Donald Trump’s administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe, and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they abused immigration programs at the expense of American citizens.

Vice-president JD Vance said on Thursday that the H-1B visa programme for highly skilled foreign workers had “become rife with fraud” and that over-reliance on such schemes was “a fundamental insult to the American worker.”

He added that “no company in the US” had “abused this system” more than Microsoft.

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If there was a year the world began waking up to climate change, it might have been 1988. That June, the NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress that the climate was warming and would continue to do so as long as humans pumped fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere. Months later, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

And, just weeks before the UN vote, Frank Sprow of Exxon’s corporate research department warned his colleagues in an internal memo, “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.”

Sprow’s memo is part of a batch of previously undisclosed documents released earlier this year without fanfare as part of an ongoing lawsuit Massachusetts filed against ExxonMobil in 2019. While the memo was quoted in a 2023 article by The Wall Street Journal, it has not been published in full. Several other documents included in the filings are being reported on here for the first time, including more recent statements from Exxon scientists challenging the company’s climate-solution claims about its work on biofuels and carbon capture and storage.

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As tensions mount over who gets access to top-end artificial intelligence, French company Mistral has released a new freely available model that it claims can compete with the very best from the US and China.

The new 1 trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed Le Chonk—can be used and customized by anyone. It’s currently available in preview, with a final version to follow by the end of the month. Though Le Chonk is built to compete with leading general-purpose models, it’s optimized specifically for coding and cyberdefense, as well as tasks particular to manufacturing, finance, electrical engineering, and other niches.

“There are a lot of areas where the other labs will not focus that much,” Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist at Mistral, tells WIRED. “There are so many domains in which you can improve models.”

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