A woman suffered injuries after being attacked by a brown bear in southern Alaska, where she was out hiking with a friend and three dogs, authorities said.

A federal judge has temporarily paused the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger after a 12-state coalition led by California argued the deal would violate antitrust law. The 14-day restraining order (PDF) preserves the status quo while the court considers a preliminary injunction, which could effectively determine whether the merger survives. Variety reports: "Plaintiff States' showing at least demonstrates that serious questions going to the merits remain, weighing in favor of preliminary injunctive relief," the judge wrote, adding that Paramount has acknowledged it will not be harmed by the delay until the end of September. "Paramount and Warner Bros. will continue to operate as separate, viable companies competing in the marketplace while they wait for the Court to adjudicate this case. The balance of equities, combined with the public's vital interest in antitrust enforcement, therefore tips sharply in favor of the requested injunctive relief." The 12-state coalition, led by California, brought a motion for the temporary restraining order. The states are also seeking a preliminary injunction, which would block the merger until the judge rules on the merits of the states' lawsuit. The 14-day restraining order could be extended to as long as 28 days. Martinez-Olguin, of the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California in Oakland, also set a hearing on the preliminary injunction for Aug. 3, though that date, too, could be delayed if the parties agree. Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, hailed the judge's ruling as a "critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day." "History tells the tale of what happens when a few people have great power over markets that are central to Americans' lives: fewer opportunities for more people, worse products and services for all people," Bonta said. "With our lawsuit, we're fighting for a free and fair market and a thriving film and television industry that serves creatives and audiences alike. We have a full tank of gas, the law on our side, and look forward to continuing to make our case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new prime minister said he wants his government to look at ‘all possible ways’ to help families with high costs

• Burnham to cut VAT on electricity bills in first cost-of-living move

António Costa, the president of the European council, said in a post on X that he held a “good” phone call with Andy Burnham last night, in which he said they agreed to “further strengthen” EU-UK relations and continue to cooperate to support Ukraine.

He said there was also discussion about “common geopolitical challenges facing Europe”, which could be a reference to many things, including energy prices soaring due to the US-Israel war on Iran, Europe’s trading and security relationship with Washington, the future of Nato, the continent facing a wave of hybrid warfare, driven by Russia, or the surge of national populism and backlash against immigration.

Iran attacks Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and a ship in the Strait of Hormuz as at least 3 U.S. forces are killed and dozens wounded in the escalating conflict.

A debt collection lawsuit doesn't have to catch you off guard. Here's how to protect yourself in the first 30 days.

The Iran-based group said it plans to impose an immediate maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea

Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, is due to meet Donald Trump for the first time today as he wraps up a four-day visit to Washington.

The meeting coincides with ongoing US-mediated talks between Lebanon and Israel. The two sides announced a “framework agreement” on 26 June which stipulates the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon as well as the disarmament of Hezbollah.

Mark Carney says Canada has made proposals to resolve dispute as tariffs are due to be imposed on wide range of goods

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US gas prices have continued to rise since the conflict with Iran resumed this month. According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), a gallon of fuel is now just over $4 – almost a dollar more than a year ago.

It comes as Brent Crude, the international oil benchmark, is now up by almost 2% to $90.92 a barrel.

Tropical Storm Bertha is the second named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Joshua Kerry appears at Westminster magistrates court charged with murder of former MP earlier this month

A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of the former MP and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe.

Joshua Kerry, 28, is accused of killing the 78-year-old former Conservative minister at her home in Haytor, Devon, earlier this month, by hitting her on the head with a hammer 21 times.

• Move is significant step in row over prize money

• US Open will come under pressure to follow suit

The French Open has become the first grand slam tournament to offer players a share of the event’s revenue in a significant step forward in the row over prize money.

The Guardian has learned that officials from Roland Garros made the offer to the players’ representative, Larry Scott, in talks at Wimbledon a fortnight ago in a move that will increase pressure on the US Open, which is due to announce its prize fund for this year’s tournament at the start of next month.

Fifa’s gargantuan revenue influx from the tournament, with little left over for locals, will beget more exploitation

You do not, under any circumstance, have to hand it to Fifa.

You do, however, have to acknowledge that the 2026 World Cup was successful in all of the ways it was intended to be successful. The soccer was interesting and competitive and dramatic, albeit mostly not great – not that this really a necessary ingredient for a compelling sporting product. People came and watched in overwhelming numbers. There was fun and folklore; underdog surprises; heroic storylines that might have been hackneyed had they been works of fiction. The whole thing made vast sums of money for its organizer. More money, by an order of billions, than even Fifa itself had projected, per the Guardian’s reporting.

New defence secretary Wes Streeting denounces drill by Neustrashimy as ‘performative and irresponsible’

A Russian warship fired its main cannon in a short notice test 45 miles south of Plymouth on Monday, the day Andy Burnham was appointed as prime minister.

The Neustrashimy suddenly announced it intended to fire its guns in the morning and requested that a British warship, which had been tracking it, retreat a couple of miles to a safe distance.

An appeals court denied former President Joe Biden's attempt to keep the Justice Department from giving a conservative think tank redacted transcripts and audio recordings of conversations with his biographer.

Several meal subscription services now have special menus for GLP-1 users. Here are the best options to help you hit your protein, fiber and vitamin goals.

After a 10th night of U.S. strikes, Tehran retaliated with fresh attacks in Jordan and Bahrain.

Oratomic, a quantum computing startup that emerged from stealth just four months ago, has raised a $300 million Series A round to pursue an unconventional approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing. The Pasadena-based company says its combination of reconfigurable neutral-atom hardware and quantum error correction could reduce the number of physical qubits needed for a useful quantum computer to roughly 10,000–20,000, rather than the much larger systems traditionally thought necessary. The financing was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures, and the company said it plans to devote the funding to building a fault-tolerant quantum computer rather than intermediate commercial products.

The investment follows Oratomic’s emergence from stealth in March alongside publication of a research paper by scientists at Caltech and the company describing a new approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing based on reconfigurable neutral atoms.

Titled Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits, the paper combines neutral-atom hardware with high-rate quantum error-correcting codes, improved logical operations and optimized compilation techniques to reduce the resources required for large-scale quantum computing. The work builds on two decades of advances in quantum error correction and quantum algorithms that have steadily lowered projected qubit requirements, while arguing that further architectural improvements could reduce those requirements by another order of magnitude compared with many previous estimates.

Oratomic CEO Dolev Bluvstein described the findings as a turning point for the team. “What we came up with—a clear road map to building a quantum computer—came faster than we expected,” he said.

Source: Cain et al., “Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits” (2026).

Oratomic was founded to commercialize the research. The Pasadena-based company is led by CEO Bluvstein and brings together researchers from Caltech, Harvard, Google and other institutions, including Caltech professors Manuel Endres and John Preskill. It aims to build utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers by the end of the decade while continuing to collaborate with Caltech through the university’s Advanced Quantum Computing Mission.

In April, Oratomic partnered with Monarch Quantum to integrate Monarch’s Quantum Light Engine technology into future utility-scale systems, combining optical interconnect technology with Oratomic’s neutral-atom architecture.

The company’s roadmap places it among a growing field of neutral-atom developers, including QuEra, Infleqtion, Pasqal and Atom Computing, each pursuing architectures intended to scale toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Oratomic, however, distinguishes itself by arguing that its neutral-atom architecture and error-correction approach can reduce the number of physical qubits required for practical quantum computing by orders of magnitude compared with conventional assumptions. If validated, Oratomic’s approach could significantly shorten the path toward commercially useful quantum computers.

The technical challenges associated with fault tolerance, error correction and large-scale system integration remain substantial, and Oratomic’s approach has so far been demonstrated only on paper. Whether the company’s architecture can be translated into a practical, large-scale quantum computer remains an open question. The $300 million Series A, however, suggests investors believe the idea is worth putting to the test.

The post Oratomic’s $300M Bet on Low-Qubit Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

The Acer Sospiro A15 borrows the year’s flashiest phone trend for a fraction of the price.

One spouse dies, but what happens to the shared credit card accounts? The answer isn't always straightforward.

A man stabbed two tourists near the ancient Acropolis in Athens, Greece's top tourist attraction, police said.

Meliá group says Donald Trump’s sanctions make it ‘impossible’ to keep any of its 34 sites open

A Spanish hotel chain is to cease all operations in Cuba at the end of the week due to “major difficulties” in doing business on the island under growing pressure from Washington.

The latest US sanctions make it “impossible, de facto and de jure, to maintain even minimal operational stability”, the Meliá group explained in a statement on Tuesday to the Spanish stock market regulator.

Once Republicans’ favourite punchline, Joe Biden’s son is now building an online following by trolling JD Vance, taunting Trump and embracing the absurdity of US politics

What sort of longshot candidate do we reckon is going to run for US president in 2028? The Rock? Kim Kardashian? Kermit the Frog? US politics has become so debased that being rich, famous and a natural-born citizen (sorry, Zohran Mamdani) now seem to be the only qualifications required for a job in the White House.

Which is why you shouldn’t entirely write off murmurings that Hunter Biden might be interested in following in his daddy’s presidential footsteps. When asked by a Fox News reporter about Hunter’s 2028 odds last month, Donald Trump suggested Joe Biden’s prodigal son might “do well”. If other “basket case[s]” in the Democratic party could do well, Trump added, then Hunter probably had a shot. Various analysts appear to agree. “Could Hunter Biden run for office? Don’t rule it out,” a recent Times headline blared. The article quotes a Biden biographer saying: “With a character like Hunter Biden in a populist, social media-driven political environment, you have to never say never.”

Animal welfare charities say marmoset could be ‘first of many’ since new law on primate licenses and microchipping

A “stressed and dehydrated” monkey has been found in a laundry bag on a London bus in what animal welfare charities warn could be the “first of many” abandonments now owners must obtain primate licenses.

The female common marmoset was discovered on a 302 bus waiting in Kensal Rise, north-west London, on Friday by a passenger whose buggy was obstructed by the bag containing the monkey in a cage. The monkey has since been named Oyster after the London transport payment system.

The Pentagon belatedly admitted that almost 100 U.S. troops have been injured in the last two weeks as Iran has hit U.S. targets across the Middle East, following months of reporting by The Intercept that found the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, which one U.S. government official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

The disclosure came one day after a U.S. official told The Intercept that recent attacks by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged, with “dozens” receiving medical attention. 

After ranting that reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious,” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, admitted on Monday that “nearly 100 service members were deemed to have some degree of injury since July 7.” But as of early Tuesday morning, the official Pentagon database tracking U.S. casualties continue to show no U.S. forces were wounded in action during July.

The U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss American casualties, called this “official ineptitude” in the service of the Trump administration.

The disclosure comes after three Army soldiers were killed in ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan over the weekend. Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, were killed in action. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment and said the soldier’s body was so badly disfigured that a “complete investigation” had to be conducted in order to confirm the identity.

In Iraq, Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed and another soldier was wounded over the weekend “during a controlled detonation” of an Iranian attack drone at Erbil Air Base.

U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. In addition to attacks in Jordan and Iraq, Iran struck U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Syria according to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The attacks came after the U.S. failed to achieve any of its war objectives and April and June ceasefires crumbled. The official said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones.

Both Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept about the attacks and U.S. casualties.

Parnell said on X that further casualty updates would be posted to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. DCAS was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

Parnell said on Monday morning that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” But DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated on Monday morning and instead offered outdated figures posted on Friday. On Monday afternoon, the count of wounded on some DCAS webpages rose from 427 to 447, but the Pentagon’s official tally of troops “wounded in action” during July remained at zero as of early Tuesday morning.

Related

“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East

The U.S. official called the Pentagon’s confused casualty count “official ineptitude” that “serves the interests of this administration.” The source said errors, conflicting information, and disappearing data were tolerated because it “floods the zone” with misinformation and adds to confusion among the press and public.

Parnell claimed that the “vast majority of injuries experienced [this month] were minor concussions,” and that 96 percent of personnel have returned to duty. But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

The Trump administration has often discounted head trauma. President Donald Trump himself has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq in January 2020, Trump said, “We suffered no casualties.” The Pentagon would later acknowledge casualties resulting from the attack and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with Central Command ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. A November 2021 inspector general report indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

The post “Cover-Up” Unravels as Pentagon Admits Nearly 100 Injured in Iran Strikes appeared first on The Intercept.

Film star promotes Christopher Nolan film epic wearing gold artefacts dating back almost 3,000 years

The Odyssey is a story about a Greek king’s long journey home. But a pair of earrings worn on the new film adaptation’s press tour – and their long separation from their homeland – is sparking controversy.

At a photocall in London, Zendaya, who plays the goddess Athena in the Christopher Nolan film, wore a pair of earrings fashioned from Iranian artefacts dating back to 700BC.

Durham University researchers find cataclysmic direct hit with Gaia Sausage sent Milky Way into its current position

Astronomers have found evidence that the Milky Way was flipped on its side following a direct hit from a wayward galaxy long before the solar system was born.

The cataclysmic collision took place about 10bn years ago when the Milky Way was struck head-on by an incoming dwarf galaxy known – for purely astronomical reasons – as the Gaia Sausage.

Exclusive: Report from LNP-convened panel heavily criticises police responses to family violence and calls for civilian oversight

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The Queensland government has buried the findings of its own working group of domestic violence victim-survivors, after their report was heavily critical of police responses and called for a “civilian review mechanism” to escalate complaints about police.

The Liberal National government has repeatedly said it would “put victims at the heart” of the state’s justice policies.

Quinn Brown discovered a warmup jacket worn by Wilt Chamberlain during the 1972 NBA Finals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Nearly seven years after Apple debuted the Apple Card, Samsung is following the iPhone maker's footsteps with the Galaxy Card, aiming for its own slice of the credit card market. The announcement comes two days before Samsung's second Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, where it's expected to showcase new smartwatches and folding smartphones. The Galaxy Card is issued by Barclays on the Visa network; the Apple Card, originally issued by Goldman Sachs but now transitioning to Chase, is on the MasterCard network. There is a physical card -- it's not made of titanium but recycled steel. The virtual card will be provisioned to a user's Samsung Wallet account. With no annual fee, Samsung says cardmembers can earn 5 percent cash rewards on all in-store or online purchases made directly from Samsung in the US, 3 percent cash rewards on purchases made with the Galaxy Card using Samsung Wallet, 2 percent cash rewards on streaming service subscriptions, and 1 percent cash rewards on everything else with the physical card. The cash rewards can be redeemed as a statement credit or transferred to a checking or savings account. The annual percentage rate (APR) varies by cardmember, but the card has no foreign transaction fees. Other perks include a 20 percent discount on Samsung's VIP Advantage membership, which offers extended device protection, specialized support, and exclusive deals, and $200 in cash rewards after spending $2,000 in the first 90 days. Applications open up on July 22. The Samsung Wallet app is only available on Samsung smartphones and watches, so what happens if a consumer switches to a different smartphone brand? The company says Galaxy Card is not limited to Samsung device owners and that anyone can use the physical card, but you lose the key perks; the card can be managed through a BarclaysUS.com online portal. (Similarly, if an iPhone owner switches to Android, their physical Apple Card will still work, but they lose access to the Apple Wallet app and the 3 percent daily cash perk on Apple purchases; there's a web portal to manage the account.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The lawsuit alleges that Eli Lilly misled consumers by using outdated clinical trial data to make its drugs appear more effective than Novo's.

Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton died during a controlled detonation at Erbil airbase as US-Iran war toll reaches 17

The US military has identified an army soldier killed recently during a “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone in Iraq as Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton, of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

According to a press release from the US defense department on Tuesday morning, the 30-year-old Swinton was supporting overseas contingency operations in Iraq – and he was “killed in action during a controlled detonation of a downed One-Way Unmanned Aerial System” on Saturday at Erbil airbase in northern Iraq.

Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of North Carolina, was "decommissioning ammunition and an accident happened," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

More on the cost of living: new figures show that UK grocery inflation eased in the four weeks to 12th July to 2.6%, its lowest rate since December 2024.

It marks the fifth consecutive month of slowing price rises, Worldpanel by Numerator found.

Easing price rises will come as welcome news to shoppers, but the annual bill tells a fuller story. The average household spent £5,530 on groceries over the past twelve months to July, up £156 on the same period last year - a reminder that even as the rate of inflation cools, the cumulative cost of the weekly shop keeps climbing.

L&VW agrees that there is an opportunity to enhance the way local government, regulators and Thames Water work together, granting greater public controls on critical business issues to improve delivery of complex, essential infrastructure projects, and demonstrate shared accountability.

The consortium is willing to make significant new commitments to grant greater controls and oversight to ministers, implemented through a ‘golden share’.

Following a pair of deadly shootings by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the division of the agency responsible for street arrests and deportations issued a new policy mandating a dress code for field operations.

The nationwide policy, shared with The Intercept by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower and confirmed by multiple ICE officers, details a new set of appearance standards aimed at making it easier for the public and fellow law enforcement officials to recognize ICE officers in the field.

“Law enforcement officers performing field operations shall wear readily identifiable ICE attire, including a ballistic vest during high-visibility operations,” says a guidance memo signed by Acting ICE Director David Venturella. “Appropriate field attire includes khaki or coyote brown tactical type pants, paired with an ICE polo, or dark blue or black polo.”

The memo adds, “Clothing such as jeans, sweatshirts, hoodies, non-collared shirts, or apparel displaying graphics or screen prints is not authorized during field operations.”

The new directives for ICE’s Employee Code of Conduct came in the wake of a botched arrest last week in Las Vegas by two ICE officers wearing hooded sweatshirts, with one attempting to pull a hood down over his face as onlookers recorded video. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

The officer attempting to make the arrest “looked like a kidnapper,” said one ICE official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood.

“Ending the era of ICE agents making arrests in hoodies and unbranded street clothes is a long-overdue admission that unidentifiable immigration enforcement is dangerous, instills fear, and erodes public trust,” Nick Wilson, the senior director of public safety policy at Center for American Progress, told The Intercept. “Real public safety requires holding federal agents to the exact same standards of visibility, training, state and local oversight, and independent investigations of civil rights violations as local law enforcement.”

Along with the use of masks, ICE officers’ failure to clearly identify themselves amid arrests and other enforcement actions have drawn criticisms from the public and raised the ire of elected officials. Attorneys general have pleaded with Congress to pass legislation requiring that ICE officers wear identifying insignia, and members of Congress have themselves urged ICE to require officers better identify themselves to the public.

Botched Las Vegas Arrest

The new dress code, two ICE officials told The Intercept, came in direct response to the recent fatal ICE shootings in Texas and Maine and the botched arrest attempt by two plainclothes ICE officers on July 13 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

“It’s because of the incident that happened in Las Vegas,” said the ICE official.

Video of the Las Vegas airport incident, recorded by a bystander, shows two people in hooded sweatshirts tackling a man in the middle of a busy terminal. After passersby draw near, the officers abandoned the arrest but left the man handcuffed on one hand. The man tackled in the video, later identified as Phu Nguyen, a 57-year-old Australian national who allegedly overstayed his visa, was arrested by ICE the following day at Los Angeles International Airport.

“It blew all our minds,” the ICE official said. “It didn’t look professional. They didn’t present a badge when they initiated.”

The new ICE dress code policy mandates that all arresting officers must clearly display an ICE badge while conducting arrests.

“During low-visibility operations, the ICE badge must remain visible at the time of arrest.” the policy says.

Another ICE official, who also cited the Las Vegas airport incident, said a wave of new ICE recruits and relaxed training standards had contributed to the lack of professionalism.

“What an embarrassment the Vegas video was,” said the second ICE official, who also requested anonymity. “Those two fucking clowns should’ve been immediately fired. Half these fucking new DOs” — deportation officers — “don’t even know the basics of immigration law or how to process an alien. They hired a bunch of fucking clowns and they look sloppy as shit.”

In a statement to the press, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed bystanders for the botched arrest in Vegas.

“As officers attempted to arrest Nguyen, a crowd of anti-ICE agitators surrounded officers,” the statement said. “To de-escalate the situation and for officer safety, officers did not proceed with the arrest.”

According to ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept, the new dress code could be the first step toward a major shift in ICE’s long-standing status as a plainclothes agency.

“I would say the writing’s on the wall,” said one ICE official. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we go to a uniformed agency.”

The post ICE Mandates Dress Code After Killings and Botched Arrest appeared first on The Intercept.

The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief has saved 26m lives globally, but slashing of funds and dismantling of USAID have forced clinics to shut in dozens of countries

No part of the United States’ anti-HIV programme has escaped unscathed from Donald Trump’s funding cuts, despite pledges from the administration to protect care that saved lives around the world, a new report has found.

Funding cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) have caused “severe and devastating” disruption globally, with thousands of staff laid off and many clinics closed, according to research being presented next week at the 26th International Aids Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It warns that changes in US policy risk reversing progress in the fight against HIV/Aids.

As the Latino population of North Carolina booms, opportunities abound – and Donal Gooch is capitalizing on changing nature of his home region

Donal Gooch is not pleased about the trash on his arena floor.

“Shit, it’s pitiful,” he says.

Meta’s throwing Xbox cloud gaming Into Its Horizon Plus Quest subscription, and converting its controllers to work with it.

@rc honestly, i think it's just practice. foot stance might be part of it, too. Lots of riders i see put their feet at each end of the board, but that seems too sketchy and more work to me. I ride with my feet close to the hub, so it's just a quick ankle flex and a bit of a weight shift for me to turn. sharper turns i think i do some sort of arm swing/shoulder & torso twist to accomplish it, but otherwise...

US health officials say source of Upper East Side cluster has probably been eliminated after 76 people fell ill

An outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in New York City has claimed a fourth life, officials have said, as they again expressed confidence the source of the exposure had been eliminated.

A statement from the city’s health department on Monday said the outbreak, which was traced to cooling towers in buildings in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had sickened 76 people – with 53 discharged after hospital treatment, and 12 others managing their recovery at home.

Average credit card rates are sitting near 22% and quietly draining wallets. Here's how to fight back now.

Government urges visitors not to approach or feed wolves as it manages safety amid growing population

Danish authorities have advised tourists to stand still, make eye contact and put up “maximum resistance” in the event of attack if they encounter a wolf while on holiday.

After a 200-year absence, wolves started returning to Denmark in 2012. There are now estimated to be 49 wolves on the Danish peninsula of Jutland.

U.S. forces launched a new round of airstrikes against Iran at the direction of President Trump following the deaths of two U.S. soldiers in an Iranian strike in Jordan.

State department’s 100-page report is latest push in Trump administration campaign to bring down government

The US government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” have come as startling revelations to those living under the six-month-long US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people search through piles of uncollected rubbish for food, or else swelter at home in 24-hour-plus blackouts.

The unsigned 100-page report, Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published by the US state department on Monday, blames Havana for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”.

The World Cup left us with some surprising heroes. Kudos to pop’s leader of the bland and his very public rebuke to hatred and division

Long before the United States turned the World Cup final into an orgy of pop music and advertising, the signs were already there that this year’s co-hosts should never have been allowed within a thousand miles of the tournament. The garish half-time show curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay seemed to reinforce that – but then came a moment of improbable genius.

I was surprised. The last time America hosted, the problem wasn’t commercial overkill so much as sheer shrugging apathy. I was in New York during USA ’94. Apart from a few flapping banners outside the Nike store, you wouldn’t have known one of the world’s biggest sporting events was taking place. This, in hindsight, was a blessing. Football was allowed to football.

Simon Price is a music journalist and author

People in Europe who used the wearable significantly improved their blood pressure readings over six months.

Salah Sarsour, president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque and a green card holder, has lived in the US for decades

The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque said he was subjected to “dehumanizing” treatment during more than 80 days in federal immigration custody – treatment that reminded him of the time he spent in Israeli military prisons in occupied Palestine nearly four decades ago.

“It all brought back old memories of things that happened to me when I was tried in Palestine,” said Salah Sarsour in his first interview since being released last month. “The humiliation, the treatment by guards, the way they talk to people, the way they try to put people down.” He said he lost more than 30lb while in immigration detention.

Storm warnings stretch from Florida to Louisiana as Bertha brings heavy rain, flooding risk and possible tornadoes

Tropical Storm Bertha strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico and was moving slowly toward the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, causing a tropical storm warning and storm surge watches, forecasters said.

The storm was about 110 miles (177km) south of Panama City, Florida, and 170 miles south-east of Mobile, Alabama, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Tuesday morning. It was moving north-west at 5mph (8km/h) with maximum sustained winds of 50mph.

Company is delivering free-space quantum memory technology to Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland to address a critical bottleneck to scaling quantum networks.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill., July 21, 2026 — Photon Queue, a quantum technology company building high-efficiency quantum memories for next-generation quantum computing systems, today announced the close of its oversubscribed seed funding round of $4 million, led by Playground Global. The seed round builds on Photon Queue’s early customer traction, including contracts with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland that validate demand from leading institutions at the forefront of quantum computing and photonic systems research.

The funding will accelerate Photon Queue’s product development, manufacturing capabilities and customer deployments as the company scales to meet demand from quantum computing companies, national laboratories and research institutions.

Quantum computing depends on photons arriving at exactly the right place and time. As systems scale, quantum platforms will need to network many smaller processors together, creating a universal bottleneck: synchronizing single photons across complex quantum systems. Quantum memories solve that problem by storing photons until they are needed.

Photon Queue’s devices store photons directly in free-space optical loops using proprietary high-reflectivity mirror systems and optical switches. Unlike other approaches that require cryogenics, vacuum systems or complex transduction processes, Photon Queue’s devices operate at room temperature using standard power, while delivering ultra-high efficiency and world-leading bandwidth.

“Useful quantum computing will require photons to move through networks with extraordinary precision, efficiency and timing. That is the problem Photon Queue was founded to solve,” said Nathan Arnold, co-founder and CEO of Photon Queue. “In less than two years, we have taken technology from the lab to deployed commercial hardware with leading national lab and university customers. Our work with Sandia and the University of Maryland is a major validation point that quantum memory is becoming essential infrastructure for the next era of computing.”

Photon Queue’s devices are designed to be compatible with virtually any wavelength, making them broadly applicable across photonic, trapped ion, neutral atom and other quantum computing architectures. The company has deployed its first commercial quantum memory device at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland.

“Quantum computing is hitting a scale problem that better qubits alone cannot solve. The industry needs new infrastructure to move, store and synchronize photons with far greater efficiency,” said Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte, Investor at Playground Global. “Photon Queue has built an elegant solution, turning breakthrough quantum optics into commercial hardware, with early customer traction. We believe they are a foundational company that will define the quantum memory category.”

“Quantum memories are a critical enabling technology for distributed quantum systems, and performance, efficiency and ease of integration are essential,” said Saikat Guha, Clark Distinguished Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park and director of the NSF Center for Quantum Networks. “Photon Queue’s room-temperature, free-space approach is compelling because it stores photons directly without the complexity of cryogenics, vacuum systems or transduction. We look forward to working with the Photon Queue team as they continue developing practical quantum memory hardware for our research in quantum networking, sensing, and communication”

Founded in 2024 as a spinout from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Photon Queue is led by co-founders Nathan Arnold, CEO and Kelsey Ortiz, CTO. The founding team brings deep expertise in quantum optics, photonic systems and hardware commercialization.

Photon Queue is a graduate of the Duality Quantum Accelerator, a corporate partner of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the winner of the Q2B Startup Pitch Competition. CEO Nathan Arnold is also a fellow at Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy entrepreneurship program.

Photon Queue also recently announced $500,000 in funding from the New Mexico Economic Development Department and Roadrunner Venture Studios to support its expansion in New Mexico and deepen its work with the region’s national laboratory and quantum technology ecosystem.

About Photon Queue

Photon Queue is the world’s leading developer of free-space quantum memory devices. Founded in 2024 as a spinout from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the company builds high-performance quantum memories that store photons using linear optics at room temperature — delivering ultra-high efficiency and world-leading bandwidth with no cryogenics, vacuum systems or complex transduction required. Photon Queue’s technology serves quantum computing, communications and metrology applications. The company is headquartered in Champaign, Illinois. Learn more at photonqueue.com.

Source: Photon Queue

The post Photon Queue Raises Oversubscribed Seed Round to Scale Quantum Memory Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Previously, we installed its contents in a way that made pacman not aware of the files (using VBoxManage extpack install ... from an install script). To mitigate issues during upgrade, you can use one of the following methods:

• Uninstall virtualbox-ext-vnc before upgrading the system, then installing it again.
• Run VBoxManage extpack uninstall 'VNC' as root before upgrading the system.
• Instruct pacman once to overwrite the existing files:

pacman -Syu --overwrite '/usr/lib/virtualbox/ExtensionPacks/VNC/*'

Nintendo Switch 2
The single-player offshoot of the quirky and colourful multiplayer series is disappointingly run-of-the-mill

Splatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooting games whose paint-splattered turf war nature means being bad at shooting is just as valuable as – if not more so than – being good. It is also blessed with an abundance of personality, with vibrant characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only dream of achieving. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.

The first spinoff in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is advertised as a single player-focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play through the entire game solo just fine – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed cooperatively with up to three others. Players start each session on a hideout ship where they can upgrade their equipment and tweak their play style before heading out on bite-sized repeatable missions, and this structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping out strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works towards creating their ultimate squid-kid avatar of chaos.

Splatoon Raiders is out 23 July; £41.99

The city rallied behind Tamboli’s despite online boycott calls, as frustration grows over the Trump administration’s federal taskforce following multiple deaths

You can measure the disconnect between angry internet commentariat and real life Memphis residents by the length of the wait for a table at Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza.

In early July, Miles Tamboli, the owner of the midtown pizza spot, made a decision: he would not serve the national guard deployed to the city by the Trump administration, which the US president claimed would reduce the city’s crime rate. Tamboli’s video announcement came days after troops killed two city residents, bringing the total to four since the initiative started in September.

Guardian analysis shows officers arrested 43,138 people as quiet and steady operations ramp up across the country

The Trump administration arrested a record number of immigrants last month, according to newly released government data that reveals how US immigration agents are quietly but steadily ramping up operations across the country.

A Guardian analysis of the latest data published by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found that federal immigration agents arrested 43,138 people in June – the highest number since Donald Trump took office in January last year and promised a campaign of mass immigrant deportations.

LEIPZIG, Germany, July 21, 2026 — SAXON Q, a pioneer in diamond-based nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum computing, today announced the commercial availability of the 128-qubit SXQ128 and 512-qubit SXQ512 — the first diamond-based NV-center quantum computers to ever exceed 10 qubits. Both systems operate at room temperature with no cryogenic cooling, vacuum equipment or specialized facilities required, offering organizations the ability to run quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNN) and chemistry simulations, accelerate materials research and develop the quantum workflows that will define the next era of computing.

Built on semiconductor-compatible manufacturing processes and protected by more than 220 patents and pending applications, SAXON Q’s systems fit within a standard server rack, plug into a standard electrical unit and run continuously without the recalibration cycles or environmental controls that quantum computing has historically required. The systems are also significantly more energy efficient than GPU-based approaches — consistently demonstrating 6-10x better energy performance — further reducing the operational cost of deployment.

“For thirty years, NV-center quantum computing was a question of manufacturing — whether we could place qubits with enough precision and yield to build something that works outside a laboratory. We solved that problem,” said Marius Grundmann, co-founder and CEO of SAXON Q. “The SXQ128 and SXQ512 are quantum computers that operate the way a computer should: reliably, continuously and without a team of specialists to keep it running.”

The SXQ128 supports near-term quantum workloads including variational algorithms, quantum chemistry simulations and quantum amplitude estimation. The SXQ512 builds on the same architecture, significantly expanding computational capability through additional NV-center modules and increased per-core quantum capacity — broadening the range of problems addressable and making it well-suited to more demanding research and applied computing workloads. Two previous generation SAXON Q systems are currently deployed and in active use at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Fraunhofer IWU, where researchers access them on premises or via cloud API.

“We began using a Saxon Q mobile quantum computing system in June 2025 for industrial optimization in material processing and robotics,” said Albrecht Hänel, Head of Digital Production Twin, Fraunhofer IWU. “The system has operated at room temperature continuously since installation — and has exceeded the gate fidelity specifications we outlined in the tender.”

While traditional NV-center creation methods typically achieve conversion yields — the rate at which implanted atoms successfully become functional quantum bits — in the range of 1-10%, SAXON Q’s proprietary sulfur co-implantation process achieves greater than 85%, solving one of the fundamental challenges in scaling quantum computing systems. The resulting qubits achieve up to 99.92% fidelity — fewer than one error per 1,000 operations, and quantum states are stable long enough to run complex, real-world calculations without degradation.

The SAXON Q platform is also the only commercially available NV-center quantum computing system capable of coordinating computation across multiple quantum processing cores simultaneously. Through its proprietary multi-core quantum operating system, the SXQ128 offers eight fully entangled qubits per core, while the SXQ512 features 16 per core. Both units are modular by design, giving organizations the ability to start with the SXQ128 and expand their quantum capability over time by simply upgrading the diamond chip or adding additional cores, providing a flexible entry point into quantum computing that grows alongside their needs.

Error correction capabilities and logical qubit architectures are part of SAXON Q’s development roadmap, as the platform scales toward systems of 10,000 qubits and beyond. SAXON Q’s broader product roadmap extends to data-center-ready quantum co-processors and, ultimately, chip-scale quantum processors designed for embedded and mass-market deployment.

SAXON Q was founded by researchers and executives whose credentials span decades of quantum science and commercial technology leadership. Prof. Dr. Marius Grundmann, co-founder and CEO, is Professor of Experimental Physics at Leipzig University, with nearly 700 peer-reviewed publications and 40 years in semiconductor physics. Prof. Dr. Jan-Berend Meijer, co-founder and CTO, is one of the world’s leading authorities on ion beam implantation — the process at the core of SAXON Q’s NV-center technology. Dr. Frank Schlichting, CEO, brings more than 30 years of executive experience across semiconductors, automotive and energy sectors.

Pricing and Availability

Each SAXON Q quantum system is custom built and configured to individual requirements.

The SXQ128 is available to order now, with delivery within three months of order placement. The SXQ512 is available to order with deliveries beginning Q2 2027.

Contact SAXON Q at info@saxonq.com to discuss specifications and pricing.

About SAXON Q

SAXON Q is a quantum computing company founded at the University of Leipzig by the research team that pioneered nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center technology in diamond over three decades of scientific work. The company was built on a simple premise: that quantum computing would only achieve its potential when it could be deployed like any other computing technology — without cryogenic infrastructure, specialized facilities or dedicated engineering staff. SAXON Q systems operate at room temperature on standard electrical power and are manufactured using semiconductor-compatible processes protected by more than 220 patents and pending applications. Headquartered in Leipzig, Germany, SAXON Q serves research institutions and commercial customers around the world.

Source: SAXON Q

The post SAXON Q Brings Room-Temperature Diamond Quantum Computing to Commercial Market appeared first on HPCwire.

The recall affects certain 2020-2027 Aviator and 2020-2026 Explorer vehicles.

Officials sought identity of sources ‘long before’ reporters wrote about the president’s Air Force One jet from Qatar

Donald Trump’s administration sought phone records of several New York Times journalists and even those of some of their relatives, according to a motion unsealed Monday – an unusually aggressive attempt to unmask the confidential sources of reporters who wrote about the president’s Air Force One jet from Qatar.

The Trump administration’s push to compel the identity of sources in the form of additional subpoenas comes at a time when the executive branch’s relationship with the press is increasingly contentious. The efforts, described in a letter-motion filed by the Times over the weekend, were more expansive than previously known, the newspaper noted – and also covered a time frame that exceeded the news articles in question.

After his dubious intervention at the World Cup, the president is now an arbiter of high-level fairway disputes. There’s one word for that: SAD!

For so many of us around the world, the final scenes of the World Cup were a chance to switch off the TV with an eye-roll and observe mildly: “Well, I think that’s quite enough America for us all for a while now.” And yet: there can and must always be more. It is simply the way of things. If you thought the World Cup being carried on to the pitch ahead of Sunday’s final in some kind of Louis Vuitton sex trunk was the nadir of hysterical trashiness in sport, then simply recall the lesson of the past few years and expand your mind. It can always get trashier.

To the parched fairways of Royal Birkdale, then, the host of this year’s Open Championship, which – yesssssss! – was won by someone other than Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler or any of the other radioactively ghastly US golfers you’d cheerfully head-flush in a Mar-a-Lago loo just as long as you could clear the classified documents out of it first. It has now been revealed that, during his heated row over a two-shot penalty he was handed for improving the area for his backswing, DeChambeau has been accused of threatening to call the US president unless it was all resolved in his favour. To repeat: threatening to call Donald Trump.

Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into question

Hello, I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you after a double-header feature of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI.

New York becomes first state to impose one-year pause on new AI datacenters

Trump rails against New York’s statewide datacenter moratorium

Albanese’s AI blueprint sparks calls for datacentre moratorium until new regulations in place

‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

IBM loses quarter of its value as tech giant’s shares plunge and profits falter

‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew

Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch

Trump made $1.4bn from crypto in one year. Is Justin Sun the man who helped him do it?

Exclusive Harris poll for Guardian reveals Americans’ assumptions about stock market and wider economy

Two in five Americans believe the stock market isn’t for them and only benefits the top 1%, according to a new Harris Poll poll exclusive to the Guardian that surveyed investing habits and knowledge about the economy.

The poll found a similar share of Americans had incorrect assumptions about the relationship between the economy and the stock market. Nearly 40% did not know that the economy and the stock market were not the same thing. And two-thirds of Americans incorrectly believed that a growing stock market means the overall economy is growing.

This survey was conducted online by the Harris Poll from 9-11 July, among a nationally representative sample of 2,154 US adults, with 1,667 reporting some level of investing.

The congresswoman can run a serious national campaign on the left and pull a movement in behind it. She should get in early

In the summer of 2018, almost no one thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could beat Joe Crowley. Crowley was a 10-term incumbent, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, a man some thought would one day be speaker. A 28-year-old former bartender and democratic socialist was the longest of long shots to succeed him. But ever since she did, the political establishment has been trying to decide whether to take her seriously.

For a while it decided not to. The Missouri representative Emanuel Cleaver said the Democratic caucus did not need her “sniping”, while the then senator Claire McCaskill dismissed her as a “bright and shiny new object”. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to enjoy the response. Asked on 60 Minutes whether she wanted people to underestimate her, she said: “Absolutely. That’s how I won my primary.”

Melinda French Gates talked about menopause and her philanthropic focus on women's health in the debut episode of Norah O'Donnell's "Healthful" podcast.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s preferred successor for her San Francisco congressional seat has gained the endorsement of the political arm of the pro-Palestine and anti-genocide advocacy group TrackAIPAC after pledging to back an arms embargo on Israel if elected to Congress. 

Connie Chan, a progressive member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, already has the backing of establishment Democratic figures such as Pelosi and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., along with influential local labor groups. But the endorsement from Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, the political advocacy offshoot of TrackAIPAC, is a notable move to further differentiate Chan from her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener. Wiener came out 11 percentage points ahead of Chan in California’s June primary election, sending the two to a general election runoff that excluded Saikat Chakrabarti, then TrackAIPAC’s preferred candidate. 

“In Congress, we will oppose any aid to Israel and do everything in our power to stop their government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people,” Chan said in a statement to The Intercept. “We are proud to stand with groups like End Citizens United and Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption to fight to fix our democracy.”

Israel and Palestine have featured heavily in the race to replace Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of the current congressional term. Days after Chakrabarti’s defeat, he dedicated his remaining campaign funds to form a PAC to support Chan, citing her position on sending U.S. weapons to Israel and her vow to “vote to end all military aid to Israel – offensive and defensive.”

To earn TrackAIPAC’s endorsement, Chan filled out the group’s questionnaire, in which politicians seeking the group’s backing swear off money from pro-Israel lobby groups like the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, agree that Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to a genocide, and promise to oppose all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, consistent with positions Chan had taken earlier in the race.

Last week, the majority of House Democrats voted in favor of cutting military aid to Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act legislation, which sets the budget for Pentagon spending. The measure failed, but the vote marked a dramatic shift in a Congress that has long granted military aid to Israel with scant opposition. With the recent endorsement and arms embargo pledge, Chan signaled her position among the changing tides in the party. She also is against U.S. involvement in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and said on her website that she would have voted in favor of the failed House resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. support for the war. 

Related

How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC?

“We heard from many of Connie’s constituents in San Francisco, as well as supporters around the country, who wanted a clear statement of her positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and America’s role in both,” a TrackAIPAC spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement. “We were proud and pleased to offer her that opportunity through our endorsement questionnaire, an opportunity her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener, has not taken.”

For his part, Wiener makes a distinction between offensive and so-called defensive weapons to Israel. He says that he would vote in favor of the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which seeks to halt arms transfers of certain munitions to Israel, but that he backs providing U.S. support for Israel’s missile interceptor systems Iron Dome and David’s Sling. Earlier in the race, Chan had taken a similar position, telling Mission Local in January that offensive weapons should be banned while U.S. support for defensive weapons should be paired with humanitarian aid to Gaza. In recent months, she has shifted toward an arms embargo on all U.S. weapons to Israel.

Positions Wiener held earlier in his political career, such as opposing local resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and supporting state legislation that free speech advocates have said censors pro-Palestine expression in schools, continued to follow him on the campaign trail. Wiener has remained an opponent of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, while Chan’s platform calls for sanctions on Israel over the genocide in Gaza and its expansion of West Bank settlements and asserts the free speech right to boycott. The TrackAIPAC endorsement pledge also opposes efforts to pass laws that punish people who participate in the BDS movement.

Last month, Wiener was chased out of the San Francisco Trans March by attendees who called out his record on Palestine, with one attendee yelling, “I think your policy on genocide in Gaza is terrible — you do not belong here anymore.” Days earlier, another person filmed his confrontation with Wiener at a bar during a World Cup match, calling him out on his support for Israel and his housing policy. 

Related

Democrats Are Split Over What It Means to Block Israel Weapons Deals

Wiener decried the incidents as harassment, a line that both Chan and Pelosi also held, condemning both confrontations. Chan said she understood the role of public disagreements, but added, “As someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence I stand firm and threats of violence and hate speech.”

Chan also came under fire just days from the primary election for supposed connections with the pro-Israel lobby. Reporting from Drop Site News revealed that Chan had received support from Pro-Choice Majority Action, a PAC with funding ties to AIPAC’s super PAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, formed as an alternative to AIPAC amid Democratic disillusionment with the flagship pro-Israel group. At the time, Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights. Chan rejected the claims and said she encouraged any groups supporting her to reject funds tied to AIPAC.

Now, with support from both Chakrabarti and TrackAIPAC, which made a name for itself by running fierce social media campaigns against lawmakers who received money from the pro-Israel lobby, Chan is trying to put allegations of coordination with the pro-Israel giant to rest.  

“Big corporations, billionaires and special interest groups are using their money to try and buy our elections,” Chan said. “But we know San Francisco is not for sale. We have never taken money from AIPAC or their affiliates, because we serve San Francisco and no one else.”

The post Nancy Pelosi’s Pick for Her SF House Seat Takes Anti-AIPAC Pledge appeared first on The Intercept.

Chiefs in Ontario say they were left to self-evacuate before homes burned to ground, after being told there was no imminent threat

Fast-moving wildfires have burned two First Nations communities in Canada to the ground, as members said they were left to self-evacuate without government help or emergency alerts.

Thirteen communities in Ontario province have been ordered to evacuate because of wildfires, most of them First Nations. The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, told reporters on Monday that close to 2,000 people had been evacuated so far to cities including Toronto and Niagara Falls.

European leaders have made positive noises about the new UK PM, but he is likely to face the same restrictions as Starmer

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham is unknown in Brussels, but that will soon change. In his schedule for the autumn is an EU-UK summit that may underscore the same dilemmas that have confronted previous British prime ministers in the relationship with Europe.

EU leaders were quick to offer congratulations to Britain’s prime minister, the seventh since the 2016 Brexit referendum. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said she looked forward to strengthening the EU-UK partnership “for the security of our shared continent” and “the prosperity of people on both sides of the Channel”. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, invited Burnham to visit Berlin “very soon”, noting that the UK and Germany’s “deep connection is particularly evident in these times”.

Our cartoonist looks back at the final game of the 2026 World Cup as Donald Trump watched Spain triumph again

• Buy this cartoon | Some of David’s favourite works

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

The pilot, Kenneth Jouppi, argues that taking his 1969 Cessna would violate the Eighth Amendment's "Excessive Fines Clause."

Interviews with residents of Russian-held region point to frustration with Moscow as Ukrainian campaign to isolate it takes toll on daily life

First, the guests stopped coming. As Ukrainian drones and missiles pounded Crimea throughout the spring and into the summer, Russian tourists began cancelling their bookings at the small guesthouse Marina runs in Yevpatoria, a resort town on the peninsula’s Black Sea coast.

Then petrol became scarce, making it harder to stock the business with food and other essentials. Now, electricity and running water are cut off for much of the day, just as the summer heat sets in.

Tech workers are increasingly unionizing, trading Silicon Valley’s myth of exceptionalism for collective bargaining to contest the corporate deployment of artificial intelligence

For decades, the technology industry was a fortress that labor unions couldn’t breach. Tech workers already had cushy compensation packages, dream benefits like unlimited vacation and free lunch, and a flat corporate hierarchy that made engineers feel as powerful as their bosses, all of whom dressed down in sneakers and hoodies. So why unionize?

Now, that fortress is cracking from the inside. Unions have become increasingly popular for tech employees. After months of mass layoffs tied to artificial intelligence and mounting anxieties about how it’s being deployed, some tech workers say they’ve been saddled with higher workloads while facing the threat of job loss caused by the very products they’re building. Workers from Google DeepMind and Meta in the UK are also objecting to how their companies’ AI products are being used, such as for military purposes or to monitor employee productivity. Those same workers are now attempting to unionize.

Yotam Moram, who helped lead Occupy Wall Street, discusses why power must be built through movements, not simply through elected officials

Yotam Marom knows why the Occupy Wall Street movement fell apart 15 years ago. The New York-based organizer and author was a key participant in the nationwide constellation of encampments and rolling protests that brought tens of thousands of people into its fold. But the movement could not withstand police raids, evictions, a bitter winter and, as Marom sees it, an internal “politics of powerlessness”, which mistook a healthy distrust of institutional power for a failure to build a strong, coherent strategy for political change. Occupy splintered within a few short months and never seriously revived.

As he recounts in his new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, Marom has again and again seen similar dynamics weigh down social movements in his work as an organizer and facilitator. He founded the Wildfire Project, a training organization for grassroots groups, and has worked with organizations including the Sunrise Movement agitating against climate decimation, the abolitionist Dream Defenders fighting for racial justice, the Uncommitted movement to end Democratic party support for Israel’s war crimes, tenants unions battling landlords, and more.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an X post by Josh Walkos, author of the Substack We the Free: If you thought Flock was bad check out Falconet. Falconet from Israeli company Cognyte serves as a cell tower simulator that intercepts cell phone data from all devices within range. Police mount these systems in Tahoes so the vehicles can collect information while driving through areas without any direct interaction with targets. This mobile approach generates ongoing records of phone locations and communications for everyone nearby rather than only suspects, which creates comprehensive movement profiles and bypasses traditional warrant requirements under the Fourth Amendment. Cognyte sells the technology directly to U.S. agencies, as shown by the Texas Department of Public Safety purchase of four Tahoes where over three point eight million dollars went to the interception equipment. Adoption spreads through routine vehicle procurement with little external review of how the collected data is stored or shared. Once active the systems permit warrantless collection of private cell phone data across entire communities during normal patrols, which enables potential misuse and leaves individuals with no effective way to discover or contest the surveillance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

National disaster agency confirms ‘severe financial and human losses’ in eastern province of Nuristan

Rescue crews in Afghanistan are searching for survivors and bodies among the rubble of houses destroyed by devastating flash floods that authorities said had killed nearly two dozen people and left more than 100 people missing.

The Afghanistan national disaster management authority said on Tuesday that 23 people had died, 80 had been injured and more than 100 were missing after floods struck the eastern province of Nuristan on Monday, causing an undetermined number of buildings to collapse. The provincial capital city of Parun was among the areas affected, authorities said.

Teargas and water cannon used on protesters after Abderrahim ⁠Fakir died pleading for help from police

Police have clashed with demonstrators during a protest in the Italian city of Bologna after a Moroccan-born man died pleading for help under police restraint.

Human rights campaigners and Italy’s opposition parties have demanded urgent answers over the death on Sunday of Abderrahim ⁠Fakir, 42, who had lived in Italy since he was five years old and ran a small removals and cleaning business.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: When the weirdest people in the country are running the government, what will it take to make competence fashionable again?

• Election Interference or Election Integrity?: Lies designed to manufacture doubt so Trump can meddle in elections he can’t win honestly.

• Pete Hegseth’s “High-T Department of War”: Hegseth’s testosterone crusade trades medical evidence for a slogan, a dangerous substitution.

• Does Major League Baseball Need a Salary Cap?: Or, will owners accept a real spending floor instead of using the cap as an excuse to stay cheap?

• The League - Sam Pollard: An absorbing documentary reminds us that the Negro Leagues were not a sidebar to baseball history but half the story.

• Cab Calloway - “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”: Robinson’s breakthrough becomes a joyous roll call for Black players who rushed through the door Robinson opened.

  ---

Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”

Dan Quayle (1947–), former Vice President of the United States

I laughed when I first read this because there is a wonderful irony baked into the source. Once upon a time, Dan Quayle established a high-water mark for weirdness in American politics.

In 1988, when George Bush (the elder) chose Quayle as his vice-presidential running mate, he seemed like a politically solid choice: he was young (just 41 years old), handsome, reliably conservative, and a Midwestern senator from Indiana who could be counted on to deliver his state’s electoral votes. But Quayle’s selection quickly became problematic, as allegations surfaced that he’d used family connections to get a spot in the Indiana National Guard to avoid being drafted at the height of the Vietnam War. (Quayle denied it.) That story was soon followed by talk of a scandalous golf trip to Florida with two Republican congressmen and a female D.C. lobbyist, who was having an affair with one of the congressmen and claimed Quayle had “wanted to make love” to her. (Quayle denied it.)

Then there was his disastrous debate performance, when he said he had as much experience as John F. Kennedy when Kennedy ran for President, only to have his opponent, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, respond, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The reviews were withering. Today, though, if Quayle is remembered at all, it’s for “The Potatoe Incident,” which occurred on June 15, 1992, during the Bush/Quayle reelection campaign, when he mistakenly “corrected” a 12-year-old student during a spelling bee, telling him to add an “e” to the end of the word “potato.” Already a liability to the campaign, the incident made him a laughingstock.

Still, it all seems pretty quaint by today’s standards. Just compare his bona fides to Donald Trump’s: Quayle used family influence to get into the National Guard, while Trump used his family doctor and some imaginary bone spurs to get out of the military altogether; Quayle made a pass at a D.C. lobbyist, while Trump had affairs with a porn star and a Playboy playmate; Quayle glibly compared himself to J.F.K. in a debate, while Trump said Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats” in a debate; and while Quayle is remembered for “potatoe,” Trump is remembered for “covfefe.” (To round out the comparisons, Quayle was the captain of his college golf team, while Trump has been accused of cheating at golf by Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, actor Samuel L. Jackson, and the late Senator Lindsey Graham.)

Quayle’s quote about weird people actually was a reference to Grigori Rasputin, the infamous monk who was said to exert an unholy influence on Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra prior to the Russian Revolution. Trump, of course, has his own cast of weird influencers, starting with “First Buddy” Elon Musk, the auto and aerospace mogul with no government experience whom he put in charge of DOGE, the newly invented Department of Government Efficiency that ransacked the government to save money for the billionaires at the expense of everyone else. There’s Roger Stone, the unofficial Trump aide who was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and witness tampering on Trump’s behalf, and who has a tattoo of his one-time boss Richard Nixon on his back. And there’s internet personality Laura Loomer, the self-described “pro-white nationalist” and “proud Islamophobe,” whom Trump has defended as “a very good patriot.” But the pinnacle of Trump-adjacent weirdness is surely occupied by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Democratic scion turned vaccine-denying, dead-animal-abusing, conspiracy-embracing, brain-worm-hosting head of Health and Human Services.

Trump’s cabinet is in fact filled with the kinds of weirdos who used to be relegated to headlines in the National Enquirer and airtime on Fox News, rather than leading important departments of the government. It all makes you yearn for a distant past when our government was manned by people who had expertise in the appropriate fields and ran the government with competence and humility rather than fealty to a mad king. Was that really just a decade ago? It feels as far away and fantastic as the world Homer and Christopher Nolan depicted in The Odyssey.

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Why Should Delaware Care?
Concerns about enrollment at school districts throughout the state have grown, with some school buildings experiencing extreme overcrowding while others face declining enrollment. A proposal to “tweak” the elementary school feeder pattern at Colonial schools marks the most recent attempt to address challenges with classroom space. 

For years, parents of special education students in the New Castle area have sought out Southern Elementary School for its programs tailored to their kids’ needs. 

But in recent weeks, the Colonial School District announced it is planning to decentralize those special education programs away from the school, which sits near the C&D Canal, and distribute the resources to schools throughout the district, which stretches from Wilmington to Port Penn.

During a board of education meeting earlier this month, Colonial Superintendent Jeff Menzer said the needs of special education students in Southern Elementary have outpaced the size and capacity of the building.

And he said that in order to reshuffle students to new programs, the district would have to also “tweak” its feeder pattern for all students at several elementary schools.

The change would send more general education students to Southern and fewer to Eisenberg, Castle Hills, and Wilbur elementary schools, he said. 

Roughly 330 students would be affected by the changes, which would not go into effect this fall, but rather the 2027-28 school year.

Menzer called the plan a “positive change” for the district.

“Bringing students closer to their home, families closer to their school, their resources closer to the students at their home, we’re benefiting the larger community as well,” he said during the board meeting.

Under the new plan, students living in Holloway Terrace and Mayview Manor neighborhoods and currently attending Eisenberg Elementary would go to New Castle Elementary for the 2027-28 school year. 

Castle Hill Elementary students living in areas such as Cavalier Country Club Apartments and Christiana Acres, among others, would instead attend Carrie Downie Elementary. And Castle Hill students living in Emblem at Christiana would attend Pleasantville Elementary. 

Southern Elementary would draw students living in High Pointe at Saint Georges, Blairville Court, Buena Vista Park, among other parts of the district that formerly attended Wilbur Elementary.

Menzer said the changes were done “as minimally disruptive as possible.” 

Schools throughout the state experience enrollment challenges

For many students with individualized education plans, or IEPs, their schooling does not only take place inside a classroom.

Some students require small group lessons or intensive interventions, and schools need space to provide those required resources. 

But space is limited in Southern Elementary. The school was at 97% capacity rate during the 2025-26 school year, according to the Delaware Department of Education.

Colonial School District officials’ decision to change elementary school feeder patterns marks the first attempt from a school district in recent years to address ongoing enrollment fluctuations. 

While some school districts grapple with overcrowded schools, a separate phenomenon of half-empty school buildings has prompted Delaware’s House Speaker Mimi Minor Brown (D-New Castle) to question whether those facilities could be repurposed into different types of community facilities. 

Last month, Minor-Brown introduced a resolution that asks budget officials to develop a framework, along with school districts, that would define an “underutilized” property. They would then outline a process for repurposing it for other community services, such as child care or senior housing.

In a social media post, Minor-Brown said her resolution would not close any school or take power from local school board members. Instead, she said it starts a “coordinated planning conversation.”

The phenomenon has been fueled by several factors, including an expansion of charter schools in New Castle County and changes to bus patterns that allow students to attend schools outside of their community.

Menzer previously told Spotlight Delaware that capacity numbers are not “cut and dry,” because some students need more space than others depending on their individual needs. 

As a result, Menzer said some schools that have lower recorded enrollments than others are still overcrowded because of some students’ needs for more inclusive settings.

Currently, the district’s new feeder pattern would take students from some of the more populated schools, such as Wilbur and Eisenberg, to schools with lower capacity rates like New Castle and Carrie Downie elementary schools.  

What will happen next with the elementary school feeder pattern? 

Throughout the next month, the Colonial School District will work with the University of Delaware to implement necessary geotagging and mapping changes for the 2027-28 school year.    

The Colonial Board of Education will then vote whether to implement the realignment recommendation during its Sept. 8 board meeting. 

Menzer said there will be a priority to share necessary information with affected families throughout the fall. The district will also host question-and-answer sessions for Back to School nights at Eisenberg, Wilbur, and Castle Hills elementary schools. 

Families will have a chance to visit the school where their child will be assigned for the 2027-28 school year, Menzer said. 

Even if the Colonial Board of Education approves the new feeder pattern this fall, implementation will not begin until August of 2027.

The post Colonial eyes redrawing elementary school boundaries with shift in special education appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Residents of Deir Jarir say raids that killed two Palestinians late on Sunday are part of pattern of violence

Even by the brutal standards of militant settler violence in the West Bank, the raid on Deir Jarir late on Sunday night that killed two Palestinians and left another in hospital with a gunshot wound was extreme.

Palestinians in the town said settlers from a nearby outpost arrived after 9pm on Sunday claiming that they were searching for stolen livestock. Israeli soldiers and police soon joined them, protecting them as they sought to take several villagers’ sheep by force.

Global hunger declined for the third year in a row in 2025 but experts call for action to bring down costs of fruit, vegetables and dairy as report shows 2.69bn people can’t afford to eat well

One in three people cannot afford to eat a healthy diet, a new report has found, prompting calls for urgent action on food affordability.

There are 2.69 billion people unable to afford a diverse diet that meets their energy and nutrient needs, and it will take “immense” amounts of work to achieve the global target of zero hunger by 2030, the annual report from five UN agencies warned.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel

The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.

Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.

My generation is struggling to find safety in our human relationships. AI companionship is filling the gap

“There are parts of myself I only share with my AI,” Jerome told me. “Your AI?” I asked.

He was 27, three months out of a breakup, and entirely aware that his AI relationship was, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel put it, “a business product”. Still, he confided in it more than he ever had his friends. I mention Jermoe because, in the four years I’ve been reporting on gen Z, I have watched my peers become him, one by one. We are the first generation of digital natives and the last generation to have experienced human-to-human intimacy exclusively. Now the attention economy’s younger sister, the intimacy economy, has monetized the connection and affection that make us feel human.

Anthropic’s AI model Claude helped find one vulnerability this update patches.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The debate in Delaware over how to investigate incidents of police violence has been reignited following the fatal shooting of Kadir Skinner. For decades, Delaware police have been granted a broad deference around use-of-force actions. Today, calls for changes are growing.

Following the fatal shooting of Kadir Skinner in Wilmington, Democratic state lawmakers in Delaware have advocated for several new police reform measures, include timelines for the public release of body camera footage and new statewide standards for investigating officer-involved shootings.  

The proposals follow weeks of public outrage and demonstrations after the shooting of Skinner by a Wilmington Police officer. The response intensified in recent days following the release of body camera footage Thursday showing an officer shooting Skinner as he was running away. 

During rallies on Thursday and over the weekend, community advocates demanded to know the name of the officer who fired the fatal shot, and called for criminal charges to be filed against him.

They also called on state legislators to pass police reform legislation, arguing that current law allows departments to conduct police-involved shooting investigations without publicly releasing reports, camera footage, officer names, among other details.

In all, the shooting has become among the state’s most closely scrutinized police use-of-force incidents since the 2015 fatal shooting of Jeremy McDole, a man who used a wheelchair, or the 2021 fatal shooting of Lymond Moses.

In an apparent response to the community’s calls, Democratic leaders in Delaware’s House of Representatives and Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear/New Castle), said they would pursue legislative reforms to promote transparency and accountability.

“Our community is grieving, and public trust has been broken,” Pinkney said in a statement on her Facebook page.

House leadership also released a statement Thursday evening following the release of the body camera footage that calls for a “thorough, independent, transparent” investigation of the incident. 

“This case has also highlighted broader questions about how Delaware responds to officer-involved shootings and how confidence in those responses can be strengthened,” the House statement said. 

House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris (D-Dover) told Spotlight Delaware that the public response should include conversations with law enforcement and the Delaware Department of Justice about creating a standard timeline for when body-worn camera footage is released. 

Under Delaware law, police body camera video cannot be released until the Department of Justice’s Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust has completed an investigation, or a prosecution – or if the division authorizes its release.

Separately, Delaware’s open records law allows police departments to use exemptions for investigatory files and criminal records to deny public requests for body camera footage.

Over half of states have a policy of releasing footage within 21 and 40 days of an incident, Harris said, so lawmakers are considering a rule for distribution within that time window. 

Lawmakers are also aiming to create more consistent guidelines for how police departments across the state handle investigations, Harris said, including incorporating third-party investigators to assuage citizens’ concerns about internal police department investigations. 

“The more that we can have a clear and straightforward way of processing these types of officer-involved shootings, the better we will be as a state,” Harris said.

Harris said House members have a goal of introducing legislation in January.

The current law

The legislative pledges have been echoed by activist groups and community members who have held several gatherings and protests following Skinner’s death. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware has also called for lawmakers to change its open records laws to allow the public access to police body camera footage, regardless of the type of incident. 

The group further called for lawmakers to make misconduct records public and allow police review boards to have oversight powers. 

Under Delaware’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, the broader statute that advocacy groups point to as an underlying shield for police, records from a police misconduct investigation are confidential and cannot be provided to the public. 

Reforms passed in 2023 opened exceptions, requiring agencies to release an officer’s name and a summary of findings whenever an officer discharges a firearm at a person or uses force that caused serious physical injury. For allegations of sexual assault, dishonesty, or domestic violence, disclosure is only required if the investigation results in a “sustained” finding of misconduct.

The same reforms also required every police department in the state to create a police accountability board to advise them on police training and other matters. 

Those boards do not have investigative, subpoena, or disciplinary authority. 

“Our right to know should not be contingent on the generosity of officials; it should be a right explicitly guaranteed in the law,” ACLU of Delaware Executive Director Mike Brickner said in a statement on Friday.

Say Buterbaugh, a community advocate, was at Thursday’s protest and told Spotlight the next day that she believes the state should require independent investigations of incidents, such as the Skinner shooting. She also pointed to the need for more training to teach officers how to deescalate encounters and the need for police to release more details of such an incident. 

“If the shooting had been the other way around, we would have known the name of the shooter the same day. If that officer believes he acted accordingly, there should be no reason to hide his name,” Buterbaugh said. 

Another community activist, Mahkieb Booker, pushed back against arguments made by critics of reform efforts that releasing information to the public would endanger officers’ safety or taint investigations.

“Proper conduct fears no exposure,” Booker said.

The Delaware Fraternal Order of Police State Lodge and Wilmington’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. 

The body camera footage of Skinner shooting, which was released on Thursday shows a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer leaves his vehicle to chase Skinner, before firing his weapon and handcuffing the wounded teen on the pavement of a Wilmington street. 

Another three-and-a-half minutes pass after Skinner was shot before officers place him into a patrol car and take him to Wilmington Hospital, where he died. 

The matter is currently being investigated by the Wilmington Police Department and the DOJ.

Protests after release of body camera footage

A group of over 50 residents, many from the Northeast Wilmington neighborhood where Skinner’s family lives, gathered on Thursday night to march from the neighborhood to the Wilmington Police Station, calling for the officer who shot Skinner to be held accountable. 

The protestors made the roughly 1.5-mile walk from 24th and Jessup Street to the Wilmington Police station on Walnut Street, carrying Black Lives Matter and Pan-African flags. They filled the multi-hour march by chanting Skinner’s name and rallying cries such as, “No justice, no peace. No racist police.” 

The group frequently called out the elected officials involved in the investigation — including Wilmington Mayor John Carney, Attorney General Kathy Jennings, and Wilmington Police Chief Wilfredo Campos — claiming they were not doing anything to provide justice for Skinner’s family.

In a joint statement on July 16, Jennings, Carney and Campos said the shooting remains an ongoing investigation, and “consistent with DOJ policy, the officers will be identified and all evidence published as part of a fully-detailed public report and legal analysis following the investigation’s conclusion.” 

Present at the protest were Skinner’s family members, including his parents, Durrell Dollard and Rashai Skinner. City council members Christian Willauer and Coby Owens also attended. 

Owens led the chant calling for justice for Skinner at one point.  

Traffic largely stopped for the protestors as they walked down the city’s most prominent downtown street, Market Street, and many cars honked at the protestors seemingly in support as they passed by. 

Wilmington Police cruisers were visible about a block down from the group on each side as they marched from Rodney Square down to the station and two officers were standing on the roof of the station when protesters reached the building. 

The officers did not appear to directly get involved with the protest, outside of blocking some traffic from passing as the protesters walked down the downtown streets. 

Some attendees said they knew Skinner personally, while others said they showed up to push for an end to the police violence that happens too often in Wilmington. 

One participant, Debra Aikens, said her own son was killed by an act of gun violence last fall, and she never felt like she got answers from Wilmington Police. She said they have yet to solve his murder. Now, when Aikens visits the cemetery, she thinks of her own son, Skinner, and other kids whose lives have been lost, she said.

“This is now about something bigger,” she said. 

Michael Bartley waved a Pan-African flag and led the group in chanting “put your foot on the gas, don’t pump the brakes,” for a portion of the march. 

Bartley said he and other community organizers recently formed a group they are calling The People’s Council, because the formal institutions are not doing anything to support their community. 

“We need to be able to give them what they need, love on them, grieve on them, because you can’t depend on nobody else,” he said.

The post Kadir Skinner shooting sparks new calls for police reform appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Beyond the diplomatic platitudes global media focuses on the ‘immense’ scale of the challenge he faces in the job

• UK politics live – latest updates

World leaders have warmly congratulated Andy Burnham on his entry into 10 Downing Street as Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, but international media largely focused on the scale of the challenges awaiting him.

Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said he hoped for a deeper relationship “in the service of our peoples, and by giving new momentum to the partnership between the UK and the EU” rekindled by Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer.

An autobiographical game about the devastating effects of chronic illness on an artist’s creative life gives players the chance to slow the pace right down

Bub does not look like a traditional video game. Artist and stop-motion animator Case Jernigan spends hours, days, months in his studio drawing, painting and delicately cutting out pieces of collected paper, while coder and gameplay designer Todd Anderson builds scripts and physics simulations to make them into a game.

In Bub, you play through the life of an artist in New York City, making art but also diving into his early memories and imaginative dreams. “You go from present day New York City into his childhood, or different sort of visions, which are all rendered in stop motion,” says Anderson. “His story is told in the present day, but also how he’s making sense of his past.”

The midsummer party in Vegas is a showcase for the next wave of NBA talent. Our correspondent in the desert empties her notebook

The hype heading into this year’s draft was tremendous, and through the small sample size of 10 or so days in the Las Vegas summer heat, this year’s class has lived up to its billing.

They claim to fix fine lines, blemishes, and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? After consulting dermatologists and putting them to the test, we have crowned a brand new number one

• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments

LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products to hit the market. They claim to either reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots or calm redness, with some even combining different types of light to enhance the benefits.

However, it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I interviewed doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices work.

Best LED mask overall:
CurrentBody Multi Light Therapy LED mask

Best budget LED face mask:
Silk’n LED face mask 100

Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America. 

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented.

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked these abuses. During the long drives back and forth between my home in Atlanta and my reporting trips in the rural South, I had a lot of time to consider how little we know about the farms that feed us.

I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most American households. I felt that disconnect in my own kitchen, every time I reached for the berries in my fridge.

I wanted to know: With enough digging, would it be possible to determine if the blueberries I’m buying come from farms with a record of mistreating workers?

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. So I had to spend time — a lot of time — trying to figure that out.

I started by looking at labels on the blueberry pints in my grocery stores.

I snapped photos. I researched the brands. I read government records.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the pints often list the state where the berries are grown or the city they’re distributed from. But not the farm itself.

As it turns out, the pints sold by a specific brand aren’t always sourced to a single farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, brands buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under a single label.

That makes it even harder to know if the berries you’re buying come from farms where workers were harmed.

I was able to trace one brand’s berries back from my grocery stores to an individual farm. I’m not going to name that brand, though, because its practices are hardly unique. 

Sure enough, I found that the brand did buy berries from a farm that had hired a labor contractor, and that contractor was responsible for some of the abuses in one of America’s largest labor trafficking prosecutions.

That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery. 

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either.

The reason contractors exist in the first place is because farmers struggle to find workers in the U.S.

Many farmers speak only English. So they end up hiring contractors to bring foreign laborers to the U.S. and oversee their work.

That outsourcing can shield farmers from responsibility for — or even awareness of — harm against their workers.

Labor regulators have repeatedly failed to make sure that contractors do what the government requires them to do: keep workers safe and pay them what they’re promised.

Many farmers, brands and grocers were reluctant to talk to me about these abuses. 

I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.

Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. 

For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly. 

When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Dozens of farms have signed on to the Fair Food Program, and participation in it has been shown to prevent abuse in the fields.

But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.

Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.

The post My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed appeared first on ProPublica.

Gregory Maassen was nearly bedridden by a burning sensation that was later diagnosed as a rare form of neuropathy. He has found relief riding his e-bike across the country.

A new American Heart Association scientific statement concludes that up to about 400 milligrams a day, or roughly three to five cups of plain coffee, is safe for most adults and may be linked to lower risks of cardiovascular disease. The benefits appear to depend heavily on the source and preparation, with coffee and tea looking more favorable than energy drinks, and added sugar, cream, syrups, or sweeteners potentially canceling out the upside. ScienceAlert reports: "Caffeine consumed in coffee is a key part of daily life for millions of people," says Gregory Marcus, cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Chair of the AHA volunteer writing group behind the statement. "In our review of the most recent research, for most adults, intake of up to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, the equivalent of up to five cups of caffeinated coffee per day without added sugars or fillers, is safe and does not increase cardiovascular risk." The statement focused on caffeine's relationship with cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure and diabetes, as well as types of cardiovascular disease, including arrhythmias, coronary artery disease, stroke, and heart failure. The picture that emerges is complicated, but generally positive. [...] All up, the new AHA statement concludes that there's a growing body of evidence that caffeine isn't harmful when taken in moderation, and that coffee specifically may be beneficial. The statement was published in the journal Circulation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It has all the minimalist elements of a standard flip phone, but includes 5G capabilities, USB-C charging and plenty of onboard storage.

Staff told positions will be cut via voluntary and targeted redundancies as part of ‘evolution’

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Australia’s biggest media company, Nine Entertainment, has blamed the “extreme state of disruption” from AI for its decision to cut another 30 newsroom jobs at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.

On Tuesday, the managing director of publishing, Tory Maguire, told staff the company was looking to cut “around 30” positions, made up of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire said the exercise was not simply a matter of cutting costs, but was an “evolution” to adapt to structural change.

People gather at cafes and outdoor screenings to support team after Spain’s backing for Palestinian rights

The Spanish football team’s World Cup win has been celebrated in the streets of Gaza, where Spain’s support for Palestinian rights and Israel’s backing for the Argentinian team turned the competition into more than a football showdown.

Gathered at cafes and outdoor screenings, Palestinians defied the risk of Israeli attacks to cheer on a team they had taken to their hearts.

This blog is now closed – our live coverage of the Middle East crisis continues here

The price of oil jumped in early Asian trade on Monday after the US carried out its latest wave of strikes on Iran and a vessel caught fire in the strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude for September delivery rose 2.72% to $90.50 a barrel by around 0100 GMT, after briefly crossing $91 – its highest price since June.

CENTCOM assets targeted Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks to further diminish Iran’s ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction.

The company argues that it’s for individuals to ensure they don’t ‘actively exploit’ this technology. That won’t keep children safe

It took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

Gaby Hinsliff 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.

Research during Hungary election shows AI recommended parties not running and gave highly volatile answers to identical prompts

AI chatbots provide inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable guidance to voters asking which party they should back, a study suggests, often recommending the wrong party, not mentioning the right one, or listing parties not even running.

“The results raise serious concerns about the reliability of general-purpose AI systems in electoral contexts,” the study, published by the civil liberties group Liberties and based on research during this year’s Hungarian parliamentary elections, concluded.

Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’

The UK will not have enough water for future datacentres, the water industry has said in stark criticism of the government’s AI growth plans.

Datacentres rely on large amounts of water to manage the heat generated by densely packed servers. Cooling towers, chillers and humidification systems make direct use of this water, with large volumes also consumed indirectly through high electrical power needs.

Despots hate cities and the mayors who run them.

Beijing wants trade but not responsibility.

A man was arrested after law enforcement officials said he ignited fireworks, poured flammable liquid and started a fire at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hackers are breaking into websites that run vulnerable versions of the popular blogging software WordPress, according to several cybersecurity firms. One estimate puts the number of vulnerable WordPress websites at tens of millions as of Monday. Last week, WordPress patched two critical security flaws, urging people who run its software on their websites to update it "immediately." The vulnerabilities are so severe that WordPress enabled forced updates where possible. Since then, cybersecurity companies Patchstack, Hexastrike, and WatchTowr have all warned that hackers are exploiting the vulnerabilities in the wild, meaning they are taking over websites that are still running susceptible versions of WordPress. It's unclear how many WordPress-powered websites on the internet are at risk, but it's possible to make some educated guesses. The vulnerable versions of WordPress are 6.9.0 through 6.9.4, and 7.0.0 to 7.0.1. According to WordPress' official stats, there are more than 400 million websites that run those flawed versions, although these statistics likely don't reflect websites that have recently been patched. Cybersecurity consultant Daniel Card, who told TechCrunch that he looked at a sample of around 3,500 WordPress websites, estimates that less than 15% are vulnerable. Applying Card's projection across the total population of WordPress websites on the internet, the total figure would still be around 90 million. [...] One of the critical WordPress bugs was found and reported by Adam Kues of cybersecurity firm Searchlight Cyber, which dubbed it WP2Shell. Paired with the other bug, hackers can take full remote control of vulnerable websites.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Homeland Security Investigations is an arm of ICE, meaning the immigration enforcement agency would effectively be investigating incidents involving its own agents.

Turmoil likely as Trump officials say Canada unfairly discriminated against US autos, alcohol and dairy products

Donald Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods in response to the country retaliating against previous US tariffs, the White House announced on Monday, declaring Canada has unfairly discriminated against American cars, alcohol and dairy products.

The tariffs will hit a wide range of products, the White House said, including wine, hockey sticks and cement. They also include goods previously protected from import taxes under the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement.

A United Airlines employee appears to have been caught on video threatening to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a passenger last week at San Francisco International Airport.

Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate will fight extradition to the U.K., where they face rape and sex trafficking charges.

An intensifying cycle of violence has left at least three U.S. service members dead since the resumption of hostilities a week ago.

President Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, from hockey equipment to alcoholic beverages, escalating the trade dispute between the two countries.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 21, #1136

There are more than 30 billion RISC-V cores deployed in the world, and some analysts estimate the open processor architecture will own a third of the market within five years. While the forecasted future for RISC-V is bright, the chip has so far failed to live up its billing in the HPC world. But that will likely change over the next few years as new RISC-V chips to market and ecosystem matures.

That’s the takeaway from a Birds of Feather session at the ISC 2026 conference last month. Titled “HPC Next: Reflections and Progress on the RISC-V Ecosystem,” the session featured RISC-V proponents who are confident that the chip’s best days are ahead.

“I think that owning both the hardware and software stack end-to-end is a huge attraction,” said Manolis Marazakis, a principal staff research scientist at the Institute of Computer Science-FORTH in Greece. “We can do really co-design the standards for the instruction set, but also extensions are open. And we can do extreme customization.”

This level of customization is not possible on X86, which is a closed architecture. Arm is more approachable as one can license an instruction set architecture (ISA), Marazakis said. We have seen numerous Arm-based supercomputers, including the current number one cluster on the TOP500 list, the new LineShine system. But Arm is controlled by a single vendor, the UK-based Arm Holdings.

That doesn’t mean that RISC-V is risk-free. It comes with caveats, Marazakis stated. “There has been a lot of development, but it remains to be proven, that the particular approach with open standards that include both instructions and stations will actually give us a tangible advantage,” he said. “We need the flagship….a lighthouse deployment, a large enough system to demonstrate all these components working in a good-enough way.”

NextSilicon’sArbel 

For years, Arm was considered to the Switzerland of ISAs, and said they would never compete with their customers, said Dan Schecter, a principal engineer at NextSilicon, which recently announced plans to productive its Arbel RISC-V-based chip into a 64-core or 128-core enterprise-grade processor by 2028.

“I think it’s very clear that that statement is no longer true these days,” Schecter said. “I think that RISC-V, what it actually brings to the table is the fact that the ISA is a consortium. It’s a non-profit organization. It’s meant to actually become a real Switzerland of ISAs and ensure that there’s always competition.”

Schechter predicted that the RISC-V chip would become a credible entity in HIPC within the next three years. “In three years, I think you’ll see very interesting things.”

Another RISC-V chip company, Inspire Semiconductor, was represented at the BOF by Doug Norton, the company’s chief marketing officer. Norton noted that RISC-V chips are already widely deployed–they’re just not in the public eye.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for what we’re doing,” he said. “Nvidia and Google’s TPU have both taken out their microcontrollers of their own and ARM and put in RISC-V, so they’re shipping ridiculous numbers of cores of RISC-V. They’re just not front and center. They’re used for control.”

Norton noted that Inspire Semi is planning to ship by the end of the year its latest product, the Thunderbird, a PCI board with 6,144 RISC-V cores, delivering 24 teraflops of FP6

Inspire Semi’s Thunderbird “supercopmuter on a card”

4 performance.

“That’s 24 times as many [cores] as you get from x86 or ARM,” Norton pointed out. “Of course they’re not general purpose. They’re lean, mean, low-power cores for compute, but very, very efficient.”

The Thunderbird is an HPC-first product that Inspire Semi hopes will fill the in void left by Nvidia, which is moving away from native FP64 performance with its latest GPU in favor of token generation for AI, Norton said.

“I think we’re going to have some good accelerated systems here pretty quick, including ours,” he said. “Will there be an all RISC-V [cluster]? Probably in five years. Two years? Maybe not.”

Teresa Cervero, a Barcelona Supercomputing Center research engineer and the vice chair of the RISC-V International Special Interest Group in HPC (SIG-HPC), says the best part of RISC-V is that it’s community driven.

“There is a common agreement between different people coming from industry, coming from academia, individuals that really want to make this happen,” she said. “One of the unique things of RISC-V is the velocity, the speed up of how many extensions have been approved or ratified during these years.”

The energy efficiency of RISC-V systems is one of the advantages, and that eventually could play a role in building greener HPC resources. “But this is not a magic ring that controls everything,” she said. “There is a set of challenges ahead.”

Monte Cimone’s motherboard

Cervero said she would like to see a RISC-V HPC system being deployed within three years that delivers the big performance gains that people are hoping for. “As far as having RISC-V IP and then new architectures and having exascale systems–where we are, we are close to this,” she said. “We are not there yet, but we have time. So we are moving faster.”

“What I’ve seen is that RISC-V ecosystem, the community, is gaining speed…and we are closing the gap with current systems,” Cervero continued. “We want to see really systems that are working, and we can access them and run our applications and get big performance comparable with what we have, or even better to what we have nowadays.”

Daniele Gregori, the chief scientific officer for E4 Computer Engineering, has experience deploying RISC-V systems, as he was involved in validating the software stack of the six-node Monte Cimone cluster that was deployed in 2021 at CINECA Computing Center at the University of Bologna in Italy.

The RISC-V software stack has improved considerably in recent years. “In the last version, we see a big improvement of the performance,” Gregori said. “Not comparable today with X86, but a very significant increase in just four years.”

Gregori, who is a physicist by training, said recent test runs using the codes for the multi-body problem in astrophysics showed a lot of promise for RISC-V. “We have an improvement of two times in terms of time-to-solution for this specific workload,” he said.

There is still a lot of work to do in terms of migrating scientific codes to run on RISC-V, Gregori said. That will help as more RISC-V systems become available and adoption beings to increase.

“Today we have a dedicated partition of HPC clusters in Europe with European technology based on RISC-V,” he said. “I think in five years we need to try to be more aggressive and think that should be possible to have also full system in production based on this technology in five years.”

When it comes to porting codes, there is always some work involved, no matter what platforms are involved Cervero said. Today, the RISC-V community is working on improving the tools to improve the performance of vector processing on RISC-V chips.

“Like everything, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work,” she said. “But with the vector agnostic with LLVM, there is no issue.”

The promise of no vendor lock-in with RISC-V is one of its biggest competitive advantages, especially compared to GPUs from Nvidia. While CUDA is well-liked and widely adopted by the HPC community, there’s no getting away from the lock-in that currently exists with CUDA, according to Norton.

“Fifteen years ago, when we started going down the GPU path with Nvidia, there was really nothing else. We all kind of knew it was a lock-in and we did it because that was the choice,” he said. “And now there’s a lot of people who really need to get out of that lock in. There’s going to be people who really don’t want this type of stuff. Openness is going to matter.”

The post Charting RISC-V’s Future in HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

Andy Burnham, until recently the mayor of Greater Manchester, promised to create a “circuit breaker” moment in the cycle of failure and cynicism that have plagued British politics for the past decade.

A draft New Orleans Police Department drone manual briefly published online would have allowed police drones to carry weapons with written approval from the superintendent, according to 404 Media. NOPD says the document was only an early draft and that its current policy (PDF) bans drones from carrying weapons or hazardous materials. 404 Media reports: The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: "The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind," referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft. "The manual published on July 1 is the current published version of the policy. Earlier versions were draft versions that were presented for review before adoption of the current policy," NOPD told 404 media. "NOPD has made it clear we are not and will not be equipping drones with weapons or other hazardous materials." NOPD didn't answer follow-up questions about how or why the draft version of the manual was published. But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones. New Orleans has long been a pioneer of camera and drone driven policing and the cops have used controversial tactics to get around public scrutiny and regulations. It shows that what the police are circulating amongst themselves and thinking about privately, what they perhaps want to happen, does not match public policy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bonjour,
je suis super motivé pour m’acheter un One Wheel et l’utiliser à Chypre mais si je l’achète en France je ne sais pas si je pourrais prendre l’avion avec et pour le faire livrer à Chypre c’est 350€. Avez-vous des solutions à me proposer ?
Merci d’avance pour vos réponses

United staffer told customer ‘you don’t act like at a citizen’ during incident over wait time at San Francisco airport

United Airlines is “looking into” a viral video showing a United Airlines employee threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a Mexican American man at San Francisco international Airport last week.

The scene erupted after Julio Varela of San Ramon grew upset at United Airlines staff for taking a long time to correct an error his family made when entering his daughter’s name to buy a ticket for a flight to Canada, according to NBC News.

sandbagger writes: Fark.com is ancient in internet terms. It's not social media. It's not quite a news site. It's a holdover from the dot-com era and is invisible to Google, which makes its community great but has necessitated begging. "[W]e won't survive this year without more TF subscribers," wrote founder Drew Curtis in a post on Bluesky. "Spread the word." For the unfamiliar, Fark is one of the web's OG community news sites that features a wonderfully weird mix of user-submitted links, absurd headlines, Photoshop contests and comment-section mayhem. It has also been featured numerous times on Slashdot over the decades, from a 2007 review of founder Drew Curtis' book and a 2010 story about his skepticism of "the wisdom of crowds" to a full Slashdot interview with Curtis in 2015. For longtime readers of both sites, Fark feels like an old neighbor from an earlier, stranger and arguably more fun era of the internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The incident follows at least two other attacks outside of ICE facilities as the agency carries out the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations.

A judge has put Paramount’s Warner Bros. Discovery deal on ice for now, pending an antitrust hearing later this month.

If a new bill to make daylight saving time permanent becomes law, Americans may not have to worry about changing their clocks twice a year. But some social media users don’t want to turn back the clock on the policy quite yet. 

On July 15, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act of 2025 to make daylight saving time yearlong with President Donald Trump’s support. If the bill is enacted, Americans will see darker mornings and later sunsets during winter.

“Congress just picked the one version of clock reform America has already tried, hated, and repealed,” one July 14 X post said. 

History shows the U.S. has been down this road before.

The Standard Time Act of 1918 law established American time zones; daylight saving time was standardized in 1966. The 1966 law let states exempt themselves from observing daylight saving time — which Hawaii and Arizona have done.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act to reduce energy usage amid an oil crisis prompted by an OPEC oil embargo to punish the U.S. for its support of Israel. The bill installed a two-year trial period of permanent daylight saving time for most U.S. states, hoping that prolonged evening daylight would save fuel.

“We have taken a number of actions to meet the energy crisis, and more will have to be taken. Many require inconvenience and sacrifice,” Nixon said. “But daylight saving time on a year-round basis, which will result in the conservation during the winter months of an estimated equivalent of 150,000 barrels of oil a day, will mean only a minimum of inconvenience and will involve equal participation by all.”

Permanent daylight saving began on Jan. 6, 1974, during the coldest and darkest parts of the winter season in many states.

Soon, news reports of early-morning traffic accidents exacerbated safety concerns. In Florida, eight children died less than a month into the trial period, compared to two within the same time frame the year prior. Six of the deaths were attributed to the lack of sunlight as children went to school, a Florida education department spokesperson told The New York Times that year. Then-Florida Gov. Reubin Askew called the state legislature into special session and proposed that most of the state return to standard time.

“Any amount of disruption in commerce would be small indeed when compared to the life of even a single child,” Askew then said. 

As most Americans began their mornings in complete darkness, the new law’s popularity plummeted: 79% of Americans had favored the change in December 1973, but by February 1974, the figure stood at 42%, according to the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.

Even the arrival of spring and summer — the sunnier seasons when Americans were already used to daylight saving — didn’t prevent U.S. politicians from working to reverse the change.

On Aug. 19, 1974, the U.S. House voted to end the year-round daylight saving testing period early. The Senate voted similarly and brought the bill to President Gerald Ford. On Oct. 27, the U.S. returned to standard time. 

We rate this claim True.

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there’s the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.

↫ maurycyz.com

Oh I know where this is going…

Doing this, I can get Chrome to render around 90 frames before giving up. Other browsers like Firefox have more patience, but a 90 scan image seems to work almost everywhere.

↫ maurycyz.com

Yes, you can abuse the mentioned feature to create a really odd type of video. Or animation? Well, it allows you to create something resembling a really low-resolution GIF. Useless, yes, but very novel.

President accused of having ‘lost control of this war’ as deaths of trio in Iranian military strikes fuel rising concern

Democrats have seized on the deaths of three US troops killed in Iranian strikes to urge Donald Trump to urgently reverse his resumption of the war with Iran amid widespread anxiety over climbing casualties.

Even as US forces launched a 10th consecutive wave of attacks against Iranian targets, concern over the deaths of American service personnel threatened to complicate moves to escalate the conflict, which has reignited after he last week walked away from a memorandum of understanding agreed with Iran in June.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children, “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18. That’s only true if parents or other donors contribute thousands of dollars per year, per child, assuming that future returns are close to the historic stock market averages.

While touting the program, Trump has also repeatedly suggested that children from homes with “essentially no money” could become “very rich” with the Trump accounts. But financial experts say it’s unlikely that parents in low-income households would be able to afford to contribute enough for their children’s accounts to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they reach adulthood. “Think of it, children that are born without money, without any money. Great parents, they can have — everything can be great, but they have no money. They can become very wealthy children at 18,” Trump said on July 6. 

Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations and individuals can contribute to these accounts until a child turns 18, up to a total $5,000 annual combined limit per account.

Not everyone has embraced the program; Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi posted on X on July 6, “It’s safe to say, I would pass on a Trump account.” Thompson said, “Trump University already taught us what happens when his name is on the brochure.”

But experts say those who eschew the accounts for their children could be leaving free money on the table.

As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, the federal government will seed new accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, who have a valid Social Security number. (Parents can open accounts for older children, but they won’t get the $1,000.) In addition, the first 25 million children under the age of 10 and residing in a ZIP code with a median income of $150,000 or less will receive an additional $250, which was funded by Michael and Susan Dell’s donation of $6.25 billion to these investment accounts.

Even if donors don’t contribute anything, that seed money could grow to several thousand dollars by the time a child reaches adulthood.

What are Trump Accounts?

The Trump accounts are a new child savings account that a parent can open for any child before the age of 18. As of July 6, Trump said that “6 million American children have signed up,” and out of those, 1.4 million met the birth date requirement that makes them eligible for the $1,000 in government seed money. As of July 4, the Treasury had already deposited the $1,000 into over 500,000 accounts. As we said, parents and relatives, employers, charities, and others can also contribute, up to the per-account $5,000 yearly maximum.

The Treasury Department said on July 1 that the Trump accounts will all be initially invested in State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF, which is a low-cost index fund that tracks the performance of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., and that other stock index fund options will be available in the “coming months.” The accounts will be managed by parents and will grow tax-deferred until the child turns 18 years old, when the account is then treated like a traditional individual retirement account.

The money can’t be withdrawn before a child reaches adulthood. Once a child has turned 18, just as with a traditional IRA, withdrawals can be made penalty-free for certain qualified expenses, such as college tuition and for first-time home purchases (up to $10,000). If an exception doesn’t apply, there’s a 10% tax for making withdrawals before age 59 and a half. Withdrawals, including any pre-tax contributions such as the government seed money or employer contributions, are also taxed at ordinary income tax rates, as the Tax Foundation explains. After-tax contributions are exempt from those taxes.

The $1,000 contributions will cost the government $17 billion through 2028, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Trump’s Claim of Investment Growth

When promoting the program, Trump has often claimed that these accounts “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they [children] reach 18 or 21.” To grow to such levels, though, parents or others would have to make significant annual contributions to a child’s account.

A White House Council of Economic Advisers report estimates — based on its mid-range scenario, which assumes an average annual return of 10.3% and the government’s $1,000 in seed money — that a Trump account would grow to $303,757 by the time a child turns 18 if supplemented by the maximum $5,000 annual contribution (adjusted for inflation starting next year). The CEA also provides a high-range scenario — which assumes an average annual 18.5% return — in which the account would grow to $730,395 by the time the child turns 18. CEA’s low-end scenario — which assumes average annual stock growth of 5.4% — projects an account balance of $187,408 in 18 years.

Growth estimates without such generous annual contributions would, of course, result in much lower returns. Accounts supplemented by annual contributions of $2,500 per child (adjusted for inflation starting next year) would grow to $154,798 when a child turns 18, according to CEA’s mid-range scenario. And with no contributions, the $1,000 seed money would grow to $5,839.

For context, the State Street ETF chosen for the initial accounts has averaged an annual return of 11.31% since it was launched in late 2005.

Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us in an interview that “it is possible” for someone who contributes the maximum to a Trump account to have a balance of hundreds of thousands. He said that “a newborn who gets the $1,000 and then their parents contribute $5,000 every year until they’re 18. You know, if you assume a 7% rate of return, that does get to about $200,000 by the time they’re, say, 18.”

He estimated the balance of an account with no additional parent contributions to be a little more than $3,000 when the child is 18. All of those values, he noted, are before taxes and adjustments for the effects of inflation. They are also all highly dependent on the performance of the stock market, he said, so the returns may be less than estimated if the stock market doesn’t do as well.

Trump’s Claim of Poor Children Becoming Rich

The government website about the accounts —trumpaccounts.gov — makes it clear that donors or families would need to contribute the maximum yearly amount to likely grow an account balance to more than $200,000 once a child is 18. But in publicly discussing the accounts, Trump has frequently framed them as an opportunity for children from low-income homes to become rich.

“It’s really an amazing thing because it gives young children that start out with really nothing and it gives them — boy, it’s more money than anybody could imagine,” Trump said in remarks about the program on Jan. 28.

“It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a child has had no money, and when that baby becomes a man or a woman, they can have hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more, but they can have hundreds of thousands of dollars, because we’re seeding it,” Trump said in a CNBC interview on July 2.

“Children can, at the age of 18 and after, become very wealthy people; come into the world with essentially no money and end up a very young age being very rich,” Trump said at a Trump account launch event on July 6. “Think of it, children that are born without money, without any money. Great parents, they can have — everything can be great, but they have no money. They can become very wealthy children at 18.”

But financial experts say it’s unlikely low-income families could afford or would make those kinds of thousands of dollars in annual contributions for each of their children. Trumpaccounts.gov estimates that if no additional contributions are made beyond the initial $1,000 seed money, that account could be worth $243,000 by the time the child is 55 years old. 

Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist for the Washington Post, wrote on July 11 that many low-income families would lack the disposable income needed for these accounts to grow significantly by age 18. “If you’re a family living paycheck to paycheck, finding an extra $400 a month to lock away is a fantasy. The issue has never been a lack of account types. The obstacle for many families is a lack of surplus cash,” she said. “By relying on families to invest up to $5,000 annually to see meaningful growth, Trump accounts do not solve the fundamental problem of poverty.”

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, “Without additional deposits into the accounts of kids from families with low incomes, children of wealthy parents will primarily benefit” from the program.

In a blog for the Tax Law Center at New York University, Greg Leiserson, a former senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, also warned the program may exclude vulnerable children who have “unstable or complex living situations” as well as “those whose caregivers have very low incomes and do not file a tax return.”

Furthermore, some experts argue that the Trump accounts are not as tax-efficient as other investment accounts for many families. Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, wrote an analysis that found the Trump accounts would yield the lowest after-tax value of savings compared with other types of accounts, such as a Health Savings Account or a traditional or Roth IRA.

“The most attractive feature of a Trump Account is not its treatment of personal contributions but the ability to receive transfers from governments, employers, and nonprofit organizations,” Michel wrote. “These contributions represent direct government subsidies or tax-free contributions from employers or nonprofit organizations. In that context, the accounts function less as a neutrality-enhancing investment vehicle and more as a welfare program. Any financial advantage of the accounts therefore derives primarily from the presence of these external contributions rather than from improved tax treatment of the contributions made by the beneficiary’s family or friends.”

In a press release, the Trump administration stated that more than 50 companies so far have committed to making Trump account contributions for their employees’ kids. Employers can make tax-free contributions of up to $2,500 a year to employee accounts. That amount counts toward the $5,000 annual maximum contribution.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post The Dubious Rags to Riches Promise of Trump Accounts appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Dying Light and Psi-Ops join the PS Plus catalog in July.

PLANO, Texas, July 20, 2026 — Siemens today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Precision Innovations Inc., a privately held electronic design automation software company, expanding Siemens’ EDA portfolio with AI-powered chip planning capabilities that help semiconductor teams optimize power, performance and area earlier in the system-on-chip design process.

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Precision Innovations Inc., a privately held electronic design automation software company, expanding Siemens’ EDA portfolio with AI-powered chip planning capabilities that help semiconductor teams optimize power, performance and area earlier in the system-on-chip design process.

Precision Innovations develops EDA software built on the open-source OpenROAD framework to help semiconductor teams evaluate design feasibility, reduce design iterations and accelerate time to market as system-on-a-chip complexity continues to grow. The acquisition will strengthen Siemens’ EDA portfolio with AI-driven chip planning and design exploration capabilities, complementing Siemens’ existing digital design and verification solutions by enabling faster feasibility analysis and more informed downstream decisions.

Precision Innovations is intended to join Siemens as a key addition to its industry-leading Digital Design Creation software, complementing existing digital design and implementation capabilities to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end digital flow that spans architecture, implementation and the full silicon lifecycle management of SoCs.

“With Precision Innovations joining Siemens, we will expand our ability to support customers as they face rapidly increasing SoC complexity and the need to explore new architectures faster and more efficiently,” said Ankur Gupta, executive vice president, IC Portfolio, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Integrating Precision Innovations’ AI-powered early design exploration into our EDA portfolio can significantly accelerate time to silicon and improves power, performance and area.”

Precision Innovations’ solutions are used by leading semiconductor and technology companies and significantly enhance Siemens’ existing EDA offerings across digital design and verification workflows. By combining Precision Innovations’ technologies with Siemens’ broader EDA portfolio, Siemens will be able to help customers address growing design complexity, shorten development cycles and improve engineering productivity.

“Becoming part of Siemens allows us to scale our technology and bring AI-driven chip planning to a much broader set of semiconductor teams,” said Tom Spyrou, chief executive officer, Precision Innovations. “Together, we can help designers leverage AI to evaluate thousands of design options earlier in the process and focus innovation where it matters most.”

Precision Innovations was founded in San Diego, California in 2019 with the mission to democratize the hardware design landscape by addressing barriers related to cost, expertise and uncertainty that have historically limited access to advanced semiconductor technologies.

Closing of the transaction is subject to customary conditions and is expected within the third quarter of calendar year 2026. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. To learn more about how Siemens is committed to leveraging AI technologies to solve critical challenges in semiconductor manufacturing, visit https://www.siemens.com/en-us/company/electronic-design-automation.

About Siemens Digital Industries Software

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.

About Siemens 

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, mobility, and healthcare. The company’s purpose is to create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations, making factories more efficient, cities more livable, and transportation more sustainable. A leader in industrial AI, Siemens leverages its deep domain know-how to apply AI – including generative AI – to real-world applications, making AI accessible and impactful for customers across diverse industries. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology provider pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably.

Source: Siemens

The post Siemens to Acquire Precision Innovations for AI-Powered Chip Planning appeared first on HPCwire.

The Verge reviewed the latest Surface Laptop, which only comes with 8GB of RAM at a higher price than the previous 16GB model, and they conclude that Windows isn’t really usable on 8GB of RAM. Whether that’s true or not I do not know – I would assume it depends a lot on your usage – but this quote from the review I found quite peculiar:

I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds. At the time, I had about 10 Chrome tabs open across two desktops, alongside Slack and Signal — not an obscene level of multitasking.

↫ Antonio G. Di Benedetto at The Verge

Excuse me, but that is actually an obscene level of multitasking because every single one of those “applications” is a complete Chrome browser. Just in the paragraph above, there’s four individual complete Chrome browsers running, with little to no optimisation. Why would anyone be surprised this scenario strains a mere 8GB of RAM? This isn’t merely a Windows problem; this is a programmers choosing suboptimal tooling × managers have no idea what they’re doing problem.

If Teams, Slack, and Signal had been proper, native applications instead of websites running in terrible frameworks, Windows 11 would have handled this scenario just fine.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The cost of healthcare has steadily risen in Delaware over the past few years, placing greater burdens on patients feeling the financial pinch on multiple fronts. New legislation signed Monday aims to lower those costs and reduce the cost of state employee healthcare — one of the state government’s single-largest costs.

Gov. Matt Meyer signed three bills Monday that will reshape the healthcare landscape in Delaware and how patients pay for their treatments in coming years. 

The bills introduced and passed this year would dramatically increase the pool of patients eligible to receive free and discounted care, put price caps on hospitals, and temporarily block the acquisition of Delaware health systems by private equity firms.

Meyer signed the bills at the Henrietta Johnson Medical Center in Wilmington’s Southbridge community, flanked by staff at the center, as well as legislators and leadership in the state health department. During a press conference, he pointed to the stress of paying for healthcare, and how one medical bill or diagnosis could derail someone’s finances. 

The governor added the current healthcare payment system is not designed to benefit patients, and that if people were to redesign it today, it would “look nothing like what we actually have.”

“Not a human being on planet Earth would design our system, the payment models, the care models, the way it’s designed today,” Meyer said.  

One of the first laws discussed puts a two-year moratorium on the acquisition of health systems by private equity firms, something Meyer said would keep “profiteers” away from the state’s health systems. 

Senate Bill 313, introduced by Sen. Spiros Mantzavinos (D-Elsmere) earlier this spring blocked private equity firms from acquiring hospitals in Delaware until 2028. 

It was introduced nearly a year after the closure of the nearby Crozer hospital system in Chester, Pennsylvania, that left thousands without nearby access to healthcare. 

SB 13 expands financial assistance

Another bill signed into law on Monday expands the pool of patients eligible to receive free and discounted care from the state’s nonprofit hospital systems. Senate Bill 13, sponsored by Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear), examines a program already required by the federal government for nonprofit hospitals to receive tax breaks. 

Nonprofit hospitals are mandated by the Internal Revenue Service to provide a “community benefit” to earn their tax-exempt status. Historically, that benefit has been offering free or discounted care, sometimes called “charity care.”

The legislation comes months after a Spotlight Delaware investigation called into question the charity care practices at the state’s largest healthcare system, ChristianaCare. 

It also follows a separate effort last summer in which the state paid off medical debts for thousands of Delawareans, despite hospital charity care policies that could have made that treatment free.

Pinkney said during the press conference patients shouldn’t have to choose between treating a medical emergency and their financial stability. She also said the bill would work to address people in the “middle” and that it would apply to both insured and uninsured patients. 

“We are making sure that everyday Delawareans who are just trying to stay on the stability that they have built for themselves and their family will be protected through Senate Bill 13,” Pinkney said. 

Under the new proposal, all of the state’s nonprofit hospitals would be required to provide free care to patients living below 300% of the Federal Poverty Line, with large discounts for patients in higher percentage brackets. 

• Below 300% of the FPL ($46,950 a year) – Full discount
• 300-350% of the FPL ($46,950 to $54,775 a year) – 75% discount 
• 350-400% of the FPL ($54,775 to $62,600 a year) – 50% discount

Separately, the legislation allows people living at 500% of the Federal Poverty Line — $78,250 a year — to seek out a 50% discount if the billed expenses are greater than 10% of their income.

SB 1 sets new limits on healthcare costs

The last bill signed on Monday was one of this year’s most controversial bills and drew a fierce rebuke from the state’s hospital systems earlier this spring. 

Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow), would work to lower healthcare spending in the state by investing in primary care and phasing in price caps for hospitals. 

In recent years as healthcare spending has exploded, the state moved this year to pass legislation that would reduce its own spending burden by capping how much it would reimburse hospitals for treatments received by state employees. 

By taking aim at how high Delaware healthcare providers can negotiate their prices with insurers, in addition to making those insurers spend 11.5% of their medical costs on primary care, the state hopes to better compensate providers proactively working to improve Delawareans’ health outcomes.

The original bill introduced reference-based pricing to medical services covered under both insurance for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance. Essentially, this would limit the amount of money a provider could be reimbursed by insurers, tying that amount to a predetermined benchmark.

Prior to the amendments, Delaware intended to set that benchmark at 250% of what the federal government pays providers through Medicare.

Now, those price caps will not go into effect until 2029. Price caps for both inpatient and outpatient procedures would also take effect on a phased basis, with costs not scaling down to that 250% of Medicare level until 2033.

During Monday’s press conference, Townsend said the bill was a “longtime coming” and that in previous years, he and other legislators had worked to pass primary care reforms. 

Townsend also addressed the amendments, and how they push the price caps out to 2029, and how in the coming years the Delaware Department of Insurance will have to work on regulations related to those caps. 

“One of the challenges with Senate Bill 1 is that the implementation of it takes a few more years to fully ramp up,” he said. 

He also thanked Sen. Ray Seigfried (D-Claymont) for challenging lobbying tactics used by the state’s hospital systems, where he called claims by the hospitals that Senate Bill 1 would lead to thousands of job losses as “disgraceful.” Townsend cited the support of Seigfried, who previously was an executive at ChristianaCare, as instrumental in gaining broader legislative support for the measure.

Delaware Department of Health and Social Services Secretary Christen Linke Young ended the press conference by saying the bills would expand access for patients, but also work to bring down the cost of care long-term. 

Young also pointed to the work required to get the bills onto Meyer’s desk, and how leaders were able to create a “great deal of consensus” among healthcare leaders that the reforms should have been passed. 

“The American healthcare system is deeply flawed, but we have a set of leaders and stakeholders here in Delaware who are committed to doing complicated, hard work to make progress,” Young said. 

The post Gov. Meyer signs healthcare bills expanding free, primary care appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The nation's largest recent cyclospora outbreak has put one of America's biggest produce suppliers under renewed scrutiny.

The NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons Fund supported an effort to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, and the work’s payed off.

All drivers which support PMF can use WPA3, which are: iwm, iwx, and qwx. So far, I have tested this patch on iwx AX200 only. I will roll out this patch to more of my devices now. Help with testing is welcome.

There are both userland and kernel changes involved.

↫ Stefan Sperling

Only the second implementation of WPA3 will be supported, which requires some explanation:

WPA3 has a complicated history. There are two versions of WPA3. The initially standardized version suffered from side-channel leaks found by Mathy Vanhoef and dubbed “Dragonblood“. A revised and fixed version has been standardized and is mandatory in the 6 GHz band as of Wifi 6e (11ax) and mandatory on all bands as of Wifi 7 (11be).

↫ Stefan Sperling

Obviously, WPA3 is a very welcome addition to OpenBSD.

Moonshot AI has temporarily paused new subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model after demand surged beyond the company's current capacity within days of the launch. The open-source Chinese AI model, described as one of the largest of its kind at 2.8 trillion parameters, has rattled U.S. rivals by beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests. The Associated Press reports: "Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected," Moonshot AI, which is Beijing-based, wrote in a X post late on Sunday. "Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity." Moonshot said that it's prioritizing existing subscribers and would be temporarily pausing new ones. "We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches," it added. The AI startup also posted a similar message on Chinese social media. "New model releases generally trigger massive interest, which can strain existing compute infrastructure," said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at the technology research and advisory group Omdia. "This does show Moonshot AI does not have sufficient compute chips to serve the current surge in demand." Su said that the key reason was more likely due to Moonshot not fully anticipating the surge in K3's popularity. K3 is "very demanding" in terms of compute requirements, he said, making compute allocation challenging and expensive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you want more streaks, fewer close calls, and faster solves, your letter selection matters more than you think.

Despite reports of a “false positive,” health officials are still linking a multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis to shredded iceberg lettuce.

July 20, 2026 — Users of Frontier — the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open science — joined scientific computing experts at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to share recent achievements and new directions in high-performance and quantum computing research at the 2026 Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) User Summit, held on June 2-3, 2026.

The 2026 OLCF User Summit welcomed more than 150 scientific computing experts from government, academia, universities and industry. Credit: Alonda Hines/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The two-day event featured user-contributed talks, research posters, scientific data visualization presentations and tours of ORNL facilities, including the new IQM quantum computer installed earlier this year. Much of this year’s program looked ahead, and the discussion focused on the OLCF’s next HPC systems, Lux and Discovery, and how those platforms and the OLCF will support the Genesis Mission — DOE’s effort to connect HPC, quantum computing and AI resources with research facilities across all 17 national laboratories.

“We’re really excited to see so many current, new and prospective users this year,” said Verónica Melesse Vergara, the summit’s lead organizer and head of the OLCF’s HPC Operations section. “We have a vibrant OLCF user community that continues to expand, and this event allows us to learn and showcase how users leverage our capabilities in HPC, AI and quantum computing in their research.”

Some 160 participants attended the 22nd annual user meeting, including domestic and international attendees from ORNL, other national labs, universities, industry and federal agencies. The event attracted 61 first-time attendees and 35 prospective users.

HPC Here and Now

The first day opened with user-contributed talks selected by the OLCF User Group (OUG) Executive Board, who highlighted major scientific achievements enabled by the Frontier supercomputer and OLCF resources. The speakers and their topics included the following:

• Spencer Bryngelson, Georgia Tech – Evaluation and Evolution of AMD Flang Targeting AMD GPU Devices
• Arthur Lorenzon, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Using Omnistat and GPU Power Management to Improve Energy Efficiency on Frontier
• Joe Oefelein, Georgia Tech – Performance Optimization of Turbulent Reacting Flow Simulations on hybrid CPU/GPU Architectures
• Suhas Jain, Georgia Tech – Simulation and AI for Multiphase Turbulence at Extreme Scale Exascale
• Dani Cassol, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – JAWS: Portable Scientific Workflow Execution Across DOE HPC Facilities

The presentations were followed by posters and lightning talks that highlighted work from many early-career professionals as well as a scientific data visualization showcase in the EVEREST visualization facility that featured stunning images and animations and demonstrated the speed and fidelity of the exascale simulations performed on Frontier.

The award for best poster went to a team from Georgia Tech. Their poster, Understanding and Analyzing Turbulence Using 32768-Cubed Simulation Data on Frontier, was presented by Rohini Uma-Vaideswaran, Daniel L. Dotson, and P. K. Yeung and was co-authored by Mark Warnecke, P. L. Johnson, C. Meneveau, and S. Nichols. The work represents the first direct numerical simulation of small-scale turbulence captured at an unprecedented resolution of 35 trillion grid points.

The award for best data visualization went to ORNL’s Dave Pugmire and Dilip Asthagiri for the Simulation of the Satellite Tobacco Mosaic Virus in Explicit Water. The simulation was originally developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign around 2006. It represented the first major virus particle simulation when it ran on 256 nodes of the Altix supercomputer. Composed of slightly more than 1 million atoms, the simulation is now routinely run on only a single Frontier node.

Looking Ahead to Genesis

On day two, OLCF leadership described the road map for deploying ORNL’s next generation of computing resources, including the leadership-class Discovery supercomputer and the AI + HPC Lux platform. Leadership also focused on how those systems and the OLCF-led American Science Cloud will play key roles in advancing the Genesis Mission as a nationwide effort to integrate HPC, AI, and quantum computing into a cohesive platform for accelerating scientific research.

In addition to the day’s events, a closed-session workshop was also held for the OLCF’s Center for Accelerated Applications Readiness program. The workshop focused on the latest developments for the first nine projects that will run on the Discovery supercomputer when it becomes available in 2028.

“The strength of the OLCF lies not only in the systems we operate, but also in the partnerships that help us bring new technologies to the scientific community and explore innovative approaches to advancing research,” said OLCF program director Ashley Barker. “By combining advanced computing, AI, and our staff’s expertise, these collaborations help accelerate discovery in areas such as energy, materials science, manufacturing and other fields critical to the nation’s future.”

User Group Elections

Each year at the user meeting, attendees vote to elect new members to serve on the OUG Executive Board for a term of three years. The OUG provides advice and feedback to the OLCF on current operations and future services.

Finishing their terms of service this year were Mike Zingale (Stony Brook University), Emily Belli (General Atomics), and Scott Callaghan (Statewide California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California). A special thanks was given to outgoing chair Eric Nielsen (NASA).

This year’s new members include Herschel Chawdhry (Florida State University), Daniel Moore (Sandia National Laboratories), and Belli — who was elected to serve an additional term. To learn more about the OUG community and see the current list of board members, visit the OUG website.

What Users Had to Say

Arthur Lorenzon is a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and started using Frontier in 2023. Lorenzon’s work focuses on improving the energy efficiency of Frontier and memory-intensive, GPU-accelerated applications.

“We are testing different applications from different research groups, and we are finding that — for example — for some applications, if we can just tune the operating frequency of the GPUs, we can save about 25-percent of the energy without degrading the performance of the applications,” Lorenzon said. “I’d like to thank all the OLCF staff. I’m very happy to collaborate with this group. We are so excited for the new machines, and our goal is to keep collaborating and making better use of the hardware resources so we can reduce energy consumption and make a more sustainable system and a more sustainable facility.”

Senior research scientist Eric Nielsen of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia has also been an OLCF user since 2009 and has been involved in multiple OLCF projects. Among the most recent supercomputing successes, Nielsen highlighted an OLCF project that evaluated retro propulsion for decelerating a human-scale Mars lander concept — a vehicle roughly the size of a two-story house.

“We’ve never flown anything like that, so we really need to determine if we will be able to reliably control the vehicle during descent on Mars in the presence of such a complex and dynamic flow field,” Nielsen explained. “The Summit and Frontier systems ultimately allowed us to start addressing that question after five or six years’ worth of work.”

Nielsen and his team leveraged a closed-loop flight control system running at NASA Langley, which was communicating in real time with Frontier compute nodes, to simulate the high-fidelity, reacting-gas flow physics encountered during a Mars entry trajectory. Nielsen said it was a powerful result that demonstrated the feasibility of developing such a concept at some point in the future.

The 2026 User Summit planning committee included OLCF staff members Aaron Barlow, Katie Bethea, MacKenzie Boyd, Reuben Budiardja, Dmytro Bykov, Haley Calbaugh, Brian Etz, Chris Fuson, Anjus George, Antigoni Georgiadou, Angela Gosnell, John Holmen, Jazlyn Ilamni, Gina Jaklic, Rajesh Kalyanam, Vanessa Lama, Alan Longcoy, Verónica Melesse Vergara, Suzanne Parete-Koon, Tatiyanna Singleton, Michael Sandoval, and Asim YarKhan.

The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

Source: Jeremy Rumsey, OLCF

The post OLCF User Summit Showcases Frontier Science and Genesis Mission Plans appeared first on HPCwire.

U.S. casualties of the Iran war spiked even as U.S. Central Command withheld information about Americans killed and injured from the public. It’s part of a long-running pattern of the Trump administration manipulating such data.

A crushing wave of attacks in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait left U.S. forces in “disarray,” causing significant damage to facilities, dozens of injuries, and the first troops killed in action since a June ceasefire collapsed, according to a U.S. official. Three Army soldiers were killed in “devastating” ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, said the official whom The Intercept is not naming because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, was killed in action on Friday. Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, was killed on Saturday. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment. At least four and as many as 10 troops were also injured in the attacks in Jordan, according to the first official.

In northern Iraq, a U.S. service member was killed and another wounded on Saturday when ordnance from a downed Iranian drone exploded. CENTCOM claimed that the injuries occurred during a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft. 

The surge in deaths and injuries raise the official U.S. casualty count to at least 446. U.S. casualties have increased by more than 15 percent since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. The first official told The Intercept that recent attacks had wounded “far more” personnel than are reflected in the Pentagon’s current casualty count. They did not provide numbers but said “dozens” had received medical attention.

Neither CENTCOM nor the Pentagon replied to numerous requests by The Intercept for information on the casualties, nor would either address the effort to cover up U.S. losses.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. The official tally was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon withheld information on “dozens of U.S. military injuries in Iran War.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the article “baseless and malicious.”

Related

Israel Asked Facebook to Censor Iran War Content, Internal Documents Show

U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. That source said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones. They said multiple U.S. aircraft had also been damaged in the attacks. Videos circulating on social media showed the impact and aftermath of Friday’s missile strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.

“They’ve got some missiles. They’ve got some drones,” Trump said on Sunday of an Iranian military he has insisted, for months, had been annihilated. “We hit them very hard, again, tonight and we did that in honor of the probably three, probably three as opposed to two, great patriots.” 

U.S. Central Command announced later on Sunday night that it had “successfully completed the ninth consecutive evening of strikes,” claiming that the “U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction.”

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to keep information about the new casualties under wraps. “We have nothing to provide beyond what is listed on the website,” a representative of Hegseth’s office told The Intercept late Friday night, without specifying which website, when questioned about U.S. casualties. Hours later, U.S. Central Command acknowledged “two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action” on Friday amid “Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.” The command also disclosed that four other troops “were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals,” an unspecified number of other troops were evaluated for injuries, and “one service member is currently missing in action.” CENTCOM later stripped “in action” from the announcement of the missing soldier but would not explain the reason to The Intercept.

“Godspeed, heroes,” Hegseth wrote on X. “Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”

Related

Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home

The spike in U.S. casualties over the last week followed the Pentagon quietly adding another fatality to its rolls earlier Monday. After Iran claimed to have killed three U.S. personnel in Kuwait last weekend, U.S. Central Command said last Sunday that there were “zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.” But last Monday, the Pentagon’s official toll of injuries and deaths in the war quietly climbed upward.

After ignoring numerous requests for clarification, an official from Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs intimated the fatality added last week was Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards, the commanding officer of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 5 who went missing almost two weeks prior, following his “helicopter’s emergency landing in the Arabian Sea.” But that official refused to confirm it.

Historically, there was little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the DCAS system, according to two people who used to work on the official casualty tally.

Asked why it took a week after the search for Edwards ended to add him to the casualty rolls, the second official said a blend of incompetence and deliberate slow-walking of casualty data has slowed down the process of updating publicly available statistics. 

For months, the Pentagon list of the names of the dead has also been missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

Counting Davius and the “missing” soldier in Jordan, the U.S. has suffered 19 deaths during the Iran war. Parnell said on Monday that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated as of Monday afternoon and instead offered outdated figures posted Friday morning.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 68 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

The casualty numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

On April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department. Despite repeated questions over three months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count.

The Trump administration began undermining transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties almost a decade ago. Not long after Trump first took office in 2017, and following an uptick of violence in the conflict, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. CENTCOM ultimately admitted that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report indicated that the number of wounded may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump claimed that for a year and a half of his first presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of strikes, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured, and even individual synopses of more than 150 attacks.

The post U.S. Official: Iran Attacks Injured “Far More” Troops Than Pentagon Admits appeared first on The Intercept.

Though we likely won’t see it until next year, I’m predicting the pickle emoji will knock the eggplant emoji off its pedestal.

Chris Fall has resigned as director of the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation just three months after being appointed to lead the Commerce Department's federal AI testing institute. Arvind Raman, who oversees the Commerce office responsible for the institute, will serve temporarily in the role. "The Commerce Department did not provide a reason for Fall's departure," reports Reuters. From the report: Fall's exit marks the latest change in direction for Trump's approach to AI. The president upon returning to office in 2025 said the federal government should take a hands-off approach to the tech sector. He has since taken a more active role in monitoring the technology, though his public statements and policies appear to change week by week. The institute is responsible for working with leading AI labs such as Anthropic, Google's DeepMind and OpenAI to test their unreleased models for vulnerabilities. The group is staffed by scientists and engineers, who are focused on calculating the "demonstrable risks" posed by advanced AI models, according to the institute's website. They want to limit opportunities for U.S. adversaries to use AI to develop chemical or biological weapons, or corrupt the data used to train American AI models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Graduate students step inside world-class research at U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories through a U.S.-Japan pilot program

July 20, 2026 — Modern science is built on collaboration. The most pressing challenges — whether in energy, health or technology — rarely fit neatly within a single discipline, requiring researchers to work across fields to generate new ideas and solutions. That spirit of collaboration also can cross international borders, accelerating discovery.

MEXT graduate students spent about five weeks working with mentors at Argonne in a pilot program with Japan. From left to right: Masahiko Gen, Shunya Uda and Ryoji Himeno. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

In that same vein, three Japanese graduate students funded by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) participated in a five-week research program in early 2026 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. The visit was part of a larger exchange program that began at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and continued at Argonne, where the students worked with mentors who conduct research in scientific computing.

Masahiko Gen, who hails from the city of Tsukuba, was eager to participate in the program along with fellow graduate students Ryoji Himeno and Shunya Uda. Gen said it was a rare opportunity to participate in a pilot program between Japan and two of DOE’s largest Office of Science laboratories.

At Argonne, Gen worked on incorporating a method — developed by his doctoral advisor in Japan, Professor Minoru Otani — into a software package for density functional theory (DFT). DFT is a quantum-mechanical modeling method used to calculate the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solids.

Gen incorporated a method called the Effective Screening Medium (ESM) to more accurately treat electrostatic potentials, especially for surface and interface systems in DFT calculations. Electrostatic potential influences how electrons behave in a material, making it especially important for studying energy technologies such as fuel cells and catalysts, where surfaces and interfaces are often electrically charged or electronically imbalanced. With the ESM method, he simulated such systems more realistically within the DFT framework.

“I learned how to implement the method efficiently, how to validate its correctness and what types of materials are suitable for its application,” Gen said. ​“My mentors are not necessarily specialists in this specific method, but they are experts in materials science and DFT calculations. They provided valuable advice on implementation and asked insightful questions at appropriate times, which helped me deepen my understanding.”

Argonne Computational Scientist Alvaro Vazquez-Mayagoitia served as Gen’s mentor. Computational Scientist Noah Paulson and Nanotechnology Scientist Jie Xu, who holds a joint appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, mentored Himeno. Assistant Computational Scientist Riccardo Balin and Computer Scientist Bethany Lusch served as mentors for Uda.

By providing the Japanese students an opportunity to engage in hands-on research in world-class labs, the program demonstrated potential of fostering new collaborations and encouraging talent development through strategic international partnership.

It was the first time Paulson had worked with doctoral students from another country, and he believes international collaboration offers great value.

“If you just stay in your community and your country, you’re going to be limiting yourself in terms of the type of things you’re going to be learning and the processes that you know about and follow,” he said. ​“So, this sort of program is important for exposing both of us to different ways of doing research, and I think it will strengthen both of our research programs.”

Argonne has become a destination for cross-border innovation and has a long relationship with the scientific community in Japan. DOE’s Office of Science worked with MEXT as well as Oak Ridge and Argonne to pilot the program, a result of the memorandum of understanding MEXT and DOE signed in April 2024.

Valerie Taylor, director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science division, is the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research program point of contact on DOE-MEXT collaborations along with Jeff Vetter at Oak Ridge.

“Argonne continues to be dedicated to building a workforce that is agile, future-ready and prepared to lead in the science of tomorrow,” Taylor said. ​“Through strategic STEM partnerships, hands-on internships like MEXT and collaborative workforce ecosystems, Argonne is cultivating talent pipelines that drive innovation.”

Internships are a critical bridge between education and real-world scientific discovery, and programs like MEXT help Argonne extend that bridge globally, said Meridith Bruozas, director of Argonne’s Institutional Partnerships organization.

“Students from programs like MEXT come to learn and contribute alongside our research teams, helping to build an international pipeline that shapes careers, fuels innovation and demonstrates the power of collaboration to advance scientific discovery,” Bruozas said.

Gen said the atmosphere at Argonne encouraged communication and collaboration.

“Although I did not engage in much collaboration in Japan, I realized that I enjoy interacting and working with other researchers more than I had expected,” he said.

Gen said he hopes this collaboration between Japan and the U.S. will continue. He aims to publish papers based on the experience.

“I would like to become more internationally engaged and proactive in collaborating with researchers,” he said. ​“I hope to return to Argonne in the future.”

Source: Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne Hosts MEXT Graduate Students in US-Japan Scientific Computing Pilot Program appeared first on HPCwire.

Thor301 here on the Refloat 1.3.0 beta 2 using 700 and 1200 combo

No issues that I have observed so far after the initial 10 minute test and about 1 hour of messing around on about 20 miles. Is there any specific method of riding that should be tested to see or is it just all around?

About four in 10 workers aren't even aware they pay fees on their 401(k)s, research has found. Here's what to know.

BOSTON, July 20, 2026 — Neo today emerged from stealth with $100M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures. Built by former SentinelOne, Wiz, and Palo Alto Networks veterans, Neo gives SecOps teams the inventory, posture intelligence, attribution, and policy control to manage enterprise-wide agentic transformation and secure AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browsers, identities, and traditional software with newly introduced agentic capabilities. Neo will use the capital to rapidly scale its go-to-market and engineering teams as enterprises prioritize security initiatives to manage rapid agentic software adoption.

“Enterprise security was built for a world where software behaved predictably,” said Nick Warner, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo. “That world is changing fast. AI agents and agentic capabilities are being embedded into browsers, developer tools, SaaS platforms, and traditional applications, giving software the ability to reason, act, invoke tools, and move through workflows with valid user permissions. Neo gives enterprises the real-time control layer they need to understand what agentic software can do, govern how it behaves, and secure adoption without slowing down the business.”

Agentic adoption is changing enterprise environments faster than traditional security programs can adapt. Threat surfaces are shifting and mutating as employees adopt new AI tools from the bottom up, while established software vendors add agentic capabilities into products already approved for enterprise use. As a result, SecOps teams are being asked to secure autonomous software operating inside approved business applications, often without the visibility and control necessary to govern its behavior. According to Gartner, only 5% of enterprise applications featured agentic capabilities in 2025, but 40% will by the end of 2026.

Neo addresses this gap by introducing a real-time control layer for evolving software stacks, helping SecOps teams inventory the suite of tools running across the enterprise even as they add new agentic functions, understand their changing capabilities and risks, assess whether they are configured safely, and enforce policy before risky activity occurs.

“Enterprise software is becoming agentic, changing how applications behave, what they can access, and how work gets done,” said Zane Lackey, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Employees are rapidly adopting AI agents and software vendors are embedding agentic capabilities into products enterprises already use. Organizations need visibility into what this software can do and the ability to govern its behavior in real time. Nick, Shlomi, Eran, and the Neo team have built category-defining security platforms before, and we believe they’re uniquely positioned to build the control layer this new generation of enterprise software requires.”

Existing security architectures were built for a different model of enterprise software, comprised of deterministic applications, human users, and known paths of data movement. Agentic systems behave differently. They can act independently, mimic user behavior, inherit permissions, chain tools, and move across workflows in ways that appear legitimate to security tools built for earlier eras of software. Securing this new model requires real-time visibility into both human and non-human activity, attribution that maps actions back to the responsible user or agent, and granular policy enforcement inside the software layer where agentic activity occurs.

“Agentic AI is creating a new security category as enterprise environments transform, becoming largely composed of software that can reason, act, and invoke tools on its own,” said Elliott Robinson, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Neo combines a clear architectural view of how to control this new software layer with a founding team that has built enterprise-grade security platforms at scale before. That combination matters in a crowded market. Vision is important, but execution will determine the companies that define this next era of security, and Neo is tackling one of agentic security’s hardest problems.”

The Neo Platform delivers five core capabilities:

• Neoverse-Powered Software Inventory: SecOps teams receive a full inventory of AI agents, AI-enabled applications, plugins, extensions, MCP servers, and traditional software becoming agentic, enriched by Neoverse, Neo’s continuously updated knowledge base of agentic software capabilities, risks, and behaviors.
• Capability and Risk Intelligence: Neo helps teams understand what agentic and non-agentic software can do, what it can access, and whether it is configured safely.
• Real-Time Attribution: Each action produces an audit trail, tying activity back to the human, agent, application, or identity responsible.
• Granular Software Control: Organizations can enforce group- or identity-specific policies for tool calls, API access, data movement, and agentic workflows.
• Native Enforcement: Neo enforces controls natively, enabling organizations to block risky activity, malicious models, and redirect out-of-bound prompts without handing enforcement off to another tool.

“AI is fundamentally changing how software operates inside the enterprise, creating an entirely new control and security challenge,” said Michael Robinson, Partner at Craft Ventures. “Neo is building the real-time control layer enterprises need to understand, govern, and secure agentic software at scale. Nick, Shlomi, and Eran bring the rare combination of category vision, deep technical expertise, and proven execution required to define this market.”

Neo’s founders have deep experience building and scaling industry-defining cybersecurity companies. CEO and Co-Founder Nick Warner designed and built the SentinelOne GTM organization and, as COO, took the company public in 2021. Nick has over two decades of cybersecurity leadership experience, including other senior roles at Cylance, McAfee, and Forcepoint. Co-Founder Shlomi Salem previously led detection engineering at SentinelOne for more than a decade and co-led the in-house threat research team where he built threat actor profiles that powered the company’s entire security platform. Co-Founder Eran Shirazi previously co-founded customer experience company EasySend and spearheaded large, enterprise-grade research and development programs after years spent leading the IDF’s Unit 8200 vulnerability research group.

About Neo

Neo is the Agentic Software Control company built for modern AI-driven enterprises. The Neo platform gives SecOps teams the inventory, intelligence, attribution, and policy control required to govern agentic software across AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browsers, identities, and traditional software as enterprise applications become autonomous. Founded by SentinelOne veterans and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, and Merlin Ventures, Neo enables organizations to adopt AI securely while maintaining the visibility and control required to manage risk across the enterprise. For more information, visit www.neo.ai.

Source: Neo

The post Neo Launches with $100M to Secure AI Software Across the Enterprise appeared first on HPCwire.

Don’t call it a comeback. The Guild aims to shine a light on how nerd culture has changed in 20 years.

PISCATAWAY, N.J., July 20, 2026 — Silicon photonics has emerged as a promising technology for addressing bandwidth and latency bottlenecks of conventional electrical interconnects and therefore are being explored for future artificial intelligence infrastructure. However, heterogenous integration of multiple material systems remains a challenge. Now, researchers show how micro-transfer printing can enable highly versatile heterogenous integration to expand the functionality of silicon photonics, paving the way for advanced photonic systems.

Micro-transfer printing enables highly flexible integration of two or more material systems in silicon photonics systems, paving the way for next-generation photonic systems.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence and related computing infrastructure has exposed the limited bandwidth of conventional electrical interconnects in integrated circuits as a major bottleneck to system performance. Silicon photonics, which transmits data using photons instead of electrons, has emerged as a promising approach for overcoming bandwidth and latency limitations. The platform is now widely used for photonic integrated circuits (PICs), particularly in telecom and datacom applications.

A major strength of silicon photonics lies in its compatibility with standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, enabling scalable PIC fabrication using existing semiconductor infrastructure. However, this also introduces a fundamental limitation. CMOS fabrication infrastructure is highly specialized and optimized and therefore cannot integrate non-standard materials. Conventional group-IV semiconductor materials cannot satisfy all requirements of advanced photonic systems, particularly for functions such as on-chip light generation. Materials such as III–V semiconductors and lithium niobate (LiNbO₃) can provide these capabilities, highlighting the need for heterogeneous integration approaches to expand the functionality of silicon photonics.

A new study published in Journal of Lightwave Technology on April 30, 2026, highlights micro-transfer printing (MTP) as a promising approach for realizing heterogenous integration in silicon photonics. “Among the various approaches being pursued for enabling wafer-scale heterogeneous integration, MTP is an emerging highly versatile technique that combines benefits of die-level assembly with wafer-scale processing,” explains Ir. Ye Chen from Ghent University – imec, Belgium.

The study highlights the limitations of existing heterogeneous integration techniques before describing how MTP can address several of these challenges. The MTP process begins with fabrication of thin-film devices, called coupons, on a dense source wafer, followed by selective etching of a sacrificial release layer. An elastomeric stamp is then used to pick up and print multiple devices onto a target wafer. Finally, adhesive or direct bonding secures the devices in place, enabling seamless co-integration of diverse material systems onto large-area silicon photonics platforms.

Notably, one of the main advantages of MTP is its broad material compatibility, which allows multiple material systems to be integrated within a single architecture. This enables individual chiplets to be independently optimized using the most suitable fabrication processes before integration, while maintaining compatibility with CMOS-based photonic platforms.

Recent demonstrations of the MTP process include a fully integrated silicon photonic engine capable of processing both optical and microwave signals using indium phosphide (InP) lasers; gallium arsenide lasers integrated with silicon nitride waveguides for applications in virtual reality, quantum technologies and microwave photonics; widely tunable narrow-line width InP lasers integrated with silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguides for coherent communications and light detection and ranging; wafer-level integration of LiNbO₃-based modulators with Si3N4 photonic circuits; and heterogeneous electronic-photonic optical receiver platforms.

The study also presents a new pilot line focused on developing key aspects of MTP for large-volume industrial manufacturing. In addition, the authors outline several remaining challenges, including yield, reliability, throughput, and the need for a robust and scalable manufacturing ecosystem, along with possible solutions for some of these issues.

“The MTP technology is still in its early stages of commercial application; however, we believe that consistent advancements will soon lead to large-scale industrial manufacturing, paving the way for advanced silicon photonics that will benefit several industries,” concludes Ir. Chen.

Reference
Authors: Ye Chen et al.
Title of original paper: Micro-Transfer Printing on Silicon Photonics: Tutorial, Recent Progress and Outlook
Journal: Journal of Lightwave Technology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/JLT.2026.3689409
Affiliations: INTEC Ghent University, Belgium

Source: IEEE

The post IEEE Study Highlights How Micro-Transfer Printing Can Lead to Advanced Silicon Photonics appeared first on HPCwire.

The European Commission has fined AliExpress more than $625 million, the largest penalty yet under the Digital Services Act, after finding that the marketplace failed to "diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform." EU officials said flagged products repeatedly reappeared, sellers could evade safeguards, and AliExpress's recommendation and ad systems helped amplify dangerous goods. Ars Technica reports: For shady sellers, the risks of detection appeared low. The e-commerce site's mandatory brand authorization system was also ineffective and understaffed, the EC found, and AliExpress did not penalize traders for selling illegal products as its policy claims it would. Making things worse, AliExpress "inadequately assessed how its recommender and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products," the EC said. So rather than remove illegal products, AliExpress was recommending them to consumers and helping to maximize exposure. Talking to the press, the European Union's tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, noted that one in five Europeans shop monthly at retail sites like AliExpress, Temu, and Shein. AliExpress also relied on a single quantitative metric to gauge how effectively its systems were working to weed out illegal products. And that metric did not properly measure the extent of the harm. EC testing found that "a high volume of illegal products" -- including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics -- "continued to circulate despite AliExpress' moderation efforts." In June 2025, AliExpress was ordered to bring its platform into compliance with the DSA but failed to make the necessary changes, the EC said. The fine was calculated to be proportionate to the nature of the violations, which the EC considered "particularly serious infringements," and to penalize AliExpress's delayed interventions to mitigate flagged risks. [...] AliExpress told Ars it was "surprised" by the "disproportionate" fine. AliExpress said it plans to appeal the decision, claiming the EC ignored its "sound risk management framework and the significant, proactive enhancements we have made." The massive online retailer noted that its EU market is substantially smaller than its China market and said that it invests "substantial resources in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection" and "has been and continues to be committed to meeting our obligations to consumers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Darline Graham, who is serving out the remainder of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham's term in the Senate, said she will seek a full term for the South Carolina seat her brother held for more than two decades.

Anker 511 Nano 3 is the kind of charger you’ll want a few of, and for $15.99, you can afford to stock up

• This clever router fixed my spotty home wifi – and it’s currently on sale

A beefy USB charger with half a dozen ports can be great for charging your laptop, phone and even USB bike light all at once, but the real heroes are the pocketable chargers small enough to always be around when you need them. That’s where the Anker 511 Nano 3 fits in.

When I tested 22 different USB chargers to find the best, this little charger easily took the crown for best budget charger thanks to its strong power delivery, compact size and a very hard-to-beat everyday price. That price just got better, though, with a seasonal deal bringing it down from its usual $19.99 to $15.99.

Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks, including strikes this weekend on e-commerce warehouses, have undercut the Kremlin’s efforts to shield most Russian citizens from the war.

The new release expands deployment options for Scale Computing edge solutions with support for AMD EPYC processors and AMD Ryzen AI processors, simplifying virtualization and AI-enabled workloads closer to where data is generated and decisions are made.

AUSTIN, Texas, July 20, 2026 — Scale Computing today announced that SC//HyperCore virtualization suite version 9.7 will add support for AMD CPU-based infrastructure, including AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processors. The expanded support gives customers and partners greater flexibility to deploy Scale Computing edge solutions on AMD CPU-powered systems designed for performance, efficiency, and modern distributed workloads.

The announcement marks a significant expansion of the relationship between Scale Computing and AMD. The SC//Reliant edge computing as a service platform already supports infrastructure powered by AMD CPUs for retail and distributed edge environments, and the in addition of AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processor support in the SC//HyperCore virtualization suite extends that collaboration further across the Scale Computing virtualization and edge computing portfolio. Together, Scale Computing and AMD are expanding infrastructure options for organizations looking to simplify operations and support emerging AI-enabled workloads closer to where data is generated.

For Scale Computing customers and partners, the release addresses a long-requested need: broader infrastructure and platform choice for organizations modernizing infrastructure at the edge, in the data center, and across distributed enterprise environments. As IT teams look to reduce complexity, improve operational resilience, and prepare for AI-enabled applications outside the centralized data center, Scale Computing edge solutions, powered by AMD CPUs, will provide a new path for deploying efficient, scalable, and simplified infrastructure where workloads need to run.

“Customers are asking for more choice, more efficiency, and more flexibility as they modernize virtualization and prepare for AI at the edge,” said Craig Theriac, Vice President of Product Management at Scale Computing. “With SC//HyperCore virtualization suite version 9.7, we are expanding support for AMD platforms in a way that directly aligns with our mission: making infrastructure simpler to deploy, easier to manage, and more resilient across distributed environments. AMD gives our customers and partners compelling options across compact edge form factors and high-performance rack systems, and this release is an important step forward in our product strategy.”

“Organizations are increasingly looking for infrastructure that can support virtualization, AI, and distributed operations without adding complexity,” said Derek Dicker, corporate vice president, Enterprise Business Group, AMD. “Our collaboration with Scale Computing gives customers greater flexibility in how they deploy AMD CPU-powered infrastructure, combining AMD’s performance and efficiency with Scale Computing’s simplified approach to managing workloads from the data center to the edge.”

The move comes as AI, computer vision, analytics, automation, and other data-intensive workloads are increasingly being deployed closer to the source of data. For industries such as retail, quick-service restaurants, convenience fuel retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and distributed enterprise, edge infrastructure must support both traditional virtualized applications and emerging AI-enabled workloads without adding unnecessary operational complexity.

AMD-powered platforms are highly relevant to these environments, offering industry-leading performance and power efficiency optimized for the far edge and adverse deployment conditions. These platforms range from compact edge devices to robust rackmount infrastructure. For Scale Computing, that breadth enables partners and customers to tailor solutions around specific deployment needs while maintaining the simplicity, resilience, and scalability that define Scale Computing solutions.

With SC//HyperCore virtualization suite version 9.7, customers can take advantage of AMD platforms for modern virtualization use cases while positioning their infrastructure for future requirements around AI inferencing, edge analytics, application modernization, and high-density distributed environments. Early technical evaluation has highlighted opportunities around consistent high-I/O thread handling, improved power efficiency for known workloads, EPYC memory throughput, and the potential to leverage embedded GPU capabilities in AMD Ryzen AI platforms.

The release also strengthens the Scale Computing partner ecosystem by creating new opportunities for hardware OEMs, ODMs, resellers, and technology partners to deliver AMD-based solutions built around the SC//HyperCore virtualization suite and Scale Computing edge solutions. For channel partners, the expanded support creates a differentiated path to help customers modernize legacy infrastructure, reduce operational complexity, and prepare for AI-driven edge use cases.

Scale Computing is sponsoring and attending AMD Advancing AI 2026 this week on July 22-23, where customers, partners, and industry leaders will gather to discuss the next generation of AI infrastructure. Meet the Scale Computing team in the ISV Innovation Experience Zone at Booth 510B. To learn more about product availability and AMD support with the SC//HyperCore virtualization suite, contact Scale Computing at info@scalecomputing.com.

About Scale Computing, Inc.
Scale Computing, Inc. is the industry’s largest edge-first platform company, uniquely positioned to power the AI-driven future of distributed enterprises. Providing edge computing, managed network security, re-virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, Scale Computing delivers an integrated infrastructure that adapts and scales from one to 50,000 locations. Thousands of organizations around the world rely on Scale Computing to power critical applications with unparalleled ease. Scale Computing is backed by Oaktree Capital Management L.P., one of the world’s largest funds with over $200 billion in assets under management. For more information, visit www.scalecomputing.com.

Source: Scale Computing

The post Scale Computing Extends AMD CPU Support for Edge and Virtualization Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

$81bn merger halted for at least two weeks after US states sued to block deal, saying it would ‘extinguish competition’

A federal judge on Monday ordered Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery to halt their $81bn merger for at least two weeks, allowing states that are challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court.

Twelve states, led by California, sued to block Paramount’s pending buyout of Warner last week – alleging that such a combination would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and lead to fewer choices for consumers, particularly moviegoers and cable customers across the US.

VideoCardz reports that connecting certain LG monitors to Windows PCs can trigger Windows Update to automatically install the LG Monitor App Installer, which runs at startup and repeatedly displays McAfee trial promotions. From the report: Gamers Nexus reproduced the behavior with an LG UltraGear 34GX900A-B after receiving reports from monitor owners. Windows Update first installed LG extension and software component packages. Windows Reliability Monitor showed that LG Monitor App Installer appeared one minute later. The installation did not display a consent prompt or require the user to approve the download. Gamers Nexus tested the application across 32 consecutive system boots. It displayed a McAfee promotion during 31 of them. On the remaining boot, it promoted one of LG's own monitor utilities. The McAfee popup offered a 30-day trial that would convert into a paid subscription. The behavior does not appear to be limited to newly purchased displays. Gamers Nexus also received the popup on an LG UltraFine 32UN880-B purchased three years earlier. User complaints about LG Monitor App Installer date back to at least 2024, although the recent increase in reports suggests that more models may now be receiving it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the special election for an Ohio Senate seat, the state’s increasing residential electricity bills are in the political spotlight. 

Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown, who will face Republican Sen. Jon Husted, posted July 1 on X: “Since the passage of the corrupt, Jon Husted-backed (House Bill 6) bailout, your utility rates have gone up $663 a year.” 

The post linked to an article citing monthly utility data from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to calculate a $663.36 annual electric bill increase from the law’s enactment in October 2019 to January. The article says HB 6 contributed to the increase. 

The Ohio legislature passed House Bill 6, or HB 6, in 2019 and it was tied to what was widely recognized as the largest political corruption case in Ohio’s history. Eight people were charged with crimes including racketeering, public corruption and bribery.  

The bill included mandated utility bill surcharges to subsidize failing power plants and allowed FirstEnergy to levy charges regardless of consumer use. 

But experts told PolitiFact that although HB6 was a factor, the law was not the main driver of the $663 annual increase. Instead, they attribute it to an influx of data centers, international conflicts and rising prices from regional power grid auctions. 

What did HB 6 seek to do and what was Husted’s involvement? 

HB 6 was a $1.3 billion bailout to FirstEnergy, an Ohio-based utility company.The 2019 legislation led to consumers subsidizing failing power plants through monthly surcharges.  

FirstEnergy spent $60 million on bribes to Ohio political figures to ensure the law’s passage. 

Husted championed HB 6’s passage as lieutenant governor. He has not been charged with any crimes or accused of wrongdoing; when testifying in March, he said he had no knowledge of the bribery. 

His 2018 campaign with Gov. Mike DeWine received heavy financial support from nonprofits and political action committees funded by FirstEnergy. Trial records include text messages and emails where FirstEnergy executives call Husted their “golden boy” and describe his high engagement in convincing both DeWine and state lawmakers to pass the bill. (In 2025 DeWine appointed Husted to fill the remaining term of J.D. Vance, who became vice president. Husted is running now to keep the seat, which Brown held previously from 2007 to 2025.) 

HB 6 had four parts: a nuclear plant bailout; a guarantee of set profits not tied to consumer usage; coal plant subsidies; and the reduction of green energy mandates with plans to eventually eliminate them. 

Husted’s campaign spokesperson, Amy Natoce, told PolitiFact “The subsidies contained in HB 6 were repealed, so it is quite literally impossible for HB 6 to be raising utility rates.” The rate increases were in effect for six years before they were repealed.  

The bailout for two of FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants added mandatory monthly surcharges to nearly all residential, commercial and industrial utility bills and was expected to generate $150 million annually. In 2021, after the FBI arrested people for racketeering, House Bill 128 repealed the surcharge before FirstEnergy collected any funds. HB 128 also repealed the utility’s ability to guarantee itself a baseline level of revenue by raising base rates.

The coal plant subsidies, which led to a $1.30-$1.50 monthly charge for residential consumers, ended in May 2025. The cuts to Ohio’s energy efficiency requirements and Renewable Portfolio Standards, which formerly forced utility companies to buy a portion of their power from renewable sources, have been maintained. 

How much have rates changed, and what’s driving increases? 

Brown’s figure comes from comparing average annual residential bills from October 2019 and January. The 2019 annual bill was about $1,070 and the January bill was about $1,734. 

The rate has continued to increase since January; based on data from Ohio’s Public Utilities Commission, the average June monthly bill was $155.65 (or $1,867.80 annually). 

When contacted for comment, Brown’s campaign cited these figures and shared a document that said the law “contributed” to the utility increase. They also cited a 2025 study from Runnerstone, an energy engineering consulting firm, showing that Ohio residents have paid $527 million because of HB 6 subsidies. 

However, Brown misleads by citing HB 6 as the main driver of rising rates. 

“There’s no way anyone with a straight face could tell you that House Bill 6 raised electric bills by $663,” said Dr. Noah Dormady, an Ohio State University associate professor in public policy analysis and energy policy, and an expert witness in the HB 6 racketeering trial,. “To attribute all of this cost to House Bill 6 is irresponsible.” Dormady said the price hikes are because of utility companies price gouging wholesale market auctions and the rise of data centers. He also pointed to  increased energy costs because of  the Ukraine-Russia and Iran wars.

Ohio relies on a regional grid and competitive wholesale power market, operated by PJM Interconnection. PJM determines what mediums to source the power, while power producers participate in wholesale capacity markets auctions, bidding to have their power ‘reserved’ for future use. Dormady explained that power producers in Ohio purposefully restrict supply so bidding prices are higher. These translate into higher supply rates on consumer bills. 

According to energy reports from Third Way, a centrist think tank and advocacy organization, supply rates make up about half of monthly electricity bills. Natural gas prices have been unusually high this year because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and war in Iran, but PJM’s recent prioritization of natural gas generation has contributed to the higher supply rates.

Molly Bryden, a researcher at liberal-leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio, said a leading cause for the energy hikes is utility companies hiking rates to combat data centers’ usage. Ohio utilities have asked the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to increase distribution and transmission rates, citing data center growth; some approved cases may add an additional $10 per month in the coming years.  

Our ruling 

Brown said since the passage of the “Jon Husted-backed” HB 6, Ohioans’ utility rates have gone up $663 a year.  

Husted was a vocal supporter of HB 6.

The article Brown cited compares the annual rate of $1,070 at the time of legislation’s enactment in October 2019  with the rate in January, which was $1,734, a $663 increase.  

However, much of the increase reflects wholesale electricity prices, increased data center demand, and a reliance on natural gas. Brown misleads by linking the increase to the legislation. 

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True. 

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 20, No. 1,135.

A hacker reportedly wiped Romania's entire land registry database after a failed extortion attempt, halting property transactions across the country and preventing notaries from issuing land extracts, authenticating sales, or registering mortgages. "On the dark web, the hacker also boasted to have begun backup copies of stolen data in an attempt to prevent it from being restored," reports Cybernews. "However, Romanian officials have managed to at least restore the ANCPI's website and post a message saying they were rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. It appears that the agency has an offline copy of the wiped data." From the report: First, the hacker breached Romania's cadastre agency, the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising (ANCPI), posting on a hacking forum: "[RO] Thy arss shall be spanked, Romania! [ANCPI]." "In addition to the data of Romanian citizens, from various databases collected through ANCPI networks, there is also a copy of the GitLab servers containing the source code of all their systems, such as Eterra, RENNS, as well as a version of my little ransomware program," the announcement continued. "The official government website announced a shutdown of IT systems due to 'technical problems,' but this is a bit of an understatement. An offer of assistance was made, but without insistence or pressure." Indeed, the ANCPI initially claimed technical issues but had to admit it was facing a cyberattack. Today, no one can really access the institution's systems. And since the extortion didn't work, the hacker -- who seems to have entered the database using valid credentials -- deleted all data they had stolen, including internal documents, employee credentials, and, of course, land registry data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A straightforward privacy request to Google can remove your home from Street View entirely. Here’s the step-by-step process.

The developer of Duck Detective reveals details of her ‘sad grandma game’ follow-up: a whodunnit – or who-plans-to-do-it? – with a darker edge

Someone wants to kill grandma. In this Knives Out-inspired mystery game, each of your family members is suspicious in their own way: your stressed mum, your “midlife crisis uncle” and especially that stranger in your bedroom. Yikes!

While Apple Crumble is still a mystery, it is mechanically different from Happy Broccoli Games’ previous game, Duck Detective, in which the player solves crimes in a small office. Here you are largely snooping through your family home. “I love the idea of having a walking sim where you can really open up every drawer, every door, and see what’s behind there,” says founder and creative director Annika Maar. As you learn more about the different grievances and troubles of your family members, the mystery slowly unwinds.

Researchers at Louisiana State University have created a room-temperature quantum material made from a thin gold film on glass, patterned with microscopic slits that act like artificial atoms. "We call this robust transport. These quantum states carry information," says physicist Omar Magana-Loaiza. "Our crystal can distinguish them and move them from one point to another in a robust way without requiring cryogenic cooling. That's what opens the door to practical quantum technologies." ScienceAlert reports: Crucial to the new material's room-temperature operation is the way it shifts the focus from electrons and atoms to photons (particles of light). This overcomes the usual atomic-level disruption that heat brings with it. The material is what's known as a plasmonic metacrystal: 'Plasmonic' because the light traveling over it makes ripples of electrons known as plasmons, and 'metacrystal' because it's an artificially created crystal. The tiny slit patterns etched into the material act as artificial atoms (meta-atoms), which dictate how different photon groups pass through (the quantum behavior). "By engineering the distribution of meta-atoms in the plasmonic metacrystal, we can systematically dictate which quantum statistics are allowed to pass through the structure," says physicist Riley Dawkins. "So, our crystal essentially acts as a statistical filter on quantum states." That means as light enters the chip and travels across the gold surface, it's manipulated by the meta-atoms -- and by tweaking the size, shape, and spacing of the slits, different end results can be produced at the quantum level. In practice, this means that certain quantum states of light can be transported with less disruption. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Petulant reaction to a justified two-stroke penalty at the Open illustrates why the American is happier on the LIV tour

The potential for stigma was laid bare close to the conclusion of Saturday at the Open Championship. “Bryson, ya cheat,” a lone voice bellowed from the stand adjacent to Royal Birkdale’s 18th green. This is an environment in which being unfaithful to one’s spouse would be seen as preferable to breaching the sacred rules of a sacred game.

By Sunday the world No 1, Scottie Scheffler, was riding to the defence of Bryson DeChambeau. “I’ve known him for a long time and he’s a lot of things, but he’s definitely not a cheater,” Scheffler said. Except in this case, nuance is required. No one in authority has actually accused DeChambeau of cheating for the incident which incurred a two-stroke penalty. The R&A’s executive director of governance stipulated that DeChambeau’s action when breaching the rules during round two was “accidental”.

The 764 network is just one part of a growing online ecosystem that pushes young members into brutal and degrading acts. It has perpetrators and victims in dozens of countries

In late 2024, in a quiet suburb of Stockholm, a 14-year-old boy approached a man in his 80s who was using a walker. He stabbed the man three times in the back.

The video of the attack in Hässelby was streamed and spread quickly. It fed a global online ecosystem that actively encourages and glorifies acts of violence and degradation – the “gamification of harm”, as the researcher Marc-André Argentino puts it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: One of the founding members of The Document Foundation and handler of LibreOffice's PR and media relations, Italo Vignoli, took to the LibreOffice blog to call out Microsoft's practices with its Office application. The last time we saw Vignoli take to the stage, we saw him accusing Euro-Office of being just as bad as Microsoft with its practices. Vignoli's new post focuses entirely on Microsoft's strategy. He says that "the dominant format for office documents" is owned by Microsoft Office, particularly the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats. The problem with these formats, Vignoli states, is that they "belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft's interest." This makes it difficult for other formats to take hold. Vignoli explains his point by stating that open document formats don't hide anything. People developing their own apps can use the format to both read and write the document format with perfection. Meanwhile, proprietary formats such as Microsoft's "contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviors" that developers can't fully adapt to. That means that a presentation that looks great in the source software comes out strange when rebuilt in a third-party app. This, Vignoli says, is a huge issue [...]. Vignoli claims this creates a huge issue with document preservation. If a Word document was saved in one version of Office, will it still be readable in 20 years? Microsoft has added legacy support to its software before, but the company can one day decide that it's not worth the effort anymore and cut it out. When that happens, you have old documents that are either jumbled or unable to be opened at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Youth-led group calls on education minister to quit in one of India’s largest anti-government rallies in years

Tens of thousands of protesters have defied police orders and descended on Delhi to demand the resignation of India’s education minister in one of the largest anti-government demonstrations in years.

A huge crowd, largely made up of students and gen Z-ers, filled the streets in the heart of India’s capital from early Monday morning shouting anti-government slogans. Hundreds had already camped out overnight.

Benchmark hits a four-year high as oil briefly breaches $90 a barrel before easing after Tehran says talks ongoing

European gas prices have hit a four-month high as the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East raises fears of supply shortages this winter.

The Dutch natural gas benchmark briefly rose above €60 a megawatt hour (MWh) on Monday, near the peaks seen at the start of the US-Iran conflict, after the US expanded its aerial offensive and Iran retaliated with strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait.

More than 3,000 solar panels power Jack’s Solar Garden, cool the land and help it turn a profit

The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent

As Todd Blanche, Erica Schwartz and Jay Clayton face the Senate, a fundamental disconnect becomes clear

There’s been a lot of discussion in America this week about the meaning of integrity.

You didn’t hear the word used directly; it was alluded to indirectly – in wondering whether Lindsey Graham was an immoral opportunist or clever pragmatist; in suspecting Todd Blanche of being more loyal to Trump than to the nation; in distrusting Erica Schwartz, Trump’s latest pick to lead the CDC, when she said she would never compromise on the science; in doubting Jay Clayton, his pick for director of national intelligence, will tell Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK

A poll found that nearly half of young people under age 30 prefer to engage politically by liking or sharing news content online.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Since 2012, the Delaware Elections Disclosure Act has mandated that organizations engaging in political advertising in Delaware must disclose the names and addresses of anyone donating over $100 to their organization nationwide. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, is seeking to overturn the law and increase its presence in Delaware politics ahead of the 2026 elections. 

The rules around campaign finance transparency in Delaware are unlikely to change ahead of the September primary elections after a judge denied a conservative foundation’s request for their immediate pause.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a nonprofit founded by the Republican megadonor Koch brothers to promote free-market policies, individual liberty, and limited government. In April, the group sued Delaware, seeking to overturn the Delaware Elections Disclosure Act on the grounds that its extensive campaign finance transparency requirements serve to discourage political speech and thus violates the First Amendment.

The Delaware Elections Disclosure Act was passed by Gov. Jack Markell in 2012 in reaction to the landmark Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision overturned traditional limitations on corporate spending in elections via political action committees (PACs), leading to several states implementing their own guardrails to mitigate the resulting impact on state elections.

Ross Connolly, the Northeast regional manager for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, said the group is not currently working in Delaware due to its disclosure laws, but would like to get involved in ongoing education and property tax debates. 

“We would like to be in Delaware,” he said. “We just will not put our small or large donors … at risk of being singled out in an unfair way and being attacked because they believe in the cause of Americans for Prosperity and they want to help us in our mission.”

In its original complaint, lawyers from the foundation argued that the Delaware Elections Disclosure Act infringes on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution via its requirements that organizations participating in political advertising within 60 days of an election must disclose the names and addresses of their donors nationwide, among other similar regulations. The suit named Attorney General Kathy Jennings and State Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence as defendants. 

The organization contends the law’s disclosure rules chill free speech by discouraging people from financially supporting their preferred political causes due to fear of it being publicized. 

Along with its lawsuit, Americans for Prosperity also filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the state from enforcing its disclosure requirements while the case moves through the legal process – potentially putting this year’s mid-term elections into play.

Following a June 8 in-person hearing, however, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Hall denied that bid. The written order did not specify why.

In a statement released after the ruling, Attorney General Kathleen Jennings defended the disclosures that are required from any group spending $500 or more to assist in the election of any candidate or in connection with any election campaign.

“This victory affirms that it is the people of Delaware – not the Koch family or any other billionaires – who get to determine our state’s election laws,” she wrote. “For years, the Kochs have funneled billions of dollars of dark money into our country’s elections to promote policies to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public. Their brazen attempt to expand that playbook into Delaware has met the fate that it deserves.”

“Had they succeeded, state law would have essentially no transparency requirements governing the Koch network, billionaires like Elon Musk, or other moneyed interests’ efforts to dump dark money into Delaware elections.”

Two days after Hall’s denial, however, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. 

A Department of Justice spokesman said the office looks forward to continuing the legal fight and defending the law’s constitutionality. The Delaware Disclosure Act also withstood a previous legal challenge that was decided by the Third Circuit in 2015. 

“The facts and moral realities that the lower court ruled on have not changed,” said Mat Marshall, the department’s director of external affairs. “We have yet to hear from any Delawarean, of any party, who believes that our campaign finance laws are too transparent.”

The Third Circuit has set a deadline to file arguments on the preliminary injunction by July 29. A hearing date has not been set, although the plaintiff asked for it to be in advance of Sept. 4, which marks 60 days before the midterm elections.

Americans for Prosperity did not respond to a request for comment from Spotlight Delaware regarding their appeal.

The post Koch-backed group loses bid to pause Delaware campaign finance transparency appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Spain dominated the match, outshooting Argentina 20-3, but couldn't manage a goal in regulation — finally scoring in the second period of extra time.

James Cameron filmed his Avatar sequels there. Marvel filmed Thor, Iron Man 2, and The Avengers. Manhattan Beach Studios in Los Angeles even handled Star Wars' series like Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian, which Bloomberg points out is about "a heavily armed bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away." "Now lenders who are selling the property's $240 million mortgage are promoting the site to potential buyers as a hub for making real space-age weapons." "The project is strategically positioned within Los Angeles' prominent aerospace and innovation corridor, anchored by industry leaders such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and SpaceX," said Cushman & Wakefield, which has the listing. "A supply-demand imbalance has emerged, driven by the growing concentration of advanced manufacturing users and a limited supply of viable space," the real estate brokerage said in a presentation. Bids are due July 28. The marketing pitch reflects Southern California's shifting economic landscape as the movie business slumps and weapons makers seek to cash in on surging Pentagon spending... The defense boom is spurring the revival of a regional industry that once churned out World War II bombers, supersonic Cold War planes and Apollo command and service modules before shrinking after the fall of the Soviet Union... In the Los Angeles area, aerospace and defense-related tenants have accounted for 11% of new industrial real estate leases since the start of 2025, up from an annual average 2% during the preceding decade, according to a report this month by brokerage Newmark Group Inc. Los Angeles "has always gone through transformations," Stephen Cheung, president of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., told Bloomberg. "This is one of those."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those minutes that are happening this week.

Here is a look at some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.

• Kent County considers data center regulations
• The Delaware Election Task Force will meet for the first time in months
• Dover to debate need for Alderman’s Court
• Port of Wilmington board to meet for first time since competitor lawsuit
• Hospital review board to debate charity care implementation

Kent County considers data center regulations

The Kent County Levy Court will consider new regulations for the development of data centers at its Tuesday night meeting.

Unlike in neighboring New Castle County, the Kent county government is attempting to set guidelines for the controversial projects before it receives an application for a first project. A developer has been exploring a Harrington-area site for such a project, but has yet to make a formal application.

The ordinance would require that any data center be in an industrial zone, setback from residential areas by at least 300 feet and limit any noise pollution. They would also be required to use closed-loop cooling systems, unless reclaimed water was utilized.

The Kent County Levy Court will meet Tuesday, July 21, beginning at 6 p.m. for a workshop and 7 p.m. for its regular meeting at the Kent County Administrative Complex located at 555 Bay Road in Dover. For more details and a link for remote viewing, click here.

Task Force to discuss election security

The Delaware Elections Task Force, a working group created in April by Gov. Matt Meyer to “ensure free, fair, and secure elections,” particularly in the face of federal intervention challenges, has a lengthy meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

The task force takes additional importance because the Delaware Board of Elections, the official regulatory body for election security, has not met in nearly a year due to vacancies on the board.

The task force will hear updates from the state Elections Office, the Department of Justice, and a variety of other state and federal partners on the preparedness ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections.

The Delaware Elections Task Force will meet at 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, at the Bradford Street Conference Room, located at 1128 S. Bradford St. in Dover. For more details and a link for remote viewing, click here.

Dover to explore need for Alderman’s Court

Dover has not had an Alderman’s Court, or a municipal court to deal with minor infractions like parking tickets, since the 1950s, but it has been debating its return.

A vote this past spring found the city council deadlocked on whether to explore the recreation of an Alderman’s Court, which is still in use in about a half dozen municipalities statewide like Newark and Rehoboth Beach.

Instead, the city formed an ad hoc committee to explore the idea, which would create new costs but also bring in more revenue as fines paid for infractions would come directly to the city. Right now, such cases are handled by the state court system in Kent County.

During a committee meeting Tuesday, officials will hear from the commissioner of Newark’s Alderman’s Court.

The Alderman’s Court Ad Hoc Committee will meet at 3 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, at City Hall, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For more details and a link for remote viewing, click here.

Port board to meet for first time since competitor lawsuit

The Diamond State Port Corporation board, which manages the state-owned Port of Wilmington, will meet Monday for the first time since a competitor sued to stop the Edgemoor expansion project.

The Meyer administration recently claimed victory in that project by obtaining a new federal permit and securing an additional $110 million in state funding for its ballooning cost, but now its future is once again in question.

A previous attempt to build the modern container port on the Delaware River was scuttled by a similar lawsuit.

Clues about how Delaware may respond and whether work on the port will proceed in the interim may be shared this week.

The Diamond State Port Corporation board of directors will meet at 2 p.m. Monday, July 20, at the Buena Vista Conference Center, located at 661 S. Dupont Highway in New Castle. For more details and a link for remote viewing, click here.

Hospital review board to discuss charity care implementation

Created two years ago, the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board is tasked with reviewing the budgets of state hospital systems to find ways they could reduce costs for patients.

After a year of wrangling over membership and a lawsuit by Delaware’s largest healthcare system, ChristianaCare, that challenged the board’s power, officials are moving closer to the introducing the regulations that will oversee their work.

In addition, the board will discuss Senate Bill 13, which expands the eligibility for free and reduced care for patients, known as “charity care,” that serves as a precondition for healthcare systems’ nonprofit status.

Under the law, healthcare systems must report their efforts to fulfill the new charity care guidelines annually to the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board.

The Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board will meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday, July 21, at the Herman M. Holloway Sr. Campus – DHSS Chapel, located at 1901 N. Dupont Highway in New Castle. For more details and a link for remote viewing, click here.

The post Get Involved: Kent eyes data centers, election task force returns, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

More than 100 Democratic lawmakers voted against arms for Israel. They’re listening to the people – their bosses are behind

The Democratic party is in dire need of a mutiny.

Top leaders at the party’s helm are unprepared to navigate the political sea change about Israel. Last week, nearly half of House Democrats voted to block $3.3bn in weaponry and other aid to that country. A recent New York Times poll found that 74% of Democratic voters “opposed providing additional economic and military support to Israel, including large majorities in all age groups”.

Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy

For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.

It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.

Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.

Read More

Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.

Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.

Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)

The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle.

“I can’t have my girls thinking that this kind of behavior is OK,” Lynn said.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members who said they were sexually abused, along with parents of child victims, and examined police and court records. Collectively, they described a culture of normalized sexual abuse that spans across North America and multiple generations of church members.

Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their abusers, while church leaders who were told of the alleged abuse failed to report it to authorities — part of a religious doctrine some current and former members say has allowed that behavior to continue unchecked.

In many interviews, reporters found a common theme: Children who were victims of sexual misconduct went on to repeat the behavior. In remarkably similar terms, women from opposite sides of the country described being touched inappropriately by an older relative or acquaintance and then repeating the sexual conduct with their peers.

“This went way beyond just normal children’s curiosity,” said a woman who grew up in a church in Minnesota, and who said that she was first sexually abused by an older cousin as a young child.

In other cases, children who were preyed upon grew into adults who committed abuse. Both kinds of misconduct blur the line between a victim and perpetrator, experts in child protection said.

“If you’ve got a culture of child sexual abuse and looking the other way and brushing it off and forgiving quickly and not truly engaging in repentence, it certainly can contribute to sexual behavior problems of children, including kids sexually assaulting others,” said Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor who now trains child-abuse investigators nationwide.

Katherine said that since leaving the church she’s struggled with what to do with unresolved anger over what happened to her.

“This is in me; it has to come out,” she said. “But you’re just taught that that’s a sin, and so then as soon as you start to feel that anger coming up, you feel like shit, because you’re like, ‘I’m sinning, and this is the devil.’”

Even though they’ve tried to end the cycle of abuse, they worry they bear some responsibility for helping extend it.

Lynn said that, until recently, she’d never talked to her brother about what she did to him, worried that doing so years later could traumatize him.

“If he does remember, I really do want to take responsibility,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail, because what we’re all doing here is not working.”

Not everyone has broken the cycle.

Some people who were sexually abused as children went on to abuse others as adults. One was Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with victims under 13 in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2024, and is currently serving nearly eight years in prison. The police investigation into Massie offered a glimpse into his upbringing. Raised in an OALC family in western South Dakota, Massie told investigators in a videotaped interview that, by the time he was a teenager, he had already been touched in a sexual manner by relatives. He described it as a routine part of childhood.

“Kids our age, playing around, you know, being stupid,” he said in the videotape.

When investigators asked for more details, Massie described the conduct with other children as “stroking, getting stroked, sucking, getting sucked.” As officers pressed him about those experiences, he became visibly shaken, raising his voice.

“It does bother me,” Massie said. “It’s disgusting. It’s not fun to talk about.”

“Do you think that had an imprint on your brain?” asked one of the investigators.

“I imagine it probably did, yeah,” he said softly.

In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed that he had inappropriately touched his daughter and fondled his young son in his bed, and forced them to perform sexual acts on him. The man told police he sought out the investigators because “he does not want it to happen anymore,” according to documents in his criminal case.

ProPublica is not naming the perpetrator to protect the identities of his victims.

The man pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. At his sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of sexual abuse when they were children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding that “faith didn’t help stop that.”

If he hadn’t turned himself in, the judge said, the pattern could have continued. “The kids would have just kept a secret, until it caused problems for them in their lives as adults.”

The accounts of Massie and the father in Duluth help explain the world Lynn and Katherine have spent years trying to make sense of. But the sisters’ lives took a different course. After leaving the church, they spent years confronting what had happened to them.

“Rather than teaching life skills and tools and coping mechanisms, it was always forgive and forget,” Lynn said. “So that forgive and forget thing was just like an umbrella forgiveness. Like it doesn’t matter what happens, if you forgive it.”

The use of Scripture is a common method to assert authority and prolong abusive relationships in religious communities, and it can also be a form of spiritual abuse, said Sandy Stevens, executive director of North East Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near an OALC community. Far from being a resolution to moving past trauma, Stevens said, the forgive-and-forget doctrine likely harms victims more.

“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And you can’t pray away a crime.”

Lynn has tried to warn people about the older brother who abused her. She said he teaches Sunday school at an OALC congregation. Eight years ago, another family member accused him of abusing her when he was an adult and she was a child. Lynn learned about the accusation from both her brother’s ex-wife and from the victim herself.

Lynn decided to help support that family member. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department in the county in Washington state where her brother lives. Copies went to two OALC churches where his family had been members and to the authorities in another jurisdiction where the abuse of both Lynn and the other family member occurred.

She said the letter was an attempt to force an intervention where the church had failed them as kids. The abuse she suffered at his hands, she wrote, had “greatly affected my life, my relationships, my physical and mental health.”

She wrote that she wanted to “make sure that you are aware of what has happened and try to do what I can to protect others from having to live this hell.”

She said she immediately got a call back from an investigator to acknowledge her letter. But the other family member withdrew her claim, the investigation stalled and she has not heard anything since. Lynn said it has been several years since she has spoken to the older brother.

Officials with the OALC church in the U.S. and Canada have said they do not believe sexual abuse is more prevalent within the church than in society at large, describing it as a serious and persistent problem that exists everywhere. They said they were not familiar with Lynn’s claims but said they were confident that local authorities would have “looked into this matter and that the local congregation will comply with their recommendations.”

Days before this story was published, Lynn called the younger brother whose flight years earlier to escape her abuse had haunted her ever since. He’s still a member of an OALC church; she asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.

“I told him that I had done something inappropriate to him when I was young,” she said. She told him, “‘I don’t know if you remember or not. I feel really bad, and I’m so sorry. It’s been been a heavy burden for me to carry.’”

When she arrived, she said, he hugged her and told her that her sins were forgiven.

“Par for the course,” she said. (Through Lynn, the brother declined to comment.)

Forgiveness wasn’t what she had come for. She wanted to acknowledge what had happened and say that if he ever wanted to talk about it — with her or with anyone else — she would support him.

“I don’t think we should forget,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. Forgetting is perpetuating the cycle.”

The post Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults. appeared first on ProPublica.

Prisoners with severe medical conditions can be granted compassionate release, but without a long-term care facility willing to accept them, many continue to wait in prison as their conditions worsen.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. But it also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. State officials say they can transform the facility’s fortunes through an expansion of the port to the site of a former chemical plant in Edgemoor.

The biggest port operator on the Delaware River is suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the second time in three years in an attempt to stop Delaware’s long-planned expansion of the Port of Wilmington.

Filed earlier this month by port companies owned by the Holt family of Philadelphia, the lawsuit claims the federal agency failed to properly account for maritime safety before issuing key permits to Delaware for its construction of a container terminal at the site of a former DuPont plant in Edgemoor. 

Those permits allow crews to build a seawall and bulkhead along the Delaware River at Edgemoor and dredge the riverbed to connect the future port to the river’s primary channel. 

Combined with land-based construction and equipment purchases, the Edgemoor project is expected to cost $669 million. Taxpayers will cover most of the cost.

The Holts’ legal challenge comes about a month after Edgemoor construction crews working under the disputed permits were given an official notice to proceed, according to Brian Devine, executive director of the state entity that oversees the publicly-owned Port of Wilmington. 

“They were active on the river last week doing demolition and pre-dredge work,” Devine said Wednesday. 

It is not immediately clear whether the lawsuit could delay the ongoing work. As of Friday, the Holts had not filed an injunction asking a federal judge to order a temporary halt to construction. 

An official with Holt Logistics Corp., which operates port facilities in New Jersey and Philadelphia, declined to comment for this story. 

The Delaware board that oversees the Port of Wilmington and its Edgemoor expansion said in a statement it remains “fully committed to advancing the Delaware Container Terminal Project at Edgemoor.”  

The board is scheduled to hold a public meeting Monday at 2 p.m. in New Castle. 

Competition among the ports

The Holts’ legal challenge marks the latest obstacle to Delaware’s decade-long effort to build a sister facility to the existing Port of Wilmington, which sits at the confluence of the Delaware and Christina rivers.

State officials say the expansion would transform Delaware’s shipping industry by creating thousands of blue-collar jobs and generating long-term economic growth. But that potential growth also sits at the center of a competition among regional ports for the riches derived from Delaware River cargo traffic. 

In recent years, Delaware and Pennsylvania state governments have each committed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to expand their publicly owned ports.   

The Port of Philadelphia also contributed more than $140 million in the past decade to a dredging project to deepen the Delaware River. The federal government paid the remainder of the $400 million cost.   

When first challenging the Edgemoor permit in 2022, the Port of Philadelphia partnered with the Holts’ companies to argue that the Delaware container terminal could cause a dangerous bottleneck on the Delaware River that would impact their ability to see a return on the investment made into a Delaware River deepening project. 

In late 2024, those arguments successfully convinced a federal judge to invalidate the dredging permits for the Edgemoor project. 

Over the following year and a half, Delaware officials reapplied for the approvals and submitted new analysis asserting that the Edgemoor terminal could be safe for marine traffic. The Army Corps of Engineers subsequently awarded the new underwater construction permits last spring.

While the award prompted cheers from state officials and union leaders, Holt Logistics President Leo Holt signaled his company’s likely legal challenge, telling Spotlight Delaware then that “the door is wide open for us to” file a new lawsuit.

In the new complaint, Holt’s attorneys argue that the Army Corps “uncritically relied on information” provided by Delaware officials when evaluating the impacts on navigational safety from an Edgemoor terminal.

The state-owned Port of Philadelphia did not join the Holts as a plaintiff in the latest lawsuit, and that port entity did not reply to a request to comment for this story.  

The post NJ, Philly port operator sues again to stop Delaware’s Edgemoor container terminal appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Rep. Andy Biggs, the party’s likely nominee for Arizona governor, faced criticism from fellow Republicans over his handling of a small police force more than a decade ago.

While they’re not as common as reviews for cafes and dry cleaners, reviews have poured into Google Maps by the thousands for the growing network of jails operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The reviews have come from internet users sharing their often harrowing experiences in the detention facilities.

Google then purges these reviews and blocks the ability to write new ones, according to newly published research.

“Google actively suppresses carceral information, narratives, and digital trace data related to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detention facilities,” wrote Muira McCammon, a professor at Tulane University’s Department of Communication who has been scraping and analyzing self-reported accounts of ICE imprisonment posted to Google Maps since last year.

Much of this record is now permanently deleted, erasing detailed testimony of people ingested by the U.S. deportation machine.

Last August, McCammon aggregated 1,636 posts from 26 different ICE facilities where Google still allowed users to post reviews and discovered there were 91 other immigration jails on Google Maps with no reviews.

“Google had already turned off reviews for the remaining 91 facilities,” McCammon told The Intercept. “Almost all of the Google reviews that I originally collected in 2025 are now no longer available.”

Only four ICE facilities appear to still permit reviews on Google Maps, she said.

Pulling the reviews has come with no public notice or explanation.

In 2023, Google said in a corporate blog post that it reserved the right to delete Maps reviews for locations that are “consistently unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic. This includes places that people go to without choice or places only accessible to people stationed or assigned there—such as police stations and prisons.”

Unhelpful to whom, however, is unclear: While some of the reviews in question were statements of protest that could have been left by anyone, many appeared to come from people directly affected by ICE. They described a variety of issues that would be of great material interest to anyone detained in the facilities or for people close to them.

“Reviews help people make decisions on where to go,” Google spokesperson Genevieve Park said in a statement, “and we don’t show reviews on several categories of places where people go without choice,” citing the company’s policy of removing Google Maps reviews that are “unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic.”

In the past, Google has complied with requests to censor speech about ICE. In 2025, the company blocked Android users from downloading ICEBlock, an app that alerted people to crowdsourced sightings of ICE agents.

Related

Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers

Asked if the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, had communicated with Google about the reviews, Park said the takedowns were “unrelated—it was about enforcing our policy that prohibits reviews for places that people go to without choice.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DHS denied that ICE requested any reviews of detention facilities be removed.

“Being in detention is a choice,” the Homeland Security spokesperson said, citing the department’s program to encourage an app-based system for self-deportation.

Many of the reviews McCammon aggregated were from despairing friends and relatives.

“My friend’s dad was sentenced to one month in jail,” read one review. “He served the time and then was moved to this facility for another 3 months. How is it not illegal to hold someone 3x longer than what they were sentenced to serve?”

A Spanish language review McCammon collected read, “You can barely hear the detainee when you make a phone call.”

Other posts reflect what apparent former detainees described as poor conditions, such as “The place is infested with roaches crawling all over the inmates body there,” or “Very bad experience i spent 2 months in this hell . . . 99% of staff is cruel and racist.”

One reviewer said many detainees weren’t able to communicate with ICE staff because of the language barrier:

I stayed there for more than a month. The food there was okay, but very unpalatable. They were all very kind. Due to the language barrier, there was a big barrier to communication. I felt that most people couldn’t express their thoughts and needs. Why didn’t they have a translator? ! Even if it’s not expensive. The air conditioner there was very cold, and many people, including me, caught cold from the cold. Even so, they were unwilling to turn up the air conditioner temperature. When I slept at night, I only had a thin blanket to cover myself, and it felt very cold.

Although Google’s stance appears to be that the censorship is based on a common-sense, consumer-centric view of Google Maps’ purpose, McCammon argues in her paper that these are essentially political decisions, made by “suppressing the circulation of carceral information and counter-narratives [and] calling into question how the company approaches the ideology of search, when it concerns the reputation of the U.S. administrative state.”

The post Google Is Censoring Reviews of ICE Detention Centers appeared first on The Intercept.

Why US plans for power-sharing in Libya will not work Expert comment LToremark 20 July 2026

Libyan anti-corruption investigations reveal the limitations of a US push to reunify the country without improving governance.

In recent weeks, Massad Boulos – President Trump’s senior adviser on Arab and African affairs – has stepped up efforts to break through Libya’s political deadlock. The country is split between two rival administrations: the UN-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli – controlled by the Dabaiba family – and the Benghazi-based Government of National Stability (GNS), aligned with Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forced (LAAF). The US plan is to bring the Haftars and the Dabaibas together with other key constituencies and form a unified government.

In June, LAAF deputy commander Saddam Haftar travelled to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as Boulos seeks the Haftar family’s agreement on power-sharing. The Dabaiba family did not travel to Washington but Boulos still hopes to convince them to support the deal.

For the deal’s opponents – and there are many – it looks like the return of family rule and a way to legitimize the two rival families. It also appears to be more of the same for ordinary Libyans as the deal focuses on power-sharing between elites rather than how the state can deliver for its citizens.

Reports reveal scale of corruption in Libya

Two recent reports released by a coalition formed between Libya’s Audit Bureau and its National Anti-Corruption Commission highlight the cost for Libyan citizens of the co-existence between the Haftars and the Dabaibas and the vested interests of politicians and armed groups. 

The reports look at the supply chains that manage the provision of subsidized fuel and subsidized medicine, respectively. They make for grim, but important, reading.

Related work

Escaping the cycle of conflict in Libya

The provision of fuel has been a major source of controversy in Libya in recent years. In 2022, a change in leadership of the National Oil Corporation – brokered between the Haftar and the Dabaiba families by the UAE – led to a rapid expansion in fuel procurement.

Despite being an oil producing country, Libya has a deficit of refining capacity, which means it must import fuels for its domestic market. Famously, petrol is provided at the pump at a cost of $0.02 a litre. But the report reveals that the cost of the subsidy has become astronomical.

The report found that the import bill had reached over $9 billion by 2024, the equivalent of nearly $1,200 per person in Libya. The volume of imports had more than doubled since 2021, an increase not justifiable by any reasonable estimation of market demand.

The report details all aspects of this supply chain, revealing the problems of Libya’s fragmented state. Assessment of demand for fuel was found to lack a ‘scientific’ basis, with Libyan state agencies demanding ever greater quantities for which they rarely paid.  Libya’s patchwork of state-affiliated armed groups increased their diesel consumption by 1,527 per cent in 2024 compared to 2021, while consumption at Tripoli South Power Plant increased by 1,368 per cent.

These findings point towards a reality where vested interests are controlling lucrative flows of goods, a significant proportion of which are likely sold on the black market at much higher rates or smuggled internationally.

And it is not only Libyan elites who benefit, there is also an international dimension to such activities. The number of suppliers of imported fuels was cut from 17 in 2021 to just six in 2024 and the report raises several significant regulatory concerns over these – mostly newly created – foreign companies. The report highlights that the prices paid by the Libyan state for its fuel became increasingly uncompetitive as the number of suppliers shrunk. For example, the increase in the cost, insurance and freight premium for diesel increased by 450 per cent, resulting in a near $600 million loss in 2024 alone.

The report on the supply of medicines illustrates strikingly similar dynamics, finding that there is no national framework regulating medicines supply and that the estimation of needs is based upon a ‘speculative’ methodology.

The system for registering pharmaceutical companies was found to be deeply flawed. The report noted that a small number of companies had grown exponentially in terms of profit and market share in recent years. Some were found to have direct ties to state officials and members of parliament. This represents a direct conflict of interest, as it is these same officials and parliamentarians that shape the very procurement policies from which the companies benefit.

The limitations of power-sharing 

Related work

Rethinking political settlements in the Middle East and North Africa

So, how is this relevant to attempts to form a unified government? The rationale behind the need for the unified government is that it will bring a stability from which economic development can emerge, particularly in the oil sector. The report on fuel is particularly relevant in the context of the US push for unity. Boulos is seeking to scale up US investments in Libya’s oil sector if the two rival factions work together.

But the findings of the reports throw into question whether simply formalizing the modus vivendi between rival players in Libya would really constitute a basis for development. Power-sharing might simply make corruption worse by reducing existing constraints on rising state expenditure. It would also not be a positive outcome for international oil companies, who are reluctant to make significant capital investments in a market where legal enforcement comes at the whim of feuding ruling families whose competition would likely continue inside the new government.

A key lesson of the anticorruption agencies’ reports is that looking at the operating system of Libya’s governing authorities is critical, and that there must be clear conditions as to how any future government should manage the state’s finances. These conditions must include greater transparency and emphasis on the provision of public services, not private enrichment. The fact that a US-mediated unified budget for Libya agreed in April has not yet been meaningfully implemented shows that political breakthroughs without an implementation plan do not change realities on the ground.

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.  

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use. 

The money being wasted is yours. 

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it. 

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak. 

Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it. 

We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find. 

Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.

Residents get online through Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite service that arrived in 2023 without any subsidy from the FCC. People here say it’s up to 40 times faster and costs $90 to $140 per month, compared with the hundreds of dollars a month that Adak Eagle, the local telecom, once collected from customers on top of its subsidy checks. (Adak Eagle’s website currently advertises internet plans for $99 to $550 per month.)

But the subsidies remain.

Like many Alaska telecoms, Adak Eagle was built on public money. It began in the early 2000s with FCC subsidies and federal loans to upgrade old telephone wires for fiber-optic lines that could support both voice and internet service. By 2011, the company was collecting $2.68 million a year from the Universal Service Fund.

A 2013 federal order determined company president Larry Mayes spent telecom subsidy money on a fleet of vehicles and a fishing boat that weren’t necessary for his business, and that the $237,455 salary Mayes paid himself one year was “unreasonable” and “disproportionate” given the size of the company and what’s typical for Anchorage, where he lives. 

(The company filed letters with the FCC at the time stating its salaries “should be evaluated in the context of a small company where each employee wears multiple hats” and citing the island’s “remoteness and harsh climate conditions.”) 

On top of the $3.6 million his company has received from the federal broadband subsidy since 2016, he also received $3.54 million from the FCC through a program that replaces revenue phone companies once earned connecting long-distance calls. The state kicked in an additional $3.75 million through its own subsidy program, the Alaska Universal Service Fund. (Some Adak residents said they continue to pay the company for landlines that they use as cellphone backup.)

When we first asked Mayes about the federal internet money, he hung up on us. He did not respond to questions emailed in May, a written interview request delivered to his Adak office in June or detailed questions emailed and hand-delivered to his Anchorage office in July. Reached again by phone on July 13, he declined to comment and ended the call.  

The one thing Mayes did say before hanging up on the first call: that he is playing by the rules of the FCC’s subsidy program, and if we had questions about it, we should ask the agency. 

We did. Repeatedly. About the publicly funded connections to demolished homes on Adak and other uses of internet subsidies in Alaska.

The FCC never responded.

Internet for Vacant Homes

Step outside Adak’s tiny airport terminal, and the scene is straight out of “The Walking Dead.” You can spend hours walking the city streets without seeing another human, the only sounds the dry scrape of tall grass and warbling seabirds. Stiffened copies of People magazine declare George Clooney the 2006 Sexiest Man Alive. A shuttered McDonald’s drive-thru still advertises 99-cent hamburgers. 

Subdivisions outside the city core sprawl like any in America, with neatly arranged ranch-style homes, powder-blue roofs, wide driveways and generous garages. After the Navy shipped out, hurricane-force Aleutian winds pried homes apart. The worst of it is in a beachfront neighborhood called “Officer’s Country” on old city maps. Bathroom mirrors and toilets and kitchen tables stand exposed to the rain in homes cleaved in half like dollhouses. 

Even in newer neighborhoods, we found rotted exterior walls with holes so wide you could drive a truck inside. Grass grew on living room floors. Bedrooms were filled with bird nests.

In the few homes the FCC paid Adak Eagle to connect that are habitable, the occupants have abandoned Adak Eagle.  

Henry Collins, 61, lives in one of those homes. He was partially blinded in a chemical accident years ago while cleaning a boat at the island docks. Now he and his wife spend their days caring for their newborn. Sometimes they FaceTime with his wife’s family in the Philippines and hold the baby up to the screen.

He accidentally cut Adak Eagle’s internet cable with a string trimmer. No matter. He never could afford the subsidized service anyway, and his rooftop Starlink receiver was untouched in the landscaping incident. 

One street over, 26-year-old Steven Ivanoff pays close attention to internet speeds because he plays Overwatch and Fortnite competitively online.

Before Starlink, residents said, Ivanoff’s former roommate and fellow gamer was notorious for using up the scant bandwidth Adak Eagle provided every time he went online to play. Neighbors hollered at him to get off the damn computer. Adak Eagle’s subsidized fiber offers download speeds of 1 to 10 megabits per second, according to the FCC National Broadband Map — far short of the FCC’s 100-megabit standard for broadband and, at the low end, barely fast enough to load a modern webpage. 

All that has changed. At our request, Ivanoff tested the speed of his Starlink connection using an online service called speedtest.net. He clocked it at a screaming (by Alaska standards) 447 megabits per second.

At another house, four dachshunds stood guard in a fenced yard while inside, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration who moved from Arkansas was playing a reality TV show on her widescreen — Starlink-powered, like everyone else’s internet.

Elizabeth Pryor has leaned into the isolation by starting a mini farm. In her solarium, a cardboard box trembled with teenage chicks, peeping under a heat lamp. No bears on the island, she said. So that’s nice. No foxes either. “But the rats ate my jalapeno peppers down to the stalk! Chomp chomp chomp.”

Her house rises across the street from a pile of rubble, the remains of a house fire. 

Both properties — the rubble pile and Pryor’s home, alive with puppies and chickens — are on the list of houses for which Adak Eagle received subsidies to connect to the internet. She doesn’t use it. 

Wiring an Empty Island

Adak was already a ghost town when Mayes’ company started wiring the island.

According to the U.S. Navy’s own Record of Decision on the base closure, published in 2000, “there was no established community on Adak” after the military’s departure. The Navy’s ongoing assessments documented houses being condemned and boarded up. 

Andilea Weaver, the company’s former vice president, said Adak Eagle began replacing rat-gnawed copper landline wires to Adak buildings in 2006 — nine years after the base closure. 

In 2016, Adak Eagle proposed a 10-year plan to receive new subsidies in exchange for connecting or maintaining lines to 346 locations, nearly every building left standing. The FCC agreed. The agency formally declared the new spending plan to be in the public interest.

The FCC in 2022 reduced the number of locations Adak Eagle was obligated to serve to 306 after the company reported some buildings were unlivable, but the agency left the subsidy amount unchanged. 

According to federal data published by the Universal Service Administrative Co., the most locations that Adak Eagle reported having broadband available was 283.

The buildings the FCC says Adak Eagle keeps wired for internet include duplexes, fourplexes and ranches where we found no sign of life. The agency shows connections at places where we found doors yawning open in the wind, hinges screaming with rust — no furniture inside, no appliances, yet in many cases, a single telephone still plugged into a wall.

Whether the abandoned structures Adak Eagle has prepped for low-speed internet can beckon new occupants is an open question.

Adak is so far west of the Alaska mainland that it’s in a different time zone. So far west that it’s almost in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The last vestige of industry departed with the closure of the island’s fish processing plant in 2020. Now the economy consists of a bit of hunting and bird-watching that lures a few hardy tourists aboard the two flights a week that serve the island. (Warning: Pack canned goods. The  grocery store and restaurant were closed our entire visit.)

Alaska’s Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has argued the U.S. should open a new military base on Adak because of its strategic proximity to waters cruised by the Chinese and Russian navies. With $115 million set aside by Congress last year for “exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure,” a Pentagon-led task force is developing recommendations on how to proceed, a Sullivan spokesperson said.

After knocking on hundreds of doors and canvassing every subdivision, we spent our last hours in Adak checking to see if anyone was using the subsidized internet in the old commercial buildings and offices scattered around the center of the city. 

At one of the last addresses on the list crouched a cinder block building surrounded by pickup trucks and wide spools of orange piping — the same piping we’d seen leading up to demolished houses the day before. A rotary phone hung on the wall. 

This was the local office of the company we’d been examining. Even the people who work there have stopped relying on the internet service that you pay for. Above the front door, above the sign for Adak Eagle Enterprises, stood two Starlink dishes.

The post On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet appeared first on ProPublica.

Company aims to develop AI software that cuts research times and use of rare metals in chipmakers’ supply chains

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Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and the UK government have invested in a £2bn British artificial intelligence startup that is aiming to become the “search engine for rare materials” that accelerates the next wave of technological breakthroughs.

The Cambridge-based CuspAI has raised $450m (£330m) in funding from investors including Bezos and the government’s sovereign AI fund, valuing the two-year-old business at $2.6bn.

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones, cutting staff, scrapping a civilian harm records database, and developing an AI assistant to accelerate assessments, according to a new report shared with The Intercept. These revelations come as the Trump administration has renewed attacks on civilian sites in Iran.

The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence has reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. Two current defense officials confirmed that staffing levels remain the same today. Current and former government officials say the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians.

The tiny contingent that remains at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the officials said, are also prevented from investigating major civilian casualty incidents like the U.S. attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

Wes Bryant, who served as the Center’s chief of civilian harm assessments, was one of the more than 30 people pushed out last year by the War Department. He told The Intercept that the Center was being kept on life support to provide cover for the Pentagon.

“The Hegseth regime held on to a thread of the program mostly in effort to be able to say they are following the law, but the reality is the Center and its efforts have had little to no influence on or oversight or visibility on operations,” Bryant said. “As long as they sit in the seat, they are continuing to try to put out good work, but the reality is, most of it is being thrown into the wind, and neither institutionalized nor operationalized.”

Before civilian harm mitigation and response (CMHR) efforts were sidelined and the staff downsized last year, the Center completed basic civilian harm mitigation training for 212 personnel from military combatant commands like Central Command and Africa Command, the intelligence community, the State Department, and other agencies, according to the report.

Established in 2023, the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was just “hitting its stride” in late 2024, a defense official told The Intercept. When the center was staffed by 40 civilians, troops, and contractors at the beginning of last year, it was on track “to achieve Full Operational Capability” by the end of 2025, according to the report. That never came to fruition, as the Center saw its staff slashed to seven civilians and two members of the military. 

“The COE was cut down shortly after becoming fully operational,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager at Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “They had minimal time to show value, but they were still able to inject critical CHMR expertise to all corners of the U.S. military, even as their staff dwindled down to a handful of people.”

The report also details financial constraints that have crippled the entire civilian harm mitigation and response enterprise across the War Department. “DoW-wide budgets for CHMR in FY26 were cut,” reads the report which notes that staff and programs across the entire Department of War — including at combatant commands like AFRICOM and CENTCOM — “were gradually reorganized, reduced, and/or terminated by the end of FY25.”

The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM, for example, has been reduced to just one individual, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the command’s chief. Reporting by The Intercept also found U.S. Southern Command was unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports after the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January. When the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, they learned the command had no mechanism for dealing with such reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

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While the Pentagon slashed the center’s staff, the military has made greater efforts to utilize artificial intelligence for targeting and civilian harm mitigation, according to the report. It specifically references the Maven Smart System, a product of the defense firm Palantir that serves as the War Department’s signature AI-enabled software platform. The Center of Excellence “leveraged the rapid adoption of the AI-enabled Maven Smart System (MSS)” within the military to advance the development of a tool to give field commands a more complete picture of the civilian environment, the report notes. A current defense official said it provided a “better layer of protection” for civilians in war zones. 

The report also details the Center’s development of “an AI Assistant prototype that helps military staff rapidly analyze civilian environment data during operations by equipping AskSage, the Army’s enterprise AI platform,” with the CHMR data. During an Army training exercise, the AI assistant reportedly shortened the timeline to produce civilian assessments by 97 percent. Several additional Army units have requested access to the assistant, according to the report.

The report also references a database used for tracking civilian harm that the Pentagon abandoned last year. It notes that “progress on the development of a standardized CHMR data management process and a repository of civilian harm information stalled due to the cessation of the CHMR Data Management Platform (DMP) project during Department-wide realignment of priorities and resources.”

Without a database like the DMP, the Pentagon is unable to effectively track civilian harm. In May, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools and was aware of just “one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions.” Months later, CENTCOM still has no additional information about civilian harm, telling The Intercept: “We have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury.” Airwars, by contrast, has chronicled hundreds of civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed and wounded thousands of civilians across the world, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East. The World Health organization put the death toll in Iran at 3,375 people — before the ceasefire fell apart this month. The U.S. military has also conducted more than 220 extrajudicial killings during a campaign of boat strikes targeting civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

Airwars also tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that the U.S. reportedly killed as many civilians in 52 days as in the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

The Center of Excellence conducted a “qualitative lessons learned study” on Rough Rider, examining “how the operational environment shaped civilian harm mitigation and assessment to identify lessons for scenarios lacking air and information dominance.” The classified study, according to the report, is supposed to help commanders “safeguard civilians while maintaining operational effectiveness in contested environments.” But Bryant said the COE’s input to the study was “nominal,” and a current defense official said the Center was “boxed out” when it attempted to examine strikes during Rough Rider.

Hegseth’s office did not return a request for comment on the findings of the study.

For months, the Pentagon has failed to reply to requests to interview experts about civilian harm policies at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Policy, or the Office of the Secretary of War.

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The “Annual Report on the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for Fiscal Year 2025” is dated April 4, 2026, and states it will be made “publicly available on an appropriate website of the Department” but has yet to be posted online. On Friday, Hegseth’s office told The Intercept: “We anticipate release of the 2025 CPCoE report in the summer of 2026.”

In a letter sent earlier this month, a group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added, “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”

The letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and nine other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a recent War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” That May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs. 

Hunke said the war with Iran demonstrates the need for a fully-funded and staffed COE. “Given adequate resources, the Center has so much potential to transform how the military thinks about and implements civilian protection,” she said. “This is needed now more than ever as the U.S. engages in ongoing and harmful operations in Iran.” A defense official was less sanguine, stating that Hegseth’s underlings would have sidelined even the efforts of a fully staffed and funded COE.

“This was never meant to succeed — whatever that means,” the official said. But that official and Bryant also praised the remaining COE staff and were strenuous in their support for their work.

Bryant, who was forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on the Pentagon’s dismantling of its CHMR enterprise, decried the department’s “tyrannical and imperialistic uses of lethal military force internationally.” He told The Intercept that the remaining personnel at the Center of Excellence are “supposed to shut up, keep their heads down, and pretend that the civilian harm mitigation and response mission isn’t simply a shell for legal CYA,” using shorthand for “cover your ass.” Asked to assess Bryant’s comments, a current defense official replied: “Yup. No notes.”

The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of civilian harm mitigation and response efforts. Last spring, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties. One of the then-current officials said that it could result in “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.” His warnings were prescient.

The post Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments appeared first on The Intercept.

Many of the more than 100 people awaiting processing on the tiny Pacific island are skipping meals to make ends meet, a new survey has found

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Most refugees and asylum seekers held in Nauru’s detention centres say they cannot afford to buy enough food or access clean drinking water, despite the Australian government spending the equivalent of more than $9m per person last financial year.

The group of more than 100 people have been sent indefinitely to the tiny Pacific island while they wait for their asylum claims to be processed. Many of the cohort say they are skipping meals to make ends meet, according to a new survey by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) advocacy group.

Experts warn increase in enhanced photos on birding platforms creating fake sightings, threatening credibility of tool used by scientists

For many birdwatchers, recording a species outside its normal range is the holy grail. In the UK, the discoveries often make national headlines. The western reef heron, for example, usually found in Africa and southern Europe, was spotted in a seaside town in north Wales in June, and widely celebrated on birding forums.

But a new scourge is threatening to disrupt the fun: AI slop.

Islamabad and the new path to global power.

Ending the war and sustaining the peace requires a new approach to regional security.

Exclusive: Outdoor workers losing up to 9% of income as weather becomes ‘poverty multiplier’, research says

Extreme heat is pushing some of India’s poorest workers further into poverty, with income losses of up to 9% for outdoor workers, new research has found.

Analysis done by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that extreme heat is acting as a “poverty multiplier” for hundreds of millions of workers in India’s informal sector.

Ferran Torres’ extra-time goal gave Spain a deserved victory over a negative Argentina

You can also follow the build up on our news blog, which contains photographtic proof that things are livening up in NYC

“One of the big questions for those of us in the UK is how to watch the final,” writes David Wall. “For all that has been made about ITV’s coverage with their New York studio and one of two excellent pundits, I think their coverage has been less than the sum of its parts, as usual. They’ve not had people other than the commentators in the stadiums so all that studio showed was that it was quite windy in New York sometimes.

Our photographer has been at Royal Birkdale for the Open. Here are some of his best shots as Ryan Fox claimed his first major with a birdie at the final hole

• US president watches Spain v Argentina match

• Match report: Spain beat Argentina in extra-time

Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino were booed as they took to the field for the presentation ceremony before the US president attempted to gatecrash Spain’s victory party.

Trump arrived at the stadium on Marine One, with the president’s helicopter first flying over the stadium about 45 minutes before kick-off. He sat in a glassed-in section of luxury seats for the match, along with Infantino. Other dignitaries and former players sat nearby, including Spain’s king, Felipe VI, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum.

"If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake," reports Bloomberg. "Not so in a robotaxi..." Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi's speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend's birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through the car's speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn't stir... Kasendar's robocab nap was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. As companies like Alphabet and Tesla bring self-driving taxis to more cities, the messier aspects of serving unpredictable humans are becoming harder to ignore. Passengers are falling asleep, spilling drinks, dropping food, vomiting, experiencing medical emergencies and, in at least two instances, giving birth in the cars. They stumble out of the vehicles and forget to close the doors, forcing the operators to pay nearby gig workers to do it. These seemingly minor nuisances are becoming a drain on municipal resources and complicating the roll-out of robotaxi service. So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: "sleepers". The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo's first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services... Remote assistants monitoring the cars try talking through the speakers and checking on passengers with interior cameras. But if they get no response, company protocols often require them to call 911. And first responders have to assume the worst. Austin dispatchers treat an incident as a potential heart attack if the remote assistant can't tell whether the passenger is breathing, Patterson said. In the end, only about 3% of such calls require transporting the passenger to a hospital, he said. But the incidents tie up personnel who might be needed elsewhere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In its final report the High Pay Centre says the median remuneration of a FTSE 100 CEO has risen to a record £5.06m

The bosses of Britain’s largest listed companies received record pay last year, fuelling the widest earnings gap with workers in eight years.

Median pay for FTSE 100 chief executives hit £5.06m in the last financial year, according to data released by the High Pay Centre, an 8.6% increase on £4.66m the previous year and the highest level on record.

Monarchs traveled to a remote part of Mexico, a journey they've made for thousands of years, and wintered there. Now tens of millions of the butterflies are on an epic aerial journey back north.

Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes producer Shari Finkelstein took a unique approach to their story, capturing the raw emotions of crime victims and wrongfully convicted men during a three-day retreat.

The annual migration of monarch butterflies is one of science's great mysteries: millions of monarchs know the correct path even though they have never made the long journey themselves. As 60 Minutes found, the expedition to watch the migration can be its own challenge.

Vice-president and second lady announced birth of Alec Neel Vance, their fourth child, in social media statement

Vice-President JD Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, on Sunday announced the birth of their fourth child, the first born to a sitting vice-president in more than 150 years.

Born on Sunday, Alec Neel Vance joins older siblings Ewan, nine; Vivek, six; and Mirabel, four.

A rape survivor, guilt ridden after learning that an innocent man had been sent to prison in her case, brings together crime victims and exonerees to help heal those impacted by wrongful convictions.

After six weeks of football, Spain defeated Argentina to win their second title in the 104th and final game of the 2026 World Cup

This is the first time in more than 150 years that a vice president's family had a child while in office.

Victims were Provo’s fire captain, his wife and their three sons, who were hiking in Bicknell amid heavy rains

Five family members who had set out for a day of hiking were killed after a flash flood swept through canyons of southern Utah on Friday, law enforcement officials said.

The victims were a captain in the Provo fire department, his wife and their sons, according to fire officials. A daughter who was not on the trip survived.

Two U.S. service members were killed in Jordan, and a third is missing in action, U.S. Central Command said.

Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha – and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don’t we? – there’s now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system. Astr0baby has published both binaries and source code for the port, as well as a lovely set of screenshots to show it off working.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: A federal judge has halted California's groundbreaking "Truth in Recycling" law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled. [Originally planned to take effect October 4th], California's recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a "chasing arrows" recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies... A coalition of farming, forestry, restaurant and packaging organizations sued the state in March, arguing the law violates their right to free speech. They argued that Senate Bill 343 operates as "government-imposed censorship." Judge William Hayes agreed that their challenge has merit, and on Tuesday ordered California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the defendant in the case, to pause enforcement of the law "until further order of the Court...." Advocates of reducing plastic use disagreed. "The court got it wrong, and I'm confident that the state will ultimately prevail," said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. "S.B. 343 does not violate the 1st Amendment; it requires companies to tell the truth when they make recyclability claims. Suggesting that the 1st Amendment protects misleading environmental marketing is inconsistent with the basic principles of consumer protection that states like California have implemented for decades." In January, CalRecycle, the state's waste agency, reported that less than 10% of most single-use plastic materials in the state were being recycled. Even yogurt containers and margarine tubs — made of ubiquitous polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic — are being recycled at a rate of only 2% in the state, the report said. Only 5% of colored shampoo and detergent bottles, made from polyethylene, or No. 1 plastic, are getting recycled... Plastic materials that can't be recycled are typically sent to landfills or sometimes illegally shipped overseas, where they are burned or end up in landfills, rivers and waterways. The bill's author told the Los Angeles Times "All you have to do is look at the numbers. These products are not getting recycled, despite what the industry is claiming. They are just confusing consumers, clogging the waste stream, polluting the environment, leading to higher and higher prices for local governments and ratepayers." He argues the symbols shouldn't be used to "confuse people who see the symbols [on products] and assume they can be recycled." The article also quotes Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. "Given the long history of the plastics industry deceiving the public about plastics recycling, this is an especially bad outcome. It is a reminder that the plastics industry has enough money to fight even the most modest policy designed to protect people and the planet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, this is new – but not at all unexpected considering the state of Windows and the wider technology industry. When you connect certain LG monitors to a Windows machine, Windows Update will pull in a bunch of adware promoting antivirus trash. Of course, all done without any consent, because Silicon Valley inherently does not understand nor respect consent.

Windows Update first installed LG extension and software component packages. Windows Reliability Monitor showed that LG Monitor App Installer appeared one minute later. The installation did not display a consent prompt or require the user to approve the download.

Gamers Nexus tested the application across 32 consecutive system boots. It displayed a McAfee promotion during 31 of them. On the remaining boot, it promoted one of LG’s own monitor utilities. The McAfee popup offered a 30-day trial that would convert into a paid subscription.

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Don’t use Windows.

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• US says another troop killed as Israel warns Tehran’s attacks coming close

• Two US troops killed and one missing in Jordan after Iranian attacks

Jordanian authorities ⁠have not issued any decision ⁠to ​evacuate the airport or ⁠seaport in the city of Aqaba, and have not detected ⁠any potential threats ​in ‌the past ‌hours, the state ‌news agency cited the government spokesperson as saying.

This denial comes in response to the US embassy in Jordan earlier saying the airport and seaport in Aqaba had been evacuated by Jordanian authorities because of a “specific and credible threat” (see this post for more details).

• Fox sinks winning putt on 18th for first major title

• ‘It’s going to be big back home in New Zealand’

Ryan Fox has said he had no ­sensation in his hands as he hit the winning putt in the 154th Open Cham­pionship. Fox, who claimed his first major title, became the first New Zealander since Bob Charles in 1963 to win the Open. He did so in dramatic style, with a birdie putt on the final hole sufficient for a 68 and 10-under-par total which was enough to beat Cameron Young by one stroke.

Fox was typically brisk in his approach to playing the 18th. Reflecting on the moment of victory, though, he explained the state of his emotions. “You can’t feel your hands, I know that,” he said.

US military says service member was killed in Iraq during ‘controlled detonation’ as it launches more airstrikes at Iran

The US military announced another death of a service member as it launched more airstrikes at Iran on Sunday in response to the killing of American troops , and Iran fired missiles toward Jordan that risked widening the conflict into neighboring Israel.

The US military said the service member was killed in Iraq on Saturday during the “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 20, No. 1,857.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 20 No. 869.

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we’ve got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with “AI” support, so odds are this will fizzle out. Bummer!).

The emulation space is going crazy, after my previous post on Windows booting on DEC Alpha es40 emulator, there is now another huge breakthrough in the emulation of other non-x86 CPU emulation. Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC (the man behind the updated es40-fork) has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and Linux/BSD also don’t boot. But Windows is amazing already.

↫ Remy van Elst

Much like Alpha hardware, Itanium hardware is quite hard to come by – especially Itanium workstations are a nightmare to find; I think I’ve only ever seen one or two Itanium workstation come up for sale on eBay in recent years, and their rarity obviously commanded hefty prices. The sooner we are able to run Itanium version of operating systems comfortably in a virtualised environment the better. As long-time OSNews readers know, my heart beats for HP-UX, but the Itanium versions of Windows and VMS would be of more interest to most people, I’m sure.

Excellent news.

Emergency response has rescued 67 people, including 15 children, from one of the country’s worst maritime disasters

A ferry carrying 116 passengers and crew sank ⁠off the coast of Guyana in South America ⁠late Saturday, with 67 ⁠people, ​including 15 children, rescued so far, according to Guyana ⁠authorities.

A massive search-and-rescue operation continues for dozens of missing passengers in what has been described by officials as one of the country’s worst maritime disasters.

Congress was granted many powers under Article I of the Constitution. Nonetheless, lawmakers have ceded much of their authority to the president – and Washington has been plagued by gridlock.

"Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com: The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe? One explanation suggests supermassive black holes push away gas, starving themselves as predicted, but also that this matter eventually cools and falls back to the black hole. That would allow for another period of feeding and thus growth. This explanation further suggests that as this gas cools down, it forms "streamers," or filaments, of gas just a few hundred light-years wide but which stretch thousands of light-years long. These would fall back to the center of the galaxy and form a swirling disk around its incumbent black hole, once again feeding it and triggering a new period of growth. This would then restart the jets from the black hole, which would again cut off the cosmic titan's food supply, allowing the whole process to begin once more. The process would in essence be a self-regulating cycle of feasting followed by fasting. However, the connection between these filaments and supermassive black holes has been elusive, meaning this mechanism has resisted confirmation. To solve the mystery of feasting black holes, the JWST turned its attention to a relatively close AGN situated at the heart of the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, NGC 4696, located just 145 million light-years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope previously studied this galaxy, uncovering a strange, hook-shaped swirl of gas near the central supermassive black hole of NGC 4696. The JWST followed up this discovery by producing a detailed map of gas flowing at the heart of the galaxy. This revealed the hook-shaped feature is around 800 light-years wide and is composed of gas moving at incredible speeds of around 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second). More excitingly, the swirl of gas appears to be connected to a vast filament of material falling in toward the central supermassive black hole. The team tested the JWST observations against a computer simulation, finding gas in the infalling filament scenario would indeed take a shape similar to that seen in NGC 4696. "JWST is now showing us the final link of this closed loop," team member Helen Russell of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. said in the statement. "The vast filamentary network of gas flows ultimately funnels gas down to a disk that fuels the black hole." The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We are finally seeing this self-sustaining cycle in action," team leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Energy secretary grapples with mounting criticism over length of US war as Democrat calls conflict ‘war of choice’

A Trump administration official on Sunday grappled with mounting criticism over the length of the US war with Iran after months of promised diplomatic breakthroughs, short-lived ceasefires, and the deaths of three more American troops bringing the total number of American military members killed in the conflict to 17.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, defended the Trump administration’s strategy after being confronted with his earlier claims that the war which began in February would have ended by now.

Labour leader will visit king to accept role on Monday and will start making cabinet appointments that afternoon

Andy Burnham will say Britain must be honest about the challenges it faces when he becomes its sixth prime minister in a decade on Monday, as he prepares to introduce measures to ease the cost of living and allow more North Sea fossil fuel drilling.

The Labour leader is expected to start making appointments in the afternoon after going to Buckingham Palace to accept the role of prime minister from the king.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sen. Mark Warner and border czar Tom Homan join Margaret Brennan.

Tensions between his aims are already there, including disputes over key appointments such as chancellor

Andy Burnham’s vision for cleaning up Westminster politics is a utopian one: ending the dominance of the whipping system, Whitehall power hoarding and the “insidious briefing culture” of the bubble.

In his first speech on becoming Labour leader, he warned his party it “won’t beat Britain’s new right if we are consumed by infighting and pulling in different directions”.

Nine people were shot and injured in a shooting in Tucson, Arizona, early Sunday morning, police said. A suspected gunman was shot and wounded by police.

Tom Homan’s comments come amid scrutiny over federal immigration agents’ fatal shooting of two men in six days

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will require its officers to record vehicle stops with at least one body camera, said Tom Homan, the Trump administration “border czar”, on Sunday. The action comes as the agency is under renewed scrutiny after ICE officers fatally shot two men earlier this month.

“They exonerate more law enforcement than they convict, and I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the ⁠officers saw when they took that action,” Homan said on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.

"A humanoid robot lost its head," reports Newsweek, "during the world's first free-combat tournament for full-sized humanoid robots." The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition began Thursday in Shenzhen, China, according to the article, with local robotics company EngineAI providing $40,000 of their "T800" robots (yes, named after The Terminator) to 32 participating teams from around the world: A video shared of the combat on YouTube by local news outlet Shenzhen Story, showed that even after one of the robots had its head practically knocked off its shoulders, it continued to fight, throwing punches at its opponent and kicking into the air... [White humanoid robot "White Eagle"] landed a high kick to the head of its black opponent, "Matador," which made the robot's head rock precariously in its socket before rolling completely out of place. The two continued to spar as Matador's head was swinging from its socket until eventually the robot fell, crushing its head underneath its body. Matador tried to scramble back to its feet, but its head flew off and the robot then collapsed back down. The White Eagle did a celebratory dance for the crowd as the fight concluded, and did a move that mimicked that of someone flexing their biceps. The White Eagle waited in the ring, fists still up, as Matador was carried away, occasionally doing a few more dance moves... Per a report by Global Times, the winning team will be awarded a gold championship belt worth $1.44 million (10 million yuan) by the event organizer. It's a strange fight. The robots sometimes seem unaware of where their opponent is, facing the wrong direction or throwing kicks and punches in the air. In the first round White Eagle just knocks over Matador, who then isn't able to stand back up. (And White Eagle again appears to do a victorious dance.) EngineAI's site says they aim to "promote the development of robot combat events toward greater professionalism, scale, and industrialization," while fostering innovation and global collaboration. Thanks to Slashdot reader pbahra for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice department files first-ever petition to Alien Terrorist Removal Court created in 90s, seeking removal of person

The Trump administration has filed a first-ever petition to a secretive and dormant court created 30 years ago to consider government requests to deport so-called “alien terrorists” from the US.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC) was established in 1996 but had never received a petition until Wednesday, when the US justice department filed an application seeking the removal of an individual whose name is withheld from the single-page document posted on the court’s website.

White House border czar Tom Homan said "I think body cameras are the way to go" after fatal shootings by federal immigration officers in Texas and Maine earlier this month.

More than 30 injured and 300 displaced after buildings collapse near Sicaya

A 5.5-magnitude earthquake shook the Andes region of Peru, killing at least six people, authorities said Sunday. More than 30 people were injured and 300 have been displaced.

The US Geological Survey reported the quake struck on Saturday at 9.24pm, with its epicentre located 2km (1.2 miles) west-south-west of the city of Sicaya in Huancayo province. It was 10km (6.2 miles) deep.

The following is the transcript of an interview with CBS News contributors Chris Krebs and David Becker that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

Sen. Mark Warner said he'll vote against Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence, citing disappointment in his testimony at a confirmation hearing last week despite his previous optimism about the nominee.

After years of daily air frying, these nine foods are the ones that proved the appliance does more than just heat up leftovers.

Outbreak has sickened dozens in the city but officials say they believe source of outbreak ‘has likely been eliminated’

A second person has died amid a legionnaires’ disease outbreak that has sickened dozens of people in New York City, according to officials, who also say there is evidence that the source of the outbreak “has likely been eliminated”.

New York City’s health department served notice of the second death in a statement on Saturday. The statement didn’t have any information about that person’s identity, age, or details on when and how they fell ill, as was the case when city officials on Friday announced the first death in the outbreak on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Windows 10 still runs on 16.9% of the Windows devices monitored by asset-tracking service Lansweeper. That's more than one in six, The Register points out. A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, falling to the low-to-mid 40% range by the time Microsoft ended standard support. The decline continued after that, reaching 18.6% in June, but Lansweeper says migration has now slowed to a crawl... Small and medium-sized businesses are particularly exposed. Lansweeper reckons that 21.4% of machines at small and medium-sized business still run Windows 10, with cost usually being the constraint that keeps the legacy operating system running. The exposure is greater in some sectors, with 23% of healthcare and pharmaceutical systems sticking with Windows 10, while consumer and retail devices hover at 22.7%. According to Lansweeper's data, "a Windows 10 device carries an average of 1,903 active CVEs against 652 on Windows 11. That's a 2.9x gap." Esben Dochy, principal technical evangelist at the company, told The Register that "the Windows 10 average also includes devices that have Extended Security Update patches applied." [According to Lansweeper's figures, 14% of Windows 10 assets have applied Extended Security Update patches.] Part of the problem, according to Lansweeper, is "patch diffing," in which Windows 11 fixes can be reverse-engineered to find flaws in Windows 10. "The supported OS effectively hands attackers a map into the unsupported one," Lansweeper said... Looking at other market share measures such as Statcounter, there was little change in the share of Windows 10 and its successor over the last few months after a surge following the end of support. As Lansweeper noted: "The easy migrations are done. What's left is the hard core: devices that haven't moved because they can't or won't." Lansweeper's evangelist noted that in some cases there is no Windows 11-certified version yet for many medical devices and industrial or retail systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Startling new research shows that in many countries – including old US allies – the public prefers Beijing to Washington

Earlier this year, a spate of western TikTok and Instagram creators announced that they were at “a very Chinese time in my life” – drinking hot water and wearing slippers around their homes. The Chinamaxxing phenomenon primarily reflected the constant need of influencers for novel content. But social media trends also reflect a growing fascination with China, as the economic historian Adam Tooze has noted.

While it broods over China’s economic, military and technical advance, the Trump administration is accelerating Beijing’s diplomatic progress, as striking new polling by the Pew Research Center shows. For the first time, China and Xi Jinping are seen more favourably than the US and its president in most of the 36 major countries surveyed – including Canada, Mexico and Australia. Only in six countries did people rate the US more highly. While Beijing has seen significant improvements in some places, the slump in Washington’s standing is more dramatic. Across 20 countries, the median percentage with a favourable view of China rose from 32% to 46% between 2023 and this year; for the US, it fell from 58% to 36%. Views of China were much more positive in Latin America, Africa and parts of south and south-east Asia than in wealthier European and east Asian countries.

Consortium preparing for potential legal battle amid reports new PM could put the company into temporary public ownership

The group of investors pursuing a rescue bid for Thames Water have said they are willing to discuss greater public control but are also preparing for a potential multi-billion pound legal battle amid reports that Andy Burnham could temporarily nationalise the company.

London & Valley Water (L&VW), a consortium of 100 institutional investors that hold £17bn of the company’s £21bn debt, has said it is open to government involvement with Thames Water, but indicated that this does not include public ownership in the struggling company.

Investigators arrest 31-year-old man identified as Charles Medina in connection with death of Rapp who was 26

US boxer Hannah Rapp, who in June fought for the World Boxing Council (WBC) women’s featherweight championship, was killed on Saturday while she bicycled in Texas after a motorist struck her with his car, according to authorities.

Rapp was 26, and investigators arrested a 31-year-old man identified as Charles Medina in connection with her death, the sheriff’s office of Brazos county, Texas, said in a statement.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

The following is the transcript of an interview with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Tom Homan, Trump administration border czar, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026. Editor's note: This interview was taped on July 16, 2026.

As with the John Cleese original, comedian is supported by famous faces from Claudia Winkleman to David Jason

John Cleese’s 1985 advert for the BBC in which he asks a pub full of stars “What has the BBC ever given us?” is one of the most famous examples of the corporation making the case to the public for the value of paying the licence fee.

In the advert, Cleese is complaining to the bartender that he has just bought his TV licence. “Fifty-eight quid for the privilege of sitting in your own home, watching your own television set. It’s diabolical. I mean, what’s the BBC ever given us for 58 quid?” he says, before being put right by a string of punters, ranging from David Attenborough and John Humphrys to Terry Wogan and David Jason.

⚽ World Cup final starts at 3pm EST, 8pm BST, 5am AEST
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Watching England against France – though, of course, defensive intensity was lower – it was still noticeable how dangerous Saka and Marcus Rashford were on the counter. Had Tuchel sent them on against Argentina soon after England scored, Lionel Scaolini’s men would’ve had to respect it and might well have feared it, forced, at the very least, to leave defenders back to mark them, while their own team would’ve had out-balls and a serious threat, meaning when they cleared their lines, it wouldn’t have simply been to face yet another attack.

It find it strange that, given his team struggled for control and also to break down tight defences, Tuchel didn’t give Mainoo a single second on the pitch – and seemed to have decided as much by the Panama game, when he brought on Henderson in preference. England desperately lacked midfield balance, control, poise and craft, a problem that eventually cost them – and is the main reason I’d have given them little chance of beating Spain had they made the final. Anderson and Rice are fine players, but given Bellingham is essential, I’d want only one, with the trio completed by a more technical and cerebral type – which needn’t be Mainoo, he was just the only one in the squad.

️Updates from the final day’s play at Royal Birkdale
️Official leaderboard | Mail Scott with your thoughts

The final few games are running late, due to a rules brouhaha in an earlier match. So if you’ve been hammering away at refresh waiting for news of Tommy Fleetwood, here he comes now. The usual hubbub on the tee, then he takes his fairway wood, hits the ball, and twirls the club in satisfaction. Not exactly sure why, because his ball disappears into a thick clump of grass atop a bank to the left of the fairway. Some tension in the shoulders no doubt.

Another birdie for Scottie Scheffler! He crashes his drive at 5 greenside, chips up to four feet, and rolls in the putt. No fuss. The defending champion is now -7, and if he continues like this, posts a number, and the late-starting leaders have to deal with the cranking up of both wind and pressure … well now, we’d have quite the Open. A long way to go yet.

NYC mayor says in Times interview that’s he’s in ‘active conversation’ with city’s law department about the matter

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he was reviewing whether his administration could arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if as expected the Israeli prime minister visits the city for the UN general assembly in September.

Mamdani’s comments on Saturday’s episode of the New York Times’s the Interview podcast echoed ones he had made to the publication as he successfully ran for mayor last fall.

One person was killed and 16 others wounded in the overnight Russian attack on Kyiv, local authorities said.

Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek: We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on their vehicles, especially those from a small company... So to waylay those fears, Aptera announced a partnership today that unlocks access to 4,300 service shops across the US, through a company called RepairPal. Aptera had been working on this partnership when we saw them at our factory tour, but today they're ready to officially announce it. RepairPal doesn't own its own shops, but instead certifies local shops to work on particular models of car... All shops will get access to Aptera-specific service procedures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek: We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on their vehicles, especially those from a small company... So to waylay those fears, Aptera announced a partnership today that unlocks access to 4,300 service shops across the US, through a company called RepairPal. Aptera had been working on this partnership when we saw them at our factory tour, but today they're ready to officially announce it. RepairPal doesn't own its own shops, but instead certifies local shops to work on particular models of car... All shops will get access to Aptera-specific service procedures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heavy smoke from several large wildfires blazing in Canada and Minnesota engulfed large swaths of the Midwest and East Coast.

Britain seeks extradition over charges including rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation and offences relating to extreme pornography

The controversial influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in the US as part of a UK police investigation into a number of alleged sexual offences.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it was bringing further charges in relation to four further individuals, and had requested the two men’s extradition.

Calls grow for global regulation as rising numbers of westerners use surrogates in countries with different laws

• Why Mexico is at the heart of ethical debate over global surrogacy

The rise in the use of surrogates abroad is leaving more babies at risk of becoming stateless, experts have said, amid growing calls for urgent global regulation of the practice.

The warning follows the suspension of a 15-year effort by The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to establish a global surrogacy convention, which was paused due to divisions among member states.

ABS data shows one in 10 people are not satisfied with life – but community cohesion and trust lift happiness scores

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Nearly 2.2 million Australians 15 years and older are living below the wellbeing poverty line, with the share of people reporting very low life satisfaction doubling over the past decade.

In 2025, 9.7%, or about one in 10 Australians, rated their general satisfaction with life at four or below out of 10, according to Guardian Australia’s analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s (ABS) general social survey.

The fear of becoming obsolete is a rising source of anxiety as artificial intelligence emerges in the workplace. Staying strongly connected with others will help

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

Earlier this year Paul* discovered via a flurry of media stories that his business group had been targeted for job cuts, alongside a number of other public-sector agencies. For him, this was the second time, after his technical management role was restructured in 2024. While that process was difficult enough, the comms this time were highlighting the integration of AI as a cost-saving tool. “They say it’s not about firing people, but hey, my whole team will go.”

For Paul, the timing could not have been worse. He and his partner are expecting a child and recently bought their first house.

Curiosity: Seek new learning, perspectives and interests, look outside your usual sources for inspiration. You can use AI to widen your perspective and spark ideas but stay engaged with the world beyond the screen.

Humility: Grow your self-awareness. Reflect on what comes naturally, what energises you and where you get stuck. Then invite honest feedback. AI learns through feedback – you can too. Ask people you trust what to start, stop and keep doing.

Emotional intelligence: Your ability to connect, show empathy and communicate with care will only become more valuable.

A storm front largely moved the smoke out of the Northeast before the final between Spain and Argentina, but additional smoke lingered over the middle of the country.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Richard Stallman. My office at the MIT AI Lab was next door to his. Stallman's position was that the source code to software should be free for everyone to use, learn from, and improve. Software encapsulates knowledge, he argued, and no one should lock something so fundamental away. To hide software inside a company was to hide knowledge itself... What I missed was that software was not just a commercial asset; it was a body of knowledge, and bodies of knowledge grow stronger when they are shared. After about two years of on-and-off debate, Stallman convinced me I was wrong." "Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger," advises Siegel. "AI is software, and AI is increasingly closed. The frontier models — the most advanced, cutting-edge AI systems — are closed completely and the trend is accelerating. Viable open alternatives are few and far between." So, what to do...? "Yes, frontier models keep getting bigger and more expensive — that arms race may well stay with the giants. But open source AI does not have to match their scale to be useful. Much of what the world needs probably does not require the absolute frontier. And where keeping a credible open option does demand serious compute, that is precisely the kind of public good worth paying for. "What's missing is not a path but will. The government, the private sector, and nonprofits should invest heavily in free and open source AI — the way they once invested in open software: public compute grants for open research, corporate and philanthropic support for universities and nonprofits doing the work, and a simple rule that AI built with public money is open by default. "We have run this experiment before. We know how it turns out. Let's not unlearn it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rolling Stone writer Barry Walters, author of the music history "Mighty Real," says the latest ballad by British singer Sam Smith is a step forward from LGBTQ love songs being marginalized.

Deputies in Brazos County have arrested Charles Medina, 31, charging him with manslaughter.

Throughout family hardships, divorce, and losing her voice to Lyme disease, Shania Twain became the top-selling female country artist of all time. She talks about her biographical new album, "Little Miss Twain," in which she reflects on her life with a smile.

A longstanding bromance means the Liverpool regional mayor very much has the ear of the soon-to-be PM

When a new prime minister enters Downing Street, observers usually look to those around the cabinet table to see where influence lies. With Andy Burnham, they should look 200 miles north – not to Manchester, but Liverpool.

Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool city region, may not have a formal role in government but he has a strong claim to having the closest personal bond to the incoming prime minister, a man he calls his “bezzie mate”.

Rates may rise, but don’t be too concerned – a small increase is unlikely to change major decisions on investment or hiring

With the appointment of a new Federal Reserve chair, the latest concern is that interest rates will go up in the next few months. That decision will depend on many factors, including inflation, jobs and the economy’s overall growth. But when that happens, watch out! The media will go nuts and the president will go ballistic. Everyone treats every Fed meeting as an economic earthquake. But for most small businesses, it isn’t.

A 25-basis-point increase doesn’t meaningfully change borrowing costs for most established businesses. In fact, it changes nothing at all.

At 79, Ronald Gould, a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, shoulders a full caseload despite living with progressive multiple sclerosis – a condition he faces with grit and a healthy dose of humor.

FIFA rules state that World Cup matches must be played on natural grass. For this year's tournament, scientifically-engineered sod (that can withstand playing conditions and differing climates) was deployed in stadiums with artificial turf.

As Andy Burnham enters No 10, Guardian data analysis reveals the fissures with Labour’s traditional supporters, and the traps the new PM will want to avoid

Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing St on a wave of optimism after a landslide victory in the 2024 general election. His Labour party had overturned a defeat in 2019 in which the party crashed to its worst result since 1935. Labour won 412 seats, just a few shy of the 418 won by Tony Blair in 1997, a result that gave Labour a leader in office for a decade.

But a little more than two years after he came to power, Starmer’s tenure is over. Over the past 24 months the popularity of the human-rights lawyer turned prime minister has plummeted, from a net approval rating of -3 when he took office, to -66 by September 2025 – the lowest net approval rating recorded by Ipsos for any prime minister since 1977.

When this is all over, people will tell us to move on. But those who perpetrated this reign of terror must be held accountable

One day, when Maga is out of power and the conditions of political possibility have changed, there are going to be people who tell you that the best thing for the country is to move on. There are going to be people who tell you that attempts to hold the purveyors of Trumpism accountable are petty, vindictive, engaging in a kind of petulant recrimination and score-settling. There are going to be people who tell you that there must not be investigations, that it would be a waste of time to have trials. There are going to be people who tell you that it is not wise to change the law to allow for prosecutions and lawsuits; that too great an emphasis on the past will only divide the country, and keep us from looking toward the future. This argument was made after Watergate; it was made after the civil war. It was wrong back then, and it will be wrong again when it is delivered, with piety and smugness, after Trump.

When Maga leaves power, all of the officers, bureaucrats and leaders of ICE – from the uniformed thugs in masks on the streets, to the contractors guarding concentration camps, to the suited vultures directing the operation in Washington and drafting legal memos to justify it – all of them must be held accountable. Their immunity from criminal prosecution and civil suits must be eradicated, and their liability must be made retroactive. They must be investigated, tried, fined, punished and ostracized. Needless to say, ICE must be abolished – attempts to merely reform it must be resisted as betrayals of democratic values. But it is not enough to abolish ICE. Those who are responsible for ICE must be driven from public life.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Investigation continues after college freshman was found dead on Mississippi island after 4 July boat trip with friends

Two weeks after Nolan Xavier Wells was found dead, his family is still searching for answers.

On 4 July, Wells, an 18-year-old Mississippi college freshman, and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a barrier island a few miles off the Mississippi Gulf coast.

You don’t have to put up with spam calls any longer.

Reform leader says support from fraudster before last election is ‘totally undeclarable in every single way’

Nigel Farage has admitted his close friend the fraudster George Cottrell let him use one of his London homes and paid for social media filming before the last election but insisted it was “totally undeclarable in every single way”.

The Reform UK leader spoke in depth for the first time about his support from Cottrell and the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne in an interview with the anti-woke Triggernometry podcast.

The allocated payment will go to your PlayStation Network wallet after the final approval hearing.

Spain will face Argentina in the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup final match on July 19. Here's how and when to watch the soccer game.

Forty-eight nations​ competed in the largest FIFA World Cup in history and two are left standing, with Spain in search of its second World Cup title and Argentina shooting for back-to-back​ championships.

Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested by federal authorities Saturday in Miami.

Surprisingly easy to manoeuvre and skilled at cleaning carpet and hard floor, Shark’s upright bagless model is one of the best corded vacuums I’ve tested

• The best vacuum cleaners

Corded vacuum cleaners aren’t as glamorous as their cordless cousins, but swapping battery power for a plug socket has its advantages. The device will never be short of power, so it can keep cleaning for as long as you need it to. Prices also tend to be lower because there’s no expensive battery to factor into the cost.

On the downside, there’s a cable to manage while you clean, and even the longest cords usually need to be switched from one plug socket to another if your home is any larger than a small flat.

Changes inside the Florida international airport are hardly evident as state and county hold back funds for full remodel

One of Donald Trump’s most grandiose vanity projects, a multimillion-dollar makeover of Florida’s Palm Beach international airport into a self-aggrandizing, gold-plated transportation hub, is running into turbulence, barely a week after the first plane’s wheels touched the runway.

At first glance, the rebranding of the airport less than 5 miles from his opulent Mar-a-Lago resort appears to be complete. Its website bears the name and oversized logo of the President Donald J Trump international airport, and state transportation workers were quick to erect highway signs leaving drivers in no doubt where they were heading.

The murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo shook Magnolia Park, but strengthened bonds in a barrio grappling with gentrification and a history of police violence

The vigil on Canal Street has grown every night since 7 July. It began when two neighbors nailed white roses to a utility pole. Within hours, streams of people brought candles and carnations. By the seventh night, the sidewalk was enveloped by votive candles painted with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexican flags flapping alongside Texas ones, and a wooden cross ringed with photographs of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old husband and father who was shot and killed by ICE on this corner of Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood.

“Magnolia Park is a tight-knit community. Neighbors know each other and they help each other,” said JoAnna Rodriguez, co-founder of the non-profit Magnolia Park Arts and Community, housed two blocks away from the site of the shooting. “So when we heard what had happened, our first reaction was, ‘Who was it?’”

The showcase library’s centenary was celebrated by thousands who filled the still-relevant public institution

The central library in downtown Los Angeles has seen its fair share of colorful moments.

The architectural gem, which turned 100 this week, has been the backdrop to the epic street battle between Pacino, De Niro et al in Heat, and was where the original Ghostbusters came across their first ghost, a friendly older lady librarian who was anything but. Television shows such as Moonlighting, Murder, She Wrote and LA Law filmed there too, when characters were researching or investigating a case.

People in Tunbridge Wells area face lower pressure, intermittent supply or no water after ‘instrument failure’

Thousands of homes and businesses in Kent are facing water supply problems for a second day, including a “complete lack of water” in some cases, South East Water said.

About 7,000 properties in the Tunbridge Wells area could face low pressure, intermittent supply or no water, after an “instrument failure” at a nearby water treatment works, SEW said.

CNBC reports: The automotive industry's increasing use of over-the-air technology to update vehicle systems makes it more susceptible to cyberattacks, analysts say, urging more intervention in the sector... Its use represents "a unique national security concern," Gabriel Lim, senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told CNBC. "Aside from data privacy concerns, the potential of a foreign actor sabotaging the controls of a moving vehicle is a possibility that countries like Norway, Denmark, and Britain have expressed concerns about," Lim added. In May, the American Enterprise Institute warned that safeguarding the automotive sector was crucial to limit foreign governments' espionage capabilities. "To protect against foreign espionage threats, the US should consider additional security reviews, implement restrictions on certain foreign-made hardware and software in vehicles, and mandate increased data-collection disclosures," the report said. The concerns come as real-life tests reveal vulnerabilities. Late last year, Norwegian bus company Ruter conducted tests on two buses and found that one had potential risks linked to OTA technology. "There is access to the control system for battery and power supply via mobile network through a Romanian SIM card. In theory, therefore, this bus can be stopped or rendered inoperable by the manufacturer," the company said. The investigation by Ruter then sparked the U.K. and Denmark to conduct their own investigations... While these investigations were conducted on buses made by Chinese firm Yutong, [Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, systems security professor at the UK's Swansea University] said the issue goes beyond one manufacturer or country, as the technology becomes more pervasive. "Other sectors adopting OTA include other transport modes [such as] maritime and rail, aerospace (particularly drones), industrial machinery and robotics," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S.-Iranian woman who was trapped in Iran on allegations of espionage and collaborating with a hostile state that her attorney called "bogus" departed the country earlier this week.

Top Democrat says findings show public ‘way ahead of the politicians’ as Trump dismisses global heating as ‘hoax’

Amid a summer of dangerous heat, drought and floods, a majority of Americans are connecting increasingly severe weather to the climate crisis, new polling shows, despite efforts by Donald Trump to dismiss global heating as a “con job” and a “hoax”.

It’s a sign that attempts to suppress polarize climate concerns may not be seeing full success, said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress.

From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.

The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.

Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implications

In January, the AI company Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a moral patient, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.

Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years.

The president no longer treats the people who defeated him as voters. He treats them as suspects

There is a version of this country in which Donald Trump tells Americans the truth he has been handed: that their elections are secure. Once, he apparently wanted to.

The Atlantic reported after Thursday night’s address that a February 2020 election-security briefing pleased Trump so much he wanted to announce the news himself. The press conference never happened. The election did, and Trump lost it.

From manufactured election insecurity to an outbreak of ‘explosive’ diarrhea, Americans are bearing the brunt of harmful policies

Between widespread cuts to vital government agencies, various disease and illness outbreaks, and new environmental disaster vulnerabilities, the United States is facing a convergence of crises with widespread repercussions.

Yet the Trump administration has hamstrung the federal government from addressing these crises – and in some cases is actively fanning them. Over the past year, the administration has moved to shrink the federal workforce, roll back environmental protections and policies intended to fight the climate crisis, reduced funding for scientific research and is seeking to advance legislation that would impose new voting restrictions.

Expectations that prioritize privileged identities keep women and people of color from even running for office

Since Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats have chased candidates who exude an ever-elusive “authenticity”. For many on the left, the answer was Graham Platner, a military veteran turned oyster farmer with a gravelly voice and deep hostility toward the political establishment.

Even as controversy after controversy emerged – racist, sexist, homophobic online posts; a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he later covered up; sexually explicit messages sent to other women while he was married; and allegations from former partners of toxic and threatening behavior, which he denied – Platner’s momentum didn’t slow. It was only after a woman accused Platner of rape – which he denies – that his political support collapsed.

There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer. 

Every morning starts the same. A jolt of coffee and nicotine as my thumbs scroll a daily intake of Black death and indignity. 

It mostly comes dosed in tears. Tears of Black moms and aunties, projected behind stone-faced fathers and grandpops trying to hold it together behind press podiums. 

This summer, it was Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a trip to Mississippi’s Horn Island over the Fourth of July. Wells, who traveled to the island with a predominately white group of friends, was found dead in the water two days later. Authorities have not announced a final determination of what happened, but Wells’s family has challenged the official timeline and sought an independent autopsy. The investigation remains ongoing, which is to say that another Black family is waiting for answers in the indeterminate dark. In a state synonymous with deep-seated anti-Black racism, and the highest number of recorded lynchings, speculators and community members have begun to fear the worst.

It’s an expectation that has set the tone for living while Black in this new era. Where at any moment you, as Black person, can be erased for the most negligible of offenses, and if you’re not careful, be discarded into the void.

Before Nolan Wells, we watched in June as another Mississippi family laid their Black boy to rest. Kohen Wiley, who was just a year old, was shot and killed by Senatobia police officers, who fired into the vehicle where Wiley was sitting on his mother’s lap. After a friend of Wiley’s mother was accused of shoplifting a box of diapers at a Walmart, police opened fire on their car under the pretense that the vehicle was “oncoming” toward the officers. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said the officers were not in the car’s path, citing a photo from the scene. A month later, investigators have yet to release body camera footage of the incident or provide any new answers. No charges have been filed.

Black Americans had already borne witness to those familiar echoes. Earlier that month, a jury in South Carolina acquitted 61-year-old Rick Chow of a murder charge after he shot and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, 14, for the alleged offense of stealing bottled water. Video evidence of the 2023 incident shows the store owner chasing Carmack-Belton out of the shop after falsely accusing him of theft. Chow, who had twice before shot patrons he suspected of shoplifting, would go on to shoot the teenager in the back as he fled. 

Whether over a box of Pampers or a gulp of water, it is a startling reminder that for too many non-Black Americans, protecting even the most trivial property can take precedence over the sanctity of a Black life.

It’s an existential dread that has now turned into expectation, an anxiety meant for the mind to blunt the inevitable oncoming pattern of pain, disappointment, and injustice — in this case, being Black in America.

These deaths do not exist in isolation. They arrive amid a broader retreat from the institutions that, however imperfectly, once acknowledged Black Americans as a constituency deserving of protection and investment.

And the casualties of Black existence transcend more than just bodies. The Trump administration has waged full spectrum warfare on Black identity in every sense. 

Since Trump returned to office, Black workers have experienced rising unemployment, with Black men seeing some of the steepest job losses in recent memory, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Related

Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination

This coincides with broader efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and contracts while encouraging similar rollbacks throughout the private sector. The administration has also sought to reshape how race is discussed across the federal government, from education and museums to civil rights enforcement. 

At the same time, the administration has continued to chip away at the legal architecture of voting rights, with years of court decisions making it more difficult to challenge racial gerrymandering and voting restrictions. The Supreme Court’s recent decision dismantling key Voting Rights Act protections has opened the door for states to erase Black-majority districts, which threatens to strip Black communities of congressional representation across the South. 

If there was anything novel to the current pulse of American white supremacy, it is that it doesn’t seek domination but to erase Blackness altogether.

Trump’s supporters have come out in droves to support this mission, from swarms of masked white supremacists descending on the U.S. Capitol in honor of our nation’s 250th birthday to the endless viral videos of white men brandishing guns at Black people doing anything from swimming at the pool to handing out flyers. 

It is no surprise that, under the constant reminder that the market value of Black life has plummeted, many Black Americans are succumbing to despair. Suicide rates among Black Americans — especially young Black men — have risen sharply over the past decade. Researchers point to a convergence of untreated depression, limited access to mental health care, economic instability, exposure to violence, and the cumulative weight of racialized stress.

Related

Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire 

None of those policies alone determine whether a police officer fires a gun, whether a jury reaches a particular verdict, or what pushes a broken down mind over the brink. But together they communicate something many Black Americans increasingly recognize: that America has further turned tail and ran away from its promise of an egalitarian society, or even the aspiration that it should be one. 

That departure has consequences well beyond Washington. It shapes who receives the public’s attention, which communities are viewed as worthy of investment, and whose fears are treated as matters of national concern. 

For Black Americans watching another summer marked by funerals, investigations, and courtroom disappointments, the sentiment is not simply that violence persists. It is that the country is becoming less interested in confronting why it persists at all. 

That is the understanding of it. But the feeling is something entirely different.

And that feeling is scary as hell.

The post It’s Scary As Hell Being Black in America Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Fans evacuated from sold-out open-air show as organisers promise full refunds

An open-air show by the Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny was abandoned in Italy on Saturday night because of a violent hailstorm, but the organiser said ticketholders would be reimbursed.

Videos posted on social media showed large hailstones hitting people at the sold-out show, along with strong winds and driving rain, after the star began his set at Milan’s Snai La Maura Hippodrome.

The Clean Air Act only covers outdoor air, but some pollutants lurk indoors. I consulted experts to determine whether air purifiers are enough to protect our airways.

As the 2026 World Cup draws to an end, take a look back at the memorable 2022 final match between Argentina and France.

The new Space Frame design should extend the life of the laptop, but doesn't alter the familiar X1 Carbon look and feel.

Health Foundation paper argues health is an economic asset and improving it could generate £72bn for public finances

Restoring the deteriorating health of the UK’s population to the level of 2014 would boost GDP by 2% and generate a £72bn dividend for the public finances, research suggests.

A paper by the Health Foundation thinktank, published on Sunday, argues the nation’s health should be valued by policymakers as an economic asset.

When Spain and Argentina face off Sunday in the World Cup final, it will mark just the second meeting between the two sides in the tournament's history, and their first in 60 years.

The incoming prime minister takes office Monday with little foreign policy background and daunting global challenges to confront.

Data shows 32,559 earnings-related overpayments in 2025-26 after DWP’s measures to end carer’s allowance scandal

Scores of unpaid carers were hit with demands to repay sums of more than £20,000 and hundreds more put at risk of prosecution last year as a result of official failures in what appear to be continuing problems with carer’s allowance.

New figures showed carers were asked to repay £33m in 2025-26 as a result of 32,559 earnings-related overpayments, despite the introduction of measures over a year ago designed specifically to prevent carers falling foul of the system.

Attack on Ukraine’s capital and other cities leaves at least six people dead and dozens injured

Russia has carried out one of its biggest ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, launching a five-hour assault that left at least six people dead and dozens injured, and caused fires and damage across the capital.

Ukrainian officials said the capital had been hit with about 40 Iskander-M and hypersonic Zircon missiles. Residents heard an air raid siren at 1.30am. There was the sound of air defences, followed minutes later by a series of booms and explosions.

A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post: The study followed more than 11,000 U.S. adolescents over a period of five years, with participants first asked about their own social media use at the average age of 12, and surveyed annually through the average age of 16. Researchers found that increases in addictive social media use were followed by rising ADHD one year later — particularly among boys who reported rising addictive social media use at ages 14 and 15. This association was not found consistently in reverse, meaning that ADHD symptoms did not appear to precede higher levels of addictive social media use... "When an individual adolescent's addictive social media use score increased from one year to the next, that same adolescent tended to show an increase in ADHD symptoms in the following year...." [said Jason Nagata, lead author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco]. He urged parents to consider: "Can their kids stop if they want to? Is social media interfering with their schoolwork? Is it impairing their social relationships? Are there addiction-like symptoms, like withdrawal and relapse?" Approximately 7 million American children between the ages of 3 and 17 have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and boys are diagnosed with ADHD at about twice the rate of girls. The study did not find a clear link between addictive social media use and ADHD among girls, Nagata said. "Some studies do suggest that teenage boys in particular may be more sensitive to immediate reward and sensation-seeking in adolescence," he said. And social media platforms are designed to provide exactly that: "It encourages frequent task-switching, and there's this constant stream of stimulation that might make it harder for adolescents to maintain and sustain attention that is needed for schoolwork and daily life," he said. "The design features of social media offer the constant reinforcement of impulsivity — it offers immediate gratification and novelty and it encourages multitasking, which can then override working memory and executive control." Experts have long noted that this kind of digital exposure is particularly significant during critical stages of mental, social-emotional and cognitive development... [I]t's especially important for parents themselves to demonstrate a healthier relationship with screens and social media. "One of our previous findings was that parental screen use is a very strong predictor of kids' screen use," Nagata said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigators say Larry Millete contacted spellcasters to try to put a hex on his wife Maya so she wouldn't leave him.

They are out to steal your password to commit further fraud such as crypto scams or phishing attacks

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

From industrial strategy and defence to housing and living costs, we lay out the challenges facing the new PM

Andy Burnham becomes prime minister as Britain contends with a series of global economic shocks and years of weak growth in living standards, fuelled by underinvestment and deep regional divisions.

Before his arrival in Downing Street, the Labour leader pledged to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by transferring power from Westminster to local communities. But with the public finances under pressure, and time running out before the next general election, the task is not straightforward.

The fatal shootings of two men, both killed in their vehicles by ICE agents, have rekindled anger over the US’s militarized deportation push

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving to work with his brother and two other passengers in Houston, Texas, when immigration agents began tailing his car. They pulled him over and fired a fatal shot through the open passenger-side window.

Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, was driving around his neighborhood when agents stopped him at an intersection – right outside the laundromat where he’d often go with his three-year-old daughter – and shot him dead.

Campaigners hope move will force commercial banks to rethink holding assets linked to the fossil fuel

Climate campaigners have declared a victory after the Bank of England said it would no longer accept bonds linked to one of the most polluting industries on the planet for key loan arrangements.

The ban, which comes into force in October, marks a fresh crackdown on thermal coal, which is burned in power plants to create electricity, and has long been a target of green policy activists.

She was the young girl in that infamous photograph with Prince Andrew, and the best-known survivor of Jeffrey Epstein. As Virginia’s explosive posthumous memoir continues to reverberate, her brother Sky Roberts and his wife, Amanda, talk about her final tragic months

A British prince was arrested at 8am and was stripped of his title; ambassadors, politicians and numerous other high-profile men lost their prestigious jobs; millions of files relating to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released and a US president remains under scrutiny. So much has happened since the death of Virginia Roberts Giuffre in April last year, and the posthumous publication of her memoir Nobody’s Girl six months later, detailing for the first time the full story of her abuse by Epstein and his associates. “This year has been extraordinary,” says Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s younger brother. “I just wish Virginia was here to see it.”

He is determined that there will be many more advances to come. Giuffre had become one of the most recognisable survivors of Epstein; in the midst of grief, Sky and his wife, Amanda, have become accidental advocates. “She paved the way, and we want to keep paving that road forward for other survivors out there,” says Sky.

Sirens sound in Bahrain and Kuwait accuses Tehran of targeting civilian sites and infrastructure as Iran strikes US allies

The US retaliated against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) after two American troops were killed and one was missing in Jordan when Tehran launched a wave of attacks against US allies in the Middle East.

Iran’s attacks came as the renewal of US strikes on Iran entered a second week and fighting escalated over the strait of Hormuz.

Incumbent Carlos Vila Nova hopes to defeat his former party and secure second term as independent

Voters in São Tomé and Príncipe go to the polls for a presidential election on Sunday as one of Africa’s least populous countries seeks to burnish its democratic credentials.

According to the National Election Commission, about 142,000 people are registered to vote in the tiny African state’s elections, approximately 15% of whom live in the diaspora.

Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage." That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, promising to delete all data that Grok Build has ever stored and give users more choice over how their data is handled." SpaceXAI's data grab was first publicized Sunday [July 12] by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud storage... [Elon Musk] said SpaceX would open-source Grok Build to sow greater trust in the product, after the codebase was audited for security vulnerabilities... ["Open-sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness," SpaceX posted on X.com. "Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI."] In a separate statement accompanying the open source announcement, SpaceX said it has always respected Zero Data Retention (ZDR), which was applied to enterprise customers by default, and acknowledged that data retention was enabled by default for everyone else, which has now been corrected. It said: "In response to user questions about privacy: Since launch, Grok Build has fully respected zero data retention (ZDR). All users have always had the ability to disable data upload in the CLI. When data upload was disabled, this choice was respected. In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy. With all retained data deleted, retention default off, and an open-source harness, we are offering complete user privacy. You can also run Grok Build fully open-sourced and local-first with your own inference. "We disabled default retention for all Grok Build users starting on July 12th. Additionally, we are deleting all coding data that was previously retained, ensuring every user's preferences are respected. With these steps, Grok Build goes beyond other major coding products to protect user privacy." SpaceX also invited researchers to probe Grok Build for security issues and report them to its bug bounty program, which offers rewards ranging from $100-$20,000, depending on the severity. The article notes Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, wrote this week that the Grok Build codebase comprises 844,530 lines of Rust code. "There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud," Willison writes, "but they seem to have been disabled now." Elon Musk also posted Wednesday that "Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of X open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One New York couple depleted their retirement and savings accounts, paying out-of-pocket for healthcare, before they were able to access Medicaid funds.

"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'" Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that the same model had deleted his entire production database. In response to these incidents, the company's engineering lead for Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, wrote on X that internal investigations have revealed that these deletion incidents are more likely to happen when "full access mode is enabled, and Codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled." In cases where full access mode is granted, the model, Sottiaux wrote, "attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory. The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead...." The company, however, according to Sottiaux, is taking steps to mitigate the risk. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," the engineering lead wrote on X. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk, including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards," Sottiaux added, noting that a detailed post-mortem outlining the root cause of the issue and the additional mitigation measures being implemented is expected to follow in the coming days, despite emphasizing that such incidents happen "extremely rarely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Coach suspended one game by WNBA

• Brondello apologizes directly to Angel Reese

• League cites professionalism standards

Toronto Tempo coach Sandy Brondello was suspended for one game by the WNBA for an inappropriate comment she used during a game against the Atlanta Dream on Friday.

She’ll miss Monday’s game against the Las Vegas Aces.

It will be the first meeting between President Trump and Sheinbaum since December after months of verbal sparring. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is also expected to attend.

France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on Polymarket's site.) In May Spain blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it launched a gambling license investigation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British runner Josh Kerr ran the mile in 3 minutes, 42.66 seconds on Saturday, breaking a record that has stood since 1999.

Boston police are investigating the discovery Saturday of a dead body that was found at a property that is owned by the husband of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

We tested smart speaker audio, voice assistants and sensors to find the best for your home.

It was the highest-scoring World Cup game since Hungary beat El Salvador 10-1 in 1982.

This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy. The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had answered the ad. They discovered that at the time "Behind the scenes, unseen by the users at the U.S. government, it's not just one person who responds," explains ProPublica's podcast. "It's two people... The China-based engineer is the one who knows how to fix the problem. On their end, they produce a block of code to solve it and send it over to the digital escort in the U.S. The digital escort then just copy-pastes it... All of this so that they can follow the government's rule: that you have to be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to handle sensitive data." But amazingly to confirm it, ProPublica's researcher just had to input "Microsoft" and "escort" into the U.S. Patent Office search bar, and actually found patents related to digital escorts — along with names of the current and former Microsoft employees listed as inventors. Had the government signed off on the practice? "I could see what Microsoft actually told the government," the reporter says on the podcast, "And there was no mention of foreign engineers being used, and definitely no mention of China." ProPublic's story was published on a Tuesday, according to the podcast, and by Friday "Microsoft said it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud systems." And America's Defense Department "also opened up an investigation, looking into whether any of Microsoft's China-based engineers had compromised the government's national security.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The attacks mark the eighth consecutive day that U.S. forces have bombed Iran. The latest fatalities pushed the American military death toll from the conflict to 16.

Tamás Sulyok signed the constitutional amendment that cited ‘serious loss of confidence’ in him as leader

Hungary’s president, Tamás Sulyok, has agreed to step down after signing a constitutional amendment passed by the ruling Tisza party of the prime minister, Péter Magyar.

The amendment will end Sulyok’s term immediately, citing society’s “serious loss of confidence” in a leader elected in early 2024 by lawmakers from the former prime minister Viktor Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party.

Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two brands win readers over, but for different reasons.

Taylor Farms does not specify where products were served or sold, as US braces for weeks more of outbreak

Taylor Farms recalled potentially contaminated shredded iceberg lettuce in 27 states on Friday, including lettuce distributed as recently as Thursday, as cases of cyclosporiasis continue rising in the US.

The US is likely to see at least another two weeks of possible cases, since infections may have happened in recent days. And the expanding outbreak investigation could point to other products in coming days.

• Green says Mets follow all MLB AI guidelines

• Ottavino alleges club used AI for pitch decisions

• MLB recently restricted dugout iPad functions

New York Mets interim manager Andy Green said the club is fully compliant with Major League Baseball when asked about a report that singled out his organization for using artificial intelligence for in-game strategy decisions.

“Whatever the rules are, we remain fully compliant and Major League Baseball makes those determinations,” Green said before Saturday’s game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

• American two shots clear of Ryan Fox and Kim Si-woo

• Burns playing because wife gave birth earlier than expected

After one of the more fiery 24 hours in Open history, how appropriate that a golfer named Burns leads going into the final round at Royal Birkdale.

While Rory McIlroy directed spicy barbs at Bryson DeChambeau, as the row over the American’s behaviour after he was docked two shots for a rules infringement rumbled on, Sam Burns was coolness personified.

Even if he does not lift the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale, the American will still be the player everyone is talking about

Whip, crack, whoosh, Bryson DeChambeau’s opening shot flies into the distance, pitches, skips, and tumbles into the rough left of the fairway. By the time DeChambeau has reached the ball a big crowd has gathered around it, they’re standing on tiptoes, perched on mounds, tilting sideways to peer around the people in front, who are pressed right up against the ropes and even spilling underneath them and on to the playing area where the marshals, hands out, are trying to usher them back.

“Careful Bryson!” someone shouts out as he wades into the rough and, it never takes much, everyone breaks out laughing. Looking around, you notice how many people are watching all this through their phones. I start counting: one, five, 10, 20, 50 – people don’t just want to see DeChambeau play golf, they want to be able to show everyone they know that they’ve done it. Did you even go to the Open if you didn’t get to see him?

Incoming PM will reallocate unspecified resources from unpopular plan to helping with cost of living

Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday.

The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 19 No. 868.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 19, No. 1,856.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 19, No. 1,134.

The PM’s vision must look beyond datacentres and copyright to questions of capability, security and public benefit

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Every new technology has a tipping point, when it speeds towards ubiquity, changing the world as we once knew it. In the past six months, artificial intelligence, in its various forms, has crossed that threshold.

You can measure it in the billions of dollars being invested; the hope-tinged-with-fear decrees from presidents, prime ministers, Nobel laureates and even the pope.

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

️Ryan Fox shot 62, Rory blasted Bryson, Sam Burns quietly took charge
️Official leaderboard
️McIlroy lashes out at DeChambeau over penalty row

It’s the same old story for Rory McIlroy: he just can’t keep any momentum going this week. He follows that chip-in eagle on 9 with bogey at 11. Back to -1, and a second Claret Jug continues to hover out of reach. At least he’s got one. Jon Rahm has a strangely underwhelming record at the Open: a couple of high finishes in 2019 and 2023 without ever really looking likely to win. And it’s threatening to happen again. He carves his opening drive over the bushes to the right and out of bounds, and starts with a double-bogey six. His fume is internal, but it is real, registering eight-and-a-half out of ten on Bryson DeChambeau’s patented R&A-o-meter™.

Ryan Fox speaks to Sky. “The game plan was to be aggressive … I hit driver a lot … your strategy changes with the wind around here … I had a couple of interesting shots on the back nine and kinda got away with them … pretty happy with 62 in the end, that’s for sure … had a lot of fun with [Xander Schauffele] … he played really well too and we kind of fed off each other … was pretty happy to make par [on 18] from that fairway trap … I haven’t really put four rounds together [at the Open] … hopefully this is a sign … I’m in a pretty good place to give myself a chance so we’ll see what happens!”

Congressman to run for seat despite Donald Trump backing Graham’s sister, Darline, should she choose to run

The Republican representative Ralph Norman, ⁠of South Carolina, has announced he will join the race to succeed the late senator Lindsey Graham, despite Donald Trump backing Graham’s sister, Darline, should she choose to run.

Announcing the launch of his bid on Saturday, Norman wrote on X: “I’m running to represent the people of South Carolina in the US Senate because we need a fighter who will stand with President Trump and carry on Lindsey Graham’s legacy!”

Poor air quality from wildfires continues to plague New York City as several neighborhoods hit by thunderstorms

Saturday is delivering a double dose of dangerous weather across the north-eastern US, with smoky skies from Canadian wildfires giving way to severe thunderstorms that have already triggered a flash flood warning as torrential rain pounds parts of the region.

After a brief break on Friday, smoke from the wildfires moved back into New York City and surrounding communities on Saturday, sending air quality back into unhealthy levels.

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Target said it received 23 reports of the sandal's pearls falling off the shoe.

Donald Trump criticised Thomas Tuchel for England’s semi-final loss

I’m still getting my head around the 2007 photo of Lionel Messi, 19, bathing Lamine Yamal, four months, for a Unicef calendar shoot.

Sid Lowe has done some digging to find out how it all came out …

The photograph was taken around Christmas 2007. Sport newspaper was putting together a charity calendar on behalf of Barcelona and Unicef, a studio set up in the away dressing room at the Camp Nou. Each player had a month and appeared with a child. Ronaldinho, the star, was July. Messi was January. Lamine Yamal was four months old. His mum, Sheila, had put him into a draw to take part. Monfort got the idea the night before when bathing his daughter, taking a plastic tub and a rubber duck with him. Although the baby was tiny and Messi was timid, with Sheila’s help he got a shot he was happy with.

In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC: "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• ‘I won’t defend Bryson – I’m not fond of him’

• Masters champion says rival’s actions ‘not a good look’

Rory McIlroy has accused a “performative” Bryson DeChambeau of “holding the tournament hostage” after the incredible scenes which marked the end of the American’s second round at the Open.

DeChambeau’s antics were matched in noteworthy terms by the scathing sentiment of McIlroy on Saturday. “I won’t pretend to be up here and defend Bryson,” said McIlroy. “I’m not particularly fond of him.”

Kyle Bylin and Jeremy Morrison uncovered the truth after Bylin received an at-home DNA test as a Christmas gift

A DNA discovery has led two families to accuse a North Dakota hospital of changing the course of their lives after learning two newborns were allegedly switched at birth nearly four decades ago.

Kyle Bylin uncovered the truth after receiving an at-home DNA test during a Christmas gift exchange. The test connected him with his biological aunt through a genealogy platform, prompting her nephew, Jeremy Morrison, to take his own DNA test. The results confirmed the two men had been raised by each other’s biological families.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee join rally to support Justin Pearson’s bid for Congress

More than a thousand people rallied for Justin Pearson, a Democratic state representative running for Congress, in the wake of four fatal shootings by members of Donald Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force over the last two months.

Crowds packed New Direction Christian church in the city’s Hickory Hill neighborhood in support of Pearson, who is running in the now-fractured ninth congressional district’s Democratic primary.

Kyiv's forces are continuing their relentless aerial campaign​ against energy infrastructure and military targets inside Russia.

In a proof-of-concept demonstration, AT&T and Ericsson showed how existing 5G networks can track aerial objects that might threaten public safety.

If you need to track your glucose, these are the CGM monitors to consider.

Jens Spahn had criticised ‘rented wombs’ and his party is strongly opposed to surrogacy, which is banned in Germany

A senior German politician and ally of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has resigned as parliamentary group leader of the Christian Democrat (CDU) party after he and his husband used a surrogate mother to become parents, a practice he has criticised in the past and his party is vehemently opposed to.

Surrogacy is banned in Germany, a policy Jens Spahn refused to relax when he was health minister in 2020, so he and his husband, Daniel Funke, used a surrogate mother in the US.

Pete Hegseth announced that soldiers aged 30 and older in the US military will be screened for low testosterone

The US defense secretary, ⁠Pete Hegseth, this week ordered an annual testosterone-deficiency screening for active-duty and reserve service members aged 30 and older, which he says will help to maintain military readiness.

But many medical professionals warn it might do nothing of the sort and instead could increase service members’ risk of infertility or lead to other consequences if testosterone is prescribed inappropriately.

Upgrade your dorm room with smart lights, voice assistants and security sensors, all at reasonable prices.

MPs and industry experts say potential reorganisation will waste time at critical moment for AI and economic growth

Andy Burnham’s plan to scrap the government’s technology department has triggered an angry backlash from MPs, Whitehall officials and tech experts.

The incoming prime minister has asked officials to draw up plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a wider Whitehall shake-up.

As Cuba swelters under six-month oil blockade imposed by US, tempers are fraying and unrest is growing

When Cuba’s national grid collapses, as it did for the third time in 10 days on Tuesday, a collective groan spreads across its cities and people wonder, again, whether the island’s antiquated electricity system may soon become unrecoverable.

The 777-mile long Caribbean island of 9.5 million people has been sweltering under a six-month-long oil blockade imposed by the US, part of a pressure campaign to bring down its communist government. But the parlous state of Cuba’s infrastructure goes far further back.

Thursday’s speech about election integrity was a case in point, as the president seeks to undermine the system

America’s mad king is spiraling. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are mired in the 30s as the Iran war rages on with no end in sight. As prices rise and the US’s reputation tanks, Trump is building self-serving monuments and putting his face on new $1 coins to ensure he leaves a lasting legacy. Don’t worry, Donald, we’ll never forget you! Your name will forever be associated with corruption, crime and a nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea.

When the going gets tough, Trump tends to go into full-on victim mode. This week was no exception. On Thursday, the president gave a televised primetime speech in which he rehashed all his usual grievances. A random jab about trans people? Check. Boasting about how he’s single-handedly made America great again? Check. Demonizing the media? Check. Complaints about how unfair it was he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 coupled with accusations about Chinese interference and misinformation about election integrity? Check. “No country can be great without fair and honest elections,” Trump announced. “If there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. Unfortunately, the system we have falls catastrophically short of that standard.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group once led by RFK Jr, still stands by Andrea Shaw after her indictment

An Idaho mother charged with the first-degree murders of her 18-month-old twins has blamed their deaths on vaccines they received eight days before they died. But doctors who reviewed details about the case at the request of the Guardian say vaccines did not kill them.

“This was not a close call,” said Dr Jake Scott, a clinical infectious disease physician at Stanford who specializes in vaccine science. “I can say with confidence what didn’t happen here. It was not the vaccines.”

White House Fifa taskforce chief defends Argentina footballers, saying US believes in free speech

The White House has backed Argentina’s footballers who displayed a banner supporting their country’s claim to the Falkland Islands after their World Cup semi-final victory against England.

After Argentina’s 2-1 win in a fractious match in Atlanta on Wednesday, some players held up a banner that said: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” – using the country’s term for the South Atlantic islands.

Cheerleading by the president, who made $1.2bn last year off uninsured currency, does not bode well for US economy

The scale of the graft is decidedly off the charts, but the revelation that Donald Trump raked in a personal fortune of $2.2bn during his first year in office should come as no surprise. The president didn’t even try to hide his venality. Not only did he refuse to sell businesses and put assets in a blind trust, as other presidents have done to limit opportunities for self-dealing; the quid pro quos with foreign governments and assorted magnates were exposed for all to see.

It is troubling that the president of the United States would so nonchalantly deploy his official powers to profit from dealings with money launderers and Middle Eastern princes. It is perhaps more so that the supposedly robust checks and balances upholding American governance proved powerless to stop him. (Here’s waiting for the supreme court to define Trump’s dealings as “official acts” in order to exonerate him.)

Less than a month after hailing a ceasefire, Trump resumed strikes on Iran, a move experts warn could prolong the war and hurt Republicans before the midterms

For half a century, Donald Trump has performed a public high-wire act based on high-stakes risks and shattering time-honored norms to get what he wants.

The approach has paid off handsomely, helping him survive multiple bankruptcies to reach billionaire status and numerous legal and political scandals to be elected US president twice.

Hand-painted works are often wildly unfaithful to the movies they portray – reinterpretations that sometimes resulted in threats, insults and even physical attacks from viewers who felt duped

Sitting on his porch in Teshie near Accra, Heavy J dipped a brush into red oil paint and dabbed it carefully on to his canvas – a flour sack – adding blood to a knife being wielded by a man. Higher on the canvas, he had started on an outline of a skull.

Heavy J was creating a poster, but not as you might have expected for a horror film. Instead, it was for the animated fairytale The Little Mermaid. The man with the knife was not a killer but the film’s kind-hearted prince, Eric. The skull was also unrelated to the story. “We add more to make people interested,” said Heavy J, whose real name is Jeaurs Affutu.

Science has discovered around 6,000 planets, and this is the first one, other than Earth, that is rocky and has an atmosphere.

An AI expert said the telltale signs people once relied on, such as distorted fingers, unnatural eyes, or other obvious visual flaws, have largely disappeared as technology has improved.

The streaming video company with the world’s most subscribers has leaned quickly into AI-assisted production.

It’s getting even more expensive to be an Apple loyalist.

Donald Trump delivered a primetime address to the country on Thursday, claiming that declassified intelligence showed Chinese interference in US elections. The US president revived long-running attacks on election security, despite a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which he lost. The Guardian's voting rights reporter Sam Levine factchecks some of Trump's claims

• Trump is invoking foreign election interference to justify his own - Opinion

The smoke pouring into the U.S. made Detroit, Chicago and D.C. among the world's most polluted major cities as of early Friday.

The White House did not respond to questions about what legal mechanism he would use to impose the tariffs or how the administration would calculate the rate of the levies.

In a July 16 prime-time speech that warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” President Donald Trump cast doubt on the country’s ability to hold “free and fair elections” but offered no evidence that widespread fraud had occurred.

He made one reference to never watching “a stolen election again,” but otherwise suggested, rather than outright claimed, that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been “rigged,” as he has often said and has never backed up.

Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in 2020 that the election that year “was the most secure in American history,” a line the president mocked in his speech last night.

The White House released a trove of documents that Trump said showed the intelligence agencies had kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, but election experts said there was very little new information revealed in the president’s speech.

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

Still, Trump distorted the facts on several issues:

• Trump said the documents he released show that China had acquired “220 million U.S. voter files” starting in the 2020 election cycle, and that this had been kept “secret” by U.S. intelligence officials. But state voter files are mostly publicly available, and an April 2020 intelligence assessment said Chinese officials were analyzing state voter rolls.

• The president said released documents revealed that U.S. election infrastructure is “vulnerable,” “easily compromised” and “people within our government knew that.” But one of the documents Trump cited said the election systems, for several reasons, “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

• Trump said the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to “foreign interference.” It has been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to influence elections. Trump focused on China; it was a “minority view” in an intelligence assessment that China had acted to undermine Trump’s reelection in 2020.

• The president’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that a foreign country changed votes in a U.S. election, but Trump never explicitly claimed that. An adviser to the president said after the speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

• Trump claimed that a Department of Homeland Security investigation “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” DHS hasn’t explained its methodology, and experts warn the figure is likely highly inaccurate. Past DHS-derived lists have proven unreliable.

• He cited an alleged instance of fraud from 2020 involving fake voter-registration applications in Michigan. Authorities say no one actually voted improperly as a result of the alleged scam, which stemmed from employees of a voter-registration company trying to defraud their employer and was not a deliberate effort to alter votes.

• The president exaggerated the time it took California to count its votes in its June election and falsely suggested that the long timeline indicates something nefarious occurred.

• Trump said that Congress needed to pass the SAVE America Act, describing its voter ID requirements as “simple.” That’s a matter of opinion. The bill’s ID rules would be stricter than those in most of the 36 states that already have a form of voter ID.

China and Voter Registration Data

Trump said the released documents show that China, beginning during the 2020 election cycle, “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” The obtained data included names, home addresses, phone numbers and political party preferences of U.S. voters, he said, calling it an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” But state voter registration files are mostly publicly available, with most states having no restrictions on who can buy them and some states providing them for free.

His use of the word “compromise” implies China was able to change the data, but he presented no evidence of that.

Trump then said the information about voter data in several states being “bought, stolen or hacked by China” had been kept “secret and hidden” by U.S. intelligence officials.

But Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that information was not revelatory.

“It would be a shock if China didn’t have this data, and the idea that, one, they had this data and then it was somehow covered up is relatively laughable,” Becker said on a July 17 press call. 

He said it was publicly reported, and has long been known by the Intelligence Community, which has told U.S. presidents, including Trump, “that China has a policy of vacuuming up as much … data on Americans as it can.” 

Becker said an April 2020 intelligence assessment that would have been available to Trump as president at the time, had “confirmed China is collecting voter data.” The partially redacted document, which was declassified during the Biden administration in October 2022, says “Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states’ … election voter registration data … to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election.”

It’s unclear if the heavily redacted assessment said how China obtained the voter data, but Becker said it wouldn’t be difficult, as certain voter information is publicly accessible or can be purchased. 

Indeed, one of the declassified documents that the White House released on July 16 said that, in early 2022, a Chinese actor had downloaded state voter information from 2013 to 2021 that was available on commercial U.S. websites. That data, “in theory,” could be used for “election influence operations,” the document said, adding that the actual motivation was “unknown.”

In a report updated in October 2020, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission provided data showing that 30 states plus Washington, D.C., had essentially no restrictions on who could purchase their voter registration files. Sixteen states had some restrictions on who could buy their files, and four states completed restricted access for some groups. The prices for the files ranged from $0 (in 11 states) to $37,000 in Alabama.

Becker said, “Just having the data doesn’t give you an ability to access their voter record. You need many, many more private person identifiable information points, things like driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, which aren’t in this data, to even begin to think about doing that.” 

And if that had happened, he said, the public would likely know about it because it would cause issues for people trying to vote. “Altering records on a voter registration record or deleting a voter registration record would mean voters would go to the polls and have problems, and we’d be hearing reports of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American voters having trouble,” he said. “We’ve got no reports of that whatsoever.”

Election Systems

Trump also claimed that the newly released documents show alarming vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems and equipment. But those issues had long been publicized, and a document he quoted from said it was unlikely those weaknesses could be exploited to the degree necessary to change the outcome of an election.

“For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems,” the president said. “They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that.”

Trump then quoted a now-declassified January 2020 memorandum from the National Intelligence Council that said at least Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as other non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.” And voter registration databases, pollbooks and official election websites “are most vulnerable to exploitation,” the document said, adding that it could “disrupt election processes” if such systems were accessed.

However, the same memo said those systems “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

For example, it said, “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” While a foreign actor “could manipulate voting results across multiple jurisdictions and enough states to influence a presidential election,” officials judged that “conducting such a campaign would be difficult and that postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

A similar assessment had been included in a classified Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election that was given to Trump, as well as administration and congressional leadership, on Jan. 7, 2021. The national director of intelligence at the time was John Ratcliffe, who now serves as CIA director. A declassified version was released in March 2021.

It said, “We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits.”

There were also “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the assessment said.

Foreign Influence in Elections

The president said that the documents he was declassifying showed that the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to, among other things, “foreign interference.” Later, he said: “China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections.” It’s been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to, or wanted to, influence U.S. elections through tactics like social media campaigns — most notably, Russia, a country Trump briefly mentioned once in his speech in a list of adversaries.

There is no evidence that a foreign influence campaign changed votes that were cast in any U.S. election. While Trump’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that this happened, he didn’t explicitly claim that it did. He made one vague reference to a “stolen” election, saying, “We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.”

John Solomon, an adviser to the president and a conservative journalist, told reporters outside the White House after Trump’s speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

MS Now White House reporter Vaughn Hillyard asked Solomon to confirm that the results of the 2020 election were valid. “I’m still researching,” Solomon responded, saying there was “not yet” any intelligence suggesting otherwise.

As for foreign influence campaigns, the Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, which, as we noted, was given to Trump before he left office in January 2021, explained how Russia, Iran and other countries likely sought to influence the election.

“We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment,” the Intelligence Community report said. Russia’s actions including using online influence actors to “amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.”

Iran, meanwhile, “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. We have high confidence in this assessment,” the report said.

China, the focus of Trump’s speech, “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment,” the assessment said, noting that China “did not view either election outcome,” meaning Trump or Biden, “as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.”

There was, however, a “minority view,” held by the national intelligence officer for cyber issues, who assessed that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media,” the report said. It’s this view that Trump emphasized in his speech.

The report said that the national intelligence officer for cyber issues “agrees that we have no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes” and had “moderate confidence in these judgments.” This assessment “gives more weight to indications that Beijing preferred former President Trump’s defeat and the election of a more predictable member of the establishment instead.”

Russia’s interference efforts in the 2016 election — involving an online propaganda campaign and a hacking operation targeting Democratic Party committees and Hillary Clinton’s campaign — were documented in the lengthy report by special counsel Robert Mueller, as we’ve explained.

DHS Claims of Noncitizens Registered to Vote

Trump continued to claim without evidence that there are large numbers of noncitizens on voter registration rolls.

“Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security,” Trump said. “According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”

As part of its data dump, the White House linked to a DHS document claiming that a “review” of “public data files” in four states — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada — found over 250,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The document provided no information about how that estimate was derived, or the methodology used. A DHS press release issued on July 17 said that “preliminary reviews of the four states’ records” revealed there “may be as many as” 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada; and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The release also shed no light on how DHS arrived at those figures, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not elaborate in a press conference on July 17.

In his July 17 press call, Becker of CEIR said he attended a background White House press briefing the afternoon before Trump’s prime-time speech and “they were not transparent about the methodology whatsoever.”

He said a White House official said only that the comparisons were done with commercial data.

“Commercial data does not allow a comparison to the public voter file in any conceivable way because of common names, because you lack … unique identifiers, like driver’s license numbers or Social Security,” Becker said. “You don’t even have dates of birth in some cases that are accurate to compare between the two because in many cases those are not included, and you’re going to create a lot of false matches because of that. Anyone who works with this data knows that.”

Becker called the 250,000 claim “an irresponsible number to share, given the opaque methodology that they claimed here.” Inevitably, he said, “I predict almost all of them are actually citizens.”

“I know about as much about voter data nationwide as almost anybody,” Becker said. “It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Sean O’Hara you have on that is the same person. You just get a huge amount of false positives, and so I suspect that 250,000 number is just their wild highest possible number.”

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar provided us a statement, saying, “We can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims. These numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”

“There are numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot,” Aguilar said. “The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work. They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”

Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, also pushed back on DHS’ claim.

“Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” Schmidt said in a statement to us via email. “In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place. All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

All four of the states in the DHS review declined to share their voting lists to participate in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, which the Trump administration has made available to states to help them identify potential noncitizens on state voter rolls.

According to the DHS document, as of June 22, 25 states that have used the SAVE tool have identified potentially 28,000 noncitizens on voter rolls — out of 68 million registration records. Even if that were accurate, that would be about 0.04% of voters. (The 250,000 discussed earlier plus the 28,000 identified through the SAVE program is how Trump arrived at his figure of 278,000.)

But as we have written, when those lists of potential noncitizens identified by the SAVE program were shared with states, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified. Some were recently naturalized citizens. In other cases, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens.

Neither Trump nor DHS claimed that any of those noncitizens who may be on state voter registration rolls have actually voted illegally. Noncitizens convicted of voting in federal elections face fines, jail time and deportation.

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, just under 100 noncitizens have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982.

“If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote for the Election Law Blog. “Claims of noncitizen registration often evaporate upon closer inspection (such as the systems’ failure to catch newly naturalized citizens). And he’s made no claims about noncitizens actually voting.”

Michigan Voter Registration Incident

Trump seized on an incident in which a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan, received a number of fake voter-registration applications ahead of the 2020 election.

But the applications did not actually result in anyone voting or registering to vote improperly, state officials have said: The clerk’s office quickly flagged the discrepancies and alerted the authorities.

Moreover, investigators concluded that the fraudulent applications were an attempt by low-level employees of a voter-registration organization to get paid for work they hadn’t done — not a deliberate effort to influence the election.

Here’s how Trump described the case in his speech Thursday night:

Trump: Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan. In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization, corrupt group, in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found … that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced. 

This case has been widely reported on by local media in Michigan for years. 

In late October 2020, days before the election, local news outlets reported that the Muskegon city clerk’s office had flagged “irregularities” in hundreds of voter registration applications, among several thousand that had been mailed or dropped off as part of an organized registration drive. 

City Clerk Ann Meisch told local station WZZM that the vast majority of those forms were valid, but “several hundred” had birthdays, addresses, signatures or other voter information that didn’t match what the state had on file. 

She said any such applications were invalidated, and no one was issued a ballot based on one.

State police later determined that around 8,000 to 10,000 applications had been dropped off by someone working for GBI Strategies, as local news outlet Bridge Michigan reported in 2023. Campaign finance records indicate GBI Strategies did work for Democratic campaigns in 2020.

Danny Wimmer, a spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, told Bridge Michigan that investigators determined the fraud had “occurred at the lowest levels of the company,” apparently by workers attempting to defraud their employer by claiming to have done work they hadn’t. The evidence did not suggest any intent to affect the election’s outcome. 

Wimmer reiterated that there is no evidence anyone voted as a result of the fraudulent applications.

“This attempted fraud was detected because the system worked,” he said.

State officials told Bridge Michigan that they turned their investigation over to the FBI because it was pursuing a national investigation related to GBI Strategies.

Trump, in his speech, accused the Biden administration of a coverup.

“The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow walked the investigation and killed it,” he said. 

Documents released by the White House on Thursday include partially redacted exchanges between federal law enforcement officials about how to proceed with the case at various times, including a November 2021 email from an unidentified FBI agent pushing back on the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section’s decision not to prosecute.

But the records also show that DOJ officials subsequently allowed the investigation to continue, and in 2023 approved a “full field investigation” that included interviews with canvassers. 

An FBI document dated September 2025, which was among the records released after Trump’s speech, states that the case was closed “because logical investigation and/or leads have been exhausted, and the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.” But it was unclear from the released documents when that decision was made.

California

As he has repeatedly done before, Trump pointed to California’s recent primary election as an example of a problem in the nation’s voting systems.

“As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor was held on June 2 – long time ago. But it was just completed a few days ago on July 10,” he said. “Think of that – much more than one month. Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.”

“This is worse than any third world country,” he falsely added. “There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

California does take a long time to count its votes, but July 10 is not when the state completed its counting, but rather when it certified its election.

Election certification, as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission explains, is “the process of election officials attesting that the election results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in a particular election.” Beyond just counting, certification involves various audits and tests to ensure that the vote is accurate.

By state law, California county election officials have 30 days to report their results to the secretary of state, who then must certify the results within another eight days. But county officials count and report on the vast majority of ballots within just 13 days, and news organizations are able to confidently call races well before that.

In the case of the June election, the Associated Press called the L.A. mayoral race on June 8 and the gubernatorial race on June 9. Both of those timelines are considered protracted, compared with other states, but Californians have known who will be on their ballots in November for more than a month.

“California wasn’t counting ballots up until last week. California finished counting weeks ago,” Becker of CEIR said. “It was just doing all of that work of auditing and reconciling and checking and double-checking, allowing for legal challenges if there were going to be any, before certifying.”

Becker said California has “one of the longer” certification periods, but that other states, such as Wisconsin, also have them. “Every state takes weeks to certify,” he said. “That’s normal because you need time to check and double-check and audit and recount and reconcile and do all of the things to make sure transparently that the count was the count that you’re reporting out is correct. You want states to take time with this.”

California’s slow vote-counting does not inherently mean there is an election integrity issue. In fact, some of the time is spent on tasks that increase confidence in the election. 

For instance, officials are “required to conduct a public 1% manual tally of the ballots tabulated by the county’s voting system in order to verify the accuracy of the automated count,” California’s secretary of state webpage says. The state also requires signature verification for mail-in ballots.

As we’ve explained before, the main reason why California is so slow is because the state sends mail-in ballots to all of its more than 23 million registered voters and 80% or more of votes are typically cast via mail.

Dealing with mail ballots is more time-consuming, as the ballots, which must be postmarked by the election day, are counted as long as they are received within a week and because the state allows voters to resolve any signature verification issues up to eight days before counties certify their results.

“The California primary went off very well. Fairly high turnout. The results stood,” Becker said, despite what he called Trump and his administration’s “slander of California election officials.”

“There are no notable legal challenges that I’m aware of with regard to the results of the primary. The people who got the most votes are advancing to the general election,” he said. “Everything actually went well. It’s just the bluster and the rhetoric that creates an image of chaos.”

SAVE America Act

Trump pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, saying that the bill “requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that?” The bill requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote, he added. But it may not be that simple for some voters. Election experts say the bill would make it difficult for some to register and cast a vote.

As we’ve explained before, 36 states already have some form of voter ID requirements, but most accept a wider range of IDs than the SAVE America Act would. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation, has said that the bill’s voter ID requirements “are stricter than those most states use.”

Acceptable IDs in those 36 states “often” include student IDs, or hunting and fishing licenses, NCSL said. Some states accept non-photo identification, such as a bank statement. The SAVE America Act limits acceptable identification for voting to: a state-issued driver’s license or ID card issued by the motor vehicle agency that includes a photo and expiration date, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a photo ID issued by a tribal government that includes an expiration date. Those voting by mail would need to submit a copy of a photo ID, or the last four digits of their Social Security number and an affidavit saying that they couldn’t obtain a copy of their ID.

Under the bill, Americans would need to prove citizenship when registering to vote or changing their registration. For most people, that would mean presenting, in person to an election official, either only a U.S. passport, or a certified birth certificate along with a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID. Election experts have raised concerns about millions of Americans not having a passport or ready access to their birth certificates, and the bill creating too many hurdles to cast a vote.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us earlier this year that the legislation wouldn’t meet the dictionary definition of “disenfranchise,” which is to “deprive a person of the right to vote.” But it would make registering and voting harder. “That extra hassle and expense would mean that some citizens eligible to register and vote will in practice not complete the needed process even though the bill does not take away their legal right to register or to vote.”

Trump also referred to an amendment to the bill that would eliminate universal voting by mail. “You would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel,” he said.

That’s more restrictive than the practice in the majority of states. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 29 states allow “no-excuse” mail-in voting, which means that voters don’t need to provide a reason when requesting a mail-in ballot.

As he often does, Trump made the unfounded claim that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt.” Election experts have told us that while fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than in-person voting, it is still relatively rare, and there is no evidence to support claims of widespread fraud. Trump himself has voted several times by mail, including once earlier this year.

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The post FactChecking Trump’s Election Security Speech appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Republican Josh Hawley accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s firm of relentlessly pursuing and attempting to bankrupt her

A US senator has accused Meta of using lawfare in “efforts to destroy” a whistleblower who made allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers.

In a letter to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded to know what measures Meta had taken to monitor Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former global head of public policy, and her family.

Shift in pecking order illustrates that investors are reassessing outlook for artificial intelligence

Apple overtook Nvidia on Friday to become the world’s most valuable company, reshuffling the top ranks of tech heavyweights as investors reassess the outlook for artificial intelligence.

Apple was last valued at $4.88tn as ⁠its shares held steady, while Nvidia ⁠was roughly at $4.86tn, ​after a 3.5% decline.

The Lobito Corridor shows how digitization is shaping critical minerals competition Expert comment thilton.drupal 17 July 2026

The railway from Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia is a global focal point of the race for critical minerals. But the digitization of mineral supply chains will be crucial to achieving genuine economic transformation in the region.

Two recent major investment announcements have refocused attention on the Lobito Corridor, a Western-backed infrastructure initiative centred on a railway linking Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast to the inland resource-rich areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia.

On 3 July, the US International Development Finance Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa secured a $753-million package to rehabilitate and upgrade the 1,300-km single-track railway from Lobito to the DRC border, known as the Lobito Atlantic Railway. 

On 10 July, the DRC government approved a partnership with Portuguese construction company Mota-Engil for a complete rehabilitation of the railway line from Angola’s border to the copper and cobalt producing regions in the DRC. 

These moves are part of wider geopolitical competition between the US (and its European partners) and China – the dominant international presence in the region – over infrastructure, mineral production and development opportunities. In this context, the railway has become the centrepiece of a potential regional mining ecosystem that could economically transform Africa’s strategic Copperbelt. 

But for this regional mining ecosystem to become integrated across borders and achieve genuine economic transformation, it will need to be digitized. 

Digitization has increasingly become a vital and under-appreciated feature of the mining sector. Data systems – such as online geological databases, traceability tools and transparency portals – and mining cadastre systems (online land records of mining rights) are fundamental to achieving regional mining ambitions. 

However, they present a new and distinct set of governance challenges that span the life of a mine: in particular, what data is needed and how is it collected? Who owns it, where is it stored, and who has access to it? 

Digitized records and their challenges

The digitized geological records of the DRC are a source of value, causing competition over owning and accessing them. This can be seen in the recent disagreement between the Belgian government and KoBold, a US company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, over who should digitize the colonial-era geological records on the DRC that are being kept in a Belgian museum. Belgium has refused KoBold access to the museum’s archives. The case demonstrates how geo-economic competition and ensuing public-private tensions are catalysing ongoing debates on data ownership and management. 

Angola, the DRC and Zambia are implementing online cadastre systems that list land records of mining rights. In principle, these systems should reduce overlaps and simplify the allocation of rights, while being more transparent to help prevent corruption and give investors confidence. However, several challenges have emerged. 

Firstly, digitized systems are still corruptible. Whether containing geological data or information on licenses and rights, digital systems can be corrupted. In some instances, digitization makes this easier than when information is stored in hard copy. 

This has led some mining companies to lose confidence in digitized systems in the region, due to changes allegedly being made overnight to concession ownership, opaque back end controls and limited audit trails. 

Secondly, these systems often depend on human capacity that does not yet fully exist. At the DRC Mining Week at Lubumbashi in June, Chatham House heard how digital cadastres had often been operated by staff with limited experience working with computers. 

The effectiveness of a data system relies on a simple principle – what comes out is only as good as what goes in. Bad inputs result in misleading information flows. Digitization without capacity and safeguards therefore risks simply re encoding existing power imbalances into a new format.

Tracing requires trust and interoperability

The DRC and its neighbours have been the focus of several international legal and regulatory requirements to report on minerals provenance, or tracing minerals back to their origin. This is due to the link between conflict and minerals, especially in the east of the country. 

The DRC’s state-owned certification agency (CEEC) has launched an E-trace digital platform to track and certify minerals across the value chain, ostensibly to ensure responsible sourcing.

However, there are notable differences between what international markets are asking for, what is actually feasible, and what is in the best interests of mining-dependent communities and producing states. 

The World Today

Related work

Angola’s critical mineral express

Consumers and regulators increasingly want mechanisms that can trace a material all the way back to where it came out of the ground to provide assurance on provenance and responsible production. For the DRC, traceability is often understood primarily as verification of mineral deposits and exports: ensuring that reported volumes and qualities match what is actually being taken out of the country and transported along the Corridor. 

The DRC’s emphasis reflects genuine concerns about misreporting, leakage and illicit flows. However, it stops short of a fuller, mine to manufacturer conception of traceability that would follow material all the way through the supply chain. 

Similarly, transparency systems are often limited by what companies can easily measure and are willing to disclose. Reporting formats also differ across firms and jurisdictions, making it difficult to assemble a coherent picture of corridor wide performance.

How these systems talk to each other, what they measure, and who controls them will heavily influence whether the Lobito Corridor becomes a coherent, credible space for investment and accountable development.

More unified data management requires interoperable systems and standards, agreed protocols for data ownership and access, and shared understandings of what traceability and transparency should encompass. Trustworthy, interoperable data systems are essential. 

Entry points for development partners

Digital infrastructure should in theory constitute the backbone of effective data governance along the Lobito Corridor, turning physical infrastructure into an integrated ecosystem. Given Africa’s over-reliance on undersea cables, reinforcing inland connectivity should be a priority. 

However, the Corridor’s digital component has so far lagged behind. While it does feature in the long-term strategic vision for the Corridor, it has not been the focus of the recent wave of investment announcements or ongoing development partnerships. Meanwhile, the DRC recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Beijing for the construction of a 2100km fibre optic network along the Congo River. 

Meta touts safety features – but for women, the dangers of these recording devices are obvious

Imagine if every time you left the house, you couldn’t be sure that the stranger you met at a bar – or even the person walking by you in the street – wasn’t secretly recording you. It sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but let’s face it, the era of wearable technology is fully upon us as everyday accessories have been developed to help track health and fitness data, receive smartphone notifications, and provide hands-free accessibility.

So when Meta announced their AI glasses a few years ago, it wasn’t too surprising that one of the biggest (and most embattled) tech companies on earth had begun cashing in on our obsession with watching others. And their AI glasses have already raised serious concerns over privacy, personal safety and even our sense of agency.

Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent police shooting of a 19-year-old in northeast Wilmington has become one of the city’s highest-profile use-of-force cases in years. A Delaware Department of Justice investigation into the incident is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers and justice.

The family of Kadir Skinner, the 19-year-old who was fatally shot by Wilmington police last month, announced Tuesday they will seek $25 million from the city in a wrongful death lawsuit.  

The announcement was made during a press conference the family held with their attorneys on the same day that state and city officials released body camera footage from the night Skinner was shot. 

The footage shows a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer leaves his vehicle to chase Skinner, before firing his weapon and handcuffing the wounded teen on the pavement of a Wilmington street. Another three-and-a-half minutes pass after Skinner was shot before officers place him into a patrol car and take him to Wilmington Hospital, where he died. 

During the press conference, the family’s attorney Harry Daniels referenced that the video also shows a loose dog behind Skinner as the officer begins his pursuit.  

“If they continue to shoot and kill our Black men down in the street as they’re running from a dog. If they do not want to hold those who do it accountable, then we’re gonna try to hold them accountable in their pocketbooks,” Daniels said.

The wrongful death lawsuit has not yet been filed. But the attorney said the family sent the city a notice of a claim on Thursday — a required step before the lawsuit can be filed.

Wilmington officials have said officers chased Skinner after they observed him walking out of a home and pointing a gun at a large crowd of people. The family disputes the claim. The body camera footage does not show the moments prior to the foot chase. 

Chance Lynch, another attorney for the family, said during the press conference that the body camera footage sparks new questions about the city account.   

“Where was this crowd that he waved a gun [at]? Why didn’t they (the city) mention the pitbull? And when he was running away from the police officer, how was he a threat to that police officer?” Lynch asked.

When reached for comment Thursday, Caroline Klinger, a spokeswoman for Mayor John Carney, said questions about previous statements made by police should be directed to the Wilmington PD. 

“The details of the incident are precisely what is being evaluated through the investigation,” Klinger said. 

Carney did comment on the situation in a Facebook post made before the family’s press conference Thursday. In it, he asserted that body cameras have “limitations” and that the footage from the Skinner shooting “does not capture the totality of the incident.”

The news of the family’s impending lawsuit comes after the June 24 incident sparked weeks of outcry from community members and elected officials who, until Thursday, had called on authorities to release body camera footage. 

Community members have also demanded the name of the officer involved, as well as police reform at the local and state level.