Seth Meyers on Kash Patel: ‘He has resting “run for your lives” face’
Late-night hosts dug into the allegations of FBI director Kash Patel’s excessive drinking, Donald Trump’s Iran war struggles and some questionable math by RFK Jr.On Wednesday evening, Seth Meyers relished more details from a shocking Atlantic report from this weekend detailing alleged excessive drinking and erratic behavior by the FBI director, Kash Patel.According to more than two dozen current and former FBI officials, Patel was known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, and many people expected him to be fired for his unreachability and impulsivity.“Generally speaking, you don’t want to hear that the country’s top law enforcement official is known for having freak-outs, you know?” the Late Night host said.“When you’re the head of the FBI, you’re supposed to be calm and level-headed.
No one wants to tune into a press conference about a potential threat to the homeland and hear a guy who looks like this” – Meyers cut to a photo of Patel’s intense, slightly cross-eyed stare – “scream ‘everyone run for your lives!’“And he always looks like that.He has resting ‘run for your lives’ face,” he quipped.But the “most embarrassing” detail amid a string of embarrassing details, according to Meyers, was that a few weeks ago, when Patel struggled to log on to an internal system, he panicked and began to frantically call aides to tell them he had been fired by the White House.“So he freaked out and told everyone he was fired, but it turned out it was just a technical glitch,” Meyers laughed.“In fact, one FBI official said of Patel’s freak-out, ‘It was all ultimately bullshit.
’ And I, for one, think that would make a great title for the first history textbook about the Trump era.”Patel has pushed back on the claims by suing the Atlantic for $250m and denying everything at a press conference, where he asked the audience how many people in the room believed the allegations were true.“I do!” Meyers answered enthusiastically.“I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.I do! I mean, I don’t know for sure if it’s true, but I definitely believe it’s possible.
We saw you crushing beers in the locker room after the men’s Olympic hockey team won gold.That definitely looks like a guy who might not remember his password the next day.“I can definitely imagine you sitting down at your computer drunkenly crying because you can’t log in,” Meyers continued.“‘Why won’t the beach ball stop spinning?!’”In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked Patel for “getting hammered this week over a report that he gets hammered on the job.”Patel denied all the claims “not just categorically but maniacally” by suing the Atlantic for $250m.
The magazine has vowed to “vigorously” defend its reporting, which “makes it sound like Patel was blacked-out more than the president’s name in the Trump-Epstein files”, Kimmel quipped.The host then turned to another embattled Trump official: the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who appeared at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, where Senator Elizabeth Warren “cut him like a raccoon penis” over Trump’s nonsensical claims about lowering prescription drug prices.“He claims that TrumpRx has reduced prices by as much as 600%,” Warren said.“Six hundred per cent, which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.”Kennedy responded: “President Trump has a different way of calculating … If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to 10, that’s a 600% reduction.
“Kimmel had choice words for Kennedy’s rationalization: “Who are you going to believe, [Trump] or math? Have you ever bankrupted a casino? I don’t think so,“The actual math is 98%, not 600%, but let’s not get caught up in semantics,” he continued,“Let’s just be quiet and listen to Robert Kennedy breathe,”The host then played another clip from the hearing, in which Kennedy’s rattling breath could be heard throughout the room,“You understand, our secretary of health is dying before our eyes,” Kimmel said.
“And no one is doing anything about it,”And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert checked in on Iran after Trump’s announcement on Tuesday indefinitely extending a ceasefire that had been set to expire within hours,“You know what? I’m beginning to think this war might not be over by Memorial Day,Which reminds me … ,” the host said, jokingly shipping a box of “Iran War Jokes” to Jimmy Kimmel, who would still be airing after The Late Show’s final taping next month,But back to Iran: soon after Trump’s announcement, Iran seized two ships from the strait of Hormuz.
The captured ships were the cargo vessels MSC-Francesca and the Epaminondas, “which is actually how I pronounce empanadas after a night of drinking”, Colbert joked,According to one Iranian official, “Trump’s ceasefire extension means nothing,” because “the losing side cannot dictate terms,”Said Colbert: “Hey buddy, we’re America – we don’t lose wars! We just leave them,”Trump “was not happy about Iran giving him the Middle East finger”, he continued, so late on Tuesday night, the president posted on Truth Social that “they only say they want it closed because I have it totally BLOCKADED (CLOSED!), so they merely want to ‘save face,’”“Sounds like someone just learned what the word ‘blockaded’ means,” Colbert said.
According to numerous reports, Trump wants out of his increasingly unpopular war.And in response to sinking poll numbers, he posted on Truth Social a New York Times report praising the ratings for The Apprentice … from April 2004.“Always a tipoff that life isn’t going great for you when you start to brag about something from 22 years ago,” said Colbert, imagining a similar scenario: “You kids think that Dad’s a loser! Well I’ll have you know that back in high school, I once won two free tickets to see the Spin Doctors in Anaheim at the Grove.”
Grok tells researchers pretending to be delusional ‘drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards’
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok 4.1 told researchers pretending to be delusional that there was indeed a doppelganger in their mirror and they should drive an iron nail through the glass while reciting Psalm 91 backwards.Researchers at the City University of New York (Cuny) and King’s College London have published a paper on how various chatbots protect – or fail to safeguard – users’ mental health.Experts are increasingly warning that psychosis or mania can be fuelled by AI chatbots.The Cuny and King’s pre-print study – which has not been peer-reviewed – examined five different AI models: Open AI’s GPT-4o and GPT-5
Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI
Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies’ productivity needs.Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees– to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000.In an internal memo to Meta’s staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn’t mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to “offset the other investments we’re making”
Thousands call on UK ministers to cut ties with US tech giant Palantir
More than 200,000 people have called on ministers to break contracts with Palantir in an apparent groundswell of public concern about the US tech company’s role in the NHS, police, military and councils.Two petitions have attracted 229,000 signatures, one calling for the government to end all public contracts with the company, the software of which is used by Donald Trump’s ICE immigration enforcement programme and the Israeli military, and another urging the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to cancel its £330m patient data contract with the NHS.This week, the Guardian revealed the Metropolitan police was in talks to use the company’s AI to analyse sensitive intelligence, and Palantir published a manifesto described by one MP as the “ramblings of a supervillain”.But the tech company is pushing back against the multipronged campaign challenging its work in the UK by taking issue with claims made widely on social media by the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, and the legal campaigner Jolyon Maugham, who this week launched a podcast investigation into Palantir. The Liberal Democrats are also calling for the NHS contract to be cancelled and new contracts to be halted
Private health records of half a million Britons offered for sale on Chinese website
The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.The latest breach comes after the Guardian revealed last month that sensitive UK Biobank data has been exposed online dozens of times, raising further questions about whether security has been too lax
Some Interrail travellers told to cancel passports as hacked data posted online
Holidaymakers across Europe are facing the stress and expense of getting new passports after their personal data was posted on the dark web after a hack of the Interrail company Eurail.Personal data, including passport numbers, names, phone numbers, email and home addresses and dates of birth of more than 300,000 European travellers was accessed in December. But this week Eurail revealed to customers that “data copied during the security incident has been offered for sale on the dark web and a sample dataset has been published on Telegram”.The announcement has led to renewed anger and confusion. The UK Passport Office has told at least one customer they needed to “cancel their passport to prevent it being used for fraudulent activity”, with the Home Office agency also indicating they needed to pay the full £102 fee for a replacement
Chinese hackers using everyday devices to target UK firms, warns cybersecurity agency
British businesses are being urged to step up their vigilance against a China-linked hacking ploy that uses everyday devices for espionage.The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and agencies in nine other countries have warned of persistent attempts by Beijing-backed groups to hack equipment such as wifi routers to launch cyber-attacks.Known as “covert networks” or “botnets”, they typically target vulnerable equipment – for instance devices that have not had a software update or are old – as a base for staging activities such as surveillance and data theft.The NCSC said the technique was used by the majority of China-linked hackers. Richard Horne, the centre’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that China’s intelligence and military agencies had an “eye-watering level of sophistication in their cyber-operations”
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