy production, of course.” As anyone who’s owned a hamster knows, midnight runs on a squeaky wheel can be obnoxious to say the least. Sleepless nights, combined with memories of cartoons where hamster wheels powered the contraptions of evil geniuses, gave the young maker an idea: Strap a turbine to the wheel and make that hamster earn its keep. Of course, it’s not as simple as just attaching a 5V electric motor to use as a turbine and wiring it up to a USB-C plug. Hamsters can’t exactly be cajoled onto a wheel for regular charging shifts, and even if they could be, keeping them running at a charging pace would be pretty much impossible. “Say you have one of those common 5V DC motors,” Flamethrower explained. “Unless you spin that at over 10,000 RPM you wouldn't even reach the standard 15-watt charging speed” of most modern smartphones. “Forget about quick charging,” he added. “The motor would probably melt before that.” To get around those limitations, Flamethrower turned to the CJMCU-2557 low-power energy-harvesting chip. Energy harvesters like the 2557 (albeit larger ones) are designed to boost and regulate tiny amounts of input power, from sources such as solar cells or generators, into a usable voltage suitable for charging components like a capacitor or, in this case, a single lithium-ion battery cell. After doing some wiring work and putting the contraption together, Flamethrower left it to run overnight, and woke to a battery with enough charge in it to provide juice to his phone, though the amount wasn’t substantial. “I haven't measured exactly how much battery it can charge,” Flamethrower told us in an email. “It's not a lot, so it certainly won't fill the entirety of a phone's battery in a single night, although of course the energy generated each day can vary a lot based on the hamster's mood.” “I did a very rough calculation and the current generated might be like around an amp when the fella is running,” Flamethrower added. In other words, as frenetic as a hamster can get, it’s still not producing that much energy. Regardless, the young inventor told us that he is still using the device, and that it’s proved to be fantastic for providing energy to charge the family's smartwatches. As for whether he might consider attaching a bigger battery, that might be a bit overkill, he told us. “In any case, the CJMCU-2557 is only meant to charge 1 cell,” Flamethrower said. “There are, admittedly, slightly higher capacity cells, but I use it frequently enough to not have to care about reaching their limit.” A useful invention, then, if not a bit of an on-the-nose realization of a science-fiction dystopia trope. Hey, at least the hamster is happy and putting all that necessary calorie burning to work for a good cause - if we all used our pets' episodes of the zoomies to charge our devices, think of the load on the grid we could save. ®

Corgi announced on Wednesday a $160 million Series B, led by TCV, valuing the startup at $1.3 billion.

Anthropic is partnering with SpaceX to ease capacity constraints that have stranded Claude customers, a gesture that may soothe developer discontent about service availability and cost. Ami Vora, chief product officer at Anthropic, announced the expanded rate limits during Code for Claude, a developer event livestreamed from San Francisco. "As of today, we are increasing rate limits for developers on Claude Code and the Claude Platform," said Vora. "More specifically, we are doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based enterprise plans. And we're raising our API limits considerably for Claude Opus." Anthropic is also ending its peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts. The AI biz is able to do this, she explained, thanks to a partnership with SpaceX that expands available inference capacity. Anthropic has struck a deal to use "all the capacity of [SpaceX’s] Colossus 1 data center." According to SpaceX, "Colossus 1 features over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators." The deal adds more than 300 megawatts of new capacity within the month and follows similar compute arrangements with Amazon and Google/Broadcom. The company's insatiable hunger for processing power may even take it into space. Anthropic says that it "expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity." In recent months, Anthropic has struggled to meet unexpected demand for Claude services – its models became sufficiently capable to win over skeptical developers and usage patterns shifted as a result of the popularity of OpenClaw's long-running agents. "Year over year, API volume is up nearly 17x on the cloud platform," said Vora. "And on Claude Code, the average developer is now spending 20 hours per week running Claude." Amid this growing popularity, Anthropic has also wrestled with bugs that affected model performance. During her presentation, Vora tempered expectations by noting that no new model would be announced. Instead, she presided over a review of new and recent Claude features in an effort to frame model improvements as exponential. The salient exponent here would be two – the doubling of Claude's five-hour rate limits. Model performance, as measured by benchmarks, has been incremental. Opus 4.7 is a few percentage points better than Opus 4.6 in various measurements, not twice as capable or more. That didn't stop Vora from claiming, "even though model capabilities are improving on an exponential, most organizations are still adopting AI on a linear path." Vora's use of "exponential" may be more of a thematic framing device than a literal assertion of progress, a device to draw a contrast between Claude's capabilities and a more cautious pace of corporate AI adoption. She cast the upcoming feature review as an opportunity for customers to see where Claude development is headed, "So you can plan for it and ride the exponential with us." The remainder of the presentation consisted of a summary of recent Claude feature improvements. These include: multi-agent orchestration, outcomes, and dreaming – a capability that showed up in the recent Claude Code source leak. "With Dreaming," explained Angela Jiang, head of product for the Claude platform, "Claude is actually able to self-learn. It's able to actually inspect over its previous sessions, figure out skills that it missed, lessons it should have learned, and actually apply those directly to memory on its own." Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, took a turn on stage to remind everyone about Routines, a way to trigger and run Claude jobs locally or on cloud servers. "Routines can be run on a schedule, they can be kicked off by webhooks, or they can even be kicked off by arbitrary API calls, you can run them locally on your machine or on remote cloud compute," he said. Cherny said, "for me personally, a lot of my code nowadays is written by routines. I'm not the one doing the prompting. I'm the one creating a routine that does the prompting." Who wouldn't want to "ride the exponential" when one's company is paying the API bill? ®

Veteran journalist and CNN mainstay Christiane Amanpour is concerned that, if Republican donor David Ellison is successful in his attempt to take over CNN parent company Warner Discovery, the network could face a devastating pro-MAGA makeover. Amanpour worked at CNN from 1983 to 2010, returning to the network in 2012 after a brief stint at ABC. She serves as the network’s chief…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos…

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The push for new data centers at Microsoft is putting one of the its key clean power goals at risk.