Comment on APNewsBreak: Kobach sought pardon for VP of corporate donor

TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly still searching for non-sale options to stay in the US after the Supreme Court upheld a national security law requiring that TikTok's US operations either be shut down or sold to a non-foreign adversary. Last weekend, TikTok briefly went dark in the US, only to come back online hours later after Donald Trump reassured ByteDance that the US law would not be enforced.

The modern Doom games have been a master class in reviving a beloved retro gaming series. Both 2016's Doom and 2020's Doom Eternal paid homage to both the look and feel of the original Doom titles without being slavishly devoted to older gameplay conventions that can feel dated decades later. Yet by the end of Doom Eternal, you could feel the modernized gameplay system threatening to burst at the seams a bit.

It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade. Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

The Oscar-winner reprises her Star Trek: Discovery role for this movie-length Starfleet espionage thriller on Paramount Plus.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has revived three complaints against broadcast stations accused of bias against President Donald Trump. Outgoing Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last week directed the FCC to dismiss the complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations, along with a fourth complaint about Fox, in what she called a stand for the First Amendment.

Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R. R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored.