The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California on Wednesday for allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls sports.Female student athletes in California are being subjected to “unfair competition and reckless endangerment by male participation on female high-school sports teams,” the department said.The lawsuit accuses California of violating Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding.The Justice Department suit is the latest salvo in a showdown between the administration of Republican President Donald Trump and the Democratic-ruled state.Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles last month to quell protests against roundups of undocumented migrants by federal agents.California Governor Gavin Newsom has said the troops were not necessary to address the mostly peaceful protests, but his legal efforts to have them removed have failed so far.Trump threatened last month to impose “large scale” fines against California after a transgender high school athlete’s victory at the state track and field championships.The Justice Department suit accuses the California Department of Education and California Interscholastic Federation of engaging in “illegal sex discrimination against female student athletes by allowing males to compete against them.””The Governor of California has previously admitted that it is ‘deeply unfair’ to force women and girls to compete with men and boys in competitive sports,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “But not only is it ‘deeply unfair,’ it is also illegal under federal law.”The Justice Department sued Maine in April for allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls sports, and the Trump administration has moved to cut the northeastern state’s federal funding for public schools.The Supreme Court agreed earlier this month to hear cases next term challenging state laws in Idaho and West Virginia banning transgender athletes from female competitions.More than two dozen US states have passed laws in recent years barring athletes who were assigned male at birth from taking part in girls or women’s sports.

Nvidia became the first company to touch $4 trillion in market value on Wednesday, a new milestone in Wall Street’s bet that artificial intelligence will transform the economy.Shortly after the stock market opened, Nvidia vaulted as high as $164.42, giving it a valuation above $4 trillion. The stock subsequently edged lower, ending just under the record threshold.”The market has an incredible certainty that AI is the future,” said Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers. “Nvidia is certainly the company most positioned to benefit from that gold rush.”Nvidia, led by electrical engineer Jensen Huang, now has a market value greater than the GDP of France, Britain or India, a testament to investor confidence that AI will spur a new era of robotics and automation.The California chip company’s latest surge is helping drive a recovery in the broader stock market, as Nvidia itself outperforms major indices. Part of this is due to relief that President Donald Trump has walked back his most draconian tariffs, which pummeled global markets in early April.Even as Trump announced new tariff actions in recent days, US stocks have stayed at lofty levels, with the tech-centered Nasdaq ending at a fresh record on Wednesday.”You’ve seen the markets walk us back from a worst-case scenario in terms of tariffs,” said Angelo Zino, technology analyst at CFRA Research.While Nvidia still faces US export controls to China as well as broader tariff uncertainty, the company’s deal to build AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia during a Trump state visit in May showed a potential upside in the US president’s trade policy.”We’ve seen the administration using Nvidia chips as a bargaining chip,” Zino said. – New advances -Nvidia’s surge to $4 trillion marks a new benchmark in a fairly consistent rise over the last two years as AI enthusiasm has built. In 2025 so far, the company’s shares have risen more than 21 percent, whereas the Nasdaq has gained 6.7 percent.Taiwan-born Huang has wowed investors with a series of advances, including its core product: graphics processing units (GPUs), key to many of the generative AI programs behind  autonomous driving, robotics and other cutting-edge domains.The company has also unveiled its Blackwell next-generation technology allowing more super processing capacity. One of its advances is “real-time digital twins,” significantly speeding production development time in manufacturing, aerospace and myriad other sectors.However, Nvidia’s winning streak was challenged early in 2025 when China-based DeepSeek shook up the world of generative AI with a low-cost, high-performance model that challenged the hegemony of OpenAI and other big-spending behemoths.Nvidia’s lost some $600 billion in market valuation in a single session during this period.Huang has welcomed DeepSeek’s presence, while arguing against US export constraints.- AI race -In the most recent quarter, Nvidia reported earnings of nearly $19 billion despite a $4.5 billion hit from US export controls limiting sales of cutting-edge technology to China.The first-quarter earnings period also revealed that momentum for AI remained strong. Many of the biggest tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — are jostling to come out on top in the multi-billion-dollar AI race.A recent UBS survey of technology executives showed Nvidia widening its lead over rivals.Zino said Nvidia’s latest surge reflected a fuller understanding of DeepSeek, which has ultimately stimulated investment in complex reasoning models but not threatened Nvidia’s business. Nvidia is at the forefront of “AI agents,” the current focus in generative AI in which machines are able to reason and infer more than in the past, he said.”Overall the demand landscape has improved for 2026 for these more complex reasoning models,” Zino said.But the speedy growth of AI will also be a source of disruption. Executives at Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon are among those who have begun to say the “quiet part out loud,” according to a Wall Street Journal report recounting recent public acknowledgment of white-collar job loss due to AI.Shares of Nvidia closed the day at $162.88, up 1.8 percent, finishing at just under $4 trillion in market value.

More than 90 percent of X’s Community Notes — a crowd-sourced verification system popularized by Elon Musk’s platform — are never published, a study said Wednesday, highlighting major limits in its effectiveness as a debunking tool.The study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which analyzed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025, comes as the platform’s CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned after two years at the helm.The community-driven moderation model — now embraced by major tech platforms including Facebook-owner Meta and TikTok — allows volunteers to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts.Other users then rate the proposed notes as “helpful” or “not helpful.” If the notes get “helpful” ratings from enough users with diverse perspectives, they are published on X, appearing right below the challenged posts.”The vast majority of submitted notes — more than 90 percent — never reach the public,” DDIA’s study said.”For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns.”Among English notes, the publication rate dropped from 9.5 percent in 2023 to just 4.9 percent in early 2025, the study said.Spanish-language notes, however, showed some growth, with the publication rate rising from 3.6 percent to 7.1 percent over the same period, it added.A vast number of notes remain unpublished due to lack of consensus among users during rating.Thousands of notes also go unrated, possibly never seen and never assessed, according to the report.”As the volume of notes submitted grows, the system’s internal visibility bottleneck becomes more apparent –- especially in English,” the study said.”Despite a rising number of contributors submitting notes, many notes remain stuck in limbo, unseen and unevaluated by fellow contributors, a crucial step for notes to be published.”- ‘Viral misinformation’ -In a separate finding, DDIA’s researchers identified not a human but a bot-like account — dedicated to flagging crypto scams –- as the most prolific contributor to the program in English, submitting more than 43,000 notes between 2021 and March 2025. However, only 3.1 percent of those notes went live, suggesting most went unseen or failed to gain consensus, the report said.The study also noted that the time it takes for a note to go live had improved over the years, dropping from an average of more than 100 days in 2022 to 14 days in 2025.”Even this faster timeline is far too slow for the reality of viral misinformation, timely toxic content, or simply errors about real-time events, which spread within hours, not weeks,” DDIA’s report said.The findings are significant as tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking, which conservative advocates in countries such as the United States have long accused of a liberal bias.Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods such as vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus.Some researchers have also cautioned that Community Notes users can be motivated by partisan motives and tend to target their political opponents.X introduced Community Notes during the tenure of Yaccarino, who said on Wednesday that she had decided to step down after leading the company through a major transformation.No reason was given for her exit, but the resignation came as Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok triggered an online firestorm over its anti-Semitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler and insulted Islam in separate posts on X.

The Texas flash floods death toll rose to 119 on Wednesday, as worries grew that the figure could more than double with over 160 people still reported missing.Workers in central Texas continued to comb through piles of muddy debris from the July 4 floods as Governor Greg Abbott ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff over the tragedy.Officials in Kerr County, the epicenter of the flooding, on Wednesday confirmed 161 people were known to be missing in the county.Part of a Hill Country region in central Texas known as “Flash Flood Alley,” Kerr County suffered the most damage, with at least 95 fatalities including 36 children, Sheriff Larry Leitha told reporters.Among them, counselors and 27 girls at a summer camp who went missing early Friday when the Guadalupe River burst its banks.Five campers and one counselor from Camp Mystic were still missing as of Wednesday, along with another child not associated with the camp, Leitha said.Two dozen other people have been confirmed dead elsewhere in the state, according to an AFP tally of official reports.More than 2,000 rescue personnel, police and experts have descended on the flood zone in what Leitha described as an “all hands on deck” operation.Ben Baker, with the Texas Game Wardens, said search and rescue efforts involving helicopters, drones and dogs were difficult because of the water, mud and debris.”When we’re trying to make these recoveries, these large piles can be very obstructive, and to get in deep into these piles, it’s very hazardous,” Baker said. Meanwhile, questions intensified over whether US President Donald Trump’s government funding cuts had weakened warning systems, and over the handling of the rescue operation.During sometimes tense news conferences Tuesday and Wednesday, officials skirted questions on the speed of the emergency response.”There’s going to be an after-action” review of what happened, Sheriff Leitha said, adding “those questions need to be answered.”But officials stressed that the immediate focus was on locating the missing and reuniting families.- ‘Door to door’ -Kerrville police officer Jonathan Lamb spoke of heroic rescues by authorities and volunteers who evacuated hundreds of people from their homes or vehicles.Officers went “door to door, waking people up” in Kerr County early Friday and in some cases “pulling them out of windows” of flooding homes and trailers, Lamb told reporters.The tragedy, “as horrific as it is, could have been so much worse,” he added.The National Weather Service (NWS) has forecast scattered storms on Wednesday in the Hill Country, including isolated pockets of heavy rain.In the neighboring state of New Mexico, flash flooding left three people dead Tuesday in Ruidoso, the village website said in a statement, adding the Ruidoso River rose to a record-breaking 20 feet (six meters).- Bodies in the mud -In the Texas town of Hunt, an AFP team saw recovery workers combing through piles of debris with helicopters flying overhead.Javier Torres, 24, was digging through mud as he searched for his grandmother, after having located the body of his grandfather. He also discovered the bodies of two children, apparently washed up by the river.Trump is due to visit Texas on Friday with First Lady Melania Trump.”We brought in a lot of helicopters from all over… They were real pros, and they were responsible for pulling out a lot of people,” Trump said of the response.Shel Winkley, a weather expert at the Climate Central research group, blamed the extent of the disaster on geography and exceptional drought, when dry soil absorbs less rainfall.”This part of Texas, at least in the Kerr County flood specifically, was in an extreme to exceptional drought…. We know that since May, temperatures have been above average,” Winkley told reporters.