French cinema has lost one of its defining faces. Nathalie Baye has died at the age of 77, her family confirmed, marking the end of a career that stretched across more than five decades and shaped modern French film in ways that were often subtle, but lasting.

She passed away on April 17, 2026, at her home in Paris after a long illness. The cause was reported as Lewy body dementia, a condition that had gradually taken her out of public life in recent years.

Mustafa Suleyman opened his MIT Technology Review essay with a crisp diagnosis of the problem: we evolved for a linear world, and that makes us catastrophically bad at perceiving exponential change. The argument flows cleanly from there.

Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind and now runs Microsoft AI, has been inside the compute curve since 2010. By his count, the amount of training data going into frontier models has grown by a trillion times over that period—from roughly 10¹⁴ floating-point operations to numbers that require scientific notation to state without embarrassment. The skeptics who keep predicting a wall keep being wrong, he argues, not because they misunderstand the individual constraints (Moore’s Law deceleration, data exhaustion, energy limits) but because they underestimate how many parallel levers the industry is pulling simultaneously.

In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum laying out DOJ’s investigative and charging priorities for the new administration. Immigration enforcement, human trafficking, smuggling, and cartels made the list. Tobacco did not. The memorandum directed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to shift resources away from its alcohol and tobacco programs toward those identified priorities.

The practical consequence for e-cigarette enforcement is documented in GAO’s March 2026 report (GAO-26-107991), and the picture is nuanced rather than catastrophic—at least for now.

The legal architecture for federal enforcement against unauthorized e-cigarettes is broader than most coverage of the issue suggests. A March 2026 GAO report (GAO-26-107991) maps out the full range of tools available to the Department of Justice—and which ones actually get used.

The Legal Basis

Two statutes form the primary framework. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits the distribution of e-cigarette products that are adulterated or misbranded in interstate commerce. Under FDA’s 2016 rule extending its tobacco authority to e-cigarettes, any product sold without FDA premarket authorization is automatically considered adulterated and misbranded—meaning the unauthorized status of a product is itself the legal violation, not any separate showing of harm or deception.

When the federal government has moved most decisively against illegal e-cigarettes, it has done so through a structure that didn’t exist two years ago. The interagency e-cigarette task force, established by DOJ and FDA in June 2024, coordinates enforcement activity across multiple agencies and has produced the largest individual seizures in the enforcement record. A March 2026 GAO report (GAO-26-107991) provides the most complete public accounting of the task force’s membership and activities.

Of the more than 6,000 e-cigarette products estimated to be available for sale in the United States as of June 2024, only 39 had received authorization from the Food and Drug Administration as of December 2025. Every other product on the market is, by definition, illegal—subject to seizure and enforcement action under federal law. The gap between the size of the unauthorized market and the scale of the federal response is the subject of a March 2026 GAO report (GAO-26-107991) examining the Department of Justice’s enforcement record on unauthorized e-cigarettes.

Oil Shock Incoming as Iran Tensions Explode

The world woke up this morning to one of the most consequential moves in recent Middle East history: President Donald Trump has ordered a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, effective immediately.

What Just Happened

After marathon negotiations in Islamabad between the U.S. and Iran collapsed without a deal on Sunday, Trump moved decisively. The U.S. Central Command issued a notice to mariners declaring that unauthorized vessels in the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea east of the Strait will be subject to interdiction.

Financial industry leaders convened to discuss the cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model after it reportedly found weaknesses in every major computer operating system. That’s a sentence that would have read as science fiction five years ago. It’s now a compliance meeting.

The specifics of what was found, and how, remain unclear from public reporting — which is its own kind of signal. When that kind of information circulates first in closed industry sessions rather than public disclosures, it suggests the vulnerabilities are either still being patched, or the exposure is broad enough that nobody wants to start a countdown clock before fixes are in place. Either way, the episode is a clean illustration of the dual-use problem at the core of frontier AI: the same capability that finds vulnerabilities defensively is also the one that finds them offensively. The institutions meeting about this risk are right to take it seriously. Whether they’re moving fast enough is a different question.

The four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down safely after completing the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. The crew became the first humans to see parts of the moon’s far side with the naked eye — a small but genuinely historic distinction in a mission that, from the outside, can seem like a very expensive test of existing hardware.

It is, to some extent, exactly that. Artemis II was never going to land on the moon. Its job was to prove the systems — Orion, SLS, the life support, the reentry profile — work with people inside. By that measure it appears to have succeeded. What comes next is Artemis III, which is supposed to put boots on the lunar surface. The pressure on that mission, whenever it launches, will be considerable. For now, four people who went to the moon and came back are home.

Bill Gates is set to testify before the House Oversight Committee in June as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, by contrast, will not testify for now — the DOJ declined. Melania Trump, meanwhile, issued a public statement from the White House insisting she was not friends with Epstein and calling on Congress to take further action.

The spectacle of congressional Epstein hearings is by now a familiar one: high-profile names, carefully managed testimony, and outcomes that rarely match the gravity of the underlying subject. Gates’s appearance will be watched closely given the documented history of meetings between the two men that Gates has previously described as a mistake. Whether a congressional hearing is the mechanism for learning anything genuinely new about Epstein’s networks is a separate question from whether it will happen. It will happen.