In a CNN This Morning segment today on the trend of northern students choosing Southern colleges, Boston Globe reporter Beth Teitell was reluctant to admit that one reason they do so is to escape the leftist politics of Northern schools. To her credit, host Audie Cornish did raise the issue. On her first try, Audie asked: "Can I talk about the liberal arts part of it? Because I understand politics is coming into play. What are these students saying about why they're making this decision?" Teitell ducked it, claiming that students chose the South because during COVID, students there were able to live relatively normal lives, compared to the stricter shutdowns in the North. But that hasn't made sense for multiple application cycles, since the COVID shutdowns ended more than 2.5 years ago. Audie tried again: "Is it also just trying to get away from the culture of liberal arts colleges?" Teitell finally admitted that "it definitely can be," but proceeded to condescend to such students, saying that many want to get away from the protests up North and "they're just worrying about what kind of cute cowboy boots they're going to wear." Teitell didn't acknowledge that--cute boots aside--principled conservative students want to escape the woke indoctrination mills up North. Can you call it "liberal arts" if schools in the North don't do a "well-rounded education" nurturing "critical thinking"? Unless you're thinking critically of conservatives. Teitell then quickly shifted to claim that it's a "double-edged sword," and that she had spoken to "One young woman [who] had gone to University of Georgia and her problem was that the school had too many people from Georgia there." Sounds kinda bigoted, no?  Inevitably, race entered the conversation. Cornish suggested: "When we look at these videos, especially Rush Talk, the algorithm is serving up a lot of white students. And I wanted to know if we're seeing similar trends to, say, historically black colleges." Teitell agreed, that some black students are headed south, perhaps due to family connections to black colleges, but then: "There was some headline that said, in Alabama, the White Tide [a play on Alabama's "Crimson Tide"] rushes on, because it is a very white presentation when you look on Rush Talk, for sure." Teitell tried terribly hard to be ingratiating. Her big grin (as seen in the screencap) remained there pretty much throughout the segment. Teitell's first words were: "Thank you, Audie. I'm so glad we're having this conversation." That was followed by: "That's such a good question," and "That's such an interesting question," and "You know, that's an interesting question." Enough already: just answer the darn question! On a personal note, I went to Cornell, in upstate New York, where I made several wonderful friends for a lifetime. But in high school, I was recruited by Davidson, in North Carolina, and sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I gone there. Here's the transcript. CNN This Morning 12/9/25 6:20 am ET AUDIE CORNISH [after scenes of sexy rush dances air] Yep, moments like these, causing Northern students to head South for college. Academics alone clearly are not selling schools anymore. It's the football, the warm weather, the Greek life, Rush Talk.  SOUTHERN COLLEGE STUDENT 1: Rush consists of four highly competitive rounds.  SOUTHERN COLLEGE STUDENT 2: Let's be honest, I probably would not be going to Alabama if it did not blow up on TikTok.  CORNISH: Documentaries like Bama Rush have sold college-bound students from the Northeast, home to many of the Ivy League institutions in this country, to head south for a good time. The increase is staggering. For some schools, like LSU, that has seen a nearly 500%—I'm going to say that again—500% jump in students from the Northeast over the last decade.  So, joining me now is Beth Teitell. She recently wrote about this growing trend for the Boston Globe. Welcome to CNN This Morning.  Thank you, Audie. I'm so glad we're having this conversation. because the trend is so notable. You'll be stuck in Boston's famed traffic and the car in front of you or the one honking behind you actually has a bumper sticker on it that will say something like Clemson or LSU. It's a big change.  CORNISH: It is. And being from Boston, I know there are smaller schools people used to go to in the Northeast. They cost a lot of money. Can I just get the money question out first? Are people going because it's cheaper?  TEITELL: That's such a good question. It definitely can be cheaper.  . . .  CORNISH: Can I talk about the liberal arts part of it? Because I understand politics is coming into play. What are these students saying about why they're making this decision?  TEITELL: You know, that's such an interesting question. A lot of the college advisors I spoke with told me that when this generation was applying to colleges, they were actually in high school. The pandemic was on. They were sitting in their homes watching, and knowing that their own siblings who were older were in their dorm, in their own bedrooms, going to college online. And they're watching on TikTok and seeing the kids, where a lot of the Southern schools were still partying. And, you know, there's a football games or there's Rush Talk and that kind of stuff. So I think it's actually making a big difference.  CORNISH: Is it also just trying to get away from the cultural, culture of liberal arts colleges?  TEITELL: You know, that's an interesting question. It definitely can be. I mean, some just saw the intense politicization that was, of course, covered in all media with a lot of protests and everything. So some kids are very interested in that. But for others, they wanted to get away from it, to go someplace where they're not protesting something. In fact, they're just worrying about what kind of cute cowboy boots they're going to wear.  When I said double-edged sword, though, what I meant was I have spoken to kids and parents of kids who actually went down South to get away from all this. They wanted the party vibe and the Greek life. And then they got down there and they thought, oh, there's too much party life, too much Greek life. One young woman had gone to University of Georgia and her problem was that the school had too many people from Georgia there.  So it can look like a lot of fun at a distance, but it's not really for everybody.  CORNISH: When we look at these videos, especially Rush Talk, the algorithm is serving up a lot of white students. And I wanted to know if we're seeing similar trends to, say, historically black colleges.  TEITELL: You know, the New York Times reported that the historically black colleges and universities are seeing an increase in interest from some of the nation's top talent. People are going for family reasons. They might have roots there or just because the education is excellent. So you are seeing black students also going down South.  But with the Rush Talk, there is the thought that, there was some headline that said, in Alabama, the White Tide rushes on, because it is a very white presentation when you look on Rush Talk, for sure. 

It was once fashionable to speak of Ethereum as a “world computer,” a phrase that suggested a certain noisy, industrial utilitarianism. The idea was that every instruction, every transfer of value, every digital breath would be executed publicly and redundantly by a global network of nodes, a process that was transparent, unstoppable, and, as it turned out, prohibitively slow. Although Ethereum in 2015 aimed at radical transparency, it is now engaged in a great transformation, an architectural renovation carried out while the building is still occupied. Ethereum is remaking itself not with more computing power, but with the mathematics of shadows: zero-knowledge proofs.Ethereum replaces personal trust with mathematical guarantees, accountability without surveillance. The central tension of the digital age has always been this trilemma: how to remain secure and decentralized while scaling to meet a global demand. Ethereum’s answer is to turn to an innovation in cryptography: the zero-knowledge proof, a protocol that allows one party to prove a statement is true without revealing why it is true, or indeed revealing any other information at all. It is a way to convince a stranger that you know a secret without ever telling him the secret itself. This property, which borders on the magical, is being woven into the very foundations of the network.The heavy lifting of transaction execution is leaving the main stage. The Ethereum roadmap, in a phase titled the “Surge,” dictates that most activity will now occur off-chain, on Layer-2 networks known as rollups. These rollups bundle thousands of transactions, execute them in the dark, and generate a succinct validity proof, which is then posted back to Ethereum’s main layer. The main chain, once the sweating engine of the network, is now a high-security court, a judge that need not hear the testimony, only see the irrefutable mathematical certificate of the verdict.Instead of a world computer, Ethereum is becoming a “world settlement layer,” an anchor for off-chain environments. To facilitate this, the network has introduced “blobs,” an inelegantly named but vital innovation of the Dencun upgrade. Blobs are temporary data, a cheap lane on the highway for rollup trucks, allowing vast amounts of information to be posted without clogging the passing lane. The new Fusaka upgrade promises to expand this capacity further, raising the gas limit and introducing PeerDAS, a system where nodes sample data rather than storing it. It is a move toward a system where the network holds everything, but no single participant must hold more than a fraction.RELATED: Bitcoin billionaire will serve time after British police broke down her door and arrested her in bed Photo by Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty ImagesBut the most radical application of this new approach lies in the “Verge,” a suite of upgrades intended to make the network “stateless.” The ambition is to allow a user with a basic laptop, or even a phone, to verify the chain. Through the use of Verkle trees — cryptographic accumulators that replace more cumbersome data structures — proofs of state become tiny, manageable things. Verification is broadened, flattening the hierarchy of nodes. In this future, we need not trust institutions or even the “full nodes” of the blockchain priesthood, but rather trust the math and verify the proof.There is a detachment to this logic that appeals to the cypherpunk instinct. The implications are deeply social. In the classical world, trust was intimate; it required knowing a reputation, a face, a history. Ethereum replaces this personal trust with mathematical guarantees. It is a vision of accountability without surveillance. This affordance is particularly relevant in the realm of privacy, an area where the unblinking transparency of the blockchain has long been a liability.The Privacy Stewards of Ethereum, a group operating within the Ethereum Foundation, have outlined a roadmap that seeks to make privacy a “first-class feature.” They speak of “private writes” and “private reads,” of enabling users to interact with the ledger without leaking their identity or intent. They reject the idea that scaling requires the sacrifice of privacy and posit that one might gain a degree of invisibility while the system enforces the rules so strictly that cheating becomes computationally impossible. One could prove one is a unique human without revealing one’s name, or prove a vote was counted without revealing the ballot. It is a shift from universal transparency to a society of secret handshakes, where transparency is selective and discretionary.Of course, the Ethereum roadmap has risks. There is the question of “gas limit politics,” the danger that the specialized hardware required to generate zero-knowledge proofs will reintroduce centralization by another name. There is the fragility of the new cryptography itself, the fear that a breakthrough in quantum computing could render these mathematical castles defenseless. There is the ever-present tension between the ideal of a decentralized network and the reality of complex governance.Yet, the momentum is undeniable. The integration of a zkEVM at Layer 1, an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine that generates proofs of the blocks themselves, represents the capstone of this overhaul. It is an attempt to scale to the level of global finance, to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, without utilizing trusted servers.Ethereum aims to renovate digital society in real time, to reconcile the conflicting desires for scale, security, and privacy through a reliance on “moon math” that has suddenly, quietly become infrastructure. Ethereum is betting that cryptographic truth can substitute for consensus. It is moving toward a global notary that sees everything and nothing, verifying the unseen with absolute precision in a ballet of proofs, harmonizing to a music we are only just beginning to hear.

The city of Seattle's progressive ideology is set to clash with Islam during the FIFA World Cup next June.Lumen Field in Seattle is scheduled to host six World Cup games in 2026, and the city's organizing committee is planning a special gay-pride game for June 26.'The match-up of two countries where it is illegal to be gay is actually a "good thing" for the Pride Match.'Announced in October, the committee is dubbing the game the "Seattle Pride Match" and has even procured gay art from fans through a contest meant to be used in Seattle's "citywide celebration."However, after the World Cup draw finally happened on Friday to determine the tournament groups, the gay game is likely to run into ethical problems after it was decided who the two combatants will be.The June 26 game will showcase a Group G matchup between two Muslim nations where homosexuality is prosecuted: The Islamic Republic of Iran and Egypt.RELATED: 'Equality' in pay and 'everything' bar for women's sports opens in Seattle Photograph by Fred Kfoury III/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images In Iran, same-sex relations are criminalized, with punishments ranging from flogging to the death penalty, according to Amnesty International.Egypt is known to use its "debauchery" laws to prosecute gay acts, and while homosexuality is not explicitly illegal, the country used anti-prostitution laws to convict a man for sending nude photos to another man on the gay-dating app Grindr in 2017, according to the Guardian.The Seattle organizers, who are not affiliated with FIFA, said they are already preparing the area's gay businesses to prepare for the influx of fans."We're working with small businesses so the region's LGBTQ+-owned enterprises are ready to benefit from the tournament's unprecedented visitor surge," said Hedda McLendon, the committee's senior vice president of legacy, according to Newsweek.Seattle also organized a committee specifically for the Pride match, calling it the Seattle Pride Match Advisory Committee. A member of that of that group, Eric Wahl, reportedly stated on social media that "the match-up of two countries where it is illegal to be gay is actually a 'good thing' for the Pride Match."RELATED: Major League Soccer lifts ban, allows fans to display Antifa-adopted 'Iron Front' flag during games Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty images The activism does not stop at gay pride for the Seattle group. It will also celebrate Juneteenth for one of the games. Juneteenth was first recognized by President Biden to celebrate the end of slavery annually on June 19.A Group D match between the United States and Australia will take place in Seattle that day."Having the U.S. Team playing in Seattle on Juneteenth creates a high-visibility, high-responsibility moment to introduce hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide to Juneteenth and to create benefit for local Black-owned businesses and arts and cultural organizations," the organizers said on their website.For that match, the group created another committee called the Juneteenth Advisory Committee.Editor's note: The headline of this article has been edited after publication for clarity.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Several of Apple's top executives have left the company, and another is signaling he may jump ship.It took just four days for four of Apple's C-suite executives to file their resignations from the company, with three of them announcing their retirements.'Our approach is to help advocates leading the charge for change in Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous communities.'John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of machine learning and AI strategy, announced his retirement last week, with 9to5 Mac relaying that he will serve as an adviser before his full retirement in spring of 2026.Jumping silicon shipsGiannandrea's departure from the company's AI department may be the canary in the coal mine and certainly points to a strategy shift moving forward. For example, several outlets, including Fortune, have repeatedly noted that Apple is fumbling and stumbling in terms of AI integration, causing employees to leave for more generous packages from competitors. This includes design executive Alan Dye — who helped create Apple's Vision Pro headset, iPhone X, and Apple Watch — leaving the company to join Meta.At the same time, Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, also allegedly told CEO Tim Cook he is considering leaving Apple. Srouji allegedly said that if he does leave, it will likely be to go work for another company.RELATED: Here's how to get the most annoying new update off of your iPhone Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch Retirement partyIn addition to Giannandrea's retirement, Kate Adams, Apple's general counsel, and Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, are also both retiring. As reported by NBC News, Adams has been in charge of the Apple's legal team as it has faced increased litigation, particularly around the iPhone App Store.Jackson is known for her social justice approach, advancing the company's "equity" efforts across the world — a word that was mentioned 77 times in a 2023 Racial Equity and Justice Initiative report. "Justice" appeared 107 times in the Apple document."Across the board, our approach is to help advocates leading the charge for change in Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Our goal is to amplify their voices, never to substitute our own," Jackson wrote in the report's foreword.NBC News claimed Jackson's job had lost relevance under Trump's second administration, due to the lack of focus on race politics.RELATED: India surpasses China in Apple exports to US, up 240% from last year Photo by Pedro Fiúza/NurPhoto via Getty Images AI initiativeThe Guardian, among others, reported that Apple has been lagging behind others in terms of rolling out its generative AI features, predominantly those intertwined with Siri.Apple has been promising an AI-focused upgrade to Siri for more than a year but has postponed the release due to not reaching its "high-quality bar," according to Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering.Cook also said in an earnings call that the company was "making good progress on a more personalized Siri" and hopes to release it in 2026.Amar Subramanya, Giannandrea's replacement, is expected to fill the gaps needed around AI advancement, having previously served as the corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft. He also worked at Google as the head of engineering for Google Gemini."Subramanya brings a wealth of experience to Apple," the company wrote in a press release. "His deep expertise in both AI and ML research and in integrating that research into products and features will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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Federal authorities arrested twin brothers in Absecon, New Jersey, after alleged threats against Department of Homeland Security officials and calls on social media to "shoot ICE on sight," according to a press release emailed by DHS to Newsmax on Tuesday.

Ukraine and its European partners will soon be ready to present the U.S. with "refined documents" on a peace plan to end the war with Russia, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday, following days of high-stakes shuttle diplomacy.