Sept. 24 (UPI) — A federal judge early Thursday ordered the Trump administration to reinstate CNN, MS NOW and Politico’s White House access, temporarily blocking President Donald Trump’s ban of the three media organizations.
The Trump administration has taken a hard-line stance against media outlets whose coverage it criticizes and has taken numerous actions during its second term to restrict their access, including taking control of the press pool that has access to Trump.
Trump banned the three news outlets on Friday, calling the outlets “FAKE NEWS” on his Truth Social media platform, prompting the trio to sue, alleging their constitutional rights had been violated.
Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in the news organizations’ favor early Thursday, issuing a temporary restraining order that directs the Trump administration to reinstate their hard-pass press credentials for 14 days, unless the court orders otherwise as litigation continues.
In his ruling, Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the news organization were likely to succeed in showing that they were banned “without constitutionally adequate due process.” Because substantial interests are at stake, the government must provide clear standards for conduct that would lead to ban and give reporters fair notice of both the prohibited conduct and possible penalties.
“None of defendants’ arguments convince the court that plaintiffs are not likely to succeed on their due process claim,” Kelly said, adding that the Trump administration had not shown why a ban was urgent as the reporting it identified were published months and years ago, and the activity it cited was “routine.”
Kelly also said that the court was skeptical of the Trump administration’s defense that the ban was in the interest of national security, saying it had offered little evidence to support its claim.
“For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Kelly said.
“Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting.”
Ted Boutrous, a lawyer representing the outlets, told CNN that they “greatly appreciate” the court’s swift order.”
“This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” Boutrous said.
This week in Washington
President Donald Trump speaks to more than 100 hunters and fisherman at a dinner in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/UPI | License Photo
How Geocodio went from bash scripts to full internal apps, the system that keeps them maintainable, and where we draw the line between building and buying.
At Geocodio, it has always been important to us to automate processes and build our own tools and helpers, so we can save time and be more efficient. For almost ten years, Geocodio was just the two of us. Automation is a big part of what made that possible.
Those tools have saved us countless hours over the years. Local bash scripts that set up a development environment or download the specific data files we need for geocoding. Infrastructure scripts that check the health of the load balancer or sync some data down. Small scripts that make the on-premises release process faster and more efficient, with fewer manual steps and less room for human error.
One of the bigger ones came along well before the AI era. We built our own deployment tool. It visualizes the deployment process, so we can easily see how far along a deploy is and what is live right now. If something goes wrong we can see it and roll back. It handles deployment freezes and a bunch of other things that would be a lot more cumbersome and a lot less transparent as a manual process.
The deployment tool. Every node in the public cluster is marked with the release it is running, and the deploy dialog lets you pick a scope and post the result to Slack.
All these small scripts and helpers and various tooling have been helpful over the years and have had a positive impact. But it pales in comparison to where we are at in 2026 and what we are able to do now.
This is the year of internal tools. We have gone from creating small bash scripts here and there, artisan commands in Laravel, small isolated repos with code to generate reports, to being able to really raise our ambitions and create full-fledged internal apps. Mobile friendly, good UX, fantastic test coverage.
What allowed us to do that is the advent of AI and frontier models that let us build at a much higher level than we have ever been able to before.
I must admit that in the beginning I was hesitant to start taking on these larger projects. The thing that always got in the way of the bigger, more ambitious ideas was not the building. Even pre-AI you might be able to knock out some kind of awesome internal tool over a couple of days. But then you have the maintenance burden. You cannot keep building tools if you do not think about the fact that you have to maintain them, keep them working, keep them up to date, fix the bugs you find.
That is the other side of the coin, and it is the side AI has also allowed us to solve. I am not worried about building all these internal tools and maintaining them, because I can use AI to keep up with the maintenance as well.
We have gotten to the point where we have specific systems in place that let us quickly scaffold and create a new internal tool. We recently launched our console-ui package, which includes Tailwind CSS tokens as well as shared React components, so all these internal apps share one component library instead of each one growing its own.
We have also built up enough experience with AI that we have some solid principles for how to give these tools a strong foundation, so they are built for the long term:
A significant amount of planning before we take on the job of building anything.
A lot of research, including engineering spikes that prove out a concept first.
Numerous Grill Me sessions, using Matt Pocock’s wonderful Grill Me skill, which interrogates a plan until the weak parts fall out.
Iterating on UI mockups, which answers a surprising number of questions and resolves problems before we go and build the real thing.
Using powerful models like Fable in the planning process, to make sure what we are building solves the problem we are trying to solve, in a sustainable and well-engineered way.
On top of that, we have also built up high quality internal standards for these projects. Testing, CI, static code analysis, best practices for authentication, that kind of thing.
That is also where the time goes. The planning and the spec take weeks. The implementation takes hours or days. Some of these apps we had been thinking about for years before that, so the spec was mostly a matter of collecting what was already in notes and meetings and turning it into a project. Atlas is the clearest example. It had been in my head for years, and once the spec existed, building it was the fast part.
Each of these tools has a full documentation subsite. A real guide on how to use the tool and how each feature works, with screenshots and examples.
Bullpen’s documentation subsite. Every tool has one, split into a user guide and internal docs.
A lot of it is AI-generated, at least the initial draft. Even so, having that consistency across every tool is really nice. It communicates what a tool does and how to use it much better than a README ever did.
It also solves a problem I did not expect. When you have been sitting there writing big specs and plans for weeks, you sometimes lose touch with what you built. Writing the documentation brings that back into focus.
Every one of these repos has a rule in its CLAUDE.md saying that any change affecting the documentation requires Claude to go and update, add, or remove the relevant parts. It still needs a human eye here and there, but it is a solid base rule that keeps things current. Documentation that is not up to date is useless.
This is the rule from the Atlas repo, lightly trimmed:
CLAUDE.md
### Keep both sections in sync with the app
Whenever you make a material change you MUST update the documentation in the same change.
A user-visible change lands in the user guide; a change to architecture, dev
workflow/tooling, infrastructure, deployment, integrations, a pipeline/job/schedule, a
scheduled command, a deploy/secrets change, or an Environment API contract bump lands in
the internal docs. Many changes touch both.
- **Changed behavior** → edit the relevant page(s) so they describe how the thing actually
works now. Don't leave stale screenshot markers, steps, class names, paths, commands, or
claims.
- **New feature or new maintainer-facing surface** → add a new `.md` in that
section's directory and register its slug and title in the matching `DocsManifest`
constant. The manifest is the single source of truth for which pages exist, their order,
and their sidebar grouping.
- **Removed capability** → delete the page **and** its manifest entry, and any cross-links
to it from other pages.
- **Renamed/moved** → update the slug in both the file name and the manifest, and fix
inbound links.
We are taking on bigger challenges now, like building our own customer support platform.
Atlas for customer support. It is built, and we are rolling it out now.
Bullpen for managing, organizing, and planning our sprints.
Yak, a coding agent for papercuts. It picks up small tasks from Slack, Linear, Sentry, and GitHub and comes back with a pull request to review. Yak is open source, so anyone can download it and run it against their own repos.
Our deployment tool.
A compliance tool that covers the parts our compliance platform cannot do, and then pushes the results back into it.
Treehouse, which gives every git branch its own worktree and its own docker-compose stack, so several branches or agent sessions can run at once without colliding on ports. Also open source.
Yak, after finishing a task that came in from Linear. The request, the summary of what changed, the step-by-step activity log, and a recorded walkthrough of the result.
Our infrastructure engineer is also working on a tool for managing infrastructure, handling CVEs in our dependencies, and making regular maintenance easier with CD jobs on top of GitHub Actions. That one is a good illustration of the maintenance point above. Some of the tools exist to keep the other tools healthy.
The big benefit of building our own is that we can make it extremely well integrated with our workflows and our data.
Right now, helping one customer can mean going into three or four different tools to get the information you need. Our current support tool. An admin tool, and we have two of those, one for self-service and one for enterprise. The billing tool. Analytics. Having both self-service and enterprise customers makes the picture more complex for us than it would be for most companies.
The whole point of building the support platform ourselves is to bring all of that into one place. The person replying to a customer can see exactly what is going on with that customer, what kind of account they have, and what has happened recently, in a UI that is streamlined for the exact workflow we have at Geocodio. They get the information and the actions they need at their fingertips, which means we can solve the problem much faster.
None of this means we are going to replace every SaaS product we use with our own tool, or that we are going to go build dozens of new internal apps. There is a limit, and there is a fine line between what should be in-house and what should be off the shelf.
Email stays with Bento, and we are happy with it. Running our own email infrastructure is a responsibility that makes no sense for us to take on. The risk is too high, and it is not something we have any experience with. Twilio keeps the communications work. Nobody here is writing a Slack. There is plenty of good tooling out there.
Three questions sort it for us:
Do we have real experience in this domain, or would we be learning it on the job?
What happens to the business if this is down for a day?
Does the value come from being integrated with our own data and workflow, or would an off-the-shelf tool do the job just as well?
Just because tools are easier to maintain now does not mean we can take on fifty of them. We have to be deliberate and thoughtful about the way we build them. This is also why we build them on shared infrastructure, shared UI, and shared principles, so they are easier to maintain and share as much code as possible. We are not trying to create a micro-internal-tool-services architecture either. We want tools that cover a whole feature set, rather than inventing a new service every time we have an idea.
That trade-off is real each time, and the part that is easy to forget is uptime. Internal tools need to be reliable too. What would happen to our business if we could not reply to customer support requests for a day because we shipped a change and broke something?
We got a small taste of this recently. We have an internal ETL tool for importing and working with address data. We did a massive upgrade of it, and then it was unavailable for a day while we ironed out a few issues with the deployment. In this case it did not affect keeping the lights on. If the same thing had happened to Atlas on a busy day, it would have been a different story.
That day was the result of a trade-off we made on purpose. These tools do not have a staging environment. A staging environment for every internal tool is one more thing to keep running and keep in sync, and for tools that only we use, we decided that cost was not worth paying. Changes go to production, and local QA, test coverage and CI carry the weight that staging would otherwise carry. The ETL outage is what that decision looks like when it goes wrong, and we accepted that when we made it.
The other half of the responsibility is access. Atlas can see customer accounts and billing, so who can reach it matters as much as whether it is up. One big benefit of hosting these tools ourselves is that they live entirely inside our private network. They are not reachable from the public internet at all. You have to be on our VPN before the sign-in page even loads, and only then do the usual authentication rules apply.
I do not know what the future will bring. We have to be careful not to end up maintaining tons of internal tools, or creating tools for the sake of creating tools.
But if these tools help us do our work better, make us more efficient, and reduce the chance of human error from manual processes, then we can build a better product, we can give our customers a better experience, and we can improve the quality of life for our team.
If you are thinking about this at your own company, start small. Find the process where you already work around the gap between two tools by hand every week, and build the thing that closes it. That is where we got the most value the fastest, and it does not require you to believe that anyone should rebuild a SaaS product from scratch.
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We write about what we’re working on, thinking about, and getting so excited playing around with that we accidentally stay up a bit too late.
Sept. 23 (UPI) — Authorities in Idaho have identified a man found dead from cyanide poisoning in a Boise church more than four decades ago and believe he may be connected to the infamous Chicago Tylenol murders of 1982.
The man known as the Unknown Wanderer has stumped detectives for years. He was found dead Dec. 4, 1982, inside Sacred Heart Catholic Church with no identification, an envelope containing 19 $100 bills and a typed note signed Wm. L. Toomey and two key rings with nearly 30 keys. His hair had been dyed, his nails were finely filed, his skin was unseasonably tanned and his pants were either brand new or recently pressed.
The case went cold until 2019 when Ada County Detective Tim Cooper reopened the case after a member of the church asked him about it while he was sitting in his car drinking cheap gas station coffee in a parking lot.
On Wednesday, Cooper identified the Unknown Wanderer to reporters during a press conference as Dr. Mathew Betkouski.
Cooper said the break in the case came from one the keys they found on Betkouski’s person, which indicated it was from a Jacksonville, Fla., hardware store. Etchings on a second key led detectives to Jacksonville’s Mills Court road.
After acquiring the property deeds for the street going back to the 1970s and 1980s, one person stood out to detectives — a man who had been pronounced dead in absentia in 1989. The Ada County Sheriff’s Office contacted the decedent’s only living relative who said that his brother had gone missing in 1982.
A DNA sample collected from the man showed that there was a “very high probability” that they shared the same father, Cooper said.
“So, the Unknown Wanderer was determined to be Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski,” Cooper said, adding that amid the investigation they learned that he had worked at two drugstores during his undergraduate studies and had a history of volatility, including a documented fascination with cyanide and explosives.
In the late 1970s, while Betkouski was working for a flavors and fragrances company in the Jacksonville area, colleagues became concerned about him after he discussed “the perfect crime” and how “cyanide could be used as a less messy means of taking one’s life,” Cooper said.
“Dr. Betkouski was observed talking to himself on occasions and had fears that he was being tracked,” Cooper said.
Writings by Betkouski found by detectives show that he tried to manage schizophrenia and depression and feelings of euphoria brought on by imaginary thoughts of violence.
In late 1979, he was hired by Lockheed where a fellow employee recalled Betkouski stating that poison could be introduced into over-the-counter capsules, according to Cooper, who said Betkouski was fired in March 1982 after creating an unspecified disturbance at a Las Cruces, N.M., area pharmacy as he tried to acquire some kind of pills or capsules he said were for an experiment.
Betkouski’s whereabouts after that date are not fully known and Cooper said they have not been able to place him in Chicago in September 1982, when at least seven people, including a 12-year-old girl, in and around the Windy City died after consuming potassium cyanide-laced Tylenol.
Detectives found pictures of Betkouski in Chicago, but they believe they were likely taken in December 1981. He was last known to be in Las Cruces on Oct. 15 and was next found dead at the Boise church.
“So, where this leaves us is while our office may have identified some possible connection between Dr. Betkouski and the 1982 events, we’re not naming him as a suspect and we cannot say he was in Chicago during the final week of September 1982,” Cooper said.
“More information does exist in this case that we won’t be releasing today.
While Cooper was restrained, Dr. Park Dietz, renowned forensic psychiatrist who was consulted during the initial Tylenol murders investigation and who was brought into the reopened case in 2021, was confident that Betkouski was likely responsible.
“It’s an extraordinary thing to have been around at the beginning in 1982 and now, today in 2026, see very likely closure, that the identity of the Tylenol killer from 1982 can be shared,” Dietz said.
Dietz told reporters that they presented information about Betkouski to groups of forensic psychiatrists, forensic psychologists and criminal profilers, who overwhelmingly considered Betkouski to be a viable suspect, while some “were as convinced as I that Detective Cooper had solved the most important unsolved murder of my lifetime, the Chicago Tylenol murders.”
The Ada County Sheriff’s Office said it has shared its findings with the Chicago Police Department and is calling on members of the public with information about Betkouski to contact the office as investigators seek to determine his whereabouts from Oct. 15 to Dec. 4, 1982.
The developments and yet-to-be-released connections between Betkouski and the Tylenol murders are to be the subject of an Unsolved Mysteries documentary titled Unmasking the Tylenol Killer, which is to air on Roku Oct. 9, saidAda County Sheriff Matt Clifford said during the press conference, explaining that authorities are hoping the exposure will generate more leads.
“Detective Cooper has done amazing work, but there’s still a lot of questions we don’t have answers to,” Clifford said.
“And that’s part of why we’re standing here today. I’m not going to beat around the bush with everybody, but this isn’t over.”
Blended cost per 1M tokens (3:1 input:output, log scale) against the Intelligence Index. Hover or tab to a point for details.
The frontier as a lookup table. Find the row your budget falls in; the pick is the highest-scoring model you can get at that price, and the runner-up is the next best that also fits.
Diff between consecutive daily fetches: new models, removed models, and re-scored or re-priced ones.
Click a column header to sort. Names link to the model's Artificial Analysis page.
Source: Artificial Analysis free data API, fetched daily by a GitHub Actions cron. Code and data: github.com/terryds/bestvaluemodel.
Sept. 24 (UPI) — Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos who was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud by misleading investors, is moving to a halfway house in Texas.
She is scheduled to move to the Austin Transitional Center in Del Valle, Texas, in August 2027, ABC News reported, citing an update from the Department of Justice Victim Notification System.
Holmes is now at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, which is about 90 miles from her hometown of Houston. The Austin Transitional Center is a 460-bed “community corrections center” owned by a private prison company.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons would not give information on the move, saying it doesn’t discuss “the conditions of confinement for any individual, including release plans,” CNN reported.
“BOP assigns individuals to facilities based on several factors. These include the level of security and supervision required, medical or programmatic needs, separation or security considerations necessary for the individual’s safety, and other relevant factors, such as proximity to the individual’s release residence,” the spokesperson told CNN Wednesday.
Last year, Holmes’ attorneys argued that she “maintained an excellent record post-sentencing” and did not have any citations or disciplinary infractions during her time in prison. Holmes “dedicated herself to being an engaged prisoner, serving other women and actively seeking opportunities to make a difference,” the attorneys wrote in their motion.
But the government argued that she had created “substantial financial hardship” to victims, hadn’t accepted responsibility for her crimes, paid minimal restitution and could reoffend, according to court documents.
Judge Edward Davila found Holmes eligible for reduced sentence but said it “does not diminish the enormity of Holmes’s crimes.”
Theranos was once valued at $9 billion. Holmes founded the company as a college student. The company claimed it had the technology to test for many diseases and conditions with just a single pin prick of blood. It gained $945 million in financing, a board of well-known political figures and notable retail outlets.
A new documentary about Holmes, You Can See Everything, is being released in theaters Oct 16.
This week in Washington
Left to right, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, and President Donald Trump pose during an arrival ceremony at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on September 23, 2026. Photo by Al Drago/UPI | License Photo
Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”
There are numerousreportson Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.
“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.
Samsung didn’t respond to Ars’ questions about what it will do to prevent this from happening in the future or how many units are affected and in which countries. SBS Korea reported that customers have filed hundreds of cases.
The complaints seem to originate only from Korea, where the problem has been made worse because it’s happening during a major Korean holiday, Chuseok, which celebrates the autumn harvest and starts Thursday.
“Customers only trusted Samsung Electronics and made an official update, but it is so absurd and embarrassing that they can’t even use refrigeration and refrigeration functions before the Chuseok,” a forum user wrote, per a Google-provided translation.
Some Samsung forum users said support agents initially told them that there are limited technicians and executives available, and a repair person might not be available until October.
“The customers who bought Samsung refrigerators have had their holidays completely ruined, while those Samsung employees are just having a good time at home,” a Samsung forum member wrote.
Samsung stopped issuing the update as of September 23 and is aiming to have some fridges fixed by September 24, ZDNET Korea reported.
Today, a Samsung representative posted a response to user complaints on the forum, saying, per a Google translation:
Yesterday (9/22), an error occurred during the testing process for a Samsung refrigerator software update[.]
Abnormal symptoms have been observed in the refrigerator power and screen of some customers.
We are currently taking emergency measures as a top priority through Samsung Electronics Service Centers. If you have confirmed this symptom, please contact the Samsung Electronics Service Center … .
We will do our best to ensure that our customers do not suffer any losses during the Chuseok holiday period.
“Never update your Samsung refrigerator!”
Out of frustration with having a broken fridge ahead of the food-centric holiday, one member of Samsung’s forum users declared, “Never update your Samsung refrigerator!”
The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.
While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.
Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.
Sept. 24 (UPI) — The U.S. Navy said that eight crew serving in the record-long deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Group attempted suicide.
Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao wrote that a rescue helicopter from the Abraham Lincoln pulled a service member serving in the carrier’s air wing from the sea in early August after the sailor “went overboard” and that in March crew members stopped another sailor who was attempting to do the same thing.
Tuesday’s letter detailing the incidents on the Abraham Lincoln and other ships in the strike group, which spent months in the Middle East as part of the U.S. conflict with Iran, was in response to pressure from Senate Armed Forces Committee member Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
No one had succeeded in taking their own life among the approximately 6,000 sailors serving on the Abraham Lincoln, its air wing and the destroyers guarding it.
Gillibrand rebuked President Donald Trump and the Pentagon on Wednesday for downplaying the impact the more than 250-day at-sea deployment had on the approximately 5,000 sailors on the Abraham Lincoln, saying the information provided by the Navy showed that conditions on the ship were “serious and deteriorating.”
Gillibrand accused Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of openly disrespecting sailors’ grievances after Trump said he was not concerned about the mental health of the crew and that the deployment actually should’ve been even longer while Hegseth said the reality had been “misrepresented.”
“What Trump and Secretary Hegseth dismissed as ‘fake news’ turned out to be serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members,” she said.
“That this administration can find endless taxpayer dollars for bombs, ballrooms and billionaires, but cannot take care of our armed services members, is completely unacceptable,” added Gillibrand.
The Navy’s former top lawyer, Rear Admiral Donald Guter, said the attempted suicides was a “disturbingly high number indicating a serious stress level.”
The Abraham Lincoln’s record long deployment, which began in November, faced reports of food and supply shortages, as well as problems with the plumbing, while crew members’ loved ones flagged up issues regarding a slide in the mental health of those on board.
The Defense Department has pushed back, pointing out that the number of suicide attempts has not risen and that counselors, chaplains and other support is available to service members.
However, Cao separately acknowledged there was an underlying problem, saying in a video post online at the weekend, “We must confront the rising tide of suicide head-on.”
This week in Washington
President Donald Trump speaks to more than 100 hunters and fisherman at a dinner in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/UPI | License Photo
