Tootfinder

Whereas the US would typically take on an adversary with diplomacy, sanctions and military force, in that order,
the US president attacked Iran with a six-month bombing campaign
and now hopes that economic isolation can finish the job.
The effort shines a harsh spotlight on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,
a billionaire hedge fund manager and former Democratic donor who the president likes to say is “central casting”
but critics warn is dangerously out of his d…

‘Inept, incompetent, craven’: Scott Bessent struggles to clean up the president’s mess
There’s little optimism about treasury secretary’s ability to handle Trump’s tariffs, Iran sanctions and colossal US debt

Triaxiality of the Milky Way dark matter halo and the microlensing optical depth towards the Large Magellanic Cloud
J. Garc\'ia-Bellido, M. R. S. Hawkins
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08988 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.08988 https://arxiv.org/html/2609.08988
arXiv:2609.08988v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The microlensing optical depth towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), $\tau_{\rm LMC}$, bounds the compact-object fraction of the Galactic dark matter halo, but is almost always evaluated for a spherical halo. We compute it for triaxial haloes and show that the shape dependence is carried entirely by the projection of the line of sight onto the halo principal axes: for a scale-free halo $\rho\propto R^{-\alpha}$ at fixed local density it factorises exactly as $\tau/\tau_{\rm sph}=S_\odot^{\alpha}\langle S^{-\alpha}\rangle_w$, with $S(\Omega)$ the ellipsoidal shape function. The LMC lies only $0\fdg78$ from perpendicular to the Sun-Galactic Centre line, making it a near-optimal probe of in-plane elongation and a poor probe of vertical flattening. For the halo shapes favoured by \textit{Gaia} we find $\tau_{\rm LMC}/\tau_{\rm sph}=0.95$--$1.15$ at fixed local density, $1.57$ for the Law-Majewski logarithmic potential, and $0.67$--$1.54$ when the major-axis azimuth is left free. For the Einasto halo required by the declining \textit{Gaia} DR3 rotation curve, truncation near $25\kpc$ is offset by the larger local density it implies and $\tau$ falls by only $7$--$15$ per cent; but the median lens distance moves inwards from $13.4$ to $8.5\kpc$, where the logarithmic slope is steep and rising, amplifying the shape sensitivity: the \textit{Gaia} RR~Lyrae enhancement grows from $15$ to $23$ per cent and the orientation-free range widens to $0.62$--$1.62$. The systematic on the inferred MACHO or primordial-black-hole fraction is two-sided, of order $\pm15$ per cent for the measured shapes and a factor $2.6$ under full orientation freedom, exceeding the statistical errors of the EROS-2 and OGLE bounds.
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[OT] Z.ai's GLM-5.2: A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI on their home turf https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/07/03/tech/china-ai-catch-up/ Paywalled at Reuters

A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI on their home turf
Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 model has been put at the heart of a growing debate about whether China is finally catching up to the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race.