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Forerunner Ventures plans to sell its entire stake in Oura for as much as $1.26 billion, according to Oura's latest IPO filing.

So far, only one Republican lawmaker has publicly condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to ban three major news outlets from the White House.

Idaho Representative Mike Simpson told Punchbowl News Monday that restricting CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s access to the White House was “wrong.”

“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that, that’s not the reason to ban the press. You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest,” Simpson said. “So I don’t like what they’re doing.”

Republican lawmakers who have opposed Trump’s policies in the past, such as Senators John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, all remained silent. Republican lawmakers who like to pretend to be free speech advocates, such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, also failed to respond to the president’s sudden crackdown on the press.

Representative Thomas Massie only receives partial credit for posting a quip about the ban that was mostly about his opposition to Trump’s fictional $5,000 checks.

Behind closed doors, however, it’s a different story.

Republican strategist Melik Abdul told CNN Monday morning that Republicans secretly acknowledged that Trump’s press ban was a “problem,” but they were too afraid to say anything publicly for fear of backlash from the president.

“If you talk to Republicans behind closed doors. What you’re hearing is this type of petulance, this type of performative thing the president does, it is truly exhausting,” Abdul told CNN.

Trump’s move has generated plenty of immediate backlash. The three outlets he banned filed a lawsuit Monday, and the entire presidential television press pool has agreed to suspend its coverage in the wake of Trump’s decision.

Tabby is designed to be a real-time bookkeeping interface, handling clients’ paperwork as it gives them up-to-the-minute data on their business’s profit and loss.

AI infrastructure growth is running into limits on energy, water, and land, according to researchers at Forrester, which predicts governments will increasingly make datacenter operators pay for the resources they consume. Governments, utilities, datacenter operators, and enterprises will have to rethink how that growth is funded, managed, and regulated, the firm said in its 2027 sustainability predictions. The scale of the infrastructure buildout needed to support AI across businesses, governments, and consumer services is beginning to emerge. Earlier this month, PwC put cumulative global datacenter capital expenditure through 2050 at between $22 trillion and $50 trillion, with a central estimate of $31.6 trillion – roughly equivalent to a year of US economic output. Whether grids and communities can support those ambitions is another matter. "Unlimited AI ambition faces a reckoning with limited resources," Forrester said. Forrester predicts that governments and utilities will require datacenter operators to finance grid upgrades, pay for reserved capacity, and provide guarantees against speculative demand. It also expects community impact reviews to become a gate that new projects must pass before construction. Forrester senior analyst Abhijit Sunil explained the reasoning in a blog post: "With unprecedented growth demands, utilities cannot assume that every proposed datacenter will arrive on schedule or consume its promised load. Building generation and transmission for speculative demand could leave households and businesses paying for stranded infrastructure. "Already, the White House has called on hyperscalers to procure their own power, fund upgrades, and pay for reserved capacity even when unused. In 2027, at least two countries will turn this ratepayer-protection principle into tariffs or equivalent obligations. Cloud and colocation costs will become more location-specific, contractually committed, and exposed to power-market risk." Sunil said datacenter operators should expect long-term minimum payment commitments, financial guarantees, energy tariffs, and requirements to reduce their loads when grids are under strain. "Cloud economics will consequently become more dependent on location, electricity contracts, grid maturity, and providers' ability to generate or reduce power. Enterprises rapidly scaling AI capacity will increasingly inherit these costs," he said. The US, however, appears to be moving in the opposite direction on some forms of environmental oversight. In August, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed eliminating federal minimum requirements for public participation in minor-source air permits. The change could make it easier for some datacenter power projects to proceed without public notice, even as Forrester predicts that community scrutiny will increasingly determine which facilities get built. ®

Attorney General Todd Blanche might get all the frontline glory for being the scuzziest example of what the Department of Justice has become, but don’t sleep on the supporting cast. You can think of 34-year-old Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh as the character actor from hell—not the star of the show but a critical part of moving the plot forward. Unfortunately, Singh isn’t a…

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Quick Take

• Paramount and the States’ Attorneys General appear to have reached a settlement in the antitrust case surrounding the Warner Bros. merger.
• The settlement comes after many of Paramount’s detractors changed their views on the case and pushed for a settlement. Paramount maintains the merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is pro-competitive.
• This settlement removes a major obstacle to the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery $111 billion merger becoming a reality.
• Nerdist Take: It’s hard to say whether this outcome is better or worse than alternatives, but it does feel like the States’ AGs could have pushed a little harder to defend consumers/their citizens.
• Learn More: You can learn more about the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger here—DOJ Approves $111B Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger.

“Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top,” says Alvaro Bedoya, a senior advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project, as 12 state attorneys general reach a settlement with Paramount over an antitrust lawsuit brought to life in the wake of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery’s proposed $111 billion merger. Whilst it seemed like California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the 12-state coalition against Paramount, would demand some significant divestitures, or “robust structural remedies” from Paramount, it seems none of this has come to pass. We don’t know the full details yet, but here’s what is being reported by Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and Variety.

Paramount

Variety notes of the settlement between the States and Paramount: “The two sides spent the weekend in tense discussions over Paramount’s commitments to remain in California and over guarantees for its production levels. The discussions also focused on editorial oversight of CBS News and CNN, a key concern for East Coast attorneys general. Sources said the settlement does not require Paramount to make any major divestitures.” In recent days, Paramount has been threatening to move its business out of California and look for alternate states to do its business. It seems this had some impact on the proceedings.

It’s also likely what has prompted Bedoya to note of the State AGs’ decision to find a settlement with Paramount: “People want champions who are not afraid of rich bullies. Newsom, Becerra and Bonta did not meet that mark. The people who work in the film and TV industry and the small businesses who support it will suffer as a result. And so will everyone who values dissent in our democracy.”

Paramount, meanwhile, positions this merger as pro-competitive. The company shares that it seeks to take on other streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon. Over time, it seems to have influenced many of its naysayers to adopt this perspective as well. Leading up to this settlement between Paramount and the states, AMC, Cinemark, and Regal all shifted their stances in favor of a settlement. And that meant that Cinema United, the trade group representing theaters overall, also shifted to a pro-settlement perspective, following the views of its biggest members. This occurred despite the fact that Cinema United had initially strongly opposed the merger.

One holdout remains the Writers Guild of America. The WGA also sued to block the merger in July. The WGA case is set to be heard in March and was meant to be heard alongside the states’ case before this settlement.

Nerdist Take: The States Settlement with Paramount Doesn’t Seem Great, But Are There Even Any Good Outcomes? Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery

However, with the states and Paramount reaching a settlement, it appears a major obstacle has been removed from Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery’s $111 billion merger. Ultimately, as far as consumers are concerned, we’re not sure there were ever any good options on the table. And we’ll have to wait and see what concessions were actually made in this settlement before judgment. But, as ever with big business in our day and age, it feels like companies and bottom lines are much more important than a fair system that rewards the majority of people. The States seemed to be battling on behalf of their citizens for a time—but it doesn’t feel clear that they pushed as far as they could or should have.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist. She is a great lover of the anti-hero and is always ready for a new ship to set sail. In her work, she likes to combine fandom passion with journalistic sensibilities. Follow her on Instagram.

The post Paramount and State AGs Settle Case, Paving Way for Warner Bros Merger appeared first on Nerdist.

Federal agents on Sunday reportedly injured a U.S. citizen, who ended up at the hospital for his injuries.

The Guardian reports that local police officers in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, were called to the scene of an argument between two people at 10 a.m. Upon their arrival, they found a man on the ground with injuries to his neck, head, and teeth, surrounded by people trying to help him and two SUVs parked nearby. Police spoke to a man in one of the cars wearing a vest with “police” written on it, who said he was a federal agent investigating a fugitive.

“The agent told the officer that agents had attempted to identify an individual who resembled a person they were seeking. He said the individual refused to provide identification, was detained for fingerprinting, and resisted detention,” Evanston police said in a statement. “Agents later determined he was not the person they were seeking and learned that he was a U.S. citizen. He was released.”

The statement noted that the federal agent appeared to have blood on his hands, which he said came from trying to handcuff the person. It’s not clear which agency the men in the SUVs were from, although witnesses told police they believed they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. According to police, the agent they spoke to said that there were five agents in the area in separate vehicles, and that they had a warrant for a person with a Chicago address.

“The agent also said the federal agents left the area after protesters began to gather because they feared they would be attacked,” the police said in their statement.

Also on Sunday in Austin, Texas, ICE agents shot and wounded a Venezuelan man, Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, making a DoorDash delivery, claiming he had a final order of removal despite his wife and lawyer saying he had an asylum claim and a work permit. And in July, federal agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man who had lived in the United States for more than 30 years. Under President Trump, it appears federal agents are becoming recklessly violent while carrying out his mass deportation agenda.

The Justice Department is pressing on with its “grand conspiracy” case against federal officials who investigated President Trump, even after the head of that effort—counselor to the attorney general Joe diGenova—controversially resigned.

DiGenova, a former Reagan administration prosecutor, Trump personal attorney, and peddler of the narrative that Trump was under attack from the liberal “deep state,” resigned earlier this month after insinuating that he was being pressed to find evidence of corruption that wasn’t there.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova said. He later claimed that those comments weren’t what he actually meant. “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution,” he clarified. “It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”

The investigation is centered around Trump’s claim that federal investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference to his indictments after he left office in 2021—were a calculated deep state plot.

Despite diGenova’s resignation, the DOJ has issued multiple subpoenas, including to former CIA Director John Brennan last week. This is an extreme escalation of the quest to blame someone for this “grand conspiracy” against Trump, even after the DOJ’s main guy in charge left because even he couldn’t find any kind of conspiracy. No one who’s been subpoenaed has been charged with a crime thus far.

“I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this,” Ken Wainstein, Brennan’s attorney, told the Associated Press. “[The Justice Department is] blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”

AWS has entered the open source agentic AI game, claiming its new Strands harness matches rivals on benchmarks while using around a quarter fewer tokens. The Strands harness, as its name suggests, is built on AWS’ Strands Harness SDK, but is packaged up and ready to roll out of the box, either locally or deployed to work with whatever AI provider a customer prefers. "The moment you build your own agent, you're on your own," AWS noted in its announcement. "It's tricky wiring up the right primitives just well enough to match that ‘it just worked’ feeling." This new open-source option means that 'all you need is one line of Python or TypeScript to get it working with your choice of model," AWS adds. On top of being relatively plug-and-play in design, AWS claims the Strands harness achieved "nearly equal benchmark scores" versus Claude Code, Codex, and “other popular harnesses” when tested using the Harbor framework, distributed across multiple nodes of AWS’ own EC2 virtual servers for benchmarking tests. Strands consumed 28 percent fewer tokens across six benchmark tests when compared to “Claude or GPT models,” claims AWS, and in some cases had better accuracy than other harnesses too. DeepSeek's harness, AWS admits, was more token efficient but - we're told - was less accurate on the same tests. AWS credits this performance to the Strands harness’ default prompt caching and context management settings. Per the announcement post, it defaults to truncating tool results over 1,500 tokens, automatically compacting its context window when it surpasses 85 percent, and automatically trying to recover context in overflow cases. It’s worth pointing out, however, that AWS describes the Strands harness as being built to be "a general-purpose agent rather than a coding agent." Considering that every agent harness it was compared to in AWS’ benchmarks (Claude Code, Codex, oh-my-pi, OpenCode, and DeepSeek Harness) is billed as a coding agent, it’s worth questioning how other general-purpose AI agents would perform when compared to the new Strands harness. Amazon plans to publish a paper from its researchers with more benchmark details - we’ll keep an eye out to see more of the specifics on how it was evaluated. In the meantime, anyone who wants to give the pre-packaged, open-source, general-purpose Strands harness a shot can do so by using the instructions included in the announcement post. It’s available as a Python or TypeScript library, and also has a CLI. And it ships with a skills file, so plugging in your own preferred tools should be relatively easy; shell, file, and web tools are included at launch. “We believe quickly prototyping with a batteries included harness will create more useful agents,” AWS says of the Strands harness design. It’s live now, so if you’re looking for another open-source option it’s ready when you are, even if a more independent gauge of its performance is currently lacking. ®

Representative Lauren Boebert’s various affairs are apparently just a bunch of fake news, according to the MAGA lawmaker and her allies.

The House Ethics Committee received a sworn complaint last week that accused Boebert of having sexual affairs with three of her staffers: District director Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff, district chief of staff Raven Finegan, and Boebert’s former chief of staff Jeffrey Small.

The complaint, filed by American Muckrakers’ David Wheeler, also claimed that Boebert paid Ratzlaff $200,000 in 2025 to “secure her silence” after Ratzlaff threatened to take the allegations of their relationship public. Wheeler’s accusations included evidence from “House payroll records, Federal Election Commission filings, court records, and on-the-record sources.”

A spokesperson for Boebert said in a statement Saturday that there is “zero truth” to the allegations, and further suggested that complaint was a violation of House Ethics rules since it was filed within 60 days of the election.

“Swearing to it does not make it a complaint,” the spokesperson said. “This was a political smear packaged as an ethics filing and published before anyone checked whether it even qualifies under the Committee’s rules.”

Also on Saturday, Boebert insisted that she’s “not a lesbian” and derided a group of reporters inquiring about the complaint on Capitol Hill, asking, “Why is everybody so horny here?”

She followed up the next day with a video statement in which she called the complaint a “smear” and Wheeler a “sloppy, desperate, obsessive hack.”

“This is more filthy garbage that reaches beyond me. This reaches into the homes of people who have dedicated years of service to Coloradans alongside of me,” she said, defending the staffers named in the complaint.

Ratzlaff told the Colorado Times Recorder that the accusations were “entirely false, defamatory, and beyond ridiculous.”

“There is absolutely no truth to any part of this claim,” Ratzlaff added.

But Ratzlaff’s ex-husband took a remarkably different tone when speaking with the Muckrakers’ boss.

“I assumed this would eventually surface,” Jace Ratzlaff told Wheeler. “I’ll have no further comment on this topic.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Boebert’s romantic interests have crossed a line: The congresswoman was ejected from a Denver theater in 2023 for allegedly groping her date during an evening performance of Beetlejuice—a caught-on-camera spectacle that has continued to plague her political career.

But the recent allegations connote a bitter hypocrisy. The Colorado Republican has spent years tearing down the LGBTQ community for cheap political points. She has campaigned to end same-sex marriage, has repeatedly likened child-friendly drag performances such as Drag Queen Story Hour to “child abuse,” has introduced and supported legislation to end gender-affirming research that could help minors, and has claimed that gender-affirming surgery is tantamount to “mutilation.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to ban three news outlets from covering him at the White House has led CNN, MS NOW, and Politico to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday for violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The outlets are suing to restore their access to White House grounds, which is of course not owned by Trump. In the suit, the outlets say the…

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President Donald Trump is looking for a way to veto billions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants from the National Institutes of Health in order to punish elite universities.

Following a contentious meeting Friday, the White House began drafting an executive order that would establish an external committee to oversee NIH grants and keep federal funding away from schools that fail to comply with the president’s agenda.

During the meeting, Trump had repeatedly complained that the NIH hadn’t done more to crack down on Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The meeting reportedly brought the simmering conflict between Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, to a head. Vought accused Bhattacharya of funding projects that contradicted the administration’s priorities to gut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the expense of scientific research.

In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s initial efforts to cut more than $1.81 billion from DEI-related grants constituted illegal racial discrimination. A few months later, another federal judge blocked the White House’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in federal research funding from Harvard University. Earlier this year, the White House wanted to impose a political test on federal grants, but was rebuked by the scientific community and blocked by Congress.

Still, under the second Trump administration, the NIH has already slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America—and all for political reasons.

During the meeting Friday, Vought also sought to access NIH funds for the year that had not already been spent, but he was denied. This move follows allegations that the Department of Defense has tried to steal cash from the NIH in order to fund Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East.

About the Daily Kos Partner Hub: This story was published through the Daily Kos Partner Hub, a space where organizations, campaigns, and advocacy groups can share news, events, and opportunities to get involved with the Daily Kos community. Partner Hub stories are authored by our partners and provide another way for readers to discover organizations and causes making an impact.

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Namibia's computer security incident response team has confirmed unauthorized activity in the defense ministry's network and linked it to the RansomHouse cybercrime group. In an unusually direct attribution, NAM-CSIRT named the group after RansomHouse listed the supposed victim on its leak site on September 16. RansomHouse identified the victim as the "Namibian Defence Force," although the domain in its listing belongs to the Ministry of Defence and Veterans Affairs (MODVA), the government department overseeing the military. Either way, openly extorting a country's defense establishment is a bold move even by ransomware standards. RansomHouse's website stated: "Dear management of Namibian Defence Force. We were waiting for you for quite some time, but it seems that your IT department decided to conceal the incident that took place in your company. "We strongly recommend you to contact us to prevent your confidential data, projects documents from being leaked." The listing treated the target as a company with $434 million in annual revenue, but NAM-CSIRT subsequently confirmed unauthorized activity within MODVA's network. NAM-CSIRT said in a statement: "Analysis of the affected systems established that the incident is associated with the RansomHouse ransomware group, a cybercriminal syndicate known internationally for deploying ransomware and engaging in so-called double extortion tactics where threat actors encrypt systems while simultaneously threatening to disclose alleged stolen information. "NAM-CSIRT remains actively engaged in coordinating technical support, investigation activities, remediation measures, and post-incident reviews in line with the National Incident Management framework outlined in the National Cyber Security Incident Management guidelines." Emilia Nghikembua, chief executive of the Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia and head of NAM-CSIRT, said the team would support MODVA throughout its investigation and recovery. She urged organizations across Namibia to report cyberattacks promptly so authorities can build a fuller picture of the threat landscape. "The collective security of Namibia's digital ecosystem depends on timely reporting, proactive information sharing, and continuous investment in cybersecurity preparedness," she said. "We urge all organizations to strengthen their cyber defences and work closely with NAM-CSIRT to safeguard critical systems, data, and services that citizens depend upon every day." NAM-CSIRT did not answer The Register's questions about the expected recovery timeline, whether a ransom had been demanded, or whether any payment was under consideration. It has not disclosed which systems or data were affected, whether information was stolen, or whether any files were encrypted. RansomHouse is associated with double extortion, in which attackers encrypt systems while threatening to publish stolen data. However, many modern extortion attacks dispense with encryption and rely solely on stolen information as leverage. Active since 2021, RansomHouse is not among the most prolific extortion groups, but it has outlasted many rivals that appeared and disappeared during the same period. According to Halcyon's Ransomware Research Center, the group has listed a steady number of victims each year since it began operating, although it remains less active than dominant operations such as The Gentlemen and Qilin. ®

Where will the next breakout startup come from? Benchmark’s full partnership weighs in on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Save up to $200 before September 25, 11:59 p.m. PT. Register now.

South Dakota’s outgoing secretary of state, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her.

Monae Johnson, whose job includes administering elections, is supporting Terrence Davis, a former police officer, in November’s upcoming election, The New York Times reports. Johnson lost the Republican Party nomination at the state party’s convention in June to Heather Baxter, a state representative who supports President Trump’s crackdown on voting rights.

“I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others,” Johnson wrote for a political blog, the South Dakota War College, on Saturday.

“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson added.

Johnson was elected to the position in 2022 on promises to prevent election fraud and manipulation, including the hand counting of ballots and audits of every precinct in South Dakota. She even refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the winner of the 2020 presidential election. But after being elected, she did not institute many of the changes she promised during her campaign.

Though she did end up establishing a process for auditing precincts, Republicans at the state convention decided it wasn’t enough and ultimately decided to withdraw their support and back Baxter.

“In June, Republican delegates considered the record and nominated me over incumbent Secretary of State Monae Johnson, 59 percent to 41 percent,” Baxter said in a statement Sunday. “That was not confusion. That was self-government in action. The letter beside a name is not decoration. It tells voters what governing philosophy they will carry into the office that runs our elections and business services.”

Election denialism and an obsession with nonexistent fraud is now a prerequisite for Republicans holding office, thanks to Trump. Johnson, who worked in the secretary of state’s office for eight years before she ran and won, doesn’t want South Dakota’s election run by someone who will further undermine democracy.

Google’s AI-native Googlebook ties Gemini to the cursor, dictation, widgets and other parts of the desktop experience.

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From first users to billions: Google’s Robby Stein joins TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Lean in on this Builders Stage session. Save up to $200 before Sept 25.

The Pentagon on Friday told congressional leaders that the Iran war has so far cost American taxpayers $43.6 billion, Punchbowl News reported, a whopping $5 billion more than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in a report earlier last week. To put that number into perspective, it would have cost $30 billion for Republicans to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for a year.

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