Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 5 No. 854.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 5 No. 1,120.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 5, No. 1,842.

Hundreds of masked members of the white supremacist organization marched and chanted in the US capital

Hundreds of masked men carrying banners, including the Confederate flag, marched through Washington DC on the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of the US’s inception.

The group appeared to be led by Thomas Rousseau, founder of the neo-fascist, white supremacist organization Patriot Front. Members of the group wore white masks and gathered in front of DC’s Union Station. They later marched towards Capitol Hill, WTOP reported.

Canada battled hard but Morocco had too much quality as the co-hosts journey came to an end

The prize on offer today is a quarter-final against either Paraguay or France. There’s a cheap strikethrough gag begging to be made there, and goodness knows we’re cheap and jaded enough to usually do it. But nobody’s taking anything for granted after Argentina’s scrape with disaster against the heroic and inspired Cape Verde. Here’s how last night’s instant-classic antics went down in Rotterdam, where six of the Blue Sharks were born.

It’s the big pennant showdown … and it’s as good as a walkover for Morocco. Achraf Hakimi will hand over this uniquely shaped artefact that almost literally drips with beauty. The Arabic script translates as Royal Moroccan Football Federation, so there’s no detail anywhere of today’s fixture and opponent; unfortunately that’s one point docked. However two bonus points are awarded for the sheer elegance of Arabic script. Total score: 11 out of 10.

Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.") But in 2026 the EU now requires a country-by-country compliance report, and the New York Times notes that Microsoft "was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply..." Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones. The report showed the sometimes absurd results. Microsoft said it had generated almost 40 percent of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3 percent of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1 percent of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2 percent of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe... [In Luxembourg Microsoft said it had $283 million in pretax income with only 34 employees.] [America's] Internal Revenue Service is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion4. The company has said it disagrees with the I.R.S. and said in a securities filing that it "will vigorously contest" the proposed tax bills. This week a Microsoft blog post offered their own "context," arguing that tax is "one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one. "Our investments, partnerships, infrastructure, and long-term presence in countries around the world also reflect a commitment to helping strengthen the economies and communities where we operate, today and for the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

St Petersburg governor reports no victims after ‘large-scale’ overnight attack that also hit Baltic port of Vysotsk

Ukraine launched a big overnight drone attack on St Petersburg and the surrounding area, hitting the city’s oil terminal and port infrastructure in the wider region.

The St Petersburg governor, Alexander Beglov, said the city had been subjected to a “large-scale” drone attack that had hit its oil terminal. He said there were no casualties and the aftermath of the attack had been dealt with.

In the nation’s sweltering capital, people come together to honor founding documents and new citizens. But barriers, delays and extremists stoke anger and frustration.

At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update: We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phones supported by the Lineage project, an Android-based volunteer-led mobile phone operating system with much free software already in it. Our current, primary focus is on the radio blobs that control WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and cellular communications. The software freedom issues with mobile computing have been around for a long time, with the most challenging issue being the baseband/modem firmware that relies heavily on proprietary software. This creates a technical and legal maze that is nearly impossible to break free from, but that doesn't mean we should ever stop working to create free systems. It certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't liberate the software that we know can be free software. Now, half a year into this project, lead developer Rob Savoye has extracted firmware from over 200 Lineage install packages, processed 85GB of files, and imported the results of these analyses into a PostgreSQL database for cross-device comparison... [M]uch of the software and blobs we need to work through are shared across multiple devices; this means even greater strides for mobile phone freedom... As insurmountable as it may seem at times, every blob we manage to free up will be progress. The FSF has proven time and time again that it can bring the free software philosophy to life, not just by advocating for it, but by making it so. The bulletin also describes how waves of botnets from "aggressive LLM scrapers, vulnerability scanners, poorly optimized CI/CD servers" inspired the FSF to create a new free-as-in-freedom automated monitoring tool: In our efforts to combat the botnets, we optimized several detection rules to ban abusive behavior. We found the upper limit of fail2ban and replaced it with reaction, an efficient alternative with our configuration that uses ipset. We also split several monolithic machines into many separate machines so that when a web service is overwhelmed the other functions of the service do not go down with it... We found quite a few ways to respond to and prevent botnet attacks, but still faced a significant related challenge: communicating when a website or service is down... Uptime Kuma is a human-readable, automated monitoring addition to our systems... You can check out our recently-launched self-hosted Uptime Kuma instance at https://status.fsf.org/. When you see the page, you will also likely say, "Wow! The FSF and GNU sure do run a ton of services!" and you would be right... If you maintain websites and services, and are looking for a simple way to communicate publicly with your users, consider using Uptime Kuma or another free software solution instead of choosing a proprietary monitoring solution." There's also an article on the state of free-as-in-freedom videogame console emulators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 35,000 people from about 600 groups made their way from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall via Piccadilly

Tens of thousands of people marched through central London for the annual LGBT+ Pride parade.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, joined the crowd as they proceeded through the capital on Saturday afternoon.

"The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday," reports the Associated Press: The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol "BSP" on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $25.2 billion. Among the company's well-known holdings are the event creation and ticketing company Eventbrite, and the video hosting service Vimeo... AOL itself went public in 1992 and was a vanguard of technology and communication. It reached a market value of $164 billion in 2000 shortly before merging with Time Warner. It then crashed along with the rest of the industry following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It has been bought and sold several times over the last two decades... [Italy-based Bending Spoons] was founded by three friends in 2013 following the failure of their first attempt at building a technology startup. It has since grown by buying more than 50 companies. The acquired companies are reorganized, and AI technology is often a key tool in the redesign. The focus remains on subscription-based revenue from the portfolio of businesses. The company said it had net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million during the first three months of 2026. It had more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million monthly paying customers as of March. The company has debt of just under $4.4 billion. It plans to use proceeds from the offering to invest in new acquisitions. The article notes that in the company's prospectus, it says they chose the name Bending Spoons because "We were about to attempt to create a world-class company with $40,000, a team of five, and a track record that read 0 for 1. A touch of irony seemed appropriate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meghan and his children may eventually join him on the rest of the trip outside London, the source said.

Mt Olive Pickle Company says it was unaware image of flag was included in exhibit, and cites value of ‘human dignity’

A leading vendor of the US delicacy that is the pickle has withdrawn from the Great American State Fair in Washington DC after North Carolina’s booth displayed a video containing a Confederate flag.

The Mt Olive Pickle Company, which is located in eastern North Carolina and bills itself as the “#1 bestselling brand of pickles, peppers and relishes in the US”, told local news station WNCT it had been unaware that an image of the flag would be included in a video as part of the state’s exhibit.

The rugged Boom 3I looks and sounds great, and you can snag it for $35 off right now at Amazon, as long as you like the color green.

EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... under which EchoStar agreed to sell about 50 megahertz of its nationwide spectrum for $23 billion." Some context from Deadline.com: Charlie Ergen, who co-founded EchoStar and Dish, recently returned as chairman and CEO to steer the company through its recent challenges... Even prior to the merger, Ergen had been working to pivot from the pay-TV business, where Dish now has just 5 million subscribers and streaming sibling Sling TV has another 2 million, toward wireless telecom. With wireless spectrum hitting the market due to the Sprint-T-Mobile merger and then Elon Musk's Starlink looking to ramp up in the sector, it seemed more attractive than the cord-cutting-ravaged pay-TV business. But it is still entails plenty of risk, especially given how tightly regulated the spectrum is due to security concerns. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our writers with the latest news and reaction as the last 16 stage begins

Australia lost to Egypt on penalties in one of the more disastrous shootout cock ups. Changing goalkeepers is a bold move, especially when Mat Ryan made a right Shilton of himself.

Jonathan Wilson was there.

The remains of a Revolutionary War soldier were identified as a young man from Maryland just before America's 250th anniversary.

Serena Williams cited a knee injury behind her decision to withdraw from a doubles match at Wimbledon.

Officials rescued seven other people after a sudden storm led to a boat sinking on Geneva Lake

Three children died after a boat capsized on Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake during inclement weather on the eve of the US’s semiquincentennial celebrations, and seven other people had to be rescued by emergency responders, according to officials.

A recreational motor boat with 10 passengers, including four children, sank on Friday afternoon as the boat “attempted to navigate to safety as weather conditions deteriorated” amid an intense, sudden storm, the city of Lake Geneva police department said in a statement.

A decade in the making, the 1976 bicentennial had a cathartic impact on the wounded national polity

• Americans: how do you feel about the country’s future after 250 years of independence?

It felt like a proper jamboree – a coming together of diverse peoples who thought they had something to celebrate. But the defining moment of the 1976 bicentennial, the US’s last epic birthday celebration, came two years before.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in his presidential inauguration speech of 9 August 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands in repositories, README files, Makefiles, or other content consumed by AI agents. If executed — particularly in auto-approve or CI environments—the commands can steal credentials, compromise developer systems, or enable software supply chain attacks. According to researchers at Adversa AI, the 11 popular open source AI coding agents tested, only one successfully blocked all of the Bash trick techniques.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fourth-century residential city in the western desert is one of two major archaeological finds announced by Egypt on Saturday.

• Knee injury sustained in singles loss on Monday

• ‘I’m heartbroken to have to withdraw’

Serena Williams will not compete with Venus Williams in the doubles after she was forced to withdraw from their first-round match due to the knee injury sustained in her singles return at Wimbledon.

Williams had been in a race to be fit to face Camila Osorio and Solana Sierra on Saturday afternoon. But she has not recovered from twisting her knee in the first set of her opening-round singles match against Maya Joint, which she lost 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3.

El Obeid becomes key battleground in war between Sudan’s armed forces and their paramilitary enemies, the RSF

Fatima has lost count of the number of drone attacks on the besieged city of El Obeid in Sudan, but said the attacks this past weekend were the most violent so far.

The drones hit schools and fuel stations, killing more than 20 people, including students, she said. “Over the past few months, seeing 40 or 45 drones is the norm. You can literally count them,” said the aid volunteer, whose name has been changed for fear of retribution.

Guardian analysis of X feed shows how keen world’s richest person was to air his views and ‘interfere’ in British politics

Elon Musk posted about race and immigration in the UK on his social media network X twice as often as he did about SpaceX, which he also owns, in the run-up to the aerospace and AI company’s initial public offering.

A Guardian analysis of Musk’s posts, replies and reposts between 31 May and 12 June has shown the extent to which the social media activity of the world’s richest person, who lives primarily in the US, has focused on UK politics.

Officers found body of 34-year-old man in luxury rental home in Pattaya area, local media says

A 21-year-old British woman has been arrested in Thailand after allegedly fatally stabbing her boyfriend, according to local media reports.

The Bangkok Post reported that on Thursday morning local time, officers found the body of a 34-year-old man, who operated a cannabis farm, in a luxury rental home in the Pattaya area, a beachside region two hours from Bangkok known for its large expat population and nightlife.

Voters disillusioned with Starmer’s Labour were tempted by the Greens – but Polanski’s party fears the affable, left-leaning Burnham could win them back

The shift was notable. A week after Keir Starmer said he would resign, YouGov polling showed Labour up two points and the Greens down by the same amount. Might an Andy Burnham premiership mean a rethink for Zack Polanski’s party?

The short answer is it is too early to know, particularly in an era of unprecedented political volatility and the seesawing poll numbers that come with it. This year alone, a five-point Labour lead over the Greens has become a similar margin in favour of the Greens, and then a seven-point advantage for Labour.

Heat health alerts in place in most regions of England from Sunday to Saturday with mercury also rising in Wales

Another heatwave is on the way across parts of the UK with peak temperatures of 34C forecast.

Temperatures in the south of England could reach 28C on Saturday, according to the Met Office.

The Verge argues that researchers "have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it's just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public's imagination." And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028: The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing... Researchers have improved the qubits themselves, so they hold onto information longer. When they hold onto information longer, you can fit in more operations and do more complicated algorithms. Last November, Andrew Houck of Princeton University and his colleagues reported that they'd made a superconducting qubit that can hold onto information three times longer than the previous record holder... And in the last two years, researchers have made substantial strides in what's known as quantum error correction... In addition, researchers have developed algorithms to correct errors while the quantum computer operates... Microsoft claimed, which experts dispute, that it made an object made of electrons known as a Majorana particle [which should make fewer errors and be easier to scale up]... "We 100 percent stand behind our results. We stand by our roadmap," Microsoft's quantum lead, Chetan Nayak, responded in an interview with The Verge. In an email statement, he added that Microsoft's "papers do show that we are creating and controlling Majorana [particles]... Microsoft's supporting evidence is unconvincing [according to [Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic]Rnqyq. What it claimed as evidence of a Majorana particle, he says, could actually be due to quantum dots forming in its device. Quantum dots are electron-containing objects that are not useful for Microsoft's quantum computer. It also bases its claim on data from a single device, says Legg. He wants to see Microsoft replicate the results in multiple chips. "If you repeatedly try and find Jesus in your toast, eventually you'll find Jesus in your toast," he says. "But that one piece of toast doesn't mean you had some kind of epiphany." "While we appreciate the religious fervor, our data maintains the strength and consistency of our roadmap, as we have for the past several years across previous milestones. We look forward to delivering the world's first quantum machine and sharing the energy of our achievements with the world," wrote Nayak in response. Past spurious work from Microsoft-affiliated researchers adds to the doubt. In 2021, the journal Nature retracted an article from Microsoft-affiliated researchers in which they'd claimed strong experimental evidence that they'd created a Majorana particle. "Even hopeful experts have varying opinions about when a quantum computer will demonstrate something useful," the article acknowledges. But quantum computing lecturer Eleanor Crane of King's College London predicts researchers will have demonstrated a useful scientific simulation on a quantum computer by 2028. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pardons issued to nine people charged with violating Clean Air Act as extreme heat smothers much of US

Donald Trump on Friday issued pardons to 11 men – two convicted fraudsters and nine charged with having violated the federal Clean Air Act by disabling or otherwise modifying trucks’ emissions controls.

Those executive pardons – coming amid US semiquincentennial celebrations blanketed in extreme heat exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions – were among a broader wave of acts of clemency from Trump during his second presidency, chiefly for those he considers to be aligned with him.

Google's Learn About is impossibly easy to use.

Deputy Labour leader says No 10 must become more meritocratic as party’s female MPs press Burnham on gender balance

Andy Burnham will change a “boys club” culture of factional briefings at No 10 which silenced critics, according to the deputy leader of the Labour party.

Lucy Powell said she had experienced “unpleasant” briefings in Downing Street, which left people afraid to speak out or challenge Downing Street’s position.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled over the Islamic Republic of Iran for 37 years, was killed along with several family members in an airstrike in February.

National Weather Service issued an extreme heat warning as high temperatures have paralyzed the east coast

Organizers of Saturday’s Independence Day parade in Washington DC abruptly canceled the event late on the eve of the event, with sweltering temperatures in the nation’s capital and on the east coast wreaking havoc on celebrations of America’s semiquincentennial.

The event, hosted by the National Park Service (NPS), was scheduled to begin at 10.30am on Saturday. But organizers said they canceled the procession due to an extreme heart warning issued by the National Weather Service (NWS).

Thousands of police deployed to Erfurt in central Germany as party holds conference on key Nazi date

Riot police have clashed with opponents of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on the streets of Erfurt in Germany, where thousands met to block roads and prevent AfD delegates from attending the party’s biennial national conference to elect its leadership.

Police reported 20,000 protesters were demonstrating in the eastern city, where Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla are expected to be re-elected as the party’s co-leaders in the run-up to crucial regional elections in which AfD could win power at state-level for the first time.

The oil giant’s sponsorship deal with Fifa has featured prominently at matches in Houston. But 100 miles away in another Texas city, residents say the firm’s refinery is exposing them to poisonous gases and long-term health problems

The street is wide, its grass verges thick and scruffy after a week of rainstorms. Jamal Johnson will walk home straight down the middle carrying his plastic shopping bag, a jot of motion through the stillness. He lives in one of the modest wood-panelled houses spaced out on each side, most lovingly kept and passed through at least two generations. There is nobody else in sight, but a freight train breaks the silence, grinding left to right along the line flanking the north-facing gardens. The west side of Port Arthur, Texas, could be any lower-income neighbourhood in the southern states if it were not for the looming menace on the other side of the track.

This is a sad, unsettling place. “I’ve got a load of friends and family who’ve had weird diseases,” says Johnson, his face contorting at the thought. He lists a grandfather and aunt who died of cancer, the latter at a young age after relocating here to care for other relatives. An uncle died with complications from ALS (motor neurone disease). “You know what I’m saying? Man, they’ve let off all these poisonous gases; it’s like that all the time. It’s fucked up.”

When you’re looking for a new pressure washer, it’s easy to focus on the wrong specs. These are the ones that matter.

Up to 30 million people expected to attend delayed events for Ali Khamenei, killed at start of war with US and Israel

Huge crowds have gathered at the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader after the gates of the sprawling Grand Mosalla mosque in central Tehran let in thousands of mourners who had been waiting through the night to enter the grounds.

Iran is staging mass funeral processions for Ali Khamenei – whose ⁠37-year reign was brought ⁠to an ​end in February by the first airstrike of the war launched by the US and Israel. By 5.30am, the Tehran streets surrounding the mosque were already filling up as Iranians, some travelling for hours and many carrying flags or posters of Khamenei, made their way to an event designed to emphasise the country’s sense of loss at the killing of the supreme leader and desire for revenge. Emotions filled the air as the crowds chanted Death to America and Israel.

Boy who was allegedly thrown into the area at a Cambridgeshire zoo has undergone five surgeries

A three-year-old boy left seriously injured after being allegedly thrown into a crocodile enclosure has undergone five surgeries and faces a long “rehabilitation journey”.

His family, who provided the update, also thanked donors who had raised more than £25,000. His parents said they had been “living at the hospital” since the incident at Johnsons of Old Hurst farm and zoo, in Cambridgeshire, on 18 June.

In Lampedusa, island gateway to Europe, the U.S.-born pope stressed human dignity and told America: "in every generation" immigrants "helped to shape the nation’s character.”

I’m an out-of-shape cycle enthusiast. I tested the Hypershell exoskeleton on a regular bike versus an e-bike and found a clear winner.

The flag-draped casket of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was put on display in Tehran with millions expected to attend his dayslong funeral.

Americans are celebrating 250 years of independence this Fourth of July with events including the largest fireworks display in history.

Shopping for a new phone can be a headache. I've tested phones for 15 years so I know what to look for.

Exclusive: £20bn of ‘potential’ £30bn AI investment touted by UK ministers appears to have been hypothetical

It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project – would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.

But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs.

The congressman spent four months mysteriously away from work, but he doesn’t seem to think his constituents should get mandated sick days

The mystery of the missing congressman has finally been solved. Almost four months ago Tom Kean Jr, a Republican, vanished from public view. He missed more than 100 votes, all while continuing to collect his full taxpayer-funded salary of $174,000 along with excellent benefits. The only explanation given for his absence was a cryptic statement from his office in late April saying he was dealing with a “personal health matter”. Kean’s father, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean Sr, further told CNN in May that his son was battling a temporary illness and would be back to work soon.

This week, Kean finally resurfaced and explained that he’d been absent due to inpatient treatment for depression. Why hadn’t he said anything about this earlier? Kean said he was “private person by nature”. Which is great, but maybe don’t choose a job in public service in that case.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

As the US celebrates 250 years, the Declaration of Independence has been curiously absent. Yet its language on the consent of the governed is more relevant than ever

It’s America’s birthday. Ear-splitting pyrotechnics will be heard across the land tonight, as they were a few weeks ago, after the cage fight at the White House. On 24 June, the administration launched the Great American State Fair, with “spectacular flyovers” from fighter jets and stealth bombers. Six 18-wheel “Freedom Trucks” are barreling down the highways, bringing history-lite pop-up displays, mainly to red states. Later this summer, we will hear drivers revving their engines, deafeningly, as they leave skid marks around the National Mall during the Indy car race scheduled for 22 August. It’s gonna get loud.

But one guest is apparently not invited to the party. The Declaration of Independence, the reason we are convening, has been curiously absent from the lead-up. That feels strange for a document that essentially rewrote world history.

Eric Dillon thought the pain in his shoulder was a minor injury. It took two years to get the real answer.

When the sun goes down on Independence Day, the skies of Washington, D.C., are expected to fill with a record-setting 850,000 individual fireworks for a 40-minute spectacle like no one has seen before.

Guardian reports after the disaster told of 5,000 deaths, much of the capital being razed, and doubts about Mexico hosting the finals

Mexico last hosted the World Cup in 1986, but the competition was almost cancelled several months before the start when an earthquake struck the capital, Mexico City, leaving at least 5,000 people dead, 30,000 homeless and much of the city flattened, in one of the worst earthquakes to hit the country.

To this day, the death toll remains disputed, with some estimates putting it as high as 40,000.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were married as they celebrated their wedding with hundreds of guests Friday at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The president kicked off America's 250th anniversary celebrations with a speech at Mount Rushmore where he warned of a resurgence in communism.

Pope Leo urges Americans to live up to ideals of Declaration of Independence in first key address to US

Pope Leo has used his first key address to his home country to praise the US history of ⁠welcoming migrants, urging Americans to live up to the ideals put forward in the ⁠Declaration of Independence.

In his latest implicit rebuke to Donald Trump, the first US leader of the Roman Catholic church said the word “America” had become ‌a “byword for freedom” across the world because of the way the country welcomed migrants.

Cornell Lab for Ornithology plans data linkup between app and population monitoring on eBird platform

The Merlin bird ID app will allow users to feed real-time bird identifications into one of the world’s biggest citizen-science biodiversity projects in an update it is hoped will aid conservation of at-risk birds.

Since 2021, the free Merlin app, created by the Cornell Lab for Ornithology, has used machine learning to provide an almost instantaneous sound-identification service for birdsong, along with an image for each bird identified. In future, the detections of bird species recorded by people will be automatically collected on the global online database eBird, which contains more than 2bn bird observation records.

Oasis tune has been sung from Texas to Massachusetts and soon in Mexico City – and the players have joined in too

It has become England’s World Cup anthem more three decades after it was first released, being belted out by fans from Texas to Massachusetts.

Wonderwall by Oasis will soon be heard in Mexico City too, where the Three Lions will face the tournament co-hosts Mexico on Sunday evening – or at 1am on Monday for fans singing along back home.

Instead of a UFC event and poorly attended state fair, how about ditching the electoral college and a new season of Game of Thrones?

I hate birthdays, especially my own, which is ominously arriving next month. I used to love them, back in those days when I had something tangible to look forward to: getting my first car, graduating high school, my first legal alcoholic drink, a new Star Wars film that’s actually good. That time is long gone. I can do all those things I listed, plus I haven’t seen a good Star Wars movie in more than 20 years. What am I even celebrating at 42? A slightly paunchier waistline? A larger bald spot? If the present you’re getting me isn’t a free Turkish hair transplant, I don’t want it. I don’t relish being 42, but imagine if I were 250?

America (the country, not the band) turns 250 this weekend, and we’re all meant to celebrate that fact on the Fourth of July. Millions of dollars have been poured into marking the occasion, though few of the events hold much appeal for me. I didn’t watch the UFC event; I have no desire to watch a bunch of cars driving around in circles, and the PragerU Freedom Truck hasn’t even come to my town. I couldn’t even get to finally see Vanilla Ice live in concert. Like every birthday, a lot of money has poured into a day where no one has any fun.

Guardian readers on celebrating on Independence Day every year – and especially this year

This Fourth of July, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its independence from Britain, a milestone that the Donald Trump administration is commemorating with a series of events and celebrations across the National Mall.

The anniversary arrives against a backdrop of civil rights rollbacks, immigration crackdowns and strained international relations. For some Americans, however, the date carries an added layer of significance: it is also their birthday.

Shifting demands and political ideology have left the industry vulnerable to global competition from cheap Chinese cars

Earlier this month, an intriguing new Detroit-based electric vehicle startup hit the market – Slate Auto, a Jeff Bezos-backed venture offering something US buyers rarely see these days – a pick up truck billed as “affordable”.

Its base price is $24,950, making it one of the lowest-cost autos in the US market and close to half the price of the average new vehicle. But as the US contends with sharply rising auto costs, even Slate may be getting left behind in the global electric vehicle (EV) transition. The global EV industry is entering a golden age powered by cheap Chinese cars that can be bought for as little as $10,000.

Not quite a desktop tower or a mini PC, the AtomMan G1 Pro ends up with some of the drawbacks of both designs.

Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their spokesperson said: "We expect the power generation portion of the system to be available as early as 2027, with the nuclear module being available to customers about 2030 based on regulatory approval." From the report: Founder and CEO Brian Matthews revealed the prototype microreactor, which features a fully 3D-printed silicon carbide reactor core and pressure vessel. "This next-generation nuclear core and pressure vessel sets the foundation for factory-built, mass-produced nuclear energy," Matthews said. "The advanced technology and additive manufacturing used demonstrate a clear commercial path for new nuclear technology coming to market in an accelerated manner." His company is developing a subcritical, solid-state, factory-built thorium-based nuclear reactor. Subcritical means the fuel cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction on its own, which prevents a runaway power excursion. Ampera uses "solid-state" to describe a design with solid rather than liquid fuel. The proposed fuel uses tristructural isotropic, or TRISO, particles, consisting of a fuel kernel containing thorium, surrounded by multiple ceramic and carbon layers. [...] "Thorium is the future for ultra-safe, clean power production," Matthews said at the time. "By producing TRISO thorium kernels in the United States, we can ensure ample access to the needed fuel supply as we scale up and also minimize price volatility risk." Ampera also describes the heart of the reactor as as a spherical monolithic gyroid core. A gyroid, as far as we can fathom, is a complex shape that provides a massive surface area relative to its volume, making it well-suited for heat transfer. Its complexity makes it difficult to produce using conventional manufacturing methods, which is where additive manufacturing comes in. The core is 3D-printed using silicon carbide and designed to operate for up to 30 years without refueling, the firm claims. Ampera says its planned systems will provide 15 or 30 MWe, depending on the configuration, enough to supply a typical datacenter. Larger configurations are planned. Matthews said that his company expects to be the first to industrialize factory-built nuclear power with near-term deployment timelines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prime minister holds no ‘personal animosity’ toward likely successor and stresses he has a platform to build on

Keir Starmer has said Labour “should go on to win the next election” under his likely successor, Andy Burnham, based on what the prime minister had already achieved.

In his first interview since he announced he would stand down, Starmer also said he held no “personal animosity” toward Burnham, who is expected to succeed him.

Exclusive: Anger at union’s decision to put 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy

The British Medical Association is threatening to axe up to a third of its entire workforce to help it tackle a significant cash crisis.

The doctors’ union has placed 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy. That has triggered anxiety and fury among staff, who have accused the BMA of appalling behaviour and “hypocrisy”.

Savings plans for children born between January 2025 and December 2028 launched as president seeks electoral boost

Trump accounts, a savings vehicle named after the US president and authorized by congressional Republicans, are set to go live on Saturday, offering American parents a new way to save money for their children by investing in funds managed by major Wall Street firms.

All accounts established for children born between January 2025 through December 2028 – nearly the entirety of Donald Trump’s second term – will receive $1,000 from the government. Parents, friends and employers will be able to deposit as much as $5,000 a year into the accounts.

Commentary: Netflix's Worst Neighbor Ever is the latest true crime installment from Blumhouse and explores riveting, heartbreaking real-life horror stories that hit close to home.

These six presidential speeches are some that have most reverberated through the ages, and whose impacts are still felt today.

Scholars will someday wonder how the richest country in history chose to throw it all away. But the crisis has been there since the beginning

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has arrived at a moment of some embarrassment for the Republic. The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own. America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak.

In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fuelled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.

A History of Violence

I’ve lived through the last 51 of America’s 250 years. For much of it, I’ve believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it deserves to be. It’s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past, and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.

Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome such a legacy.

Still, many Americans broke their bodies and laid down their lives trying to atone for the sins of the founders and those that followed them. Ordinary people pressed and struggled to gain some measure of the liberties, equality, and the chance at happiness promised, but not delivered, at America’s birth. In return, they faced terror, truncheons, and tear gas. Year after year, people denied supposedly inalienable rights faced down, for themselves and their neighbors, white-hooded nightriders and bayonet-bearing troops and robber barons and monied interests and hateful bigots and vicious police and craven politicians and foolish experts and infinite hordes of functionaries and good-German-type neighbors willing to do the bidding of oppressors or just look the other way. But because of all these shattered skulls and cracked ribs, endless abuse and arrests and incarcerations, there was a chance for redemption.

You could almost see it if you squinted hard enough. That fleeting moment when a panoply of rights movements appeared ascendant, and that long arc of the moral universe was straining hard toward justice, and the volunteers of America — an unarmed army of the better angels of our nature — were on the march. For an instant, it was there: a shining wave of promise about to swamp the forces of America’s decrepit order. Maybe you glimpsed it in the raucous joy of an occupied campus or park or city block, on a graffiti-scribbled wall, in the smoke of a burning tire, in the frenzied talk of a comrade, in the pages of a banned book, wherever; you sure knew it if you saw it.

But that shimmering wonder crested, collapsed, and consumed itself. Now you need to crane your neck and strain your eyes to see the bare trace of that high-water mark — the cruel evidence of the last, best hope for America’s redemption just before it was swept back into the depths. We’ve been drifting ever further from it since. 

If the question of which America would prevail hadn’t been settled earlier, the reelection of a megalomaniacal, racist, war-mongering, bigoted, vulgar, anti-democratic, authoritarian, inveterate liar, and would-be tyrant to preside over America’s semiquincentennial seemingly resolved it.

America is the “greatest, strongest, and most exceptional nation the world has ever known,” said President Donald Trump recently in celebrating the country’s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall. He added that it was “superior to any nation that’s ever been built no matter how many years it took.”

While Trump’s demented, deteriorating mind might not recall George Orwell’s warning in 1984 — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — he or his minions certainly understand the concept on some level. Immediately upon taking office last year, Trump began efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history to match his boasts. An executive order issued last March took aim at a supposed “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” 

Related

Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Christopher Columbus

It’s Trump, however, who has been rewriting history to comport with his claims. For months, to take one example, Trump has fought a pitched battle to censor the history of his presidential predecessor George Washington, whom he calls “our foremost American hero.” For his exploits at Trenton and Valley Forge, for his leadership in the turbulence of the Revolution’s wake, the capital bears Washington’s name and in it a giant obelisk stands in his honor. Most Americans have literally, if not figuratively, long embraced his visage since his face adorns the quarter and the dollar bill.

In January 2026, crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the President’s House site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, where Washington and his wife Martha lived in the 1790s — when the city was briefly the nation’s capital — with nine of their slaves. On orders from the Trump administration, the workers pried off panels discussing the ownership of people by our foremost American hero, details about the lives of those enslaved men and women, and information about the broader history of slavery. Recently, a federal appeals court discarded an injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, allowing the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit. “It is an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful,” wrote the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display.

No country can be great, much less the “greatest,” if it’s afraid of its own people knowing the story of their nation. Trump looks at America and sees an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” according to that executive order. He claims that malevolent forces have “reconstructed” America’s past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” fostering “a sense of national shame.” But no one need rewrite U.S. history to foster a sense of unrelenting disgrace. It’s everywhere, if we have the courage to call it out.

In 1779, for example, Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples, to bring about the “total ruin” of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” he told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages.

Such sins of America are legion. Given the time and space, one could name 250 or 250,000 or 2.5 million of them. On this Fourth of July, it’s worth recalling some of those inconvenient truths that Trump would rather you forget and future generations never know.

• Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district led more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on November 29, 1864. In what he called “an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on a sleeping village at Sand Creek. For almost four hours, they slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children. Many Native women were also raped, and Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia were taken as souvenirs. In a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington stated: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”
• In 1914, striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security company opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car that the miners called “the Death Special.” Those miners fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered in federal troops. Almost 200 people were killed, according to some estimates.
• A two-day attack by white mobs on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921 began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching. Rioting white people, in response, killed hundreds, and more than 30 city blocks were destroyed, including a community known as Black Wall Street. Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor, recalled piles of bodies in the streets and watched a white man execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
• During the 20th century, coerced and forced sterilization became a method of controlling “undesirable” populations: disabled people, immigrants, people of color, the poor, unmarried mothers, those with mental illness, and others. This included federally funded sterilization programs in 32 states. Over 70 years in California, for example, approximately 20,000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions, often without their full consent.
• From 1932 to 1972, 399 black men, many of them sharecroppers and poor, in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Despite the availability of penicillin beginning in the 1940s and the fact that syphilis can damage the heart, brain, and other organs, government officials ensured the men received no medical care while telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” 128 of the men are estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications.
• In a horrifying echo of the Tuskegee syphilis study, U.S. government and Guatemalan doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections — chancroid, gonorrhea, and syphilis — to study potential treatments. The researchers also paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. Left untreated, all three can be fatal.
• The U.S. government conducted thousands of radiation experiments on Americans, including children, from 1944 to 1974. They included the injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air to track their movement or effects.
• U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not hundreds of thousands of rapes in Europe during and after World War II. Around 190,000 German women alone were raped between the U.S invasion of Nazi Germany and 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty, according to one estimate. In reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945, the youngest victim mentioned was a 7-year-old child. The oldest was a woman in her 60s.
• On August 6, 1945, the U.S. launched the world’s first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.
• The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program targeted the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among others in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1976 Senate report, it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.
• On March 15, 1968 in South Vietnam, U.S. troops were briefed by their commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina. The Americans were told they would find enemy troops in the village of My Lai and, as one unit member recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” When the troops arrived, they encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nonetheless, Medina’s order was carried out. More than 500 civilians were slaughtered over the course of four hours. The soldiers even took a break to eat lunch amid the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, and systematically burned homes.

There is no way not to view these “historical milestones in a negative light.” Nor the sins of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the global war on terror and the countless crimes they spawned. In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars. We’ve also watched as Black women and men were murdered in cavalier fashion and anti-ICE protesters were gunned down in the streets. We’ve seen immigrants deported to foreign prisons, war zones, and human rights-violating pariah states for spite, and rights disappeared as if they were panels detailing historical truths.

“There has never been anything like the United States of America,” Trump said recently. It’s lucky for the world. Because for every landing at Normandy, there is a massacre at Bear River or Sand Creek or Samar or No Gun Ri or My Lai or Le Bac 2 many times over. I’ve spoken with hundreds of survivors of these types of atrocities. I know the story of America’s impact abroad better than most.

Trump believes that he resuscitated the U.S. “A short time ago we were a dead country,” he said during semiquincentennial festivities. “We were dead.” Those comments about America’s death resonated with me — even if I don’t think they’re true — because the other side of that coin is rebirth. While I don’t believe this country can be redeemed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be reborn.

Washington isn’t the only predecessor Trump loves. He’s also besotted with, as he put it, “the late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important Founding Fathers.” Although in Trump’s version of history, Jefferson was a “principal writer of the Constitution.” (He actually authored the Declaration of Independence — the anniversary Trump is celebrating these days.) Perhaps if Trump knew what Jefferson, another slaveholder, actually wrote, he would be less enamored. Whatever his grave faults, Jefferson offered a prescription for an ailing nation. What country “can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” he asked in a 1787 letter. Noting the necessity of “rebellion,” he continued, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Two hundred and fifty years in, during the presidency of a sick-minded, wanna-be despot, and despoiler of history, it’s worth considering the endless sins of America, its sheer brutality, its staunch resistance to reform, and how one of Trump’s favorite founders thought about sending a message to “rulers.” A country that won’t face its crimes and instead tries to disappear them can’t be saved. Even rebellion, at this late date, might be only a half-measure. But if there is any wisdom left in Jefferson’s words, it could be somewhere to start. 

The post The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History appeared first on The Intercept.

In a speech at Mount Rushmore, the US president claimed a resurgent ‘communist menace’ posed a severe threat to the country

Donald Trump has kicked off America’s 250th birthday weekend with an extraordinary partisan attack on the “communist menace” in America, framing its supporters as “the enemy of July 4th 1776”.

The US president spoke for half an hour on Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the milestone anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence from Britain.

Sony's Japanese Reon Pocket Pro Plus is now shipping in the US. These are my thoughts after days of testing.

Donald Trump has kicked off America’s 250th birthday weekend with an attack on the 'communist menace' in America. The US president spoke for half an hour on Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the milestone anniversary of the US declaration of independence from Britain

• Trump launches America’s 250th birthday celebrations with partisan attack

Group, whose constituencies have derelict or at-risk pools, are campaigning to make outdoor swimming available for all

Cooling, blue expanses of water have been a lifesaver for many lucky enough to live near a lido during the recent UK heatwave.

Now, a group of 20 MPs, along with the Fabian Society, are calling for this relief to be made accessible for all by getting water companies to fund the reopening of the country’s lost lidos.

We assess the standing of the nations who played in the tournament’s last 32 before the next round of games begins

Les Bleus look unstoppable – all six of our judges ranked them No 1. Sweden did their best to cope with the French front four but were blown away by the slickest operation in town. Even when an opponent is feeling comfortable, Michael Olise or Kylian Mbappé can produce genius without notice, ripping apart the best-organised defences. “I did say that I wanted to enjoy this World Cup to the fullest,” Mbappé told reporters after the Sweden game. It is hard to imagine the fun stopping any time soon.

There are plenty of reasons for Americans to feel discomfort about the behavior of their country. But sports have a way of bringing joy and unity

The US men’s national team are on the verge of history. One win away from matching their best-ever run in the World Cup’s modern era, they are playing with more verve and quality than they ever have before at this stage. Wednesday’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina has begotten a rarity: American soccer, in the spotlight, in America.

To longtime US soccer fans, the question of whether to support this particular team at this particular time is barely a question. Or if it is one, it’s vaguely along the lines of “should I breathe?”

“Dear You,” a Teochew-language family drama and migration story, has raised fraught questions of identity among some Chinese communities abroad.

The tragic deaths at the girls’ camp grabbed headlines for months. But other people who lived through the ordeal have dealt with a quieter trauma.

The programme, aimed at keeping 1m girls in school across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, withdrawn after aid cuts

A leading higher education programme, aimed at keeping 1 million girls in school across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, has been axed by the British government just two years after it was announced.

The scheme, Strengthening higher education for female empowerment (SHEFE), which was unveiled with some fanfare two years ago by the outgoing Conservative government, had a £45m budget to increase access to higher education for 1 million students worldwide. It has now had its tender withdrawn, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said.

As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine language, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT

Three paragraphs, from three different hotel reviews. Can you tell which, if any, were AI‑generated?

“The hotel is in a great location for everything. Lots of places to eat and drink. The hotel itself is always abuzz. The tavern located on the ground floor is definitely a must. Food, service, prices and atmosphere were great.”

Annie’s lawyers argue that prosecution was so badly executed it breached her human rights

At her kitchen table, in a village in southern England, Annie* sits with a blue folder stuffed with court documents, witness statements and correspondence relating to the trial of her stepfather, whom she had reported to police for alleged childhood abuse.

As she prepared to tell her story for the first time, she was flooded with emotion when a photograph fell from the folder. The square Polaroid showed a young girl standing in a field beside a pony, dressed in jodhpurs and a riding hat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies' refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivists to build legal repositories. Sony's announcement that all PlayStation games will be digital-only from 2028 onward has sparked concern that titles will become harder to preserve and more easily vanish, since the company's servers will become the sole point of distribution. In an official statement, Cifaldi noted that the end of physical PlayStation games has surprisingly little impact on the Foundation's efforts because the majority of games from the last two decades are already digital-only. According to the Foundation, most games nowadays are not released for consoles, let alone on physical discs. Furthermore, many discs for major titles require downloading updates before they are playable, although the DoesItPlay database reveals that, even today, most are playable offline out of the box. Cifaldi claimed that the true reason piracy remains the best option for preservation is that the Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies for game publishers, has closed off other routes. For example, in 2018, the Association opposed efforts to grant copyright exemptions for museums, libraries, and archives to retain copies of abandoned online games for research. This is the same organization that recently helped defeat a proposed California bill to preserve premium-priced online-only games by falsely claiming that community servers are illegal. The Foundation accused the ESA of repeatedly blocking attempts by cultural heritage institutions to reform DRM legislation. Cifaldi also described the Library of Congress' outdated software preservation process, which currently only requires tiny snippets of source code. For example, Capcom once asked the Foundation to provide the LoC with "the first and last ten pages of code" for a Mega Man game. Unable to discern where digital records began and ended, the group simply chose random segments. Platform holders' habit of closing online storefronts and removing media from users' accounts is also unhelpful. "What continues to baffle us is what the industry expects institutions like ours to do about it," the Video Game History Foundation said. "If platform owners are deciding to eliminate physical media and older digital storefronts, then we'd also like to see trade groups like the Entertainment Software Association offer meaningful solutions for archives and museums to legally preserve digital-only content and make it accessible for research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Politicians brace for constitutional turmoil if Nigel Farage’s party end up in government – or even as a strong opposition

The rise of Nigel Farage has prompted political leaders across Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to game the unthinkable: the breakup of the United Kingdom.

Unionists who wish to save the union and nationalists who wish to end it are bracing for constitutional turmoil if Reform UK emerges triumphant – with Farage as prime minister or official leader of the opposition – after the next election.

‘Home fee’ qualification ends in 2028, leaving those hoping to study in UK not now eligible for British loans

British teenagers living in the EU could be priced out of UK universities in two years’ time as a Brexit rule change means they face the double whammy of paying costlier international fees, while losing access to student finance.

British passport holders living in the EU still qualify for “home fee” status at UK universities. But this will no longer be the case when the grace period ends in 2028, meaning the first wave to be affected are starting their A-levels, or equivalent, this autumn.

From the gold rush to civil rights, the moon landing to 9/11, the US has always understood, mythologised and sold itself through the power of the still image

The United States was founded in 1776, but did not begin to see itself until the autumn of 1839, when daguerreotypes, the first form of photograph, reached American cities. You could argue the US began again on the morning it could look at its own face.

At first photography seemed to answer the democratic promise of 1776. A portrait was no longer reserved for the rich; almost anyone could now leave a trace of their existence. The gold rush became one of the first great American dramas to find the camera: ordinary diggers squinting into the lens, looking beyond it for gold. A more emblematic American scene can scarcely be imagined: what would be called the American Dream, a lottery everyone plays and very few win. The myth was not that they all found gold – it was that the search itself made them American.

Three children died on Geneva Lake in Wisconsin after a boat capsized during a severe storm Friday, Lake Geneva police said.

The Empire State Building lit up in blue for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding Friday night.

The couple were married in a star-studded ceremony at Madison Square Garden

• Full report: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce marry at New York City’s Madison Square Garden

Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities -- a dispute that highlights the frantic race between the U.S. and China to take the lead in artificial intelligence. [...] Anthropic said last month that it had suffered a strike by Alibaba, which it described as a "distillation" effort that involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one. The distillation helps accelerate China's ability to reach Anthropic's advanced Mythos Preview capabilities, it said in a letter seen by Reuters that was sent to two U.S. senators. Alibaba's ban comes just days after developers said Claude Code contained mechanisms that inspected user environments, including timezone and proxy-related information, and inserted subtle markers into prompts sent to Anthropic's servers. An Anthropic employee wrote on Tuesday on X that the feature was "an experiment we launched in March" intended to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protect against model distillation. The person who spoke to Reuters about Alibaba's ban said that Anthropic's restrictions targeting China were difficult to enforce on individual users who can deploy servers in the United States and make traffic appear as if it originated there. But companies were more aware of legal and compliance risks, the person added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The couple invited an array of celebrity guests to the wedding, including Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper, while Adam Sandler officiated their nuptials

• In pictures: Fans and A-list stars gather for the wedding
  

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are officially wed. The couple hosted their wedding celebration on Friday in New York City, nearly three years after first meeting.

The ceremony was officiated by Adam Sandler, a Swift spokesperson said in a Friday statement confirming the nuptials.

Rishi Sharma started his journey 10 years ago by driving around his Southern California neighborhood to record interviews with veterans and later expanded his outreach.

Prime minister also speaks of his ‘intensely personal decision’ to step down in first interview since resigning

Keir Starmer has warned his likely successor, Andy Burnham, that it will not be possible to spend less time focusing on international affairs.

Speaking during a BBC interview, he also spoke of his “intensely personal” decision to announce his resignation last month after two years as prime minister.

A fight between two groups of young people who knew each other escalated into gunfire, police said

A shooting altercation between two groups of young people at a shopping mall in Dearborn, Michigan, left two people dead and a third injured over what is typically the most violent weekend of the year in the US, police said.

The shooting occurred as the US began celebrating the Fourth of July, historically a holiday weekend that sees higher rates of gun violence across the country. In 2024, the Gun Violence Archive reported more than 500 shootings over Independence Day weekend.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration in a speech marking America's 250th birthday.

Attendance had been thin to Trump’s ‘unbelievable’ event before an increase on Friday – and then the high temperatures swept in

Even by Trumpian standards, the event was promoted with intense hyperbole: nothing short, the US president suggested, of the “the most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen”.

“It’s gonna be great,” Donald Trump proclaimed on the opening night of the Great American State Fair, the centerpiece of the US 250th anniversary celebrations. “It’s gonna be unbelievable.”

A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6.

The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on. It’s unclear how long it will take ReactOS to become compatible with Windows Vista software, but it took Microsoft around half a decade to develop Vista after the release of XP and marked a major upgrade, even if it didn’t land well with users at the time.

↫ Paul Hill at Neowin

It’s a milestone for sure, but not one that’s going to make a huge difference for ReactOS at this moment in time. Still, it’s a sign of things to come, even if the very nature of the ReactOS project means that whatever things are coming tend to take a while to arrive.

Parasite cyclospora spreads through produce and water contaminated with feces and causes the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis

The US Centers for Disease Prevention has been working to find the source of a parasitic illness that causes “explosive”, watery diarrhea, with more than 400 cases of the sickness reported across 18 states.

The parasite, cyclospora, spreads through raw produce and water contaminated with human feces – and it causes the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis, whose symptoms include cramps, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, low-grade fever and vomiting. The most commonly reported symptom is “watery diarrhea with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements”, according to the CDC.

As we commemorate the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, Americans are asking familiar questions. Who were the founders? What did they believe? How did this nation begin?

But there is another question that deserves just as much attention: Where do I fit into this story? For many people, the answer begins with family history.

Genealogy is often thought of as a personal hobby or a search for long-lost relatives. But it can also be a powerful way of understanding American history itself. Every family story is woven into larger stories of migration, community, work, faith, conflict, aspiration, and civic life. Exploring where we come from can help us better understand not only our own identities but also the nation we have inherited together.

Recent historical research suggests that genealogy played a much more significant role in the founding era than is commonly recognized. Many founders, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, carefully documented and studied their own family histories, viewing genealogy as a way to better understand their inheritance and their place in a changing world. Family relationships influenced inheritance, citizenship, political power, religious life, and legal standing. Rather than being a side concern, genealogy helped shape the very structure of the society the founders were building.

Across early America, people of diverse backgrounds preserved their histories in countless ways: through family Bibles, letters, oral traditions, quilts, gravestones, church records, court documents, and stories passed from one generation to the next. Enslaved families fought to preserve family connections despite systems designed to erase them. Indigenous communities maintained rich traditions of kinship and ancestry. Immigrant families carried family histories across oceans and into new communities. Genealogy has always been both deeply personal and profoundly civic.

That insight feels especially important as we celebrate America's 250th.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that all people are created equal and speaks of "one people" coming together to dissolve the political bonds that once tied them to another nation. The Constitution begins with three simple words: "We the People." Those ideals have always been aspirational, inviting each generation to expand the circle of belonging and help the nation live more fully up to its founding promises.

Genealogy offers another way into that ongoing work It also reminds us why primary sources matter.

When we explore our own family histories, we rarely rely on secondhand accounts alone. We search for birth certificates, naturalization papers, census records, death certificates, marriage licenses, letters, photographs, family Bibles, and other documents created by the people who lived those lives. These records allow us to move beyond inherited stories and encounter the past on its own terms.

The same is true of our nation's history. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, letters between the founders, petitions, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and court records are, in many ways, America's genealogy. They are primary sources that reveal who we were, what we believed, what we debated, and how our constitutional democracy came to be. Just as discovering an ancestor's signature on a naturalization record can make family history suddenly feel real, reading the Declaration in its own words or encountering the voices of ordinary Americans who petitioned for greater liberty and equality can make our national story feel immediate and personal.

Whether we are exploring our family's genealogy or our nation's constitutional history, primary sources invite the same habits of mind: curiosity, close observation, empathy, and the humility to recognize that every story is richer and more complex than we first imagined.

Looking into our family histories often reveals journeys across oceans and borders, service to country, moments of hardship and resilience, and efforts to build new lives and communities. Sometimes we uncover histories we never knew. Sometimes we encounter difficult truths. Often, we find both. In every case, we are reminded that American history is not distant or abstract. It was shaped through millions of individual lives, each contributing another chapter to a story that continues today.

That perspective makes this a particularly meaningful moment to explore family history. Starting on July 4, 2026 and running through the end of August 2026, visitors to the National Constitution Center can experience The Stories of US Discovery Center, presented by Ancestry, where historical records and interactive experiences invite people to discover connections between their own families and the broader American story.

The experience also reflects a broader commitment to preserving our shared history. Through Ancestry's partnership with the City of Philadelphia, approximately 20 million historical records, including birth, marriage, death, naturalization, and property records, will be digitized over the next two years, expanding access to the stories of the people who helped shape both Philadelphia and the nation.

These efforts are about more than preserving the past. They invite us to see history as something we inherit together and continue to write together. That idea is at the heart of the National Constitution Center's Our Story Continues campaign, which encourages all of us to recognize our place in the nation's ongoing constitutional story.

Understanding the past helps us better understand one another and ourselves. It reminds us that every family has a story worth telling and that every community has helped shape the nation we have inherited.

Civic learning begins with connection. Sometimes that connection starts with reading the Declaration. Sometimes it begins with visiting a historic place. Sometimes it starts around a family dinner table. And sometimes it begins by discovering the name of a great-grandparent in a centuries-old record.

As Americans gather in Philadelphia during this historic anniversary year, I hope they will not only reflect on the nation's founding documents but also ask what stories brought their own families to this moment.

Because the American story has always been written not only by the extraordinary figures we remember, but by the countless ordinary people whose lives became part of something larger than themselves.

Julie Silverbrook is the Chief Content and Learning Officer of the National Constitution Center.

Singer and fiance Travis Kelce have been coy but festivities are getting under way at Madison Square Garden

The streets of New York City and the first-class lounges of Heathrow and JFK airports were crawling on Friday with celebrities on their way to attend the wedding of the year.

Taylor Swift had kept fans guessing about whether it was her nuptials that had caused the closure of 11 streets in midtown Manhattan and the endless deliveries of flowers, food and decorations to the huge Madison Square Garden arena.

CBS News previously reported President Trump was weighing pardons of a slate of people convicted of emissions and clean air-related violations.

The Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., are deemed a "national special security event," which is the highest possible designation.

As Americans endure another bout of extreme heat, experts say small thermostat adjustments and other energy-saving steps can help reduce soaring cooling costs.

For the surviving Iranian regime, the funeral offers an opportunity to project power after withstanding months of war with Israel and the United States.

Fireworks, parades and celebrations in photos from around the country.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 4, No. 1,841.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 4, No. 1,119.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 4, No. 853.

Valve has open-sourced the design for a customizable e-ink front panel for the Steam Machine, dubbed the "Inkterface." "All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, which goes over everything you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine," reports GamingOnLinux. From the report: They're now calling it the "Inkterface" and there's a good few things you'll need to make it including: 1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM. 1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend. 1 x Adafruit 5.83" Monochrome eInk Panel. 13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws. 4 x 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/16" Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT. Valve even provided a video on the GitLab showing it being put together [...].

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People gather outside Madison Square Garden despite security keeping them from seeing anything noteworthy

Taylor Swift’s fans gathered in the heat outside New York’s Madison Square Garden on Friday for her wedding – or at least the celebration of it – to Travis Kelce, and the sense of being close to the superstar singer-songwriter and her NFL champion groom on their big day.

Whether or not Swift and Kelce have already tied the knot, which has been at the center of contradictory reports, fans said they were thrilled at the union – and the location.

• Striker’s one-match ban will not be increased

• Balogun says yellow card would have been fair

• Pepi and Wright among options against Belgium

Folarin Balogun fielded questions on the morning of his 25th birthday, though the cards being discussed weren’t filled with kind notes and two-dollar bills.

Per Fifa rules, the striker was unable to speak to the media following the United States’ World Cup last-32 triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he opened the scoring in a commanding 2-0 win but was sent off after receiving a red card in the second half.

Here's how to row better by fixing these errors.

The gift comes months after Belgium's diamond industry won the removal of U.S. tariffs on diamond imports.

Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, the aftermath of the earthquakes in Venezuela, a brutal heatwave in Europe and Harry Kane at the World Cup – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Judge says evidence indicates attack on Pouria Zeraati outside home was carried out on behalf of Tehran regime

Two Romanians who took part in a “targeted” knife attack on a television journalist in London “on behalf of the Iranian state” have been jailed.

Pouria Zeraati, who worked for the Persian-language channel Iran International, which is critical of the Tehran regime, was left bleeding in the street after being stabbed three times outside his home in Wimbledon.

Republican Liz Murrill was indicted for the alleged intimidation of New Orleans elected officials

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Louisiana’s highest court has granted a stay of the proceedings in a criminal indictment targeting the state’s attorney general, in the latest twist of a high-stakes political battle between Republican state leaders and Democrats who govern its most famous city, New Orleans.

Liz Murrill, a Republican who is Louisiana’s first female attorney general, was slapped with a 16-count indictment on Thursday by a New Orleans grand jury charging her with intimidation and malfeasance. The charges effectively accused her of trying to intimidate New Orleans officials who fought a law passed by Republican legislators to overhaul the city’s courts.

Federal safety regulators are urging consumers to stop using the recalled fireworks and return them for a full refund.

As imaging tools become more sophisticated, online predators are using images of children to make extreme pornography

• UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears

The two photos started out as typical teenage selfies: looking into the mirror, fully clothed. But once online predators had got hold of those pictures and ran them through an AI imaging tool, they had become the basis for extreme pornography videos.

These examples come from the Report Remove service, which allows children who have had explicit pictures of themselves distributed without their consent to flag the image confidentially and have it blocked or taken down from social media. Due to breakthroughs in AI, and the wide availability of AI models and nudification apps, some under-18s are becoming victims without even being in contact with criminals.

Exclusive: National Crime Agency and safety watchdog issue guidance amid rise in explicit material online

• AI prey: why watchdogs are telling parents to protect children from nudification apps

Parents should not put photos of their children on public display online, according to landmark guidance issued to tackle the rise of AI-generated sexual abuse material.

The recommendation has come from the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation, which fear that most people are unaware of the dangers posed by paedophiles and criminal networks.

They suggest that parents and guardians make their social media accounts private or share pictures of their children through a “close friends” group. The NCA and the IWF stressed they were not telling parents how to behave online, but said they should be aware of the problem and how to tackle it.

But the satellite internet company has a long way to go to catch up to established rival Starlink.

Party had justified plan to hang flags in Nottinghamshire on basis that local businesses would foot £75,000 bill

A £75,000 scheme by a Reform-led council to hang union flags at sites across the county, which the party said would “not cost the taxpayer a single penny” as it would be sponsored by local businesses, has failed to attract a single sponsor, it has emerged.

The plan to attach the flags to brackets on about 180 lamp-posts and other places was agreed in the autumn by Nottinghamshire’s council, won by Nigel Farage’s party in last year’s May elections.

Hundreds of Guardian readers expressed concerns over greed in the White House and a billionaire president unconcerned with high gas and grocery prices

Donald Trump has earned more than $1bn from his crypto businesses since returning to the White House, according to recent financial disclosures.

Amid questions of conflict of interest, more than 400 Americans expressed feelings of outrage, disgust and despair at their president. They answered a Guardian call for their views on Trump’s fortune.

The latest news, reaction and build-up as the last-32 stage draws to a close

⚽ Player guide | Bracketology | Knockout draw | Email us

Julian Nagelsmann is set to resign as Germany coach, according to reports in the newspaper, Bild.

It was reported ⁠on Friday ​the 38-year-old had agreed to leave following talks with senior German soccer ⁠officials, ⁠a three-hour “secret summit” on Thursday at the German ​Football Association (DFB) headquarters in ‌Frankfurt.

That pundit was Ange Postecoglou, and now, Asia’s No 1 team need him to not just talk the talk but walk the nation to the top level of the global game. The federation in Tokyo should do all they can to get his signature on a lengthy contract as he is going to be in demand this summer.

On July 3, 2026, the National Constitution Center awarded the 38th annual Liberty Medal to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV in a ceremony in Philadelphia just steps from Independence Hall.

“Dear friends, I am honored to accept the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in this year that marks the 250th of the founding of the United States of America with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,” said Pope Leo XIV.

Pope Leo XIV delivered his live acceptance remarks virtually from the Vatican, which were livestreamed to those gathered at the National Constitution Center and to audiences worldwide.

“As a son of this great country founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God's blessings upon America's future that the lofty ideals enshrined at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence may continue to guide the flourishing of the nation in unity, justice, and peace,” he said.

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the ceremony brought together civic and faith leaders, as well as visitors from Philadelphia, across the nation, and around the world, to reflect on how the promise that individuals may worship freely, speak openly, and live according to their own convictions has strengthened civic life in the United States and inspired movements for human dignity and freedom around the globe.

“We honor Pope Leo XIV today in recognition of his lifelong work for promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience around the world, ideals enshrined by America's founders in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” said Vince Stango, Interim President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

Watch Full Video of the Event

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost on September 14, 1955, in Chicago, Ill., is the first pope from the Order of Saint Augustine and the first U.S.-born pontiff. He was elected supreme pontiff on May 8, 2025, after decades of pastoral leadership, missionary work, and service in the global Catholic Church.

The Liberty Medal, established in 1988 and hosted by the National Constitution Center since 2006, recognizes and celebrates individuals of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.

The medal’s distinguished roster of recipients includes U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy; world leaders Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Mikhail Gorbachev; U.S. congressional leaders Senator John McCain and Representative John Lewis; and U.S. cultural influencers Muhammad Ali and Ken Burns.

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is a private, nonprofit organization with a congressional charter “to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a nonpartisan basis in order to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.”

For more information about the Liberty Medal, visit https://constitutioncenter.org/about/liberty-medal

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope launched network after being repeatedly assaulted by partners while unconscious

Two women who were drugged and raped by their partners while they were unconscious have said hundreds of people – including about 80 in the UK – have come forward to an international support group for victims of the crime.

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope, who were both repeatedly assaulted by their partners while unconscious, are calling for tighter laws to stop men sharing images and videos of sexual assaults and rape online.

The US superstar golden couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are finally tying the knot in a rumoured major event in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The couple – who got engaged 10 months ago, announced via an Instagram post that received 14m likes in its first hour online – held an intimate rehearsal dinner at MSG with a rumoured guest list of 1,000 for today’s ceremony and construction of a custom-made fairytale castle inside.

But with tight security, NDAs and New York streets on lockdown – what do we know? Lucy Hough speaks to Guardian writer Elle Hunt

Tesla said Michael Butler disabled his car’s self-driving mode before it plowed into Martha Avila’s home in June

A man whose Tesla Model 3 was allegedly in self-driving mode when it crashed into a home near Houston and killed a 76-year-old woman inside recently has been jailed on a count of manslaughter.

Michael Butler’s arrest in the 19 June death of Martha Avila was announced late on Wednesday in a Facebook post by the sheriff of Harris county, Texas, Ed Gonzalez.

A year after President Trump signed the sweeping tax and spending package, its effects on households, businesses and federal programs are increasingly evident.

New York mayor’s speech cut ideological counterpoint to policies of president, who will deliver his own remarks later today

New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency.

Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk in the White House, Mamdani was surrounded by naturalized citizens like himself as he listed the waves of immigrants who shaped the city.

On paper, the US constitution is a thing of beauty. But the would-be emperor in Washington has revealed its great weakness

America’s big birthday has come at a bad time. On Saturday it will be a divided nation that marks 250 years since 13 North American colonies declared their independence from the Great Britain of George III. Many will be anxious that the republic they established that day is fragile – not least because of the would-be emperor in the White House.

Some will console themselves that hope and angst have always been intertwined in the American story. From the very start, confidence in a bright, exceptional US future was combined with foreboding and doubt. At the close of the 1787 constitutional convention, a woman approached one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to ask if the delegates had established a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Avoiding traditional questions and stilted broadcast clips, PM-in-waiting has evolved his style of media management

He is due to become prime minister in just over a fortnight as parliament begins its six-week summer break. But at a marquee speech this week, he took precisely zero questions. So is Andy Burnham, as the opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, claims, dodging scrutiny? His allies say no: he is simply going about it in his own way.

The former Greater Manchester mayor is very obviously a different type of communicator from Keir Starmer, and therefore always likely to convey his message in methods beyond Starmer’s traditional questions after a speech and the occasional stilted broadcast clip.

Prince William will appear on the podcast hosted by Jason and Travis Kelce just hours before Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's anticipated wedding.

President Trump hasn't committed to a firm number of people who will receive clemency — he's scheduled to have a meeting on pardons Friday afternoon, sources said.

A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.

Commentary: Sugar is a sharply written tribute to classic movies, featuring lush visuals and a cool soundtrack. Now in its second season, Colin Farrell's stoic performance makes this series another win for Apple TV.

Only 330 car club vehicles available for rent after big provider left British market, data reveals

The number of car club vehicles in London has fallen by a “catastrophic” 89% since Zipcar ended its service in late 2025, with former users being pushed to consider buying or leasing.

Car clubs allow drivers to use vehicles parked around a city, using apps to book and unlock them. Zipcar dominated London’s car club market before the US company’s shock decision to pull out in December 2025. That left a gap that has yet to be filled for Londoners without a car.

Port expansion and protections for whales part of BC and Alberta plan to expand country’s presence overseas

The governments of Canada and the province of Alberta will move forward on a major new oil pipeline after the pair announced a plan to ease concerns of British Columbia and First Nations on the Pacific coast.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, shuttled between British Columbia and Alberta on Thursday to announce more than C$150bn in new investments in both provinces, part of a broader project of reducing trade with the United States and expanding his country’s presence in overseas markets.

Family of woman who died after being hit by a bullet as she observed rioting in Derry say justice system has failed her

Three men from Derry have been found not guilty of murdering the journalist Lyra McKee in 2019.

Her family said the verdict at Belfast crown court meant the justice system had “completely failed” them and McKee.

Exclusive: Shabir Ahmed, jailed in 2012 for rape, abuse and trafficking of girls, was deemed three years ago to present ‘high risk of sexual offending’

The leader of the Rochdale grooming gang was deemed to pose a “very high risk of serious harm” towards children just three years ago, the Guardian can reveal.

Shabir Ahmed, 73, was freed from HMP Leeds on Thursday despite three failed attempts to secure parole, the most recent of which was in October 2024. One document, relating to a previous review in 2023, shows Ahmed was seen to present a “high risk of sexual offending”.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code. The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It's compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target's login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server. [...] PamStealer shows a native password prompt designed to resemble a system authorization request. Text that appears with the prompt says: "Maccy wants to make changes. Enter your password to allow this." As noted earlier, once a target complies, the malware validates it locally through the PAM API. "This check is done entirely through PAM: there is no call out to dscl, security, osascript or any spawned process to verify the password, as many commodity macOS stealers do," [said Jamf, a security firm for macOS users]. "The result is a quieter routine that keeps only a verified password, and one fewer process chain for defenders to detect on." If the validation fails, PamStealer displays the prompts again until it receives the correct one. Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss. The malware uses tactics to maximize the information it can steal. One tactic is to request the target grant full disk access to the fake Maccy app. It also contains code designed to access ethereum accounts. The various techniques -- particularly the Script Editor lure, a self-contained JXA dropper, a Rust-based second stage, and local validation of credentials through PAM are all noteworthy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emails sent between MP Anoulak Chanthivong’s staff take cautious approach to AI giant arriving in Sydney – despite the government’s encouragement

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The NSW technology minister’s office removed a reference to being “absolutely thrilled” about OpenAI opening a Sydney office after staffers joked a dystopian Skynet could be headed for the city within five years.

Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI announced its first Australian office in August last year, before opening in December.

The government said it had to react to England’s progression in the World Cup, which was only confirmed on Wednesday

Downing Street said it would continue to use X after the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, announced she would stop using the social media platform.

Nandy said yesterday the culture and media department will also stop using X because the site “now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate”.

It is for individual departments to decide what is right for them in this regard.

Our full focus remains on making sure X is following the law, cleaning up its act and ensuring it is safe for women, girls, children and people right across the country.”

‘Hugely significant’ race for Manchester mayor will give clues on whether PM-in-waiting can turn tide against Reform UK

Andy Burnham was delivered to the steps of Downing Street after one of the most consequential parliamentary byelections in recent British history.

But it is the race to be his successor as Greater Manchester mayor that could reveal far more about the mood of the nation than the historic – and unique – contest in Makerfield.

The mayor of Venice says the city is seeking government approval to introduce a form of dynamic pricing to deal with tourism costs.

Antitrust regulators suggested that state attorneys general could assist in investigating unlawful conduct by companies.

Deal including ‘national priority’ policy brings prospect closer of countrywide agreement between parties

The prospect of a national coalition between Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party has drawn closer still after the two groupings sealed another deal that will allow the PP to continue ruling the southern region of Andalucía.

The PP, which has governed the former socialist bastion for the past seven years, lost its absolute majority in May’s regional election, forcing it to look to Vox to help it stay in power in Spain’s most populous region.

Country’s leadership vows to never surrender as memorial on grand scale aims to relay message of resistance to world

In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran, as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years.

Khamenei was killed aged 86 in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the final farewell ceremony is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. By Thursday, knots of mourners carrying flags and blankets were already gathering along roads festooned with banners showing the red fist, the symbol of the funeral, alongside the slogan: “We must rise.” Many were heading to special hostels being set up across Tehran for the pilgrims. In Revolution Square a giant statue of a clenched fist was being installed.

A new batch of A24 films, including Everything Everywhere All At Once and Lady Bird, arrives this July on free streaming services.

The New York City mayor delivered a speech on Friday morning from behind George Washington’s desk in New York City Hall to mark the US’s 250th anniversary

Suspect seen in Germany after attack apparently targeting tycoon Vadym Iermolaiev

The main suspect in a Monaco bomb attack this week that seriously injured a Ukraine-born business tycoon and two of his family members is a Ukrainian woman living in Germany who disguised herself as a man, authorities have said.

Interpol, the international police organisation, on Friday issued a red notice for Anastasiia Berezovska, aged 39, describing her as German-speaking with dark hair and a tattoo, possibly of a snake, on her right arm from the shoulder to the elbow.

From the lightbulb to the airplane, to medical breakthroughs and the internet age, the past 250 years have been defined by America's intrepid intellect.

Against a backdrop of sweeping rollbacks of civil rights and deteriorating relations with allies, many are feeling cynical

As the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary on 4 July, the country faces a turbulent moment under the Donald Trump administration.

The anniversary coincides with sweeping rollbacks of civil rights, deteriorating relations with traditional allies and growing domestic opposition to the administration’s handling of immigration and free speech. Against this backdrop, many Americans say they feel increasingly cynical about the country’s future.

For how often people invoke it, the concept of “hell” in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I’m glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements.

Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn’t just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it’s the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions.

↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot

Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with “AI” nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called “Win3”, which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can’t run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency.

We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don’t want to use “AI” of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry’s sick, twisted mind to force people into using “AI” with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley’s strength, after all.

At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on “AI”, so I wouldn’t be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something “AI”-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.

Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft is designed to capture and boost NASA's Swift observatory back to a safe altitude.

NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that’s about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon.

Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7. The driver (libvulkan_lvp.so, ~17 MB) installs into /usr/pkg/lib, and its ICD manifest (advertising Vulkan API 1.4) installs into /usr/pkg/share/vulkan/icd.d/, so a Vulkan loader on the system can discover it. ldd resolves every dependency cleanly. The entire process — environment setup, dependency builds, the Mesa build, and installation — is automated end to end and reproducible on a fresh install.

↫ vulkan-netbsd GitHub page

It’s important to note that the next step in the process is to port the Vulkan loader, which is required to actually run Vulkan applications. This entire effort is still ongoing and seems to be handled mostly by Dean Howell alone, so expect breakage and incomplete documentation as development progresses. Still, this is a hugely important effort, and seeing it this far along is great news.

EveryMac turned 30.

On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.

Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.

↫ EveryMac news item

I thought OSNews was pretty unique with its founding in 1997, so it’s great to see another enthusiast’s website as old as ours. Amazing company to be in, too – EveryMac is an indispensable, tirelessly maintained, and stupidly accurate resource that I use countless times each year. Here’s to another 30 years.

I didn't move all my files, but in just 15 minutes I made a big dent.

Some days, Elon Musk is worth $1 trillion. Other days, he's merely an absurdly wealthy billionaire.

Tons of recent releases, from blockbusters to independent films, are all streaming free in July.

The 250th anniversary is arriving among Black communities as a whisper instead of a roar

Not soon after Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, there emerged a viral illustration of four Black women sitting at the top of a building while watching the world burn at a distance. They are observing with coffee cups in hand. An American flag hangs over the edge. If that exhaustion hadn’t been made clear enough, Black people, particularly across TikTok and Threads, have urged one another to “not give them a reaction”.

The “them” is white people who find Black rage exciting and lucrative for their own personal gain. We’re not allowing our anger to become spectacle. We’re not shouting any more. What is most important is to stay alive, take care of one another, and to allow ourselves to step to the forefront for the rights that they have taken for granted as we’ve risked our lives to protect them. There is an old African American proverb: “If you can’t hear, then you must feel.”

Morgan Jerkins is a senior writer, race and equity, at the Guardian US

Investigations into president and corruption charges will get heavy scrutiny if Democrats win majority in midterms

Donald Trump’s presidency is facing investigations and corruption charges from a key House Democrat and ex-prosecutors, involving political and personal abuses of power, which legal experts predict will get heavy scrutiny if Democrats win the House majority in the midterms.

Legal critics call the scandals dogging the president “target rich” for investigations that Democrats will have a “field day” investigating if they win the House majority. Critics cite, for instance, Trump’s damaging the rule of law by weaponizing the Department of Justice (DoJ) to exact revenge on political foes and protect himself from federal investigations, plus Trump moves to profit in radical ways from his presidency with lucrative and new cryptocurrency ventures.

Experts say the Food and Drug Administration is not prepared for the health threat of bacterial contamination

Multiple brands of infant formula have been recalled recently due to bacterial contamination, and experts say the Food and Drug Administration is inadequately prepared to deal with the health threat they pose in the wake of Trump administration cuts.

Last March, the FDA announced the launch of Operation Stork Speed, specifically intended to “expand options for safe, reliable, and nutritious infant formula for American families”. Two months later, Martin Makary, who was FDA commissioner at the time, told Congress that the FDA had lost around 3,100 employees due to the Trump administration’s reorganization and cuts. Makary departed the FDA the same month.

‘Late announcement’ means forces will have to adapt plans and move officers ‘away from communities’, say chiefs

• UK politics live – latest updates

Police leaders have criticised Downing Street’s decision to let pubs stay open until 5am on Monday for England’s World Cup match against Mexico, saying it will take officers “away from communities”.

Mark Roberts, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for football policing, and Scott Green, the organisation’s lead for alcohol licensing, said the “late announcement” meant forces would have to adapt plans and would leave officers working extended hours.

The London-based fintech says restructuring is necessary to reduce ‘duplicate’ roles

• Business live – latest updates

Starling Bank has said it will cut more than 100 jobs as it invests more heavily in artificial intelligence to push down costs.

The digital-only bank told staff that 3% of its workforce, or 130 jobs, would be made redundant, as part of a restructuring of its banking and tech operations.

A speeding bus plunged from a highway into a rocky ravine in Pakistan, killing 40 people and injuring eight others in one of the deadliest road accidents in recent years, officials said.

Move inspired by customer service provided by online retailers such as John Lewis and Amazon

People waiting for hospital treatment will get three weeks’ notice of their next appointment under NHS plans inspired by the customer service provided by online shopping operators.

Hospitals are being ordered to start telling everyone on their treatment waiting list at least three weeks before their operation, diagnostic test or meeting with a consultant.

Thousands of volunteers are joined by overseas teams in the hope of finding more survivors in the rubble, reports Tom Phillips in Caraballeda.

Photography and video by Manu Quintero

When twin earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was at home hundreds of miles away in the industrial city of San Félix. As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the 24-year-old knew he had to react. A mechanic and budding photographer, Rivas gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and jumped on a bus to make the 12-hour journey to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage.

“I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying, so I … came here and I’m doing the best I can,” he said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster, as he stood outside Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that had collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside.

Subscribers on grandfathered plans are being notified that they'll be automatically pushed to other plans, some of which come with a price hike.

Amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, thousands take the oath of allegiance in a US ‘not as welcoming as in the past’

In June, Yesica McKeone officially became a US citizen. At the naturalization ceremony, she raised a hand and took the oath of allegiance to a country on the verge of its 250th anniversary. Thousands of new citizens recited the oath alongside her. Some cried softly.

“I’m finally here,” McKeone, 32, remembered thinking about her citizenship journey. At two years old, she left Michoacán, Mexico, with her family and settled in California, where she became a permanent resident. Now, home is a pastoral patch of land in Solvang, in the heart of California’s central coast.

People across the country are pushing for moratoriums, and electeds who approve projects are being punished

Lenoxdatacenter.com went live in May, promoting what it called a “proposed advanced technology and data center campus” in Michigan. The site did not state who wanted to build the center. Lenox Township officials denied anyone had applied to build one.

Emails obtained by residents through an open records request showed, however, that developers had contacted the township supervisor and deputy supervisor asking for their support to build a datacenter.

This weekend marks 250 years since the signing of the declaration of independence, but Donald Trump is making the celebration all about himself. As the anniversary approaches, Jonathan Freedland talks to the Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum about why so many Americans are feeling less patriotic these days

Why Should Delaware Care?
As America marks its semiquincentennial on July 4, Delaware can be remembered for its service in the statesmanship and military service in the founding of the nation.

On July 1, 1776, Caesar Rodney was in Dover, questioning British loyalists when he received the fateful word from counterparts in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress.

His vote had become crucial, and his presence in Philadelphia was necessary the next day.

That stormy night was the culmination of weeks of change across the American colonies and in Delaware in particular. Less than three weeks prior, there was no Delaware to speak of.

After a decade of increasing British taxes, nationwide boycotts and a crackdown on colonial dissent, war broke out in Boston in 1775. The occupation of one of America’s key cities convinced the colonies of their need to assert their independence. 

Within a year, each colony would craft its own constitution to declare themselves an independent state. In June 1776, Delaware was still considered “the Lower Counties” of the Pennsylvania colony.

But state delegates met in New Castle on June 15, 1776, where they declared Delaware’s independence from both Great Britain and Pennsylvania.

Rodney casts historic vote

After expending significant political capital to secure what Rodney thought would be a successful vote for independence, the third member of Delaware’s congregation, George Read, had decided to vote against separating from the British

With fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean voting in favor, Read’s dissent would leave Delaware – and potentially the nation – in a stalemate. The Continental Congress intended to declare national independence unanimously or not at all.

With the nation’s independence sitting on a razor-thin margin, Rodney embarked on his famous midnight ride to break the tie and swing the Delaware delegation’s support for independence. 

For 18 hours overnight, he trekked the 80 miles to Philadelphia on horseback and by carriage through thunder and rain, as detailed in a letter Rodney sent to his brother, Thomas, on July 4, 1776 — the only such letter recovered from a Congressional delegate from that day. 

Aside from the national implications of the watershed moment, Rodney’s ride was an act of personal courage as well. He hailed from southern Delaware originally, where the population held more sympathetic views towards the British — Rodney’s grandfather was even an Anglican minister — though his family believed in the revolution. 

As put by Ciro Poppiti, the New Castle County Register of Wills and reenactor who recently completed a horse ride from Dover to Philadelphia to honor the anniversary of Rodney’s journey, the statesman also knew he was “riding to the gallows.” 

In the midst of a raging war, Rodney was potentially exposing himself to targeting by the British as one of the deciding votes for independence. Additionally, at the time of his ride, Rodney was battling facial cancer that had left his cheek and nose deeply scarred, a significant disfigurement which Rodney concealed with a scarf.

The cancer would claim Rodney’s life nearly eight years to the day of his momentous ride. 

Delaware had a conflicted populace

Rodney’s ride is perhaps the most notorious single piece of Delaware lore in relation to the American Revolution. But thanks to its location, resources, and an apprehensive and divided population, the state played a significant role in the struggle for America’s freedom from the British kingdom.

During the Revolutionary era, Delaware was viewed as a valuable strategic spot, particularly given its coastline and proximity to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital and largest city at the time. The territory’s largely rural environment further made it an agricultural hub, meaning it was also a popular supplier of food for the American armed forces to the north.

The state – second smallest with just 37,000 residents in 1776 – was a melting pot of cultures, including English, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French, along with native tribes, enslaved Africans and free Blacks.

Similar to today’s political partisanship, the state’s geography also played a role in residents’ opinion of the Revolutionary movement. The Wilmington area was primarily a Revolutionary stronghold, along with cities like New Castle, Dover and Lewes. 

Sussex County was more sympathetic to the British, even drawing the presence of American forces at times to quash small-scale rebellions, while Kent County was split. 

As evidenced by the division that necessitated Rodney’s ride, the state’s population had the same misgivings about independence as anywhere else, even as the war intensified after the Declaration. 

British Loyalists in Delaware continued to organize against the revolutionaries during the war and after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and in response, roving “committees of inspection and observation” were established. 

These committees acted as a kind of secret police force dedicated to snuffing out British-sympathetic activities among citizens, according to Ryan Schwartz, of the Lewes Historical Society, largely achieving this through intimidation as opposed to violence. 

Many British Loyalists living in Delaware ended up fleeing to Canada as the war continued and after it ended, finding Delaware to be an increasingly inhospitable place to sow dissent. 

Patriots fight in the war

Despite its location and festering opposition, Delaware’s native sons also raised up a respected regiment of soldiers known as the “Delaware Blues” for the color of their uniforms – there was no standard uniform in the Revolutionary War as each state outfitted its men how it could.

They would fight at some of the war’s earliest battles, including Long Island and White Plains. They crossed the Delaware River with Gen. George Washington on Christmas night 1776 for an attack at Trenton, New Jersey.

Their founding colonel, John Haslet, would be killed in January 1777 during the Battle of Princeton.

The state of Delaware only saw one major battle during the war, which took place at Cooch’s Bridge near Newark, though there were smaller skirmishes throughout the state. 

But Delaware narrowly avoided potentially becoming another main theater of the war, Schwartz said. The British were focused on toppling Philadelphia, and with previous attempts to do so via land proving futile, their plans in the late summer of 1777 turned to a naval advance on the capital via the Delaware River. 

Stymied by the Delaware River’s shoaly terrain and further deterred by strong American defenses established along the body of water, the British instead decided to land at nearby Elkton, Maryland, just beyond the Delaware border. 

That then led to the Battle at Cooch’s Bridge on Sept. 3, 1777, which saw the undermanned Delaware battalion of 1,200 men, officially formed just a week before the battle, temporarily hold off a group of 16,000 British soldiers before eventually retreating north to join Washington’s forces. Casualties are unclear, but a British officer commented at the time that the fighting at Iron Hill was the worst they faced on their march to Philadelphia. 

While the battle is recorded as a loss for the Americans, Joe Sullivan of the Delaware Public Archive said the battalion’s efforts derailed the British advance to Philadelphia for an additional five days after the fighting had ended. That gave Washington additional time to gather troops and prepare for the oncoming British forces. 

Despite the apparent setback, the Delaware battalion had fulfilled Washington’s Sept. 2 directive: “Give them as much trouble as you possibly can.” 

Days later, the Delaware soldiers would fight at the Battle of the Brandywine, just over the state border in Pennsylvania. It would be a humiliating defeat for the Americans as British Gen. William Howe outflanked Washington’s army.

Following their victory at Brandywine, the British forces would decamp to Wilmington, where they occupied the city and tended to their wounded for about a month before advancing up to Philadelphia.

Along the way, the Delaware Blues would fight at the Battle of Germantown, where they suffered significant losses, including the wounding of their second leader Col. David Hall.

Delaware’s soldiers would head south in 1780 and 1781 to fight in five more battles in the Carolinas before the end of the war.

An American victory at Saratoga generated enough optimism that the French then decided to support the revolutionary effort militarily. This forced the British to expand their fight on several international fronts, diverting resources from their troops on American soil and opening the door for the Americans to emerge victorious from the war. 

Rodney’s ride would not be for naught. 

The post Delaware held vital place in America’s founding 250 years ago appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Ceremony for Ali Khamenei intended to be epic display of national power. Plus, the expected wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce pays dividend to good causes

Good morning. Final preparations are under way for Ali Khamenei’s six-day funeral. The farewell to the former supreme leader is expected to draw millions in Iran. Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the funeral is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion.

Iran’s first vice-president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who is the lead funeral organiser, described the ceremony, which begins on Saturday in Tehran and will end with Khamenei’s burial on Thursday in Mashhad, as “the most important event of this century” and the most attended event since the 1979 revolution. The scale of the funeral has been conceived to relay political and religious messages of resistance to the rest of the world. At the request of Iraqi politicians, Khamenei’s body will also be carried through the Iraqi Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Will Ali Khamenei’s successor take part? Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is not expected to make an appearance at his father’s funeral. He was severely injured in the same US-Israeli strike that killed his father and also killed Mojtaba’s wife and his 14-month-old daughter. The extent of Mojtaba’s injuries is unknown and he has so far issued only written statements, including one that distanced himself from the ceasefire negotiations but sanctioned their continuance. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, threatened to kill him this week, saying he was marked for death.

Why is Trump so unhappy with Nato? Aside from the failure of countries such as the UK and France to join in with the US-Israeli war on Iran, Trump has long complained that Europe does not spend enough on defence. Under pressure from the US, Nato leaders agreed at a gathering last year to boost defence-related spending to 5% of GDP by 2035.

While it's certainly well designed and delivers respectable 1080p gaming performance, another PC offers better frames per dollar.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What does it say about America that Frederick Douglass’s disappointment still rings true in 2026?

• Trump wants to SAVE Republican control no matter who it harms: When a party can’t win fairly, it starts calling voter suppression election integrity and hopes no one realizes the difference.

• Trump’s Birthday Grift for America: Nothing says democracy like cashing in on the nation’s 250th birthday with a glorified campaign rally and VIP donors.

• Senator Jim Banks of Indiana Calls Clarence Thomas the “Greatest Living American”: I say potato, and you say potatoe—Jim Banks proves himself worthy of comparison to Indiana legend Dan Quayle.

• Unforgivable Blackness: As told by Ken Burns, the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, is a quintessential tale of American greatness and intolerance.

• “American Tune” Rhiannon Giddens & Paul Simon: Rhymin’ Simon finds a new partner to make one of his greatest songs a more inclusive anthem for a country still trying to tell the truth about itself.

Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), abolitionist, author, and statesman

Every July, all across this nation, fireworks explode over crowds of people who have agreed, at least for one evening, that they share the same inheritance, the same dream, and they call it America. The speeches hit the same notes. It’s a kind of collective fantasy—not exactly a denial of all the times we have failed to live up to our ideals, but a fairy tale we tell ourselves in which the shining princes and princesses of America have stood up to the dark forces aligned against us and emerged victorious. For one day every year, we pretend those ideals are historical facts and not merely aspirations. We allow ourselves to be dazzled by the fireworks and blinded to all the places where we have come up short. But in the last decade, the last eighteen months, the last week and a half, it has become almost impossible to deny the darkness in those corners the fireworks don’t light; to deny that the dark forces we dreamed of defeating now occupy center stage in our national story.

Frederick Douglass was never under any such illusions. An escaped slave from Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in the Northeast. He gave his most famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. It was one of the most precise acts of rhetorical surgery in American history. Standing in front of a predominantly white abolitionist audience, people who considered themselves allies, he described their country to them with words so sharp his voice must have felt like a scalpel.

What strikes me most, though, is not the anger of Douglass’s words, but the sadness. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.” Anger is easy to dismiss. Sadness does something different: it implicates. The grief in his words carried its own argument. I see this clearly, and what I see makes me grieve for you as much as for me. That is a much harder thing to walk away from than fury. The people in that room could not accuse him of losing control. They could only reckon with what he was describing.

The argument embedded in those words, that the brighter the celebration of freedom, the more visible its denial becomes, has proved to be a running thread through more than two centuries of Black American writing. Langston Hughes made it in 1935 when he wrote “Let America Be America Again.” Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead are some of the authors who have carried it forward through the decades that followed. Can we look at that unbroken line of writers making the same essential argument across two centuries and still conclude the issue has been fundamentally settled? In the summer of 2020, five of Douglass’s descendants read the words from his 1852 speech for an NPR video project, and they landed like they were written that morning. That is either a tribute to how timeless great writing is, or a sobering commentary on how durable this particular problem has proven to be.

The distance Douglass named in 1852 has not been closed. It has been reduced, in fits and starts and with enormous effort; and to deny that progress would dishonor everyone who bled for it. But “reduced” describes something different than “closed,” and the Fourth of July, of all days, is a good time for all of us to sit with that distinction. Selective national memory is a comfortable place to inhabit. Douglass kept insisting we step outside of it. In his vision, the Fourth of July could not be a celebration without a reckoning. That would be a gift to anyone who wished to ignore or minimize the moral failures committed in the guise of freedom. He refused to give his opponents that gift. That refusal strikes me as the most serious form of patriotism available to any of us.

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Visitors can get free peek at works by one of UK’s most significant 20th-century artists and one of his successors

Swifts screech overhead, hares lope along the grassy paths and butterflies flutter in the woodland fringe. There is an orchard; there are chickens, beehives. It seems simply a lovely, if conventional, slice of English countryside – until you happen upon striking sculptures fashioned out of chunks of reclaimed steel or machinery parts salvaged from factories, shipyards and farms.

The pieces are the stars of a show called Heavy Metal, which brings together work by one of the UK’s most significant 20th-century artists, Anthony Caro, and one of his successors, James Capper.

Amid America’s 250th-birthday celebrations, the Eagles are facing tough challenges, looking for momentum and meaning on and off the field

Saturday is America’s 250th birthday and a huge national holiday but the US Eagles will be working. The men are in Denver, kicking off the World Rugby Nations Cup against Portugal, champions of Europe’s second tier. The women are in Johannesburg for the first of two games against South Africa, a double bill with the Springbok men facing England.

“I’m dual nationality,” said the women’s captain, Georgie Perris-Redding, who speaks with a Manchester accent but was born in Detroit and whose development included a stint at the American Pro Rugby Training Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, a groundbreaking operation that nurtured US women’s talent.

USA v South Africa and USA v Portugal are broadcast in the US on Paramount+.

Martin Pengelly writes on rugby in the US on Substack, at The National Maul.

America at 250 is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair

To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beings. A truer account of American freedom runs through 1619 and Juneteenth, when Americans forced the country, at last, to begin making its promises answerable to reality.

So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone. The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.

Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist

Major retail stores will be open on Friday, although some may have modified hours on Saturday, July 4.

Why Should Delaware Care? A recent shooting of a 19-year-old has quickly become one of Wilmington’s highest-profile police use-of-force cases in recent years. With differing accounts from police and community members, a Delaware Department of Justice investigation is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers.

On Thursday morning, the family of a teen shot and killed by police in northeast Wilmington publicly demanded that city officials release body camera footage from the shooting. 

Later in the day, the family was shown the video by Wilmington police. Also watching was a family attorney, Harry Daniels, who told Spotlight Delaware the video depicted events on June 24 that differed from the city’s account. 

He said 19-year-old Kadir Skinner could be seen running from a neighborhood dog as police began chasing him. Skinner never turned toward the officer before police shot him three or four times, according to Daniels.

“He never threatened the officers. He was running with nobody around him,” said Daniels, a Georgia-based civil rights lawyer. 

Skinner was then handcuffed. He later told officers several times he couldn’t breathe, Daniels said. 

“That’s when they decided to rapidly pick him up and take him to the hospital, where he ultimately died,” he said. 

Daniels also sought to refute the city’s assertion that Skinner had pointed a gun toward a crowd of people prior to the foot chase. He said the body-camera video showed no crowd of people in the area until after the shooting when neighbors began to gather around the scene. 

Asked about Daniels’ account, Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff to Mayor John Carney, said the footage does not contradict any of the city’s statements 

“This footage does not reflect the totality of the investigation, which is still ongoing,” Walker wrote in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.  

Walker did not respond to the question of why the officer in question made the decision to shoot Skinner. 

Police account under scrutiny

Police have said officers were monitoring a large gathering near Jessup and East 24th streets when they saw Skinner leave a home and point a gun toward the crowd.

When officers approached him, Skinner fled on foot, according to police.

On Wednesday, city officials released additional details, saying Skinner was shot once in the buttocks during the chase, and that officers then transported him to the hospital themselves.

Police also said they recovered a firearm but did not say whether Skinner was holding it when he was shot.

The officer who fired the shot, who has yet to be identified, remains on administrative leave, according to police.

The police’s account of the events was challenged even before Skinner’s family watched the body camera footage.

Latiya Greene, who said she witnessed the shooting while visiting a relative in the area, previously told Spotlight Delaware she saw Skinner running with his hands raised as officers chased him.

She said she heard him say something to the effect of, “I don’t have nothing,” before he was shot. Greene said she did not see anything in his hands.

Greene also said she saw an officer collect shell casings shortly after the shooting.

“He came and swooped up all the shell casings from off the ground, put them in his pocket,” she said.

Asked about Greene’s account, city spokeswoman Caroline Klinger referred Spotlight Delaware to an earlier statement from the mayor’s office saying details would be released after state and city investigations conclude.

Klinger has also noted that city officials sent the body camera footage to the Delaware Department of Justice for its investigation.

The DOJ intends to release the body camera footage publicly, department spokesman Mat Marshall said, but it first must blur faces of bystanders and collect supplemental footage. 

Marshall also stated that Attorney General Kathy Jennings has spoken with Skinner’s family and has expedited her department’s investigation.

DOJ officials are asking anyone with video that shows the incident to contact publictrust@delaware.gov

A community backlash

City officials showed Skinner’s family the body camera footage after days of rallies, community meetings and growing criticism of the shooting — and the city’s response to it. 

At a protest on Tuesday, local activist Mahkieb Booker led a crowd of about 50 people on a march from Rodney Square to the nearby Delaware state building. 

Organizers decided to gather at the state’s Carvel Office Building to highlight what Booker said was a lackluster response to the police shooting by the state DOJ. 

Two days later, on Thursday, Skinner’s family held their press conference. While there, his sister Aniyah Clark pleaded for Wilmington officials to provide a more detailed account of what happened.  

“My goodness, it shouldn’t take this much for us to get the closure we need,” Clark said, with her voice breaking. “We already have to bury him and never see him again.”

Also speaking at the press conference was prominent national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has been hired by Skinner’s family.

According to Crump, Skinner’s father had approached officers directly after the shooting to tell them the victim was his son. Officers then maced Skinner’s father, Durrell Dollard, in his face. 

The city did not immediately respond to questions about the incident.

Crump also noted that police took Skinner to ChristianaCare in Wilmington that night. Working at the hospital at the time was the teen’s mother, Rashai Skinner.

Rashai Skinner spoke briefly at the family’s press conference Thursday. With her voice quivering, she noted that Kadir Skinner’s middle name is Assad, which means lion. Then speaking to police, she said “you guys have woken up the lioness.” 

“And I’m not going to stop fighting for my son,” she said.  

Asked if the family plans to sue the city or police department, Crump – who in the past had represented the family of George Floyd, among others – said they “plan on exploring every possible legal parameter to get full justice.”

The post Attorney says body-cam footage challenges Wilmington police account in shooting of teen appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The US age-adjusted death rate fell to a record low in 2025, likely pushing life expectancy to a record high as overdose deaths declined and mortality improved across all age groups. CNN reports: There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking. The age-adjusted rate has fallen 22% since 2021, landing about 4% lower than it was just before the pandemic in 2019. [...] The top causes of death in the US in 2025 followed longstanding patterns: Heart disease led with nearly 695,000 deaths, followed by cancer with nearly 623,000 deaths. Unintentional injuries, which includes drug overdoses, were the third leading cause of death. Overdose deaths are still high -- about 70,000 people died from an overdose in 2025, preliminary CDC data shows -- but experts say that sharp declines probably played a large role in bringing the age-adjusted death rate down in the US.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the legacy of contentious Revolutionary War era Delaware figure and slaveholder Caesar Rodney once again comes into view. Six years after a Rodney statue was taken down in Wilmington during a national era of racial reckoning, Delawareans still have a range of beliefs about how Rodney’s legacy should be interpreted, and what should be done with his statue.   

A statue of one of Delaware’s most controversial Revolutionary figures is on display in Washington for America’s 250th birthday, after spending the past six years in storage.

As time ticks until Caesar Rodney’s return to Delaware following the Fourth of July celebration in D.C., state leaders still are not sure what should be done with the statue of his likeness, and, more broadly, how to reckon with Rodney’s complicated legacy as Founding Father and a slaveowner.  

Rodney is most famous for trekking 80 miles from his Dover home up to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to cast the tie-breaking vote to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 2, 1776. 

But he also enslaved at least two dozen people throughout his lifetime on his family’s Kent County farm, known as Byfield. 

A number of prominent Delaware establishments are named for Rodney, including Wilmington’s main public square, a Kent County school district and a conservative public policy think tank. 

Defenders of Rodney say he deserves to be recognized for his contributions to the nation and the state — in addition to being a delegate to the Continental Congress, Rodney also served as governor and a state Supreme Court justice. They say the past cannot be erased by hiding the statesman from public view.  

“Any person of influence had slaves,” said Delaware Republican Party Treasurer Brandon Brice, who has been an advocate for reinstalling the statue. “There’s a good, a bad, and an ugly to history, and I think if we’re going to tell history, we have to tell all of history.”

But, in a state where about one in four residents are Black, others are skeptical as to whether substantive conversations about Rodney’s slave-owning past ever took place, and some question whether he really is a Delaware figure who should be highlighted. 

“I don’t think the people’s voice has changed because conditions haven’t changed, history hasn’t changed,” said Hanifa Shabazz, who was the Wilmington City Council president when the statue was taken down in 2020.  

The statue of the man was taken down from Wilmington’s Rodney Square in 2020, during national protests over the police killing of George Floyd. When then-Mayor Mike Purzycki made the decision to remove the statue, he promised that an “overdue discussion about the public display of historical figures and events” would take place. 

Community leaders say they have had plenty of informal conversations since 2020 about Rodney’s legacy and representation in Delaware. 

But when asked by Spotlight Delaware, Wilmington city and state officials could not provide specific examples of any formal discussions about Rodney that have taken place.

Gov. Matt Meyer’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment about his thoughts on the statue. 

There has also been a push in recent months by a group of Wilmington residents to reinstall a statue of Christopher Columbus, which was simultaneously taken down in 2020.

Rodney’s complicated history

Some facts about Rodney’s biography – including his personal beliefs about slavery, and his famous ride to Philadelphia – are debated by scholars. 

Rodney lived his whole life at Byfield, an 800-acre Kent County farm owned by his family, and held a number of political positions both in Delaware and in the Continental Congress. 

The commonly told story is that Rodney heroically rode the 80 miles from Delaware to Pennsylvania on horseback, through a thunderstorm, to arrive in Philadelphia in time to cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Declaration of Independence. 

However, historians now say it is more likely that Rodney did most of the ride up to Independence Hall in a covered carriage, because he was battling facial cancer. 

And undoubtedly more controversial than how Rodney got to Philadelphia is a dispute over how  many people Rodney enslaved, and his views on the institution of slavery. 

It has been widely reported, including in the Delaware Public Archives, that Rodney owned more than 200 slaves. 

A recently completed research report on Rodney’s slave-owning past commissioned by former Mayor Purzycki and obtained by Spotlight Delaware, however, estimates that Rodney enslaved at least 26 people during his lifetime. 

Some Delawareans also have argued that Rodney was an early abolitionist. One such individual is Charlie Copeland, former chair of the state Republican Party and director of the namesake think tank, the Caesar Rodney Institute.

Copeland cited a proposal Rodney made to the Delaware legislature in 1767 that they forbid the importation of more slaves into the province as evidence of his beliefs.

Both the report initiated by Carney’s office and Delaware historian Dick Carter, however, say they would not go so far as to call Rodney an abolitionist. 

Carter told Spotlight Delaware Rodney’s view of slavery was “sufficiently complex,” but he does not believe Rodney was “a strong supporter of the institution of slavery.” 

A semiquincentennial reenactment

Adding to the conversation surrounding one of Delaware’s Founding Fathers, and what to do with the statue of his likeness, was a recreation of Rodney’s ride from Dover to Philadelphia last month. 

Ciro Poppiti, a Delaware lawyer and the New Castle County Register of Wills, donned a Rodney costume and undertook the two-day journey by carriage, traversing back roads to make it to Independence Hall on June 13.  

Poppiti said the ride was substantially more complicated to pull off in 2026 than in 1776, because Delaware roads are far busier now, and many are not safe to travel by carriage. 

To Poppiti, though, it wasn’t just a whimsical opportunity to wear 18th century garb – the ride was also a chance to espouse some unity among Delawareans for the country’s 250th anniversary and reflect on Rodney as a part of Delaware history, he said. 

Poppiti’s ride included stops at some spots in Rodney’s life, such as Christ Episcopal Church in Dover, where Rodney attended services. A participating group conducted a penance service recognizing that Rodney owned slaves. 

Riding alongside Poppiti in the carriage were some of who he called the “unheard voices” of Rodney’s story – actors portraying people he enslaved and prominent Delaware women of the time. 

“How do you think Caesar Rodney had time to be a hero? It was because of those patriots enslaved and working at his farm at Byfield,” Poppiti told Spotlight Delaware. 

He said he hopes this nuanced representation in the Rodney reenactment will help inspire discussions about how to fairly display the statue in Delaware again. 

Complicated statue conversations

The bronze statue of Rodney, depicted heroically on horseback, was erected in Rodney Square in Wilmington in 1923.

As protests over the death of George Floyd took place in Wilmington in the spring and summer of 2020, then-Mayor Purzycki and the Wilmington City Council decided to put the controversial statue in storage, vowing to initiate conversations about its future. 

According to a number of people with knowledge of the situation, however, those discussions never fully took place. 

Shabazz, the city council president at the time, said Wilmingtonians saw the statue being removed as a victory, but there were so many other issues to be addressed that there wasn’t ever time to revisit the statue’s future. 

Yasser Payne, a University of Delaware sociology professor, said he was a part of community meetings about the statue, but he does not recall conversations with city or state officials. He described elected officials’ support for actual introspection about Rodney as “tacit.”

Ivan Henderson, executive director of the Delaware Historical Society, said his organization tried to work with the city and other groups to have public dialogue about the statue in 2024 and 2025, but nothing came to fruition. 

A spokesperson for Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s office said the city has been engaging in “extensive conversations with historians, community leaders and cultural institutions” since 2020 about Rodney’s life and legacy. 

The spokesperson did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s follow-up questions about what those conversations have entailed. 

In 2024, as Carney campaigned for mayor, he told Spotlight Delaware that he was in favor of renaming the city’s main square after its most famous modern leader, former President Joe Biden.

State Sen. Eric Buckson (R-South Dover) has been pushing publicly for Rodney to be put back on display for several years.

Spotlight Delaware first reported in November 2025 that Buckson had secured a deal with the federal Department of the Interior to transport the statue to D.C. and display it as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration in the nation’s capitol. 

The Rodney statue was placed in the so-called Freedom Plaza, along with statues of other Revolutionary War-era figures, in late April. Rodney’s statue is slated to remain in D.C. for the next six months, Buckson said. 

What’s next for Rodney?

While the Rodney statue is scheduled to stay on display in D.C. until the fall, state leaders do not appear to have a plan as to where it will go when returned to Delaware. 

Buckson wrote a resolution in June calling for the city of Wilmington, the state and Kent County leaders to work together on finding a suitable location for the statue in Kent County – Rodney’s home – by November of this year. It was never considered by legislature before it concluded this week.

Wilmington is not being considered as a place for Rodney to be displayed once again, he said. 

“It’s a victory for Delaware and the country to tell the historical significance of his ride,” Buckson said. “When that guy comes back to Delaware, Delawareans can decide where best to display the statue and how best to display it.” 

Buckson said he is proposing the state stand up a committee made up of a diverse group of Delawareans to decide how to best display the statue “in its full context.” 

He also said his current ideas for where to best place the statue include Legislative Mall and the John Dickinson Plantation, both in Dover. 

A spokesperson for Carney said he is in support of Buckson’s proposal, but the plans “are still taking shape.” Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen said he is strongly in favor of returning the statue to Dover. 

Other Delawareans on both sides of the debate, however, still have concerns about the status of the statue. 

Copeland, the Caesar Rodney Institute director, said he is disappointed that “our current political environment” means the statue likely won’t return to be displayed in Wilmington, where it would get the most foot traffic from out-of-town visitors.  

Payne, the UD professor, said he views the push to reinstall the statue now as a reflection of a step backward from the progress made during the George Floyd years and a reflection of the country’s current “conservative spirit.”

But to Poppiti, the historical reenactor, months of studying Rodney’s life and trying to embody his character left him with a different conclusion. 

He said he believes Delawareans are putting too much emphasis on the statue and what will be done with it, when Rodney himself would not have cared about the statue. Rather, Rodney would have urged us to carry on the legacy of the Revolution, and of national unity. 

“What he’d say is, ‘Let’s not lose the incredible gift that we were given 250 years ago,’ which is the opportunity for self-determination,” Poppiti said.  

Transparency Notice:
Brandon Brice serves on Spotlight Delaware’s Advisory Council. Advisors have no role in the editorial decision-making of Spotlight Delaware. For more information, see our Ethics Policies page.

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post 250 years since his ride, how does Delaware reckon with Caesar Rodney’s legacy? appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent shooting of a 19-year-old has quickly become one of Wilmington’s highest-profile police use-of-force cases in recent years. With differing accounts from police and community members, a Delaware Department of Justice investigation is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers.

On Thursday morning, the family of a teen shot and killed by police in northeast Wilmington publicly demanded that city officials release body camera footage from the shooting. 

Later in the day, the family was shown the video by Wilmington police. Also watching was a family attorney, Harry Daniels, who told Spotlight Delaware the video depicted events on June 24 that continued to raise more questions than answers.

He said the body camera footage, taken from the officer who fired the fatal shot, begins with 19-year-old Kadir Skinner running from a neighborhood dog as police began chasing him. Skinner never turned toward the officer before police shot at him three or four times, according to Daniels.

The Wilmington Police Department has verified that Skinner was struck once by the firing officer.

“He never threatened the officers. He was running with nobody around him,” said Daniels, a Georgia-based civil rights lawyer. 

Skinner was then handcuffed. He later told officers numerous times that he couldn’t breathe, Daniels said. 

“That’s when they decided to rapidly pick him up and take him to the hospital, where he ultimately died,” he said. 

Daniels also sought to refute the city police department’s assertion that Skinner had pointed a gun toward a crowd of people prior to the foot chase. He said the body-camera video showed no crowd of people in the area until after the shooting when neighbors began to gather around the scene. 

Asked about Daniels’ account, Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff to Mayor John Carney, said the footage, which doesn’t show the lead up to the shooting, does not contradict any of the city’s statements to date.

“This footage does not reflect the totality of the investigation, which is still ongoing,” Walker added in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.  

Walker did not respond to the question of why the officer in question made the decision to shoot Skinner. 

Police account under scrutiny

In their first statement, Wilmington PD reported officers were monitoring a large gathering near Jessup and East 24th streets when they saw Skinner leave a home and point a gun toward the crowd.

When officers approached him, Skinner fled on foot, according to police.

On Wednesday, city officials released additional details, saying Skinner was shot once in the buttocks during the chase, and that officers then transported him to the hospital themselves.

Police also said they recovered a .45-caliber handgun but did not say whether Skinner was holding it when he was shot.

The officer who fired the shot, who has yet to be identified, remains on administrative leave, according to police.

The police’s account of the events was challenged even before Skinner’s family watched the body camera footage.

Latiya Greene, who said she witnessed the shooting while visiting a relative in the area, previously told Spotlight Delaware she saw Skinner running with his hands raised as officers chased him.

She said she heard him say something to the effect of, “I don’t have nothing,” before he was shot. Greene said she did not see anything in his hands.

Greene also said she saw an officer collect shell casings shortly after the shooting.

“He came and swooped up all the shell casings from off the ground, put them in his pocket,” she said.

Asked about Greene’s account, city spokeswoman Caroline Klinger referred Spotlight Delaware to an earlier statement from the mayor’s office saying details would be released after state and city investigations conclude.

Klinger has also noted that city officials sent the body camera footage to the Delaware Department of Justice for its investigation.

The DOJ intends to release the body camera footage publicly, department spokesman Mat Marshall said, but it first must blur faces of bystanders and collect supplemental footage. 

Marshall also stated that Attorney General Kathy Jennings has spoken with Skinner’s family and has expedited her department’s investigation.

DOJ officials are asking anyone with video that shows the incident to contact publictrust@delaware.gov

A community backlash

City officials showed Skinner’s family the body camera footage after days of rallies, community meetings and growing criticism of the shooting — and the city’s response to it. 

At a protest on Tuesday, local activist Mahkieb Booker led a crowd of about 50 people on a march from Rodney Square to the nearby Delaware state building. 

Organizers decided to gather at the state’s Carvel Office Building to highlight what Booker said was a lackluster response to the police shooting by the state DOJ. 

Two days later, on Thursday, Skinner’s family held their press conference. While there, his sister Aniyah Clark pleaded for Wilmington officials to provide a more detailed account of what happened.  

“My goodness, it shouldn’t take this much for us to get the closure we need,” Clark said, with her voice breaking. “We already have to bury him and never see him again.”

Also speaking at the press conference was prominent national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has been hired by Skinner’s family.

According to Crump, Skinner’s father had approached officers directly after the shooting to tell them the victim was his son. Officers then maced Skinner’s father, Durrell Dollard, in his face. 

The city did not immediately respond to questions about the incident.

Crump also noted that police took Skinner to ChristianaCare in Wilmington that night. Working at the hospital at the time was the teen’s mother, Rashai Skinner.

Rashai Skinner spoke briefly at the family’s press conference Thursday. With her voice quivering, she noted that Kadir Skinner’s middle name is Assad, which means lion. Then speaking to police, she said “you guys have woken up the lioness.” 

“And I’m not going to stop fighting for my son,” she said.  

Asked if the family plans to sue the city or police department, Crump – who in the past had represented the family of George Floyd, among others – said they “plan on exploring every possible legal parameter to get full justice.”

The post Attorney says police body-cam shows Wilmington teen being shot while running appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

A noise demonstration that took place outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas one year ago has resulted in decades of prison time for the anti-ICE activists involved. Federal judges sentenced eight defendants, who the government cast as antifa operatives, to between 30 and 100 years in prison for terrorism-related charges last week; seven more people were sentenced this week.

“There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge, who has been covering the Prairieland case and was present at the sentencing. “It’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.”

“There’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism,” says Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” “There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Daniel Sanchez [Estrada]: 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Bray and Sledge about Prairieland as a test case in Trump’s war on dissent, and why the administration is determined to convince the public that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.

“I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that ‘Communist’ was used in past generations, antifa is used now,” says Bray. He and Sledge point out that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration became much more aggressive in its targeting of the left and dissent in general.

Related

Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines

“You had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged, and then the government really ups the ante against them by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences. And I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere,” says Sledge. “It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.”

“What that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement,” says Bray. “I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Matt Sledge: And I’m Matt Sledge, also a politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: Matt, it’s really great to have you back on the show. Today, we’re going to talk about some really important reporting you’ve been doing on the Prairieland case.

Last week, judges sentenced eight protesters to between 30 and 100 years in prison on terrorism-related charges for their participation in a July 4 protest last year outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. 

Matt, as you wrote in your piece, Judge O’Connor handed down a 30-year sentence to a man, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest and whose only alleged crime was moving a box of anarchist zines for his wife.

His wife, Maricela Rueda, who was present at the anti-ICE protest but left early, received one of the harshest sentences — 70 years — because she asked her husband to move her zines. 

You were at the sentencing. What was the room like when people heard that they would be spending, for some of them, the rest of their lives behind bars for attending a protest?

MS: I would say it was very somber, but also strangely reserved. I think many of the defendants and their supporters went into the courtroom expecting very long sentences. At the same time, some of them held out a sliver of hope that the judges who were sentencing people in two courtrooms at the same time might listen to their pleas for downward variations from the sentencing guidelines, might do something to attempt to distinguish between the different roles of the people who were at the protest and the one person who wasn’t there, Daniel Sanchez Estrada. And that essentially didn’t happen.

They all got really harsh sentences, and the judges made it clear that they were trying to send a message.

JW: Matt, we talked about this a little bit offline before the podcast, but it’s hard to imagine that the jurors who handed down these convictions could have imagined that they would be sending people to prison for these enormously long sentences, could have imagined that someone would spend 70 years in prison for a nonviolent act. What do you think is going through these jurors’ heads now?

MS: It’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s heads, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re surprised. Because even though some of these charges had various serious-sounding names like “riot” and “material support of terrorism,” jurors almost never know the sentencing ranges that come with charges.

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Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury

And in this case, probably did not know or expect that federal prosecutors would seek — and the judges would apply — these very harsh terrorism sentencing enhancements that really raised the sentences for all the defendants.

JW: Can you tell us what happened outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility and how this case came to be in the first place?

MS: There were a group of people, generally from the kind of lefty scene in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, that wanted to stage what they termed a “noise demonstration” protest outside this ICE facility, a show of solidarity, they later said, with the people detained inside the facility. This is one of these facilities that saw a huge increase in the number of people detained under Trump. 

There had been a daytime protest outside this facility earlier on the day on July 4, 2025. This group of people, around a dozen people, went that night, much later around 10:30, wearing all black, carrying fireworks, and in some instances carrying guns — which is legal to do in Texas.

Related

Texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes On Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE

They set off some fireworks. One of the people who was there described it as actually a kind of festive environment. Then the police were called, as you might expect, and some of the demonstrators there were already gone by the time the gunfire erupted. A responding local police officer was left with a gunshot wound to his neck. And then the person later convicted of shooting the gun that left the police officer injured, Benjamin Song, escaped that night and was on the run for several days, hiding out in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

So there was a large police manhunt. This was a big story in the Dallas–Fort Worth area for days.

JW: Obviously, federal prosecutors have a different spin on who these protesters were and what their connection to each other was. Federal prosecutors have labeled this group of protesters as a “North Texas Antifa” terrorist cell.

What are prosecutors trying to do here by labeling protesters as members of antifa, and what evidence did they actually have to make a case that these individuals were “antifa operatives”?

MS: There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial.

I’m not aware of anybody associated with this group ever claiming that there was such a thing as the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which is what the government has branded this as. Several of the cooperating defendants, the people who helped the government out in its prosecution, said they did not think of themselves as antifa.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody involved in this protest was politically on the left, outraged over the Trump administration’s immigration policies and other things. Some of these people may have thought of themselves as anarchists or consumed antifascist zines, but it’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.

In fact, at trial, the government story was a little more nuanced than what it put in its press releases and referred to a smaller planning group and then a larger group of people who had essentially just showed up to this demonstration. But there were two really different spins from the protesters and their attorneys and the government as to the intentions going into this night.

The people on trial said basically to a person that they did not go there intending to hurt anybody, they were just trying to show solidarity. Then the government pointed to things like wearing all-black clothing and bringing guns and ballistic vests as evidence that they were essentially going there looking to attack.

JW: Could you just explain to our listeners why it’s a bit of a misnomer to call antifa a group, or particularly in the way that the government is describing here?

MS: The whole idea behind the ideology or movement, whatever you want to call it, is that it’s very decentralized and is all about individuals or small groups taking direct action against people they view as fascists.

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This idea that there might be a whole movement of people committed to antifascism is a little too complicated for antifa’s critics to grasp. [Laughs] They insist that there is this, like, global network.

There are certainly small groups and larger groups of people who identify as antifascists. They certainly talk to each other. But again, this idea that there was something called a “North Texas Antifa Cell” just doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts.

JW: So Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines, as we’ve already discussed. Elizabeth Soto and her husband, Ines Soto, were sentenced to 50 years for their part in the protest. But part of the evidence used against the Sotos was that they owned a printing press to print zines. Matt, what kind of zines are we talking about here?

MS: Yeah, a lot of the zines and kind of social media feed evidence that the government presented at trial were your standard, off-the-rack anarchist, antifascist zines you might find at any anarchist bookstore or book fair, something like that. Something that would not be surprising at all to someone who has spent time in those spaces.

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The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

There’s nothing that came close to being directly relevant to plotting either a protest or an attack outside the Prairieland Detention Center. The government stretched and pointed to zines that were from years before and discussed very general tactics.

So it’s stuff that you may have seen before. It’s not some super secret stuff. It’s very typical anarchist, anti-government zines.

JW: So anything I could probably find in a bookstore in Bushwick, is what you’re telling me.

MS: Exactly.

JW: Speaking of, one of the frequent takeaways I’ve heard from this case is that it proves Signal is not as secure as you think.

You’ve extensively covered the trial. What did you learn about digital privacy in 2026 and how people can continue to resist in an era where our digital communications simply aren’t safe?

Matt Sledge: Yeah, there was something interesting that came out at trial, essentially like a glitch in the way Signal worked and the way it interfaced with iPhones. I’m probably oversimplifying or butchering this, but basically our phones store what pops up in the little notification center when our phones are locked. The feds were able to use that to glean some of these communications. 

But you also have to remember they had several cooperating defendants. There were several Signal group chats going on at the same time. So even if Signal is perfectly buttoned down and the government hasn’t found some new hack or glitch to do — your messages with your fellow organizers, or anybody else you want to communicate with in an encrypted fashion, are only as good as the weakest link in the group.

Related

How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages?

If someone decides they’re going to be willing to cooperate with the government and they’re in your Signal chat, the government’s probably going to be able to get access to it, which is why security researchers say it’s really important to have disappearing messages on and keep groups as small as you need them to be, and so on, common-sense approaches.

But I also just think that Signal is not like some silver bullet for privacy protection; it’s a way of reducing risk. People should think about it that way. 

It was also really interesting at trial, and we’ve seen this in a few of these cases, the way the government treats the use of Signal itself as something suspicious.

I’ve seen this also in government bulletins to local police that using Signal or another encrypted messaging app is a threat indicator — when people who use Signal, including Pete Hegseth, would say it’s just a way of keeping their messages private. But Hegseth is a good reminder that you have to look at who you’re including in your Signal group.

JW: I do appreciate a little Hegseth diss as a part of the Signal explanation, as that was, I would say, one of the more high-profile — “leaks” is really not even correct to describe what happened there. 

MS: Yeah, it’s not a leak when you just send a journalist out of the blue your war plans. [Laughs]

JW: Yeah, really can’t call it that. But I did want to talk more broadly about not just the legacy of this case, but what the administration is trying to do more broadly. The Prairieland protest case came on the heels of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which the Trump administration almost immediately used to justify cracking down on the broader left.

Matt, can you talk about how the administration is trying to silence critics more broadly by labeling all dissent and protests as acts of terrorism, and can you talk about the other active cases the government has against activists?

MS: Yeah, I think it’s important to remember the timeline. The Prairieland demonstration happened in July of 2025, and then Charlie Kirk was killed in September 2025.

Very soon after that, President Trump issued this executive order purporting to designate “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization — not something he can actually do, but so it goes.

Then he issues NSPM-7, this presidential memorandum instructing the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies to really crack down on the president’s enemies on the left.

So you had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged. And then the government really ups the ante by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences.

I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere. It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.

In terms of other cases, you can look to Illinois, where the protesters outside the Broadview facility there, the government attempted to charge them. The grand jury initially rejected it and the government was able to secure charges, and then the case fell apart under government scrutiny.

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More recently, we’ve had [new] charges against some Stop Cop City organizers in Georgia, and charges against protesters in Minneapolis with this aggressive theory about a conspiracy against federal officers, and these folks’ defenders say they were essentially just cop watchers keeping an eye on the federal invasion in Minneapolis.

So the charges may differ from case to case. The exact logic of how these cases work may differ, but the overarching strategy of using the most aggressive charges you can find and painting this all as a big conspiracy is going to continue.

JW: The cases that you just brought up had given some people hope that while the government may be trying to target protesters and dissenters, they didn’t have the power to jail them to the extent that they obviously wanted to and were intending to.

The Prairieland case and these sentences is a really scary wake-up call that the government is incredibly powerful and that these are not just words or prosecutions. This is an intent to really jail Trump’s dissenters and to jail any kind of opposition to this regime and that they have the power to do that in some of these cases.

We’re going to leave it there. Matt, I just really want to thank you for this update and your reporting. To continue following Matt’s work, sign up for The Intercept’s newsletter at theintercept.com.

MS: Goodbye, Jessie. Thanks for having me.

JW: Next, we zoom out with Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

Bray is a history professor at Rutgers University and a frequent target of the right. He also consulted as an expert witness with one of the Prairieland defendants but did not testify. With Bray, we’ll take stock of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on dissent and talk to him about his own experiences being targeted by the right.

[Break]

JW: Mark, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Mark Bray: Thank you for having me.

JW: Mark, we just spoke to my colleague, Matt Sledge, about the details surrounding the Prairieland case. But to start, can you just give us your reaction to the charges and to the sentencing?

MB: Certainly when we look at the Prairieland case and some other somewhat similar cases during this second Trump administration, we can see that there’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism. I see it in that context. 

There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Des — to Daniel Sanchez — 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.

It’s part of this broader effort to characterize opposition as terrorism conspiracy that we’ve seen in various manifestations. It seems like a particularly egregious version of that, when, to my knowledge, many of the people who were at this protest in Prairieland aren’t even accused of firing the weapon that was supposedly fired.

JW: Yeah, you’re right. The fact that Benjamin Song is the only person who actually fired a weapon and that everyone else participated in what appears to be nonviolent protesting — the charges that were handed out are really hard to even contemplate.

I want to get a little bit more personal as well. So The Guardian reported that you acted as a consultant for one of the defendants but didn’t testify. I know your name also came up multiple times during the trial. Can you talk about that, and what that was like for you?

MB: I was in Spain at the time. I had left the U.S. in response to death threats from the far right and my concerns about the political situation in the U.S. So I was unable, unfortunately, to testify in person. I was consulted by the attorneys for Daniel Sanchez, for Des. I think they asked whether I could testify remotely, and I imagine they were turned down because they didn’t follow up on that.

But part of what I did was, they sent me a Dropbox link or some such equivalent to read all of the radical literature that he transported, all of the scanned zines.

I read through a bunch of them; a few of them I was familiar with already. And a few things stood out. As I said, number one, it’s not illegal to own these things. Just because you own a book or a piece of writing doesn’t mean you necessarily agree with everything in it or anything in it. I own a copy of “Mein Kampf” — that doesn’t make me a Nazi. 

Although these folks were accused of being part of some sort of supposed antifa cell, very few of the zines that he transported had anything to do with antifa politics, and one of them was actually a critique of it.

So it just goes to show you that the political claims are intentionally superficial, vague, and minimalist in order to be able to package as much stuff they don’t like under the same kind of terrorist umbrella as possible.

JW: I want to get into why you had to flee a little bit more deeply. But before that, we spoke to Matt Sledge about this, but I wanted to get your take as well. Why is the administration determined to convince the public that antifa, a decentralized antifascist movement, is a domestic terrorist organization? What are the motivations here, and what does it mean if they can successfully convince us that these are terrorists?

MB: I guess the starting point is to recognize that I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that “Communist” was used in past generations, antifa is used now.

Certainly, the FBI have been monitoring antifa groups for years now, and I’m sure they have a reasonably accurate sense of what it is. There’s a number of different groups in different cities that organize against the far right in a variety of ways. None of them are particularly large. There aren’t that many of them in the U.S., relatively speaking.

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But by arguing that antifa is — as a number of far-right provocateurs over the years have argued — like the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, that phrasing shows us how they’re trying to make the case that whatever kind of far-left radical figure is actually just a version of the center-left, and that everyone who is not with us is against us.

That, I think, is reflected in the term “antifa-aligned,” which the Department of Homeland Security promoted as a framework for thinking about this. That, OK, there are antifa groups, there’s antifa-aligned. It’s like different layers to the onion to be peeled back. 

For me, it’s a useful term because it’s poorly understood. It’s associated in the popular imagination with people who cover their faces, who engage in acts of violence. And in that way, it’s a useful linchpin for framing a conspiracy.

Beyond that, we haven’t actually seen self-described antifa groups in the streets opposing the far right in the U.S. since last decade. It’s not particularly germane to what’s going on in U.S. politics, but of course, the reality of it is not particularly important to Trump and his allies.

JW: That’s really interesting. This isn’t just an attack on the left, and I think people on the left can often see it as, “OK, this is an attack on the left.” This is an attack on any kind of resistance, any kind of dissent, any kind of opposition to Trump. And have we seen this in history? You alluded to attacks on communists, but can you talk a little bit about the history of targeting the left and the broader ripple effects?

MB: There are so many cases. One that comes to mind is something I wrote a book about. I wrote this book called “The Anarchist Inquisition” about Spain and France at the turn of the 20th century. In short, there were anarchist bombings and assassinations — actual anarchists who said, “Yes, I’m an anarchist,” who tried and sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed to kill the king of Spain or to kill the president of France.

They didn’t have a ton of allies, and even in the anarchist movement, most disagreed with that strategy. But the Spanish government, and to a lesser extent the French government, used that as an excuse to arrest all sorts of trade unionists and Freemasons and anti-clerical figures and socialists in this big scandal in the 1890s, El proceso de Montjuïc, where these people were put in a dungeon. And it was this effort to create this conspiracy among the left that all these different people were somehow in cahoots to try and overthrow the monarchy.

So there are many cases throughout history around this. You can go forward into the movements of the ’60s. It’s useful for the right to portray all of the left as being the same. Which is actually a useful way I think those of us on the left should remind ourselves — that while there are comparisons between different kinds of right-wing forces, it’s also a mistake to say that all different kinds of fascists and far-right formations are all the same. Because there are differences there too, and understanding them makes sense. Flattening the dynamic can be useful rhetorically on both sides, but it’s usually not accurate.

JW: One thing I have just been thinking about is we’ve seen so many attempted prosecutions of protesters under the Trump administration, and this is their first real victory against, they’re calling it their first real victory against antifa.

Obviously, as we’ve discussed, it’s much more complicated than that. But we’ve seen the administration attempt to prosecute the Broadview Six, who were arrested for protesting outside of an ICE facility in Chicago. Obviously there are sillier instances where federal prosecutors tried to go after someone for throwing a Subway sandwich.

But now that they have their boogeyman scenario for the left, they have sentenced people to prison for the rest of their lives for protesting against injustices perpetrated by their government — does this embolden the administration? Do they learn that they can successfully prosecute people for opposing them?

MB: It certainly emboldens the administration to get this verdict and to get these sentences. Looking back to the fall of last year, when I received threats for my alleged involvement in antifa groups — which is not true, I haven’t participated in any of those groups — the specter of a kind of antifascist Red Scare was looming large.

I think that to a reasonable extent, it kind of faded a bit as the administration focused on a lot of other problems and issues, or created them. It’s come back a bit recently with the Prairieland case, the Prairieland verdicts, also the anti-ICE activists arrested in Minneapolis. There seems to be a bit of a return toward trying to stitch together this alleged antifascist conspiracy.

It’s so Orwellian to think that the antifascists are the bad guys in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian regime, which many scholars of fascism call, to one extent or another, if not fascist, trying to create something akin to fascism. So I do think it emboldens them. I do think it establishes a precedent.

We know that the legal system is all based on different kinds of precedents. And when the administration tried to make the case for antifascism as terrorism back in the fall, they cited a number of different cases which really had nothing to do with it. But what that shows us is that they’re trying to establish a track record, establish the reality of this enemy, this internal enemy they’re trying to combat. This helps them do it because there’s something they can point to. Of course it’s a dishonest intellectual, if you even want to call it intellectual project, to fake evidence and then refer to it as evidence of the thing you’re trying to use as evidence for the evidence. But we know how this administration functions, and it’s not surprising.

JW: As someone who has had to deal with the comms side of the White House, I will say it is not very surprising at all. 

You touched on this already a little bit, but because you’re widely viewed as an antifascist expert and you wrote the 2017 book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” you’ve long been a target of the right, so much so that you and your family had to leave the country.

Can you talk about that experience and how the threats you were receiving escalated over time to the point that you had to make that decision?

MB: When my book was published in 2017, it was rushed to publication and came out days after Charlottesville. It became a bestseller and was really the book of record for talking about what it was that antifa groups did and what they thought and why.

In that context, I received quite a few death threats. I was visited by the FBI. There was a bomb scare at my work. I was denounced by my employer, the president of Dartmouth College, but not fired because I received support from fellow faculty. But over the coming years, that kind of diminished. Antifa was not particularly pertinent to the news, with maybe the exception of a week in 2020 when Trump tried to blame the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd on antifa. It pretty much disappeared. 

Then all of a sudden, with Charlie Kirk’s killing, antifa was back on the radar. It was declared a supposed terrorist organization, although it’s neither terrorist nor an organization.

At first, frankly, I didn’t think much of it because I had received threats in the past. Even when Turning Point USA — the local group on my campus, although they were really fed the initiative by the national organization — crafted a petition to have me fired for writing my book, I kind of shrugged. It changed when some of the threats included my home address, and then my home address was published online on X, along with information about my family.

In a country that’s awash in guns, I was very concerned about something like something that happened to Charlie Kirk happening to me, and I was also very alarmed about the political direction of the country. So my goal was not actually to publicize that I was leaving the country, that leaked, but I was planning on leaving. Spain’s sort of my second home, I’ve done research there over the years. 

Now, going back to your earlier point though, the degree of the kind of onslaught of the Red Scare that I was fearful of did not fully materialize over the coming months. It didn’t — I don’t regret going — but it didn’t fully materialize.

I was concerned about all sorts of progressive activists being rounded up, and fortunately that hasn’t happened. It doesn’t mean that we need to stop our vigilance. That’s why we’re talking about issues like this. But it didn’t fully materialize. I do think it’s picking up again a little bit now, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods, so to speak.

But that was my experience, and I returned to the U.S. last week. I’m going to take all sorts of precautions to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again and to do what I can to keep speaking about these issues.

JW: Why do you think that the energy, the kind of Red Scare energy we had seen pick back up, why do you think it died down, and what do you think brought it back? Do you attribute that to Charlie Kirk’s death specifically? I think a lot of people think that the right used that as an excuse. I’m curious why you think it went up and down in that way.

MB: The killing of Charlie Kirk was obviously an excuse. Even before we knew who had done it Trump was blaming the left.

The effort to frame Tyler Robinson as a leftist is ridiculous if you actually look at all the kinds of convoluted things he believed. Then there was this effort for a few weeks to craft the antifa terrorist threat. Now, why it stopped, I’m not entirely sure. I do think that we live in this social media era where you can make something a big deal very quickly, but just as quickly people move on to the next thing.

I wonder if there was an element of that, particularly in the context where the administration was trying to pursue a number of different objectives at once. I felt, I don’t know what your opinion was, but towards the end of 2025, the kind of authoritarian momentum of the regime started to wane a little. And then all of a sudden January hit, Maduro gets kidnapped from Venezuela, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis grows even more intense. It seemed like particularly with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that there was an effort to get the momentum back going again. In that context, the antifa terrorist threat was almost completely abandoned because Pretti and Good were simply called terrorists. 

So the middleman term between leftist and terrorist was antifa. They took out the middleman term: Leftists are terrorists. They’re coming back to it now. I’m not entirely sure how far they’ll get with it. One of the questions you always have with the growth of authoritarianism or fascism or whatever you want to call it in democratic states is, to what extent can the institutions that are designed to thwart those advances hold up?

I think overall it’s been a mixed bag in the U.S., but certainly you’d have to think that Trump and his allies do not believe that they can simply arrest just anyone and claim they’re part of a terrorist conspiracy at this point or they would have done it. A lot of the arrests that ICE made have not held up, and so I guess they don’t feel fully emboldened.

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But as you suggested earlier, every step they take, every supposed precedent they establish could make them feel more emboldened to take steps moving into the future. The one last thing I’ll say, though, is that I think the real linchpin for these efforts is something more approximating a genuine crisis or emergency, where they can more believably say, “If we don’t deal with these terrorists, our efforts to save the country will be for naught.”

Right now I don’t think that most Americans believe that there is this internal terrorist conspiracy, that’s something they have to be concerned about, especially when the price of groceries is going through the roof, or of gas. But if they get some situation where that’s more plausible, then I’d be more scared.

JW: As you noted, you wrote your handbook just at the start of Trump’s first term. The forward is written by the late Joshua Clover, who recounts pivotal moments in those years in which antifascists were pushing back against the rise of white nationalism. Nearly a decade later, how do you think about this moment that we’re in, and how we’ve gone from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” holding tiki torches, to all of the in between and where we are now?

MB: When I published “Antifa” in 2017, I described the situation we were in as a moment of preventative antifascism that was akin to one extent or another to the post-war European context of trying to organize such that Nazis or fascists couldn’t bring back another horrific regime. We’re not in that situation anymore in the U.S., and I think to some extent we’re in a bit of an unprecedented situation, which I know that’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but I mean it when I say it.

Whereas you look at the growth of Hitler’s regime in Germany or Mussolini’s in Italy, from the point at which they had the opportunity to take authoritarian power to the kind of consolidation of the regime, there was a much quicker, more straightforward ascension. Hitler outlawed various different political parties and threw their leaders in jail pretty quickly over the months after the Reichstag fire, which provided the context for the Enabling Act [of 1933], which allowed him to centralize his power.

In the U.S., we are not in the status quo, but we’ve not yet fully reached a kind of fascist or authoritarian regime, that we do still have other political parties. You can at least, under most circumstances, protest. So thinking about that in between I think is very interesting, particularly since the kinds of antifascist politics that I wrote about in the book were designed by different kinds of leftists after World War II to stop small and medium-sized fascist groups before they reached the halls of power.

But now, figures like Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and so forth they have their hands on the wheel. So what that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement.

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I would call it an antifascist movement, which ironically is exactly what Trump is trying to get us to call it from a different angle. I think there’s a kind of contestation over language, contestation over images of suffering. I found it shocking when they published the alternate video of the killing of Renee Good in order to essentially — I and many others interpreted it — for us to think that she deserved it because of the context of her partner shouting at the ICE agent.

So contestations over images of violence over words, and I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.

That’s what I think is happening now, and that’s what I hope we’ll continue to see, and that could produce really inspiring social movements over the years to come.

JW: To your point, what we’ve been witnessing with these anti-ICE protests is not just organized groups in Signal chats working together, although that is obviously happening as well. We’re seeing everyday people watch their neighbors get dragged out of their homes and standing up and saying, “I won’t stand for this.”

You have to think that the movement of antifascism — separate from how, the Trump administration is trying to describe antifa — but this larger movement of antifascism does have legs if people are willing to stand up for each other, to see their neighbors as members of their family, as members of their community.

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Mark, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thank you so much.

JW: We want to know what issues you are following, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Trump’s Communist Boogeyman Playbook: Charging Protesters as Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

A volunteer at the National Archives in London found the document among other papers seized from an American ship in 1776.

UK provisional peak of 37.7C shatters previous record by huge margin, while Germany hits all-time high of 41.7C

Last week’s heatwave across western Europe shattered national June records and set new all-time highs.

The UK recorded a provisional high of 37.7C at Lingwood in Norfolk on Friday 27 June, smashing the previous June record of 35.6C, set in 1976. Such a margin is exceptionally rare: temperature records are typically broken by 0.1C or 0.2C, not a remarkable 2.1C.

Ditched single-use plastic bottles but can’t find a good reusable one? I spent months putting dozens through their paces – these are the ones worth buying

• The best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups, tested

If you think a water bottle is just a water bottle, it’s time to wake up. These days, there’s a lot riding on your choice of drinking vessel. The heady combination of worrying about the planet and, on a more day-to-day level, staying hydrated has made reusable water bottles a must-have.

Once the preserve of hikers and gym-goers, water bottles have become a small but significant act of environmental virtue signalling. Not all bottles are created equal, though. Some are insulated, some leak, some weigh as much as a toddler, and some even infuse your water with hydrogen (more on that later). The choice is dizzying.

Best water bottle overall:
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Best budget water bottle:
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America has long stood for freedom and prosperity, but under Trump insults, threats and unpredictability have become the new norm. As the US marks its 250th anniversary, Guardian correspondents around the world report on how it is perceived elsewhere

Amy Hawkins in Beijing

Guards at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, could see a detainee in his cell with one end of a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and the other tied to the door handle. If they opened the door, the sheet would tighten and strangle him. 

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, had been in detention at Camp East Montana for a month by then. The facility itself was still relatively new and had been opened as part of the Trump administration’s plans to house and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time.

Almost immediately after being admitted, the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant began expressing frustration about his care, according to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report. 

The report, reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, includes dozens of notes that detail medical staff interactions with Lunas Campos, who had a history of mental illness and had been previously institutionalized in New York. 

The report and the records it contains offer a rare and disturbing look at how immigrant detention facilities — erected rapidly and with little oversight — manage detainees with serious mental health needs. The records paint a portrait of a man in a crisis and a facility whose staff, on several occasions, discussed transferring him to a facility where he could get a higher level of care. 

According to the records, he complained at least eight times to staff about skipped or late doses of antipsychotic drugs to treat his depression, anxiety and hallucinations. He “expressed frustration regarding his medication dosage,” says a Sept. 9 entry from medical staff. 

They point to moments of exasperation that led to self-harm. He banged his head against the wall after he couldn’t afford to pay the charges to talk with his children in New York. That left him with a black eye. In response, staff simply noted that they spoke with him about “not hitting his head against the wall bc he must take care of his brain and his eyes.” 

The incident with the noose and the doorknob came in early October. A mental health provider eventually coaxed him to untie it. Notes detailing the incident stated that Lunas Campos affirmed he wasn’t suicidal. The notes dismissed what occurred as a “suicidal gesture made to force security staff to release him” from the isolation room where he had been segregated from the rest of the detainees. Hospitalization, the notes stated, was “not clinically indicated at this time based on assessed risk and protective factors.”

Lunas Campos died in detention nearly three months later, after an altercation with guards over his medication. The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but a coroner later ruled his death a homicide. 

The conflicting accounts over the cause of his death have drawn significant media attention and served to rally advocacy groups who have alleged that it is one of the more shocking pieces of evidence of the dangerous conditions endured by immigrants in federal detention facilities. 

But little had been reported about Lunas Campos’ condition and treatment before that day. On Monday, Lunas Campos’ three children sued the companies running the facility at the time of his death. The lawsuit alleged that guards killed him and argued negligence, including missed medication doses and the improper use of force and restraint. The Washington Post on Thursday reported that Lunas Campos had repeatedly sought treatment for his mental illness, pointing to the medical examiner’s investigative report. The companies have not responded to the allegations in court filings and did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed the contents of the report several weeks ago. Two doctors, who are experts on mental health and deaths in detention, also reviewed the report at the news organizations’ request. The takeaway was clear: The detainee asked for help, the facility staff failed to adequately respond.

The news organizations separately reviewed more than 160 emergency calls, as well as records and interviews with staff and government officials familiar with the detention center. They show medical and mental health emergencies beyond those experienced by Lunas Campos, as well as staff indicating they felt ill-equipped to respond. Detainees had little access to recreational activities and time outside, which mental health experts say exacerbates their despair. Staff also ignored warning signs, such as detainees’ previous efforts to harm themselves.

“It’s civil detention,” said Will Horowitz, an attorney representing Lunas Campos’ adult children in the lawsuit. “They’re not in detention because they’ve committed a crime.”  

The White House declined to comment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview and did not answer a list of written questions. The administration has previously dismissed detainee accounts of inadequate medical care and poor conditions at Camp East Montana and other detention centers as “false” and called them “fearmongering clickbait.” Federal officials have repeatedly said that for many immigrants, the medical care they receive in detention is the best in their lives.

In Lunas Campos’ case, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, initially minimized the incident that led to his death, pointing to his criminal history. Later, in response to news reports that the medical examiner planned to rule the death a homicide, a DHS spokesperson said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself. 

Lunas Campos was sentenced to a year in jail after a 2003 conviction for sexual contact with a child under the age of 11, according to The Associated Press. The news organization also reported that he was convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance and sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009.

Horowitz said Lunas Campos’ criminal history is irrelevant to his detention. Lunas Campos’ children declined to comment on the failures highlighted in the medical examiner’s report or on his criminal history, but, Horowitz said, “They want people to know that he was a person like anyone else and that he didn’t need to die.” 

In a report issued after Lunas Campos’ death, DHS officials said he received regular medical and psychiatric evaluations, with staff adjusting his medication as needed. They also contended that he was monitored for suicidal ideation. Investigative records from the El Paso medical examiner show a period during which facility staff checked on him every 15 minutes following his suicide attempt, as required by the federal government. 

But the medical examiner’s report also brings into focus a series of breakdowns in care, according to Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He said Lunas Campos’ case is a model of how such moments compound, creating crisis after crisis with dire outcomes.

“The clinical trajectory documented in his chart — escalating agitation, self-harm, pressured speech, repeated confrontations with staff over medication — is the predictable result of erratic psychotropic medication administration in a patient with serious mental illness,” Basu said.

He pointed to records that show staff didn’t transfer Lunas Campos to a facility that could better treat his mental health, even after noting that they were working to move him as early as Oct. 8. Lunas Campos was also repeatedly placed in segregation cells, separate from the rest of the camp population, which had little more than a bed in them. The government’s own detention standards say staff should generally make every effort to avoid placing detainees with a serious mental illness in segregation. 

Most critically, instead of taking his previous suicide attempt seriously, staff interpreted it as an effort to manipulate them, Basu said.

The records, Basu said, clearly show “systemic neglect.” 

A System Unraveling

Camp East Montana was supposed to be the model for how detention centers across the country would operate under President Donald Trump’s administration. It was near the U.S.-Mexico border and had easy access to a highway and an airfield to quickly transport and deport unauthorized immigrants. Its location on barren, massive Fort Bliss land also allowed for a space that could hold up to 10,000 unauthorized immigrants at a time, more than any other facility in the country.

Instead, the detention center became an example of what could go wrong. 

Within months of the camp’s opening, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the federal government, published accounts from immigrants who said they were beaten by guards, denied lifesaving medication and kept in squalid conditions with sewage at times spilling into their eating areas. Detainees commonly caught measles or tuberculosis. The government hasn’t responded formally to the lawsuit, but in statements to the media a DHS spokesperson said claims of inhumane conditions and detainees being abused are “categorically false.” 

The problems treating people with mental health challenges were not as visible but stacked up in ways that experts said added mental distress and could contribute to more suicide attempts. In the worst cases, they said, detainees unnecessarily died.

The facility was never set up to house detainees struggling with serious mental health conditions, a DHS official and a medical provider who worked there told ProPublica and the Tribune. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government did not authorize them to discuss conditions at the camp. 

Several staffers told the news organizations that they had a lot of relevant information they could share, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements.   

The DHS official said immigrants didn’t have adequate space to read, pray, write or get legal services. They were kept inside windowless cells with nothing to do. Detainees were also granted little time outside, partly because the facility’s outdoor space was not big enough for all of them, a government report later found. The federal government requires detention centers to provide detainees at least one hour of outdoor time per day, but many got only a couple of hours a week, detainees told ProPublica and the Tribune. 

“Recreation and amenities, games, books, TVs, are all lifelines for people in detention,” the DHS official, who did not participate in the report, said. 

Prolonged confinement made detainees more anxious and desperate, at times leading to hunger strikes and fights. Immigrants were only supposed to remain at Camp East Montana for a maximum of two weeks, according to contract documents and statements from federal officials. When Lunas Campos died, the typical detainee had spent 38 days in the facility, according to a ProPublica analysis of government data provided to the Deportation Data Project, which collects and posts immigration enforcement information. He had been there far longer, more than 100 days.

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights who has studied healthcare in immigration detention centers, said that the conditions reported at Camp East Montana signal that it is not a safe place for any detained individual. 

“You’ve been detained. You don’t know what the process is going to be. You don’t know when you’re going to be released,” Peeler said. “It’s really hard to trust people who are in charge to give you accurate information and so, as a result, you’re going to have a lot more despair and a lot more kind of anguish.” 

The situation is worse for people with a history of mental illness, Peeler said. Solitary confinement can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, self-harm and suicide risks, according to a 2024 report that Peeler co-authored with partners, including students and staff at Harvard University. 

“We are creating a mental health crisis that does not need to be there,” Peeler said.

Some detainees at Camp East Montana who showed signs of potential self-harm were placed in isolation rooms that were not suicide-proof. They had doorknobs and mesh ceilings to which detainees who wanted to harm themselves could tie a bedsheet, the DHS official said. 

National detention standards don’t specify the number of suicide-proof rooms needed in each facility but make clear that detainees who are suicidal should be placed in rooms “free of objects and structural elements that could facilitate a suicide attempt.” 

“It’s insane,” said the medical provider who spoke to ProPublica and the Tribune. “If somebody wants to kill themselves, there’s nowhere to put them that’s actually safe.” 

“They Just Didn’t Do It”

Lunas Campos was in such a room when he first tried to commit suicide. By then, staff had reported at least three other suicide attempts to 911.

There were the two calls in September, one about a detainee who lay on the floor holding his stomach in agony and unable to speak after swallowing an unknown object. The other about a man biting his arms and trying to cut his wrists with a piece of cardboard and a comb. 

Another call came in October, the day before Lunas Campos was spotted with a sheet tied around his neck. A man being kept in a medical isolation room to rule out tuberculosis tried to hang himself, the caller told the 911 operator. 

Suicide attempts are warning signs of a larger problem at a detention center, which could include inadequate strategies for observing or flagging self-harm or more general medical issues, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official at ICE who served in the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. 

Out of 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump returned to the White House, at least 10 have been reported as presumed suicides. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for independent investigations into the ICE deaths and expressed alarm over the reported use of solitary confinement.

“You would hope that if you have a number of negative outcomes of problematic incidents like that, that they would do critical incident reviews, figure out what was going on and try to take corrective action,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Last week, DHS’s inspector general launched probes into detainee deaths and whether the department was following its own standards on the use of force, citing a rise in ICE custody fatalities since 2022. 

Other problems were already identified in a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found millions of dollars had been wasted, pointed to gaps in medical care and noted unsanitary conditions at the El Paso facility. The report mentions that in October, ICE officials raised concerns with the contractors running the facility about the lack of windows on some doors in medical holding rooms, which prevented staff from easily seeing what was happening inside. 

The DHS official flagged several other problems that the government could have worked to improve. It could have assigned more ICE agents to help with chronic staffing shortages, created more opportunities for recreational activities and built special tents with suicide-prevention rooms, the DHS official said. 

“There was no lack of money or space and there was an obvious incentive to do it,” the official said, referring to the suicide attempts at the facility. “They just didn’t do it.”

There seemed to be a push-pull between career ICE staff and political appointees, the DHS official told the news organizations. 

“The political side didn’t want to give the appearance that it was so chaotic, they wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening,” the official said. 

Even without the proposed changes, staff at the detention center should have done more to treat Lunas Campos’ mental illness, said Joanne Ahola, a psychiatrist who has spent 17 years evaluating immigrants inside detention centers for Physicians for Human Rights’ volunteer Asylum Network. She also reviewed his records at the request of ProPublica and the Tribune.  

Lunas Campos’ early pleas for help continued throughout his detention. Nearly two weeks after his suicide attempt, he again flagged that he wasn’t getting his medications.

“Pt reported being very frustrated and anxious because he had not received his medication for a couple of days,” a medical note from Oct. 19 read. It noted that Lunas Campos was visibly “irritated and yelling.”

Another note on Nov. 10, said Lunas Campos “had not gotten his medications since Nov. 6.” 

And, on Nov. 11, more than a month after staff told Lunas Campos that they were working to move him to a facility with a higher level of care, shorthanded as HLOC, he was still waiting. “Continues to request transfer to HLOC stating conditions at current facility are adversely affecting his mental health,” according to a note from that date.

Lunas Campos was temporarily moved to another facility, but it was another detention center that experts say did not provide the higher level of care he needed.

On Jan. 2, a day before his death, he returned to Camp East Montana. A note from medical staff at 9:42 p.m. said they “provided emotional support,” “reviewed grounding and breathing techniques to manage anxiety,” encouraged him “to seek ongoing mental health support as needed,” and added his name to the medical sick call for a psychiatric evaluation. 

“This is a man who needed regular medications, a full evaluation, mental health clinicians and, no doubt, re-hospitalization,” Ahola said.  

“Instead, it almost seems like it was brushed off or brushed under the rug,” she added. 

Less than two weeks after Lunas Campos’ death, the health administrator at Camp East Montana called 911 again.

Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan native, was found in a cell with his pants tied around his neck. He was in a room with no windows.The staff found him as they were doing routine checks.

An ambulance was needed, the health administrator told the operator, explaining where emergency responders should go upon arrival at the facility. Without hesitation, he added, “They’ve been out here many times.” 

Díaz, who cooked chicken and washed dishes at a Minneapolis Korean restaurant, had been picked up and flown to Camp East Montana a week earlier. The GAO noted that ICE itself later acknowledged in a report that staff had not properly followed procedures after he “exhibited risk factors for suicide.” Staff placed him in a medical holding room — not a suicide-resitant cell — and left him unattended for periods longer than 15 minutes, the GAO stated. 

His autopsy, which was conducted by the military, has not been made public. 

The post “He Didn’t Need to Die.” How an Immigration Detention Center Repeatedly Failed to Address a Mental Health Crisis. appeared first on ProPublica.

After four years of war, life in Lukianivka, the most frequently hit part of the Ukrainian capital, is a mix of adaptability and endurance, defiance and denial, resignation and resilience.

President Trump says it would be "ridiculous" for the United States to continue its "one sided" relationship with NATO. His remarks came less than a week before a NATO summit in Turkey.

Will the UK’s next prime minister finally have a ‘national conversation’ on defence? Expert comment thilton.drupal 3 July 2026

The Defence Investment Plan recommits the UK to a national conversation on defence and security. The failure to deliver one so far undermines public trust and leaves the UK vulnerable to hybrid threats.

Keir Starmer has released the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which sets out the UK’s military spending plans, ahead of the NATO summit next week. The DIP also contains a commitment to a ‘national conversation campaign on defence and security’. 

However, this plan for a ‘national conversation’ was already adopted by Starmer’s government in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of 2025. The conversation was to focus on the rationale for investing more in defence, the role of the public in support of national security and resilience, and countering misinformation. 

The review recommended it take the form of a ‘two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends’. This has not yet happened. 

Meanwhile, intelligence services have warned that Russian sabotage, hostile reconnaissance, cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns are increasingly directed at the UK, a country viewed as ‘enemy number one’ and a ‘soft target’. The first step in countering these ‘hybrid’ attacks targeting the UK’s political stability is for a new prime minister to inform the public and build a societal response. 

Building trust and consent

The commitment from the Starmer government in 2025 reflects UK and NATO doctrine, which emphasize the ‘central proactive element’ of strategic communications in countering hybrid threats. Increased public awareness can spur civil society action to recognise hybrid threats and address vulnerabilities, acting as a deterrence by denying or reducing the impact of such threats. 

However, the UK government faces a strategic challenge: low public trust. According to 2024 polling, the UK government is one of the least trusted by the public among OECD countries. A ‘national conversation’ could be an important way to improve the public’s trust in the government. 

Allowing the public to feel they are part of a dialogue with authorities and including them in decision-making can build long-term public trust. Communications can foster cohesion through values-led narratives which promote civic unity. 

Sharing more about security also requires government to trust the public. The UK government has been accused of a ‘Stalinist’ culture of excessive official secrecy, with information either not shared due to fear of public and media panic, or a desire to control the narrative of the threat. 

Withholding information on threats can however negatively impact public confidence, especially if the British public perceives allied governments or independent media as offering greater candour than official UK sources.  

In turn, a national conversation that builds trust and explains the level of threat facing the UK will help the government to secure public approval for increased defence spending as outlined in the DIP. This is vital considering that higher defence spending generally requires a combination of cuts elsewhere, tax rises, or borrowing – all options that could prove unpopular with the public if the government doesn’t better explain and justify its decisions. 

What role should the public play?

A key element of the conversation is to engage the public in supporting national security and resilience. To send a clear demand signal to society through outreach activities, the government must first organize and articulate policy on the public’s role.

According to Dr Fiona Hill, a co-author of the SDR, civil aid organizations currently feel ‘there is no green light from above’ and ‘a sense of inaction’ in planning to support emergency responses. While the government is researching policy options on aspects of societal resilience, there appears to be limited political direction or ownership with no single minister responsible. 

Related work

Britain’s next prime minister faces deep foreign policy challenges – whether Burnham or another

The SDR also recommended the conversation should support ‘efforts to counter threats to information integrity as a critical component of national cohesion’. This reflects an online information ecosystem which is becoming easier to manipulate, with impacts offline. Violent disorder has occurred every summer since 2024, fuelled in part by misinformation on platforms including Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Facebook.

Possible calls to action might include asking the broader public to engage in media literacy initiatives, such as those available in libraries and online, for example via civic organizations in Finland and Sweden. 

Given the potential of misinformation to cause polarization and destabilization, the UK government has taken some limited steps to improve resilience, but actions on media literacy are focussed on parents and limited to a government campaign rather than a broader civic coalition. 

Strategic questions

Attempts to destabilize UK society currently exist in a ‘space between peace and war’, with attacks seeking to exploit vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions. 

Europe’s Centre of Excellence in Countering Hybrid Threats therefore recommends a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, using societal resilience as an organizing framework to cohere other disparate policy areas. In Nordic states, this has extended to social, cultural, and constitutional policy, while the German zeitenwende (turning point) shift since 2022 has linked investment in the military with infrastructure resilience and economic development. 

With players leaving EA’s series once life there felt like a grind beset by ethical concerns, this quirky new sim promises a better life elsewhere

For 26 years, the life-sims genre has been dominated by one series: The Sims. Originally designed by Will Wright, creator of Sim City, EA’s virtual dollhouse series has grown into a $5bn [£3.8bn] empire with the constant release of new games, expansion packs, and collaborations cementing its place among the bestselling video game franchises of all time. But things are beginning to change. New contenders are emerging and turning the heads of even loyal players in The Sims community.

The most recent, and promising, of these is Paralives, once the solo project of indie designer Alex Massé, who is now employing a small team of developers. Released on the PC games platform Steam in May 2026 as an early access title (meaning it’s technically unfinished and looking for user feedback), it sold 250,000 copies in just eight hours. On that first day, the concurrent player count hit 78,603 – not far off The Sims 4’s all-time peak of 96,328 in 2022. While Paralives is a small project, this success is understandable. Following the news of EA’s controversial acquisition by a Saudi-backed business consortium, some simmers are looking for what they see as a more ethical alternative. But this is only part of the game’s appeal. The real draw is the game’s focus on creativity over realism: the quirky details that made many fans fall in love with The Sims in the first place.

Weekend’s high temperatures and humidity ‘virtually impossible’ without climate crisis, researchers say

The scorching heat blanketing much of the US this week would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis, researchers have found, warning that the high temperatures could threaten Independence Day celebrations and World Cup matches this weekend.

“The climate the country has today is fundamentally different to the one it had when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence,” said Theodore Keeping, extreme weather and wildfire researcher at Imperial College London, in a press release.

Amazon says its Leo satellite network now has enough spacecraft in orbit to begin limited commercial internet service, with 396 satellites providing "continuous service across initial latitudes." Early performance will likely be uneven, however, and well behind Starlink. "It'll be years before Amazon can boast similar performance numbers as it continues to launch a planned 3,232 Leo satellites," reports The Verge. From the report: SpaceX went live with its "Better than nothing beta" back in 2020 when it had almost 900 satellites operating in low-Earth orbit. It initially served a narrow band of users in the upper US and Canada, who complained about frequent service interruptions and high sensitivity to obstructions, with speeds between 50Mbps and 150Mbps, and latency from 20ms to 40ms. By 2022, the service and coverage areas had already dramatically improved. [...] SpaceX currently has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in operation, providing robust internet connectivity on land, sea, and air in over 160 countries. Performance varies by the dish, service level paid for, time of day, and location of the user, but we're now talking 200Mbps median download speeds, 10Mbps to 40Mbps uploads, and latency hovering around 25ms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In today’s newsletter: As official celebrations spotlight a narrow cast of ​white heroes, communities across the US are reclaiming the histories that Freedom 250 leaves out

Good morning, and a very happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. If you prefer to celebrate with cage fighting on the White House lawn, an IndyCar rally through the streets of Washington DC, or simply by watching the president do his lonely bop to YMCA at a sparsely attended state fair, so much the better.

It takes a special kind of someone to make the semiquincentennial birthday of a nation of 349 million people, from a whole variety of backgrounds, all about himself. But he wouldn’t be the only one centred on a very particular (white, male, Christian-centric) view of how the nation came to be.

UK news | Women from Black and Asian backgrounds are less likely than their white counterparts to receive an epidural while giving birth, research has revealed.

Ukraine | Ukraine and Russia have promised fresh assaults after Moscow launched a huge barrage on Kyiv, killing at least 27 people, tearing open apartment buildings and sending tens of thousands of people to shelters.

UK news | Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.

UK politics | Keir Starmer has formally apologised for the British state’s role in past forced adoptions after decades of campaigning by mothers and children affected.

World news | A rescue team pulled a 43-year-old security guard alive from a collapsed basement, ending an operation that became a symbol of hope after the devastation of twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela.

President says Washington’s relationship with Nato is ‘not reciprocal’ and ‘they were not there for us’ in Iran war

Donald Trump has said it is “ridiculous” for the US to continue its “one sided” relationship with Nato, less than a week before a summit of the military alliance in Ankara.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “They were not there for us!!!” and Washington’s relationship with Nato “is not reciprocal”.

Researchers say Stelios Kouloglou’s device was compromised after he joined European parliamentary committee

NSO Group’s hacking software was repeatedly used against a member of the European parliament while he was conducting an investigation of spyware abuses in Europe, according to a new report.

Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said they could not attribute the attacks against Stelios Kouloglou to any particular government operator of Pegasus spyware. But their investigation found the attack against the Greek now-former MEP bore the hallmarks of a previous hacking campaign against exiled Russian and Belarusian journalists in Europe.

SwitchBot's latest 3K camera includes some familiar AI features and a couple of standout customizations I've never seen before.

What Thucydides really thought about power.

What America’s armed forces can—and cannot—do for democracy.

Migratory giant petrel discovered near Hawks Nest north of Newcastle infected with H5. Testing under way to determine if it’s highly pathogenic H5N1 strain

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New South Wales has its first suspected case of the deadly H5 bird flu in a giant petrel that was found near Hawks Nest, north of Newcastle, on the state’s coast.

If CSIRO testing confirms it is the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, it would mark the first detection of the deadly disease on the Australian east coast.

Official statement offers the most detailed official account yet of the highly unusual and fatal incident in Beijing

Chinese authorities said the man who flew a small plane into Beijing’s tallest skyscraper last week was a 66-year-old who had mental health problems.

The statement published on Thursday offered the most detailed official account yet of the highly unusual incident that occurred in Beijing’s central business district on the evening of 26 June.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for July 3.

Powered by chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, South Korea is seeing a surge in wealth, but there are questions over who gets to share in the profits

When South Korea’s most high-profile divorce case returned to court last month, the lawyers were arguing not just about the breakdown of a relationship, but also the exact date at which to value shares in one specific company.

The judges’ decision in Seoul could change the value of business tycoon Chey Tae-won’s assets by billions of dollars. The shares were in the holding company behind SK Hynix, the manufacturer of chips powering AI systems around the world.

The Aspen Acres Fire continues to burn out of control in Pueblo and Custer counties.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump posts AI video of him as doctor treating critics’ ‘derangement syndrome’

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OpenAI is reportedly in early stage talks to give a 5% stake in the ChatGPT developer to the US government as artificial intelligence companies attempt to smooth relations with Donald Trump’s administration.

The OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, has argued that giving the US public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the benefits of AI, according to the Financial Times, which cited two unnamed people familiar with the discussions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers who tracked more than 90,000 people over a decade found that sitting or lying down while awake for more than 30 minutes in one period each day was associated with an increased risk of cancer death. The risk increases for every additional hour of continuous inactivity, the findings suggest. However, the researchers also found breaking up periods of sedentary behavior longer than 30 minutes with bursts of physical activity could help reduce the risk. Getting up every half-hour, even for a short walk around the office, could do wonders for your health, they said. [...] The findings, published in Plos Medicine, focused on the health effects of prolonged sedentary behavior on a daily basis. [...] The team analyzed data from wearable devices worn by more than 91,000 UK Biobank participants, who were followed for an average of 12 years. The findings suggest prolonged inactivity lasting more than 30 minutes was associated with cancer risks. Each additional hour of prolonged inactivity every day was associated with a 10% increase in risk of cancer death. However, replacing long spells of inactivity with movement appeared to reduce that risk. Substituting one hour of sedentary behavior each day with light physical activity, such as ironing or washing up, was associated with a 12% lower risk of cancer death. Replacing 30 minutes of inactivity each day with 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, such as walking at an average pace, was associated with an 8% lower risk. The risk was 22% lower when five minutes of inactivity was replaced with five minutes of vigorous physical activity each day, the study suggested. There were limitations to the research, including the fact that the researchers performed a statistical analysis of an observational study, so could not prove causation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent touched on the recent disclosure of President Trump's crypto earnings, the latest developments with the tax-deferred Trump Accounts, and the struggles facing the U.S. economy.

Gonçalo Ramos scored to set up a last-16 clash with Spain as Croatia’s hearts were broken when VAR ruled their late equaliser offside

1 min: Croatia in blue, Portugal in white.

Weather and ref

Princess Cruises vessel is docked in San Francisco for disinfecting in third outbreak for company this year

More than 100 passengers and about 23 crew members on a Princess Cruises ship fell sick from suspected norovirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), marking the third outbreak to hit one of the company’s watercrafts this year.

The Ruby Princess vessel set sail on 12 June from San Francisco, bound for Alaska and Canada, with a scheduled return on 2 July. More than two weeks into the journey, CDC officials received a report of an outbreak, which is defined by a threshold of 3% or more of passengers. Aboard the ship were 3,032 passengers and 1,144 crew members, per the CDC.

Commentary: With July 4 upon us and generative AI infiltrating the world of creatives, what are we to make of the increasingly bonkers On This Day...1776?

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for July 3, No. 648.

Narendra Modi received the Guardian of the Blue Horizon award, with trophy and certificate, from the Seychelles president, Patrick Herminie, at the weekend.

The US Department of Energy wants changes to energy-efficiency standards enacted under the Biden administration.

• Red Sox’s Contreras also given seven-game ban

• Pitcher apologized for remark, racial overtones

• Bench-clearing fracas resulted in four ejections

Major League Baseball suspended Washington Nationals starting pitcher Cade Cavalli and Boston Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras seven games each on Thursday for their ⁠roles in a benches-clearing incident on Tuesday in Boston.

MLB also suspended Nationals right-hander Miles Mikolas for five games and Red Sox outfielder Nate Eaton for three for ⁠their actions during the ⁠incident at Fenway Park. The ​four players each were fined an undisclosed amount as part of the discipline.

Amazon's head of devices and services discussed the company's focus on artificial intelligence, Alexa Plus and new types of technology to support it.

Memo calls for ‘surge’ of analysts after agents in January seized hundreds of boxes containing Fulton county ballots

The FBI has asked its field offices across the country to dedicate more than 200 staffers to its investigation of the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton county.

A memo obtained Thursday by the Associated Press calls for the FBI to “surge” 260 investigative analysts and staff operations specialists to the effort, which it described as a “priority investigation.”

In latest legal twist, appeals panel rules US does not have to reinstate signage on climate, immigration and slavery

The Trump administration does not have to reinstate materials related to climate change, immigration and slavery that it has removed from national parks, a US appeals court ruled on Thursday.

It’s the latest twist in a legal battle over how history is remembered at American public monuments.

The clock is ticking for Android as a (somewhat) open platform.

If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation. Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat.

Disguising itself as the innocuously-titled “Android Developer Verifier” (ADV) process, this trojan horse runs surreptitiously in the background as a system service with full root privileges, quietly awaiting an activation signal. The service cannot be blocked, disabled, or removed. Unlike a commonplace bit of malware, this extraordinary strain won’t be detected and neutralized by Play Protect (the malware scanning and remediation service that is installed on all Android Certified devices). In fact, Play Protect is itself the vector through which this virus is transmitted and installed.

That is because it is Google themselves who is propagating ADV. And once activated, this malevolent process has exactly one goal: to block you from running software by developers who haven’t been approved centrally by Google.

↫ The F-Droid news website

If nobody steps up, if no regulator takes on Google in this matter, we could very well be looking at the end of F-Droid and similar open source application repositories on Android. I use F-Droid, and in fact, one of the most important and most-used application on my Pixel 10 Pro comes from F-Droid: Fennec. This Firefox fork is not available through any Google-sanctioned means, and I could just wake up one day and have the browser on what is supposed to be my phone stop working.

Age verification, tying crucial services to iOS and Google Android, killing the ability to install your own software on your phone, purposefully making people hopelessly addicted to and dependent on “AI”, and so much more – we’re facing a multi-pronged attack designed to beat us into submission and give up on the idea of Free computing. I have to admit I’ve lost all hope we’ll be able to win this battle, as the combined interests of technology megacorporations and our own governments are just too powerful to fight.

I feel like we’re living in the computing end times.

Dr. Debra Houry, who resigned in protest from the health agency, said the spread of misinformation impacted lives.

Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, leads polls ahead of Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow in primary

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her support behind Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive Democrat seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan’s closely watched US Senate race.

In an interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez – an influential congresswoman on the left of the Democratic party – endorsed El-Sayed, a former public health director. “Despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential,” she said.

President, in latest AI-generated social media post, targets prominent celebrities who have spoken out against him

Donald Trump on Thursday posted an AI-generated social media video portraying himself as a doctor who claims to have cured some of his most prominent celebrity critics – including Rosie O’Donnell – of the fictional condition “Trump derangement syndrome”.

Outside the AI fantasy, O’Donnell said her assessment of the president remained unchanged. In a statement, she offered her own diagnosis: “He’s quite ill-and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.”

One of 11 surviving copies of ‘Exeter printing’ and only one known outside US was taken from American privateer ship

For Michael Scurr, a volunteer at the National Archives in Kew, west London, it was “just a boring old Thursday morning” when he sat down in late May to catalogue a collection of documents from the British national collection that had never previously been recorded in detail.

As he opened a volume of 18th-century Royal Navy correspondence, however, Scurr unfolded a document whose opening words he recognised. “In Congress, July 4, 1776. A declaration by the representatives of the United States of America …”

What if you need to do very low-level testing involving the very guts of Windows NT, but don’t need most of the userland that sits on top? In fact, what if that userland only slows you down and complicates the work you’re trying to do?

The solution is Windows PE (Windows Preinstallation Environment). It is an official, stripped-down environment distributed with every Windows ISO image. It runs entirely in RAM, requires as little as 512 MB of memory, and lacks support for DirectX, the PowerShell subsystem, or the standard graphical shell (Explorer). Booting by default with NT AUTHORITY\\SYSTEM privileges makes it an ideal test harness for both of these tasks.

The following analysis focuses on the low-level mechanisms of WinPE, as well as BCD and QEMU modifications that allow transforming this system into an ultra-fast, idempotent testing environment.

↫ Piotr Bednarski

Now, the kind of work Bednarski does isn’t the most common of tasks, but I’ve often wondered just how far you can get by bolting on whatever WinPE will allow you to. There were various unofficial third-party tools that built Windows live CDs based on WinPE, but I think most of those have died out by now. If you look hard enough, you can also find some other utilities people made for WinPE, including even some rudimentary web browsers. Regarding web browsers, modern efforts seem to run into issues.

WinPE is not really meant for any advanced functionality, but I really do wonder how capable you can make it without turning it into regular Windows.

San Francisco jury fails to reach verdict on more serious felony conspiracy charge over April 2024 demonstration

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Seven protesters who blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge during a 2024 anti-war demonstration have been found guilty of misdemeanor charges in a case that became yet another flashpoint over how governments and major institutions respond to pro-Palestinian protests in the Trump era.

The jury, which deliberated for a total of seven days, was deadlocked on the most serious charge: felony conspiracy. If convicted of that charge, the defendants would have faced a potential sentence of 15 years in prison.

M/PC is a concatenative operating system for Varvara, inspired by Openfirmware, designed to manage files on system without a file browser. It uses the postfix notation, meaning that the function success their operands.

↫ M/PC website

I’m not going to pretend to really understand what any of this means.

Though publicly denied by Elon Musk, a new AI device from SpaceX wouldn't be very surprising.

AI is becoming an increasingly important tool for drug discovery. However, for many pharmaceutical and biotech companies, the challenge isn’t finding more powerful models. It’s getting existing models to work together with proprietary research data and computing infrastructure in a way that’s actually useful for scientists.

That is exactly the problem Databricks and Nvidia are trying to address with the new Genesis Workbench – an open-source blueprint for building AI applications in the life sciences. 

Rather than introducing a new model, the project combines enterprise data, Nvidia’s BioNeMo models and GPU infrastructure into a single environment designed to help researchers move from setting up AI workflows to using them.

In a Databricks blog post, the company described Genesis Workbench as “an open blueprint for a life-sciences application on Databricks – a modular workbench that brings the major stages of computational drug discovery under one roof, one UI, and one governance model.”

Drug discovery projects often combine multiple AI models with different components that all play a role in data-driven scientific research. These components may include internal research data, lab results and GPU resources. The problem is that these components frequently live in separate environments. This makes collaboration and reproducibility more difficult than they need to be.

The number of AI models available to researchers is only growing. That makes it even more important to have a way to manage them alongside proprietary data and existing research workflows.

(Credits:Databricks)

Genesis Workbench is Databricks’ attempt to change that. Instead of focusing on one part of the drug discovery process, it pulls together tools for genomics, single-cell analysis, protein engineering and small molecule design into a single environment where researchers can move between tasks more easily.

According to Databricks, “By centralizing both public and proprietary datasets with Databricks AI Search, we’ve entirely eliminated external API dependencies. Ultimately, this seamless setup connects every step of the process—allowing genomics findings to flow effortlessly into single-cell validation, target structure prediction, candidate docking, ADMET, and ranking.”

Databricks says the platform relies on open-source models managed through Unity Catalog, with MLflow tracking experiments and GPU-backed Model Serving handling inference. 

Nvidia contributes its BioNeMo Agent Toolkit along with technologies such as Parabricks and a growing portfolio of biology and chemistry models that can be incorporated into scientific workflows.

One of the platform’s distinguishing features is that it runs entirely inside a customer’s Databricks environment. That is important, because it allows organizations to keep sensitive research data within existing governance controls instead of sending it to third-party AI services.

There is also flexibility to scale as biological AI continues to evolve. New AI models will continue to emerge. Organizations can add or replace individual modules without rebuilding the broader research environment. 

Genesis Workbench also reflects a broader shift in how enterprise AI platforms are evolving. Much of the industry’s early focus centered on building larger and more capable foundation models. However, that is changing. At BigDatawire, we see vendors are increasingly focusing (and competing) on how well those models can be integrated with enterprise data and domain-specific workflows.

(DCStudio/Shutterstock)

Life sciences, including drug discovery research, present a particularly demanding environment as research spans multiple disciplines. This includes everything from genomics and structural biology to chemistry and clinical data, while also having to handle highly regulated and proprietary data. 

Building AI applications in this setting requires more than raw computing power. It also demands secure access to data and the flexibility to incorporate new models as the technology evolves.

For Databricks, Genesis Workbench is another example of the company pushing beyond analytics and further into AI applications built on the lakehouse. Nvidia, meanwhile, is using the project to put BioNeMo and its accelerated computing software at the center of enterprise drug discovery workflows instead of treating them as standalone research tools.

If researchers spend less time moving data, connecting models and configuring infrastructure, they have more time to focus on the science. That is what Nvidia and Databricks are trying to achieve with the Genesis Workbench.

The post Genesis Workbench Launched by Databricks and Nvidia appeared first on HPCwire.

• Fox averages 24.429 million; 9.1 million on Telemundo

• Outpaces averages of NBA Finals, Sunday Night Football

• Monday’s last-16 matchup sure to challenge record again

The US men’s national team’s dramatic win over Bosnia and Herzegovina in the World Cup on Wednesday drew a record television audience, according to preliminary reports released by Fox Sports and Telemundo.

The game had an average of 24.429 million viewers on Fox, making it the most-watched English-language soccer broadcast in US history, the broadcaster said. The Fox telecast peaked at 31.883 million. Telemundo, which holds the Spanish language rights to World Cup broadcasts in the US, reported 9.1 million viewers over the total game window.

The current president chatted with a life-sized AI version of the 26th US president at the new Theodore Roosevelt presidential library.

Former Fox News host further said he doesn’t ‘want to be a candidate’ for president and aired frustration with Trump

Tucker Carlson, the rightwing broadcaster, wants to help build a new political party in the United States, he said in an interview – though he gave scant detail about the party, and did not indicate whether he was referring to a concrete project or merely musing.

In the same interview, Carlson dismissed the idea of running for office as part of that new party. “I don’t want to be a candidate,” he said.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is reportedly in discussions with the White House over a government financing deal. It may not happen.

A spokesperson said the Kentucky Republican "continues to improve."

Liz Murrill accused of trying to intimidate officials who opposed GOP-enacted law to overhaul local courts

Louisiana’s Republican attorney general was indicted on Thursday on criminal charges by a grand jury in New Orleans, accused of trying to intimidate local officials who fought a law enacted by GOP legislators to overhaul the local courts.

Liz Murrill, the attorney general, told eight New Orleans officials, including Helena Moreno, the mayor, and Jason Williams, the district attorney, that they could face removal from their jobs because of their opposition to the law.

This week's guests include NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and former CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry.

Derrick Callella admitted he called and sent texts to Guthrie’s family, demanding a bitcoin transaction

A California man is facing up to two years in prison or a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to sending Nancy Guthrie’s family a phoney ransom note, federal authorities announced on Thursday.

Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the Today Show host Savannah Guthrie, was last seen on 31 January at her residence outside Tucson, Arizona. Inside the home, authorities observed her cellphone, medication and other basic essentials. Law enforcement officers also found drops of her blood near the porch.

USA at 250: Soft power, hard power and the future of the American dream Audio sseth.drupal@c… 2 July 2026

In this episode of Independent Thinking, Bronwen Maddox is joined by Laurel Rapp and Ambassador Tim Davis to discuss America’s international role and its domestic divisions as it approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.

The United States marks its 250th birthday at a moment of intense division and international uncertainty. At home, President Donald Trump is aggressively remodelling America’s governance around expanded White House power and burning through firewalls intended to prevent presidential overreach and self-enrichment. Internationally, his capricious mix of transactional diplomacy, coercive tariffs and naked hard power has left American allies shell-shocked – and opened the door for China to spread its influence.

Former US ambassador to Qatar Tim Davis joins host Bronwen Maddox and Laurel Rapp, director of our US and North America programme, to discuss the future of the United States in the world – and whether, for ordinary citizens, the American dream still exists.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

The company apparently expects to sell a lot of folding iPhones.

July 2, 2026 — The Building HPC Infrastructure and HPC Capacity for ASEAN Data Utilization Project, implemented under the Korea-ASEAN Digital Innovation Flagship (KADIF) program, reached a key milestone with the Opening Ceremony of the ASEAN-Korea High Performance Computing (HPC) Facility in Indonesia on June 18, 2026.

Credit: AKCF

Held in Jakarta, the opening ceremony brought together representatives from ASEAN, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), and key stakeholders from across the region, marking an important step in advancing regional digital infrastructure and cooperation.

Supported by the Government of the Republic of Korea through the ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund (AKCF), the project is a multi-year initiative running from 2024 to 2028 with a total budget of USD 10 million. It is implemented by KISTI in collaboration with BRIN.

“More than just a supercomputer, this facility is a strategic asset for ASEAN. Access to advanced computing capabilities will be essential in supporting innovation, digital transformation, and the region’s future economic competitiveness,” said H.E. Satvinder Singh, Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN for the ASEAN Economic Community.

Strengthening Regional Research and Innovation

The newly inaugurated HPC facility provides advanced computing capacity to support data-intensive research and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. With a theoretical peak performance of approximately 4.28 petaflops, the system can process massive datasets and enabling complex computations required for climate modeling, disaster risk reduction, healthcare innovation, industrial research, and next-generation AI development. It has also been nominated as a candidate for inclusion in the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Delivered to BRIN’s Soekarno Science and Technology Area (KST) Cibinong on 21 April 2026, the facility will be accessible to researchers and institutions across ASEAN, helping to address regional gaps in high-performance computing infrastructure and strengthening the foundations for a more integrated data ecosystem.

Building Human Capital for the Digital Economy

In addition to infrastructure development, the project places strong emphasis on capacity building and knowledge transfer. Through 2028, the project will deliver specialized training programs in HPC operations, data utilization, and AI applications. Around 160 local operations personnel are expected to benefit from these technical trainings, ensuring the sustainable management and long-term usability of the facility.

“We hope this facility will be widely utilized to support various initiatives and collaborations among ASEAN member states. The facility is open to researchers, scientists, industry players, policy analysts, and development planners across the region to innovate together,” stated Arif Satria, Chairman of BRIN.

This project reflects the shared commitment of Korea and ASEAN to advancing inclusive digital transformation. By combining world-class computing infrastructure, creation of ASEAN data utilization platform, and human resource development in data and AI, the initiative supports ASEAN’s efforts to build a more resilient, innovative, and competitive digital economy.

Source: AKCF

The post New ASEAN HPC Center Aims to Expand AI and Data Research Across Southeast Asia appeared first on HPCwire.

July 2, 2026 — AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C9g and C9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. C9g instances are compute-optimized and deliver up to 25% higher performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation C8g instances. They feature the fastest memory of any processor instance in the cloud, with DDR5 8800MT/s DIMMs, 5x more L3 cache, and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance compared to Graviton4-based instances. The faster memory and larger caches mean your workloads spend less time waiting on data, translating into higher throughput for in-memory analytics, faster agentic loops, and more responsive real-time applications.

Credit: Shutterstock

C9g instances are ideal for batch jobs, video encoding pipelines, or distributed analytics that can utilize Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage. It is also a natural fit for agentic AI workloads, where concurrent environments and CPU-bound reasoning steps benefit from Graviton5’s higher core count and larger caches. As AI shifts from answering questions to taking actions, running code, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, the demand for CPU compute is growing, and C9g instances are built for this shift.

Some workloads also need fast local storage alongside that compute power. Choose C9gd when your application benefits from high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage, for example scratch space during HPC simulations, temporary caches for ML inference, or local buffers for ad-serving engines.

Graviton5-based instances with NVMe instance store volumes also support detailed performance statistics, providing high-resolution I/O metrics, including latency histograms broken down by I/O size, up to 1-second granularity and accessible via Amazon CloudWatch or nvme-cli at no additional cost.

C9g and C9gd Instances at a Glance

C9g and C9gd instances are available in 11 sizes ranging from medium to 48xlarge, plus a bare metal option. They offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher EBS bandwidth on average across sizes compared to the previous generation, with the largest 48xlarge size delivering up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 72 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, a 2x increase.

C9gd instances add local NVMe SSD storage with up to 30% higher storage performance compared to previous-generation local storage instances.

Both families are well-suited for high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad serving.

Here are some additional capabilities:

• Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by up to 25%, helping you optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.
• ENA Express support for enhanced networking.
• Up to 128 EBS volumes can be attached to virtual instances.
• Support for Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

Nitro Isolation Engine

Security and isolation are foundational requirements for running workloads in the cloud. Within the Nitro System, the AWS Nitro Hypervisor is designed to isolate instances from each other as well as AWS operators. With C9g and C9gd instances the bar is being raised even further with the Nitro Isolation Engine, an enhancement to the Nitro System, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision.

C9g and C9gd instances are the first set of compute-optimized instance types to feature Nitro Isolation Engine, a purpose built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs.

To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see this technical white paper.

Now Available

Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances are now available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). Additional regions will follow.

Source: Sébastien Stormacq, AWS

The post Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd Instances Powered by AWS Graviton5 Processors Now Available appeared first on HPCwire.

The US unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in June largely because 720,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to 61.5%. Excluding the Covid-era jobs market, that's the lowest participation rate since June 1976. CNBC reports: The decline in the labor force marks a "massive exodus" driven by multiple factors, said Mike Reid, head of U.S. economics at RBC. "The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% as both the number of unemployed workers and the size of the labor force pulled back," Reid wrote in a post-report commentary. "This may well be a story of retirements but could also be a story of prior job seekers dropping out of the labor force." [...] [T]he rolls of those counted as not in the labor force, a group that includes the unemployed and those not looking for work, jumped by 832,000. And while the establishment survey, which counts jobs filled, showed growth for the month of 57,000, the survey of households, which counts the actual level of those working, tumbled by 507,000. On a year-over-year basis, the labor force is down by just over 1 million, while the level of the employed also has fallen by 1.06 million and the ranks of the unemployed have risen by 40,000. The employment-to-population ratio slipped to 59% in June, the lowest since October 2021. All that has happened while the unemployment rate has risen by just one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.2%. The drop in participation is sometimes attributed to a shrinking immigrant population and retiring baby boomers and Gen Xers. However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as "prime age" workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023. "Looking at the statistics now, that argument doesn't hold up so well," North said of the retirement and immigration rationale. "I hate to use the word 'alarming,'" he added, but said the numbers are cause for concern.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Massachusetts’ deadline to prosecute rape cases will no longer be one of the strictest in the nation under a bill Gov. Maura Healey pledged to sign into law.

State law currently bars nearly all rape prosecutions involving cases with adult victims after 15 years, making it difficult to charge someone after that deadline even in cases where new evidence is likely to lead to a conviction. The new law would ensure that if DNA is matched to a suspect after that 15-year window, prosecutors could file charges indefinitely. 

Healey pushed to revise the prosecution deadline for rape as part of her annual budget proposal in January. The move came after WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 other states allow more time to charge rapes or similar sexual assaults than Massachusetts. 

Many of those states extended their deadlines in recent decades as DNA technology helped solve old cases and as evidence mounted that police across the nation had failed to fully investigate rape cases.

Healey’s proposal survived the legislature’s monthslong budget process. She announced Wednesday that she’d sign the $63.4 billion budget and has until July 11 to approve it. It would go into effect as soon as it’s signed.

“Today, DNA evidence can provide new answers years later, and our laws should reflect that reality,” Healey said in a statement. “This change gives survivors another path to justice while helping law enforcement hold violent offenders accountable.”

Prosecutors must still file charges within the existing 15-year deadline if a match is made within that timeframe, as they were required to under the old law. The new law could open the door to prosecution for cases for which the statute of limitations has not yet passed. 

In Massachusetts, legislators have tried unsuccessfully to change the rape statute of limitations every session since 2011, WBUR found. Defense attorneys opposed those bills, saying a longer deadline risked violating the rights of the accused.

Read more

DNA Finally Tied a Man to Her Rape. It Didn’t Matter.

Rape survivors have worked with state Rep. Adam Scanlon, a Democrat, for the last five years to create a DNA exception, he said. They joined the effort because they were frustrated that they could no longer pursue justice after the deadline, even when new evidence emerged.  

 ”It gives them hope in the future to ensure that no one has to suffer the same indignities,” Scanlon said, adding, “This was a long process driven by survivors.” 

Some survivors whose cases were too old to be prosecuted pushed for the change. One of them was Louise, who was the focus of WBUR and ProPublica’s investigation. WBUR doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault without their permission and agreed to identify Louise only by her middle name.

In October 2005, she was raped and repeatedly stabbed by a man who gave her a ride in Boston, according to police and court records. Seventeen years later, a DNA match identified an area man as a suspect. 

DNA evidence also linked that suspect to another rape. Suffolk County prosecutors charged the man in both cases in 2022, but had to drop the cases because the statute of limitations had expired. He maintained his innocence. Had this law been enacted a few years ago, Louise could have seen the suspect in her case face trial.

“It really was devastating,” Louise said. “ I never fathomed that time lapsing would be an issue.” 

Louise testified before state legislators in support of the DNA exception after her interview with WBUR. She said she’s relieved it will become law.   

“It’s nice to have the government move in the right direction, which builds a sense of trust, a sense of safety — and justice,” Louise said.

The post Massachusetts Set to Extend Statute of Limitations for Rape Cases With DNA Evidence appeared first on ProPublica.

Two of the biggest US carriers are battling for your business. We run down all the specs and features of their plans.

Grigor Dimitrov claimed an emotional win against the 15th seed; Alexander Zverev, Iga Swiatek and Elena Rybakina advanced; while three of the four remaining Brits departed

At 4-3 in the second, Shnaider makes 0-40, Sansonova saving the first break point with a forehand ushered to the corner and the second with a serve out wide and clean-up. But when a return, thudded flat and close to the baseline, arrives, the response falls long, and the French Open semi-finalist will now serve for a decider at 4-6 5-3.

We get going on No1 at 1pm BST, 1.30pm on Centre, but before that, we’ve close matches on 12 and 18. Samsonova is still holding her own against Shanider, who beat Sabalenka – admittedly with help from Sabalenka herself – on her way to the semis at Roland Garros, leading 6-4 3-3 and refusing to wilt though her opponent has improved. And Fery – who our commentators reckon has the ability to break the top 20 – trails Virtanen 5-7 4-4. Back with our hidings, though, De Minaur has just served out a 6-2 set to lead Mannarino 2-0.

Dozens were injured overnight in Kyiv during an attack that caused fires and explosions throughout the city.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 3 No. 1,118.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 3, No. 1,840.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 3 No. 852.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce donated to 20 local and national charities ahead of their wedding Friday.

David Hearn is accused of ripping out a piece of sealant on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool on June 19, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said.

Canoeist David Hearn was arrested in June after touching a peeling piece of liner in the pool from renovation project

David Hearn, a three-time US Olympian and canoeist, has been indicted by a grand jury in Washington DC after Donald Trump blamed vandals for damaging Washington’s reflecting pool following a $14.7m renovation project.

The ‌indictment accuses Hearn, 67, ‌of “maliciously” breaking or destroying lining material on the bottom of the reflecting pool on 19 June. Lawyers for Hearn denied ‌the allegations following his arrest, accusing the ​Trump administration of treating ordinary conduct as criminal.

Sysdig says it has documented the first ransomware attack carried out end to end by an AI agent, which autonomously exploited exposed systems, stole credentials, established persistence, compromised a production database, and destroyed data. The research team named the attacker "JadePuffer" and said it gained initial access to an internet-facing Langflow instance by exploiting CVE-2025-3248. "The most striking characteristic, however, was the LLM's behavior," Sysdig director of threat research Michael Clark said in a blog post. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from The Register: JadePuffer's "self-narrating" payloads "contained natural language reasoning, target prioritization, and the kind of detailed annotations that human operators don't often write but LLM-generated code produces reflexively," Clark added. "The operation also adapted in real time, retrying failed steps within refined parameters. In one sequence, it went from a failed login to a working fix in 31 seconds." After exploiting CVE-2025-3248, a missing authentication vulnerability in Langflow that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary Python on the host, the AI agent began scanning for and collecting secrets, including LLM provider API keys, cloud credentials "with explicit coverage of Chinese providers" including Alibaba, Aliyun, Tencent, and Huawei, while also scanning for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, cryptocurrency wallets, and database credentials. The AI also installed a crontab entry on the Langflow server to maintain persistence and call back to the attacker's infrastructure every 30 minutes. JadePuffer's intended target was a separate internet-exposed production server running a MySQL database and an Alibaba Nacos configuration service, we're told. Nacos is an open-source service-discovery and dynamic configuration platform developed by Alibaba and used in the cloud provider's microservices applications. The agent connected to the server's exposed MySQL port using root credentials, although Sysdig doesn't know how the attacker obtained them. These credentials weren't stolen from the victim's environment. JadePuffer then attacked Nacos via multiple vectors including an authorization bypass flaw (CVE-2021-29441) and forging a valid JSON web token (JWT) using Nacos's default signing key. Additionally, using its root database access, the LLM injected a backdoor administrator into the Nacos backing database. It ultimately encrypted all 1,342 Nacos service configuration items using MySQL's built-in AES encryption function, and created an extortion demand, ransom note, Bitcoin payment address, and a Proton Mail contact [...]. However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can't recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated "from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale," without backing up any of the encrypted data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify said the streams tied to Malcolm Todd's "Earrings" were not from genuine listeners after suspicious betting activity emerged on Kalshi.

Makerfield MP said he would consider reducing business rates as part of a package that could also include freeze on private rents

Andy Burnham promised to ease the cost of living if he becomes prime minister in his first interview since returning to parliament.

The Makerfield MP told LBC that if he became prime minister later this month, as expected, he would look at reducing business rates for some high street businesses, bringing down water and energy costs by de-privatising companies and making bus travel free for 16- to 18-year-olds.

The Washington, D.C., fireworks show, which is sponsored by the Trump-backed organization Freedom 250, is not slated to begin until 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m.

Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has centered healthcare in his campaign, championing Medicare for All and critiquing his opponents, both Democratic and Republican, on the issue. 

El-Sayed, a Democrat and former public health official, has accused former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, the sole Republican candidate in the Aug. 4 primary election, of being influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. 

In multiple interviews and recent social media posts, El-Sayed said Rogers "took a $14 million payout as a pharma lobbyist." 

Federal and Michigan records do not show Rogers ever working as a registered lobbyist for any company, including pharmaceuticals. We found no record that he worked in the pharmaceutical industry after leaving Congress.

Rogers did paid consulting work for technology companies after leaving Congress. His net worth may have increased by more than $14 million since then, but no single reported payment or group of payments match that amount.

Rogers’ campaign sent El-Sayed a June 22 cease and desist letter, demanding that El-Sayed stop referring to Rogers as a "pharma lobbyist" and stop claiming he received a $14 million payout from the pharmaceutical industry. The letter said El-Sayed’s statements "constitute defamation under Michigan law." 

"Team Rogers put Abdul on notice for lying to Michigan voters about Mike’s background," Rogers campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said in a statement to PolitiFact.

In response to the letter, El-Sayed partially walked back the statement, saying Rogers is not a pharmaceutical lobbyist in a tongue-in-cheek social media video. 

"My mistake, he just spent so much time in Congress helping the pharmaceutical industry that I thought he was a pharma lobbyist … When I say Mike Rogers, do not think of a pharma lobbyist. When I say pharma lobbyist, do not think of a Mike Rogers," El-Sayed said in the video. 

When we asked El-Sayed’s campaign if he still stands by his statements that Rogers was a pharmaceutical lobbyist, the campaign pointed us to its June 22 statement responding to Rogers’ cease and desist, saying Rogers put "Big Pharma over the people he served." The statement did not say that Rogers is a pharmaceutical lobbyist.

Rogers’ career after Congress

Rogers represented Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2015. After leaving office, Rogers worked as a consultant and served on boards for telecommunications and cybersecurity companies including AT&T, Nokia and Telefónica. He also served on nonprofit boards related to national security and was a CNN host and commentator.

Rogers’ financial disclosures from his 2024 Senate campaign and the current campaign don’t include any work for pharmaceutical companies. Consulting is distinct from lobbying, said Michael Beckel, the director of money in politics reform at Issue One, which seeks to reduce the role of money in politics.

Consultants advise clients on navigating issues, Beckel said, while lobbyists advocate for specific legislation and regulations.

"Both consulting and lobbying are part of Washington's influence industry, but consultants and strategic advisors are generally not required to register as lobbyists unless they meet the formal definition of being a lobbyist," he said. 

Those rules are governed by the Lobbying Disclosure Act. To meet the federal definition of a lobbyist, people must be paid by clients, spend at least 20% of their time engaged in lobbying activities, and make at least two contacts with a covered federal official seeking to influence policy. 

Rogers’ cease and desist letter said he never met those definitions under federal or Michigan law.

Rogers received a $30,000 payment from the lobbying firm CGCN Group before his 2024 Senate run, according to a financial disclosure. The firm represented more than 50 clients in 2022 and 2023, including drug companies and medical tech companies. 

Rogers campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said Rogers worked for the strategic communications side of the business, not the lobbying side, and advised on telecommunications issues. It’s not uncommon for lobbying firms to employ people who aren’t lobbyists, Beckel said, though they may still work to influence government decisions.  

"Accusing someone of earning a particular amount of money for paid lobbying work is a very specific criticism," Beckel said.

El-Sayed’s more recent statements have focused on contributions Rogers received while in office from pharmaceutical political action committees. Donations to a candidate’s campaign aren’t the same as lobbying, and they’re not personal payments to the candidate.

Political action committees tied to the pharmaceutical industry donated tens of thousands of dollars to Rogers’ campaign each cycle from 2004 to 2014, according to OpenSecrets. It was the No. 1 industry donor in PAC contributions in 2008 and 2014. In his current Senate campaign, Rogers has received $2,000 from pharmaceutical company PACs. 

$14 million payout description is distorted

Although Rogers became significantly more wealthy after leaving office in 2015, El-Sayed’s narrative is a major misrepresentation of the financial picture. 

When Rogers left office in 2015, he had non-property assets between $415,600 and $605,600, according to his financial disclosure. Business Insider estimated his net worth at between $800,000 and $1.7 million when combining his property values and liabilities. Rogers’ 2025 financial disclosure reported assets held by him and his wife valued between $6.7 million and $13.5 million and no debt. Combined with assessed property values of his homes in Michigan, Virginia and Florida, his net worth is estimated between $10.1 million and $16.9 million.

We don’t know every payment he received for the last 10 years, but his recent financial disclosures cover income between 2022 and 2025. The 2023 report includes more than $1 million in payments for corporate advising and consulting. Some of those positions he’s held since shortly after leaving Congress, and any payments before 2022 aren’t included in the disclosures. Investment and property value growth also account for part of the increase over the last decade. 

Rogers also owns homes that aren’t included in those financial reports. A 2024 research memo from the Democratic group Defend the Senate said Rogers owned homes in Michigan, Virginia and Florida, with assessed values totaling $3.2 million, according to property records. In 2015, Rogers owned the Virginia home and a home in Maryland, worth a combined $1.8 million. 

Taking the investments and property together, it’s plausible that Rogers’ net worth has increased by more than $14 million since he left office. The growth between the mid-point estimates is around $12.3 million. But that does not prove a specific "payout" for lobbying for pharmaceutical companies.

Our ruling 

El-Sayed said Rogers "took a $14 million payout as a pharma lobbyist." 

The statement mislabels Rogers’ post-Congress consulting as lobbying and offers a mangled interpretation of his net-worth growth, all while inserting a pharma connection that doesn’t exist. 

Rogers never worked as a lobbyist and we found no record he ever advised or worked for pharmaceutical companies after leaving Congress. His wealth has increased substantially since leaving office, but not tied to any payment from pharmaceutical companies.

El-Sayed offered no evidence to support the statement.

We rate the statement Pants on Fire!

The Godot Foundation will stop accepting AI-authored code, agent-submitted pull requests, and AI-generated text in contributor communications after maintainers were overwhelmed by low-effort submissions. "It is time for us to recognize that these problems aren't going away and therefore we need to take steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while ensuring we still have a pipeline to mentor new contributors to become future maintainers," the Godot Foundation said in a blog post. Contributors may still use AI for limited "menial things" if they disclose it, but humans must understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit. PC Gamer reports: The Foundation says the pileup of Godot pull requests pending review isn't all bad: It's a sign that interest in using and contribution to Godot is increasing. But the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests. "If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review," the Foundation said. As the problem becomes increasingly unsustainable, the Godot Foundation says it's in the process of updating its contribution policies, focusing on "adding barriers to low-effort slop" contributions, encouraging maintainers to review code, developing new contributors into future maintainers, and crucially, requiring that all contributions come from humans who are accountable for their code -- and fixing it if it fails. "AI cannot take responsibility, and we can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it," the Foundation said. The Foundation says we can expect Godot's contributing policy to soon include explicit rejections of AI-authored code, noting that contributors should only use AI assistance for "menial things" and must disclose its use. Additionally, the Foundation will reject any AI-generated text in human-to-human communications, saying it's "a basic principle of respect" -- though it says machine translations "are still acceptable" if the original text was human-authored. "Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available," the Foundation said. "We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Utz Quality Foods voluntarily recalled select varieties of potato chips due to potential salmonella contamination in the seasoning powder.

Exclusive: Findings cast doubt on Keir Starmer’s claims that reallocation of funds to MoD will boost British jobs

Keir Starmer’s decision to cut billions of pounds of infrastructure spending to pay for more defence equipment will end up costing the UK 10,000 jobs, according to an analysis of the government’s own figures.

The prime minister announced this week he was putting an extra £15bn into defence investment to revamp the country’s armed forces and boost British manufacturing.

The president made $2.2bn last year, with plenty of help from his own political decisions. This is called corruption, folks

• People in the US: share your views on Trump’s earnings in his second term

In financial disclosures released on Tuesday, Trump reported earning more than $1bn last year from his several cryptocurrency ventures.

All told – including other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets – Trump made at least $2.2bn last year, as opposed to the roughly $622m his businesses raked in in 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

Google owes 4.1 billion euro ($4.7 billion) for anticompetitive practices involving Android, rules Europe's top court.

CAMPBELL, Calif., July 2, 2026 — OXMIQ Labs Inc., a unified GPU and AI architecture company founded by Raja Koduri, has closed its $35 million Series A financing, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $60 million. The funding will scale OxCore, OXMIQ’s licensable GPU architecture that allows semiconductor companies and AI system builders to build custom AI silicon without a full chip program.

The round was co-led by Fundomo and Samsung Catalyst Fund, with participation from MediaTek, AM Intelligence Labs, Pegatron Venture Capital, CDIB-TEN, Darwin Ventures, and Morgan Creek Digital, among other financial and strategic investors. OXMIQ’s expertise spans the full AI stack, from renewable power and data center infrastructure to silicon IP, electron-to-token machines (ETMs), along with the software that runs AI factories and agents.

One Core, Three Engines

Token demand is outpacing the world’s ability to build infrastructure to serve it. OXMIQ was founded to re-architect the GPU stack from Atoms to Agents, building the silicon IP, configurable systems and software platform that enable semiconductor companies and AI infrastructure builders to drive down the cost of intelligence at every layer of the stack.

At the center of the architecture is OxCore, a scalable, licensable GPU core that integrates three distinct compute engines: a CUDA-compatible GPU engine, a tensor processing engine, and an orchestration engine (CPU) responsible for coordinating workloads and agents across the system. OxCore tightly couples compute functionality that is typically split across three chips, and was purpose-built for near-memory compute, minimizing data movement to enhance compute and energy efficiency of AI workloads. OxCore was designed for scalability and the architecture scales efficiently from single-core AI deployments to large-scale datacenter configurations. OxCore is running on FPGA today, with live demonstrations available.

OxQuilt, OXMIQ’s chiplet integration architecture, combines heterogeneous compute chiplets and memory in a single package. Most AI silicon designs are locked to a specific foundry and memory type. OxQuilt instead adapts to any supply chain, with configuration tools that let customers design across logic process nodes, memory types, interconnect standards, and advanced packaging options. By making high-performance AI compute licensable and configurable, OXMIQ lets any design team build custom AI silicon packages without needing cost-prohibitive full chip programs. The architecture is also designed to incorporate emerging interconnect technologies such as silicon photonics as they reach production readiness.

OXMIQ pairs the hardware with a software stack spanning OxCapsule for high-level orchestration to low-level kernel optimization. OxPython runs existing CUDA and PyTorch code on OxCore without code changes, giving developers full portability across hardware. This stack supports emerging silicon architectures for optimized inference at scale and delivers day-zero support for new models. OxPython has been validated on third-party platforms with live demos available.

OXMIQ’s IP-first model is built for capital efficiency. By focusing on new architecture IP rather than full SoC development, the company generates revenue from customer engagements while preserving capital for building the stack.

“We are very excited to co-lead OXMIQ’s financing round and back Raja Koduri and the strong team at OXMIQ,” said David (Dede) Goldschmidt, SVP & Managing Director, Head of the Samsung Catalyst Fund.“OXMIQ’s novel AI core and software platform enable heterogeneous compute for efficient, custom inference solutions serving large-scale agentic workloads.”

“Raja has built silicon at every layer of the stack, and he knows exactly where the constraints sit. Most compute IP makes the customer bend their memory, packaging, and foundry around the chip. OXMIQ does the opposite, and that flips a cost center into leverage. We backed this team because they will define how AI compute gets built this decade,” said Rajeev Surati, Partner at Fundomo.

An Expanding Team

OXMIQ has strengthened its board and advisory ranks with two additions that bring decades of silicon pedigree. Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and among the most influential chip architects in the industry, joins the board of directors alongside existing board member Dr. Ker Zhang. Dr. Valluri (Bob) Rao, a renowned Fellow who retired from Intel’s process technology group, joins as an advisor. Together, they deepen OXMIQ’s leadership as the company moves from architecture to customer integration.

“I am excited to join the OXMIQ board. Raja and this team are creating an open GPU architecture, a much-needed step toward removing the artificial boundaries around AI innovation. As the industry concentrates around a few incumbents, this is more important than ever. OXMIQ’s open, configurable foundation, which developers can build on and own, is exactly where compute should be heading,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and OXMIQ board member.

Raja Koduri, OXMIQ founder and CEO, added: “A licensable core with an open architecture means design teams everywhere can build the custom AI silicon their work needs. Today, state-of-the-art AI reaches most people through a handful of channels, and the cost of the compute underneath is the reason. Bring that cost down, and you widen who gets to build with it. I believe AI is a force for good when it is a tool everyone can pick up and use, not just the few who can afford to build with it. Closing this round with investors who own the supply chain tells us we can get there.”

About OXMIQ Labs

OXMIQ Labs is a GPU and AI architecture company with expertise spanning every layer of the AI stack, from renewable energy and data center infrastructure to silicon IP, electron-to-token machines, and cloud software for AI factories and agents. OXMIQ develops licensable compute IP and adaptive AI infrastructure software. The OXMIQ stack, OxCore, OxQuilt, OxPython and OxCapsule, enables semiconductor companies, neoclouds, and AI system builders to develop and deploy custom AI compute across the full spectrum of AI applications. The company’s mission is to re-architect the GPU stack: from Atoms to Agents, making high-performance AI compute available, affordable, and within reach of design teams and builders who need it. Founded by Raja Koduri, OXMIQ is headquartered in Campbell, California, with a development site in Hyderabad, India. Learn more at oxmiq.ai.

Source: Intel Capital

The post OXMIQ Raises $35M to Scale OxCore Architecture appeared first on HPCwire.

Meta is introducing a subscription for expanded access to advanced smart-glasses features. According to Wired, "[U]sers will need the Meta One Premium Plan to unlock expanded access to some features for their smart glasses, whether it's the Ray-Ban, Oakley, or Meta-branded version." They'll still be usable with a subscription, but "certain features will be limited," the report says. From the report: Specifically, a feature called Conversation Focus, which boosts the audio of the person you're speaking with so you can hear them better in loud environments. You'll get three hours per month without a subscription, but if you want to use it more often, then you'll need to pay up. Though even then, you're still capped at 15 hours. Subscribing also nets you "Premium Device Support," where you'll get faster access to what Meta says are "human experts" trained on the smart glasses' features, should any problems arise. Guess humans are better at some things after all. A Meta spokesperson tells WIRED that this is "not an AI rate limit." Rate limits are common on other AI platforms -- users get free access to a feature until they hit a certain cap, then they'll need to subscribe to use it more until the limit resets at the end of the month. However, the Conversation Focus feature runs on-device, meaning it doesn't need to head to Meta's servers for AI processing. There's no real-time way to monitor how many hours you've used Conversation Focus, but you'll receive a notification when you get near the limit. "The subscription supports that ongoing work and gives power users expanded access along with premium device support," the spokesperson says. "We're going to start testing new optional subscription plans that offer more premium features and advanced capabilities for those who want to unlock more from our apps and AI glasses."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine's capital, killing at least 21 people and prompting President Zelenskyy to call for sped-up weapons support from his partners.

NEC told it must take steps to address fears – including not hiring Everton stadium to announce new leader before nominations even open

Labour chiefs have been warned they must placate disgruntled Labour members who are angry at the lack of party democracy because Andy Burnham is not expected to face a challenge to become Labour leader.

MPs have told the party there are growing complaints from members about the lack of involvement from members if Burnham does not face a leadership contest from any other MP.

Study suggests even light activity such as ironing could reduce health risks linked to prolonged sedentary behaviour

Sitting for longer than half an hour at a time each day raises the risk of dying from cancer, a study suggests.

Researchers who tracked more than 90,000 people over a decade found that sitting or lying down while awake for more than 30 minutes in one period each day was associated with an increased risk of cancer death. The risk increases for every additional hour of continuous inactivity, the findings suggest.

Have a CD account with a July 2026 maturity date? Here are three things to avoid doing before that point.

No matter what you're looking for in a 3D printer, we've found the best around in 2026.

Culture secretary says her department will stop using platform, citing concerns over far-right content fuelling violence and division

The UK’s culture and media department will stop using X because the site “now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate”, Lisa Nandy has announced.

The culture secretary’s department is the UK’s second to quit the Elon Musk-owned platform over increasing concerns about the way it highlights and prioritises often inaccurate far-right and racist content and is used to incite violence and division.

Interest earnings on a CD of this size and length will be substantial, but that's not the only advantage for savers.

Couple pledges millions to children’s hospitals, food banks and educational programs in advance of their big day

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are donating $26m to charities in advance of their rumored wedding at New York’s Madison Square Garden this weekend, a representative for the couple has confirmed to the Guardian.

The 20 named charities include organizations in meaningful locations to the couple such as Nashville (where Swift got her start in music), Kansas City (the home of Kelce’s Chiefs NFL team) and New York City, where Swift and Kelce’s wedding is reported to take place.

The FBI is asking for analysts to help evaluate thousands of records for a "priority" investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel.

Security guard Hernán Alberto Gil Flores, 43, initially told rescuers not to tell his wife in case he did not survive

A 43-year-old security guard who survived last week’s devastating earthquakes in Venezuela thanks to a pocket of air in his workstation cabin has been pulled from the collapsed basement of a shopping centre amid huge cheers from international rescue teams.

Hernán Alberto Gil Flores had been trapped for eight days under the rubble of the Galerías Playa Grande in the hard-hit coastal port city of La Guaira since the back-to-back quakes struck.

Yorgen Fenech said to have spent €400,000 on fees for men convicted of car bombing that killed investigative journalist

A businessman accused of commissioning the murder of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent more than €400,000 (£343,000) on legal fees for the hitmen convicted of her killing, prosecutors claim.

Yorgen Fenech, the 44-year-old heir to one of Malta’s largest fortunes, arrived in court for the second day of his trial on Thursday in an unmarked armoured police vehicle. He is on house arrest having pledged a record bail estimated at €50m.

The White House declined to say how much President Trump paid in taxes on his crypto windfall.

The latest news and reaction on day 22 of the tournament after England set up a last-16 clash with Mexico

And I appreciate all this has been forgotten because England won but Harry Kane should have been awarded a first-half penalty. When a goalkeeper slides and does not get the ball, of course the forward is going to take the contact. Kane is just being punished for being as clever as the officials desire.

Maurico Pochettino was rather unhappy with Folarin Balogun’s dismissal. The striker painfully caught the Bosnia and Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemovic on the ankle but it was a complete accident with two players going for the ball.

Raw performance has long been the benchmark for success in HPC. However, as AI and exascale systems grow larger, power is becoming just as important as speed. Today, it’s not just about building faster supercomputers – it’s also about energy efficiency. 

The growing emphasis on energy efficiency is reflected in the latest Green500 rankings, announced alongside the TOP500 list at ISC 2026.

China’s LineShine claimed the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer. KAIROS, ROMEO, and Levante GPU extension systems at DKRZ successfully defended the top three spots on the Green500. This reinforces Europe’s leadership in energy-efficient HPC.

The Green500 has historically seen more turnover than the TOP500 list, where the arrival of a single flagship system can dramatically reshape the rankings. 

One reason for this is that vendors continually work on extracting more performance from watts of electricity. This could come from refined processor architectures and new system designs. 

Also, with the latest advances in cooling technologies and interconnects, you might expect the rankings to change from the last release in November 2025. However, none of the top 10 systems were displaced. This suggests that the current leaders continue to set a formidable benchmark for energy-efficient supercomputing.

Commenting on the stability of the Green500, Erich Strohmaier, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-founder of the TOP500 rankings, said “I think it has never happened in the Green500 that the top ten has not changed because the Green500 is about technology, not about size… Not just the top three stayed the same. Actually, the whole top ten in the Green500 did not change.”

KAIROS offers an energy efficiency of 73.28 Gigaflops/Watt and achieved 3.046 Petaflop/s on the HPL benchmark. ROMEO performed at an HPL benchmark of 9.863 Petaflop/s with an efficiency of 70.91 Gigaflops/Watt. The Levante GPU extension achieved 6.747 Petaflop/s HPL performance and an efficiency of 69.43 Gigaflops/Watt.

The top three systems all have a degree of architectural consistency. The top ranked KAIROS, operated by CALMIP at the University of Toulouse, and the No. 2 ranked ROMEO at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne are both built by Eviden on its BullSequana XH3000 platform and powered by NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. 

Germany’s third-ranked Levante GPU Extension follows a similar approach, pairing HPE Cray EX infrastructure with NVIDIA Grace Hopper processors.

Achieving leadership in performance per watt requires more than just a single breakthrough technology – it needs optimizing every layer of the system. 

The top three systems serve different institutions and workloads, but they share many of the same engineering principles: Tightly integrated CPU-GPU architectures, high-bandwidth memory, direct liquid cooling, and optimized software stacks. 

The growing emphasis on performance per watt also reflects broader changes taking place across the HPC industry. There is no doubt that AI training, inference, and large-scale scientific simulations are driving demand for ever-larger computing systems, however, power has become one of the industry’s most significant constraints. 

Building the next generation of supercomputers is no longer simply a matter of adding more processors or accelerators—it also requires sufficient electrical capacity, cooling infrastructure, and operating budgets.

(Matveev Aleksandr/Shutterstock)

As a result, energy efficiency has moved well beyond being a benchmark statistic. Performance per watt is increasingly shaping procurement decisions, system architecture, and long-term operating costs. The Green500, once viewed primarily as a companion to the TOP500, is becoming an increasingly important indicator of how future leadership-class systems will be designed.

Nvidia also pointed to the growing role of accelerated computing in HPC, writing in a blog accompanying the latest rankings that “accelerated computing is becoming the foundation for the systems taking on the world’s most demanding work, across AI and science.” The latest Green500 appears to support that observation, with Grace Hopper-based systems occupying several of the top positions.

The TOP500 will remain the industry’s definitive measure of raw computing performance, but the Green500 is emerging as an important indicator of how those systems are built and evaluated. 

As large-scale scientific workloads continue to grow, simply adding more processors or accelerators is no longer enough. Future systems will also need to make better use of available power and cooling resources. 

The post Green500 Shows Performance per Watt Is Becoming HPC’s New Arms Race appeared first on HPCwire.

NCA says offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships

Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.

The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.

The Other Lobby

Regime change in Venezuela; a punishing siege of Cuba; election meddling in Honduras, Argentina, and Colombia; economic sabotage and terrorist designations in Brazil; boots-on-the-ground militarism, knife-to-the-throat death squads, and torture in Ecuador; lawfare, psy-ops, and CIA kill teams in Mexico; mass deportations and support for a gulag state in El Salvador; a deadly crackdown on protesters in Bolivia; and outright murder in the Caribbean and Pacific — a year and a half into his second term, President Donald Trump has deployed, with significant success, the full range of U.S. hard power on Latin America.

Even as the White House has proved reckless and self-defeating in Iran, it has maintained a menacing, disciplined focus on Latin America. The siege of Cuba and informal annexation of Venezuela are the centerpieces of this program, but there’s not one country, except perhaps Uruguay, where Washington isn’t in deep. The State Department was even micromanaging the recent Colombian elections, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approving the deportation of Beto Coral, a Colombian national who lives in Texas, because he has been critical of Trump’s preferred candidate.

The extent of this power projection is impressive, even if the power asymmetries make operations in Latin America easy compared to the Middle East. You can pressure Ecuador with a gang designation and $20 million in security aid and get results. You can’t do that with Iran.

But asymmetry alone doesn’t explain the Trump administration’s overwhelming focus on Latin America. Florida, to a large degree, does. A narrow, wealthy Latin American diaspora geographically concentrated in the greater Miami area has captured U.S. hemispheric policy — not through persuasion or broad public support, but through the state’s electoral math and alliance with the Republican Party. This informal lobby represents a Latin American propertied class who fancy themselves dispossessed, who imagine their interests threatened by the mildest of democratic reforms. The members of this class see Trump and Rubio as their personal repo men. 

The Cause

Florida’s outsized role in U.S. politics begins with the backlash to Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Those who fled Fidel Castro’s socialist government in its early days overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes. They turned the peninsula into a sanctuary state. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion — the CIA’s 1961 bid to use exiles as an expeditionary force to invade Cuba and dislodge Castro — the more ideological of these agency-trained exiles continued to populate the counterinsurgent gothic. These Cuban emigres allied with rogue elements in the CIA and FBI, Colombian drug traffickers, and mafiosi to advance “The Cause,” as the novelist James Ellroy calls efforts to liberate Cuba through the violent overthrow of Castro’s government.

Cuban exiles, drawn into covert operations and the ranks of the then-fringe U.S. New Right, would go on to participate in many of the storied black-bag operations that defined the middle to late Cold War: the conspiracies surrounding JFK’s assassination (as the House Select Committee on Assassinations put it in 1979: “anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination, but the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved in the assassination) and the execution of revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, led by Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA operative Félix Rodríguez, who then went to Vietnam to train the death squads of the Phoenix Program. Other Bay of Pigs alumni flew CIA combat missions over the Congo strafing Simba rebels and carried out the Nixon White House’s Watergate break-in and the Iran–Contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold weapons to embargoed Iran and diverted the illegal profits to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, directly violating a congressional ban.

The Cold War ended but the Cause continued. In 2000, the notorious Republican operative Roger Stone recruited Cuban American protesters for the infamous Brooks Brothers riot — the mob action that shut down the Miami-Dade recount of presidential ballots and handed George W. Bush the White House — by instrumentalizing exile grievance through Cuban radio broadcasts. “The idea we were putting out there,” Stone later said, “was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.”

Drug profits financed many of these operations. “Every major area of operation in which the CIA has worked has left behind a major functioning drug cartel,” as CIA operative-turned-whistleblower John Stockwell put it. So too the Western Hemisphere with the Cubans. The beginning of the modern cocaine trade “had developed largely under the control of exile Cuban criminal organizations based in Miami,” Bruce Bagley, an expert on Latin American drug trafficking, observed in Foreign Affairs.

By the late 1970s, Miami prospered, even as the rest of the country was suffering from a prolonged economic downturn, high unemployment, and urban decay. Laundered cocaine money in effect provided Miami a covert Keynesian stimulus, a massive injection of cash into construction, retail, banking, and services at the exact moment the U.S. government was abandoning such policies as inflationary. While nearly every other Federal Reserve district was running a deficit, the vault of Miami’s Fed was stuffed with a $5 billion surplus made up of manicured bundles of $50 and $100 bills, evidence of large cash transactions conducted outside normal financial channels. Real estate boomed. Employment boomed. Car dealerships, paid in cash, boomed. Buildings went up, the city’s traditional pastel stucco and red tiles giving way to glass, glitz, and gleam.

Cuban Americans came to dominate Miami’s independent banking sector. Continental National Bank, the first Cuban American-owned bank in the United States, was founded in 1974 by exile Carlos Dascal in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Typical of the small Latin American-owned banks that proliferated in this period, Continental went from $12 million in annual deposits in the mid-1970s to over $600 million by 1980 — a dramatic illustration of the narco-dollars flooding Miami’s banking system.

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It was a wild time in Miami’s exile community. Cocaine and covert ops were a dangerous mix. No two figures better embodied the era than Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch — both CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veterans, both connected to the New Orleans mob and the drug trade. Together, they founded the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, or CORU, which the FBI described as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization” that served as a subcontractor for Operation Condor, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s hemisphere-wide assassination program. In 1976, Cuban CORU operatives planted the car bomb that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt in Sheridan Circle in Washington — the first case of state-sponsored international terrorism in the nation’s capital. Posada and Bosch also carried out the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard, including the Cuban national fencing team, soon after.

Democracy Promotion in Hialeah

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential election victory changed the calculus. His advisors were hard-line: the New Right had moved from the fringe to the halls of power. Cocaine continued to finance Miami, but the off-the-books exiles had become a liability. The historian Alan McPherson writes that by the mid-1970s, Cuban exile militants had carried out, in addition to the attacks described above, more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil and in 1974 accounted for 45 percent of all terrorist bombings in the world. The Reagan White House didn’t want to dim exile passion, but it also didn’t want planes being shot down over the Caribbean and bombs exploding in Sheridan Circle. And so mercenaries were out, and lobbyists were in.

Reagan’s national security adviser Richard Allen worked with Jorge Mas Canosa, who had left Cuba in 1960, to create the Cuban American National Foundation, or CANF. Allen explicitly modeled CANF on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC — telling fellow Cubans to study the Israeli lobby and replicate its methods, as documented by political scientists Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush. The goal was not just to sideline terrorists like Posada and Bosch but to marginalize more moderate perspectives within the Cuban American community who wanted some accommodation with the Cuban government. Reagan needed a respectable political vehicle for hard-line Cuba policy that could operate in the open. That was CANF.

Note the self-reinforcing loop: The Reagan White House organized the creation of a lobbying group to lobby itself for policies it already wanted to pursue, generating the appearance of popular democratic pressure for what was in fact long-standing government hostility toward the Cuban Revolution.

Mas Canosa put his own personalistic imprint on the AIPAC model. He combined, as Saul Landau put it, the style of an “old-style political ward boss” — getting himself and his allies appointed to local utility, road, and electoral commissions; awarding contracts; doing incoming immigrants favors; finding them jobs and housing — “with the pragmatic lobbying techniques” of AIPAC, cultivating congressional allies to enforce and strengthen the Cuba sanctions. His anti-Castro ideology was both genuine and lucrative: a Cuba opened to U.S. capital would be an enormous prize, and he and his inner circle would be best positioned to seize it.

In 1989, CANF won its first congressional seat, when Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen defeated her Democratic opponent to succeed Claude Pepper, the New Deal lion who had championed labor, Medicare, and Social Security from the same Miami district for more than two decades. The symbolism was stark: “Red” Pepper’s left-liberal tradition eclipsed by Cuban exile politics.

Ros-Lehtinen would serve for 30 years, becoming the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and what the South Florida journalist Juan David Rojas called a founding figure of the “Miami neocons.” She was simultaneously the exile community’s most aggressive Cuba hard-liner, a champion of Israel in its Lebanon and Gaza wars, the author of Iran sanctions legislation, and a vocal defender of the accused Flight 455 bomber Orlando Bosch. Her former intern was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state.

Over in Broward County, Florida’s 25th Congressional District, with its large Jewish, Colombian, and Venezuelan population, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is another Miami neocon, a Democratic one, advocating for hard-line policies in both Israel and Latin America. An AIPAC favorite, Wasserman Schultz shortly after first being elected in 2004 worked closely with Trump’s current Venezuela viceroy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, to squash five initiatives that would have diluted Cuba sanctions. 

At the time, Claver-Carone, born in Miami, was running both the U.S.–Cuba Democracy PAC and the Cuba Democracy Advocates. Since 1996, the National Endowment for Democracy, a nongovernmental organization, and the U.S government have channeled more than $100 million into similar “democracy” programs, many of them headquartered in Hialeah and Coral Gables. Democratization in Cuba was the stated objective, but the work of the NGOs and their subcontractors are often protected from disclosure as “trade secrets” under FOIA exemptions.

Mas Canosa died in 1997, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that the Cuban American lobby had peaked. The old guard was dying off, and poll after poll showed that younger Cuban Americans — U.S.-born, English-dominant, less connected to the island — were open to normalization and an end to the embargo. President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement in December 2014 that the United States and Cuba would restore diplomatic relations — the most significant shift in Cuba policy in more than half a century, negotiated secretly with the help of Pope Francis — seemed to confirm the lobby’s decline.

And yet the U.S. government, in the last two years of Obama’s presidency, continued to flood Miami with “democracy promotion” grants, a direct federal stimulus to activists who would become some of Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters. With Trump’s election, what looked like the lobby’s last gasp turned out to be its renaissance.

Trump ended the normalization of relations with Havana and, listening to Florida’s then-Sen. Marco Rubio, imposed harsh sanctions on the island. After Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial victory turned the state hard right, Florida (home to a good number of the nation’s billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Larry Page) became the command center of MAGA power.

A Febrile Complex

Beyond Trump, something was transforming Miami that would change the lobby’s nature entirely. Through the 2000s and into the 2020s, the city was absorbing a new wave of Latin American capital flight on a scale that dwarfed anything produced by the original Cuban exodus.

Across Latin America, economic liberalization, a policy pushed by Washington since the 1980s, failed to generate prosperity and stability, leading many nations to elect left-leaning governments. Venezuelans had been arriving in Florida since Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998. Now they were joined by wealthy Brazilians, Bolivians, Argentines, Nicaraguans, and Mexicans. Colombians had been coming for decades, fleeing the violence of their country’s civil war.

Even the mildest of leftists could spark a flight of capital northward. When it looked like Gabriel Boric would win Chile’s 2021 presidential election, two Chilean law firms opened offices in Miami to help wealthy Chileans move their assets to South Florida. Boric did win, and investors pulled money out of Chile at a record pace, leaving behind what Bloomberg estimated as a $50 billion hole. Chileans ranked eighth among foreign buyers of real estate in South Florida in 2021.

“When governments in Latin America go left,” as one prominent Miami realtor put it, “buyers go north.” Latin Americans bought nearly half of all new luxury units in South Florida through mid-2025, most of them in cash.

The city of Doral, just west of Miami, became so heavily Venezuelan it is informally known as Doralzuela. Miami’s Brickell neighborhood is filled with Colombian and Brazilian private banking offices. The Biscayne corridor attracted Mexican, Argentine, and Peruvian capital. These were not the huddled poor who arrived in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, an exodus of Cubans, or the desperate Haitians who came after the 1991 coup. These were the propertied business classes — and they were looking for ideological allies in Washington to beat back the social democrats at home.

The Cuban exile network absorbed and nurtured the grievances of these new arrivals. Following the 2009 military coup in Honduras — which ousted the elected center-left president Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with a right-wing government — a delegation of Miami Cubans, working with Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s most prominent neoconservative, served as a bridge between AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby and hosted Honduras’s coup leaders in Washington to validate their takeover. For a brief moment, President Obama opposed the coup government, but when Cuban Americans and other conservatives began associating him with Castro and Chávez, he backed down and recognized the regime as legitimate.

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The new Latin American arrivals found a common language in a single word: “castro-chavismo.” The term had been popularized in Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s former president and leader of its far right. Uribe himself imported the term into the U.S. as part of a campaign to derail the Colombian government’s Cuban-brokered peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas. Flanked by then-Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Uribe gave a rallying speech at a Doral restaurant, Mondongo’s, in October 2016. He warned the crowd of Colombian and Venezuelan expats that castrochavismo would come to Colombia if the peace deal were ratified. Uribe used this trip to deepen his ties with Trump’s people: Policy analyst Adam Isacson and historian Christy Thornton, separately, note Uribe’s influence on Trump’s first reelection campaign, when he ran ads in Florida linking President Joe Biden to the Latin American left. “Joe Biden is a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS,” he tweeted in 2020.

The Cuban lobby had long been motivated by the specific wounds of the Castro revolution: the confiscations, the executions, the broken families, what Joan Didion called in her 1987 book “Miami” the “febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos” that united the exiles. The newcomers from across Latin America were equally febrile, but their cause was not just a free Cuba — it was a continent liberated from the likes of left-leaning presidents like Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro.

Unlike the Cuban lobby, which had operated under the tight discipline of Mas Canosa and CANF, the newer Latin American exile community had no single institutional home. The Trump transition team after the 2024 election moved quickly to capture these new constituencies, reaching out to figures like Félix Maradiaga, a Miami-based Nicaraguan opposition leader whom former guerrilla fighter and strongman president Daniel Ortega had stripped of his citizenship. Maradiaga says that Trump’s envoys were urging the opponents of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela to “unite our points of view so that the actions that come from the United States have a joint impact in the quest for democracy.”

Mar-a-Lago became the diaspora’s clubhouse, a palace-in-exile for Latin America’s displaced elites — where Brazil’s Bolsonaro family bends Trump’s ear, Venezuelan opposition figures convene with White House officials, and Colombian magnates attend fundraisers alongside Cuban American politicians and businessmen to discuss business opportunities and coordinate the hemisphere’s restoration.

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The scale of what was being plotted there has been partially revealed: a cache of forensically authenticated voice notes leaked from former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. Convicted of drug trafficking, Hernández had been serving a 45-year sentence in a West Virginia federal penitentiary until Trump pardoned him in December 2025. The leaked memos reveal that Hernández was being financed by both Israel and Argentina (he spent his first night of freedom in the five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel) and that his political proxy, current Honduran President Nasry Asfura, was meeting with investors at Mar-a-Lago to discuss sketchy deals with U.S. officials and to plan a broader destabilization program targeting Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

Miami Rules

The new, greater Latin American lobby operates differently from the old CANF model, trading a single-issue ethnic lobby focused on one country for a class-based hemispheric operation united by a common enemy: reformism of even the blandest sort. CANF itself continues to exist but has fallen into irrelevance. Its PAC went dormant and its lobbying function was absorbed into a broader, more decentralized Latin America lobby. Florida’s Republican Party has largely absorbed CANF’s electoral machinery.

Class divisions had long existed in the Cuban diaspora, especially after the Mariel boatlift. But a singular focus on liberating Cuba had muted the cleavages. Now, though, as the diaspora became hemispheric in scope, the gap between the haves and have-nots has become more visible. Doral’s gated communities sport lovely names — Doral Isles Riviera, Doral Isles Venetia — and wealthy Venezuelans play golf at Trump National. Tens of thousands of poorer Venezuelans — many of whom risked their lives trekking the Darién Gap to get to the U.S., many of whom work at that same golf resort — live in constant fear: Trump has revoked their Temporary Protected Status, leading to more than 15,000 deportations. Some have been sent back to Venezuela, others to El Salvador’s infamous maximum-security CECOT prison.

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The cruelty is not limited to Venezuelans. The Trump administration has targeted other poor immigrants, including Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. Even poor Cubans — who in the past could expect automatic residency — are now being shipped to Mexico, where many, elderly and sick, find themselves sleeping on the streets of random cities, such as Villahermosa, the humid capital of Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco. “They’re casting us aside to die,” said Harold A, a 58-year-old Cuban national who was deported to Mexico earlier this year. “They don’t give us anything, nothing. … How are we supposed to eat?”

The wealthy members of the diaspora tend to see these deportations as harsh but necessary to protect their reputation as “exceptional migrants.” Poor Venezuelans are referred to by some of their better-off compatriots as orcos — orcs, subhumans — a class contempt that Oxford scholar Erick Moreno Superlano has documented in detail. The lobby that presents itself as the agent of Latin American freedom is, in fact, a staunch defender of the hemisphere’s status and class hierarchy.

These new well-to-do exile groups vote in their national elections as a bloc, and often decisively so for their country’s most Trump-like candidate. Last month in Peru, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori — who spent 16 years in prison for human rights violations committed during his presidency, including death squad killings — would have lost the presidential election if only votes cast in Peru were counted, but ultimately beat her center-left opponent thanks to the votes of the Peruvian diaspora. The roughly 9,000 Miami-Dade votes helped her win by less than 1 percent.

More recently, Colombians living in Miami turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for the hard-right Trump mimic Abelardo De la Espriella, helping him win a presidential election that was as close as Peru’s. De la Espriella is a U.S. citizen and was a long-time resident of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Miami, where he worked as a defense lawyer for Colombian clients, among them paramilitaries, right-wing politicians, and money launderers.

Be it by the bullet or the ballot, Miami rules.

The Dogs That Caught the Car

Both AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby had, in the second Trump term, achieved close to their maximal ambitions simultaneously: a war on Iran and a full-court press on Latin American leftists of all stripes, with the deployment of U.S. Special Operations forces, CIA assassination teams, naval blockades, and sanctions. War powers resolutions to stop Trump’s actions — in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela — are routinely blocked by a Republican caucus dependent on AIPAC money and Florida’s electoral votes, often with an assist from a handful of AIPAC Democrats.

Yet both lobbies now find themselves something like the dog that caught the car, and then was run over.

Trump’s war in Iran was a tactical and strategic disaster, leading the White House to lash out at Israel in ways that, just a month ago, would have been unimaginable. Vice President JD Vance just lectured Israel that it “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem.” And Trump warned Benjamin Netanyahu “you will be on your own very soon.” AIPAC’s maximalist project — permanent war, permanent leverage, permanent intertwining with U.S. power — is in tatters.

Whether the same reversal comes for the Latin American lobby remains to be seen. Trump is still pressing Cuba hard, demanding a “deal.” But the deal Trump is pushing looks less like regime change than an investment prospectus. It’s less the Monroe than the Capone Doctrine: Sanctions destroy foreign competitors, Helms–Burton lawsuits punish anyone who stays, and Trump-connected U.S. investors move in to pick up assets at distressed prices. Recently, a business connected to a former Trump official Ray Washburne muscled out a Canadian mining and cobalt corporation.

Trump’s sanctions worked too well. They broke Cuba’s economy so completely that Havana was forced, recently, to enact sweeping economic liberalization — reforms that serve investors, not exiles.

In Florida, Cuban Americans who have never set foot in Cuba, like Nicolás J. Gutiérrez — a Miami-born lawyer whose “young millionaire” father lost his sugar fields to Castro — founded organizations such as the “National Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba,” hoping that Trump would make a country they have never seen theirs again. 

For many, that hope is dissipating quickly as they face their nightmare scenario: a repeat of what happened recently in Venezuela, where Trump entered into a partnership with the existing government, letting demands for root-and-branch regime change take a back seat to oil industry dealmaking. ExxonMobil, which has a large role in setting Trump’s Venezuela policy, just won a Supreme Court Case that allows it to sue Cuban state-owned companies in U.S. federal courts to win compensation for property confiscated more than 65 years ago. This ruling will give the company enormous leverage in what comes next for Cuba. At the same time, Trump, in his second term, has deported nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals, many of the low-income asylum-seekers but also a considerable number of middle-class business and property owners.

The sugar fields, it seems, will not be returned to the children of their former owners any time soon, though they might be put out to bid. But those hoping for restoration will always have Mar-a-Lago.

The post How Florida’s Cuban Diaspora and the Israeli Lobby Came Together — and Are Coming Apart appeared first on The Intercept.

OpenAI is reportedly in early talks to give the U.S. government a 5% stake, potentially alongside similar contributions from other major AI companies. "Such a deal would help improve the industry's relations with the Trump administration and could help garner political support by sharing wealth generated by the AI boom with the public," reports The Guardian. From the report: [OpenAI CEO Sam Altman] and other OpenAI bosses have suggested that each of the biggest AI developers in the US should give 5% to their equity to an investment vehicle such as the Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign fund that invests US oil wealth into stocks and pays dividends to the state, the FT reported. The talks are "conceptual" and in early stages, it said, and any deal could require an act of Congress to implement. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have previously suggested in policy papers that a public or sovereign wealth fund may be required in the future to distribute shares to the public. In April, OpenAI said that a "public wealth fund" could provide "every citizen -- including those not invested in financial markets -- with a stake in AI-driven economic growth." Further reading: Bernie Sanders Unveils $7 Trillion Plan To Give Americans Control of AI Industry

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ticket reseller StubHub abruptly canceled customers' tickets to World Cup matches, costing them thousands of dollars, a lawsuit alleges.

Critics condemn decision by education board aligned with hard-right Ron DeSantis to block access to college system

Immigration advocates in Florida have decried a “cruel and harmful” new rule by education officials aligned with hard-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis to ban undocumented students from state colleges and universities.

The Florida board of education voted on Tuesday to bar access to its 28 state-funded institutions to anybody not a US citizen or “lawfully present” in the country. It follows Florida’s move last year to strip discounted in-state tuition rates for certain immigrant students.

The NHS will divert billions of pounds from essential services to pay for new medicines, under the terms of the US-UK trade deal agreed in December, which could lead to more than 200,000 excess deaths, analysis has found.

Ministers have defended the deal as a way of helping British drug exports avoid US tariffs and giving patients access to vital medication, but critics accuse the Labour party of caving into pressure from Donald Trump.

Lucy Hough speaks to columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

The CDC is reporting the highest rate of emergency room visits from tick bites since 2017 in many parts of the U.S.

Politicians of both political parties have blamed either the Trump or the Biden administration for the arrival of the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating fly that affects the cattle industry, in the U.S. after decades of eradication. But experts say the reasons are different or more complicated than either side is saying — and that it’s no one administration’s fault.

The agriculture secretary, meanwhile, has said that the previous administration “hadn’t really done anything” to combat screwworm, wrongly claiming that there had been “no funds” secured and “no plan deployed.” The Biden administration approved nearly $275 million in emergency funding to fight screwworm starting in late 2023.

Since the Department of Agriculture announced a confirmed screwworm detection in a calf in Texas on June 3, politicians on both sides of the aisle have lobbed blame at the other. The return of the fly is a major threat to the cattle industry, and its arrival in Mexico has already contributed to rising beef prices in the U.S.

Several Democrats and some in the media have been pointing the finger at President Donald Trump, noting staffing cuts at USDA or funding cuts to screwworm programs made in early 2025 by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“Apologized yet for the Screwworm outbreak?” Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, wrote in a June 8 X post addressed to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “You agreed to the DOGE cuts to federal programs that were designed to prevent Screwworm outbreaks.” He repeated a similar statement at a June 9 press conference.

“The Trump administration is directly responsible for this crisis: Last year, it decimated the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which oversees prevention and response efforts related to pests and diseases that pose a threat to U.S. agriculture, including the New World screwworm,” a June 8 Democratic National Committee press release said.

Republicans, meanwhile, have pinned the blame on former President Joe Biden.

“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for — that when millions of people came out of … Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well,” Sen. Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, said in a June 8 Newsmax interview.

“The threat didn’t appear overnight; it was the direct result of the Biden-Harris Admin’s WEAK foreign policy agenda and FAILED immigration policies (and wide open border…),” Rollins wrote in a June 4 X post, noting that the biological barrier for the fly at the border of Panama and Colombia “broke down in 2022,” during the prior administration.

“The Biden-Harris admin … ran a wide-open border that turned the Darien Gap into a nonstop highway for illegal migration, infested animals and all,” she wrote in another post the same day. “That single policy did more to introduce NWS into the US than anything we’ve seen in 60 years.”

Rollins repeated some version of this story on multiple occasions, including in two congressional hearings.

Experts, however, told us that both parties are off-base. A couple of entomologists we spoke with suspect that what precipitated the barrier breakdown in Panama was a fly strain failure, which in some ways was decades in the making. Better monitoring — particularly as late as 2025 — would have perhaps slowed but not prevented the arrival. And while illicit cattle movement could be a major way the screwworm travelled north, an expert told us it had nothing to do with Biden’s immigration policies (any travel on humans would be minor).

“Neither of them are to blame,” David Taylor, an emeritus adjunct professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told us, of the Biden and Trump administrations.

The return of screwworm “should not be reduced to a simple partisan blame story,” Dr. Joseph Annelli, a former director of emergency programs for veterinary services at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told us. “The more accurate explanation is a long-term preparedness failure involving multiple administrations, multiple Congresses, international partners, workforce shortages, infrastructure limitations, and the natural human tendency to underinvest in prevention until a crisis occurs.”

‘A Scientific Marvel’

Screwworm was once native to the southern U.S., but through the use of sterile fly releases starting in the 1950s, the parasite has largely been eradicated from the country for more than 40 years.

The flies lay eggs in open wounds and the resulting larvae then burrow like screws into live tissue. After about a week of feeding, the larvae then drop off the wound and complete their transformation into flies in soil, the USDA explains. While the fly can infest open wounds in any warm-blooded animal, including people, pets and wildlife, the insects prefer larger mammals and human cases are rare.

Eradication efforts began last century due to the burden on ranchers. Screwworm infestations can sicken or kill livestock, especially newborns, and they can be expensive to treat and monitor for. According to the USDA, before the eradication of the pest, livestock producers lost tens of millions of dollars or more to screwworm every year. 

Annelli called it “a scientific marvel” to figure out how to use sterile flies to control the pest. Because the female flies mate only once, releases of sterilized males stop reproduction, and the population dies out. Scientists devised ways to rear the flies, irradiate them to sterilize them, and release them into the wild, over time pushing screwworm out of the U.S., down through Mexico and as far as the Darien Gap in Panama.

With the exception of Darien province, Panama had been free of screwworm since 2006, with a dedicated facility producing tens of millions of sterile flies each week that were dropped over the isthmus, preventing spread of the fly from South America, where it has remained endemic.

The U.S. declared the screwworm eradicated in 1966, although Taylor said that there were large outbreaks through the 1970s. It was “not really until 1980 that the U.S. became screwworm-free,” he said. Since then, there have been some imported cases, but only one self-sustaining outbreak, largely in deer, in Florida in 2016, which ended after bringing in sterile flies.

“Unfortunately, we are the victim of our success,” Anneli said. “People don’t even know about screwworm anymore because it was eradicated so long ago.”

Screwworm began its return to North and Central America sometime around 2022, with Panama experiencing an increase in cases that year. By mid-2023, screwworm was in Costa Rica, and in Nicaragua by March 2024. Mexico reported its first case, near the border with Guatemala, in November 2024.

Since the U.S. detection in early June, the USDA has identified 31 animal cases as of July 1, primarily in cattle, but also in sheep, goats and dogs. All of the cases have been in Texas, except for one dog in New Mexico. (Rollins said in a hearing and elsewhere that the dog had been brought across the border with Mexico, but state officials have said that is not true.)

The Democratic Argument

In assigning blame for screwworm, some Democrats, such as Lieu and the DNC, have focused on funding and staffing cuts made under the Trump administration.

It’s true that the USDA is significantly smaller under Trump. In one year, the department lost around 20,000 employees, including around 2,000 members, or 23%, of the agency’s inspection service, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The Agricultural Research Service, the agency’s chief scientific arm that is involved in sterile fly efforts, also lost nearly 2,200 people, or 31% of its staff.

However, it is not known how many of those individuals worked on screwworm. 

Using Office of Personnel Management data and figures through April, we got similar staffing reductions for the inspection and research departments. Overall, USDA staffing has dropped by about 16,000 employees.

Three former USDA officials told Politico for a June 17 story that the staffing cuts complicated the agency’s screwworm response, particularly because more experienced veterinarians were gone.

Rollins has said that when she came into office there were just 10 people working full time on screwworm, and that she has now expanded that to over 110 or 120 people. She has denied any negative impact on screwworm from funding or staffing reductions.

An April 2025 memo from Rollins indicates that employees dedicated to screwworm would be exempt from a hiring freeze.

Four former USDA officials have disputed Rollins’ figure of 10 employees, with one calling it “definitely false” and an underestimate, according to reporting in Agri-Pulse, a trade publication.

A few Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio, who is the vice ranking member of the agriculture committee, have also cited a separate March 2025 Agri-Pulse story about funding cuts. Lieu’s press office also directed us to the story, among several others, when asked for support for his claims. It reported that among the administration’s many cuts to USAID were “animal disease monitoring projects” operated by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, including $250 million specifically for global health security projects.

“Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America,” the trade publication reported. It went on to say that the stop work orders went out in late January, “just days before” the Trump administration reopened the border for cattle trade that the Biden administration had closed due to concerns about importing screwworm.

Reporting by KBHB Radio in South Dakota at the same time confirmed the cuts via a Food and Agriculture Organization spokesperson, but offered little additional detail. “Throughout Central America, FAO monitored and responded to New World Screwworm, preventing the spread of the disease to the U.S.,” the spokesperson said, giving an example of the FAO program’s impact.

FAO did not reply to our request for more information, but confirmed the cuts to Agri-Pulse in a separate June 24 story, stating that “the reductions meant that some planned country support — including disease surveillance, laboratory strengthening, veterinary training and outbreak preparedness — could not be implemented as originally planned or had to be delayed or scaled back.”

Many of the scientists we interviewed were not able to comment directly on any funding or staffing reductions. But given the timing of the grant cancellations, it is unlikely that those had a large impact. Screwworm had already been detected in southern Mexico in late November 2024, two months before Trump took office.

Taylor said that once the outbreak reached Nicaragua, it was “inevitable” that the flies would reach the U.S. because there was not enough sterile fly production capacity.

“You might have been able to do better surveillance. You might have been able to track it better,” he said. “But I don’t see that you are going to stop it.”

“I would be cautious about attributing the problem solely to recent USAID, USDA, or other federal funding reductions,” Annelli, who is also the executive vice president of the National Association of Federal Veterinarians, said, noting that he was speaking for himself and not for any organizations. “Surveillance and prevention funding are important, and reductions can certainly weaken preparedness. However, the northward progression of screwworm reflects broader and longer-term vulnerabilities that predate any single administration.”

The Republican Argument

Some Republicans, meanwhile, have been pushing a narrative that Biden’s immigration policies are to blame for bringing screwworm stateside again. 

“With open borders and the proliferation of the Mexican cartels and their illicit cattle trafficking, the New World screwworm began to make its way north,” Rollins said in recent congressional testimony. 

Setting aside that Biden’s approach was not one of “open borders,” there are several flaws with this argument.

First, to be clear, experts do not think migrants themselves are carrying screwworm frequently enough to spread the pest. Paul E. Kaiser, a retired insect geneticist who had leadership roles in two sterile screwworm production facilities, told us that to the best of his knowledge, “no data” support that idea.

Illegal cattle movement, including from the cartels, however, likely did play a role in bringing screwworm north. Researchers and journalists have documented how cartels traffic cattle with falsified veterinary papers to launder money and how those trade routes align with the spread of the pest. But scientists told us that this does not explain what originally went wrong because illicit trade has long been a problem — and yet screwworm had remained at bay.

Illegal livestock movement “had nothing to do with the outbreak” itself, Kaiser said. Animals “infected with screwworms are brought illegally from Colombia into the Darien every year,” he explained. “So illegal cattle trade exacerbated the problem, but it didn’t start the problem.”

Taylor agreed. The illegal cattle trade “may have accelerated the pace of the advance, especially once they made it through Panama and Costa Rica,” he said, “but I think the flies would have made it to Texas with or without cattle smuggling.”

“Illegal livestock movements can certainly contribute to spread, but the biology of the parasite does not support immigration policy as the principal explanation for what occurred,” Annelli similarly said.

Moreover, Jennifer Ann Devine, a Texas State University geographer and political ecologist who has studied narco-ranching, told us that it is inappropriate to link the illegal cattle trade to immigration policies.

“If we’re to point blame for screwworm re-emergence, a big part of the puzzle is not immigration policy, but the war on drugs,” she said.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Devine explained, efforts to clamp down on the drug trade have arguably driven the cartels more toward activities such as narco-ranching, which not only offers a source of funding and plausible cover, but also develops new smuggling routes as traffickers seek out more remote areas for their operations.

In terms of drug policy, the Biden and Trump administrations are “much more similar than not,” Devine said, although Trump has perhaps amplified the traditional approach of interdiction, seizure and criminalization.

“Both administrations have contributed to the spread of illegal cattle ranching,” Devine said. “We can’t say that the Biden administration [specifically] made this worse.”

What Scientists Suspect Really Happened

Several scientists told us that one possibility is that the sterile flies being used to maintain the border in Panama became less effective or stopped working. The specific strain in production had been in use for 16 years by 2022, even though entomologists told us that they should have been swapped out at least every eight years, or even every two to three years.

“The fault lies with, in my opinion, very possibly with strain deterioration,” Taylor said, although he cautioned that this was only a suspicion at this point.

As the flies are mass produced, he explained, they could have developed genetic mutations that made the flies less compatible with wild flies or in some way diminished their ability to reduce fly populations in the field. Although the sterile fly facility in Panama — a joint effort between the U.S. and Panama called COPEG — runs tests on the produced flies to check basic functions, Taylor said, there is no direct way to test for effectiveness.

The strain “was obviously not competitive in the field against wild males,” Kaiser told us, calling the breach in the Darien “completely avoidable.” He believes the APHIS employees in charge at USDA in 2022 should have recognized the problem faster, immediately restricting animal movement and collecting a new strain. Panama did not declare a state of emergency until 2023, and a new strain was not established until 2024, which by then was too late, Kaiser said.

This would have occurred under the Biden administration, but multiple administrations had the opportunity to swap out strains or maintain viable backup strains. 

Both Taylor and Kaiser also said that these sorts of mistakes would come down to management of the sterile fly program itself, rather than a president or even a USDA chief.

“The blame goes down to the local level for not changing the strain,” Kaiser said.

“I think there have been systematic problems in the program since the early 2000s,” Taylor said. He believes there needs to be an external review.

Enrique Samudio, the then-Panamanian director of COPEG, told a Panamanian newspaper in July 2023 that the “fly wasn’t being effective enough” and said a new strain, which had been cryopreserved, was in production by March 2023. He also attributed the surge in screwworm cases to a variety of other factors, including a larger population of cattle in the Darien than when the program started, ranchers not recognizing the problem and climate change. 

COPEG did not respond to our request for more information. According to a February 2026 research study, the current production strain was established in 2024 from 11 lines of flies collected from animal infestations in Panama and Costa Rica during 2022 and 2023.

A variety of other missteps over many years have contributed to the current situation, experts said.

The only facility capable of producing sterile flies until recently was in Panama, with a capacity of 100 million flies per week. Experts say that left no contingency plan in case of a larger outbreak that would need significantly more flies.

“There are not enough flies to do the control,” Taylor said. “You’re putting Band-Aids on mortal wounds until you get more flies.”

There had been another production facility in Chiapas, Mexico, that the U.S. was involved with, but it closed in 2012. “While that closure occurred during the Obama administration period, it would be inaccurate to portray it as solely an Obama administration decision,” Annelli said. “Rather, it reflected a broader perception shared by multiple governments and administrations that screwworm had been sufficiently controlled and that maintaining excess production capacity was no longer necessary.”

Annelli also said that both Republican and Democratic administrations had made cuts to the USDA’s veterinary workforce over the years, leading to staffing shortfalls particularly during emergencies.

Entomologists also bemoaned the fact that the government has not more aggressively pursued the use of an all-male screwworm strain, which would make fly rearing cheaper and much more efficient. As it is now, half the sterile flies that are produced are females and are worthless or worse, since the sterile males may end up mating with them rather than with wild females.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that we don’t have an all-male strain,” Kaiser said, noting the general concept for such a screwworm strain goes back to at least the 1990s.

Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, has been working on such an effort. He said he tested one strain in the field in 2018 but that COPEG decided not to use it for mass production.

“There were opportunities years ago to develop much more effective genetic methods to control a screwworm,” he said, and “no one funded them.”

Scott said it might never be known why the boundary in Panama failed, but “it’s probably going to be a mix of factors,” noting that there had been an increasing number of cases along the border in Colombia, putting more pressure on the barrier. The blame game politicians are participating in, he said, is “not particularly helpful.”

Rollins’ Claims About Biden’s Actions

On multiple occasions, Rollins has portrayed the previous administration as taking little or no action against screwworm.

In a June 10 Senate hearing, Rollins said, “I was sort of shocked that the last USDA really had no plans, hadn’t really done anything,” regarding screwworm. She later asked, “Why did no one do anything about it until we walked in the door in January and February of last year?”

During an interview in Texas a day after that, Rollins said that when she began as secretary last year, she realized “that really not much had been done to prepare for this moment — no funds had been secured, very little staff … really no money invested, no plan deployed.”

While it’s a matter of opinion whether the Biden administration could or should have done more, it’s not the case that it did nothing and had no funding or plans in place.

In December 2023, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack approved a transfer of $109.8 million in emergency funding to combat screwworm “in areas of Panama and other areas that are critical to preventing the pest from spreading back into North America,” according to an agency press release.

In November 2024, when Mexico notified the USDA of a screwworm detection, the agency immediately halted imports of live cattle and bison from Mexico. 

Then, a month later, Vilsack approved another $165 million in emergency funds.

In a letter Vilsack wrote to his counterpart in Mexico just before his departure in January 2025, he said that the authorized emergency funding “has allowed us to increase sterile fly production fivefold in the past year” and to scale up “dispersal, surveillance, education, and partnerships in the region.” He also asked for Mexico’s assistance in setting up “two planned sterile fly dispersal centers in Southern Mexico.”

In two trade publications in June, Vilsack disputed Rollins’ claims, saying it was not true that the Biden administration’s USDA had done nothing, pointing to the sterile fly additions, funding for a Mexican dispersal facility, bolstered surveillance measures and closing the border to imports, which Vilsack said at the time “was perceived to be a very aggressive step.”

One of the reports also noted that Rollins said that some of the $1.3 billion in screwworm funding under Trump came from Biden administration programs.

Two anonymous former USDA officials also told Politico that the Biden administration had left plans and funding to convert a fruit fly facility in Metapa, Mexico, into a screwworm production facility. The Trump administration took four months to review the spending, officials told the outlet. Agri-Pulse published a similar account. Rollins announced the $21 million renovation project in late May 2025.

USDA did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson, however, told Politico that the agency “has moved at lightning speed to obtain any and all necessary funding and approvals to fight New World screwworm,” having “aggressively moved dollars and project timelines at a pace unprecedented for [the] U.S. government.”

In early February 2025, the Trump administration resumed cattle imports from Mexico, but halted them again a few months later in May.

Taylor said the Biden administration’s decision to block imports was a “good move” primarily because it slowed the movement of cattle from southern to northern Mexico.

“There were very, very strong feelings amongst my colleagues in Texas that [Trump] should not have reopened the border, and they were quite happy when it was closed again,” he said. “But it was such a short period of time, I don’t think it really had an impact.”

Now, the emphasis is on building up sterile fly production. Rollins has said that the U.S. now needs as many as 500 million sterile flies a week to begin pushing the screwworm back out of the country, essentially starting the eradication process over again.

On June 27, the retrofitted production facility opened in Metapa, Mexico. It will eventually produce as many as 100 million sterile flies a week.

In March, the USDA announced a contract to build a new sterile fly facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, that eventually can produce 300 million flies a week. But the first flies aren’t expected until around November 2027, with an initial start of 100 million per week.

Kaiser said it would likely take several years before screwworm is out of Texas again, and over a decade before the flies are pushed once more back to the Darien.

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The post Democrats’ and Republicans’ Screwworm Blame Spin appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Eleven-year-old developed symptoms 19 days after encounter in Ontario in ‘exceedingly rare’ case

Doctors in Canada say a child who awoke to find a bat resting on his nose and mouth while visiting an Ontario cottage later died of rabies, in an “exceedingly rare case” that highlights the need for better public awareness.

In a report published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, infectious disease physicians confirmed that the 11-year-old boy died from rabies, a fatality they said probably could have been prevented with greater awareness of how the virus is transmitted.

Electric scooters are a simple and efficient way to get where you need to go.

The NHS will divert billions of pounds from essential services to pay for new medicines, under the terms of the US-UK trade deal agreed in December, which could lead to more than 200,000 excess deaths, analysis has found.

Ministers have defended the deal as a way of helping British drug exports avoid US tariffs and giving patients access to vital medication, but critics accuse the Labour party of caving into pressure from Donald Trump.

Lucy Hough speaks to columnist Aditya Chakrabortty – watch on YouTube

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Hernan Gil was brought out on a stretcher as elated rescuers cheered and hugged each other. He was loaded into a waiting ambulance and driven away.

June's payroll gains were much lower than the 100,000 new hires that economists had predicted.

A man who sold land for a controversial, Jared Kushner-backed luxury development in Albania is suspected of money laundering and drug trafficking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: WhatsApp this week started rolling out username reservations ahead of the broader launch planned later this year. The feature -- which lets people find and message each other by handle instead of phone number -- is already raising impersonation concerns, drawing scrutiny from security experts and regulators in India, the app's largest market, with more than 500 million users. The rollout marks a shift in how people identify one another on WhatsApp. Instead of relying on phone numbers as the primary identifier, users will increasingly interact through platform-managed usernames, a change that Meta says improves privacy but that critics argue could create new opportunities for impersonation. [...] Asked about how it protects against impersonation, Meta told TechCrunch it reserves usernames for public figures, government entities, and "some variations" of those names so only the legitimate owner can claim them. The company did not explain, however, how it decides which lookalike usernames get proactively reserved and which don't. The concerns have already reached regulators in India, where cyber fraud schemes frequently exploit messaging platforms to impersonate police, banks, and government officials. [...] Rachel Tobac, chief executive of SocialProof Security, called usernames a net privacy gain because they reduce the need to share phone numbers, which can expose users to SIM-swap attacks, phishing, and account takeovers. Still, she said, lookalike usernames still create opportunities for impersonation. "Ultimately, usernames are a great idea to avoid leaking your phone number to folks you don't know, but it's important to verify identity with the username function too," Tobac told TechCrunch. Her advice for most users: Pick a username that isn't easily guessable, so it's harder for attackers to find you, message you cold, or harass and spam you. [...] The Mozilla Foundation said the introduction of usernames is likely to bring new tradeoffs. "Increased scams and impersonation from fake handles are potentially a big one," it told TechCrunch. "Checking a phone number can be a useful verification tool, but these harms are also permitted by the platform's fundamental design choices." Mozilla also flagged a broader interoperability question -- one worth logging if you're building on top of, or competing with, Meta's ecosystem. While letting users claim their existing Facebook and Instagram usernames may cut down on impersonation, it also shows how easily Meta can stitch identity together across its own apps, even as users still can't take that identity, or their contacts, to a rival platform. For now, WhatsApp says it is taking a gradual approach to the rollout. "We're taking our time and listening to feedback so that when it rolls out later this year we get it right," the company said in its FAQ.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The price of silver has dropped substantially from a January high. Here's why it's still a good investment anyway.

Government seeks workaround after licensing rules threaten to force pubs to shut before World Cup tie finishes

• World Cup live – latest updates

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Keir Starmer is exploring ways to keep pubs open into the early hours of Monday after facing backlash over strict licensing rules that would force many venues to close during England’s next World Cup game.

The team’s win over the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Wednesday night booked a last-16 tie against Mexico that is due to run until at least 3am UK time.

Knowing when to stop paying a loved one's bills after they die can help you avoid costly financial mistakes.

The woman, 31, suffered some injuries but was found alert and in good spirits on Mount Shasta, officials said

A novice climber was rescued after surviving a 1,500ft fall down California’s Mount Shasta on Sunday, officials said.

The woman, 31, was attempting to ascend the mountain along the Left of Heart variation of the popular Avalanche Gulch route alongside two other novice climbers at an elevation of about 13,000ft when she fell.

In part two of a two-part series, Charles Sahm explains how no group has been more steadfast in their devotion to the core beliefs of the Declaration or more determined to make them a universal reality than African Americans. Part one reviewed events up to 1830.

As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, it became more common for Black abolitionists like William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Paul, and David Ruggles to cite the Declaration. The “colored convention” movement that emerged in the 1830s employed the Declaration’s preamble in numerous proclamations. For example, a “Declaration of Sentiments” issued at the 1834 convention in New York and repeated at the 1835 convention in Philadelphia quoted the Declaration’s preamble and plead “that the laws of our country may cease to conflict with the spirit of that sacred instrument, the Declaration of American Independence.”

Part One: Constitutional Voices: African Americans’ early responses to the Declaration of Independence

White abolitionists also cited the Declaration with increased frequency. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison, who later denounced the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” described the Declaration’s preamble as “the corner-stone upon which is founded the Temple of Freedom.” In 1841, former president John Quincy Adams referenced a copy of the Declaration hanging on the wall of the Supreme Court to argue for the freedom of the Africans who took over the slave ship La Amistad. A few months before his Harpers Ferry raid, John Brown authored an abolitionist “Declaration of Liberty,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, ending the document with the Jefferson quotation: “Indeed; I tremble for my Country, when I reflect; that God is Just; And that his Justice; will not sleep forever.”

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” is the most iconic use of the Declaration as a political weapon. After denouncing the hypocrisy of a nation founded upon the premise that “all men are created equal” keeping millions of enslaved people in bondage, Douglass changed his tone toward the end of the speech to one of hope: “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

The Declaration during the Civil War and Jim Crow

The Civil War was fundamentally a war about the meaning of the Declaration. In the lead-up to the war, pro-slavery forces began to insist that the words “created equal” were a mistake. In 1848, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun argued that the Declaration’s preamble was a “great error.” In 1857, the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision gave this anti-equality reading of the Declaration the force of law. The meaning of the Declaration was the central focus of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858. “All men are created equal.… This they said and this they meant,” said Lincoln. Douglas called this reading of the Declaration “a monstrous heresy.”

Lincoln lost the Senate election to Douglas, but two years later won the presidency. And then the war came. In his “Corner Stone Speech,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, declared that the original Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” an error that the Confederacy was formed to correct. “Our new government,” he insisted, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea.”

Two and a half years later, Lincoln would dedicate the nation to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and the Civil War Amendments began, at last, to give that principle constitutional force. Reflecting on this transformation, Senator Charles Sumner titled his eulogy for Lincoln “The Promises of the Declaration of Independence,” arguing that while the founders had “cut the connection with the mother country” and opened the path to popular government, Lincoln had set in motion the consummation of “all the original promises of the Declaration” and time and time again had “summon[ed] his countrymen back to the truths in the Declaration of Independence.”

Although Reconstruction briefly offered hope that those promises might finally be realized, the rise of Jim Crow and the persistence of white racial violence betrayed them. Yet Black leaders continued to invoke the Declaration as a moral claim on the nation. In 1895, at the close of his final speech, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” Frederick Douglass still expressed faith that white Americans might one day overcome their prejudices and fulfill the nation’s founding ideals. Echoing the Declaration, he urged his listeners to remember “the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted and startled a listening world … the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”

In the 20^th century, civil rights leaders often grounded their arguments in the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal citizenship. But the poetry of the Declaration’s preamble still offered a powerful rhetorical weapon. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. DuBois stated that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In 1910, Ida B. Wells cited the Declaration in an essay honoring the 40^th anniversary of the Fifteenth Amendment: “Here at last was squaring of practice with precept, with true democracy, with the Declaration of Independence and with the Golden Rule.” On July 28, 1917, the NAACP organized a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest the horrific racial violence of the era. At the front was a simple banner containing the words of the Declaration’s preamble.

Thurgood Marshall cited the Declaration in a 1954 brief that the NAACP submitted to the Supreme Court for Brown v. Board of Education, echoing an argument that Charles Sumner had made a century earlier in the nation’s first school desegregation case, Roberts v. the City of Boston. “It was one thing, and a very important one, to declare as a political abstraction that ‘all men are created equal,’ and quite another to attach concrete rights to this state of equality,” Marshall wrote.

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called the Declaration a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was not the only time he cited the Declaration. He also invoked it in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and in a 1965 Independence Day speech that praised the Declaration for expressing “in such profound, eloquent, and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.” In his final sermon, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, King referenced the Declaration when he intoned, “All we say to America is, be true to what you said on paper.”

Malcolm X also invoked the Declaration but, in contrast to King, emphasized its right of revolution. In his 1964 “Ballot or the Bullet” speeches, he made the Lockean argument that Black disfranchisement rendered the government illegitimate and justified resistance: “This is not even a government based on democracy…. Half the people in the South can’t even vote…. Half of the senators and congressmen … are there illegally, are there unconstitutionally.” The Black Panther Party’s 1966 Ten-Point Program concludes by echoing the Declaration’s preamble. In 1970, the National Committee of Black Churchmen issued a Black Declaration of Independence that mimicked the original.

Other groups not originally included in the Declaration’s promise of equality have fought to make the words “all men are created equal” apply to them. Famously, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” In 1917, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote to Congress: “Woman suffrage became an assured fact when the Declaration of Independence was written.” In 1978, gay rights advocate Harvey Milk stated: “In the Declaration of Independence, it is written: ‘All men are created equal, and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights.’…That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.” Native Americans, Latinos, farmers, and laborers have all cited the Declaration in their demands for equal treatment under the law.

But over the past 250 years, no group has been more steadfast in their devotion to the core beliefs of the Declaration or more determined to make them a universal reality than African Americans. These stories deserve more attention in this semi quincentennial year and beyond.

Charles Sahm is the director of content strategy and program development at the National Constitution Center.

People are seeking refuge from intense temperatures and humidity this week.

From space to healthcare and artificial intelligence, what could the next 250 years of the United States look like?

Strong figures suggest Tesla’s auto business is regaining momentum after two straight annual sales declines

Tesla blew past ​Wall Street estimates for second-quarter deliveries on Thursday, posting a record for the period as recovering demand in Europe outweighed persistent weakness in North America.

The strong figures suggest Tesla’s ⁠mainstay auto business is regaining momentum after two straight annual sales declines, providing the spending cushion needed to power its ambitions in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence – the main drivers of the company’s roughly $1.6tn valuation.

Loan revamp affects how much students and families can borrow to pay for college, as well as their repayment options.

U.S. Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Franklin H. McKinney disappeared after leaving China for a spy mission over Thailand in November 1944.

See where a “ring of fire” weather pattern could produce disruptive thunderstorms.

Damage recorded in 30 locations across in the city from overnight attacks, with ‘most of them ordinary residential buildings’

in Dublin

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he hopes not to wait too long for the results of an Irish government investigation into alumina exports to Russia thought to be feeding the Kremlin’s war machine.

“Unfortunately there are companies in Europe that are owned or effectively controlled by Russia and its sanctioned oligarchs. They keep supplying the aggressor with essential materials even now.”

‘Rooftopers’ Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov were arrested after allegedly scaling the New York skyscraper

Two Russian “rooftoppers” who staged an apparent marriage proposal at the peak of the Empire State Building’s spire were reportedly arraigned in New York City on Thursday on a slew of charges including reckless endangerment.

Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov were arrested on Wednesday after the stunt, which featured the pair, dressed in all black, unfurling a peace banner and kissing.

Despite a deadly heatwave sweeping through Europe, the US president’s ineptness has created reason for optimism on the climate crisis

• Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here

Two real-life climate-themed movies are playing in parallel across the globe. They are about the world today, but they are also a snapshot of the future. The first is a slow-building horror story; the second, a feelgood summer hit. Both are worth watching.

Horror films are suddenly box-office gold, so let’s start there. The World Health Organisation says the extreme, record-breaking heatwave blanketing Europe has killed more than 1,300 people. But everyone knows that number will end up a dramatic understatement.

OnePlus is directing customers in some European markets toward OPPO devices, with its German website presenting OPPO as the natural upgrade path for existing users. The regional handoff adds to "months of speculation that the smartphone brand is slowly being folded into its parent company," reports Android Authority. From the report: The banner, seen on OnePlus' German website, tells visitors seeking "the experience you trust" that OPPO offers the same speed, performance, and compatibility that OnePlus users have come to expect. It hosts devices ranging from earbuds and tablets to OPPO's latest foldables, with each button taking users straight to OPPO's website. Particularly revealing is the wording. Instead of pushing future OnePlus hardware, the company focuses on the fact that OPPO's products are built on the hardware and software that users already know, while promising seamless compatibility with current OnePlus devices. In other words, if you're up for your next upgrade, OnePlus seems to be saying OPPO has what you're looking for right now. Reports in the past several months have said OnePlus has been scaling back operations in several global markets. Previous restructuring reportedly included cutting headcount, a more focused regional strategy, and greater dependence on OPPO's infrastructure. The two brands have been sharing engineering resources, software development, and supply chains for years now, particularly as OxygenOS and ColorOS have begun to look more and more alike. Interestingly, the change appears to be regional. OPPO already has a retail footprint in Germany, so the handoff is fairly straightforward. In the United States, however, things are very different, where OPPO does not officially sell smartphones. That means American OnePlus customers aren't getting the same messaging, mostly because there isn't an OPPO lineup waiting to step in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 70 missiles fired at Ukraine capital as Russia faces fuel shortages after strikes against its oil refineries

At least 27 people were killed and dozens injured overnight in Kyiv, local authorities said, in what the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, called the worst Russian attack on the capital during more than four years of air assault on Ukraine.

Russia used nearly 500 drones and more than 70 missiles in the hours-long attack on Kyiv and other parts of the country in the early hours of Thursday. Loud explosions shook the capital for several hours as waves of drones as well as cruise and ballistic missiles came towards it and Ukraine’s air defence attempted to shoot them down.

Keir Mather and Virginia McVea’s claims follow decision by Maritime and Coastguard Agency to reject worker status of coastguard rescue officers

A government minister and a senior official have been accused of misleading MPs over their plans to strip coastguard officers of their hourly pay.

Keir Mather, the maritime minister, was said to have made false claims on Wednesday, while Virginia McVea, the chief executive of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), was accused of having done so during a meeting with MPs a week earlier.

Worried about your card account going to collections? You may have more control over that debt than you think.

HAMBURG, Germany, July 2, 2026 — The ISC 2026 event concluded last Friday, drawing 4,035 attendees from 64 countries for five days of discussions on the latest advancements in supercomputing. Participants also witnessed the announcement of a transition in the community’s most-watched benchmark, as stewardship of the TOP500 project passed to Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

ISC 2026: 4,035 attendees from 64 countries

Held from June 22 to 26, ISC 2026 featured a strong community-driven technical program, including invited and contributed sessions, as well as an international exhibition with 188 exhibitors from 26 countries.

A Milestone Handover for TOP500

It was announced that a new steering committee, consisting of existing authors Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, Horst Simon, and ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) chair Christine Harvey, along with new members Satoshi Matsuoka, Wu Feng, and Anders Jensen, will oversee the transition and the new governance. A new technical committee will manage the list’s production, starting with the 68th November list.

The project was founded in 1993 by the late Hans Werner Meuer and Erich Strohmaier at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

“After managing the TOP500 since our father’s passing in 2014, we are pleased to hand it over to ACM,” said Martin Meuer, co-managing director of ISC Group. “We retained the project for over a decade to protect our father’s legacy and that of the other founding authors. We sought an organization that prioritizes the community’s interest and will not monetize the TOP500 project, and we are confident that ACM is the right home.”

A Successful ISC

Registration data from ISC 2026 revealed a diverse international audience, with participants from 64 countries. By sector, 39.5 percent of attendees were from academic and research institutions, while 33.9 percent were from hardware, software, or services vendors. Of the attendees, 63.6 percent identified their role as Industry and 30.4 percent as Academia.

Data on attendee interests indicated clear trends in the field. AI applications driven by HPC technologies and AI factories were the two most-cited areas of interest, significantly ahead of topics such as data center infrastructure, cooling, and quantum computing integration. This highlights the evolving landscape that ISC 2027 will aim to address.

Beyond the data, attendees consistently highlighted networking and ISC’s human-scale atmosphere as distinguishing features. They praised its environment compared to larger international HPC events, noting the ease of meeting peers, partners, and collaborators face-to-face.

The next ISC will take place in Hamburg from June 7 to 11, 2027, under the program leadership of Professor Rio Yokota of the Institute of Science, Tokyo, and the RIKEN Center for Computational Science.

More from HPCwire

• HPCwire ISC 2026 Speacial Feature Page
• ACM to Take Over TOP500
• ISC Introduces Rio Yokota as ISC 2027 Program Chair
• Jack Dongarra Discusses a Changing HPC World in ISC 2026 Closing Keynote

About ISC High Performance

Established in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most-attended event dedicated to HPC, AI, and quantum computing. The conference and exhibition bring together researchers, engineers, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students from around the world to exchange knowledge and discuss the future of supercomputing.

Source: ISC

The post ISC 2026 Concludes with Record Attendees and TOP500 Moves to ACM appeared first on HPCwire.

The fathers of a camper and a counselor who died last July Fourth after flash floods swept through Camp Mystic in Texas reflect on the tragedy a year later.

BROMONT, Quebec, July 2, 2026 — Pasqal, through its Canadian subsidiary Aeponyx, today announced the creation of a specialized center of competency focused on assembling and packaging key components used in quantum and advanced sensing technologies in Canada. The Center of Competency in Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) Packaging for quantum and sensing applications will be based at C2MI in Bromont, Quebec.

Supported by the Canadian government, the initiative brings together Aeponyx, HOP Technologies, and Phantom Photonics to strengthen Canada’s domestic capabilities in advanced photonics and quantum technologies.

Bridging Research and Industry at C2MI

Anchored at C2MI, one of Canada’s leading R&D and commercialization hubs, the initiative is intended to bridge the gap between research, prototyping, and low-volume manufacturing in a field that is critical to enabling scalable quantum systems. It will focus on advanced PIC packaging processes tailored for PIC based quantum technologies, with the objective of standardizing and making novel packaging capabilities available to the broader ecosystem – solving a bottleneck that is critical to scaling PIC based quantum technology. Central to the project is the installation at C2MI of state-of-the-art packaging equipment specifically designed for PIC based quantum computing applications, made possible through Aeponyx’s long-standing partnership with Aixemtec Gmbh, a leading German equipment manufacturer.

“Building on more than a decade of strong collaboration with C2MI on silicon nitride PICs, this initiative directly supports Pasqal’s roadmap by enabling a reliable, domestic supply chain for advanced photonic packaging in Canada,” said Philippe Babin, CEO of Aeponyx. “Creating this Center of Competency is an important step in strengthening the capabilities that will firmly position Canada as a global leader in the next generation of quantum and sensing technologies.”

“With Aeponyx, we validated our active-alignment technology on quantum photonics prototypes, and we believe the collaboration has created a strong foundation for scalable production,” said Tobias Müller, Chief Commercial Officer at Aixemtec GmbH. “We look forward to supporting Aeponyx as it advances capabilities that are important to Pasqal’s quantum hardware roadmap.”

Complementary Experience Across Canada’s Innovation Landscape

The consortium brings together complementary experience that reflects the breadth of the opportunity. HOP Technologies leverages photonic integration for physiological monitoring and wearable biosignals applications, targeting real-world human health impact. Phantom Photonics adds strong expertise in next-generation LiDAR and optical sensing designed for demanding environments including autonomous systems and defense. We believe this international consortium demonstrates that the packaging capabilities being developed at C2MI extend far beyond a single application field, they can serve a growing range of high-stakes applications across Canada’s innovation landscape.

The project is backed by $4 million in combined federal and provincial support, including $3 million from Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) through its Advanced Manufacturing Technology Program. The total project budget is $7.9 million and marks the first phase of a broader effort to develop a domestic supply chain for advanced PIC packaging.

The first phase of the project will establish low-volume manufacturing capabilities and is intended to support thousands of devices. The second phase aims to scale production to 500,000+ modules per year.

C2MI has built a strong and recognized leadership in advanced packaging through years of close collaboration with the industry,” said Marie-Josée Turgeon, CEO of C2MI. “With this Center of Competency, we are now activating that expertise at scale, partnering with new players and unlocking new applications to fast-track the development and commercialization of next-generation photonic and quantum technologies.

A Strategic Move for Pasqal’s Quantum Roadmap

For Pasqal, the project highlights the strategic importance of PIC technology to the company’s long-term leadership in neutral-atom quantum computing. Aeponyx, acquired by Pasqal with the intention of bringing PIC experience in-house, will help enable Pasqal to strengthen the precision, robustness, and scalability of the photonic layer underpinning its quantum hardware roadmap.

“This PIC Packaging Center of Competency at C2MI, launched in collaboration with Aeponyx and our partners, helps turn advanced integrated photonics into repeatable, industrial-grade capabilities in Canada — a key step toward more robust, scalable controls for our neutral-atom quantum processors,” said Loïc Henriet, CTO of Pasqal.

About Aeponyx Enterprises Inc.

Aeponyx is a Canadian photonic integrated circuits (PICs) company specializing in silicon nitride (SiN) and hybrid photonic integration technologies. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Montréal, Quebec, Aeponyx designs, develops, and manufactures advanced photonic chips and modules for high‑performance applications, including quantum computing, optical communications, and sensing.

Aeponyx’s core experience spans PIC design, wafer‑scale fabrication, advanced packaging, and opto‑electronic integration, with a strong focus on scalable, manufacturable solutions. The company has built a robust intellectual property portfolio and works closely with industrial, academic, and government partners in North America and Europe.

Aeponyx is a subsidiary of Pasqal, a global leader in neutral‑atom quantum computing, and enables large‑scale, laser‑based quantum processors through advanced photonic technologies.

For more information, visit www.aeponyx.com.

About Pasqal

Pasqal is a global leader in delivering practical quantum computing at scale utilizing neutral atom technology and dedicated software for industry, science, and governments. Since its founding in 2019, Pasqal has leveraged Nobel Prize winning research to build high-performance quantum systems and cloud-ready software designed to address complex challenges in optimization, simulation, and artificial intelligence.

Headquartered in France, Pasqal employs over 275 people and serves over 25 clients and partners, including Aramco, CMA CGM, OVHcloud, Thales, IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network), and Sumitomo.

Backed by more than USD 300 million in total private funding from international investors, Pasqal is pursuing a listing on Nasdaq in partnership with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II (Nasdaq: BBCQ) and is accelerating the adoption of scalable, high-performance quantum computing worldwide.

Source: Pasqal

The post Pasqal Expands Canadian Quantum Supply Chain with New PIC Packaging Center appeared first on HPCwire.

First judge found to have erred by giving 15-year-olds youth rehabilitation orders for rape of two girls in Hampshire

Two 15-year-old boys who were spared custody for raping two girls have been sentenced to four years’ detention after the court of appeal ruled their sentences were “unduly lenient”.

After a national outcry, the attorney general, Richard Hermer, referred the case to the court to consider whether the sentences given to three boys – identified only as X, Y and Z – were too light

It isn't approved by the FDA, but we found an experimental weight-loss drug called retatrutide for sale at a local convenience store.

National Weather Service warns heat index could reach 115F (46.1C) as heat grips midwest, Ohio valley and east coast

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A “prolonged, dangerous heatwave” is expected to intensify across parts of the central and eastern United States over the next few days and into the holiday weekend, bringing record-breaking temperatures, humidity, and dangerous conditions to millions of Americans.

The National Weather Service (NWS) warned on Thursday that temperatures between 95F (35C) and 105F (40.5C), combined with high humidity, will push heat index values across parts of the region to between 100F (37.7C) and 115F (46.1C).

For all its gloss and elitist governance, football will not bend to the will of a president so eager to demonise and exclude

At 4.38pm on 28 June Donald Trump dropped a Truth. Nothing unusual in that. Trump’s Truth Social feed is relentless and ever-giving.

That same afternoon he also Truthed at 3.58pm, 3.59pm, and twice at 7.42pm, all in the same instantly recognisable, weirdly cartoonish tone, as if a giant maize-based salted snack from a jaunty 1970s TV advert has been pumped full of voodoo and vitamins and propped up behind a lectern to explain geopolitics to the world, but only in the kind of words you might use while arguing with your nine-year-old sister.

PM’s former chief of staff opens up on political mistakes and shares Trump’s theories about wind turbines

• UK politics live – latest updates

Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s former chief of staff, has said Labour was not prepared enough for government or for the volatile world when Keir Starmer was first elected.

McSweeney, who had been Labour’s elections guru credited by many in the party for the size of their victory in 2024, said the party did not have an idea about how to make things happen quickly for people who wanted change.

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Indictment against alleged leader of gas pipeline attack claims former Ukrainian army officer was directed by state

German prosecutors have accused Ukrainian “state authorities” of ordering the 2022 explosives attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia with Europe, a charge likely to ignite tensions between Kyiv and Berlin, its biggest military backer.

The sabotage in the Baltic Sea by a team of assailants almost entirely destroyed the seafloor infrastructure of the key source of Russian gas to Germany.

How does artificial intelligence use tokens, and should we be worried that AI now has claws? Here's a quick primer on the vocabulary of today's inescapable technology.

Schism caused by Society of Saint Pius X ordaining four bishops without consent presents first crisis for Pope Leo

• Europe live – latest updates

The Vatican has excommunicated a rebel group of ultra-conservative Catholics who defied Pope Leo by ordaining bishops without his consent, creating a schism in the Roman Catholic church.

In a statement on Thursday, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who heads the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the group from the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), founded in the Swiss village of Écône in 1970, had “committed an act of a schismatic nature” which, under canon law, was punishable with automatic excommunication.

A recent survey suggests that using apps and artificial intelligence for health advice may be linked to vaccine distrust.

The midfielder had to work hard to win his place in Mauricio Pochettino’s squad for this tournament. He is more than repaying his coach’s faith

While Malik Tillman was unsure what to expect from the United States’ last-32 clash with Bosnia and Herzegovina, he certainly must have assumed he would finish the game with his boots intact.

Tillman has been one of the US’s most important players in their run to the World Cup last 16, a vital part of the team’s buildup and a tricky technician for opponents to contend with when he’s maneuvering through the final third. While everyone else waited to learn whether or not Folarin Balogun would be sent off during the second half of Wednesday’s 2-0 victory, Tillman noticed some discomfort with his right boot. There was a good reason: the top of it had been ripped after a stomp from an opponent.

Reports say up to 80,000 people waiting by mid-afternoon for chance to see historic artwork at British Museum

People keen to see the Bayeux tapestry faced online queues of up to nine hours when tickets went on sale for the first time on Wednesday morning.

The British Museum, which is hosting the tapestry from September, saw huge traffic to its ticketing website as a scramble for access began.

The US government’s latest U-turn on Anthropic’s Mythos sends mixed signals on AI governance Expert comment thilton.drupal 2 July 2026

The Trump administration’s approach to controlling US companies’ powerful AI capabilities is volatile. It undercuts global safety and governance at a pivotal time.

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Commerce removed restrictions on two of Anthropic’s new advanced AI models that have prompted security concerns: Mythos 5 and Fable 5. This is a major change in the way the US controls frontier AI and comes after recurring flip-flopping on the issue.

The move, described in a letter by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik to Anthropic, lifts the export control directive issued by the Trump administration less than three weeks ago. That 12 June directive banned non-US nationals from accessing the two models. This ban included foreign employees at US companies and cyber defenders from international partners. In response, Anthropic suspended access to Mythos and Fable for all users a day later.

The administration then partially changed its approach. On 26 June, Anthropic said the US government had allowed it to release Mythos 5 but had reserved access to the model to only a select group of ‘trusted’ big companies and agencies: all of them, unsurprisingly, from the US.

Now, Anthropic says it is coordinating with the government to expand Mythos access to a broader group including international partners. As of 1 July, Fable 5 – which Anthropic says has stronger safeguards than Mythos 5 – is available to public users globally.

A volatile approach

Since Anthropic’s initial limited release of Mythos in April, the model’s apparently powerful cyber hacking capabilities have led to concerns over who has access. Initially, Anthropic had limited access to trusted partners in ‘Project Glasswing’: a select group of companies and agencies that were granted access in order to fix vulnerabilities in their systems and browsers. Since then, the question of access has remained contentious.

Many companies and allies will applaud the US administration’s latest policy reversal. Access to models like Mythos can be helpful for cyber defenders the world over. Information about model capabilities is critical for regulators and officials.

Related work

In the face of growing AI cyber threats, do middle powers have agency?

This latest U-turn on Mythos aside, the bigger picture is that the US government is regulating powerful AI in a way that it previously indicated it wouldn’t. OpenAI’s latest models – GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna – have also recently come under government pressure due to security concerns, and will be initially released to only ‘a small group of trusted partners’.

However, the government’s changeable approach is not a win for security. The policy volatility is concerning. Its unpredictability sends confusing signals to markets and is bad for investors.

It also represents competing dynamics at the heart of the US’s frontier AI strategy, each with global consequences. These include anxiety about China’s access to cutting-edge capabilities, a lack of clarity over what the technology can actually do and how transformative it really is, and distrust in the partnerships required to develop and deploy it.

Deregulation, re-regulation?

This flip-flopping on Mythos is just the latest chapter in the dispute between the Trump administration and Anthropic. Earlier this year, the Department of War (DoW) labelled the company a ‘supply chain risk’ to national security: the first US company ever to receive this designation. The DoW and Anthropic remain in a legal battle. Regardless, Anthropic engineers reportedly help the National Security Agency to use Mythos in cyber operations targeting adversaries.

The administration’s turbulent relationship with Anthropic has global consequences, including for US allies. In early June, Anthropic offered the EU access to Mythos after weeks of negotiations, only for the EU to lose it days later following the export control directive (and now, presumably, regain it). The G7 also saw attempts to re-negotiate a ‘trusted partners’ scheme for access to cutting-edge AI capabilities. 

This turbulence also highlights the unstraightforward relationship between US political leaders and the country’s most powerful technology companies, two of which are on the cusp of IPOs. Generally, the Trump administration has been in favour of deregulation. It fears stifling innovation, preventing adoption and losing the US’s competitive edge over China.

But the US government’s recent turn towards a more proactive but volatile regulatory approach is a significant change; the Anthropic saga is just one part of this recent shift towards ad hoc government control.

Related work

AI export controls are not the best bargaining chip

On 2 June, an executive order called for AI companies to voluntarily submit their models for safety testing for 30 days before general release. The order was reportedly watered down from a 90-day period after lobbying. On 5 June, a national security directive instructed government agencies to end contracts with AI companies that limit how the government uses their tech. (Some policy experts consider this a response to the Pentagon-Anthropic legal battle.) And OpenAI’s limited release of its GPT-5.6 models last week reportedly came at the request of the US government.

This approach has its flaws. First, Chatham House experts have previously argued that tightening restrictions around valuable technology – so-called ‘golden eggs’, whether software (like models) or hardware (like chips) – will not fully prevent their proliferation.

Second, clamping down on models immediately pre-release doesn’t control or slow down the frontier of development. And clamping down on ‘foreign access’ to AI cyber capabilities – which includes restricting access for non-US AI safety institutes and allies – does not improve US readiness for an AI-enabled global crisis, like a global financial crash. It weakens the evidence base and trusted cooperation needed to navigate a shared shock.

Not-so-global governance

Next week’s inaugural United Nations meeting on AI – the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance – faces an impossible balancing act. This is because AI risks are shared, whether to global health, nuclear security or financial systems. They demand a minimum level of global governance to regulate them. This includes monitoring and information-sharing, technical measures like model ‘kill switches’, or decision-making pathways like emergency backchannels.

This is a non-starter without the US and its powerful AI companies. But the unpredictability and protectionism of US frontier AI governance creates barriers to these types of international cooperation. This is complicated by the dynamics of the US-China AI race, which makes it hard to get Beijing and Washington to reach a consensus on safety, despite promising signs of future intergovernmental talks.

The Vatican says bishops from the ultra-conservative Catholic SSPX society were automatically excommunicated after ignoring Pope Leo's plea for unity.

Independence Day celebrations are a great time for fireworks photos. Here's how to capture them with just your phone.

The country’s unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.2% as US job growth also slowed for the month

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US job growth slowed in June as employers added 57,000 new jobs – just about half of what economists had predicted – and the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its figures from the past two months down by a total of 74,000.

The country’s unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.2%, but the number of unemployed people changed little, according to the latest data, as 720,000 people left the labor force. The bureau revised the unexpectedly high May figures from 172,000 new jobs to 129,000, and revised the April figures from 179,000 to 148,000.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., July 2, 2026 — Qolab Inc., a leader in quantum computing hardware, today announced the initial closings of its Series B Preferred Stock financing, which, together with the conversion of an aggregate of $12.6 million in convertible securities and a commitment for an aggregate of $10 million in future convertible securities, represents total funding of $54.2 million for the company.

The round was led by UC Investments (the University of California Office of the Chief Investment Officer). The Series B Preferred Stock financing and prior convertible financing included participation from existing financial and strategic semiconductor investors including Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), Octave Ventures, and Phoenix Venture Partners.

The announcement was made during the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, where Qolab co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Dr. John Martinis, recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, joined fellow Nobel Laureates, leading scientists and emerging researchers from around the world. The gathering provides a fitting backdrop for Qolab’s next phase of growth at the intersection of breakthrough semiconductor manufacturing and quantum innovation.

Among other things, the Series B Preferred Stock financing will support Qolab’s continued development of scalable superconducting quantum computing technologies, expansion of strategic semiconductor collaborations, and acceleration of the company’s target toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

“Quantum computing is entering a new era, where decades of scientific research are beginning to translate into technologies capable of addressing real-world challenges,” said Martinis, also a distinguished professor at UC Santa Barbara. “This investment enables Qolab to accelerate development of scalable quantum systems while deepening our collaborations across the University of California ecosystem and the broader scientific community.”

The investment by UC Investments further deepens Qolab’s ties across the University of California’s world-class research ecosystem. Qolab collaborates with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory through the Quantum Systems Accelerator — a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by the Berkeley Lab — and with researchers from UC Santa Barbara to explore next-generation quantum algorithms using Qolab technologies.

“Our mission at UC Investments is to help ensure that our great public research university system continues to thrive for generations to come,” said Jagdeep Singh Bachher, UC’s chief investment officer. “That’s why we seek transformative investment opportunities that we believe will speed scientific discovery and innovation, and, in the end, make the world better.”

The announcement also coincides with the seventh year of a highly competitive UC Investments fellowship that supports UC graduate students and post-doctorates’ participation in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, a collaboration dedicated to fostering scientific excellence, encouraging emerging researchers and advancing breakthrough innovation.

“The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings create a unique environment where pioneering scientists, young researchers and visionary institutions come together to exchange ideas and inspire future discoveries and perhaps, future Nobel Laureates,” said Bachher. “UC is proud to continue supporting this extraordinary forum and to help cultivate the next generation of scientific leaders.”

“Solving the most difficult challenges in quantum computing requires deep collaboration with the semiconductor industry to effectively scale manufacturing,” said Alan Ho, co-founder and CEO of Qolab. “The support of UC Investments, together with our existing financial and semiconductor investors, strengthens our ability to deliver scalable quantum technologies that can transform computing.”

The Series B financing builds on significant momentum for Qolab as the company continues advancing its superconducting quantum computing platform and expanding partnerships across the global quantum ecosystem.

About Qolab

Qolab is a hardware company developing utility-scale superconducting quantum computers. By combining deep physics and engineering expertise with strategic semiconductor partnerships, we solve the toughest challenges on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Source: Qolab

The post Qolab Secures $54.2M Series B Funding for Quantum Hardware Development appeared first on HPCwire.

Charges yet to be filed over incident in Mukdahan involving 11-year-old, as police seek to establish circumstances

An 11-year-old boy has driven his parents’ truck into a Buddhist procession in Thailand, killing at least nine monks.

CCTV footage shared by a local rescue group showed the moment the monks, wearing orange robes, were run over as they walked in procession along a road. The timestamp on the footage was shortly before 11am local time on Thursday.

The 19th annual competition features photographers from 48 countries, most using older iPhone cameras.

Samsung's book-style folding phone lineup may be expanding to include both a widescreen variant along with an Ultra model.

Critics say the Trump administration is trying to rewrite and whitewash history by removing and altering scores of signs on public lands

Jerry Bransford, a former US National Park Service (NPS) ranger, has always had a deep connection with the land he grew up on – and the land hundreds of feet below it. His great-great-grandfather, Materson “Mat” Bransford, was one of the earliest explorers of Mammoth Cave in south-central Kentucky, the largest known cave system on the planet.

But for decades, Mat wasn’t paid for his work. Enslavers rented him out for $100 a year to a man who wanted to turn the site into a tourist attraction – what would later become Mammoth Cave national park.

Estimated 650,000 bags of potato chips are affected as US agency upgraded recall of popular brands made by Utz

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has upgraded a recall of several popular brands of potato chips to its most serious level because of the risk of salmonella contamination.

Manufacturer Utz issued a voluntary recall in May for varieties of its Zapp’s and Dirty potato chips products, citing the possible presence of salmonella in dry milk powder sourced from a third party used to make a seasoning ingredient.

July 2, 2026 — Quantum computers could one day solve problems beyond the reach of even the world’s most powerful supercomputers, accelerating everything from drug discovery to the development of advanced materials and cleaner energy technologies.

But the fragile quantum states that make such machines possible are notoriously easy to disrupt. Even tiny changes in the environment — such as stray radio waves, small fluctuations in temperature or slight physical vibrations — can interfere with calculations, introduce errors and disrupt quantum coherence.

Assistant Professor Han Zhao in his UCF lab, standing beside superconducting hardware and lab equipment. Zhao’s work on stabilizing quantum operations with mechanical vibrations is supported by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. Photo credit: Antoine Hart.

To help address this challenge, University of Central Florida Assistant Professor of Physics Han Zhao is developing a new approach that combines superconducting quantum systems with nanomechanical devices to make quantum operations more resistant to noise and errors.

Supporting New Quantum Research

“The future of quantum computing will be its real-world breakthrough applications in science and the economy,” Zhao said. “So it is absolutely true that practical quantum computers need to address the fragility of quantum states.”

The project is supported through the highly competitive Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award program, which provides seed funding to early-career faculty conducting research in science and engineering. The funding supports graduate student research and the acquisition of specialized superconducting quantum hardware used in the experiments. The project will also leverage UCF’s nanofabrication facilities and quantum research infrastructure, including advanced waveform control systems and superconducting quantum hardware.

“The most inspiring aspect of receiving the award for me is to know that the scientific merit of the proposed research received extremely positive recognition in the community,” Zhao said. “This means our lab is on the right track to accomplish research of high importance. We are also grateful for the support of getting students involved in advanced experimental quantum research.”

Entangling Quantum States Through Braids

There are generally two approaches to mitigate error rates in quantum computing, Zhao said. The first is quantum error correction (QEC), which uses multiple physical qubits (the basic unit of quantum information) to protect logical qubits, the encoded units of quantum information used for computation. However, QEC requires substantial hardware resources.

Zhao’s research explores an alternative approach that seeks to make quantum operations themselves more resistant to noise and errors. His efforts focus on developing a more fault-tolerant method for quantum entanglement using superconducting quantum systems and nanomechanical devices operating at temperatures near absolute zero.

At the center of the project are tiny mechanical resonators — microscopic vibrating structures capable of interacting with microwave signals inside superconducting quantum circuits. By carefully controlling these interactions, Zhao aims to create a topological “braiding” process in which quantum states cyclically exchange properties in a predictable and stable way.

Unlike conventional quantum operations that rely on extremely precise control sequences, the braiding process is designed to be inherently more resistant to environmental noise and small operational errors. Because the process depends more on the overall pattern of the interaction rather than every exact microscopic detail, the approach could help reduce the impact of noise and small hardware imperfections. Zhao compares the process to tying a shoelace.

“Braiding means winding multiple strands to form or undo knots,” Zhao said. “The formation of a knot, like how you tie a shoelace, does not need to be exact every time and can tolerate large wiggle room for the strands to deviate.”

“Now, imagine the strands as the evolution of the quantum excitations and the knots as the entangled quantum states,” he continues. “The process of achieving a certain quantum state, i.e., the knot, can have various wiggles due to noise and control imperfection, but as long as it follows a certain pattern, it will result in a high-fidelity quantum operation. And this certain pattern is dictated by the intrinsic topology of the engineered interaction between superconducting quantum circuits and the mechanical resonators in an open quantum system.”

A Stable Quantum State at Absolute Zero

To perform these experiments, Zhao’s lab uses superconducting quantum systems inside a specialized dilution refrigerator. Operating at these extreme temperatures helps eliminate thermal noise that would otherwise disrupt delicate quantum behavior. The refrigerator, which cools the system to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, creates the ultra-stable environment needed for superconducting circuits and quantum mechanical interactions to function reliably.

Within this environment, Zhao’s team studies how microwave signals and tiny vibrating mechanical resonators can exchange quantum information through carefully controlled interactions.

Traditionally, researchers have sought to isolate quantum systems from the external environment as much as possible when building quantum computers, says Zhao. However, these physical systems are constantly interacting with their environment and should be used to generate new ways of thinking about the methods of quantum information processing.

“Practically, the ultimate success will be a big step towards a fault-tolerant quantum computing that solves problems beyond the capability of modern computing technology for applications in quantum simulations, complicated optimizations in relevance with the global economy and information security,” said Zhao.

This research is supported by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award program under Award No. FP00012463. Matching support for the project is provided by UCF.

Source: Andrew Miller, UCF

The post UCF’s Han Zhao Advances Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing with Nanomechanical Devices appeared first on HPCwire.

Federal prosecutors to focus on issue despite court backing constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. Plus: Greek priest whose metal music has become cult smash

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Good morning.

The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, has said federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on combating so-called birth tourism – which involves tourists, temporary visitors, or undocumented immigrants traveling to the US primarily to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their children.

What did Blanche say? “There’s other things … the federal government can do in the visa process, and the application process, to try to minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here not to visit, and not to do what they’re saying they’re doing on the tourist visa, but just to have a baby that can then be a US citizen. What we have to do as Department of Justice is make sure our agents … and the FBI are focused on stopping that.”

President Trump has signed "Lulu's Law," which requires the FCC to allow emergency alert messages for shark attacks. It was inspired by shark attack survivor Lulu Gribbin.

Rebels shoot pilot and set his civilian ⁠plane on fire amid long-running low-level battle for independence in region

Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s restive easternmost region of Papua have shot dead an American pilot and set a civilian ⁠plane on fire, in what a spokesperson for a local militant group described as a “message” to the US and Indonesian governments.

Sebby Sambom, ⁠a spokesperson for the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), named the pilot as Nicholas F Gosselin and said separatist fighters had set his ⁠plane on fire after it landed in the Yahukimo region of Highland Papua province.

Two people climbed to the top of New York City's Empire State Building, unfurled a banner, and then apparently got engaged Wednesday afternoon.

Between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers and placed for adoption in England and Wales

Starmer said what happened to the mothers, and their children, should never have happened. He said:

What happened to them, and to tens of thousands of mothers, children, and families, should never have happened. It is a stain on our history.

Mothers, many young, vulnerable, and without support were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them. What a thing to do.

I have to confess, as I said to them this morning, I found it hard to read the testimonies and to hear their stories.

I find it particularly hard, as a dad. How much harder it must have been for them to go through that, to set out their testimonies and tell their stories over and over again.

The two people taken into custody for climbing New York City's Empire State Building where they apparently got engaged have been identified as Ivan Kuznetsov, 32, and Angela Nikolau, 33.

The FBI said in a statement Wednesday that some ransom notes in Nancy Guthrie's disappearance have been "deemed to be extortion attempts without legitimacy," and other "demands may potentially be legitimate and are still being investigated as such."

The sect, the Society of St. Pius X, defied a direct plea from Pope Leo XIV and sought to consecrate four bishops without the Vatican's approval.

Exclusive: Finance experts warn against investing in bitcoin treasury companies after Stack BTC assets plunge

A bitcoin company that Nigel Farage has advertised lost more than 15% of its asset value, prompting finance experts to warn investors against those types of firms.

The Reform UK leader has invested £215,000 in a bitcoin treasury company named Stack BTC. A bitcoin treasury buys the cryptocurrency on behalf of its shareholders, and Stack aims to purchase other companies with the increase in value it gets from holding bitcoin.

The restoration of capital punishment in 1976 was based on a fantasy of fairness. It must be abolished

Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of the rebirth of the death penalty in the United States. On 2 July 1976, the supreme court handed down decisions in five cases that laid out a formula for passing constitutional muster.

The formula the court devised and explained at length in one of those cases, Gregg v Georgia, was built on a wish and a prayer. It was a fantasy of fairness, powerful enough, its authors thought, to keep capital punishment alive and to lend it legitimacy, but it was a fantasy nonetheless.

Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty

Pennsylvania families note promised investment has yet to deliver safer mills or cleaner air in the Mon Valley

It was two days before Father’s Day, and Trisha Quinn was wondering how her six, 12 and 17-year-old nieces and nephews would handle the first of many without their dad.

Timothy Quinn, 39, worked at the Clairton Coke Works plant south of Pittsburgh, one of US Steel’s biggest production sites and the largest of its kind in the western hemisphere, for 18 years. Last August, he and colleague, Steven Menefee, were killed there in an explosion.

Birthright citizenship ruling only a surface level setback, with the court granting president’s multiple power grabs

The symbolic and high profile defeats cannot obscure a more uncomfortable truth.

The US supreme court – a vital cog in the US constitutional framers’ vision of an intricate system of checks and balances aimed at reining in an excessively assertive president – has made Donald Trump stronger than ever, and shows little inclination to stop.

Get your deep freezer ready. Summer grilling season is here, and it's time to stock up on all your favorite cuts of meat.

Contract-free flexibility isn't always a flex, especially when your ISP is nickeling and diming you.

Jaylen Brown is headed to Philadelphia in a stunning trade. The Celtics get Paul George and draft picks in return.

Weather this year has encouraged smaller but earlier cropping of sweet and bountiful fruit in gardens, RHS says

If your bowl of strawberries and cream tastes particularly sweet this year, you’re not mistaken.

It is a bumper summer for strawberries, with the recent weather conditions making them more abundant and delicious than ever, according to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS).

Two people were arrested after an apparent marriage proposal atop the Empire State Building’s spire on Wednesday, having climbed well above the section open to the public. The pair were identified as Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, Russian 'rooftoppers' known for carrying out similar stunts in cities including Los Angeles and Tianjin in China. Dressed in black and with their faces covered, they unfurled a large black banner bearing the words: 'When the power of love beats the love of power, the ‌world knows peace.'

It remains unclear how they reached the uppermost section of the building, which rises 1,454ft (443 metres) above midtown Manhattan. The New York police department said charges were pending and the investigation remained ongoing. CBS News later reported that the pair were facing charges including burglary, criminal trespass and reckless endangerment

More than 100 million people could be affected in week leading to 4 July, with increased risks of droughts and wildfires

Meteorologists are anticipating a tumultuous summer that could rank as one of the US’s hottest ever.

New data released on Tuesday showed the first six months of the year were the hottest ever measured for parts of eight western states.

Man once called ‘godfather’ of Calais migrant camps lives in Leicestershire and is said to be trying to claim asylum

A convicted people smuggler who has reportedly been found living in Britain should be arrested and deported, the Conservatives have said.

The man, once labelled “the godfather” of the Calais migrant camps, was tracked down by the BBC to Leicestershire, where he reportedly changed his name from Twana Jamal and was working illegally while attempting to claim asylum.

July 2, 2026 — Researchers from the University of Sydney, working with IBM, have identified and quantified important factors limiting the performance of quantum computers and demonstrated ways to overcome their impact.

The findings, which improve our understanding of how errors emerge during quantum computations, could significantly advance the reliability of quantum technology.

IBM Quantum System Two in Poughkeepsie, New York. The machine was used in the experiments conducted by University of Sydney quantum physicists. Photo: IBM

The paper has been published in Nature Communications.

Project lead Professor Stephen Bartlett from the University of Sydney Nano Institute said quantum computers remain highly susceptible to ‘noise’, or external interference, and instability, making their scaling up to useful machines difficult to achieve.

The post University of Sydney and IBM Identify Major Source of Quantum Computing Errors appeared first on HPCwire.

Authorities say rainy season getting deadlier, with Ghana reporting 13 dead and floods hitting Benin, Togo and Nigeria

Floods in Côte d’Ivoire have killed 59 people since May, the communication minister told a cabinet meeting in Abidjan.

There are fears the toll could further rise as rescue teams continue to search for victims during the rainy season, which runs from May until July, the minister, Amadou Coulibaly, added.

On its 250th birthday, the US is still defined by its fault lines Expert comment jon.wallace 2 July 2026

The most urgent fault line in US politics is between those who believe in the system of government and those who do not. It is, in fact, the foundational US fault line being relitigated for modern times.

For 250 years, the United States of America has been defined by its fault lines, which have bound the landmass and its people together and, at times, have driven them apart. It is a history of rupture and repair. 

The original fault line was between the thirteen American colonies and British imperial rule. The Declaration of Independence stated that ‘When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation’. 

For the American colonists, those causes emerged from British rule, which had brought a series of ‘abuses’ and ‘usurpations’ amounting to a form of ‘Tyranny’. Pursuing their unalienable rights to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’, required an altering of ‘their former Systems of Government’, and a setting of a new course. 

In the centuries that followed independence, the US wrestled with a set of homegrown fault lines. The Civil War erupted along the great dividing line between the North and South over slavery, nearly ripping the country apart in the 1860s. 

The American Industrial Revolution in the decades that followed created booming urban population centres, setting up an enduring tension between the US farming heartland and its cities. The social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s fractured the country along generational, gender and racial lines. Threaded throughout has been a series of disputes about economic distribution and equality, from ‘taxation without representation’ to the Great Depression, the Seattle anti-globalization protests of 1999 and the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

Today, as the US looks to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the most urgent fault line in US politics is between those who believe the current system of US democracy can provide rights, equity and prosperity for all, and those who do not. It is, in fact, the foundational US fault line being relitigated for modern times. A long unthinkable question is being asked by Americans: is it necessary again to dissolve the political bands which connect them?

The new (old) fault line

This fault line can be seen at play in the emergence of New York City mayor and self- described ‘democratic socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. It can be seen in the near daily reporting of outside political voices performing well in primaries running up to this year’s mid-term elections. Americans want new leadership. 

It can be seen in shifting views of wealth and anti-billionaire sentiment: Americans want affordability, and a majority now view billionaires as a threat to democracy. And it can be seen in the growing skepticism around artificial intelligence (AI), which has become the engine of US economic growth. More Americans now think AI will have a negative impact on society and are concerned about the personal dangers it poses. 

The fault line can also be discerned in a shift over the last decade from partisanship and polarization to radicalization: on 6 January 2021 citizens overtook the US capital to reject an election outcome they viewed as fraudulent. Politically motivated attacks have surged: In 2022 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was attacked in his home. In 2024 and in 2026, attempts were made on the life of Donald Trump. In 2025, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was assassinated with her husband. Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political activist, was also assassinated that year. Meanwhile US governmental departments have flagged the threat posed by the accelerationist movement, an ideology holding that the democratic state is so corrupt and irreparable that violent action must be taken against it to precipitate its replacement. 

This turn towards the use of violence is not isolated. As many a third of Americans polled agree that the US government is corrupt and it may soon be time to take up arms against it. Americans are increasingly considering bullets over ballots. 

A loss of faith

Together, these fractures reflect a catastrophic loss of public trust in the US government from 49 per cent at the turn of this century to just 18 per cent as of 2025. Approval ratings of the executive, legislative and judicial approval ratings have also waivered. 

Related work

Europe watches the next American revolution take shape

Especially telling is that even as Americans believe their freedoms are under threat, Supreme Court favourability has reached historic lows. The Supreme Court this cycle eased some restrictions on campaign finance caps, limited the scope of the Voting Rights Act and affirmed the president’s right to remove members of independent governmental agencies. But it also allowed mail-in ballot rules to stand and upheld birthright citizenship. Americans searching for clarity from the Court will be left wanting. 

As political skepticism grows, the two party-system that has defined US politics for centuries is showing cracks. A record-level 45 per cent of Americans now identify as independent of a political party. This surge in independents has overlapped with a declining number of Americans strongly identifying as either Republican or Democratic. Both parties are feeling this heat. 

For Republicans, questions of party cohesion and direction have for the last decade been answered by US President Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement. But defections from former prominent faces of the party including Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and journalist Tucker Carlson are revealing. 

First phase of inquiry identified multiple failings to prevent murders of three girls, which government will ‘urgently’ address

Downing Street has accepted all recommendations for changes made by an inquiry that found the Southport killings could have been prevented and identified “fundamental failings”, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said.

Mahmood said the government would do “whatever is needed to protect the public” as she accepted the recommendations in full from the first phase of the Southport inquiry.

IEEE Spectrum argues that orbital data centers remain far from economically or technically practical despite Elon Musk's prediction that space will become the cheapest place to run AI within a few years. Deploying SpaceX's proposed million-satellite constellation would require enormous increases in launch and manufacturing capacity, while cooling, radiation, maintenance, latency, orbital debris, and astronomical interference present major unresolved obstacles. Longtime Slashdot reader xetdog shares the report: Consider this: There are roughly 14,500 active satellites in orbit. Musk's Starlink constellation accounts for about two thirds of those. Both the launch cadences and satellite-manufacturing capacity would have to scale up astronomically to deploy a million orbital data center satellites. For context, there have been roughly 7,000 orbital launches in all of human history. To loft 1 million satellites into low Earth orbit on SpaceX's Starship, which is designed to carry up to 60 satellites per vehicle, would require 16,666 launches exclusively devoted to satellite deployments. Considering that SpaceX launched a record 165 orbital missions in 2025, even at 10 times that cadence, it would take a decade. And how long would it take to build 1 million satellites, given Starlink's current pace of around 4,000 per year and a generous tenfold increase in capacity? Short of a manufacturing revolution, try 25 years. Dissipating heat in space also requires enormous radiators. As IEEE Spectrum editor Dina Genkina noted, startup Starcloud has sent only one Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit, and "their radiator was too weak to let the chip run at full power." A single 700-watt H100 would require about 1.4 square meters of radiator area, while a 100-megawatt data center could need 2,500 radiators measuring 80 square meters each. So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As GLP-1s drive the current protein craze, a supplement once only taken by powerlifters is now so popular US producers are struggling to keep up

For generations, the Meives family made cheese. Tony Meives’s grandfather, a Swiss immigrant, and his father both ran small cheese factories in Wisconsin, in the heart of America’s dairyland. “I worked in the cheese factory my whole life,” Meives says. “I have four world-class cheesemakers in my family.” But when it came time to inherit the family business, Meives found there was more money in the industrial runoff that his grandfather would have once thrown away. Today, the 39-year-old bodybuilder and gym owner runs a company that sells whey protein powder, the watery byproduct of cheesemaking that was once considered waste. “Twenty years ago, the only people who took whey were bodybuilders,” he says. “Over the past five years, the market has really opened up to each and every type of person you can probably think of.”

When Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, declared late last month, that “the war on protein is over”, he sounded a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers of second world war lore, who spent years hunkering in the jungles of south-east Asia, oblivious to the fact that hostilities had long ceased. Perhaps there was a time when advice leaned more towards a diet based around fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates – but by May 2026, the war on protein was surely over. Protein had won.

After decades of campaigning by those affected, PM says state ‘did not do enough to protect’ mothers and children

Keir Starmer has formally apologised for the British state’s role in past forced adoptions after decades of campaigning by mothers and children affected.

The prime minister said “the shame is ours” and that he was “deeply and profoundly sorry” for what had happened, as he announced extra funding to help people access their adoption records and reconnect with biological families.

Police said the boy had taken his parents' pickup truck without permission before losing control of the vehicle and crashing into the monks.

To reach a more durable peace agreement with Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz, Trump needs Israel to uphold the terms of a deal with Lebanon that Hezbollah says it will block by "any means necessary."

The gang "has committed numerous attacks targeting civilians, law enforcement officers, and government officials," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

Apple raised the prices on its products, but not its phones. We tested and reviewed every iPhone the company sells. Here's which one you should buy.

Writer says ‘Trumpish’ decision to ban staging is warning of what may happen if National Rally runs country

In the Anglo-French playwright Alexis Michalik’s play Passeport, a young man has been beaten and left for dead in the notorious Calais refugee camp known as “the Jungle”.

When he wakes up, he has no idea who he is – and his only possession is a blue Eritrean passport containing the name Issa. With two others from the camp he decides to leave, not to take the perilous Channel crossing to the UK but instead to try to integrate into France and obtain the necessary papers to remain.

After weeks of testing Dyson's HushJet Mini Cool and comparing it to other handheld fans, these are my thoughts.