Outrage has erupted among health experts over news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still eager to fund a widely condemned vaccine trial that would expose newborns in Guinea-Bissau to hepatitis B, putting them at high risk of a lifelong infection, which can lead to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and premature death.

The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director's office told the agency's budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC's global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts.

At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no conflict whatsoever with Trump charging up to $100,000 monthly for instant API access to Truth Social posts that often break news from his administration.

Trump is the largest stakeholder and majority owner of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company that owns Truth Social, and the value of the API access comes largely from Trump’s role as president.

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As tensions mount over who gets access to top-end artificial intelligence, French company Mistral has released a new freely available model that it claims can compete with the very best from the US and China.

The new 1 trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed Le Chonk—can be used and customized by anyone. It’s currently available in preview, with a final version to follow by the end of the month. Though Le Chonk is built to compete with leading general-purpose models, it’s optimized specifically for coding and cyberdefense, as well as tasks particular to manufacturing, finance, electrical engineering, and other niches.

“There are a lot of areas where the other labs will not focus that much,” Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist at Mistral, tells WIRED. “There are so many domains in which you can improve models.”

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Researchers published late-stage clinical trial data today for the latest obesity drug, retatrutide—expected to be the most powerful formula yet—and the results appear in line with high expectations. Patients with obesity on the highest retatrutide dose lost an average of 25 percent of their body weight after 80 weeks, and an average of 30 percent after an extension period to 104 weeks. Overall, more than a third of participants taking retatrutide lost 30 percent or more of their weight.

The drug also proved effective at reducing knee pain (by up to 62 percent) in a subset of participants with obesity-linked knee osteoarthritis. It reduced the number of sleep apnea events per hour (by up to 57 percent) in a subset of participants with obesity-linked obstructive sleep apnea. The drug improved cardiometabolic measurements across the board, including blood pressure, triglycerides, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (bad cholesterol). At the start, more than a third of trial participants had prediabetes, and, by the end, the condition had resolved in more than 90 percent of those participants.

The trial began in 2023 and included 2,339 participants from 131 clinical trial sites in 11 countries. Participants were broken into four nearly equal groups, given either: 4 mg of retatrutide, 9 mg, 12 mg, or a placebo. Across all groups, the average starting weight was around 113 kg (250 pounds), and the average body mass index (BMI) was 40. For the subset analyses, 574 participants had knee osteoarthritis, and 243 had obstructive sleep apnea. The results appeared today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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