Light to moderate shaking occurred throughout the state of Maine, as well as in areas of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, on Monday due to an earthquake that was centered off the coast of the state. Just before 10:30 a.m. ET, the U.S. Geological Survey recorded the earthquake as a 3.8-magnitude temblor. About 45 miles southwest of Portland, off the coast of York Harbor, Maine, was the epicenter. As of right now, there have been no reports of fatalities or major damage, and the National Weather Service has not issued any tsunami watches, warnings, or advisories. Since a 4.8-magnitude earthquake near Lebanon, New Jersey, in April, this event was the biggest earthquake recorded in the northeastern United States. According to USGS data, that tremor was the strongest to hit the N...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Republicans are engaged in a civil war, with Governor Ron DeSantis opposing the GOP-controlled state legislature, over President Donald Trump's desire to swiftly restructure the country's immigration system. Earlier this month, DeSantis summoned lawmakers back to Tallahassee for a special legislative session specifically to align state law with a series of anticipated executive orders from Trump that center on immigration. The special session was abruptly ended Monday morning by Republican leaders in the House and Senate, who had previously criticized DeSantis' plans as "premature," and they promptly called their own. Republican leadership was able to draft its own immigration measures, including wording that places the governor in a precarious political positio...

As concerns grew that the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeekleap was outpacing the United States in AI research, tech stocks fell sharply on Monday morning. At the opening bell, the Nasdaq Composite, which monitors the biggest tech companies in the nation, fell 3.4%. The S&P 500 plummeted over 2%, and the Dow dropped 180 points. China's DeepSeek, which claimed that it took only two months and less than $6 million to construct an open-source artificial intelligence model, was the catalyst for the sell-off. Concerns that China may surpass the United States in the scope and effectiveness of its AI efforts are fueled by the fact that those claims would be significantly less than the hundreds of billions of dollars that American tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and...

DALLAS—A Texas physician who referred to himself as a whistleblower on transgender care for juveniles and was charged with unlawfully accessing private information about patients who were not in his care was dismissed by federal prosecutors on Friday. The U.S. district judge in Houston dismissed the case against Dr. Eithan Haim a week after the Trump administration issued executive orders restricting transgender rights. Haim, a 34-year-old surgeon, was accused by the prosecution of taking the information and giving it to a conservative activist with the intention of maliciously harming Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, which is one of the biggest pediatric hospitals in the country. In June, Haim entered a not guilty plea to four counts of improperly obtaining personally identifiable he...

AVIV TEL A Middle Eastern official briefed on the situation told NBC News Monday that Hamas has informed Israel that eight of the 26 Israeli detainees scheduled for release as part of the ceasefire's first phase are dead. The extremist organization is thought to have disclosed the precise number of captives killed or alive for the first time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesperson later said that these figures were consistent with data obtained by Israeli intelligence. Earlier this month, the first three Israeli hostages—Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher, and dual British citizen Emily Damari—were released in return for 90 Palestinian prisoners, the majority of whom were women and children. 200 Palestinian inmates, many serving life sentences after being found guilty of deadly att...

Silicon Valley has been rocked by a little lab in China. The U.S. tech industry has been discussing and debating what the abrupt arrival of an advanced AI helper from DeepSeek, a little-known firm in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, implies about the larger AI development race. The AI models that drive DeepSeek's assistant are already outperforming the best models in the United States, despite the fact that they were created with a fraction of the resources, according to the business. The assistant recently ranked number one in the Apple App Store. A week ago, DeepSeek released R1, their most recent large language model. R1 is already outperforming a number of other models, including as Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Meta's Llama 3.3-70B, and OpenAI's GPT-4o. It is ...

As concerns grew that the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeekleap was outpacing the United States in AI research, tech stocks fell sharply on Monday morning. At the opening bell, the Nasdaq Composite, which monitors the biggest tech companies in the nation, fell 3.4%. The S&P 500 plummeted about 2%, and the Dow dropped 180 points. China's DeepSeek, which claimed that it took only two months and less than $6 million to construct an open-source artificial intelligence model, was the catalyst for the sell-off. Concerns that China may surpass the United States in the scope and effectiveness of its AI efforts are fueled by the fact that those claims would be significantly less than the hundreds of billions of dollars that American tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, an...