What happened
Search teams have rescued eight people from the ruins of a shopping center (pictured above) after a powerful earthquake struck the southern Japanese island of Kyushu yesterday. Recovery operations continued overnight at the Aeon Mall in Kumamoto Prefecture after part of the building collapsed and an explosion followed the initial quake.

The earthquake was initially measured at magnitude 7.1 before being revised to 6.8. It was followed by more than 60 aftershocks and, together, they sparked fires, damaged roads and cut power to thousands of homes. At least 13 people are known to have died, and the death toll is expected to rise.

Who said what
“Although more than 20 hours have passed since the earthquake, there are those still in need of help,” Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said during a press conference. “This is truly a race against time.”

The earthquake has “rattled a region still marked by one of the country’s deadliest recent disasters,” CNN said. In 2016, a series of massive earthquakes killed 275 people, injured thousands more and caused widespread devastation, with more than 200,000 homes damaged. 

What next?
Emergency workers continue to look for people who are trapped or missing, as engineers assess the damaged infrastructure. The Japan Meteorological Agency has warned of landslides and further aftershocks over the coming week because the quake is still “triggering seismic activity in the area,” said The Guardian.

What happened
Former trillionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company x.AI has filed a lawsuit against Minnesota’s “first-in-the-nation law” banning programs and applications that “create and post deepfake videos or images of people naked without their consent,” said MPR News. Those found in violation of Minnesota’s anti-nudification rule risk fines of “$500,000 for each unlawful access, download or use,” per the law’s text. 

Who said what
X.AI did not dispute that the state has “valid interests” in barring the “dissemination of artificially generated nude images of people without their consent,” said Bloomberg Law. Rather, it argued that Minnesota’s rule goes “far beyond that goal” and exposes a “wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanctions.”

What next?
Musk’s suit holds that Minnesota’s law is “unconstitutional” and should either be “placed on hold while the case proceeds” or “struck down entirely,” said MPR News. The provision is set to go into effect on August 1. If and when it does, x.AI has threatened to “limit services for users in the state.”

An anonymous phone call — along with prepaid cellphones and burner phones — may soon be a thing of the past. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed requiring a host of personal information in order to enable someone’s phone service. While the new rules are an effort to stomp out pesky robocalls, they may cause more harm than peace.

The FCC 26-27 proposal, adopted on April 30, was deemed a “know-your-customer” standard with the intention of “stopping illegal calls before they enter the phone network, requiring providers to block unwanted or illegal calls and giving consumers more information about the calls they receive,” said the FCC in a news release. The proposal is “misguided and counterproductive,” Sydney Saubestre, a senior policy analyst on the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said to Fortune. 

A lack of access to private telecommunications can cause “especially acute harm and danger for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, technology-facilitated abuse and stalking,” the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence said in a letter to the FCC. Also, requiring government-issued IDs is a barrier for many to obtain a phone.

Many also have concerns about how phone providers will handle user data. “Every other year, there’s a new data breach in which 70 million, 100 million U.S. consumers have their data exposed,” Chao Jun Liu, a senior legislative associate at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said to CNET. Those in favor of the proposal, like banking industry groups, said Fortune, have cited “fraud and scam losses that totaled nearly $200 billion in 2024.”