There are few exceptions to the days when bargain buffets were used as a way of attracting Las Vegas gambling fans.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Michael Gaughan as saying that the South Point casino and hotel’s buffets are what bring people into their establishment. They get value for money and stay to play.
According to the magazine, The South Point makes between $1.5 and $2 million per month but attracts about 3,000 guests a day.
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Members can get the casino breakfast for $16.95, which includes two Bloody Marys. Prime rib brunch with champagne, two mimosas included, is available for as little as $32.95 Prime rib and shrimp dinner buffet is $37.95 or only $32.95 if you are a member.
The Journal reports that people start to line up before noon for the Friday Seafood Night. It begins at 3 pm. The prime rib is $57.95 and comes with two glasses of red sangria, draft beer or wine. Lunch buffets are $22.95 per person for club members, and $26.95 per person for nonmembers.
The budget hotel Circus Circus offers an affordable buffet. The hotel bills itself as offering “classic Las Vegas cuisine, something for everyone.” Buffets are available from $19.95 on Fridays and Saturdays.
Excalibur Hotel’s weekday brunch is $32.99 per adult and $18.99 per child. The price for brunch goes up slightly on Fridays. On Saturdays and on Sundays the mimosa brunch is offered for $43.99.
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The Journal reported that Circus Circus managed to make a profit between $50,000 and $80,000 per month during the summer months by using prime ribs from their hotel steakhouse to create a stew for a buffet.
The publication claims that the famed buffets in Las Vegas have been impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic, social distancing and the increasing trend for wealthier tourists to seek out higher-end restaurants.
The Journal stated that there were over a dozen Vegas-style buffets along the Strip by 2020. Only four are left.
Budget casinos, unlike many Strip resorts rely on locals and gamblers who are value conscious. Cheap buffets can be an effective tool to increase casino traffic.
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Las Vegas is booming with luxury buffets. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Wynn Buffet (with prices starting at $80 for dinner and upwards) and Caesars’ Bacchanal ($87 or more) have often long lines.
Whytney RAWLS, a luxury travel expert at Fox News Digital, said that the economics of New York City have changed fundamentally.
Rawls stated that “Gaming used to be the main revenue generator.” Today, the revenue share is dominated by premium rates for rooms, fine dining, nightlife entertainment, retail, and large scale events.
Fox News Digital reported that while the city used to be a popular destination for tourists, the cost of entry is becoming more difficult to justify.
According to The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city has a greater focus on luxury hotels, celebrity chefs restaurants, stadium weekends, and expensive events.
Las Vegas’s visitation in 2025 will be down to 38,5 million visitors, a 7.5% drop from 2024. This is according to Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Visitors generated $55.1 billion dollars in direct expenditures, a record amount.
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A new demographic has emerged. According to Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, in 2024 64% of tourists will earn $100,000 or more.
In 2025 the market will be even bigger. News 3 Las Vegas reported that 44% of visitors earn $150,000 or higher.

SpaceX had a lucky day on Friday. It sent its thirteenth Starship full-scale test flight from South Texas, halfway around the globe, to a splashdown intact and exactly as planned in an isolated section of the Indian Ocean.
Starship’s splashdowns have been precise in the past. The ship rolled gently and floated in an isolated stretch of ocean to the west of Australia. SpaceX officials are used to conflagrations after previous splashdowns.
After reaching the Indian Ocean, it appeared that Starship was in good shape. Engineers from SpaceX flew drones above the vehicle in order to examine its heat shield. They got their best view yet of how the more than 18000 ceramic tiles that insulated the stainless steel ship’s airframe endured the journey to and from space. As Starship sped back to Earth after its one-hour flight, the tiles were able to withstand temperatures of up 1,430deg Celsius (2,600deg F).
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and founder, said that the perfect end of Friday’s launch encouraged SpaceX to make the next step with Starship. This would require launching Starship into a higher-altitude orbit (possibly low Earth), to return the vehicle to its launch site. The launch tower’s mechanical arms will try to catch the vessel as it hovers. SpaceX already did this when it launched the massive Super Heavy booster of its rocket, which was heavier and larger than Starship, yet returned at only a fraction the speed.
Musk posted on Friday night that SpaceX would try to capture the ship and tower in the next flight if we don’t find any problems.
Data hungry
The performance and durability the Starship heat shield is one of the biggest challenges. SpaceX has ambitious plans for Starship, including rapid turnarounds and multiple flights per day. The heat shield must be able to withstand the extreme temperature and vibrations it experiences during the launch and landing. The heat shield can’t just be repaired or replaced every time.
Dan Huot is a SpaceX communication manager who commented on SpaceX’s webcast. This is the perfect scenario for a team trying to collect heat shield data.
SpaceX could also tow the rocket to the shore for a more thorough inspection, if the splashdown was intact. Starship can be reused, but only after it has been exposed to saltwater.
This is crucial for the refinement of both the heat shield as well as everything else. Huot stated that the good news was “you’re seeing a heat shield which looks pretty intact.” We were at significantly higher dynamic forces, which put a lot more strain on this vehicle as we climbed uphill. And it is still sitting in the water.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network continued to receive signals from Starship even after the splashdown. The six Raptor engine of Starship were not damaged by the water splashing against its lens.
The test launch on Friday was SpaceX’s 13th Starship flight, atop its Super Heavy booster. It also marked the second of two flights of Starship Version 3, the most powerful rocket in the world.
At 5:51 PM CDT, the 408-foot tall (124-meter), rocket took off at Starbase in Texas. This is a few kilometers north of US-Mexico Border. The Super Heavy booster was powered by 33 Raptor methane engines. They guided the rocket to the east, over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX had a checklist of Flight 13 but the only item left unchecked was a controlled splashdown for the Super Heavy booster. The booster was to be re-lit for a burn to simulate a landing off the Texas coast, allowing it to perform the maneuvers necessary to bring the booster to its launch pad to recover and reuse.
The Raptor engine failed to start for the landing burn and so the booster crashed into the sea at high speeds. SpaceX had similar problems with splashdown during the May flight. The Friday flight was a step forward, but there is still work to be done on recovering the Super Heavy booster. SpaceX recovered Super Heavy boosters twice with Starship Version 2 but never with Version 3.
SpaceX’s officials posted an update to the website saying that the booster had completed its high-thrust portion of the boostback with all 33 engines for the first time using a Super Heavy engine V3. The burn was then ended early. It attempted to relight the engines before the landing burn. A subset of them ignited successfully, but the booster experienced a splashdown into the Gulf.
Space Success
Starship continued to accelerate into space while the Super Heavy booster descended towards the Gulf. It fired its six engines for more than five minute before starting a coast of a quarter-hour over the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.
Starship’s payload bay opened a few minutes after the engine shut down and began deploying 20 Starlink satellites. These satellites, the first upgraded Starlink V3 models from SpaceX with improved throughput and performance, are the most advanced yet. The satellites are larger and heavier, so they won’t fit into SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which is smaller.
Starship released Starlink V3s with its Pez-like deploymenter. They were thrown overboard via a slit like opening in the side of spacecraft. These flat-panel satellites didn’t stay up in the air for very long. The flat-panel satellites did not stay in space for long.
SpaceX’s ground teams were able to establish contact quickly with the satellites via radio and laser links and then “downloaded important telemetry” prior to their destruction. The engineers were able to see the first performance data of Starlink V3s.
After the deployment of satellites was complete, engineers decided to restart one of Raptor’s engines. This is something they had not done on their last flight. The burning lasted for approximately 14 seconds and could be seen by observers in South Africa. SpaceX called the Starship demonstration “core technology for future orbital mission”. Gravity pulled Starship down to Earth.
Starship’s next step is to get into orbit, and then return the vessel to its launch pad. These achievements will allow SpaceX to launch operational Starlink V3 Satellites and unlock higher-speed direct connectivity to devices for the US Military and consumers.
NASA is on the path to orbital refueling with SpaceX’s orbital flight. The demonstration will be crucial for all Starship flights beyond low Earth orbit including NASA’s Artemis Moon missions. NASA has partnered with SpaceX, Blue Origin and Blue Origin in order to create human-rated versions Starship as well as the Blue Moon Lander to transport astronauts from and to the moon surface.

Earlier this week, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models—the newly released GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable, unreleased system—broke out of a locked-down internal test environment, exploited a previously unknown “zero-day” vulnerability to reach the open internet, and then breached fellow AI company Hugging Face to steal the answers to a cybersecurity test they were being evaluated on.
The incident has alarmed the world, but perhaps no one more so than AI safety experts who have warning about these kinds of dangers for years and urging companies and governments to adopt more safeguards.
Several AI safety experts told Fortune the recent hack appears to show OpenAI’s models have crossed into a level of risk that OpenAI’s own published safety policies define as “critical,” the highest level of danger. At that level of danger, the company had pledged in these published policies that it would pause model development until it could figure out better control systems.
The “critical” threshold is defined in a risk policy document known as OpenAI’s “Preparedness Framework.” According to the policy, the “critical” danger level designation is supposed to apply to a model that can independently find and build working exploits for previously unknown security flaws across many well-defended, real-world systems—or one that can design and carry out an entirely new attack strategy against a well-defended target after being given only a general goal, with no human guidance along the way.
The policy says that when an AI model reaches this level of risk, OpenAI will “halt further development” until “we have specified safeguards and security controls standards that would meet a Critical standard.”
The Preparedness Framework is a voluntary commitment by OpenAI, rather than a legal requirement. But the company publishes the document on its website, in part to allow other AI safety researchers and the public to see what controls it says it will implement. The adoption of a policy like the Preparedness Framework is mandatory for frontier AI labs under the EU AI Act, with that portion of the law having come into force in August 2025.
“OpenAI’s preparedness framework defines critical cybersecurity capabilities, and prescribes safeguards that need to be implemented before development can continue,” Nathan Calvin, general counsel at Encode AI, an AI safety advocacy group, told Fortune. “From my reading of OpenAI’s preparedness framework, it looks awfully like this internally deployed model met the critical criteria for cybersecurity. Does OpenAI dispute that critical designation? Do they plan to have safeguards that meet a Critical standard before proceeding further?”
Tyler Johnson, founder of the AI watchdog group the Midas Project, also said it seemed the models had hit this highest danger threshold. “I think a plain reading of it would say yes,” he said. “It operated independently over the course of a weekend, trying different attack vectors on Hugging Face and chaining multiple zero-day exploits.”
OpenAI did not respond to specific questions from Fortune about whether the AI models involved in the incident met the “critical” standard outlined in its risk policy. Instead, a spokesperson said: “This is an unprecedented incident, and we think it marks an important moment for AI safety. We are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone.”
The vagueness of the framework’s language could leave room for dispute, however, according to Johnson. The threshold requires a model to find zero-day exploits “of all severity levels,” but it’s unclear whether the exploits used in the Hugging Face breach would meet that requirement. It’s possible a more severe class of vulnerability, such as one granting an attacker deep, system-level control over a computer’s operating system (known as “kernel-level” access), would need to be demonstrated for the threshold to apply, he added.
“OpenAI’s model outsmarted its creators, exploited a never-before-discovered vulnerability in OpenAI’s code, escaped onto the open internet, and attacked another company,” said Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network. “If this doesn’t cross the line into Critical, OpenAI needs to say much more about what’s going on and how this threshold works.”
AI safety experts say OpenAI is missing other safeguards
OpenAI has previously said it was treating its newest model, GPT-5.6, as “High” risk for cybersecurity. High is the lower of the two risk levels outlined in the Preparedness Framework. Models that are below the “High” threshold can be released without risk significant risk mitigations.
A High designation is supposed to trigger several protections, according to OpenAI’s policy: tighter security controls, safeguards to prevent outside misuse once the model is released publicly, protections against the model itself behaving unpredictably or deceptively when it’s used heavily for internal research, and efforts to help other cybersecurity teams defend against similar threats.
However, some experts question whether one of these, the safeguards against misalignment for large-scale internal deployment, have been properly implemented. These protections are meant to catch a model that’s acting deceptively, hiding its true capabilities, or otherwise working against what its developers intended.
This isn’t the first time OpenAI’s compliance with that particular safeguard has been called into question.
Fortune reported in February that safety experts claimed OpenAI had failed to implement required misalignment safeguards after its GPT-5.3-Codex model became the first to hit “high” cybersecurity risk under the Preparedness Framework.
At the time, OpenAI disputed that its framework required the safeguards in that instance, arguing the extra protections only kick in when high cyber risk occurs “in conjunction with” long-range autonomy—the ability to operate independently over extended periods—something it said GPT-5.3-Codex had not demonstrated.
The models involved in the current incident involving Hugging Face reportedly operated independently for days, which would seem to meet that long-range autonomy standard.
“In February, we warned that OpenAI may have skipped on its required safeguards according to its own policy. They disagreed, claiming the model lacked long-range autonomy. But the model that hacked Hugging Face clearly has long-range autonomy, so where are the safeguards now,” Johnson said.

The Maine mother who went to the hospital expecting a routine procedure ended up with a nightmare. A surgeon had allegedly removed a cyst from her ovary instead of her bladder.
According to Bangor Daily News, Emily Mitchell (43), of Skowhegan was awarded $15.7 million by a jury after it found Northern Light Inland Hospital liable for the botched surgery that rendered her permanently disabled.
Mitchell had laparoscopic surgery on her left ovary in March 2023, expecting to be treated for a cyst. Court records show that Dr. Danielle Gagnon, the surgeon who performed her surgery, mistakenly took out nearly all of Mitchell’s healthy bladder.
Mitchell was not aware of the shocking mistake until he returned to hospital, in severe pain and suffering from severe swelling. He also had difficulty urinating.
Her bladder had been removed by the time she was taken to Eastern Maine Medical Center. Surgeons were preparing to fix what they thought was an injury to her bladder, but made this horrifying discovery as they prepared to do so.
According to WMTW8, local television station, Mitchell was unable to function without tubes for more than 8 months. She suffered from kidney infection, recurrent infections of the urinary system, and multiple other medical procedures.
News Center Maine reported that after doctors determined there was not enough original tissue to restore Mitchell’s bladder, they used a small section of her intestine.
Mitchell has been battling urinary tract infection for more than three years. He will need to be treated throughout his life because of this mistake.
After a 10-day long trial, a unanimous jury of nine people sided with Mitchell, awarding damages to her for suffering and pain, injuries permanent and future medical costs.
Joshua Mitchell’s wife was awarded $1.25m for loss of companionship. The family received a total payment of $17m, the highest medical malpractice verdict ever in Kennebec County.
Susan Faunce, Mitchell’s lawyer told Bangor’s newspaper that “this is the closure Emily and her families have been waiting for.” They can now move on, confident that their story has been heard, seen and accepted.
The hospital officials expressed their respect for the decision and sympathy to Mitchell and her parents, and added that patient safety is still their number one priority.
Northern Light Health no longer employes Dr. Gagnon.
Last year, the hospital that performed the operation closed due to financial problems.

Former Donald Trump top food official, has accused administration of “catastrophic mismanagement” of the outbreak of cyclospora that sickened thousands in US.
Frank Yiannas was the deputy commissioner of food policy for the Food and Drug Administration during the tenures of Presidents Trump and Biden.
Yiannas, a Politico reporter said: “This case deserves to be questioned. It is approaching a catastrophe level when it comes to how it has been mismanaged on many fronts.”
Yiannas stated that there is widespread confusion in the public about cyclosporiasis. This intestinal disease can be caused by the microscopically parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. He said that the “lack” of strong leadership from federal agencies and their mixed messages has compounded this problem.
In the US, the chaotic response has highlighted the efforts to stop the outbreak of cyclospora. The disease has affected more than 4,500 people, and it is believed that thousands more may have been infected.
After initially linking lettuce supplied by Taco Bell supplier Taylor Farms to an outbreak, the FDA reversed its position. Taylor Farms claims that the FDA apologized for the outbreak. The FDA denies this claim.
Federal food regulators still believe there are strong links between Taylor Farms and the outbreak. Taylor Farms has had its lettuce recalled. Robert F Kennedy Jr., US Health Secretary, stated last week that the outbreak is “under control”, despite the FDA expanding its investigation to 7,400 possible cases in nine states.
Yiannas, a FDA employee said: “They went way too fast. They made a big mistake.” They should explain more how it happened, and tell us what steps they will take to avoid it happening again.
Yiannas stated that a review of government response would be better done under the oversight of Congress or by an independent inspector. Yiannas said that the FDA did not respond immediately to this request for an investigation into its actions.