News Reel

Automaker had given ‘numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so’, says California attorney general

General Motors (GM) agreed to pay $12.75m to resolve claims that it illegally sold hundreds of thousands of Californians’ location and driving data to two data brokers, said the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, on Friday. He said this came after the Detroit-based automaker had given “numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so”.

“General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent,” Bonta said in a statement. “This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians.”

Motion submitted by Virginia house speaker paves way for appeal to Friday’s ruling striking down recently passed redistricting referendum

• Virginia supreme court strikes down new congressional maps in win for Republicans

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest on the conflict in the Middle East. Including secretary of state Marco Rubio’s visit to Rome, to mend strained relations with Italian leaders and the Vatican after Donald Trump chided Pope Leo XIV for his stance on the war in Iran.

Rubio told reporters in Rome that the US should get a response on Friday from Iran to its proposal to end the war.

Centcom says it has struck two tankers heading for Iran after Tehran warned Washington was violating fragile ceasefire; two days of ‘intensive talks’ between Israel and Lebanon slated as strikes continue in the region

• Ceasefire under threat after strikes exchanged in strait

The ship monitor Tanker Trackers has posted the following on X about the Ocean Koi oil tanker:

Her new name is actually JIN LI (9255933), and has been so since 2025-11-30. Examining our data, we can see that she’s transported various Iranian hydrocarbons on at least 16 occasions since 2021; and with full knowledge of Iran because half of her loadings were conducted directly at port in Iran while the other half were conducted via Ship-to-Ship transfer further out.

JIN LI’s ownership is based in Shanghai, China. The vessel was slapped with sanctions by US OFAC on 2026-02-25.

The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed.

CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots. While these tests are already the bane of our internet existence, they are going to get worse for some Android users. A requirement for Google’s next-generation reCAPTCHA system will make it a lot harder for de-Googled phones to browse the web.

A Reddit user has highlighted a seemingly innocuous support page for Google’s reCAPTCHA system. The page in question relates to troubleshooting reCAPTCHA verification on mobile. In the document, it says that you’ll need to use a compatible mobile device to complete verification. If you have an Android phone, then that means you’ll need to be running Google Play Services version 25.41.30 or higher.

↫ Ryan McNeal at Android Authority

When was the last time you actively thought about reCAPTCHA being a Google property? Even then, when was the last time you imagined something as annoying but ultimately basic as a captcha prompt could be used to tie people to Google Play Services, and thus to “blessed” Android? Every time we manage to work around one of these asinine ties to Google Play Services, another one pops up to ruin our day. We’re so stupidly tied down to and entirely dependent on two very mid – at best – mobile operating systems, and it’s such a stupid own goal for especially everyone outside of the US to just sit there and do nothing about it.

Worse yet, it seems we’re only tying ourselves down further, while paying for the privilege.

At the very least we should be categorising certain services – government ID services, payment services, popular messaging platforms, and a few more – as vital infrastructure, and legally mandate these services have clearly defined and well-documented APIs so anyone is free to make alternative clients. The fact that many people are tied to either iOS or “blessed” Android because of something as stupid as what bank they use or the level of incompetency of their government ID service should be a major crisis in any country that isn’t the US.

I don’t want to use iOS or Android, but nobody is leaving me any choice. It’s infuriating.

This week's guests include Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.

After January order from US department of the interior, managers across 55 sites have lifted prohibitions

Donald Trump’s administration is quietly pushing national park, refuge and wilderness area managers to dramatically scale back hunting restrictions, raising questions about visitor safety and the impact on wildlife.

Doug Burgum, the US Department of the Interior secretary, issued an order in January directing multiple agencies to remove what he termed “unnecessary regulatory or administrative barriers” to hunting and fishing, to and justify regulations they want to keep in place.

Welsh Labour leader and first minister Eluned Morgan loses seat with party pushed into third place behind Plaid Cymru and Reform

This liveblog is now closed. Read the Guardian’s report on the elections here and find all our election coverage here.

• 2026 election results: latest from local, Scottish and Welsh votes

• 2026 elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

We’re getting statements from some of the political parties now as we wait for results.

For the Conservatives, party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said:

We have run an energetic and positive campaign, showcasing that we have a clear plan to get Britain working again and that we have the team to deliver it... We know that so soon after a historic general election defeat and contesting wards won during the Party’s polling highs, that this will be a difficult set of elections for us. But we will continue to rebuild and to show the public that we have changed, to demonstrate that only this new Conservative party is a credible alternative.

People are deeply disappointed with a Labour government that has been too timid to fix the country, but they are also appalled by the rise of Reform and Nigel Farage’s Trump-style politics. While those on the extremes of the right and the left want to burn everything down, Liberal Democrats want to fix what’s broken. Every Liberal Democrat local champion elected today will fight tirelessly for the communities they serve.

I’ve travelled across England and Wales and I’m hearing the same everywhere I go – confidence that we will win more councillors than ever before. The news from the doorstep is that we will be taking seats from not just Labour but the Tories and Lib Dems too, from all across the country. Voters are responding to the fact that Greens are the only party taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously, with real plans to cut bills, reduce rents and provide genuinely affordable homes, as well as tackling the climate and nature crisis.

Throughout this election, we have heard a clear appetite for change. People want a government that will stand up for Wales and focus relentlessly on the key issues affecting their lives. People have told us they have been inspired by Rhun ap Iorwerth’s leadership and driven by a desire for a positive alternative to Reform UK’s chaos and division.

Longtime Slashdot reader cellocgw writes: Hiding inside another layoff report, Fidelity is reorganizing: "The changes are aimed at moving the teams away from an 'agile' makeup -- comprising smaller, siloed squads -- and toward larger teams built to move faster on projects." OMG, as they say: "Sudden outbreak of common sense." According to the Boston Globe, Fidelity is cutting about 1,000 jobs even as it plans to hire roughly 5,300 new workers, many of them early-career engineers. Half of the 3,300 new workers hired this year "will be in tech or product-related roles," the report says, noting that "about 2,000 of those jobs are currently open, and 400 of them are in tech/product-delivery." "The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects. The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Department of War just dumped a huge batch of UFO files, but does it have proof of aliens? Here's what we make of it.

Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, concedes his party was comprehensively beaten

• Election 2026 live: latest news updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

John Swinney, the Scottish National party leader, has challenged Keir Starmer to show “greater respect” to the Scottish government after winning the Holyrood elections by a comfortable margin.

The Scottish National party secured a record fifth term in office on Friday after securing at least 57 of Holyrood’s 129 seats, with Labour and Reform vying for a distant second place.

US judge says halt of $100m in funds allotted by Congress for scholars, writers and research illegal and discriminatory

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the terminations of hundreds of humanities grants last year by the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) were unconstitutional and involved “blatant” discrimination. In April last year, Donald Trump’s administration terminated more than 1,400 grants, representing more than $100m in congressionally appropriated funds awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions and other humanities organizations.

The terminations were part of a cost-cutting drive that billionaire Elon Musk was leading at Doge.

A designated contact may be notified if a chat discussion indicates a possible safety concern.

CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 8, 2026 — Honeywell (NASDAQ: HON) today announced that Quantinuum, a leading, full-stack quantum computing company, has publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its Class A common stock.

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Quantinuum intends to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “QNT.”

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley (in alphabetical order) are acting as joint lead active book-running managers for the proposed offering. Jefferies and Evercore ISI are also acting as active book-running managers.

The proposed offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.

The proposed offering will be made available only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus, when available, may be obtained from: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717 or by email at prospectus-eq_fi@jpmchase.com and postsalemanualrequests@broadridge.com; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014, Attention: Prospectus Department or by email at prospectus@morganstanley.com; Jefferies LLC, Attn: Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, by telephone at (877) 821-7388 or by email at Prospectus_Department@Jefferies.com; or Evercore Group L.L.C., Attention: Equity Capital Markets, 55 East 52nd Street, 35th Floor, New York, NY 10055, by telephone at 888-474-0200 or by email at ecm.prospectus@evercore.com.

The registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Any offers, solicitations or offers to buy, or any sales of securities will be made in accordance with the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

More from HPCwire: Honeywell Confirms Quantinuum IPO Filing as Quantum Firms Face Market Scrutiny

About Honeywell

Honeywell is an integrated operating company serving a broad range of industries and geographies around the world. Our business is aligned with three powerful megatrends – automation, the future of aviation and energy transition – underpinned by our Honeywell Accelerator operating system and Honeywell Forge IoT platform. As a trusted partner, we help organizations solve the world’s toughest, most complex challenges, providing actionable solutions and innovations through our Aerospace Technologies, Industrial Automation, Building Automation and Energy and Sustainability Solutions business segments that help make the world smarter, safer, as well as more secure and sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.

About Quantinuum

Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity as of December 31, 2025. Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.

Source: Honeywell

The post Honeywell Announces Quantinuum’s Filing of Registration Statement for Proposed IPO appeared first on HPCwire.

BrianFagioli writes: Micron says it is now shipping the world's highest-capacity commercially available SSD, and the numbers are honestly hard to wrap your head around. The new Micron 6600 ION packs 245TB into a single drive and is aimed squarely at AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and cloud providers dealing with exploding data growth. According to the company, the SSD can reduce rack counts by 82 percent compared to HDD deployments offering similar raw capacity, while also cutting power usage and cooling requirements. Micron says the drive tops out at roughly 30W, which it claims is about half the power draw of comparable hard drive setups. The announcement also feels like another warning sign for spinning disks in the enterprise. Hard drives still dominate bulk storage because of lower cost per terabyte, but SSD capacities keep climbing into territory that used to belong exclusively to HDDs. Micron is also touting major performance gains, claiming up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads and dramatically lower latency versus HDD-based systems. While nobody is dropping one of these into a home NAS anytime soon, the idea of a quarter petabyte on a single SSD no longer sounds like science fiction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Shaknovsky botched the surgery of William Bryan, 70, who died on the operating table

A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death.

In a deposition from November that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply”.

Party has success in Labour and Tory heartland areas but one pollster says results suggest Reform may have peaked

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

• Elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

Nigel Farage hailed sweeping election wins for Reform UK as a “historic shift in British politics” on a day when the populist party made gains at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives.

Reform made advances in heartland areas of both parties, clocking up substantial early results in the English local elections by taking control of Essex county council, Havering – its first London local authority – and Sunderland city council.

A "hawkish" turn at the Fed and stubbornly high inflation could delay interest rate cuts, according to Bank of America economists.

Senior Labour MPs urge prime minister to step down within year as party loses control of 25 English councils and humbled in Wales

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

• Mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

Keir Starmer is under pressure to set out a timeline for his departure after a crushing defeat in elections across Britain prompted senior Labour MPs to call for him to step down within a year.

In a disastrous set of results, Labour had lost control of more than 25 councils and almost 1,000 council seats in England by Friday evening, many to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which made large gains across the Midlands and the north as well as taking seats from the Tories in the south.

Farage said a “truly historic shift in British politics” had occurred after Reform UK won hundreds of seats and control of more councils in England. The gains included Essex where the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, has her constituency and which the Conservatives held for 25 years.

Plaid Cymru became the largest party in Wales, beating Reform into second place, after Labour admitted it was on course to lose control of the Senedd for the first time since devolution. Morgan, the first woman to lead the Welsh government, became the highest-profile casualty and called on Labour to “go back to being the party of the working class”.

The SNP leader, John Swinney, declared victory in the Holyrood elections – though was expected to fall short of an outright majority. The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, conceded defeat saying his party had failed to counter “national dissatisfaction” with Starmer.

The Greens gained their first two directly elected mayors – in Hackney and Lewisham – although they missed out on some more ambitious targets in London, as their leader, Zack Polanski, declared Britain’s two-party politics “dead and buried”. They also won three councils: Norwich, Hastings and Waltham Forest.

The Tories were on course to lose hundreds of seats – both to Reform and the Liberal Democrats – across the south of England. However, they won back the flagship Westminster council in central London, with Badenoch announcing it meant the party was “coming back”.

Labour appeared to be struggling in its London stronghold, despite early indications that its vote was holding up, unexpectedly losing control of Brent. Party insiders were closely watching councils including Lambeth, Lewisham and Haringey.

Men were convicted in Miami federal court for plotting to kill Jovenel Moïse at his Port-au-Prince home in 2021

Four south Florida men were convicted on Friday of plotting to kill the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021 by hiring mercenaries to assassinate him at his Port-au-Prince home, court records show.

Prosecutors argued during the nine-week trial in a Miami federal court that the men assembled two dozen former Colombian soldiers and supplied them with money, guns, ammunition and tactical vests in a conspiracy to kill Moïse. The 53-year-old president was shot dead in July 2021 at his private residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince, a killing that left a gaping political vacuum in the Caribbean nation and emboldened powerful gangs.

Trump announced the three-day halt in fighting, which coincides with Russia’s Victory Day celebrations.

You could build an entire data center around a new GPU with elaborate scale-up networking, exotic chiplet architectures, and advance liquid cooling. Or if you’re AMD, you could release a powerful GPU that customers can plug directly into the PCI busses of their existing servers, providing an immediate boost for running new AI workloads.

That’s just what AMD did this week with the release of its MI350P, the latest GPU in its Instinct line. Boasting 185 billion transistors, 144GB of HBM3e capacity, and 4 TB per second of peak memory bandwidth, the MI350P is designed to run small, medium, and large language models for AI inferencing and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) use cases.

The MI350 GPU (Source: AMD)

The MI350P plugs into a standard PCIe Gen 5 bus, providing 128GB per second of connectivity with a host. It operates within a 600W thermal envelope, and supports BF16, FP8, MXFP6 and MXFP4 workloads, offering 2,299 teraflops and up to 4,600 peak teraflops at MXFP4 precision through 128 AMD CDNA 4th Gen compute units.

Up to eight MI350P GPUs can be configured per node, and customers can segment their MI350P GPUs into four partitions, each with 36GB of HBM3 memory. The GPU is designed to handle AI models with up to 200 billion to 250 billion parameters; it also provides video and JPG decoding.

The new GPU uses standard air cooling, which AMD makes a point of. “Adopting AI doesn’t mean rebuilding infrastructure from the ground up,” wrote Suresh Andani, who heads business development teams for compute and enterprise AI at AMD, in an AMD blog post. “With AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards, enterprises can run more models and serve more users within their existing data centers.”

AMD launched the MI350P with support from computer makers, including Dell Technologies. David Schmidt, Dell’s vice president of product management, said the new GPU will help customers move forward more quickly. “For enterprises serious about AI, on-premises infrastructure isn’t a compromise,” he said. “It’s a competitive advantage delivering the control, security and predictable outcomes that matter most.”

Gigabyte is also adopting the MI350P across its AI server portfolio. Gigabyte General Manager Daniel Hou praised the new GPU for its practicality. “With its PCIe-based design, AMD Instinct MI350P enables flexible deployment and seamless integration into systems, allowing enterprises to build high-performance AI environments with the flexibility and efficiency required to scale globally,” Hou said.

AMD is also touting its software stack for its MI350 line of GPUs (Source: AMD)

AMD is also working on higher end air-cooled GPUs, as well as liquid cooled. For instance, it offers the Instinct UB B8, which is an 8-GPU air-cooled configuration of its MI350X and MI355X line that is delivered as a Universal Baseboard. The UB B8 delivers 2.3TB of HBM3, offering 8TB per second of memory bandwidth. It will also plug into AMD’s Infinity Fabric to provide scale-up capabilities that AMD says will be on par with Nvidia Blackwell. The UB B8 will support models with up to 500 billion parameters and is designed for AI training and inference at scale.

AMD also offers a liquid cooled version of the Instinct MI355X, which features a thermal envelope up to 1,400W. Supermicro and TensorWave are partnering with AMD to support these liquid-cooled chips. AMD also offers a liquid-cooled version of its Radeon gaming GPU.

There is definitely a market for ultra high-end GPUs that can be strung together in exotic ways to train the biggest AI models and power massive AI factories. These absolutely require liquid cooling, and possibly even different electrical regimes, such as Nvidia’s shift to 800V DC. But there are plenty of customers that need HPC gear to run slightly smaller AI models on their existing stack and who don’t want to build an entirely new data centers to do so. This is the segment that AMD is targeting with the MI355P GPUs.

The post AMD Delivers Plug-In AI Power with PCI-Based GPU appeared first on HPCwire.

mrspoonsi shares a report: Dirty Frag is a vulnerability class, first discovered and reported by Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel), that can obtain root privileges on major Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability. Dirty Frag extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high. Because the embargo has been broken, no patch or CVE currently exists. "As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions, and it chains two separate vulnerabilities," Kim said. Detailed technical information can be found here. BleepingComputer notes that the two vulnerabilities chained by Dirty Frag are "now tracked under the following CVE IDs: the xfrm-ESP one was assigned CVE-2026-43284, and the RxRPC isye is now CVE-2026-43500."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump administration urges US Postal Service to scrap 100-year-old rule as Democratic state attorneys general protest

Handguns could be mailed through the United States Postal Service (USPS) for the first time in nearly 100 years if a proposed Trump administration rule takes effect.

Democratic attorneys general in two dozen states have sent a letter in opposition.

If you own a Whoop fitness-tracking wearable, you’ll want to check out these new updates surrounding medical records and AI insights.

With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32. If you know anything about computers, powers of 2 tend to stick out. Let’s take a look at the binary representations of some characters compared to their lowercase counterparts.

↫ Tyler Hillery

I only have a middling understanding of the rest of the article and thus the ultimate reason why ASCII includes those six characters between Z and a, but I think it comes down to making certain operations on uppercase and lowercase letters specifically more elegant. In some deep crevices of my brain all of this makes sense, but I find it very difficult to truly understand and explain as someone who knows little about programming.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 797 for Saturday, May 9.

Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history. The -l option isn’t necessarily what login and sshd and so on use, it’s something that you can use if you specifically want to get a login shell in an unusual circumstance.

Bourne shells also have a ‘-c <command string>’ option that causes the shell to execute the command string rather than be interactive (this is a long standing option that is in POSIX). It may surprise you to hear that most or all Bourne shells that support -l also allow you to use -l and -c together. Basically all Bourne shells interpret this as first executing your .profile and so on, then executing the command string instead of going interactive. One use for this is to non-interactively run a command line in the context of your fully set up shell, with $PATH and other environment variables ready for use.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

Now, what if you want to detect the use of these two options combined, for instance to make it so certain parts of your .profile are ignored? It turns out very few Bourne shells actually support this, and that’s what Siebenmann’s latest post is about.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 593 for Saturday, May 9.

With gasoline prices a hot issue for voters as the midterm elections approach, President Donald Trump said he is making progress. 

A reporter asked Trump on May 7 about average gasoline prices recently rising past $4.50 a gallon nationally. 

Trump replied, "Gas prices have come down today. Have you looked? They've come down very substantially today." 

That’s inaccurate.

According to the American Automobile Association, the national average price for a gallon of gasoline rose each day for four days preceding Trump’s remark. The day after he spoke, May 8, prices dropped by about a penny per gallon.

Crude oil — which is refined into gasoline — had a price drop in the days before Trump’s remark. But gasoline prices did not follow, a pattern that experts say is typical because of short-term volatility in crude oil prices. 

The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry for this article.

Recent changes in gasoline prices

From May 4 to May 7 — the day of Trump’s comment — the national average price as reported by AAA rose each day leading up to his statement:

• $4.457 on May 4

• $4.483 on May 5

• $4.536 on May 6

• $4.558 on May 7. 

(There is price variation across states and regions, and from gas station to gas station; literally, your mileage may vary.)

The day after Trump’s remark, the average gasoline price reported by AAA dropped to $4.546. Even if that change had happened before he spoke, it would not have qualified as prices dropping "very substantially." The 1.2 cent drop amounted to a decline of two-tenths of 1%.

In the days leading up to Trump’s comment, crude oil, the commodity that is refined into gasoline, declined in price. 

Brent crude, the standard price metric for international oil markets, fell from a peak of about $114 a barrel on May 4 to roughly $103 around the time Trump spoke on May 7, a drop of about 10%. West Texas Intermediate, a price measure for U.S.-produced oil, fell from almost $84 a barrel on May 4 to around $79 when Trump spoke, roughly a 6% decline.

But the price of gasoline — not the price of crude oil — is what consumers encounter at gas stations. And a crude oil price decline — if it were sustained over more than a few days — can take weeks or even months to show up at the pump, experts say. 

In the short to medium term, the pattern for gasoline prices is known as "up like a rocket, down like a feather" — rapid rises, but slower declines. 

Part of this stems from gas station owners’ caution; they fear a sudden price spike cutting into their usually narrow profit margins. Motorists also tend to shop around less when prices are falling, reducing competitive pressures among gas stations.

The bigger picture on gasoline prices

Gasoline prices are unusually high, spurred by the war Trump launched with Israel against Iran, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Before Iran closed the strait, about one-fifth of the world’s oil flowed through it, and the stalled tanker traffic has hampered oil supplies, increasing prices.

The price of gasoline May 8 — about $4.55 — is the ninth-highest weekly price in U.S. history since 1990. The only time period when prices were higher was eight weeks from May through July 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted western sanctions on Russian oil.

The share of income Americans are devoting to gasoline today is high but — unlike the price they see at the pump — it isn’t close to the highest ever.

At today’s prices, 10 gallons of gasoline accounts for almost the same share of disposable household income as it did in 2022 — around 3.6%. And if — or when — the average gasoline price passes $4.80 per gallon this year, it would match that 2022 level.

However, 10 gallons of gasoline cost more as a percentage of disposable income in nine of the 10 years between 2005 and 2014.

How high could prices go?

Experts cautioned that even after the strait is opened — which is uncertain — gasoline prices will likely remain high for months. 

So far, "we’ve lost 65 days" of oil shipments because of the closure, and it will take months to make that up, said Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis for the gasoline price tracker GasBuddy.

Iranian attacks on neighbors’ oil infrastructure will add to that delay by forcing key oil infrastructure to idle or rebuild. It could take "months to years to get export capacity up to where it was" before the war, said Hugh Daigle, University of Texas-Austin petroleum and geosystems engineering professor.

Skip York, fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies, said that because wholesale prices have been increasing faster than retail prices over the last eight weeks, additional price increases could continue working their way through the system. 

"I wouldn't rule out gasoline prices breaching $5 a gallon this summer depending on what happens to crude oil prices, what the U.S. driving season looks like and whether there are any major unplanned outages at U.S. refineries," York said.

Our ruling

Trump said gasoline prices have "come down very substantially today."

From May 4 to May 7, gasoline prices did not drop. Crude oil prices decreased during that time period, but day-to-day variations in crude oil prices generally do not show up immediately in prices at the pump. 

By historical standards, U.S. gasoline prices are unusually high. The only time they were higher was for eight weeks in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We rate the statement False.

Apple is reportedly searching for options beyond its main chip supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act has long been considered a landmark Civil Rights era achievement that aimed to end discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote. 

But a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely gutted the law, and many Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP frontrunner in the race for Florida governor — celebrated the court’s decision.

Donalds countered that it was Democrats’ discriminatory gerrymandering practices that spurred the Voting Rights Act’s creation in the first place.

Congress wrote and passed the 1965 law "because of the Democrat party at the time, especially in the South, who were racially gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise Black voters," Donalds said in a May 4 interview with Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator.  (Gerrymandering is drawing district boundaries to give one political party, incumbent or group an advantage.)

Historians told PolitiFact that racist gerrymandering was not the driving force behind the law’s creation.

The Voting Rights Act was created to combat discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote, including literacy and property tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, voter roll purges, intimidation and violence. 

"Donalds’ statement is not accurate, not even close," said Alex Keyssar, a Harvard University history and social policy professor. The Voting Rights Act passed because, in most Southern states, Black Americans were not permitted to vote or even register to vote, he said.

"Numerous devices were used to prevent Black people from registering, like literacy tests and understanding clauses, but gerrymandering was not the issue. There was no need to racially gerrymander because they couldn’t vote in the first place." 

Although Donalds pointed at Democrats for the gerrymandering, Democrats today are not the southern Democrats of the 1960s. 

Carol Anderson, an Emory University African American studies professor, called Donalds’ comment ahistorical and disingenuous, saying it ignores the Southern Strategy, where Republicans turned the Democratic South into a GOP-stronghold by criticizing the Civil Rights Movement to gain support.  

"It treats the demographics of the two parties as stagnant, when it was the mid-1960s through the Reagan era when the major shifts happened."

PolitiFact asked Donalds’ campaign for comment but received no reply. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson moves to shake hands with Martin Luther King, Jr. while others look on during the signing of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, in Washington, D.C. (photo courtesy of LBJ Library, photo by Yoichi Okamoto)

Why was the Voting Rights Act created? 

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the 15th Amendment and end over a century of discriminatory practices that prevented Black Americans, particularly in the South, from voting.

Despite Black men gaining the right to vote in 1869 with the amendment’s passage, many Southern states spent decades creating significant barriers for when Black men tried to register or vote. In practice, those barriers nullified the constitutional protection. 

"The Voting Rights Act was necessary because the South had choked the life out of democracy through poll taxes, literacy tests, brutality, and white domestic terrorism," Anderson said.

Other barriers included property tests, allowing only property owners to vote and "grandfather clauses" which said people who didn’t own property could vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867 — before Black men had the right to do so.

These Jim Crow obstacles led to decades of marches and voter registration campaigns that left activists brutally beaten or murdered. Mounting civil rights activism, along with increased media attention, pushed the federal government to act. 

"Bloody Sunday," on March 7, 1965, in which police savagely beat hundreds of protesters as they set out to march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, was another turning point, speeding the Voting Rights Act ’s passage less than a month later.

State troopers hit protesters with billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965. (AP)

What the Voting Rights Act did 

The law required state and local governments, including some Florida counties, with a history of discriminatory voting practices to go through a federal approval process called preclearance before changing any election laws or procedures. (The Supreme Court overturned this in 2013, ruling that the formula used to determine what places needed preclearance was unconstitutional because it was based on 1960s and ‘70s electoral conditions.) 

"The VRA sought to have federal monitoring of areas throughout the U.S. that had a history of these actions," said Keneshia Grant, a Howard University political science professor. "While much of that discrimination was happening in the South, it was not limited to that region."

Section 2 of the law also prohibits governments from imposing election procedures or practices that would deny or restrict the right of U.S. citizens to vote based on race or color.

As a result, states drew new congressional maps to create districts with a Black majority, a practice the Supreme Court all but overruled. 

How much did discriminatory gerrymandering factor into the law’s creation?

Experts said the VRA primarily sought to fortify the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on race. The law does not mention "apportionment," "gerrymandering" or "redistricting." Instead, it uses a broad brush to prohibit the many ways Black Americans could have their right to vote abridged or denied. 

Some cases of discriminatory gerrymandering, primarily in the South, took place before the law passed, but historians say it wasn’t a primary tool for voter disenfranchisement at that time. It was lumped in as one of many discriminatory election procedures that the legislation aimed at remedying without explicitly saying so.

"I would not say that (gerrymandering) was the driving factor for the VRA," Grant said. "That would be like saying desegregation of buses was the reason for the Civil Rights Act. Are these things related? Yes. But the Civil Rights Act was much bigger than busing. Likewise, the VRA was bigger than just the lines." 

Attempts at racial gerrymandering became more prevalent after the VRA passed, Keyssar, from Harvard said. It was in anticipation of such moves, he said, that the law required some states to get preclearance before amending election laws, which would include districting issues. 

Our ruling

Donalds said Congress wrote and passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act because "the Democrat party at the time, especially in the South, were racially gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise Black voters."

The law sought to enforce the 15th Amendment and end longstanding racist practices against Black Americans to keep them from voting — including literacy tests, poll taxes, property tests, intimidation and violence.

Historians say racist gerrymandering existed before the law passed, but it wasn’t a primary tool for voter disenfranchisement at that time. The practice became more prevalent later in an attempt to neutralize the power of newly cast ballots as more Black people were able to vote. 

The law doesn’t mention gerrymandering, and while it’s included as one of many discriminatory practices the law sought to prohibit, it wasn’t the reason for its creation.

We rate Donalds’ statement False.

RELATED: What does federal law say about partisan gerrymandering? Fact-checking Florida Democratic leader

RELATED: Is Florida’s mid-decade redistricting plan ‘illegal,’ as some Democrats say?

The MV Hondius is currently traveling to the Canary Islands, where the 147 people on board will be methodically off-boarded and flown home.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. was expecting a response from Iran on a peace proposal Friday, adding, "we'll see what the response entails" and that he hopes it's "a serious offer."

The Trump administration, sidestepping a widening battle in the Strait of Hormuz, said it was anticipating a reply from Tehran on its latest terms for ending the war.

Southern Republicans moving quickly to capitalize on supreme court ruling in Louisiana case that weakened voting protections for minorities nationwide

Alabama lawmakers approved a plan on Friday for new US House primaries if courts allow the state to use different congressional districts in this year’s elections, sending the legislation to the Republican governor, Kay Ivey.

The move came the same day that the Virginia supreme court dealt a major setback to Democrats by overturning a redistricting plan that could have helped them win as many as four additional House seats. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana and South Carolina also presented congressional redistricting plans that faced staunch opposition from civil rights activists and Democrats.

Reform, Greens and pro-Gaza independents make significant gains, although no party has yet won majority

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

• Elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

The Labour party’s 14-year leadership in Birmingham has come to an end after Reform, Greens and pro-Gaza independents made significant gains in the UK’s second-largest city.

No party has yet won an overall majority at Birmingham city council, one of Europe’s largest local authorities, with the results reflecting wider political fragmentation across England.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,063 for Saturday, May 9.

DARA FISHER
Staff Reporter

If you live in Delaware and drink water, then you have Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in your body.

Students in the honors section of Introduction to Environmental Engineering (CIEG133) engaged in a semester-long project during the spring of 2025 involving preliminary research, field sampling, data analysis and a poster presentation to test their hypothesis: Can standard water quality parameters indicate PFAS contamination?

PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals commonly used in consumer products such as non-stick cookware. They pose health and environmental concerns, and are increasingly found in natural waters. Since PFAS are extremely expensive to test for and remediate, students set out with the intent of finding another option to track them.

Led by Paul Imhoff, a professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, the honors section explored PFAS through discussion in the classroom, preparation for field sampling and a lecture from Megan Wassil, a graduate student studying water science and policy. 

Current CIEG133 Professor Luiza Notini aided in the planning and field sampling for this project, which marked the first time that freshmen environmental engineering students participated in field work as part of the introductory course. 

“When I was talking with two students in the class last year, they commented that they really wanted to do something hands-on,” Imhoff said. “Engineers certainly do things hands-on, and even though it takes more resources, I thought it would be important to do that.”

In March of 2025, students traveled to three sites: White Clay Creek, Red Clay Creek and a nearby downstream location where the creeks merge.

Using standard water quality instruments, they measured pH, turbidity, temperature and electrical conductivity, and collected samples for later laboratory analyses.

Environmental engineering student Sasha Sehgal spoke about her experience during the field trip. 

“I really liked that I was able to get into the water to take the samples,” Sehgal said. “I felt like an actual scientist doing research, and it was really nice seeing my peers measure the water quality parameters with the tools that we had.”

In the lab, the students were introduced to a variety of instruments and methods to determine the total suspended solids, total organic carbon and ion concentrations (such as fluoride, chloride and bromide) of the water samples. 

Over the next few weeks, they created graphs to analyze the relationship between the water quality measurements and known concentrations of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), both of which are types of PFAS. 

The findings showed that samples with elevated PFAS concentrations also had high concentrations of fluoride, suggesting that fluoride could be an indicator of PFAS. Since fluoride is relatively easy to measure, it could serve as a useful and cost-efficient tool for identifying PFAS-related activity.

Imhoff acknowledged the limitations surrounding the conclusion. The measured PFAS concentration could be traced to a manufacturer operating near one of the stream sites. Wassil’s data shows multiple spikes in PFAS concentrations along the creeks, suggesting there may be several sources of contamination.

“In some ways, this is consistent because fluoride is an element that is in the perfluorinated compounds, but also quite unexpected in the sense that perfluorinated compounds are not easily degraded biologically or chemically,” Imhoff said. “So anyways, it really leads to more questions.”

To conclude the semester-long project, students presented a poster at the 2025 Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN) Research Symposium. 

“The biggest takeaway I hope the students have is learning how to tackle a problem,” Imhoff said. “And in the process, learn more about your major and how to work together and interact with people who are different from you.”

Notini spearheaded the research project this semester, focusing on correlating historical water quality data with current watershed issues. Students gained exposure to fieldwork and laboratory work through this process, and presented their findings at the 2026 DENIN Environmental Research Symposium on April 15.

While the 2025 project was unable to draw strong conclusions, the experience of field sampling and analyzing data was valuable for a first-year engineering course. 

“This class made me feel more confident that I want to stay in Environmental Engineering,” Sehgal said. “I feel really good that I could make a potential change, especially seeing the data analysis that we did, and how we are actually proving that there is PFAS contamination in the water. We can change that. We can figure out how to better adapt what we’re doing to prevent that, and I think that’s really cool.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security researcher Dor Zvi and his team at the cybersecurity firm he cofounded, RedAccess, analyzed thousands of vibe-coded web applications created using the AI software development tools Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify and found more than 5,000 of them that had virtually no security or authentication of any kind. Many of these web apps allowed anyone who merely finds their web URL to access the apps and their data. Others had only trivial barriers to that access, such as requiring that a visitor sign in with any email address. Around 40 percent of the apps exposed sensitive data, Zvi says, including medical information, financial data, corporate presentations, and strategy documents, as well as detailed logs of customer conversations with chatbots. "The end result is that organizations are actually leaking private data through vibe-coding applications," says Zvi. "This is one of the biggest events ever where people are exposing corporate or other sensitive information to anyone in the world." Zvi says RedAccess' scouring for vulnerable web apps was surprisingly easy. Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify all allow users to host their web apps on those AI companies' own domains, rather than the users'. So the researchers used straightforward Google and Bing searches for those AI companies' domains combined with other search terms to identify thousands of apps that had been vibe coded with the companies' tools. Of the 5,000 AI-coded apps that Zvi says were left publicly accessible to anyone who simply typed their URLs into a browser, he found close to 2,000 that, upon closer inspection, seemed to reveal private data: Screenshots of web apps he shared with WIRED -- several of which WIRED verified were still online and exposed -- showed what appeared to be a hospital's work assignments with the personally identifiable information of doctors, a company's detailed ad purchasing information, what appeared to be another firm's go-to-market strategy presentation, a retailer's full logs of its chatbot's conversations with customers, including the customers' full names and contact information, a shipping firm's cargo records, and assorted sales and financial records from a variety of other companies. In some cases, Zvi says, he found that the exposed apps would have allowed him to gain administrative privileges over systems and even remove other administrators. In the case of Lovable, Zvi says he also found numerous examples of phishing sites that impersonated major corporations, including Bank of America, Costco, FedEx, Trader Joe's, and McDonald's, that appeared to have been created with the AI coding tool and hosted on Lovable's domain. "Anyone from your company at any moment can generate an app, and this is not going through any development cycle or any security check," Zvi says. "People can just start using it in production without asking anyone. And they do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 9, No. 1,785.

The State Department is initiating a review of all 53 Mexican consulates in the United States, a U.S. official said, a move that could lead Secretary of State Marco Rubio to consider ordering the closure of some posts.

Whimsical film shows relay of animals carrying centennial card from Balmoral Castle to naturalist in London

King Charles has featured in a surprise birthday tribute to David Attenborough, with a cast of wild animals helping to relay his handwritten congratulatory centenary card.

The whimsical film, A Very Special Delivery, begins with the king writing his tribute in the library of Balmoral Castle. Charles, wearing an animal-themed tie featuring elephants, reflects on more than 60 years of friendship with the renowned naturalist.

At the SCSP AI+ Expo, Wright joined Buck to lay out the case for the Genesis Mission, NVIDIA’s AI-for-science initiative built on years of collaboration between NVIDIA and the US Department of Energy.

May 8, 2026 — AI will help build the energy it needs.

That’s the case U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and High Performance Computing Ian Buck made Thursday morning at the SCSP AI+ Expo. The 30-minute fireside chat, moderated by SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari, was called “Powering the Next American Century.”

From left: NVIDIA’s Ian Buck, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari onstage at the SCSP AI+ Expo.

Their argument: American leadership in AI runs through American leadership in energy.

“Energy is life,” Wright said. “The more energy you have, the more affordable energy you have, the more opportunities you have in your society.”

The Genesis Mission — the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s effort to apply AI to scientific discovery — is where that case meets execution. NVIDIA is among the DOE partners on the mission, building on what Buck called two decades of NVIDIA building supercomputers with the national labs.

“NVIDIA is 100% committed and invested in Genesis,” Buck said. “I’ve never seen more excitement across the lab and industry.”

The session was one of several SCSP panels this week with NVIDIA leaders on stage: Cofounder and NVIDIA Fellow Chris Malachowsky will lead a panel on the AI+ Careers Workforce Task Force; Rev Lebaredian will speak on physical AI and simulation; Dion Harris will discuss AI-accelerated American science and AI infrastructure for Africa; and John Josephakis will join a session on U.S. quantum leadership.

The DOE Partnership

The DOE brings 17 national labs, the scientists, the national problems and the data. NVIDIA brings the full stack — not just chips, Buck said, but algorithms, methods and 20 years of partnership with the labs.

The work is happening at scale. NVIDIA and the DOE are building two AI supercomputers together at Argonne National Laboratory. The first, Equinox, is being stood up now with 10,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs — what Buck called “the same GPU, the same software being used to train and build AI that we’re all enjoying today.” The second, Solstice, will use 100,000 GPUs with NVIDIA Vera Rubin.

“To put that 100,000 in perspective on the next-generation GPU, which is dedicated to science, it’s 5,000 exaflops,” Buck said. “That’s a big number that actually is five times larger than the entire TOP500 supercomputer list combined.”

“We’re creating all the same technology, all the same hardware, all the same software building blocks used by all the major AI labs around the world,” Buck said, “for all of world science to go get access to.”

What that looks like in practice: Buck described an open source NVIDIA AI model trained on 1.5 million physics papers, then fine-tuned on 100,000 papers specifically about fusion. The result is a specialized AI agent DOE researchers can interrogate to advance their work faster.

Energy and the Pace of Building

Over the last 20 years, Wright said, the U.S. has tripled oil production and doubled natural gas production — but barely grown electricity production. That’s a problem because, as Wright put it, the most important source of energy for AI is electricity.

His department is leaning back into all three pillars of the U.S. grid: natural gas, nuclear and coal.

On nuclear, Wright pointed to small modular reactors as a near-term lever — three small modular reactors (SMRs) will go critical by July 4 of this year, he said, with both new large reactors and additional SMRs to follow.

On fusion, his department has stood up a strategic fusion office, and the lab and university programs are being, in his words, “hypercharged” by the computing power and insights AI now provides.

“We have to fix this bureaucratic and complex electricity grid so that it can grow fast, so that it can grow like our primary energy production and it can keep up with AI,” Wright said. “If we don’t do that, we’re going to slow down AI.”

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has described AI as a five-layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. Wright’s department covers the bottom layer.

Buck took up the next layer. Asked about the intersection of energy and AI, he pointed to per-watt efficiency gains in NVIDIA chips with each generation.

“We went from the Hopper generation to Blackwell,” Buck said. “We increased performance by 30x. We actually increased performance per watt by 25 times.”

Wright returned to the grid. AI, he said, can break the bottleneck of grid interconnection studies that today take years.

“With AI, we’re going to take something that was years long and make it weeks or hours,” Wright said.

What Success Looks Like

Asked what success looks like 12 months in, Wright pointed to fusion, materials and grid interconnection — concrete deliverables.

“We will have deliverables that we’re going to point to — we couldn’t do that before, and now we can,” Wright said. “That’s the goal of Genesis: drive discovery and bring the benefits to humans.”

There’s growing public concern that AI and data centers will drive up electricity costs, he noted. The reality, Wright said, runs the other way: “Building more electrical generation, building data centers, are actually the mechanism to lower the cost of electricity in our country and make our grid stronger.”

AI and energy are both key to human progress.

“AI doesn’t love, it doesn’t have passion,” Wright said. “It’s just going to make humans more powerful and better at pursuing whatever your passions are. It’s a thing that supercharges humans — it does not replace you.”

Source: Brian Caulfield, NVIDIA

The post DOE and NVIDIA Detail Genesis Mission Plans at SCSP AI+ Expo appeared first on HPCwire.

The Cohutta town council will discuss reinstating the police and consider request for mayor's ‘immediate resignation’

The town council in a small mountain community in the US state of Georgia called a special meeting on Friday evening to discuss reinstating the police department after the mayor fired the chief and all the officers.

The notice for the meeting, posted outside the Cohutta town hall, says the council will also consider a request for the mayor’s “immediate resignation”.

Keir Starmer’s party lost out to Reform and the Greens, with no respite in Scotland, Wales or England. These maps show the scale of the historic results

• Election 2026 live: latest news updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

Labour has suffered heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales, losing ground to opponents on the left and the right in a fragmented political system.

The graphics below show where Labour’s losses were most severe, and how the electoral landscape has changed as a result.

Parents will receive hundreds of free diapers before leaving hospital under new program aimed at alleviating expenses

California families welcoming newborns will soon receive hundreds of free diapers before leaving the hospital under a first-in-the-country program announced on Friday by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

During the program’s first year, it will be offered at about 65 to 75 hospitals that handle about a quarter of births in the state and largely serve low-income patients, Newsom’s office said. The initiative will expand to more hospitals statewide, though the governor’s office did not say how many. The state has partnered with the non-profit Baby2Baby to manufacture the diapers under the label “Golden State Start”.

Understanding the ‘dark matter of the genome’ could help develop therapeutic medical advances

May 8, 2026 — In the field of human biology, there are many still-unanswered questions about the role of RNA, the less well-understood companion to DNA also found in all living cells, as scientists begin to unravel the complicated and important responsibilities of nucleic acid. In research described in Communications Biology, a Nature publication, an international research team applied innovative techniques to understand the structure and function of a particular ribozyme RNA.

A Los Alamos research team is unraveling the structure and function of RNA. Image credit: Shutterstock.

“One challenging aspect of learning about RNA structure and function is that there is not much data. We were surprised that RNA is structurally much more variable and often floppier than proteins built by DNA,” said Los Alamos scientist Karissa Sanbonmatsu. “That means we have to be able to predict many different structures to be able to map RNA to functions. Because RNA plays a role in cellular response to stress, heat, infection and other conditions, structural information is fundamentally important to unlocking RNA’s therapeutic potential.”

The research team specifically tackled the SINE B2 retrotransposon, or jumping gene, a genetic element that can move around in the DNA sequence, often by making an RNA copy of itself. That function is part of the regulation of gene expression: what a gene in DNA directs or enables a cell to do and when. The research provides an essential foundation for future studies on RNA structural dynamics and their impact on biological functions.

A Unique Self-Cleaving RNA System

Where it appears on the DNA-based genome, the SINE B2 retrotransposon is a repeated sequence that gets converted into RNA. From there, the RNA can regulate processes in a cell. The research team sought to understand the structure of the RNA in those situations and how that structure impacted process regulation.

The SINE B2 retrotransposon offers a useful system to study because it is one of the few RNA systems known to work as a molecular switch. Environmental conditions in the body can impact the shape it takes, and in some conditions the gene actually cuts or cleaves itself. That self-cleaving RNA (a “ribozyme”) has been known in bacteria and other organisms for a long time, but this is one of the only instances of that activity known to occur in mammals.

The research team studied that cleavage site and activity as well as other aspects of the ribozyme. Using an RNA engineering approach, the team examined the effects of point mutations, deletions of the main cleavage site, and deletions of the cleavage domain on the structural ensemble of the RNA. Combining this approach with methods that disrupt the RNA and observe reactions, the team was able to highlight the relationships between the structure and biologically relevant functional outcomes.

Next Steps: AI Models for 3D Structures

The team’s approach exemplified the new field of integrative structural biology, in which multimodal data — molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology experiments — is gathered and brought together with computer simulations to obtain a 3D model of molecules in action. The international team each contributed different components of the research: cell biology, X-ray scattering and RNA biochemistry experiments, tying it all together with the RNA modeling using Los Alamos’ Chicoma supercomputer.

The analysis will be contributed to a new artificial intelligence project the team is developing called “Beyond Alpha Fold.” Many of the computational techniques employed in the research will be brought into the Beyond Alpha Fold AI project. The team will seek to leverage AI for its long-term vision of building an ensemble of 3D structures of the RNA for a given sequence.

“Understanding RNA’s structure and function in the body is one of the challenges of the century in biology,” Sanbonmatsu said. “Non-coding RNA is like the dark matter of the genome; we know it’s there, and we know it plays a role, but we have a lot of work to do to pin those things down. We still don’t understand how cells with the same DNA look very different and do different things. One of the keys to unlocking this understanding is likely the role RNA plays in regulating gene expression.”

Paper: “Cleavage region organizes the structural architecture of the SINE-derived B2 repressive ribozyme.” Communications Biology: 10.1038/s42003-026-09819-0

Funding: The work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Los Alamos and by the National Institutes of Health.

Source: LANL

The post LANL: Scientists Map the Shape of RNA That Can Shut Down Genes appeared first on HPCwire.

Don’t have much time to look into specifics and explain, but just wanted to chime in a lead to start on, you need to use the VESC set_remote_state command (can be communicated over CAN or UART), rather than communicating with Refloat directly. The js-y parameter is the throttle value we care about.

As we get closer to WWDC in June, more rumors are circulating about what the next iPhone could look like.

A trade court's ruling this week against a 10% U.S. tariff is narrow in scope, offering limited relief to importers. Here's what to know.

Among the releases is a 1969 debrief of Buzz Aldrin stating he saw a ‘sizeable’ object close to the lunar surface

The Pentagon on Friday released an initial group of previously secret files documenting reports of UFOs – a move sought for decades by some.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said in a statement posted on X.

Reform makes gains in Labour’s working-class heartlands, while Greens chip away at party’s progressive base

Keir Starmer hates to lose. Unsurprisingly, he refused to walk away and end his premiership as Labour’s local election losses began to trickle in on Friday morning. Upon entering Downing Street in July 2024 after leading Labour to a historic general election victory, Starmer promised the public that his government would “fight every day until you believe again”.

Now, Starmer is faced with the uncomfortable truth that the frustrated yet united coalition that brought him into No 10 hoping for change is completely fractured and its discontent cannot be dismissed as early midterm blues.

From devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales to councils and mayoralties in England, find out what happened in your area

• Elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

• Latest news updates and analysis from election night

The Pentagon has begun releasing new UFO/UAP files through a newly launched public website, starting with 162 documents from agencies including the FBI, State Department, NASA, and others. Officials say more files will be released on a rolling basis. The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has begun releasing new files on UFOs, saying members of the public can draw their own conclusions on "unidentified anomalous phenomena" like an object that a drone pilot says shone a bright light in the sky and then vanished. It said in a post on X on Friday that while past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Donald Trump "is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files." It said additional documents will be released on a rolling basis. Besides the Pentagon, the effort is led by the White House, the director of national intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA and the FBI. A newly unveiled website housing the documents on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, has a decidedly retro feel, with black-and-white military imagery of flying objects displayed prominently on the page, with statements displayed in typewriter-like font. The first release includes 162 files, such as old State Department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space. One document details an FBI interview with someone identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a "linear object" with a light bright enough to "see bands within the light" in the sky. "The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished," according to the FBI interview. Another file is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, showing three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon says in an accompanying caption that "there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated that it could be a "physical object."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US president says on Truth Social the ceasefire will include suspension of all ‘kinetic activity’ and a prisoner swap

Donald Trump has announced a three-day ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine from 9 to 11 May.

The US president said on social media the ceasefire would include a suspension of all “kinetic activity” and a swap of 1,000 prisoners from each country.

After successfully supporting agentic simulation in production with strategic customers, SimScale opens Engineering AI to organizations globally who are ready to automate the full simulation workflow

MUNICH, May 8, 2026 — SimScale today opened enterprise waitlist access to its guided pilot service for Engineering AI agents — autonomous simulation orchestration tools that extract technical intent from engineering specifications and execute the complete validation workflow, from CAD preparation and meshing to solver configuration and final report. The announcement marks the transition of Engineering AI from strategic customer deployments into full public availability.

Engineering teams face a constraint that has resisted decades of tooling: the most time-intensive parts of any simulation project require the judgment of senior specialists who are always in short supply. As design cycles compress, organizations face a compounding challenge: exponentially more design decisions to validate, with a specialist workforce that cannot scale at the same rate. SimScale’s Engineering AI resolves this by encoding expert knowledge — a team’s specific standards, solver preferences, and compliance rules — into agents that operate near autonomously, making every engineer in the organization as capable as its most experienced simulation specialist.

“The constraint we kept hearing from engineering leaders isn’t compute – it’s time,” said David Heiny, CEO of SimScale. “How do you capture what your best simulation engineers know, and make it instantly available to every project, every team member, every second of the day? Engineering AI answers that. What used to require a specialist to configure from scratch now runs autonomously, with the same guardrails your senior engineers would apply. The results our customers are seeing — workflows that took weeks, now done in minutes — are what happens when that constraint is removed. We’re excited to open that opportunity to all our users.”

SimScale customers have reported step-change results. Shane McConn, Lead Mechanical Design Engineer at Silent-Aire, put it plainly: “Months of engineering work can now be done in an evening.” At Convion, an HD Hyundai company pioneering hydrogen fuel cell technology, AI underpins a generative design workflow that produces new optimized designs in under one hour — a cycle that previously took months. “We now have an AI model that can generate a new optimized design in under an hour, and I have complete confidence in the results,” said Armin Narimanzadeh, Manager of Thermofluids & Simulations at Convion.

SimScale Engineering AI orchestrates the complete simulation pipeline based on context and intent: extracting requirements from RFQ and project documentation, configuring the simulations needed, executing parallel simulation runs in the cloud, and delivering auditable, proposal-ready validation reports. Agents are built on a foundation of more than one million real-world simulation projects and can carry an organization’s own domain standards and compliance rules — ensuring every simulation run reflects the depth of judgment of the team’s senior specialists.

To accompany public availability, SimScale has opened a guided pilot waitlist for organizations with active simulation workflows and defined AI objectives to express their interest in starting their agentic engineering adoption journey. Accepted teams may receive a serviced pilot program in which SimScale engineers deploy Engineering AI directly on live projects.

Enterprise teams can apply now at https://www.simscale.com/engineering-ai-waitlist.

About SimScale

SimScale is the AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation. Trusted by more than 800,000 users, SimScale empowers engineers everywhere to innovate faster by exploring thousands of engineering decisions in seconds. By integrating Engineering AI workflows with computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), electromagnetic, and thermal simulation in a single cloud-native platform, SimScale empowers teams to engineer the irreplaceable.

Source: SimScale

The post SimScale Opens Waitlist for Engineering AI Simulation Agents appeared first on HPCwire.

Local officials in Arizona are pushing to remove Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, who is leading the Nancy Guthrie probe, alleging Nanos lied under oath during a deposition for an unrelated lawsuit.

Lawyers for Cole Allen say Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro could be considered victims or witnesses in case

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Federally aligned workforce program offers paid, applied learning opportunity to help professionals and organizations prepare for emerging quantum technologies

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., May 8, 2026 — The Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative (CQC) and BuildWithin have launched the nation’s first quantum pre-apprenticeship: a paid, 12-week program built on the U.S. Department of Labor’s apprenticeship framework and designed to prepare early-and mid-career professionals to lead quantum adoption inside their companies as the technology moves from research labs into commercial use.

The program runs from June 29 through September 18, 2026, and will include 10 participants in the inaugural cohort, each of whom will receive a $2,500 stipend upon completion. BuildWithin, a U.S. Department of Labor National Apprenticeship Program Sponsor, will deliver the pre-apprenticeship curriculum through its workforce technology platform. The program is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Research Institute, which is leading this work and supporting this program in partnership with CQC.

“This is an important step in translating quantum from something people hear about into something professionals can engage with directly,” said Charlie Brock, CEO of the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative. “Innovation often starts with people already inside organizations who are curious about what’s next. We’re activating those intrapreneurs and giving them a structured pathway to bring quantum back to their teams.”

The launch arrives at an inflection point for the U.S. quantum economy. As investments accelerate and commercial systems come online, regions across the country are racing to build the workforce required to capture economic value from the technology, and to do so without the multi-year delay that slowed cloud adoption. Gartner estimated insufficient cloud skills pushed enterprise migration back by two years or more, and the same pattern is now constraining AI.

“Quantum has the potential to define Chattanooga’s economic future and partnerships are key to its success,” said Tim Kelly, Mayor of Chattanooga. “A pre-apprenticeship that’s accessible to working Chattanoogans across a variety of technical fields is another step in preparing our workforce for what’s coming.”

”At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, we translate research into opportunity for our students, our industry partners, and our community,” said Chancellor Lori Mann Bruce. “Through the UT Chattanooga Quantum Center, we are advancing quantum research and have the national and international partnerships that align our students with the career opportunities of the quantum future. Programs like this pre-apprenticeship expand access, strengthen our workforce, and position Chattanooga to shape what comes next.”

‍A Different Kind of Quantum Workforce

Unlike many post-secondary quantum programs aimed at physicists and Ph.D. researchers, the pre-apprenticeship is designed for working professionals with a technical baseline: IT specialists, analysts, and operations leaders across various sectors such as logistics, healthcare, energy, and technology. The program does not require advanced degrees in physics or mathematics and emphasizes practical application within participants’ existing roles.

“Helping local professionals prepare for future economic opportunity as Chattanooga positions itself as a hub for the emerging quantum technology industry is part of EPB’s mission to serve our community,” said EPB President and CEO-elect Janet Rehberg. “Quantum technology is no longer theoretical. Companies are already using quantum to create growth opportunities. We’re working to help people in our area benefit as quantum advances and creates new jobs.”

Delivered primarily online through the BuildWithin platform, the curriculum combines asynchronous coursework with live support, industry speakers, and a capstone project. Participants will progress from foundational quantum concepts to hands-on exposure with tools and content informed by IonQ, IBM, D-Wave, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and other open-source resources.

A group of Quantum Learning Guides will host rotating office hours, and each participant will be paired with a mentor to help connect coursework to real-world organizational challenges. As a capstone, participants will develop a proposed quantum use case for their current employer.

A Replicable National Model

The program is intentionally structured on the U.S. Department of Labor’s apprenticeship framework, the same federal system that has trained American workers across more than 1,000 occupations for nearly a century. By anchoring quantum workforce development in that infrastructure, the partnership creates a pathway other states and regions can adopt without standing up new programs from scratch.

“Every wave of transformative technology scales through workers who solve problems where they sit. Cloud did. AI is. Quantum will too,” said Philip Minardi, Co-Founder of BuildWithin. “We built this program with CQC so Chattanooga’s mid-career professionals can become their company’s quantum expert through a structured, proven pre-apprenticeship pathway.”

Chattanooga has emerged as an early hub for quantum activity, with assets including a commercially available quantum network, an on-site quantum computer coming online this month, partnerships with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and growing university and industry collaboration. The pre-apprenticeship adds an additional workforce layer to that ecosystem.

“This pre-apprenticeship opportunity continues our community’s connected efforts to build jobs and trainings into those jobs at the same time,” said Andrew Hudson, Director of Workforce Development Strategy at the City of Chattanooga. “Quantum will provide next generation technology, and through programs like this, continued access to economic mobility for Chattanoogans.”

Applications for the inaugural Quantum Ready Cohort are now open, with participant selection in June. Apply HERE through the One Chattanooga Works platform. CQC also welcomes inquiries from those interested in serving as Quantum Learning Guides or mentors.

About the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative

The Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative (CQC) is a nonprofit organization aligning education, industry, and research around the region’s emerging quantum sector. By advancing partnerships and building talent pathways, CQC supports workforce readiness and long-term economic growth in the Chattanooga/Hamilton County region. Learn more at www.ChattanoogaQuantum.com.

About BuildWithin

BuildWithin is a workforce technology company building the intelligence layer for how American talent is developed, matched, and mobilized. As a U.S. Department of Labor National Apprenticeship Program Sponsor, BuildWithin operates apprenticeship programs across more than 50 DOL-approved occupations and provides AI-driven systems for skills matching and workforce mobility for employers, intermediaries, and public workforce systems nationwide. Learn more at www.BuildWithin.com.

Source: Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative

The post Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative and BuildWithin Launch Quantum Pre-Apprenticeship Program appeared first on HPCwire.

I've tested dozens of tiny ultraportable wireless speakers, some of which fit in your pocket, attach to your bike or are wearable. These are my top picks right now.

President Trump said the agreement will swap 1,000 prisoners from each country after Russia and Ukraine announced separate short-term ceasefire plans.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is preparing for the legal fight of its life with the U.S. government — but its most immediate threat is coming from the financial system, rather than the courts.

Fidelity Charitable, Charles Schwab affiliate DAFgiving360, and Vanguard Charitable have begun blocking donor-advised fund, or DAF, donations to the SPLC — effectively cutting off one of the organization’s most important funding pipelines at a critical moment. The decision arrives alongside a politicized and bogus indictment announced late last month by the Trump Department of Justice, which is attempting to paint one of the country’s most prominent watchdogs against hate and racial violence as a promoter of it.

A letter from Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon notes the House Judiciary Committee has received whistleblower reports that the DOJ “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.” As Alabama Reflector editor Brian Lyman wrote, “DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience.”

But before any courts can assess the merits of the case, the SPLC is already suffering severe financial consequences.

Donor-advised funds have become a key part of American philanthropy. Managed by firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, DAFs allow donors to receive immediate tax benefits while recommending grants to IRS-recognized nonprofits over time. They are one of the primary channels many nonprofits use to connect with donors.

What’s happening to the SPLC fits a broader pattern of using financial exclusion to punish speakers who challenge those in power. In 2010, after WikiLeaks published State Department cables that embarrassed the U.S. government, major financial institutions — including Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America — cut off its ability to receive online donations. The punishment happened without WikiLeaks ever having a chance to defend itself in a court of law. The consequences were devastating for the organization, which lost more than 95 percent of its revenue the following year.

That episode is often treated as a one-off, but my research has shown that’s far from the case. I’ve spoken to dozens of law-abiding U.S. citizens who’ve lost financial services due to speech or political viewpoints — groups like VoteAmerica, which had a bank account closed by Chase Bank and was denied an account by First Republic Bank, and the National Committee for Religious Freedom, which also had its bank account shuttered by Chase. I detail these and many other cases in my newly published book, “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” 

As with the SPLC, financial censorship sometimes happens to those who have been merely accused of a crime. I’m reminded of the case of a Stop Cop City activist who faced charges for participating in an anti-police protest in Atlanta. The Daily Mail wrote a disparaging news article about her, calling her “an Antifa terrorist who is part of the Atlanta cell.” Shortly after that article was published, Chase closed the bank account she’d held for years, citing “negative media.” 

The implications of this type of censorship go beyond the individual accounts impacted; it has a chilling effect on anyone who wants to attend protests or engage in advocacy. Like WikiLeaks before and the SPLC today, organizations and individuals who challenge the status quo must fear drawing the ire of the corporations that wield immense power over our financial lives.

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We’ve also seen financial corporations try to police the news, as with a 2022 policy rolled out by PayPal that promised a $2,500 fine to any accounts spreading “misinformation” — a term left conspicuously undefined. PayPal was widely criticized and swiftly retracted the policy. Given the Trump administration’s open hostility to journalism and its novel legal tactics to attack the press, it’s entirely possible that the next target of financial censorship could be a news outlet after the WikiLeaks blockade set the precedent.

Courts have recognized the danger when the government plays a direct role in shuttering financial accounts. In Backpage.com v. Dart, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compared a government official pressuring credit card companies to end services to a website as similar to suffocation, saying it was like “killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him.” The Supreme Court has also seen the dangers of financial companies policing speakers at the behest of the government, noting in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo that intermediaries like financial companies won’t stand up for free expression because they “will often be less invested in the speaker’s message and thus less likely to risk the regulator’s ire.” But in both of these cases, the government pressure was overt and coercive, triggering the First Amendment protections for the speakers involved.

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The case of SPLC is more ambiguous but no less troubling. As of now, there is no public evidence that the government contacted Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity directly. Instead, these financial giants are justifying their decisions by pointing to their own terms of service, which they can write and amend as they see fit and which don’t trigger the same First Amendment concerns.

But the ethical and societal concerns are just as important. Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity are punishing a lawful nonprofit organization that hasn’t been convicted of any wrongdoing. These companies are under no obligation to shut off SPLC donations at this time. The San Francisco Foundation, which also oversees donor-advised funds, has promised to continue sending DAFs to SPLC, noting, “we are guided by our values and by our donors, not shifting political winds.” 

The result of Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity’s decisions could be devastating for the SPLC, which will have fewer resources available to fight this politicized prosecution. Regardless of how one feels about the SPLC, we should all object to weaponizing the financial system this way.

This is a problem across the ideological spectrum. The SPLC has itself championed the idea that DAFs should stop the flow of donations to conservative nonprofit organizations it alleges promote hate and racial violence. Pressuring financial intermediaries to advance a political agenda when no court has weighed the merits of a case is no more appropriate in those cases than it is in this one.

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What is particularly ironic about this moment is that President Donald Trump himself has spoken out against financial exclusion used as a political weapon, going so far as to sign an executive order against debanking last year that attempted to stop “politicized or unlawful debanking.” But under his administration, one of the country’s most prominent civil rights organizations now faces a sudden constriction of its funding channels. 

A financial system that shutters or blocks the accounts of advocacy organizations that have not been convicted of any wrongdoing is not neutral. It is a system that can be used to sideline communities and activists — without ever stepping into a courtroom.

The post Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

US CDC personnel are reportedly meeting ship in Canary Islands to accompany Americans on a flight to Nebraska

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reportedly sending personnel to the Canary Islands to meet the cruise ship affected by the hantavirus outbreak, with plans to accompany American passengers back to the US on a chartered flight and place them into quarantine in Nebraska.

An additional CDC team is already headed to Nebraska, according to unnamed sources who spoke with CNN. The sources indicated that passengers are expected to undergo quarantine measures there to help prevent any possible spread of the virus. Nebraska is home to both the federally supported National Quarantine Unit and the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.

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The combined institute will retain the Stanford HAI name and be helmed by computer scientist James Landay. Co-founder Fei-Fei Li takes on a new university-wide role as Special Advisor on AI and joins John Hennessy as co-chair of the advisory council.

May 8, 2026 — As AI opens up new opportunities for research and education at Stanford, the university is organizing to meet the moment. Stanford University is merging its two flagship AI and data science organizations into a single institute, to be led by computer scientist James Landay.

From left: James Landay will lead the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, while John Hennessy and Fei-Fei Li will serve as co-chairs of the advisory council. Credit for photots: Andrew Brodhead, Linda A. Cicero, Drew Kelly.

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the Stanford Data Science initiative will combine under the Stanford HAI name, with Landay continuing as Denning Director. University leaders believe the human-centered focus is critical to the future of technology. It is reflected in the broad sweep of faculty involved – from engineering to medicine to the humanities and more.

Former Stanford president John Hennessy and HAI founding director Fei-Fei Li will serve as co-chairs of the institute’s advisory council. Li will also take on a new university-wide role as Special Advisor on AI to President Jonathan Levin.

The merger combines HAI’s network of more than 400 scholars, extensive industry affiliates program, and $60 million in cumulative grant funding with Stanford Data Science’s high-performance Marlowe computing cluster and early scholar fellowship program. Levin describes the new Stanford HAI as “the front door for AI at Stanford.”

Much of that capacity has been built through donor investment – endowed professorships, the Data Science Scholars program and the HAI Graduate Fellowship program that train early-career researchers, and seed and scale-up research grants funding projects across the university.

“The merged organization creates a community of scholars whose research touches powerfully on every aspect of AI, its applications, and implications,” Levin said, “and the human-centered focus provides a north star for the institute.”

Landay has spent three decades working in what’s now called human-centered computing. His 1990s design software SILK foreshadowed tools like Figma and Canva; his UbiFit project in the early 2000s anticipated the Fitbit and Apple Watch. In 2024, he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.

“This technology is changing everything,” said Landay, who is also the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering. “To have real impact in this moment, we need to adapt. This is about shaping how AI affects people, communities, and society – with that human-centered perspective at the core of everything we do.”

Opportunities Unlocked

AI is beginning to open up research frontiers across the campus. Stanford astronomers use machine learning to spot new exoplanets and model early-universe physics. Neuroscientists build models that predict brain activity. Historians run natural language processing over archival collections to surface patterns in how societies communicate. And education researchers test tutoring systems that adapt to individual learners and support teachers in classrooms.

“Data science and AI share the same mathematical foundations and computational infrastructure, each pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with data,” said David Studdert, vice provost and dean of research. “Bringing them together under one roof will accelerate research and unlock opportunities that neither of the two organizations could have accessed alone.”

Two Programs, One Roof

HAI, founded in 2019 by Li, former Stanford provost John Etchemendy, computer scientist Chris Manning, and Landay, has grown into a multidisciplinary hub spanning research, education, and policy. It was founded on the principle that Stanford could play a leading role in developing AI technology and applications, and also in leading discussions on what it means to be fully human in an age of machine intelligence. HAI runs the Congressional Boot Camp on AI for policymakers and centers studying foundation models, the digital economy, the science of intelligence, and ambient intelligence for aging in place. It launched fellowship programs for early career scholars, hired junior and senior faculty, developed executive and policy education programs, and produces the annual AI Index.

Stanford Data Science, launched and led by Emmanuel Candès, the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences, built out research centers in sustainability, astrophysics, causal science, neuroscience, and other fields; created interdisciplinary graduate student fellowships; recruited faculty members in partnership with collaborating departments; and spearheaded the establishment of the Marlowe cluster. Guido Imbens, the Applied Econometrics Professor and professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, served as faculty director for the past year and led the transition team with Landay and Li before returning earlier this year to focus on his teaching and research.

Candès will become an associate director of Stanford HAI, focused on computational resources. Etchemendy will continue as a senior fellow and advisor.

Built on Openness

Stanford HAI will organize its work around three pillars: advancing AI and data science for discovery across fields, transforming education from K-12 through lifelong learners, and examining and shaping AI’s societal impact through evidence-based research.

This comprehensive approach ensures the university can influence AI development across foundational algorithms, real-world applications, economic analysis, and governance frameworks. The institute will also partner with global organizations to extend its human-centered approach beyond Stanford.

Landay says Stanford HAI’s defining commitment will be openness: open science, open-source code, open datasets, and open education.

Openness has shaped the field before. ImageNet, the labeled image database Li helped create, is widely credited with catalyzing modern deep learning. Open-source code and libraries like FlashAttention democratized AI development. And open science publication subjects results to scrutiny that closed industry work often lacks.

“What makes Stanford’s approach impactful is our commitment to operating as an open community,” said Landay. “We publish in open forums, we champion open research, we make knowledge accessible. That’s what differentiates universities from the frontier AI companies dominating artificial intelligence today.”

Landay is now working to define what “human-centered AI” means in practice – pressing researchers to design for and weigh impact on users, communities, and society from a project’s inception through to its development, deployment, and maintenance phases.

New Co-Chairs and Role

Hennessy, who co-founded the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, will also serve as a Stanford HAI special advisor, in addition to his role on the advisory council.

“This is the most important effort for Stanford, and I am happy to help it succeed,” Hennessy said. “AI will evolve in ways we can’t predict, but the principles guiding our work – openness, excellence, human-centeredness – will be enduring.”

Li’s co-chair role is separate from her new university-wide appointment advising President Levin, which will span research, partnerships, education, and student careers across all seven Stanford schools. She will retain her title as Stanford HAI’s founding director and senior fellow.

“AI is transforming not only technology, but also the way we pursue scientific discovery, learn and educate, and serve society,” Li said. “It is a historical opportunity and responsibility of Stanford to rise to the occasion.”

The new institute will harness team science – spanning Stanford’s seven schools and partners across sectors – to tackle AI’s toughest challenges while preserving what universities do best: pursue fundamental questions, train the next generation, and serve the public good.

“This is not just a stronger institute,” Landay said. “It is a new model for how a university organizes AI and data science to have real impact in the world.”

Source: Stanford University

The post Stanford Merges AI and Data Science Efforts Under Single Institute appeared first on HPCwire.

The US secretary of state met the Italian prime minister in Rome on Friday at a moment of unusual strain between Trump and Italy, driven largely by the war with Iran. Rubio called the meeting with Pope Leo 'cordial and important' and said he had explained the US position on Iran, in a fence-mending visit to Rome after sharp disagreements over the US-Israel war in Iran and Trump’s criticisms of the pontiff

• Middle East crisis live

Workshop sponsored by National Science Foundation and National AI Research Resource attracts faculty, students from Ohio and beyond

COLUMBUS, Ohio, May 8, 2026 — Across the United States, higher education institutions are navigating the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, as faculty and students assess how to effectively incorporate machine learning, data analytics, large language models, and other AI tools into their classroom instruction and research.

Ayanna Howard giving her keynote speech at the National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS Regional Workshop hosted by OSC.

To discuss emerging best practices and spotlight national resources available for academia, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) hosted a National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS Regional Workshop on AI April 14-15, 2026, at The Ohio State University that attracted nearly 100 faculty, administrators, and students.

The free event, sponsored by the NSF ACCESS program and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), is part of a regional series based on the NAIRR Pilot’s AI Unlocked: Empowering Higher Ed through Research and Discovery workshop. The University of Colorado Boulder, the leader of an NSF ACCESS project on which OSC serves as collaborator, was instrumental in organizing the workshop opportunity.

“As a member of NSF ACCESS, OSC was pleased to provide a forum that could help educate researchers, students, and technical staff in higher education institutions about the growing number of AI resources available through federal programs such as NAIRR and ACCESS, which can support new teaching or research initiatives,” said David Hudak, executive director of OSC.

AI experts from institutions across the Midwest—Ohio State, University of Kentucky, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Cincinnati, Purdue University, Ohio University, and Case Western Reserve University—gave talks or led panel discussions on topics such as developing campus AI services, supporting AI in clinical research, and weighing issues of privacy, equity, and ethics when using AI tools.

Ayanna Howard, dean of Ohio State’s College of Engineering and the author of the book “Rebooting the Machines: A new human vision for artificial intelligence,” gave Tuesday’s keynote lecture. Howard, who has conducted research in the robotics field for more than 30 years, discussed human-AI interactions, perceptions, and behaviors, as well as the implications for incorporating AI into real-world environments.

Timothy Huerta, professor of family medicine, chief research information officer, and associate dean for research information technology at Ohio State’s College of Medicine and Wexner Medical Center, gave Wednesday’s keynote lecture. Huerta discussed how researchers should consider the strengths and limitations of using large language models (LLMs) in writing and data analysis, stressing that LLMs should support human judgement and not replace it.

Workshop sessions also covered how faculty are using AI to solve specific research problems, such as designing therapeutics as countermeasures to pesticide and chemical nerve agent exposure, developing custom crop management strategies tailored to individual agricultural operations, and analyzing millions of images of living creatures to build a more detailed tree of life.

In addition, speakers discussed how their universities are creating comprehensive programs to integrate AI into the student educational experience, guiding faculty on how to incorporate AI into teaching and clinical research, and creating policies and procedures to ensure the safe, ethical, and legal adoption of AI tools.

OSC highlighted its wide range of AI resources and services, including new hardware and software offerings, as well as its efforts to train more Ohio students and cyberinfrastructure professionals on how to use AI in their research and technology workflows.

The event encouraged participants to leverage the federal NSF ACCESS and NAIRR resources to advance their AI research and teaching, and provided guidance on how to get started.

Attendees also had the opportunity to participate in OSC’s annual Research Symposium, held in conjunction with the workshop, to learn how faculty, students, and industry in Ohio are using OSC’s HPC resources to advance research, education, and innovation – including in the fast-growing area of AI.

About OSC

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the services essential to making extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required for 21st century jobs.

Source: Andrea Gibson, OSC

The post Ohio Supercomputer Center Hosts NSF ACCESS Workshop on AI in Higher Education appeared first on HPCwire.

The Trump administration announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.

Apple and Intel have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement (paywalled; alternative source) for Intel to manufacture some chips used in Apple devices, after more than a year of talks and pressure from the Trump administration. It's still unclear which Apple products would use Intel-made chips, but the deal would mark a major potential win for Intel's foundry ambitions and give Apple another manufacturing option beyond TSMC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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President Donald Trump has insisted that his proposed White House ballroom will be paid for with private donations. Now, Senate Republicans have offered legislation that would spend $1 billion of taxpayers’ money on what they say are security measures for a White House modernization project, which includes the ballroom. 

Senators, including Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced legislation May 4 that would fund the White House security projects. That provision, part of a reconciliation bill, could pass the Senate on a simple majority vote rather than a 60-vote supermajority. The proposal is awaiting a vote.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, reshared a post with a budget breakdown for the bill. 

"The American people are weathering $5 gas, $6 diesel, and skyrocketing fertilizer costs because of the war of choice in Iran," Kaptur wrote May 5 on X. "And now the GOP want you to pay $1 Billion for a ballroom."

Other Democrats joined the chorus. 

"Republicans are on a different planet than American families," wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a May 5 X post. "Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom."

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., wrote May 5 on X: "Trump said, ‘Not one penny is being used from the federal government’ to fund his ballroom boondoggle. True, in the sense that $1 billion is a lot more than one penny! Another GOP billion-dollar bailout for the gaudy gilded king, paid for courtesy of the American commoners—the rest of us minus the billionaires who pay no taxes."

Grassley’s bill doesn’t say the $1 billion will be used for building the ballroom; it says the money can be used only for security aspects of the East Wing Modernization project, which includes the ballroom. However, experts told PolitiFact it would be difficult to designate project features as purely for security or purely for construction.

A Kaptur spokesperson told PolitiFact that the White House’s support for taxpayer funding amounts to a 180-degree flip after more than a year of Trump saying that no taxpayer funds would be used to construct the ballroom.

Trump’s ballroom size, costs

In October 2025, Trump launched his quest for a White House ballroom by demolishing the White House’s East Wing. Trump said the 90,000-square-foot ballroom would seat 999 people, far larger than any room in the current White House complex. The unprecedented demolition and construction drew a lawsuit by a historic preservation group because the project lacked  approval from Congress or the agency that approves construction of federal buildings. 

Although the National Capital Planning Commission approved the project April 2, a judicial ruling said it still needs congressional approval.

The White House first said the project would cost $200 million and would be privately funded. Trump later upped that figure to $400 million. Pledges came from individuals and corporations such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, according to a White House list.

Following an April 25 shooting inside the hotel hosting the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that Trump was attending, he said the event was proof that the White House needs a secure ballroom. Some Republicans quickly agreed.

On April 28, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Katie Britt, R-Ala., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., introduced a bill authorizing $400 million in federal funding for the "design, construction, and other appropriate expenses to complete the East Wing Modernization Project, including a secure State ballroom."

Construction of the new White House Ballroom is seen from a window in the East Room, May 4, 2026, at the White House in Washington. (AP)

What the bill says about the ballroom and security features

Grassley’s legislation says federal funding would support the U.S. Secret Service for security adjustments and upgrades" relating to the "East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features."

The legislation also specifies that the funds can’t be used for "non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project." It doesn’t spell out what is a "non-security" element.

It defines the term "East Wing Modernization Project" as the building plan the National Capital Planning commission approved April 2. That project also includes building a new colonnade, adding a new office suite for the First Lady and replacing a movie theater.

The bill did not specify the security adjustments and upgrades that the legislation would fund, but Trump and the Justice Department have offered some examples of planned security. 

In a legal filing last month, the Justice Department said the East Wing project would include "missile resistant steel columns, Military-grade venting, drone-proof ceilings and bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass;" which it says will protect the main White House and West Wing as well.

The filing also mentions "bomb shelters, a state of the art hospital and medical facilities, Top Secret military installations, structures, and equipment." 

We asked the White House how the $1 billion would be used on the East Wing project and about plans to separate taxpayer money so it’s not used to fund the ballroom.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle’s reply didn’t answer those questions. 

"Congress has rightly recognized the need for these funds," Ingle said. "Due in part to the recent assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the proposal would provide the United States Secret Service with the resources they need to fully and completely harden the White House complex, in addition to the many other critical missions for the USSS." 

The White House told PolitiFact that the ballroom would still be funded by private donations.

Can taxpayer funded security features be separated from ballroom construction? 

An architectural expert told PolitiFact that separating security features allowed under the legislation from the ballroom would be tricky.

"Security measures must be integrated into the structure and envelope of the building," said Sara Bronin, an architect and a law professor at the George Washington University Law School. "Unless Congress places clear constraints on the way this money will be spent, taxpayers may end up footing most of the bill."

Steven Smith, an Arizona State University political scientist who studies Congress, said lawmakers have tools to scrutinize spending, including holding hearings that demand detailed plans and aggressive oversight of all project contracts and developments.

The question is whether Congress — especially under the control of Republicans who are reluctant to rein in Trump — is willing to exercise oversight.

"We have already learned from the president’s sleight of hand in juggling money to bring airport security workers back to work that, to him, all federally appropriated funds are fungible and can be used for whatever he wants," said Donald Wolfensberger, a former staff director of the House Rules Committee. 

Our ruling

Kaptur said Republicans "want you to pay $1 Billion for a ballroom." 

The Republican proposal said funds are only for security upgrades at the East Wing modernization project, which includes the ballroom. It’s unclear how much of the $1 billion would go explicitly toward the ballroom.

The bill said "non-security" elements cannot be funded through the bill. But experts said it’s hard to designate project features as purely for security or purely for construction. For example, the Trump administration has said the ballroom would have "missile resistant steel columns" and ballistic and blast proof glass.

We rate the statement Mostly True.

RELATED: Column: Why a correspondents’ dinner at a White House ballroom could endanger press freedom

• Previous high for Category 1 had been $10,990

• Resale tickets for final listed from $8,000 to $11.5m

• New Jersey reps pen letter to Infantino about ticketing

Fifa tripled the price of its best available tickets to the World Cup final, making $32,970 seats available on Thursday for the 19 July match at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

The governing body listed those seats as Front Category 1 on its sales site.

Researchers say the findings raise questions about what happens to our brains and patterns if we depend too much on AI.

Network lawyers in a legal motion strongly pushed back against the FCC’s investigation into The View talkshow

Lawyers representing an ABC station have accused the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of punishing the network for political purposes in a strongly worded attack on the Trump-controlled commission’s investigation into the top-rated talkshow, The View.

In a legal motion filed on Thursday, KTRK-TV, a Houston-based local television station owned by ABC, pushed back strongly against the FCC investigation, accusing the purportedly independent agency of taking actions that “threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly”.

US energy department says 13.5kg of uranium taken from reactor in Caracas – a fraction of the 408kg held by Tehran

Donald Trump has succeeded in removing a country’s stash of highly enriched uranium – although that country is not Iran.

On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that “thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership” 13.5kg (about 30 pounds) of uranium had been removed from a legacy research reactor in Venezuela.

NASA's Apollo 17 crew reported seeing three mysterious dots and sparks that resembled fireworks, according to new files released by the Pentagon.

Federal and local lawmakers in Puerto Rico, as well as civil rights and advocacy organizations, have called for investigations after ProPublica reported how a federal probe into a drugs-for-votes scheme in Puerto Rico prisons got quashed after the 2024 elections.  

The territory’s representative in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, called on members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to join him in a push for a congressional probe into the matter. 

“The report published today by ProPublica details facts that no elected official — whether in Puerto Rico or in Washington — can ignore,” he said in a statement in Spanish.

The same day, Rep. Héctor Ferrer Santiago, a Popular Democratic Party member, introduced a resolution in the territory’s House ordering its Committee on Public Security to investigate, calling the allegations “serious!” and saying the House has “an inescapable duty to investigate.” 

Their requests came the day ProPublica published its investigation detailing how prosecutors had uncovered a drugs-for-votes scheme being run by a violent gang in Puerto Rican prisons and were deep into looking at whether now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón or her campaign were involved. In the days following President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, as prosecutors prepared the indictment, they were told by supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico to exclude the voting-related charges against inmates and prison staff, four sources with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. Then, once Trump took office, they were told to abandon the probe into potential political ties entirely, the sources said.

González-Colón, a longtime Republican and member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has declined repeated requests for interviews by ProPublica. In a statement Tuesday, she denied any wrongdoing and said she “has stood firmly against corruption” throughout her career and political campaigns. 

“I categorically reject any attempt to link me to unlawful conduct,” she wrote. González-Colón has not been charged with any crime.

She told local news outlets Wednesday she doesn’t think any investigation into the matter is warranted. “There is nothing here,” she said in Spanish. “And, if they have research from the past four years, let them do it, let them bring it to a successful conclusion. But I have absolutely nothing to do with the things that are pointed out there, much less my campaign.”

On Wednesday, leaders of the Puerto Rican Independence Party also called for an investigation. Sen. María de Lourdes Santiago, vice president of the party, said on social media that the questions of partisan intervention in prison spaces should not be ignored considering their “severe implications.” 

Read More

Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme “Locked Up.” Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges.

Thomas Rivera Schatz, president of the Puerto Rico Senate and a member of González-Colón’s party, initially told local news outlets that government officials in Puerto Rico should investigate thoroughly. But at a press conference on Thursday, he backed away from that assertion, saying of ProPublica’s report: “I do not lend it any credibility whatsoever. … It appears to follow a specific editorial line — one directed against the Republican Party and against Trump.”

An indictment filed in December 2024, while Joe Biden was still president, charged 34 members of a gang, known as Group 31 or Los Tiburones, and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. Prosecutors also alleged that the gang made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences” and that the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections,” but included no charges related to the drugs-for-votes scheme.

Sources familiar with the investigation said gang leaders forced inmates to vote for González-Colón or face brutal beatings and being cut off from a supply of drugs. Many of the inmates are addicted to illicit drugs. Prosecutors said they had evidence that González-Colón had spoken with one of the prison gang leaders on WhatsApp during the primary campaign and were pursuing other potential ties when they were instructed not to look any further, people with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. 

González-Colón said in her statement that she engaged with all sectors of society during her campaign. “That included meeting with families of incarcerated individuals concerned about rehabilitation and reintegration, because public policy must be inclusive and responsive to every community,” she said. She did not address the allegation that she had talked with a gang leader directly. 

W. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since, told ProPublica that his office does not comment on open cases. While a couple of defendants in the drug and money laundering cases have taken plea agreements, most of the cases are still pending. 

“Given the ongoing nature of the case and the importance of maintaining the integrity of active matters, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further in a press setting,” Lymarie Llovet-Ayala, spokesperson for the office, said in an email Wednesday. Previously, she said that charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office.

As Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Congress —  a role similar to a U.S. representative — Hernández Rivera has the power to introduce and co-sponsor legislation and vote in committee, but is prohibited from voting on final passage of laws in the House. 

Hernández Rivera, a Democrat and member of the Popular Democratic Party, said he already has support from at least a couple of members from the House Judiciary Committee who are interested in starting the oversight process and are working on a draft letter requesting an investigation.

Political parties in Puerto Rico don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, they center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.

Hernández Rivera said the fact that the New Progressive Party has a stronghold on inmate votes is suspicious. “About the prisons in particular, it raises eyebrows from a statistical standpoint, the fact that 83% of inmates vote for the candidate of that party when no other place in Puerto Rico votes by those margins,” he said, citing a ProPublica tally of voter returns from the State Elections Commission’s website. By comparison, González-Colón won 41% of the overall vote in her victory in the five-way general election contest. 

“The issue here is more about whether the processes were followed and whether there was corruption in giving up the case,” Hernández Rivera said. 

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told ProPublica that while he didn’t yet know the details of the matter, he would support an investigation. He said the allegations aren’t surprising given the suspicions of election fraud across the U.S. and considering “today’s morals.” 

“I hope our committee or another committee does some investigating,” he said. 

Annette Martínez-Orabona, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico, said abandoning an investigation into a fraudulent voting scheme in prisons undermines the trust of those who believe in democracy. 

The ACLU is “advocating for full transparency about what happened with this investigation … what evidence was collected, and what was done with that evidence,” Martínez Orabona said in a written statement. 

The Power 4 Puerto Rico Coalition, a diaspora organization that advocates for more independence for the territory, said it wants answers from González-Colón and the U.S. Department of Justice. 

“Power 4 Puerto Rico calls for Congressional hearings to fully review what happened, who knew, and why the voting-related investigation did not proceed,” Erica González Martínez, director of the group, wrote in a statement. “The Puerto Rican people deserve the truth.”

The post Puerto Rico Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

ABC filed a petition with the FCC claiming that the agency's scrutiny of "The View" threatens to "chill critical protected speech."

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.

Pearson called the gerrymandered maps a “political lynching” that “set our state back over 150 years.”

Trump’s Larger Project

Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.

Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina all called special legislative sessions — as explicitly ordered by Trump — to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.

“The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. “If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.”

In short, as Levitt put it, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

As other states follow Tennessee’s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.

In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting — but there’s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.

“The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,” Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate.

Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because “the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.”

According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.

“Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,” she said.

Meanwhile, Democratic redistricting efforts in Virginia were dealt a blow on Friday, when they were struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. Voters had approved in a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map, but the court’s ruling hands Republicans a fierce electoral advantage.

After Thursday’s vote, Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda, surrounded by protesters who had gathered to decry the racist gerrymandering.

“We saw a time like this, in this building before,” Jones told his fellow lawmakers earlier this week during the unprecedented redistricting special session. “If you study Reconstruction. We had Black lawmakers after the Civil War, then from the end of the 1800s to the 1960s, we had no Black folks here” — meaning the statehouse.

On Thursday afternoon, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the new congressional map, which is likely to be the first of several legal efforts against the rushed, conniving, and unrepentantly racist gerrymander.

The post Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow appeared first on The Intercept.

May is typically the worst month for allergies. To prepare, I consulted allergists to find out how we can allergy-proof our homes.

NEW YORK and SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 8, 2026 — NVIDIA and IREN Limited have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate deployment of next-generation AI infrastructure.

Credit: Shutterstock

As part of the partnership NVIDIA and IREN intend to support deployment of up to 5 gigawatts of NVIDIA DSX-aligned AI infrastructure across IREN’s global data center pipeline over time. The companies will collaborate on deployment of NVIDIA accelerated compute in DSX AI factories to expand access to AI-native, startup and enterprise customers. As part of the partnership, IREN issued to NVIDIA a five-year right to purchase up to 30 million shares of ordinary stock at an exercise price of $70 per share, resulting in a right to invest up to $2.1 billion, subject to certain conditions including regulatory.

The partnership is intended to accelerate deployment of large-scale AI factories by combining NVIDIA’s DSX AI factory architecture with IREN’s expertise across power, land, data centers, GPU deployment and infrastructure operations.

Future deployments are expected to focus on IREN’s 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas, which the companies expect to serve as a flagship deployment for NVIDIA’s DSX architecture.

“AI factories are becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Deploying these systems at scale requires deep integration across the full stack — compute, networking, software, power and operations. IREN brings the scale and infrastructure expertise to help accelerate the buildout of next-generation AI infrastructure globally. Together, we are building for the age of AI.”

“This partnership combines NVIDIA’s AI systems and architecture leadership with IREN’s expertise across power, land, data centers, GPU deployment and infrastructure operations,” said Daniel Roberts, cofounder and co-CEO of IREN. “Together, we believe we can accelerate deployment of AI infrastructure and expand access to compute for AI-native and enterprise customers globally.”

About IREN

IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud provider, delivering large-scale data centers and GPU clusters for AI training and inference. IREN’s platform is underpinned by its expansive portfolio of grid-connected land and power in renewable-rich regions across North America, Europe and APAC.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.

Source: NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and IREN Partner on 5GW AI Infrastructure Deployment Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

MATTHEW MCKAY
Staff Reporter

Since early December, an anonymous Instagram account going by the username @christiana_towers_glazer has been posting videos about the Christiana Towers. 

The comedic nature of the videos propelled them to considerable viewership, with clips routinely gaining tens of thousands of views on Instagram. 

“We were inspired to make the account because of our love for the towers,” one of the multiple anonymous account owners said. 

The Christiana Towers, which have stood since 1972, have remained empty since 2019. Serving as dorms for nearly 50 years prior to the closure, the buildings were abandoned as a result of increased maintenance and operational costs, which were deemed unsustainable. 

“I think [the towers] are pretty cool,” said Vincent Evola, a sophomore computer engineering student who follows the account. “But I think it’s a little concerning that someone has such extreme opinions about a building.” 

The towers have long been a subject of debate among students. While some criticize their aging infrastructure and distance from central campus, others appreciate their community atmosphere and distinctive architecture. 

“With flashing lights of radio towers and endless windows, they’re kind of hard to miss,” reads a 2019 Delaware Today article highlighting the towers. “Like a time capsule, East and West Tower show us what UD imagined for its future.”

For the account’s creator, that distinctiveness is exactly what makes them interesting.

“Our bond to the towers is primarily due to the juxtaposition of having two large brutalist/industrialist/modernist buildings smack in the middle of a mainly classical/georgian style campus, as well as the fact that they don’t fit in with the scale of any other building in the area at all,” the account owner said via DM. “To those who say the buildings should be demolished, we would disagree and say the towers should be renovated, overall, it would be cheaper than building new dorms in their place.”

The account owner emphasized the towers’ unique value to campus, which many students agree with.

“I think it’s really funny that this person is really dedicated to the Christiana Towers,” Abby Biederman, a sophomore pre-veterinary medicine major who also follows the account, said. “It made me think like, yeah, why aren’t we using the towers for housing and why are they still there?”

According to the creator, the goal was simple. 

“We also figured it would bring some joy to people,” the anonymous account owner said. 

Many followers enjoy the approach that the account has taken.

“Christiana Towers Glazers, keep doing your thing,” said Biederman. “Your edits are fire.” 
As the account continues to gain traction, and with demolition which was supposed to occur this past summer pushed back — the future of the towers still remains unclear and uncertain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said. Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is "a very real issue costing us time and money." "We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price," Kahle said. "We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives." "We are fortunate to have an active community that donates to the Archive, and we are also looking for help from hard drive manufacturers in these difficult times. We are always looking for more help," he added. "So far we have ways to work around these shortages, but it is a very real issue causing us time and money." The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and various other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of royalty free media, told 404 Media that the cost of storage has become a concern for the foundation's projects as well. "With over 65 million articles on Wikipedia alone, access to server and storage capacity is vital to us. We've certainly seen price increases since the end of 2025. These price increases are of concern to us, as with every other player in the industry. We see the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told us. "The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, and as such how we allocate budget is very carefully considered. We maintain our own data centers to serve our users from all over the world. We're putting workarounds in place where we can, mainly involving being smart with how we prioritize investment in hardware, building in flexibility as well as extending the life of existing hardware where possible." Western Digital, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives and other storage systems, said that it has essentially sold out of its 2026 inventory to enterprise clients, many of which run data centers. Micron, which made RAM and SSDs under the brand name Crucial, has exited the consumer market altogether because "AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an exclusive interview with CBS News, former reality star Spencer Pratt addressed his inexperience in politics as he runs for L.A. mayor.

May 8, 2026 — A powerful new suite of hardware will enhance University of Nebraska researchers’ ability to conduct cutting-edge science, particularly work involving artificial intelligence and machine learning.

From left: Derek Weitzel, Garhan Attebury, Adam Caprez and Hongfeng Yu in the Holland Computing Center’s Lincoln site, located at the Schorr Center. Credit: Cheyenne Rowe, UNL Office of Research and Innovation.

With a nearly $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the Holland Computing Center recently deployed PLUMAGE, a flexible graphics processing unit-based cyberinfrastructure that will benefit researchers across the disciplinary spectrum, from computer scientists and engineers to scholars in business, architecture, the social sciences and more.

PLUMAGE – which stands for Promoting Learning Using Mixed Advanced GPU Environments –adds to Holland’s already comprehensive suite of computing and storage resources, expanding a cyberinfrastructure system that researchers across the university system have relied on for years. The new deployment will help NU researchers keep pace with the explosion of AI and other data-intensive research by providing cutting-edge GPUs, which are the specialized computer chips that process vast numbers of calculations in parallel.

“All of these new AI and machine learning services depend on GPU technology to be able to do the work in an efficient manner, otherwise it would take hundreds or thousands of years to generate a model,” said Adam Caprez, principal investigator and associate director of research development and engagement at HCC.

Though supercomputing is traditionally tied to areas like computer science, physics, chemistry and bioinformatics, it’s now gaining traction in every field, creating a need for additional cyberinfrastructure.

“There are disciplines that had very few computing needs before – maybe they just did everything on their desktop – and now, all of a sudden, they are finding that they need these huge resources to do things with AI, creating a land rush,” Caprez said. “It’s very important to have resources like PLUMAGE, but also the personnel and expertise to help people use them. Holland has this complete ecosystem.”

The research team also includes Hongfeng Yu, HCC director and professor of computing; Derek Weitzel, research associate professor of computing; and Garhan Attebury, Holland’s associate director of research cyberinfrastructure.

PLUMAGE is now available at no cost to NU researchers, and access can be arranged for collaborators and users outside the NU system. Interested parties can register for an account on the Holland Computing Center website or contact the center for additional information. For general information about news, workshops and trainings offered by Holland, NU researchers are encouraged to join the center’s mailing list.

PLUMAGE features some of NVIDIA’s most advanced accelerators for AI and high-performance computing, including six NVIDIA H200 GPUs and 52 NVIDIA L40S GPUs. This new hardware strengthens Holland’s position as Nebraska’s premier academic supercomputing resource and distinguishes it nationally by linking local cluster resources with cyberinfrastructure networks across the U.S. via dual access pathways.

One mode of access is through Swan, Holland’s flagship computing cluster, which uses a traditional, scheduler-based batch system where jobs are assigned at fixed times or when resources are available. The other route is through the National Research Platform, an NSF initiative that provides high-performance computing resources using a dynamic, interactive approach called Kubernetes, which continuously manages the workload across a cluster.

PLUMAGE’s flexibility to shift GPUs between these two systems is a unique setup enabling researchers to use the method best suited for a given project.

“One reason NSF funded this project is that it’s a novel idea. The design of PLUMAGE bridges our local computing environment and the broader national cyberinfrastructure, which is critical because modern research increasingly depends on a connected ecosystem,” Yu said.

Caprez said he and other Holland personnel are focused on spreading the word about PLUMAGE and other center resources, including tailored training and support. Though the center was established in 2007, some ampus researchers remain unaware of its extensive tools. Increased visibility is crucial as the evolving research landscape requires scholars from diverse fields to leverage supercomputing and AI capabilities. The center is committed to paving the way for these new users.

“I know people can be intimidated when using a supercomputer,” Caprez said. “But the Holland Computing Center is more than just hardware. It’s also the personnel, expertise and a whole package that’s available to help researchers and enable usage. We’re happy to meet with people, learn about their research, and provide any needed assistance so they can make effective use of the resources to accelerate their research.”

PLUMAGE is funded through the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure program under NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Award No. 2430234.

Source: Tiffany Lee, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The post University of Nebraska Deploys NSF-Funded ‘PLUMAGE’ GPU Infrastructure for AI Research appeared first on HPCwire.

If you're tempted by T-Mobile's offers but not sure which plan is best for you, we have recommendations.

DELFT, Netherlands, May 8, 2026 — Exactly five years after its launch, Graduate Ventures is celebrating its 80th investment. The milestone backing goes to FrostByte, a Delft startup whose technology makes it possible to build quantum computers at greater scale. The investment is part of a 1.3 million euro funding round, alongside Innovation Quarter, Paeonia Group, UNIIQ and an angel investor.

Credit: Graduate Ventures

Since its founding in 2021, Graduate Ventures has invested in 79 startups from the ecosystem of TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Erasmus MC. The portfolio ranges from AI companies such as Eddy Grid and Iconic Works to deeptech players like QuantWare and climate tech names including Hydryx and Back to Battery.

Several portfolio companies have since secured follow-on funding from international investors, expanded into foreign markets and positioned themselves as category leaders in their respective fields. This demonstrates Graduate Ventures’ ability not only to invest early, but to build lasting value into subsequent stages of growth.

Control Electronics for Quantum Computers

The 80th name in this ambitious portfolio is FrostByte, a Delft-based quantum startup developing chips that solve a critical bottleneck in quantum computing. As these systems grow larger, connecting and controlling all their components becomes increasingly difficult.

FrostByte’s solution is to move part of the control architecture closer to the core of the computer, rather than keeping it on the outside.This makes systems easier to scale, smaller, and more power efficient, which makes the technology relevant to virtually every organisation working on quantum computers worldwide. It is enabled by cryogenic chips, which operate at extremely low temperatures.

‍World-leading Expertise in Cryo-CMOS

FrostByte is led by founders James Kroll (CEO) and Luc Enthoven (CTO), with scientific support from Fabio Sebastiano and Masoud Babaie. Both advisors are internationally recognised pioneers in the field, bringing decades of research experience that is now being translated into commercial applications.

“FrostByte is exactly the kind of company that shows what the Dutch knowledge economy is capable of producing,” says Auke van den Hout, Managing Partner at Graduate Ventures. “This investment fits within Graduate Ventures’ broader strategy of backing key technologies such as quantum, AI and climate tech, where fundamental research is translated directly into industrial application.”

‘The Perfect Investor for a Deeptech Company’

“For a deeptech player like us, Graduate is a uniquely well-suited investor,” said James Kroll, CEO and co-founder of FrostByte. “They understand what it takes to commercialise technology rooted in decades of academic research. On top of that, the access to their network of seasoned entrepreneurs is exactly what you need at this stage, particularly for a company operating at the intersection of science and industrial scale-up.”

FrostByte is a spin-off from TU Delft and QuTech, which is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading institutes in quantum technology. Graduate previously also invested in QuantWare, another QuTech spin-off, which has since grown into one of the world’s major suppliers of superconducting quantum chips, with customers in more than 20 countries.

On May 5, QuantWare announced a successful, oversubscribed follow-on round of 152 million euro, led by a strong international consortium. Graduate, an early backer of QuantWare, again participated in this round.

‍Eighty Investments in Five Years

Graduate Ventures was founded in 2021 by alumni of Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus MC and TU Delft. The fund invests from a 10 million euro pre-seed fund and a 50 million euro seed fund. With 80 investments in five years, Graduate Ventures ranks among the most active early-stage investors in the Netherlands.

Beyond capital, the fund’s strength lies in its network of more than 200 experienced entrepreneurs and investors who make their expertise and network available to the founders in the portfolio. Driven by this “Giving Back” culture, Graduate has facilitated more than 600 concrete connections between founders and the supporter network.

‍More from HPCwire: QuantWare Raises $176M as It Builds KiloFab and Targets Utility-Scale Quantum Processors

Source: Graduate Ventures

The post Graduate Ventures Invests in FrostByte as Quantum Startup Targets Scaling Bottleneck appeared first on HPCwire.

‘Unprecedented operation’ under way to receive MV Hondius off Tenerife to assess and repatriate those onboard

• What is hantavirus?
• Where did the cruise ship hantavirus come from and what happens next?

The evacuation of the hantavirus-stricken MV Hondius cruise ship must be completed within 24 hours of the vessel reaching Tenerife on Sunday or face days or even weeks of delay because of bad weather, authorities in the Canary Islands warned on Friday.

The Dutch-flagged vessel, which was sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde, is due to arrive in the Spanish archipelago this weekend, triggering what Spain’s health minister has termed an “unprecedented operation” to receive, assess and repatriate the 149 passengers and crew members onboard.

Maps, recently approved by voters, would have helped Democrats gain up to four new seats in US House

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Virginia’s supreme court on Friday ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.

Diplomatic efforts continuing despite fighting in and around contested strait of Hormuz in recent days

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said that Washington is expecting a response from Iran on Friday to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.

In recent days there have been the biggest flare-ups in fighting in and around the contested strait of Hormuz since the informal truce began. The rise in violence followed Donald Trump’s announcement – then rapid pause – of a new naval mission aimed at opening the strategic waterway.

The top sports streaming services for you depend on your favorite sports. We've analyzed the options, covering everything from the NBA playoffs and MLB to soccer and UFC.

INNSBRUCK, Austria, May 8, 2026 — AQT has unveiled the LYNX Series, a new generation of 19-inch rack-mounted quantum computers that has officially achieved a record-breaking Quantum Volume (QV) of 32768.

The LYNX Series represents the culmination of years of research into high-fidelity gate operations and advanced trapped-ion control. The LYNX Series integrates AQT’s proprietary gate developments, significantly reducing the sensitivity to laser frequency noise and laser phase noise and allowing for deeper, more complex circuits in a standard data center environment.

“With the LYNX Series, we aren’t just increasing qubit counts; we are perfecting control and reducing sensitivity,” said Dr. Thomas Monz, CEO of AQT. “Achieving this new Quantum Volume benchmark proves that our trapped-ion architecture is the most viable path for real-world industrial applications, from chemistry to complex logistics.”

Why Quantum Volume Matters

While qubit count is a frequent headline, Quantum Volume is a more holistic metric that accounts for gate fidelity, connectivity, and hardware stability. By reaching this new QV milestone, the LYNX Series ensures:

• Higher Algorithm Success Rates: users can run longer sequences of operations with minimal error.
• Seamless Integration: the series remains housed in a standard 19-inch rack, requiring no special cryogenic infrastructure beyond its internal cooling.
• Cloud Readiness: the LYNX Series will soon be available via the AQT Cloud and AQT partners.

Strengthening the European Ecosystem

This launch reinforces AQT’s commitment to European technological leadership. Developed and manufactured in Innsbruck, the LYNX Series provides European industries and research institutions with high-performance quantum assets that guarantee data sovereignty and security. The first units of the LYNX Series are scheduled for availability to select strategic partners in Q4 2026, with wider commercial availability following shortly after.

About AQT

AQT is a leading quantum computing hardware company based in Innsbruck, Austria. AQT builds general-purpose quantum computers based on trapped-ion technology. Focused on standardizing quantum hardware, AQT provides the world’s only rack-mounted quantum computer, bringing the power of the atom into the data centers of tomorrow.

Source: AQT

The post AQT Launches LYNX Series Trapped-Ion Quantum Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

CNET's gaming experts have deliberated and come up with the top PlayStation 5 games you can play right now, such as Astro Bot, Marathon and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

More than 12,000 people gave up their asylum claims or voluntarily departed the U.S. as ICE moved to cut cases short by sending asylum-seekers to third countries, a CBS News analysis found.

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

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement that the documents "have long fueled justified speculation — and it's time the American people see it for themselves."

The congressional redistricting referendum was passed by Virginia voters last month and would have given Democrats a more favorable map.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. expects to receive Iran's response to the draft agreement for ending the war "today at some point."

Longtime Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from That Privacy Guy's Alexander Hanff: Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched. This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4GB binary they did not request.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a look at what's new in May.

US secretary of state has been meeting Italian leader amid strained tensions over Iran

The European Commission also insisted that airlines must not charge customers extra fuel fees after they have already bought tickets, as the aviation sector feels the pain from high energy prices because of the Middle East war, AFP reported.

“Airlines may adapt their published fares to the situation, but adding a fuel surcharge to a ticket after it has been bought cannot be justified,” EU spokeswoman Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels.

The secretary of state held warm meetings with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Pope Leo XIV after the president’s repeated criticism of both leaders.

Roman Lavrynovych is one of three accused of arson attacks on a vehicle and two houses in London tied to the prime minister

A Ukrainian man has admitted setting fire to a car that once belonged to Keir Starmer for £3,000, after telling a court he had been being threatened by a “powerful” Russian-speaking man using the pseudonym El Money.

Roman Lavrynovych, 22, is accused, along with Stanislav Carpiuc and Petro Pochynok, of arson attacks on a vehicle and two houses in north London linked to the prime minister.

Hiring once again exceeded forecasts, with employers adding far more than the projected gains of 65,000.

Party makes gains in Portsmouth and Richmond upon Thames in local elections but loses a Scottish stronghold

• Elections 2026 – live updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

Ed Davey has sought to cast Liberal Democrat wins in England’s local elections as proof his party is best positioned to confront what he described as the “extreme populist change” offered by Reform UK and the Greens.

As Labour assessed a disastrous set of results, the Lib Dems could claim they had been able to fend off Reform challenges in areas including Portsmouth, where they made gains to seize the city council, which had been under no overall control.

Tumbler Ridge secondary school was site of February mass shooting in which nine were killed and dozens injured

The school that was the site of one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings will be torn down, officials have announced.

The decision to demolish the Tumbler Ridge secondary school came after meetings between the school board and survivors, family and community members, said the British Columbia premier, David Eby.

A system that thousands of schools and universities use was offline due to a cyberattack.

Train operator will become 11th national service returned to public ownership since Labour was elected in 2024

Great Western Railway will be nationalised in December, the government has announced.

The train service, which has been in private hands for 30 years, mainly run by First Group, will be the 11th train operator on the national railway brought back into public ownership.

One U.K. lawmaker says big election losses for the ruling Labour Party and its main rivals show the de-facto two-party system is "not just dying, it is dead."

In the game by Melbourne-based Beethoven and Dinosaur, you play as a teenage girl the night before moving to New York – drinking, skateboarding and getting into trouble, all soundtracked by 80s and 90s classics

When Johnny Galvatron was 14, his cousin gave him a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins’ seminal 1995 album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. For Galvatron, a rambunctious teenager in Geelong who defined himself by his musical taste, it was love at first spin. “I don’t think there’s a track like Tonight, Tonight from any other band,” he reminisces.

A song from the album plays at a critical moment in Mixtape, the second game from Galvatron’s Melbourne-based studio, Beethoven and Dinosaur. It’s a narrative adventure game about Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s American suburban town of Blue Moon Lagoon.

The gentle French garment is now as cursed as the infamous megacorp, which has accumulated $80m in government contracts in Australia alone

It’s taken me years to find a chore coat with a cut that flatters my big tits but, now that I finally own one, I want to incinerate it.

Such is the power of brand contamination; infamous data surveillance megacorp Palantir, has decided to bang a logo on a chore coat to sell as corporate merch.

Cloudflare plans to cut about 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,100 employees, as it restructures around an "agentic AI-first operating model." Reuters reports: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder Michelle Zatlyn said in a message to employees that the company was reimagining every team and function to operate in what they described as an agentic AI era. Cloudflare said the job cuts reflect a redesign of internal processes and roles, rather than a response to employee performance or short-term cost pressures. The company added that its own use of AI has increased more than sixfold over the past three months, prompting major changes in how teams operate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter was taken from her after she was subjected to parental competence psychometric tests

A Greenlandic woman whose newborn baby was forcibly removed by Danish authorities as a result of controversial parenting competency tests has won a landmark case in the high court ruling that their actions were illegal.

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter Zammi was taken away from her when she was two hours old and placed in foster care in November 2024 after Kronvold was subjected to so-called FKU (parental competence) psychometric tests. At the time she was told that the test was to see if she was “civilised enough”.

Within days of reports of a rare Andes hantavirus outbreak, political figures and prominent Covid-era ivermectin advocates once again began promoting the drug as a potential treatment — even as infectious disease experts say there is no clinical evidence supporting its use against hantaviruses.

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X on Wednesday suggesting vitamin D, zinc, and ivermectin could prevent the rodent-borne disease. Ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication, surged in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic as vaccine skepticism rose. In another post, Greene shared a 2024 article about mRNA hantavirus vaccine research while claiming pharmaceutical companies “manipulate the virus (bioweapon)” and “make the vaccine (poison).”

Other high-profile ivermectin advocates also circulated claims online, including physician and activist Mary Talley Bowden, whose post about ivermectin and hantavirus was viewed millions of times on X, and commentator Josh Walkos, known online as “Champagne Joshi,” who shared posts questioning hantavirus vaccine development.

Primarily found in South America, the Andes hantavirus can cause severe respiratory illness and, unlike most hantaviruses, has demonstrated limited ability for person-to-person transmission in previous outbreaks. Health authorities are now investigating a recent cluster linked to international travelers aboard an expedition cruise ship traveling between Argentina, Antarctica, and South Africa, with several cases identified beyond the vessel.

The strain can be deadly, with mortality rates in some outbreaks estimated at as high as 50 percent. But experts say it typically requires close contact to spread, making it significantly less transmissible than Covid-19.

The resurgence of ivermectin claims comes as some Republican-led states continue efforts to expand access to the drug years after it became a flashpoint during the Covid-19 pandemic. On Wednesday, the South Carolina House passed https://www.wistv.com/2026/05/06/sc-house-inching-toward-passing-bill-allow-ivermectin-be-sold-over-counter/legislation that would allow ivermectin to be sold without a prescription.

“There is no meaningful clinical evidence for ivermectin against hantavirus, full stop,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security whose work focuses on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.

Adalja said the only antiviral formally evaluated in clinical trials for hantavirus is ribavirin, and even those results showed limited benefit.

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said the Andes virus remains the only hantavirus known to spread person to person.

“There is zero evidence indicating that ivermectin would be a treatment for any hantavirus,” Racaniello said.

While ivermectin is approved to treat certain parasitic infections in humans, including river blindness and intestinal strongyloidiasis, the FDA warns that improper use or high doses can cause serious side effects, including seizures and neurological complications.

Racaniello warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can create public confusion during disease outbreaks.

Health communication experts say distrust that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic continues to shape how some Americans respond to new disease outbreaks. Evolving public health recommendations during the pandemic, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/21/g-s1-5705/coronavirus-faw-if-youre-still-trying-to-stay-covid-safe-does-the-6-food-rule-matterhttps://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/21/g-s1-5705/coronavirus-faw-if-youre-still-trying-to-stay-covid-safe-does-the-6-food-rule-matterAnthony Fauci’s acknowledgment that the widely used 6-foot social distancing rule was not firmly grounded in data, contributed to enduring skepticism toward public health institutions.

Related

Network of Right-Wing Health Care Providers Is Making Millions Off Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, Hacked Data Reveals

Even as his administration rushed vaccine development, President Donald Trump publicly promoted unproven Covid-19 treatments including hydroxychloroquine, further politicizing debates around experimental therapies and public health guidance.

The president has so far offered scant remarks on the outbreak. Asked about the virus on Thursday, he told reporters “it should be fine.”

“People’s experience with Covid-19 permanently changed how many view public health guidance,” said Rebecca Fish, a health communications professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media who previously worked in senior health policy and pharmaceutical industry roles. “There is now a much higher level of skepticism toward institutions like the CDC and official public health messaging.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether federal health agencies have evaluated ivermectin for Andes hantavirus or plan to address unsupported treatment claims circulating online.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly defended the off-label use of ivermectin and criticized clinically informed public health policies for Covid-19, now oversees HHS and the CDC. Last year, CBS News reported that layoffs tied to Kennedy’s restructuring of federal health agencies eliminated all full-time employees in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, which investigates outbreaks aboard cruise ships. Amid the news of the hantavirus outbreak, the administration confirmed to STAT that the cuts had been reversed. The chief of the Vessel Sanitation Program, however, announced his retirement on Wednesday.

People in a health crisis often look for reassurance and a sense of control, not just facts, Fish said, adding that unsupported treatment claims can spread quickly online when distrust in institutions is already high.

“When someone feels ridiculed for asking a reasonable question, they don’t defer to authority, they route around it,” she said. “The question is not whether that vacuum will be filled, but by whom and with what.”

Fish said public health officials and journalists should distinguish carefully between what is false, what remains unproven, and what is still unknown as evidence develops.

Related

Hacked Records Corroborate Claims in Hydroxychloroquine Wrongful Death Suit

But experts said distrust in public institutions does not eliminate the need for clinical evidence when evaluating medical treatments.

“Clinical claims require real evidence that goes beyond anecdotal evidence,” Adalja, the Johns Hopkins scholar, said.

Racaniello, the microbiologist, warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can still carry real public health risks.

“The problem arises when people inject their opinions on social media when they have no expertise in the matter,” Racaniello said. “Ivermectin at high doses can be damaging, so encouraging its use in this outbreak is irresponsible.”

The post Amid Hantavirus Panic, the Ivermectin Super Fans Are Back appeared first on The Intercept.

Do Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions inevitably lead to military action? Expert comment jon.wallace 8 May 2026

When ‘maximum’ economic pressure fails to bring regime change, and rhetoric has made diplomacy politically impossible, momentum towards military solutions will grow.

During the first administration of President Donald Trump, the US imposed so-called ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions on five countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. In three of those cases, ‘maximum pressure’ was exerted by either creating new sanctions (Venezuela), tightening existing ones (Cuba) or returning sanctions that had been lifted (Iran).  

Maximum pressure sanctions are not only a Trump phenomenon: President Joe Biden applied punishing sanctions to Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. Those were multilateral and focused on reversing the invasion. But Biden initially claimed they could also lead to regime change.

In his second term, President Trump has dialled back the regime-change rhetoric regarding sanctions on Russia – indeed he has lifted some oil-related sanctions on the country as a result of the Iran war.

But his administration has launched military action against two maximum-pressure sanctioned countries (Venezuela and Iran). And, even as war with Iran drags on, Washington is still threatening military intervention in Cuba.

This would seem to indicate a significant risk in the maximum pressure policy: imposing economy-wide sanctions without a coherent strategy for off ramps and negotiations creates an escalatory momentum – particularly when the primary objective is regime change.

Sanctions’ uneven record

The chances that sanctions fail to deliver are significant. Even less comprehensive sanctions, intended to force democratic change or human rights reforms, have a poor track record.  

Related work

Understanding and improving sanctions today

According to a 2025 Chatham House study Understanding and improving sanctions today, of the 858 sanctions applied by Western countries with at least one of the stated goals of democracy and/or human rights, 522 were determined to either be ongoing or have failed.  

In the case of Cuba, economic and financial sanctions imposed in 1962 remained in place for 65 years and were codified twice into law by the US Congress – all without bringing about a change of regime.

President Trump, in both terms, has argued that previous administrations used insufficient force, and that a maximum pressure sanctions approach could bring about US goals.

But so far maximum pressure has not delivered. In 2019, shortly after announcing maximum pressure-style sanctions on the Venezuelan government, then National Security Advisor John Bolton called for the Venezuelan military to defect to remove President Nicolas Maduro. Later he declared that the regime’s collapse was only a matter of time. Those sanctions largely remained in place through the Biden administration. But so did Maduro.

Having failed to bring about the regime’s fall, and with no greater economic tools available, President Trump authorized the special forces operation that captured Maduro on 3 January 2026. That mission brought not the fall of the Maduro regime, but its decapitation – and the imposition of a more pliable leadership. Democracy and even regime change were not delivered, despite the promises made.  

US policy towards Iran has followed the same pattern. In his first term, Trump pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration – calling the deal ‘defective to its core’ and promising a better one.  

No such deal was achieved. And on his return to the White House this year, following the decapitation of the Maduro government, Trump turned his attention back to Iran.

The US’s stated goals for the Iran war were never coherent, but the implicit message was the same: maximum pressure sanctions had failed, demanding escalation to military intervention along the lines of the Venezuela operation.

Cuba may be next. In June 2017 Trump announced he would roll back the measures Obama’s administration had taken to loosen sanctions on Havana. He re-tightened sanctions, promising that he would not negotiate until Cuba’s government held multi-party elections.

Related work

What lessons will China, India and other Asian nations draw from the Iran war? Independent Thinking Podcast

Unfortunately, despite their failure to produce either regime change or even modest human rights improvements, those sanctions largely remained intact under President Biden – and again failed in their stated goal to bring down the Cuban regime.

In January 2026, shortly after the Venezuela operation, Trump threatened to attack Cuba next. His administration then upped the pressure by halting the flow of subsidized oil the Venezuelan government had previously sent to Cuba. That has brought massive blackouts in Cuba, a collapse of the economy, and sparked outbreaks of disease, poverty and malnutrition.

But the regime is still standing, and Trump has returned to a more violent threat. On 3 May he said he could send the US aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln to Cuban coastal waters to force the issue – even though the Iran war has exposed the limits of military options.

Who else should worry?

Regime change came to Syria in late 2024, during the Biden administration. The role of sanctions in bringing about that change is debatable, but the toppling of the former Assad regime has seen US relations with the country improve and negotiations to lift sanctions begin.

But should other remaining ‘maximum pressure’ sanctioned countries, besides Cuba, fear US attack?  

It seems unlikely. The objectives for these sanctions differ – ending the invasion of Ukraine in the case of Russia (despite Biden’s early, heated rhetoric about regime change) and ending the build-up of nuclear weapons in the case of North Korea. The fact that both countries have nuclear arsenals will no doubt deter military escalation by the US.

Is it the sanctions that lead to war, or is it Trump?

It is possible to argue that the increase in US military intervention is not simply the product of maximum pressure sanctions, but the consequence of a tempestuous president bent on enforcing a new vision of US dominance in the global order. But that seems reductionist.

The failure of ‘maximum pressure’ tactics to provoke regime change creates its own logic and momentum towards escalation. That can accelerate under a leader who feels the need to act (for whatever reason) – particularly when the sanctioned country is at a clear technological disadvantage to the US military and has no nuclear deterrent.

And the temptation to move from sanctions to military action may not only be limited to Trump or Trump-adjacent presidents. It remains a risk for any US administration, Republican or Democrat, that has placed significant political capital in a ramped up, punitive sanctions policy.  

It remains easier for administrations to be drawn into escalating sanctions – or to maintain them – when efforts to liberalize or amend them inevitably bring calls of weakness, as has been the case in Cuba, Iran and Venezuela.

That is reflected by a spike in new sanctions in the past two decades: The Chatham House study shows the number of sanctions imposed by countries and multilateral organizations nearly doubled between 2001 and 2023 – the majority created by the US.

State-run media​ reported that the newly found rough ruby was discovered in mid-April, just after the traditional New Year festival.

Star Wars actor later deleted post and apologized, saying president should live ‘long enough to be held accountable’

• US politics live – latest updates

The White House has branded Star Wars actor Mark Hamill “a sick individual” after an AI-generated image showing Donald Trump in a shallow grave, with the words “If Only” as an overlay was posted to one of star’s social media accounts.

Hamill, who played the lead character of Luke Skywalker in six movies of the iconic science fiction franchise and is a longtime critic of the US president, apologized and removed the post from his Bluesky account on Thursday.

Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions

Since the surreal scene at the 2024 presidential inauguration, when a row of big tech titans took their VIP seats and signaled their new alliance with Maga, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley’s AI ambitions and shareholder priorities.

Washington has doled out billions in lucrative federal subsidies and contracts to the cash-rich sector, bloating an AI bubble that experts warn may imperil the entire economy while prohibiting any guardrails on the fast-moving technology.

At Google I/O this month, we should learn a lot about a wide range of new smart glasses coming from companies other than Meta.

Man was reported missing on Sunday and on Wednesday officials found a body with wounds indicating a bear attack

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A hiker in Glacier national park is believed to have been killed in a confrontation with a bear, which is likely the first such fatality in the Montana park since 1998, authorities said.

The body of the male victim was found on Wednesday, and on Friday morning his identity and other details about him had not yet been publicly disclosed. The man had been reported missing and a search and rescue team was sent out to look for him this week and came upon his remains.

Trial jurors said they couldn't agree on the more serious charge of murder, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial on that count.

May 8, 2026 — Hydrology experts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) used artificial intelligence and a physics-based understanding of streamflow to create a model that provides highly accurate predictions of river temperatures, even in waterways that lack sensors.

A map of continental U.S. river systems showing thermoelectric power plant locations, with nuclear power plants in bold. Credit: Sean Turner and Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

The method is important to hydropower utilities and dam operators for avoiding non-compliance risks, mitigating damage to aquatic ecosystems, and understanding impacts to downstream water users. The predictions have broad potential to support nuclear and other power plant operations, strengthening the nation’s energy and economic security.

More than 70% of the nation’s electricity is generated by thermoelectric power plants that use water for cooling, such as nuclear, natural gas, and coal-fired facilities. Information about the availability and temperature of nearby water resources is crucial for reliable and efficient power generation, in addition to agriculture, data center siting, managing fish populations, and overall ecosystem health. Yet, most U.S. waterways do not contain gauges or sensors that monitor temperature.

To construct a model to accurately predict river temperatures, ORNL scientists used an AI/machine learning approach called a Long Short-Term Memory network that’s well suited to analyzing patterns over time. The model learned how weather and landscape conditions influence river temperatures over days, seasons and years.

“The model can improve our understanding of both existing nuclear power plant operation and siting suitability for the nation’s nuclear expansion,” said Sean Turner, senior engineer in the Water Resources Science and Engineering Group at ORNL.

The model achieved an average absolute error of only 1.1 degrees Celsius between predicted and actual values. The error rate was comparable to conventional, data-intensive models that take more time and resources to build and maintain, as detailed in the Journal of Hydrology. The framework:

• Consistently produced seasonal warming and cooling patterns across diverse waterways.
• Maintained accuracy during very hot weather events, times that are critical for grid reliability and regulatory compliance for water withdrawal and release.
• Made better predictions as scientists focused on nearby, relevant upstream areas that resulted in cleaner signals for downstream temperature predictions, especially in large rivers.
• Was trained using inputs that are available for all 2.7 million river reaches across the continental United States, meaning the model can generate daily in-stream temperature estimates anywhere—even in completely ungauged watersheds.

“These deep-learning foundation models, trained on vast amounts of data to recognize and predict long-term patterns, are producing better and more transferable results than the models that people have been building and tinkering with for the last 50 years,” Turner said.

The team used publicly available data sources including nine years of daily observations from some 300 selected U.S. Geological Survey river gauges; ORNL-developed waterway data reflecting precipitation, air temperature, solar radiation, humidity, snowpack and other phenomena; ORNL-simulated daily streamflow statistics; and federal data on watershed characteristics.

More information on the model, River Temperature Time Series for Hydrothermal Modeling and Analysis (RiTHyMs), is available on the DOE HydroSource platform maintained by ORNL.

“We wanted a system that could be applied anywhere in the nation, and that means we needed to train it with data that’s available for every waterway,” Turner said. “That’s where ORNL and the datasets we’ve generated for HydroSource came in.”

Researchers are now applying the model to the managed river systems and utility operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority. They are also refining the model to enhance predictions in mountainous regions, targeting western watersheds influenced by glacial runoff, where other utilities have shown interest in water temperature projections.

RiTHyMs leveraged ORNL’s high-performance computing resources to rapidly train the continental-scale model on large datasets across hundreds of river basins. The resources are part of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL.

Other ORNL researchers on the project included model development lead Md Abu Bakar Siddik, as well as Shih-Chieh Kao, Ahad Tanim, and Jesus Gomez-Velez, formerly of ORNL and now at the University of Iowa.

The project was funded by the DOE Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation’s Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office.

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, visit energy.gov/science.

Source: Stephanie Seay, ORNL

The post ORNL Develops AI Model to Predict River Temperatures Across US Waterways appeared first on HPCwire.

Killing of development leader exposes insecurity in government-controlled Yemen Expert comment thilton.drupal 8 May 2026

Recent assassinations in Aden are likely to undermine confidence in the Yemeni government’s ability to maintain security for its civilians as well as international organizations and aid workers.

The kidnapping and killing of Wesam Qaid, a prominent British-Yemeni development practitioner and acting executive director of Yemen’s Social Fund for Development (SFD), is not only a tragic loss for Yemen’s development sector. It also underscores a persistent and unresolved challenge facing Yemen’s internationally recognized government: its inability to establish credible security in the areas of southern Yemen under its control, including its temporary capital Aden. 

This incident is likely to deepen Yemen’s already severe humanitarian crisis, as development and aid agencies will be hesitant to send their staff into dangerous circumstances. It will further undermine confidence among donors, international organizations and members of the Yemeni diaspora, who are seen as essential for both humanitarian work and for future reconstruction efforts. 

It also presents a challenge to Saudi Arabia’s efforts to consolidate its authority in southern Yemen, where it has supported the internationally recognized government against rival factions. The killing comes at a fraught moment amid the ongoing rift between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and following the consolidation of the Saudi-backed government’s control over southern Yemen late last year.  

Without meaningful improvements in security provision, similar incidents are likely to continue in territory nominally controlled by the government. 

A pattern, not an exception 

No group or individual has claimed Qaid’s killing, which has attracted international attention reflecting his status as a senior civilian development worker. 

But the assassination is not an isolated incident. In late April, Abdulrahman Al Shaer, a senior figure in the Islah Party who also heads a private school, was assassinated in Aden. 

Aden security officials announced the arrest of four suspects in the killing of Al Shaer, and the Yemeni prime minister has ordered an investigation into Qaid’s killing. But these developments point to systemic vulnerabilities rather than isolated security breaches. 

Several structural factors underpin this fragility. Despite the formal consolidation of authority under the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), backed by Riyadh, the government still lacks coherent command and control over security agencies. Since its formation in February 2026, the cabinet has made some progress on economic issues, such as adopting its first general budget since 2019. But it has struggled to gain public confidence or deliver tangible improvements in security. 

Efforts to unify intelligence structures – such as the nominal merger of different intelligence agencies – largely remain on paper. Security coordination mechanisms in Aden are still reactive, focused on post-incident response and capturing suspects rather than preventative intelligence-sharing and operations. Moreover, the integration of armed groups with divergent loyalties has prioritized political accommodation over professional competence, limiting the effectiveness of security institutions. 

Implications for international engagement 

For years, the Yemeni government has sought to encourage international organizations and diplomatic missions to relocate to Aden, which it has used as a temporary capital since 2015. However, unlike in Sanaa – where the Houthis maintain tight security control – consecutive authorities in Aden have struggled to offer comparable security assurances. 

Recent developments highlight this gap. Although the EU’s ambassador to Yemen made a rare visit to the frontline governorate of Taiz this week, other diplomats have cancelled or postponed their planned visits in the wake of the killing. 

Aid organizations are now likely reassessing their security plans and operational footprint, despite Yemen remaining one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. 

Regional and strategic consequences 

The incident also complicates Saudi Arabia’s position. Riyadh has sought to stabilize southern Yemen and assert itself as the sole regional leader in Yemen amid tensions with the UAE. In early 2026, the UAE’s ally in Yemen, the Southern Transitional Council (STC), was forced out of power, leading to a reconfiguration of alliances in the country. The Riyadh-backed PLC has since consolidated its rule over southern Yemen. 

However, the persistence of insecurity underscores the limits of Riyadh’s top-down approach to stabilization. Security in southern Yemen is not solely a function of military control; it depends on local legitimacy and buy-in. Groups and constituencies that feel excluded from new arrangements retain the potential to undermine stability. Without broader inclusion, such as involving pro-STC actors, and providing people’s basic needs and services, efforts to impose order are unlikely to succeed. 

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 8, 2026 — Compal Electronics and Verda have announced a strategic partnership under which Compal will supply next-generation GPU server systems to accelerate the build-out of its next-generation AI infrastructure across Europe and the APAC region.

Alan Chang, Vice President of Infrastructure Solutions Business Group at Compal, and Jorge Santos, Chief Operating Officer at Verda.

Under this collaboration, Compal will supply high-density, liquid-cooled AI server platforms. The platforms are engineered for the workloads defining the next wave of AI: agentic applications that process extensive context and operate at high concurrency, while maintaining the thermal efficiency required for Verda’s sustainable cloud deployments.

The partnership underlines the growing global traction for Verda’s services as well as Compal’s growing role as an infrastructure partner to neocloud operators addressing rising demand for localized AI compute. As enterprises and governments increasingly prioritize data residency, security, and regulatory compliance, neocloud providers like Verda are emerging as key enablers of Sovereign AI strategies.

“Verda’s platform reflects where AI infrastructure demand is heading—toward regional, high-performance, and energy-efficient deployments,” said Alan Chang, Vice President, Infrastructure Solutions Business Group (ISBG) at Compal. “This collaboration demonstrates our ability to deliver advanced AI systems at scale for customers building the next generation of AI clouds.”

“Our mission is to build the next generation of cloud infrastructure for AI and empower pioneering teams across the globe. Working with Compal helps us deliver with world-class quality and reliability, and is an important step in our plans to expand our presence in the APAC region. We’re excited about what’s ahead,” said Jorge Santos, Chief Operating Officer at Verda.

Compal brings deep engineering expertise in accelerated computing, advanced thermal design, and system integration, enabling customers to deploy AI infrastructure efficiently while managing power density and operational complexity. To support global AI deployments, Compal continues to expand its manufacturing footprint across Taiwan, Vietnam, and the United States, strengthening supply-chain resilience and aligning production capacity with regional customer requirements.

About Compal

Established in 1984, Compal has grown into a leading global manufacturer of computers and smart devices, partnering with top-tier brands worldwide. Compal was recognized by CommonWealth Magazine as one of Taiwan’s top 7 manufacturers and has consistently ranked among the Forbes Global 2000 companies. Compal has actively expanded into new growth areas, including cloud servers, automotive electronics, smart medical and healthcare, and advanced communication solutions. Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, Compal operates design and production facilities in the United States, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, and Poland.

About Verda

Verda (formerly DataCrunch) is a European AI cloud provider operating high-density GPU data centers across Europe, delivering on-demand compute for training and inference at scale. Headquartered in Finland, Verda runs infrastructure powered by renewable energy and serves frontier AI labs, research teams and startups building the next generation of models.

Source: Compal

The post Verda and Compal Partner to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Development and Expansion appeared first on HPCwire.

Former David Cameron adviser says a vote for him will make California ‘Califordable’ – not everyone is convinced

He “knows how to wind people up like Trump”, according to friends, and made his name in the UK with zany policy ideas including making the country sunnier using state-owned cloud busters.

Now the controversial strategist Steve Hilton, named the “pint-sized Rasputin” of Conservative politics, has become an unlikely frontrunner in the primary race for California governor.

Mike McGuire courts red territory with town halls and a populist pitch on jobs, healthcare and wildfire costs

Quincy, population 1,600, is not exactly the sort of place you regularly run into California’s most powerful Democratic lawmakers. Nestled deep in the Sierra Nevada, the forested town is in a rural and reliably red county that – like nearly all of far northern California – has sent Republicans to Congress for nearly half a century.

But on a Tuesday night in mid-April, Mike McGuire, a three-term state lawmaker who previously led California’s senate, was inside a local veterans hall rallying a crowd of about 40 people with the verve of a baptist preacher.

As more people turn to chatbots for financial advice, experts say AI offers both pros and cons for retirement planning. Here's what to know.

Whitaker Malem worked with pop art sculptor Allen Jones, visual artist Nadia Lee Cohen and a car bodyshop in Kent

At Monday’s Met Gala, it inevitably fell to Kim Kardashian to deliver the evening’s biggest jolt. One of the few celebrities to straightforwardly interpret the “fashion is art” dress code – which focused on how the dressed and undressed human body is the through-line in most works of art – she decided to forgo her usual role as a walking billboard for a major fashion house and instead arrived in an orange fibreglass breastplate created by a small east London art duo and a car bodyshop in Kent.

“Good art should start conversation, and Kim did exactly that,” says 61-year-old Patrick Whitaker, half of the design practice Whitaker Malem, who made the breastplate just weeks before the gala. “She was very clear on wanting a breastplate, very clear on the car body finish. And I think she was nervous really. She understands the competition.”

The Pentagon's release of files might help scientists shed light on unexplained phenomena and government secrets, experts said.

Unemployment remained steady at 4.3% as the US-Israel war on Iran continues to rattle the American economy

US employers added 115,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3%, a surprisingly robust gain to the labor market as the US-Israel war with Iran continued to drive up economic uncertainty.

Economists projected about 55,000 new jobs and a 4.3% unemployment rate. A day earlier, the labor department announced 200,000 people filed for weekly unemployment benefits, a slight increase from the week before.

The president expressed optimism about reaching a deal despite the attacks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. is expecting a response from Iran on Friday.

The Guardian analyzed ICE records from January-August 2025, as advocates say the family-separation crisis will lead to generational trauma

• We sued the Trump administration for these immigration records

After three months in immigration detention, 1,500 miles (2,400km) away from her 13-month-old daughter, LT was running out of options.

Her baby, who was allergic to formula and had other food sensitivities, had been vomiting constantly and needed breastmilk. But the government refused to release LT – an asylum seeker from Haiti – on bond. So, the family’s pediatrician petitioned the government to allow her to pump and mail her breastmilk from the Dilley detention center in Texas to her baby in Florida. That request was denied.

During the first seven months of 2025, the administration arrested 18,400 parents – including 15,000 fathers and 3,000 mothers. They are the parents of 27,000 to 32,000 children.

The administration arrested the parents of at least 12,000 US citizen children.

Nearly 7,500 fathers and 1,000 mothers who were arrested had a different nationality than at least one of their children. In about half of these families, siblings had different citizenships from each other.

On average, the Trump administration has been arresting about 2,300 parents each month and deporting 1,400 parents every month. The Biden administration, in comparison, deported about 700 per month in 2024.

Carmaker gives one of biggest warnings yet of conflict’s impact on businesses while Trump tariffs also take toll

Toyota has reported a £3bn hit from costs from the war in Iran, as prices of parts and materials soared and sales dropped.

The world’s biggest carmaker said profits declined in its financial year to March as it was “likely unable to absorb newly added impact from the Middle East”, in one of the largest warnings yet of the war’s impact on businesses.

The system’s power is comparable to others – but it still has frightening implications for the future of hacking

Last month, Anthropic made a remarkable announcement about its new model, Claude Mythos Preview: it was so good at finding security vulnerabilities in software that the company would not release it to the general public. Instead, it would only be available to a select group of companies to scan and fix their own software.

The announcement requires context – but it contained an essential truth.

Memory chip shortages are a wildcard in the prediction game, but here are the computers rumored to be getting updated this year.

• Players huddle around refs to voice frustration

• Oklahoma City win 125-107 for 2-0 series lead

• Cunningham lifts Pistons past Cavaliers

Lakers coach JJ Redick criticized the way LeBron James is officiated and guard Austin Reaves complained about treatment from the referees after Los Angeles lost 125-107 to the host Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday night.

A number of Lakers players gathered around the referees at midcourt after the game and Reaves voiced his frustration to crew chief John Goble. He felt that while players were jockeying for position during a jump ball during the game, Goble crossed the line.

It wasn't a matter of if it would happen, only a matter of when.

Owner IAG expects to recover 60% of additional fuel bill caused by Iran war through ‘revenue and cost management’

• Business news – live updates

British Airways fares will rise to try to recoup most of a €2bn (£1.7bn) hit in fuel costs this year, its parent group has said, warning that the Iran war will dent profits.

The International Airlines Group (IAG) said its annual fuel bill was now expected to be about €9bn, up from the forecast €7.1bn, as 70% of its supply was hedged, shielding it from the full impact of soaring jet fuel prices since the start of the conflict.

Kirk Moore, the Oklahoma principal who tackled a gunman​, sits down with CBS News for a network exclusive interview airing Monday on "CBS Mornings."

Donald Trump insists ceasefire remains intact after the most serious test yet. Plus, David Attenborough’s 100 most spectacular moments

• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up here

Good morning.

The US and Iran traded fire late on Thursday in the greatest test so far to their month-long ceasefire. Tehran accused Washington of breaching the truce by targeting two ships in the strait of Hormuz and attacking civilian areas, while the US said it had struck in retaliation.

Where were negotiations up to before the strikes? There were reports the two sides could be nearing an agreement to halt the war, with a one-page memorandum shared between Washington and Tehran, via Pakistan. Here is a rundown of the ins and outs over the past week.

What happened to Trump’s “Project Freedom”? The US plan to guide tankers through the strait of Hormuz was ditched just days after it was launched, apparently because Saudi Arabia refused to let the US use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation.

Follow our liveblog for the latest developments.

How has the redistricting affected the sway of Black voters? Each now contains a third of the city’s Black voters, which means all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts now lean Republican.

The body of a missing hiker killed in an apparent bear attack has been found in Glacier National Park in Montana, park officials say.

Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and other southern states stun residents with all-out charge to redraw congressional maps to favor white voters after supreme court ruling

The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.

One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.

Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Fehrmarnbelt tunnel is a European construction megaproject building a tunnel between Denmark and Germany, crossing the Fehmarnbelt in the Baltic sea. The first segment of the tunnel has now successfully been placed in its designated spot. This is a yet-unseen, next-level engineering feat achieved by the Danish Sund & Baelt construction company. It took 14 hours and used a massive pontoon ship built specifically for this project. The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons, and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm. The tunnel will eventually consist of 89 of these segments, be 18 km long, and connect the Danish city of Rodby with the German island Fehmarn through five individual tunnel tubes: two for cars, two for trains, and one rescue and maintenance tunnel. Crossing time will be reduced from a 45-minute ferry crossing to seven minutes by train or 10 minutes by car, and cut the travel time between the German city of Hamburg and the Danish capital, Copenhagen, down to 2.5 hours. The project's planned completion is set for the year 2029. German news Tagesschau has some details and a neat animation, while further details are available from the German tech news site Heise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian wanted to know who, exactly, was pulled into the mass-deportation dragnet of Trump’s second term

• Revealed: The Trump administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 kids in seven months

Donald Trump entered his second term promising “mass deportations”. He also promised he’d target the “worst of the worst”. The Guardian wanted to know who, exactly, would be pulled into this deportation dragnet.

That question led us to “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms, also known as I-213 forms. Immigration agents fill out these forms each time they make an arrest, alleging that the person is in the country without authorization. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) then uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally.

Exclusive: Co-chair Vula Tsetsi says it is time to trigger debate, as statement is agreed at annual leadership meeting in Brussels

The European Green party has urged the UK to consider rejoining the EU and draw a line under the “political and economic failure” of Brexit.

A text declaring that “the United Kingdom’s future lies in the European Union” was adopted by a large majority of European green parties at the movement’s annual leadership meeting on Friday, the day before Europe Day.

Japan confirmed the first fatal bear attack of 2026 after a record 13 deaths last year.

US president expresses impatience at speed of EU’s implementation and warns of ‘much higher’ tariffs

• US trade court rules against Trump’s 10% global tariffs

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has walked back from his threat to tear up part of the US trade deal with the EU by hiking tariffs on car imports.

The US president has given the EU until 4 July to implement its side of the deal, reducing tariffs to zero on most American imports, warning that the bloc would face “much higher” tariffs if it did not do so.

Promises to cut emissions and use more fuel-efficient planes fail to stop rise, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% up on 2019

Emissions from flying in Europe have now passed pre-pandemic levels, with Ryanair’s carbon footprint 50% higher than in 2019, research has shown.

Total aviation emissions continue to increase despite industry pledges to decarbonise and the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes, driven by the massive expansion of low-cost carriers.

Three hikers in an off-limits area died in an eruption of Indonesia's Mount Dukono volcano, police said.

Two Singaporeans and a local person were in no-go zone when they were killed, say officials

Three hikers – two Singaporeans and an Indonesian – have died in an eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Dukono volcano, where they found themselves in a no-go zone, officials said.

The eruption, on Halmahera island, sent an ash cloud about 6 miles (10km) into the air, with no towns or villages near enough to face any immediate threat.

Here's how to determine if you have the 4GB AI model -- and how to get rid of it.

Apple's got the genre titles you're looking for.

Trump’s ego cannot accept a humiliating loss, and we are already seeing the effects of his failure playing out

We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate, but cannot.

Iran is unlikely to give in. It can withstand the economic pressure of a blockade better than Donald Trump can withstand the political pressure that comes with rising gas prices (now nearly $4.50 a gallon, on average), soon followed by rising food prices.

Stanley Burkhardt, convicted abuser and ex-investigator of sex crimes against children, gives deposition in civil case

Convicted child molester Stanley Burkhardt – a former investigator of sex crimes against children who has been in and out of prison for decades – invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination more than 700 times while being questioned under oath recently, including when asked whether he committed a series of unsolved murders of youths in his orbit.

Burkhardt’s decision to remain silent came when faced with questions about the killings during a deposition in a civil lawsuit by an alleged sexual abuse victim of his – a case aimed at him and the New Orleans police department (NOPD) which used to employ him.

You don't need your Calculator app to perform conversions and equations.

Temperature swings have left crops across the Plains in terrible conditions, with some farmers opting not to harvest

Merrill Nielsen’s wheat crop looked healthy after he planted it in the fall on his 2,500-acre farm in north-central Kansas, about 50 miles west of Salina, the plants benefiting from higher-than-normal November rainfall.

But an abnormally warm and dry winter, followed by extreme temperature variability, stressed the developing wheat. In the winter-to-spring transition, temperatures fluctuated from 70 to 80F on some days and lows in the teens or low 20s on other days.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Homelessness in Kent and Sussex counties has dominated local debate in recent months. Now, as federal funds meant to improve rural health enter the state, Delaware officials are planning to build a homeless shelter in each of the counties. One proposal could see one of those centers a mile away from Delaware State’s campus. 

Delaware officials are in talks to convert hundreds of Delaware State University dorms into a homeless shelter modeled after the New Castle County Hope Center. 

The state would fund the endeavor using federal dollars it received last year to bolster rural health access. 

Jon Starkey, DSU’s vice president for government relations, confirmed on Thursday the university is negotiating with state leaders about the property — a 132,000-square-foot building on U.S. Route 13 that houses up to 265 students.

He said the decision to consider a sale of some of its student housing comes as the campus has grown in recent years, and the university looks to downsize its real estate footprint. 

“We are taking a hard look at several of our non-contiguous properties, and how we should rationalize our footprint to most effectively meet the current and future needs of the university,” Starkey said in a text message. 

Should the plans materialize, the effort would stand up a government-run homeless shelter in a county that advocates say sorely lacks services. The facility would sit about a mile from Delaware’s second-largest higher education institution.

A spokesperson for the Delaware State Housing Authority confirmed the talks, saying the agency is “excited about plans to expand the Hope Center model in Delaware.”

In 2013, DSU purchased a Sheraton hotel on North DuPont Highway for $12 million, later converting it into student housing. The building is now called the “Living and Learning Commons.” It also houses the Delaware State University Early College High School, a charter school offering students the chance to earn a high school diploma and up to 60 hours of college credit. 

It is unclear how much Delaware would spend on the property, assuming it goes through with a deal, but Kent County records currently value the building at more than $14 million. 

In April, the Delaware State Housing Authority received $26 million to replicate the Hope Center model in Kent and Sussex County using federal grant dollars. Its initial $26 million award is the first batch of funding in what will amount to a five-year federal program. 

The housing authority expects to receive close to $100 million by the end of the program, according to a non-binding document signed by the housing authority and the state health department outlining the project. 

In a project timeline for the two Hope Centers, the state told the federal government it would secure its first property contract for one of the centers by the end of June. That center would then open by the end of September, according to the timeline. 

The signed document tasks the housing authority with developing and operating the Hope Centers in both counties. Over the next five years, the document also said the housing authority should act as a landlord of the facility by managing its operations and “charging rent to all building tenants.”

“During the grant period, DSHA will ensure rent is paid through the grant to support mission-aligned services identified in the project plan,” the agreement said. 

A spokesperson for the housing authority said in an email it would charge that rent to service providers, not people seeking shelter. At the New Castle County center, ChristianaCare is a provider, among other programs.

Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen told Spotlight Delaware on Thursday that he and Police Chief Thomas Johnson will meet with the state housing authority early next week to discuss the proposal. 

Christiansen said he was hoping to discuss security at the facility and address the concerns of nearby property owners. Unlike the New Castle County Hope Center, the DSU property is nestled among a busy commercial plaza that features a Sam’s Club, Lowe’s and an auto dealership.

New Castle County Hope Center

The two homeless shelters poised for development in Kent and Sussex County are modeled off a similar facility in New Castle County that Gov. Matt Meyer stood up in 2020 during his time as county executive. 

Like the Dover proposal, New Castle County also purchased a Sheraton hotel. The facility, which is nearly 200,000 square feet, offers emergency shelter to people as they try to find stable housing elsewhere. 

Since the Hope Center opened, Meyer has touted it as a success story, even as it has been subject to controversy over the years. County officials have it called the largest homeless shelter on the East Coast. 

The county bought the hotel for close to $20 million at the end of 2020, from the same company that also was awarded a contract to manage the shelter. 

But in early 2024, ownership and oversight of the facility was transferred back to the county shortly after an audit found the company did not properly report all money flowing into the facility.

Spotlight Delaware also reported that a resident expressed concerns about black mold in the facility amid an ongoing lawsuit that examined who was at fault for past water leaks into the Hope Center building. County officials have emphatically denied that the facility is unsafe.

Rural health funds

To open two new Hope Centers, Delaware will use funds from a federal grant program awarded to all 50 states aimed at bolstering rural health. In December, the feds awarded Delaware $157 million. The first batch it is poised to receive over the next five years. 

The full award amount for the state remains unclear at this time, but Delaware will receive at least $500 million from the federal “Rural Health Transformation Program.”

Delaware officials said they plan to use those funds to invest heavily into health infrastructure in Kent and Sussex counties, including building the state’s first medical school as well as the two new Hope Centers in the lower counties. 

State leaders also hope to fund 13 additional programs, including additional preventative care, financial assistance for medical students who commit to working in Delaware for five years after graduation, and robust nutritional education.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which will oversee the funding, said states can expect their annual award to change year over year based on performance and implementation. 

CMS also said states can expect their year-two awards by the end of October 2026. It’s unclear how the 15 total initiatives budgeted by the state will be impacted by the fluctuating awards. 

“We’re excited to share more details in the coming weeks, as Governor Meyer remains focused on lowering costs, improving access, and growing our healthcare workforce to benefit every family, regardless of income or ZIP code,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office said in December. 

Karl Baker contributed to this report.

The post Delaware officials eye DSU dorms for new Dover homeless shelter appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In his second year in office, Wilmington Mayor John Carney says he will double down on encouraging affordable housing in Delaware’s largest city. But several council members, concerned about how new money would be spent, are supporting an alternative proposal to send more dollars directly to people struggling to secure housing.

After weeks of scrutiny into Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s proposed $20 million affordable housing initiative, the City Council has introduced an alternative plan that would reduce the amount of money available for subsidies to developers.

The new plan, introduced by Councilwoman Christian Willauer as an amendment to Carney’s initiative, calls for redistributing many of those dollars into various programs to directly support people struggling to secure housing. 

During a council meeting Tuesday, Willauer said her proposal aims to address residents’ immediate needs. It also reduces the amount of money used from the city’s savings accounts and provides safeguards around the dollars that would be sent to developers, she said.

“We need a lot more details and guardrails on any spending around the construction of affordable housing,” Willauer said. 

Willauer’s skepticism of Carney’s plan highlights persistent ideological divisions between the mayor’s office and a faction of the City Council over how the city should address its housing crisis. 

It also sets up what could become the latest policy standoff between the two sides, following previous contention over rent stabilization, tenant protections and homelessness.

In response to Willauer’s alternative plan, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, Daniel Walker, said her amendment relies on funding commitments that would ultimately increase long-term costs for city residents. He also said it unrealistically relies on still-uncommitted dollars from the state government. 

“It believes a $10 million match from the state will magically materialize,” Walker said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware. 

Carney’s and Willauer’s competing proposals also come in the wake of calls from some housing advocates for the city to direct money to rental assistance and to services for the city’s unhoused population. 

But Walker has also pushed back on that approach, saying rental assistance may provide short-term relief but does not increase the city’s supply of affordable housing. He also reiterated the mayor’s longstanding stance that homeless services should not be funded through the city. 

How do the plans compare?

During a city council meeting on Tuesday, Walker sat alongside Wilmington housing director, Bob Weir, to provide a presentation of Carney’s original affordable housing plan, which would draw $20 million from the city’s Tax Stabilization Reserve.

Their comments came more than a month after Carney first unveiled the plan during his budget address for the City of Wilmington.

They noted Tuesday that most of that money – $16.8 million – would fund subsidies to developers to incentivize the construction of around 200 affordable homes. Walker said the incentives would offset construction costs and also leverage private investment.  

The affordable units would target households making between 60% and 80% of the area median income, as defined under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standards. In Wilmington, that would translate roughly to households that earn between $1,434 and $1,910 monthly.

Of the remaining dollars from the initiative, about $2 million would fund the preparation of vacant lots for development. Another $500,000 would be used for architectural design and engineering, and another $500,000 would go to the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank.

In contrast, Willauer’s plan would direct several chunks of $500,000 into a litany of programs, including emergency rental assistance; first and last month rental assistance; eviction prevention; a homeowner repair program; and a fund to fix property tax assessment errors. 

To incentivize development, Willauer’s plan would also allocate at least $10 million into a city housing trust fund to be overseen by the City Council and the mayor’s office. Willauer said the joint oversight would allow both bodies to decide where and how the money would be spent. 

WIllauer’s plan would cost the city a total of $12.5 million. It also involves asking the state to match that investment.  

During Tuesday’s meeting, several council members expressed support for the alternative plan, which Willauer said had been developed with the help of Councilmembers Shané Darby and Coby Owens.

Councilman Alex Hackett called it “a compromise that needs to be made here.” 

Several council members also raised concerns during the meeting about the mayor’s proposal. They questioned Walker and Weir over whether the plan is specific enough, whether it does enough to help current Wilmington residents, and whether the city should spend such a large amount from its reserves without more detail.

Separately, Council members Zanthia Oliver and Ernest “Trippi” Congo stressed what they said was a need for clearer guarantees that Wilmington residents and minority developers would have access to the construction opportunities tied to the program. 

Owens challenged the administration’s argument that rental assistance would duplicate state and federal programs, saying the city is already proposing to stack its housing development money with other state and federal development funds. 

“Why not try to do both?” Owens asked, adding that rental assistance, if done correctly, could help residents stay in their homes.

Will the money be for big or small developers?

Tuesday’s meeting came about a week after another meeting in which City Council members similarly interrogated the Carney administration over its housing plan. During that meeting of the council’s Finance Committee, more than a dozen city residents also occupied the council chamber’s gallery to hold signs making clear their opposition to plan.  

During the meeting, council members peppered Weir with questions about the city’s previous housing initiatives they said did not produce what had been promised. Many also voiced concerns that the developer incentive would be directed primarily to the most prominent developers in the city. 

Willauer opened her questions of Weir by stating that she has several “concerns about the $20 million.” She then asked how city officials would define “small” and “large” developers, and  how much money each could receive under Carney’s plan. 

“Do you anticipate that $10 million would be for larger developers and $6 million for smaller developers? Or do you anticipate that it’s going to be $15 million for large developers and $1 million for small developers? “ Willauer asked.

Weir in response said he could only guess what the ultimate breakdown would be. He did note his expectation that the largest developers to receive city dollars would likely be nonprofit companies.  

City spokesperson Caroline Klinger later indicated that Wilmington’s most influential developer, Buccini/Pollin Group, would not likely be involved in the affordable housing project. 

“Currently, BPG does not develop affordable housing, nor have they approached us about doing so,” Klinger said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.  

The post Wilmington council, mayor at odds over affordable housing dollars for developers appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to successfully challenge racial gerrymandering. 

Following the 6-3 decision along partisan lines, Louisiana suspended its already active congressional primary, throwing out cast ballots. Alabama’s Republican governor took steps to gerrymander her state’s maps ahead of November elections. Tennessee GOP leaders also convened a special session to eliminate the last remaining Democratic stronghold in the state, home to Memphis, a majority-Black city and district; the new map would split Memphis into three districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and the new map was passed by Tennessee Republicans.

The primary goal state Rep. Justin J. Pearson tells The Intercept Briefing “is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level.” The Democratic Tennessee state representative for Memphis is running for U.S. Congress in the district at the heart of the state’s re-districting fight. “When you look across the South, the truth is about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there,” Pearson says. “We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening.” 

Voting rights journalist and author Ari Berman says SCOTUS’s latest blow to voters’ rights is a “power grab.”

This week on the podcast, Berman and Pearson speak to host Jessica Washington about how the latest Supreme Court decision bolsters President Donald Trump and Republicans’ aims to take control of voting in the country.

“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act,” says Berman. “You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. … This is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Berman says that this ruling could bring us back to the “dark days” before the Voting Rights Act made the United States a “multiracial democracy.” Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.”

Pearson says that the Supreme Court’s assertion that these protections are no longer necessary is a lie. “The hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into state houses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States,” says Pearson. “Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic. … Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.”

“The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California,” says Pearson. “The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.”

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

Transcript

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

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

JW: Midterms are heating up this week, and Maia, on top of being my editor, you also manage our election coverage. So what’s sticking out with you this week?

MH: This was a really weird week because we’re coming off some primaries where the most-watched races in the country were actually a set of state Senate races in Indiana. And that’s weird because most people don’t even know who their state senator is. It’s very rare to be focused on state legislative elections as the top race.

But this one was seen as a huge test for Trump because essentially he was on this revenge path where a handful of Indiana state senators, Republicans, part of his party, had defied the president when he wanted them to redistrict the state. So he said, I’m gonna primary you, and I’m gonna kick you out of office for not doing what I wanted.

In all but one or maybe two of those cases, the people that Trump backed — so the challengers taking out the incumbents — won. So it looks like, if that was a test of Trump’s power in his base, at least in Indiana, at least there, it looks pretty good for him on that front.

JW: Trump has really set off this redistricting war that’s happening across the country. There was this idea that Donald Trump was going to be weakened by the war in Iran, by the economy. The fact that we’re also seeing redistricting, which generally makes people really angry, also doesn’t seem to be weakening Trump, that sets the stage for something really interesting in the midterms.

MH: It’s a really interesting question because I think it gets at the constant tension in politics between the politician’s identity and the issues.

So on the issues, the conventional wisdom right now is that Trump and the Republicans look really weak going into the midterms, right? People don’t love it when you’re running on lowering the cost of living and not starting new wars — and then you start a new war and spike the cost of living.

But it is still, in my view, a cult of personality around Trump in the Republican Party, and it seems like he still holds a ton of sway over what the Republican base thinks. That’s really interesting if we think ahead, not just to the midterms, but to 2028, which unfortunately we’re already thinking about because even if Democrats have a stronger footing perhaps on a lot of these popular issues right now, they don’t have that figurehead.

JW: Republicans have been unleashed by the Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The ruling also required there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a congressional map is discriminatory.

Obviously, we know that there’s going to be many new redistricting efforts as a result of this ruling, and we’re going to get into the ruling itself a little later in the episode. But Maia, where are we seeing pushes from Republicans to reshape the map?

MH: Right now, this is according to The AP, as of Thursday, there are four states that are still in flux. Louisiana, as you mentioned; there’s also Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. 

This is such an interesting issue because gerrymandering to help your party get seats or keep seats is frankly anti-democratic in the simplest, most literal possible sense of the word. You’re taking some of the power of choice away from the people. But it also puts politicians in a really weird bind because if one party’s doing it, how is the other party supposed to not?

JW: Yeah, as you point out, there’s been a lot of news on that front. On Wednesday, Republicans in Tennessee unveiled a new congressional map that would split Memphis into three distinct districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. The new Memphis district would span nearly 300 miles. On Thursday, the Tennessee House passed this new map.

Then there’s Virginia. The FBI raided the office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas on Wednesday. She’s one of the leaders in the Democratic-led redistricting fight there, and she’s been a real target of Trump and Republicans’ ire.

On the podcast today, we break down the latest Supreme Court decision with voting rights journalist Ari Berman and Justin J. Pearson. He’s a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis. He is also running for Congress in the district at the heart of these redistricting fights. Pearson lays out Republican strategy to eliminate the last remaining Democratic district and gut Black voting power in the South.

But first, we’re going to start with Ari. He’s going to give us more of a bird’s-eye view of what this decision actually means for voters and democracy as we head into an election.

MH: Cool. I’m excited to hear that conversation.

JW: Ari, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ari Berman: Hey, Jessica. Great to see you. Thank you.

JW: Glad to have you on. I want to get into the news of last week. As you’re well aware of, last week, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district, and requiring there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a map is discriminatory.

Ari, you wrote that the Louisiana v. Callais decision “narrows Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.”

What did you mean by that, and what does this decision mean for voters?

AB: What I meant by that is that the last remaining weapon of the Voting Rights Act is essentially gone. The Supreme Court has already narrowed other parts of the Voting Rights Act, or struck them down altogether, so that the law has lost almost all of its teeth. And now they took away the last part of it, which was the protections against racial gerrymandering — the ability of voters of color to elect candidates of choice.

Basically what they said is, those districts in which voters of color can elect their preferred candidates are unconstitutional. At least, that’s what they ruled in Louisiana. The expectation is that’s what they’ll rule in other places as well. 

My big fear with this ruling is that it’s going to lead to a major rollback in representation for candidates of color. It could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. You could have a situation throughout the South — where the largest percentage of Black Americans live — there could ultimately be no Black representatives. That would take us back to the Jim Crow era, in terms of how representation looks in America.

JW: You’re laying out a really scary scenario where we no longer have any of the protections that the Voting Rights Act — that was obviously so hard-won and fought for — those protections are now mostly gone. I guess my question is, for voters as they’re thinking about primaries, November, what does that mean for them?

AB: Voters are going to have less choices. It’s going to mean that red states, in the South in particular, are going to maximize Republican representation. The way they’re going to do that is by eliminating Black representation, because in the South, voting is very racially polarized. By and large, white people vote for Republicans, and Black people vote for Democrats. That was one of the really insidious things that the Supreme Court said in their opinion in Callais was basically that, if Black people support Democrats and Republicans are just targeting Democrats, then it doesn’t matter that Black voters are disenfranchised.

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But the fact is that even if race and party are intertwined, this is ultimately about race. This is ultimately about white legislators in all of these states — because all of these Southern states have white-majority legislatures and governors — eliminating Black districts. That means that in a place like Mississippi, for example, that’s 40 percent Black, you could have no Black representatives. In states like Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, states with large Black populations, there could be no Black representatives, and that means those communities are going to be underrepresented.

A lot of these communities are already underrepresented in Congress, and a lot of these communities are already among the poorest, most impoverished areas with the greatest need for representation, and now they’re going to have the least amount of representation. It’s really going to skew representation all across America.

JW: You just brought up Louisiana. And in this episode, we also are going to speak to Justin J. Pearson, a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis, about how after the Supreme Court ruling last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat, which is home to Memphis, a majority-Black city.

What’s your reaction to that redistricting effort?

AB: It just reminds me of what happened when Reconstruction ended in the South. That you had a situation where there were Black members of Congress from the South elected during Reconstruction after the passage of the 15th Amendment. And then you had violence, you had fraud, and then you had, ultimately, changing of the laws: things like literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandered districts and all-white primaries.

Suddenly, there were no more Black representatives, and that situation lasted for nearly 100 years in the South. When I see states rushing to immediately get rid of majority-minority districts, immediately get rid of districts in which there are Black majorities after this ruling, I think of what happened at the end of Reconstruction.

So it’s a very dark chapter in our history. It’s one that we would like to think we’ve moved past. In his opinion in Callais, Justice [Samuel] Alito talked about all the progress that America has made on race, but he completely ignored the dark parts of American history that could return when laws like the Voting Rights Act no longer exist or are functionally irrelevant.

JW: Do you take the court at face value when they argue that racism, racial gerrymandering, these are issues of our past? Should this be understood as more of a conservative power grab, or are these genuinely held opinions that the court is expressing?

AB: It’s impossible for me to get inside Alito’s head and know that, but I think it’s a power grab, ultimately.

The fact that they not only dismantled the Voting Rights Act but did so leaving Southern states time to actually redistrict for 2026 makes me believe that this is ultimately about a power grab. Because at the very least, they could have waited until June when it was too late for most of these Southern states to be able to redistrict.

Instead, they did it with just enough time for Southern states to redraw their maps. The Supreme Court has said over and over, you shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election. And now they’ve basically allowed all of these Southern states to change their voting laws in the middle of an election — in some cases, canceling elections to put in place new maps.

This is extremely political to me. It’s extremely partisan. This decision just underscores how partisan, how political, how authoritarian the Roberts court has become.

JW: In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan touches on just how big of a decision this actually is, and how the court is trying to hide the extent to which this is going to change what voting looks like in this country.

So I’m going to just read a small piece of her dissent: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

What do you make of what Kagan wrote there? Is this a fair reading of the decision?

AB: Yes, because Alito basically made it sound like he was just updating the VRA, it was just these technical changes, and what Kagan said was, this was a demolition of the law. And it wasn’t the first demolition of the law; it was part of a pattern. This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, they ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer need to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That was the first blow against the Voting Rights Act.

In 2021, they ruled that it was going to be much harder for voters of color to challenge discriminatory voting laws. That was a second major blow against the Voting Rights Act.

Now they have essentially overturned majority-minority districts, which is a third major blow of the Voting Rights Act.

You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. A pattern that the Court wants to dismiss, but a pattern that is now impossible to ignore.

JW: To your point, the echoes of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision are clearly felt throughout both the dissent and the opinion. For those who don’t know, the Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states and localities to seek preclearance before changing their voting laws. Can you set the stage a little bit more for us about what happened in Shelby County v. Holder, and how we’re still feeling that to this day?

AB: Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, because the requirement that states with a history of discrimination, largely but not exclusively in the South, had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That stopped attacks on voting before they even occurred.

It was like stopping a crime before it had been committed. It was such a powerful tool the federal government had to block voting discrimination. It meant that when all of these Southern states had to do new redistricting plans, they had to be approved with the federal government. Now they no longer have to be approved with the federal government, but they can openly discriminate in terms of these maps.

What was clear at the time was that the Shelby County decision was going to open the door to new attacks on the Voting Rights Act, and the court denied this at the time. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in that case, said this attack on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will not affect Section 2, the other part of the Voting Rights Act.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened in 2021, and again in 2026. They attacked the other remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, which makes me believe that they’re not out to get one part of the Voting Rights Act or another part of the Voting Rights Act. They’re out to get the Voting Rights Act altogether, and this is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Voting Rights Act is the most important law of the civil rights movement, of the civil rights era, and that’s why this has been the top target of the right for so many years.

JW: As you point out, it’s been a while since this decision. We’ve had over a decade in between. Do we have any sense that the Supreme Court has been looking at the track record of what happened, the aftermath of them undermining Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act?

Do we have any sense in any of their opinions or writings that they’ve noticed what’s happened, the kind of carnage that they’ve unleashed on the country in this decade-plus since?

AB: No, the Supreme Court completely got all the facts about the aftermath of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act wrong.

Justice Alito said the Black and white turnout gap is narrowing. Well, the elections that it narrowed were 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot. If you look at what happened after that, in the wake of Shelby County, the Black and white turnout gap has widened. So Justice Alito was just completely wrong in terms of the statistics that he talked about in terms of Black/white turnout, in terms of racial polarization in voting.

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The only time that the court has reversed itself was two years ago in Alabama, when they upheld a second majority-Black district in Alabama. That makes the Louisiana ruling even more confounding because the Louisiana case followed from the Alabama case in 2023. It was only because of the Alabama decision, which was authored by John Roberts and joined by Justice Kavanaugh, that Louisiana created a second majority-Black district.

So some of the justices clearly had buyer’s remorse from that decision. Basically, what happened was Alito’s dissent in the Alabama case in 2023 became the majority opinion in the Louisiana case in 2026. 

At some point, someone’s going to write a backstory of how that occurred, but it’s clear that the small victories from voting rights that emanated from the Roberts court have been the exception, rather than the rule. And the rule more often than not has been a steady stream of weakening things like the Voting Rights Act, and more broadly attacking voting rights.

JW: I would definitely read a book on that backstory. I want to ask a little bit more about the history of the Voting Rights Act, because I think to understand what’s happened in the decade-plus since Shelby and what’s likely to happen now, we have to understand how we even got the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Can you tell us a little bit of that history and how the Voting Rights Act came to be?

AB: The Voting Rights Act was meant to rectify the widespread disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the South who couldn’t vote because of things like poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and all-white primaries.

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There was a situation where in states like Mississippi, for example, only 6 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. That was a situation that existed for many years in the South. It only changed when there were huge protests of the civil rights movement that people are very familiar with. For example, the march, in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when John Lewis and civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers. The footage from Selma, Alabama really transformed the nation and led to LBJ introducing the Voting Rights Act and Congress passing it overwhelmingly.

It really was a transformative law because of what it did. It got rid of, overnight, those literacy tests and those poll taxes and those things that had disenfranchised Black voters for so many years. It led to a huge registration of previously disenfranchised Americans. Then over a longer period of time, the law was broadened so that it didn’t just help Black Americans, but it helped Americans of color throughout the country, whether it was Latinos or Asian Americans or other language minority groups.

It really made America a multiracial democracy for the first time. It was the first time that you had a situation in which people of color could vote broadly throughout the country, candidates of color could win office, and you had multiracial coalitions being built in America. So it really profoundly shaped American society and American democracy. And I’m very concerned that without that, we’re going to go back to the dark days of racially polarized voting, of Black voters and Black candidates being disenfranchised, of one-party rule and white supremacy being enshrined, particularly throughout the South.

So I think it’s a misnomer to look at the Voting Rights Act in terms of just Black and white. That’s why I always talk about the fact that it made multiracial democracy possible. Because it had a big impact on white voters as well and on white politicians as well, that you didn’t just have to pander to race, and you didn’t just have to appeal to white supremacy to get elected anymore.

Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.

JW: The nightmare scenarios that you’re describing are happening against the backdrop of what the Supreme Court did, but also what the Trump administration is trying to do and Republicans are actively trying to do.

Wired recently ran a story about how the Department of Justice under Trump has essentially dismantled its voting rights [division], going from 30 attorneys to two since he started a second term. What are the implications of this broader attack, both from Republicans and the Trump administration, and now the court as well?

AB: That’s right. You can’t divorce the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act from the larger context of the attacks on voting rights we’re seeing from the Trump administration. There’s already a mid-decade redistricting war going on that’s trying to eliminate representation for Democrats, and particularly targeting communities of color.

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There’s already a huge rollback in civil rights enforcement. The Department of Justice basically doesn’t enforce civil rights laws in America anymore. They’ve weaponized those laws, in fact, to defend white people at the expense of communities of color that these civil rights laws were meant to protect.

You already have the Trump administration, for example, going after elections in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots, demanding names of election workers in the largest county in Georgia, home to Atlanta, which has a huge Black population. So it’s very clear that over and over, the Trump administration has tried to target certain communities.

They’ve tried to target communities that ally with Democrats, and so often those are Black, Latino, other minority communities. That’s why this attack on the Voting Rights Act is part of this larger effort to, in Trump’s words, “take over” the voting system. Some of it succeeded, some of it hasn’t succeeded, but the fact that all of these things happened at the same time is very alarming.

JW: Do voters have any recourse to defend themselves against what appears to be a blatant power grab?

AB: I think, more broadly, there needs to be a lot more investment in the South. A lot of these places, these “red states,” places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, they’ve been ignored by the national Democratic Party, and I don’t think that can happen anymore.

There has to be investment in these places because if these districts no longer exist, then there’s going to have to be efforts to win in new places and build new coalitions that haven’t existed before. That’s going to take new leaders. It’s going to take new investment. That’s something that needs to be created. That’s one part of it. 

I also think that some of the bigger issues that come out of this decision, for example, the need to reform the Supreme Court, the need to actually do something at a national level about the problem of gerrymandering — those are things that voters can demand from their politicians.

What are you going to do about a completely unaccountable and lawless Supreme Court? What are you going to do about the problem of gerrymandering so that states just don’t redraw their maps every year or two when they feel like it because of the political circumstance? 

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Then I think in terms of what voters can do to protect the election system, voters can become poll workers. Voters can become election monitors. Voters can decide to volunteer for civil rights organizations, things like that. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for democracy, and people are going to have to get involved in whatever way they think can make the most difference.

JW: Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AB: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.

[Break]

JW: After the most recent Supreme Court ruling further gutting the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn immediately called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in the state. 

Justin J. Pearson is a Democratic state representative in Memphis running for Congress for the district at the heart of Tennessee’s gerrymandering fight. We spoke with Pearson on Tuesday evening as that fight began. 

On Thursday afternoon, the state legislature concluded the special session, eliminating the only remaining Democratic-held House District. We speak to Rep. Pearson about the impact this will have on his district and Black voters statewide. 

Rep. Justin J. Pearson, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Justin J. Pearson: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: After the Supreme Court’s ruling last week invalidating a Louisiana map that — in line with the Voting Rights Act — created two majority-Black districts, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in your state, which happens, of course, to be the seat you’re running for and part of your district. What impact is that going to have on your state? 

JP: The removal of the only Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee will have detrimental ramifications for our representation and our right to be able to select elected officials of our choosing.

The fact is, this is a racist redistricting and gerrymandering attempt. It is a coup. It is the stealing of a congressional seat on behalf of the president of the United States, the governor, and white supremacist leaders in the state House and state Senate. And I’m using that language very particularly. 

This is an election cycle. This is a moment where white supremacy is governing. It’s not what’s best for our citizens. It’s not what’s best for our constituents. But it is a weaponization and a mobilization of power. And stealing it is what this president has asked for the state government of Tennessee to do on his behalf, and it is what they are doing and have done right now in the state.

JW: We’re speaking Tuesday evening after that first redistricting special session that you were part of. What can you tell us about how the first of these sessions taking place this week went down?

JP: Today, committees were assigned, and each of those committees, the biggest ones in the House, was the Congressional Redistricting Committee, there’s a resolutions committee, and a couple of other ones.

But my big concern is these committees are set to operate at the speed of lightning to make a decision that actually undos current statute, which says that there can be no redistricting between apportionments of districts between the census. Now we’re going to undo that law in an attempt to now take a congressional district that would otherwise be directly in contradiction.

There’s an expectation that we’re going to hold those committees, and that those committees are going to be presented with new gerrymandered maps that break up the only Black-majority district. And the only reason that this is happening at this point in time is because Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, and the ability of Black folks to seek remedies in the judicial system no longer exists in the way that they had before.

They still do exist, but the fact of racial animus and the racial intention has been severely weakened — which is why this case is so devastating. Because our ability to go to the courts and seek remedies from those decisions is really something that has been able to keep the Voting Rights Act in effect. It’s been able to keep Black representation as a possibility in our democracy. 

It’s really important to realize we aren’t at this point in our nation’s history of needing a Voting Rights Act because people were just bad, right? It was because of centuries of systematic oppression.

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It was violence, lynching, the murdering of people whose bodies were found in the Mississippi River and other small towns all across the South in particular, just for registering to vote or trying to vote. We have to realize the ramifications of what has happened in the state of Tennessee and what is likely to happen in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and across the South — the Confederacy states — are going to have far-reaching implications for us in this generation and generations to come

JW: People bled out for this. They fought for this. These are rights that are hard-won. In your district, what are you hearing from people in Memphis about, particularly Black people, about how this is going to impact them and the kind of rights that they’re, I’m sure, terrified of losing right now?

JP: I think the first feeling for a lot of people is fear. Fear that they’ll never ever again have the opportunity to send a Black person to the U.S. Congress, that they’ll never — and we’ve been on the campaign trail since October 8 — but that they’ll never really be able to have a voice in the national government is deeply concerning to them as Black people and also for folks who are Democrats. They’re deeply concerned that this won’t happen again because of, again, mid-decade racist redistricting that is happening. 

There is some organizing and some energy that has mobilized people into action. We’ve had two busloads of people come up to Nashville every single day — it’d be on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — who are speaking up and speaking out and saying, “No, this is unfair. This is unjust. This is wrong.” They’re not just coming from Memphis and Shelby County, which I have the privilege of representing in the [Tennessee] House of Representatives for District 86, but these folks are coming from all across the state in small rural counties and other places who fear that their representation will no longer be proximate to them because districts are being created that in some cases stretch 200 miles, just to break up the compactness of our district, just to break up our ability to have Black political power. 

That is what is the primary goal of what they’re doing. It is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level. When you look across the South, the truth is, about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there. We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening. 

We just have to have people’s eyes wide open to what is going on and to the far-reaching implications this is going to have when you no longer have advocates and people who speak to the concerns, the issues, the culture, the identity of our community.

JW: There’s precedent for what you’re talking about here, for that kind of impact. Back in 2022, Republicans redistricted Nashville in a way that diluted Democratic voters’ influence, making the district lean more toward the GOP. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened then, and what that could mean for the district you represent?

JP: Absolutely. So we did see this in Nashville when the maps were redrawn in 2022. They were forced to have three different congresspeople all representing the city of Nashville. The intention there was to dilute Nashville’s political power, putting them inside of districts where the majority of people probably live very differently, much more rural, vote much more conservatively, and have much less diversity than the city of Nashville does.

Since then, people who live here don’t have representation in the U.S. Congress. The congresspeople don’t have any offices near or around Nashville, and even elected officials that I’ve met who represent Nashville have a hard time accessing any of the people who supposedly are representing them on the federal level.

So the voices in this community have, in effect, been silenced when it comes to the federal government and national government issues, and that has really been detrimental to this community, and many people here will tell you that.

I am deeply concerned that that is the exact same thing that’s going to happen in Memphis. We won’t have a voice in Washington, D.C. We won’t have someone advocating about the issues from the socioeconomic perspective, from public health perspective, from an educational perspective, that can elevate the problems that we know acutely exist in our city. 

My city’s the most beautiful place in the world, but we have problems.

A fourth of our adults are living in poverty. We got poor kids because we got poor parents. We haven’t increased the minimum wage to $25 an hour. We need access to universal healthcare in a state that has refused to expand Medicaid. We need housing, 55,000 units of housing for people who make $17,000 a year.

When you understand that history, that tradition, those statistics, not just as numbers on a page, but as something that you feel an accountability to do something about because it’s the community where you live. It’s the community where I’ve grown up. It’s the place that has made me into who I am. That is very different than being connected or thrown into a district that is majority-white in an attempt to silence our voices.

JW: The conservatives on the Supreme Court obviously hold a very different opinion of this issue from you. In this case, and obviously in the Shelby County decision as well, they argue that these protections are no longer necessary because the South has made great strides on racism. As a Black representative who represents a majority-Black district in the South, what do you make of the notion that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression are issues of the past?

JP: Anyone who says that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression and racism no longer exist are lying. The fact that they are saying that shows the depth of racism and the institutionalization of white supremacy in our country, that some people are so enamored with whiteness being right that they don’t see the disparities that are vast and right in front of them.

Black people are still being deprived of educational opportunities. As it relates to housing, Black folks are still living in some of the most segregated neighborhoods in the United States of America. The wealth gap remains about 10 to 1. At every level, Black folks and African American folks are being deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In fact, there’s even a case right now of a man named Tony Carruthers who is on death row to be killed on May 21 in the state of Tennessee. Because we know the people who are on death row disproportionately are Black African American people, and even though 10 percent of them could be exonerated, states are using death by lethal injection, or now the federal government wants to do firing squads as a new form of lynching.

Twenty-one percent of Black people can’t vote in the state of Tennessee. Already, 1 out of 5 Black people cannot vote in the state of Tennessee due to felon disenfranchisement. And so for people who are trying to articulate some false narrative and argument that racism is no longer a problem, you are lying.

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You are lying to yourselves, and you are lying to communities that are feeling the impacts of racism every single day. Those vestiges are very real, and the hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into statehouses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States, and that is what we are dealing with right now.

So the Supreme Court has it wrong, but John Roberts has been going after the Voting Rights Act, I think, for [more than 40] years he’s been trying to gut it, since he was a staffer in the White House. So the fact they passed Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted Section 5, and now they passed anti-affirmative action. They wrote an opinion against affirmative action, which again targeted race consciousness, and now gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is all in sequence of their goal to try and make us somehow believe we live in a colorblind society that just so happens to leave Black African American people at the bottom every single time. 

JW: The forces that you’re talking about here of white supremacy are just incredibly strong. We can talk about racial gerrymandering, all of the other issues with racism that we’re dealing with in this country that you just mentioned.

How do we do anything about that? What does resistance look like in this moment? Obviously, in 2023, you were famously expelled from the state legislature for protesting for stronger gun control laws in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. That expulsion disenfranchised the voters in your majority Black district.

But instead of accepting an early retirement, you went on to win your district in the next election and continue to fight Republicans in the legislature. Do you think your story has any lessons for how people fight back against this behemoth of white supremacy and this energy of racial disenfranchisement?

JP: It’s multifaceted, the fight back. Here we are three years later from April 6, 2023, and Republicans are at it again disenfranchising our community and seeking to disenfranchise 750,000 people, both white and Black, but majority-Black district here in District 9. The fact of the matter is this: We did not quit then, we must not quit now.

As horrible as this decision is by the U.S. Supreme Court, what we also need to internalize is we need to organize for the next 50 years. Because I do not believe that when I die, this is the type of America that we’re going to live in. But that isn’t going to happen if we throw our hands up, if we quit, if we say, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do.”

Certainly, you can go quit and go get a job in corporate America, make six figures doing all those other things. But the reality is, if you are living in a society that structurally is designing itself to make you less than, structurally designing itself to tell my wife she is less than, my nephew’s sons, that they are less than American citizens, they’re less than human beings — if you sit on the sidelines at such a time in a critical and crucial moment as this, you are a part of the problem.

I understand some folks are working 80 hours a week just to make it. I get that. But there are some people who are retired, and they’re sitting on the couch, and they won’t pick up the phone to call their state House member, their state senator, and their governor. There are some people who are just hoping and praying in pews, but they’re not willing to show up and help people get to the polls.

That is what we have to quit on. Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic that very quickly is being disrupted and destroyed at every single turn. Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.

That’s what we’re looking at here. This is not a joke. This is not a game. And to anyone who says I would have been there with Dr. King, I would have been marching in the 1960s and 1950s. As one pastor said to me, “Whatever you are doing now is what you would have done then.” And people need to realize they have a responsibility now to do more.

JW: Do you feel as if your Democratic colleagues, both in the state legislature and nationally in Congress, do they have your back on this? Are they allies in this? Do you feel like they have that fight in them that you’ve mentioned?

JP: I am seeing more fight right here in the statehouse than I’ve seen in the last three years. People realize that the racism, the bigotry, the white supremacy that for too often has been cloaked in decency and niceness was all a façade.

We get caught up being told you have to learn to work across the aisle. I have done it. I passed resolutions with Republican co-sponsorship, signed on to some Republican bills, but we cannot forget that the roots of the institution are rotten.

They are designed to defeat our ability to resist, to speak up, to stand up against what’s happening.

In this moment in time, what I will say is, we need more support. We need more support. We need in every state, in every city that this is happening, we need a cadre of Congressional Black Caucus members coming to speak and to testify. We need dozens of nonprofit organizations, like we have right here in Tennessee, coming together to fight back and to resist and to speak up and to shout and to sing and to testify and to speak and to organize power at the ballot box. Not just registering people to vote, but making sure people actually get to the polls.

The South is where the litmus test for America’s future is, and I’ve said this for years. The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California. The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.

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If we continue to be neglected, millions of us, tens of millions of us, are going to continue to live under authoritarian, anti-democratic, mobcratic rule, and that is wrong. That should rouse this nation into action. It should force people who might not otherwise show up to show up and to speak up and to do more because their voices are the voices that we’re going to lean on and rely on to help change the status quo that is deeply impacting our states.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. Those were all of my questions, but do you have any final thoughts to share with our audience?

JP: I think what’s really important here for Black America is to realize this: We did not just come this far to get this far, and our ancestors who marched, who protested, who bled, who died, who were assassinated, who were taken from their families much too soon and too young, like 39-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., like Medgar Evers, who was quite young and in his 30s, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten by police officers and other folk. We didn’t come this far easily. This is a difficult road that we trod, as our Black National Anthem says, but we were built for this moment in time.

As a spiritual person who practices Christianity, I have to tell you this: I think we have been sent for such a time as this. And everybody who is alive right now has a responsibility in this moment to do something. So if that is march, do that. If that’s protest, do that. If that’s run for office, do that. If that’s sign a petition, do that. 

But you’ve got to do something because the moment is coming where somebody’s going to look you in the eyes, somebody who is not born yet, and they will say, “What did you do in the year 2026, in our 250 year of this country, when democracy was crumbling?” And you need to have a response.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. We really appreciate you coming on The Intercept Briefing.

JP: I appreciate you, too, and thanks so much for having me.

JW: And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Claire Mullen mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us. Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It  appeared first on The Intercept.

US–Israel war with Iran: What is the impact on Gaza? 18 May 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 8 May 2026 Online

How has the war distracted attention from Palestine? And how will it affect the Trump peace plan?

Speakers discuss current conditions of the Gaza ceasefire along humanitarian, governance, and security dimensions, and the impact of the US-Israel war on Iran.

As the Israel-US-Iran War continues, the Gaza ceasefire has ceased to be a priority for international or regional actors. On the ground, however, humanitarian conditions in Gaza are worsening, political pathways are narrowing, and temporary borders and security measures are becoming permanent.

In this webinar, speakers will discuss where conditions currently stand with the ceasefire along humanitarian, governance, and security dimensions; how the Iran-US-Israel war is (re)shaping the calculations of different actors; and what future trajectories might be possible.

David Hinton will remain in post while successor is found, group says, a week after resignation of chair Chris Train

The chief executive of South East Water has announced plans to step down, a week after the group’s chair quit in the wake of major supply outages in Kent and Sussex.

The supplier said David Hinton, who joined the board in 2013, would stay in post to allow an “orderly transition” over the summer while the group hunts for his successor.

The Iran war has left Gaza neglected Expert comment thilton.drupal 8 May 2026

With the world distracted by the Iran war, the situation is worsening in Gaza, where neither Israel nor Hamas are under pressure to make progress on the ceasefire plan.

In the shadow of the Iran war, the Gaza ceasefire has ceased to be a priority for international or regional actors, even while Palestine remains inextricably linked to other conflicts in the region. Meanwhile, with the world looking elsewhere, humanitarian conditions in Gaza are deteriorating, the room for political pathways is narrowing and supposedly temporary borders and security measures are at risk of becoming entrenched.

It was always likely to be difficult to move from the initial ceasefire to the second phase of US president Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, given that it contains two of the biggest sticking points: the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of the Israeli army. But the Iran war, and the subsequent lack of external pressure on either Hamas or Israel, has given both parties time to double-down on their positions and cement the status quo, with dangerous consequences.

Hamas refuses to disarm

In April, Hamas rejected a disarmament plan from Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza on the US-led ‘Board of Peace’, which linked the decommissioning of weapons to reconstruction efforts. Hamas officials asserted that they would not negotiate on the second phase of the ceasefire until Israel fully implemented the first phase, including allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza at the levels stipulated in the ceasefire agreement.

Moreover, Hamas sees no incentive to disarm without a framework for establishing a Palestinian state. Unlike Northern Ireland or South Africa (historical cases to which the Israel-Palestine conflict is often compared) there is no peace process on the horizon, nor is there a political pathway available to Hamas if the group lays down its arms.

Many Palestinians I’ve spoken with, including non-Hamas supporters, support a pathway in which Hamas could potentially maintain a political role in Palestinian governance. But this is a non-starter for Israel and ruled out in the 20-point plan. While the plan offers individual Hamas members amnesty if they disarm and ‘commit to peaceful co-existence’, they may well doubt this offer is sincere or worry about reprisals.

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If there were few incentives for disarmament before, Israel has introduced additional disincentives by reportedly backing other Palestinian armed groups to carry out attacks against Hamas. Groups like the Popular Forces near Rafah, the Counterterrorism Strike Force near Khan Younis, and the Ashraf al-Mansi group near Gaza City are based in the Israeli-controlled area of Gaza. These groups conduct operations in Hamas-controlled territory where nearly all of Gaza’s approximately 2.2 million civilians are living.

The militias provide Hamas with another reason to reject disarming, adding another armed threat on top of Israel’s continued air strikes. Furthermore, because the militias are reportedly viewed as collaborators by many in Gaza, they may be inadvertently boosting Hamas’s support, while making it more difficult for any alternative anti-Hamas voices to emerge.

No pressure on Israel to withdraw

Just as Hamas leaders see little incentive to disarm, Israeli leaders see little incentive to withdraw from Gaza. According to Trump’s 20-point plan, the Israeli army’s withdrawal was meant to coincide with the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF). However, uptake for the ISF has been slow, with few countries expressing interest. While the American commander of the ISF has announced that five countries will be joining the force, there remains a lack of clarity over its mission and doubts about whether it will actually be deployed if that entails direct confrontation with Hamas in Gaza.

This increases the likelihood of Israel maintaining a troop presence in Gaza in the long-term. After the ceasefire, Israeli troops occupied roughly 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip, demarcated on maps by its ‘Yellow Line.’ Recent reports appeared to show maps issued by the Israeli military with an expanded restricted zone of control in Gaza that added an estimated extra 11 per cent of Gaza’s territory beyond the ‘Yellow Line’. While the exact line of control may yet shift, these new lines of control are now at risk of becoming de facto long-term borders.

This would be in line with Israel’s embrace of so-called ‘buffer zones’ as a central strategy in both Syria and Lebanon in the regional realignment that followed Hamas’s 7 October attacks. This tactic is not new – Israel occupied parts of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, and maintained a buffer zone of about 300 metres around Gaza’s perimeter even before 2023.

It seems highly unlikely that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will reduce Israel’s area of control in Gaza, especially in an election year, even if Hamas were to make concessions. While this ‘buffer zone’ tactic may yield some short-term security gains for Israel, it could also play into Hamas and Hezbollah’s calls of resistance against the continued Israeli army presence.

NCAG unable to enter

Other key ceasefire measures also remain stalled. These include governance steps that could help stabilize the territory, like admitting the entry of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a transitional Palestinian governing body established by the Board of Peace.

Since its launch in January, the 15-member NCAG has been based in Cairo, with members reportedly blocked from entering Gaza. There were questions from critics from the outset about NCAG’s legitimacy, autonomy and remit. Nevertheless, many Gazans expressed hope that NCAG could bring at least some Palestinian-led improvements. Now, however, that cautious optimism has shifted to frustration as NCAG’s physical absence from Gaza has reinforced its perceived impotence.

By not admitting NCAG to Gaza while continuing to reject any meaningful role for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the territory, Israel is contributing to conditions that make the territory appear lawless and ungovernable. This also strengthens Hamas by preventing the emergence of any alternatives.

Positions hardened

The wars in both Iran and Lebanon have only further entrenched these positions. For Hamas, the ability of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah to (thus far) survive multiple rounds of military operations will likely embolden their own position of defiance.

For Israel, the lack of a knock-out blow in either Iran or Lebanon will likely harden its position on Gaza and further postpone any meaningful negotiations involving Palestinian self-determination, even under a new government. 

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Nathan Law, an exiled leader of the Hong Kong student protest who lives with a £100,000 bounty on his head from the Chinese authorities, was not surprised to discover a spy ring had photographed him entering the Oxford Union for an evening debate in November 2023.

The conviction at the Old Bailey of Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 38, and Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 65, for assisting a foreign intelligence service, was a sobering first – no Chinese spies had been convicted in British criminal history before Thursday – but the details that came out in the nine-week trial mainly served to confirm his suspicions.

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• Sign up to get WNBA 30 in your inbox every Tuesday

A summer of basketball without the specter of CBA uncertainty. There’s no doubt last season had highs – the Aces’ third title, the Liberty’s star power, breakout rookies and the emergence of the Golden State Valkyries – but the possibility of a shortened, delayed or even cancelled 2026 season loomed over so much of 2025. After 17 months of negotiations and hard-earned, deserved wins by the players, here we are. My second answer: getting Jordan Robinson’s WNBA 30 newsletter in my inbox every Tuesday! EB

In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

Richard Shaffer, asset manager at Scrubgrass Reclamation Company, emailed asking for an exemption covering a western Pennsylvania power plant that burns coal waste. A significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was important “for the security of the United States,” Shaffer wrote.

A response came 11 days later in a presidential proclamation. Approved.

A Citgo Petroleum Corporation lawyer, Ann Al-Bahish, sought exemptions for petroleum refineries in Illinois, Louisiana and Texas, which had all been hit with Clean Air Act violations in recent years. The rule at issue, the agency had previously concluded, would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.” (The company agreed to install new pollution controls to resolve some of its violations.)

Kevin Wagner, vice president of the medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, messaged asking that nine facilities emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide, including near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta, be exempted. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data.

Both companies got their response in July proclamations. Approved and approved.

The companies did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In granting these requests, the White House didn’t seek input from EPA scientists. The administration cited authority under the Clean Air Act that had never before been used.

More approvals followed. All told, more than 180 facilities in 38 states and Puerto Rico have, by Trump’s unilateral decision, been given a two-year reprieve from following the latest Clean Air Act rules. About 250,000 people live within a mile of these facilities, according to EPA and U.S. Census Bureau data collected by the Environmental Defense Fund.

A majority are coal power plants and medical sterilizers. And more than 70 had faced formal enforcement action in the past five years by the EPA for violations such as emitting contaminants above regulatory limits and failing to properly track facilities’ pollution.

Few requests appear to have been denied. The administration hasn’t made public its decisions on requests from three classes of plants that it said it would consider exempting: manufacturers of rubber tires, iron and steel, and lime, which is used in products ranging from metals to concrete. About 55 facilities are covered by those rules, although Republicans in Congress have already repealed the rubber tire updated rule.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, an EPA spokesperson said in a statement: “EPA played no role in the determinations set out in the statute and specifically vested in the President. Any requests sent to the EPA’s electronic mailbox were forwarded to the White House.”

In defending the exemptions, the administration cited two standards in the Clean Air Act that a president must invoke to exercise such powers: The industry must be integral to national security, and the technology needed to meet the EPA requirements must be unavailable. Sticking with Biden-era requirements could shut down businesses, Trump argued.

“The President has provided regulatory relief from certain burdensome Clean Air Act requirements due to national security concerns that critical industries would no longer be able to operate under such stringent standards,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “Exemptions were issued due to crushing Biden-era regulations that required large swaths of our industrial base to adopt technologies that don’t exist outside the imagination of Biden’s EPA bureaucrats.”

Numerous policy experts told ProPublica that they do not believe the White House’s justifications for the use of the exemptions.

“It’s being absolutely abused now, and it couldn’t be more obvious,” said one EPA staffer who asked not to be named because they currently work for the agency.

Indeed, multiple utilities have publicly said that they were already implementing pollution controls to comply with the more stringent rules, undercutting the administration’s claim that the technologies necessary to do so don’t exist.

Community groups and environmental nonprofits have sued the administration five times to halt the exemptions. A coalition of 12 organizations labeled the action an “illegal scheme.” (Four of the cases have been consolidated and are ongoing. In a motion to dismiss them, the administration argued that the groups did not have legal standing to sue and reiterated its stance that the law gives the president the authority to grant such exemptions.)

“The cancer risk presented by these facilities is huge,” said Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, adding that years of scientific study and public input informed the rules. “With a stroke of a pen, President Trump thinks he can just brush all that away.”

“He Disregards the Checks-and-Balances System”

Freeport-McMoRan’s massive copper mining and smelting operation sits on the hills above the towns of Miami, Claypool and Globe in eastern Arizona. A Clean Air Act rule that was updated in 2024 regulates the smelter’s emissions and, by extension, the air breathed by the 10,000 people who live in these towns.

Nearly two and a half years of fine-tuning passed between publication of a draft rule and the final product. Some of it was spent gathering input from residents, public health groups, Native American governments and companies — feedback the agency addressed in subsequent rewrites. Years of air monitoring data also informed the process. Implementing the updated rule would “reduce emissions of toxic metals, primarily lead and arsenic, by nearly 50 percent” at the country’s several copper smelters, the EPA concluded.

Trump undid that work when he signed a proclamation in October pausing implementation and approving Freeport’s request that its Arizona copper smelter be given a pass on “all the deadlines promulgated under” the rule.

On a sunny morning a few weeks after Freeport received the exemption, white smoke poured from its smelter above a Baptist church and residential neighborhood. The plant’s low rumble reverberated across the surrounding desert, unusually green from a recent rain.

Trina Bunger has lived her life next to this smelter. Decades ago, the air was so polluted that her children wore handkerchiefs over their mouths when they went to school. So many of the family’s cattle fell ill that she no longer believed the sicknesses were a coincidence.

Years ago, on particularly bad days, when the air around the smelter was hazy, “it would choke you out. It was like walking in a cloud,” Bunger said. “If you read the obituaries, ‘Died of cancer. Died of cancer,’” she said of her neighbors. “Well, that’s our destination, so I better get done what I’m gonna get done.”

But she’s seen air quality steadily improve as regulations tightened, following advances in emissions control technology. Freeport spent $250 million on improvements completed in 2017 to better control sulfur dioxide emissions.

“It’s better than in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s,” Bunger said.

Trump paused the requirement that Freeport follow the latest rule, including by installing additional pollution control equipment.

William Cobb and Todd Weaver, Freeport’s vice president and senior counsel, respectively, emailed the EPA in March 2025 to request a reprieve from the Clean Air Act. They argued that complying with the rule governing copper smelters would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while bringing minimal emissions reductions.

“Significant investments have been made over the smelter’s long history to manage sulfur dioxide, lead and other regulated emissions in accordance with applicable standards, contributing to sustained improvements in local air quality,” Linda Hayes, Freeport’s spokesperson, said in a statement. The company has increased monitoring around the smelter and asked for the additional time to work with the EPA on evaluating “flaws” in the updated rule, she said.

For this conservative county, where more than two-thirds of voters went for Trump, the smelter is an economic blessing. Freeport’s broader copper operation here employs nearly 950 people, according to the company. A brightly painted mural down the road from the smelter reads: “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”

Eduardo Sanchez lauds the company’s economic impact and is hesitant to criticize the smelter. But, he said, Trump has no right to unilaterally decide when laws do and do not apply.

“In order to help the rich get richer, he’s deregulating everything,” Sanchez said. “He’s a tyrant. He disregards the checks-and-balances system. He overreaches through executive dictates.”

An Error-Ridden Process

While Trump’s exemptions will affect millions of Americans like those in Miami, Claypool and Globe, the process for granting them has been sloppy.

Because presidents have never previously used this authority to circumvent the Clean Air Act, industries were left guessing how to make the request, experts said.

“Hello, I am a gas company looking for an exemption. How do I start?” one businessman wrote in an email to the EPA.

Others appeared to mock the administration’s regulatory rollback, with one email calling for a coal power plant to be built on a 300-foot-wide mangrove island just offshore of the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It will produce power so strongly that jobs and power will be the best that people have ever seen,” the email stated.

The American Chemistry Council and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, two trade groups representing chemical manufacturers, sent a letter requesting a blanket exemption for their roughly 640 member companies. “Without immediate intervention, such as a Presidential exemption,” the groups wrote, referencing the section of law Trump was using to hit pause on Clean Air Act rules, “companies will evaluate whether to shut down units or offshore their operations to prevent the application of an imprudent and unlawful rule.”

It emerged later that the administration had decided that companies must submit requests on their own behalf.

Rank-and-file agency staff also had little understanding of how the process would run, according to hundreds of pages of internal EPA communications obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. Instead, a political appointee who had previously worked for a utility and a petrochemicals trade group played a key role in creating the inbox where companies sent their requests for exemptions, the records showed.

“There’s certainly no input from experts in EPA,” the EPA employee told ProPublica.

The administration gave notice of approved exemptions by publishing presidential proclamations listing the factories’ locations on the White House’s website. “It is in the national security interests of the United States to issue this Exemption,” Trump wrote when exempting Freeport’s smelter. 

These proclamations at times added to the confusion. In a July proclamation, Trump appears to have granted an exemption to a plant south of Baton Rouge, although he listed it as being located in Alabama, not Louisiana, and to another in Alabama that may not exist at all.

Spelling mistakes and formatting errors throughout the proclamations have made identifying exempted plants a guessing game. The name of an Arkansas coal plant receiving an exemption was misspelled, for instance, as was the name of the company Phillips 66, which was granted exemptions at its oil refineries in Illinois and Texas.

Phillips 66 declined to comment.

In April, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, introduced a bill to amend the process by requiring the president to obtain Congress’ consent before granting pauses to Clean Air Act compliance. The exemptions, Whitehouse said in a statement, show a willingness to “abuse every loophole available to pollute for free, damn the health consequences for Americans.”

A Sweeping Deregulatory Agenda

Trump’s exemptions give companies an extra two years to comply with updates to nine sets of regulations written under the law’s authority that mandate lower emissions or better monitoring around facilities in specific industries. The rules were slated to take effect this year and next.

This pause is part of a much larger strategy to unwind the Clean Air Act, buying time for the administration to deconstruct large portions of the legislative framework regulating the nation’s air quality — weakening regulations on everything from ethylene oxide emissions to plastics pyrolysis plants. And while the law largely governs toxins, the rollback has also undermined action on climate change, including repealing the legal theory used to classify greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide as regulated pollutants.

The White House has focused these efforts most intently on one industry: coal. Trump has so far granted 71 coal power plants — more than any other category — two-year exemptions to the Clean Air Act rule governing them, called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. Then, in February, the administration formalized the rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, in effect making the exemptions permanent.

Among the beneficiaries of these moves is Ameren Corp.’s Labadie Energy Center west of St. Louis. The coal-fired power station is massive — 2.4 gigawatts, enough to power roughly 2 million homes — as are its emissions. It’s one of the nation’s largest sources of sulfur dioxide, which forms haze and harms the respiratory system, and the second-largest source of carbon dioxide, according to EPA data. But due to its age, the plant isn’t equipped with most modern pollution controls and can be linked to more than 300 premature deaths per year, according to a recent Sierra Club and Clean Air Task Force analysis of EPA data.

Patricia Schuba’s family has lived in Franklin County, Missouri, for five generations. From her home, she can see the plant and, emanating from it, “black clouds on an otherwise normal day.” Schuba keeps a mental list of the friends and family members who suffer from cancer, respiratory issues and other diseases and wonders if these health problems are linked to the emissions.

“I’m hopeful that the American public will wake up and elect people who actually put the American public first. And if we can do that, we can unwind some of this and clean up these sites,” said Schuba, who has served as the president of the Labadie Environmental Organization, a nonprofit community group, for about 15 years.

Sunil Bector, an attorney with the Sierra Club, said that heavily polluting facilities will reap overlapping benefits from the assault on the Clean Air Act. Research by his organization suggests that the Labadie power station stands to gain from every major action rolling back coal plant regulations.

“Ameren may expect that these rules are going away,” Bector said, “which means the levers that would force Ameren to internalize the cost of pollution are going away, which means the people who breathe air in St. Louis are internalizing the cost of pollution through their lungs.”

Craig Giesmann, the company’s director of environmental services, said in a statement, “Ameren Missouri’s Labadie Energy Center provides electricity to our customers in a cost-effective manner, operates in compliance with all applicable environmental regulations designed to protect public health and is supported by decades of investment in emissions controls.” Additionally, Giesmann said, the power plant is “critical infrastructure.”

The law requires the president to tie such exemptions to national security, and Trump has declared a national energy emergency over fears that emerging industries, like artificial intelligence, will not have access to the massive amounts of electricity they need. Data center proposals have come to Franklin County, and the county recently voted to recommend one despite the opposition of hundreds of locals. As the Trump administration speaks of an artificial intelligence arms race, Schuba fears Labadie will remain open for years to power data centers.

“There are real human consequences,” Schuba said, “lives that we sacrifice for whatever we think our future should be.”

“Death Started to Come”

Amid the rush to give out passes to the Clean Air Act, communities already saddled with air pollution find themselves affected once more.

An 85-mile stretch of Louisiana, running southeast from Baton Rouge, hosts such a concentration of heavy industry that it long ago garnered the nickname “Cancer Alley.” Studies have shown elevated cancer rates in the region, home to tens of thousands of people, and local chemical plants received passes on Clean Air Act rules. Louisiana hosts 20 of the facilities Trump has exempted. (Texas and Pennsylvania, two other states with histories of heavy industry, rank first and third, respectively, for the number of exempted facilities.)

Tonga Nolan grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the north side of Baton Rouge and remembers it fondly as a tight-knit community. She also remembers when “death started to come.” Years later, she can recite the names of more than a dozen neighbors and family members who lived within a few blocks and died of cancer.

Nolan also had cancer. Wondering about a link between emissions from nearby facilities and her own health woes, Nolan moved away after undergoing a hysterectomy, she said. She is now in remission.

Chemical plants mark the western edge of the neighborhood, including a Formosa Plastics facility, which produces the plastic commonly called PVC.

The plant, owned by a Taiwanese chemicals company worth about $300 billion, has a history of violations. In 2003, the company accidentally released 8,000 pounds of carcinogenic vinyl chloride into Baton Rouge, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. And EPA data shows that its pattern of reported infractions has continued in recent years. (A company spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement that “significant improvements have been implemented” relating to “process safety, monitoring, and operational controls” since the 2003 incident.)

Formosa Plastics’ Baton Rouge plant applied for an exemption to a Clean Air Act rule. Jay Su and Tamara Lasater Wacker, executive vice president and corporate environmental director of Formosa Plastics, respectively, wrote to the EPA in March 2025 to make their case for it. They said that the company needed more time to design and install technology to comply with the rule and that the plastic synthesized at the plant was important to national security because it’s used in products such as blood bags.

“Due to the complexities and challenges that the rule currently presents, we request that the President grant a 2-year compliance date exemption for related emission limits and standards, performance testing, monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements,” Su wrote.

The rule would have mandated better monitoring at the fence lines of Formosa Plastics and other plants. Such facilities can leak toxic gases from pipelines, valves and tanks, and they often vastly underestimate local emissions. But monitoring for leaks has proved effective in other industries; fence-line emissions of benzene, a carcinogen, fell 30% at petroleum refineries after implementation of a similar monitoring program, according to the EPA.

The administration granted Formosa Plastics’ request in July.

“We take our environmental responsibilities seriously and remain committed to safe, compliant, and transparent operations,” Formosa Plastics’ spokesperson said.

Exacerbating historical disparities, about 54% of people who live close to the facilities Trump exempted are not white, according to the federal data the Environmental Defense Fund collected. By comparison, only about 43% of the country is not white.

Polluting facilities “seem to be in the backyards of a lot of African American families,” Nolan said, adding that it’s hard to cope with the reality that many family members and neighbors are lost forever.

“You are hurting,” she said. “It’s like a hole that can never be filled.”

The post Trump Exempted Some of the Nation’s Biggest Polluters From Air Quality Rules. All It Took Was an Email. appeared first on ProPublica.

People facing the prospect of prolonged ICE detention are increasingly abandoning their claims for humanitarian protection and agreeing to depart voluntarily.

Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in rural western Pennsylvania had only one commercial carrier. Spirit Airlines’ closure has left it scrambling to find a replacement.

In a letter to Twitch and Amazon, New York Democratic Rep. Richie Torres once slammed Hasan Piker, the popular political streamer, for his “depravity” and called him “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism.” While mainstream Democrats and their allies have for months weighed the “problem” of Piker for the party, his star has only continued to rise. Insurgent candidates on the left are now making him their go-to surrogate, with Piker as a new kind of kingmaker, one they hope can shepherd his mass of online supporters behind them.

Piker recently touched down in Missouri to lend his star power to Cori Bush, who is looking to reclaim her position in the House after serving as the first Black woman to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District from 2021 to 2025. During her first term in office, Bush authored a bill calling for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” In what was widely read as retribution, Bush was primaried by a Democratic opponent, Wesley Bell, who ended his own Senate campaign against Republican Josh Hawley for the run; Bell defeated Bush with the help of an unprecedented nearly $9 million in spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Now Bush is back, and like Piker, is unbowed: During the rally, she wore a T-shirt with her campaign slogan “FIGHT BACK” in big, bold letters. 

“I love seeing you all,” Bush told the May Day crowd. “I just don’t love why I keep seeing you all.”

Bush, who rose to prominence as an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, quickly gained a reputation in office for bucking establishment Democrats — even outpacing other members of “the Squad” — and being outspoken in her criticism of party leadership.

On his wildly popular Twitch stream, Piker has argued that “80 percent of the Democratic Party now agrees with the principles that Cori Bush was defending at a time when it was inopportune for her to do so.” Piker’s visit to St. Louis coincided with weeks of national media scrutiny condemning the popular streamer’s views as antisemitic, culminating in Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., pushing a bipartisan bill to explicitly denounce Piker.

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But for the left, the criticism rings more like an endorsement, and Piker has hit the campaign trail for a number of progressive Democrats including Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for the Senate in Michigan; Dr. Adam Hamawy, who’s running for a New Jersey House seat; and Rep. Ilhan Omar, who’s up for reelection in Minnesota. 

On stage with Bush, Piker described Bell as an “AIPAC stooge,” and urged St. Louisans to rally around the Bush campaign. “Republicans are monsters who traffic in hatred,” said Piker. “But we’re no longer going to vote for do-nothing Democrats, either.” He told the crowd about a St. Louis woman at the airport who was shocked to see him, visiting the city. “There’s this attitude in places like Missouri where city slickers like myself, the bicoastal elite, don’t come to places like St. Louis. Like, she genuinely was shocked,” Piker said on a stream re-cap.

At the rally, Piker described St. Louis as part of a growing coalition of the discontented. “I’ve seen a lot of places like St. Louis. Places that have been left behind by wealthy corporations that pollute your waters and steal your productive output … but today we say, ‘No more!’”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Bell pointed to common criticisms from mainstream figures over Piker’s past online comments. “If Cori Bush spent as much time meeting with her constituents as she does associating with people who condone sexual assault and blame America for September 11th, she may have fared better in her last election,” said Bell campaign spokesperson Jordan Blase.

Before Piker and Bush, historian Ángel Flores Fontánez took the stage as an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, anchoring the day in proud St. Louis labor history. One of the first American general strikes took place in the city in July 1877, when railroad workers across the United States objected to immiseration imposed by Gilded Age robber barons.

In 1877, railroad workers across the United States shut down rail line capital from New York to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania to Ohio, all the way out west to Missouri. In St. Louis, the strike escalated, evolving into a general action which drew river levee roustabouts, coopers, newsboys, foundry workers, and refinery laborers into a weeklong action. 

The strike was a multiracial coalition, and the strike’s executive committee briefly ran St. Louis as one of the first commune governments before it was violently suppressed.

Fontánez recalled the city’s legacy of socialists, which dates back to the abolitionist German ’48ers, and the Funsten Nut Strike of May 1933. As University of Missouri history professor Keona Ervin notes in “Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis,” the Funsten strike was one of the first successful strike actions of the era, with the Communist Party USA using the strike as a moment to “mark the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics spearheaded by black working women.”

In the aftermath of the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, many hoped to see St. Louis once again become a beacon of progressivism. But Missouri poses a cadre of challenges: The 1st District is a gerrymandered product of a red state that used to be purple. Missouri was a bellwether for a century, but as polarization intensified in the early 2000s, Missouri Republicans successfully drew maps that neutralized the state’s urban progressive centers.

Most Missourians live in the blue islands of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield, which also make up 80 percent of the state’s annual GDP. Previously, the state elected Democratic governors, senators, and controlled a handful of congressional seats. But now the 1st District is one of the few remaining positions not controlled by Republicans.

Decades of state and federal Republican rule have been disastrous for the Greater St. Louis area, plunging the city into a pattern of capital flight and population loss. The city is still reeling from the May 2025 tornado which ripped through the city and hit historically Black neighborhoods in North St. Louis the hardest.

From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the St. Louis mayor’s office, many residents feel the recovery has been botched and worry that the North Side will not be rebuilt. Last month, protesters confronted Mayor Cara Spencer over the sluggish cleanup effort, where houses have been left half-destroyed and their residents sleeping in tents. 

“When we’re going to our electeds, we’re saying fully fund the North Side,” Bush told the crowd. “If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his administration — at the city level, the state level, or the federal level — then you’re no representative for us. If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his allies, then how are you supposed to stand up for us?”

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St. Louisans are calling on their elected officials to fight for more disaster relief, and also against attacks by the state legislature. At the direct request of President Donald Trump, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, a former car dealership owner turned Republican politician, is attempting to further gerrymander the voting map for Kansas City. 

Kehoe also wants to abolish Missouri’s income tax, which critics say will send the state into a budget tailspin not unlike Sam Brownback’s failed tax-cutting policy, the “Kansas Experiment.”

The governor also caused an uproar by legally invading St. Louis in 2025, taking over state control of the city’s police department. In doing so, Kehoe defied a 2012 statewide vote which granted local control of the police to the St. Louis mayor. Missouri is the only state in the U.S. where the governor controls the police of the major cities, including the police budget.

Many St. Louisans are vehemently opposed to the police takeover and disgruntled with the status quo, but Missouri’s 1st District includes several neighborhoods in St. Louis County that went heavily for Bell in 2024. G Gamache, a union organizer with Starbucks Workers United who attended May Day rally, told The Intercept that Bush is still the fighter St. Louis needs.

“When you see her in person, you see how much she hasn’t changed who she is. … She’s still 10 toes down on things like Medicare for All, affordable housing, and ending the genocide of Palestinians by Israel. A wide majority of Democratic voters, and even many Republican voters, even in Missouri, support all these things,” he said.

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Back in August 2025, Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, held his first and only in-person town hall, which was disrupted by protesters. Local activists challenged the congressman on his support of Israel, his refusal to call Gaza a genocide, and his trip to Tel Aviv, which was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation.

During the town hall, a man providing security for Bell was caught on video attempting to forcefully physically remove the protesters. 

Between Missouri Republicans and Bell, the 2.8 million St. Louisans living in the greater metropolitan area are generally represented by pro-Israel politicians. According to the Pew Research Center, most U.S. voters have soured on Israel, which is now engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, continued violence in the West Bank, the further annihilation of Gaza, and now an ongoing conflict with Iran, which has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane. As of April 2026, 60 percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

Bell has tried to square this circle by recognizing the Armenian genocide, voting against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and denouncing Kehoe’s attempts to redraw Missouri’s congressional maps. Since the initial almost $9 million, AIPAC has continued supporting Bell, directing donors through its PAC’s portal to fund his campaign.

Blase, the Bell spokesperson, told The Intercept that “Congressman Bell remains focused on standing up to Trump and fighting for the people of Missouri’s first Congressional District.”

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While Bush called for a ceasefire early on, her criticisms of Israel don’t quite explain why AIPAC would spend so much on a Missouri congressional campaign.

A more complete answer may lie in Missouri as a node in the country’s military–industrial complex. St. Louis is home to several Boeing facilities, with the Seattle-headquartered aerospace company selling a range of weapons to the Israeli military, including F-35 and F-15IA fighter jets, missiles, and smart bombs.

In 2020, pro-Palestine student groups in St. Louis protested the St. Charles Boeing facility over a $2.2 billion contract to manufacture small-diameter bombs sold to foreign nations, including Israel, and in 2024, the Washington University Student Union Senate passed a resolution to divest from Boeing.

In one of its corporate PR products, a 2025 Boeing video highlighted St. Louis as “Fighterland U.S.A.,” nicknamed for its importance in military jet manufacturing across the Lambert International Airport and Scott Air Force Base complexes. In February 2026, the company announced the return of its Defense, Space & Security headquarters to St. Louis. Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, near Kansas City, made headlines in June 2025 as playing a key role in launching strikes against Iran.

St. Louis is also home to a number of companies on pro-Palestine boycott lists. The North American headquarters of Israeli Chemical Limited Group — which manufactures fertilizers, metals, and chemical products including white phosphorus — is in Creve Coeur, Missouri. As Human Rights Watch reported, Israel used white phosphorus in populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon in October and November 2023.

Bush told The Intercept that Missouri voters are agitated enough to show up and oust Bell, pointing to polling that shows the race to be neck and neck. But Bush is positioning herself as a fighter for people who have long felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

“If you hurt my people, I can’t sit back and do nothing. … If we wait on the feckless people in some of these seats to do it, it’ll never happen,” she promised.

The post Hasan Piker Is the Democrats’ New Man on the Trail, Whether They Like It or Not appeared first on The Intercept.

For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant

Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.

Wired describes the recent Canvas breach as an unusually disruptive ransomware-style extortion incident because one attack on Instructure's learning platform temporarily paralyzed thousands of schools during finals and end-of-year assignments. The hackers using the "ShinyHunters" name claim more than 8,800 schools were affected, while Instructure says exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and platform messages. From the report: Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States. The widely used digital learning platform Canvas was put into "maintenance mode" on Thursday after its maker, the education tech giant Instructure, suffered a data breach and faced an extortion attempt by attackers using the recognizable moniker "ShinyHunters." Though the hackers have been advertising the breach and attempting to extract a ransom payment from Instructure since May 1, the situation took on additional immediacy for regular people across the US and beyond on Thursday because the Canvas downtime caused chaos at schools, including those in the midst of finals and end-of-year assignments. Universities like Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Georgetown sent alerts to students about the situation in recent days; other institutions, including school districts in at least a dozen states, also appear to have been affected. In a list published by the hackers behind the attack on their ransom-focused dark web site, they claim the breach affected more than 8,800 schools. The exact scale and reach of the breach is currently unclear, though. And the fact that Canvas was down throughout Thursday afternoon and evening further complicated the picture. In a running incident update log that began on May 1, Steve Proud, Instructure's chief information security officer, said that the company had "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." He added on May 2 that "the information involved" for "users at affected institutions" included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged by users on the platform. The situation was ultimately marked as "Resolved" on Wednesday, with Proud writing that "Canvas is fully operational, and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity." At midday on Thursday, though, the Instructure status page registered an "issue" where "some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios." Within a few hours, the company had added another status update: "Instructure has placed Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test in maintenance mode." Late Thursday evening, the company said that Canvas was available again "for most users." TechCrunch reported on Thursday that the hackers launched a secondary wave of attacks, defacing some schools' Canvas portals by injecting an HTML file to display their own message on the schools' Canvas login pages. According to The Harvard Crimson, attackers modified the Harvard Canvas login page to show a message that included a list of schools that the hackers claim were impacted by the breach. The message from attackers "urged schools included on the affected list to consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact the group privately to negotiate a settlement before the end of the day on May 12 -- or else risk their data being leaked," The Crimson reported. "It is unclear what information tied to Harvard affiliates was included in the alleged breach."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barrister for actor Charlotte MacInnes, who is suing the Pitch Perfect star for defamation, also accused Wilson of ‘a complete revision of history’. Wilson has rejected defamation claims

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Rebel Wilson has been accused in court of being a liar who made up terrible claims about her colleagues and completely rewrote history.

The Pitch Perfect star copped the blunt assessment in the dying hours of a fiery defamation battle where she is being sued by Charlotte MacInnes, the lead actor in musical comedy The Deb which Wilson directed, co-produced and starred in.

Whether it’s Palantir selling a $239 chore coat, Anthropic taking over a coffee shop or executives walking the red carpet at the Met Gala, tech’s biggest players are pivoting to fashion to sell their brands – and attempt to appear cooler in the process

Last week, the US spy tech and data firm Palantir launched its latest “merch drop”, including a denim chore coat. “Rugged utility, enduring style” reads the website’s description of the $239 (£175) jacket, which is branded with the company’s logo on the chest pocket and comes in blue or black.

Eliano Younes, the head of strategic engagement at Palantir, told the New York Times that it was part of the company’s commitment to “re-industrializing America” – the jacket is made in Montana and recalls workwear of a previous era. “It’s not political,” he added. “It’s about people who love Palantir and are aligned with our mission.”

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• US-Iran ceasefire under threat after exchange of strikes in strait of Hormuz

The European Union is set to tell airlines the impact from the Iran war on tourism is not yet severe enough to justify emergency measures for the sector, draft EU guidelines seen by Reuters showed.

“The current situation does not point to the need for dedicated measures for the tourism sector, unlike during the COVID-19 crisis,” said the draft EU guidelines, which the European Commission is due to publish on Friday.

The Justice Department argues the patchwork of state laws around guns makes it difficult to take them across state lines for lawful purposes like target shooting, hunting and self-defense.

A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

How U.S. partnerships can survive the war in Iran.

Beijing is playing a long game on Taiwan.

How U.S. partnerships can survive the war in Iran.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit's mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. [...] This week, Musk's legal team called a parade of witnesses who questioned whether Altman was acting in the interest of the nonprofit. On Thursday, that included a former OpenAI safety researcher, who described a slow erosion of the company's safety teams, which prompted her to leave the company. Witnesses also shared stories about the company launching products without the proper safety reviews -- or the knowledge of the board. Rosie Campbell, a former AI safety researcher at OpenAI, testified that the company became more product-focused during her time there and moved away from the long-term safety work that had initially drawn her in. She said both long-term AI safety teams were eventually eliminated, and that she supported Altman's reinstatement only because she feared OpenAI might otherwise collapse into Microsoft: "It was my understanding at the time that the best way for OpenAI to not disintegrate and fall about would be for Sam to return." Still, Campbell's testimony wasn't entirely favorable to Musk. She also said xAI, Musk's AI company, likely had an inferior approach to safety than OpenAI. Helen Toner, another former OpenAI board member, also testified about the board's concerns leading up to Altman's removal. She said the board was not primarily worried about ChatGPT's safety, but about Altman's leadership and investor relationships, saying, "The issues that we were concerned about in our decision to fire Sam were exacerbated by relationships with investors." Toner also described concerns that Altman was misrepresenting what others had said, telling the court, "We were concerned that Sam was inserting words into other people's mouths in order to get people to do what he wanted." Meanwhile, Tasha McCauley, a former OpenAI board member, described a deep loss of trust in Altman and accused him of creating "chaos" and "crisis" inside the company. She said Altman fostered a "culture of lying and culture of deceit," including allegedly misleading others about whether GPT-4 Turbo needed internal safety review before launch. Musk's lawyers then called to the stand David Schizer, a Columbia Law professor and nonprofit-governance expert, who framed Altman's alleged behavior as a serious governance problem for an organization that was supposed to be mission-driven. Asked about claims that products were launched without full board awareness or safety review, he said, "The board and CEO need to be partnering, working together, to make sure the mission is being followed," adding that "if the CEO is withholding that information, it's a big problem." The day ended with the start of a Microsoft executive's deposition. Microsoft VP Michael Wetter said Azure had integrated OpenAI technology, that Microsoft saw strategic value in having AI developers build on Azure, and that a 2016 agreement allowed OpenAI to use Microsoft tools for free even though it could mean a loss of up to $15 million for Microsoft. Testimony ended early, with no court on Friday and the trial set to resume Monday. Recap: Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

True crime. Real justice. The one to watch on Saturday night.

Attorneys for accused White House Correspondents' Dinner shooter Cole Allen asked a judge to disqualify Jeanine Pirro and other senior Justice Department leaders from the case because they were present during the incident.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 8.

Journalist Jamie Bartlett on the people trying to get AI to say things it shouldn’t … for the safety of us all

All the major AI chatbots – from ChatGPT to Gemini to Grok to Claude – have things they should and shouldn’t say.

Hate speech, criminal material, exploitation of vulnerable users – all of this is content that the most successful large language models in the world shouldn’t produce, that their safety features should guard against.

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• Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district

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Following Marco Rubio’s closed-door meeting with Pope Leo XIV, the state department said that the pair discussed the “situation in the Middle East and topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere”, according to a readout from spokesperson Tommy Pigott.

“The meeting underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity,” he said.

Skirmishes threw into question the viability of shaky ceasefire that had largely held for previous month– key US politics stories from 7 May at a glance

The US and Iran were supposedly close to a peace deal on Thursday, according to Pakistani officials. That was before the US military and Iranian forces exchanged fire in the strait of Hormuz.

Each side claimed the other shot first, with US Central Command saying its forces intercepted “unprovoked Iranian attacks” and responded with “self-defense strikes”. Iranian officials said the US vessels were attacked after the US “violated” the ceasefire by targeting two ships at the strait of Hormuz and attacking civilian areas.

TikTok pulls back on its AI-generated summaries feature after it posted wildly inaccurate video descriptions.

Kathryn Bigelow's hauntingly realistic VR dystopia doubles as a Y2K time capsule.

Stone being paid $50,000 a month to ‘rebuild’ relations between Washington and Myanmar’s military-backed government

The US lobbyist Roger Stone, a longtime friend and ally of Donald Trump, has been condemned for accepting $50,000 a month to “rebuild” relations between Washington and Myanmar’s military-backed government.

Myanmar’s leaders have been internationally isolated since seizing power in a coup in 2021, and have repeatedly been accused of atrocities that may amount to war crimes. Activists say the military rulers, which recently held widely condemned “sham” elections, are now trying to reassert themselves abroad.

If you or a senior family member needs phone service, anyone 55 and older can save money with these special phone plans.

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Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 8, No. 1,784.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 8, No. 1,062.

The rover spent five days trying to free itself from the planet's first sword-in-the-stone moment.

Tennessee Republicans earlier Thursday approved a measure to overturn the state's ban on mid-decade redistricting.

Three U.S. Navy destroyers transiting the Strait of Hormuz came under attack on Thursday, and the U.S. struck on two Iranian ports abutting the strait, putting into question an increasingly fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire.

The tariffs were put in place in February, days after the Supreme Court struck down President Trump's previous round of sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs.

As President Trump again voiced optimism that Iran will "make a deal" to end the war, Tehran declared itself the regulator of Strait of Hormuz shipping.

We placed 12 different air purifier models in a smoke chamber to determine which captures viruses best.

Naturalist says he has been ‘overwhelmed by greetings’ as milestone is marked with event at Royal Albert Hall

David Attenborough said he had been “completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings” for his centenary on Friday and thanked wellwishers “most sincerely”.

The naturalist said he had hoped to celebrate his 100th birthday quietly. Instead, the milestone will be marked with a live event at the Royal Albert Hall broadcast on BBC One, featuring music from his programmes as well as stories and reflections from public figures and leading advocates for the natural world.

In a recorded audio message shared on Thursday night, Attenborough said: “I had rather thought that I would celebrate my 100th birthday quietly, but it seems that many of you have had other ideas.

Jeremiah Manele toppled after months of political upheaval in the nation seen as one of China’s closest partners in the Pacific

Solomon Islands prime minister Jeremiah Manele lost power in a no-confidence vote in the South Pacific country’s parliament, ending months of political uncertainty.

Parliament was adjourned to allow the governor general to make arrangements for the election of a new prime minister.

Donald Trump says ceasefire remains in place despite strikes, with Iranian TV saying situation is ‘back to normal’

The US and Iran exchanged fire late on Thursday in the most serious test yet of their month-long ceasefire.

Iran accused the US of violating the ceasefire by targeting two ships at the strait of Hormuz and attacking civilian areas, as the US insisted it struck in retaliation.

Spencer Pratt has said he was compelled to launch his unlikely mayoral run after his home was destroyed in last year's devastating Los Angeles wildfires.

A clinical study from Korea shows that health monitoring on the Galaxy 6 watch can effectively address problems like vasovagal syncope.

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Norfolk police charge 39-year-old from Suffolk, who will appear in court later

A man has been charged after allegedly threatening Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor near his new home on the Sandringham Estate.

The former Duke of York was out walking his dogs when the incident occurred in Wolferton, close to his Marsh Farm property, shortly after 7.30pm on Wednesday, the Telegraph reported previously.

The IMF is warning that advanced AI-powered cyberattacks pose a serious threat to global financial stability. "IMF analysis suggests that extreme cyber-incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets," the lender warned in a new report. The report urged greater international cooperation and emphasized resilience, since breaches are "inevitable" -- particularly for emerging economies with weaker defenses. Agence France-Presse reports: The study's authors highlighted the risks posed by the highly interconnected nature of the global financial system, with advanced AI models able to "dramatically reduce" the time and cost of exploiting vulnerabilities. [...] The IMF warned that emerging and developing countries, "which often have more severe resource constraints, may be disproportionately exposed to attackers targeting regions with weaker defenses." The risks, the authors said, were systemic, cut across sectors and came with the threat of contagion, with the reliance on a small number of platforms and cloud providers likely to increase "the impact of any single exploited weakness." "Defenses will inevitably be breached, so resilience must also be a priority, specifically to limit how far incidents spread and ensure rapid recovery," the report said. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned last month that the global financial system was not ready for the cybersecurity threats posed by AI. "We are very keen to see more attention to the guardrails that are necessary to protect financial stability in a world of AI," she told CBS News, seeking global collaboration on the issue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Criminals are manipulating pictures found on school websites and social media to create sexually explicit images

UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.

Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.

As CNET's portable audio expert, I've reviewed dozens of Bluetooth speakers. Here are my current top picks for every budget based on sound quality, size, durability and battery life.

Three of the nation's major scholarly groups challenged the Trump administration's cuts to humanities grants.

CHARLOTTE MCQUILLAN
Development Officer

Note: On May 8, after the time of this publication, the university’s information technologies department (UDIT) announced in an email that “Canvas service has been restored,” and that “there is no indication that University systems were compromised.”

On May 7, shortly after 4 p.m., the university’s Canvas page crashed due to a cybercrime group, ShinyHunters. The group hacked into Instructure, the creator and holder of Canvas learning systems. The hackers left a message regarding the nature of the attack and threatened to release students’ private information.

“If any schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement,” the message read. “You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked.”

ShinyHunters has been active since 2019, becoming known for its large-scale data breaches.

Canvas has since removed the message from ShinyHunters, uploading its own statement that the website and app are under scheduled maintenance and that users should check back soon. 

In a statement provided to The Review, the university described the incident.

“We are aware of an unauthorized message appearing in Canvas tied to a nationwide cyber incident affecting Instructure, the company that operates Canvas,” the statement read. “The university will share further guidance and updates with the campus community when available.”

The university is one of thousands of educational institutions worldwide affected by this breach. Within the past week, many schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Oxford have been impacted. 

The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that “ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for breaching Instructure on May 3, reportedly compromising the data of hundreds of millions of users, including 306,000 Penn affiliates.”

The University of Pennsylvania was previously targeted by this group in the fall of 2025, when it released a variety of the school’s internal files.

“In February, a ShinyHunters spokesperson told the DP that Penn failed to pay a $1 million ransom to prevent the further release of stolen files,” the Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

At 5:00 p.m., the university’s information technologies department (UDIT) sent out an email stating that they are “aware of a reported security incident involving Canvas” and that UDIT is working to investigate and solve the issue with the vendor. 

They state that the incident did “not originate from University systems.”

While students and faculty wait for the site’s return, the university provided an additional site where the status of the investigation will be updated.

This website states that the university has been aware of the cybersecurity incident since May 1, and that the information at risk includes “names, email addresses, student ID numbers and messages among users.”

They urge students to be aware of phishing emails and to check for any further updates from the university.

Revocations will start on Friday for those who owe $100,000 or more, and then expand to those who owe $2,500 or more

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The US state department will begin revoking the US passports of thousands of parents who owe a significant amount of unpaid child support.

The department told the Associated Press on Thursday that the revocations would begin on Friday and be focused on those who owe $100,000 or more. That would apply to about 2,700 American passport holders, according to figures supplied to the state department by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The MatePad Pro Max is thinner than all its competitors -- but it might never come to the US.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman was sentenced to life in prison for the June 1 attack on demonstrators voicing support for Israeli hostages in Gaza.

On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier. Setting aside the “AI” of the proposal and ensuing discussion, it’s actually a very interesting read, going deep into the weeds about consequential questions like building an LTS kernel on Fedora, support for out-of-tree kernel mods, and a lot more.

To spoil the ending: the proposal has already been approved unanimously by the Fedora Council, meaning the efforts laid out in the proposal will be undertaken. This means that, depending on progress, we’ll see a Fedora “AI” Desktop or whatever it’s going to be called somewhere in the timeframe from Fedora 45 to Fedora 47. As a Fedora user on all my machines, I’m obviously not too happy about this, since I’d much rather the scarce resources of a project like Fedora goes towards things not as ethically bankrupt, environmentally destructive, and artistically deficient as “AI”, but in the end it’s a project owned and controlled by IBM, so it’s not exactly unexpected.

What really surprised me in this entire discussion is a post by Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta, responding to worries people in the thread were having about such a big “AI” undertaking under the Fedora branding causing serious reputational damage to Fedora as a whole. These concerns are clearly valid, as people really fucking hate “AI”, doubly so in the open source community whose work especially “AI” coding tools are built on without any form of consent. As such, Fedora undertaking a big “AI” desktop project is bound to have a negative impact on Fedora’s image. Just look at what aggressively pushing Copilot has done to Windows 11’s already shit reputation.

Spaleta, however, just doesn’t care. Literally.

As the Fedora Project Leader, I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of Ai tools.

↫ Jef Spaleta

I’ve been looking at this line on and off for a few days now, and I just can’t wrap my head around how the leader of an open source project built on and relying on the free labour of thousands of contributors says he doesn’t care about reputational damage to the project he’s leading. Effective and capable open source contributors are not exactly a commodity, and a lot of the decisions they make about what projects to donate their time to are based on vibes and personal convictions – you can’t really pay them to look the other way. Saying you don’t care about reputational damage to your huge open source project seems rather shortsighted, but of course, I don’t lead a huge open source project so what do I know?

In the linked thread alone, one long-time Fedora contributor, Fernando Mancera, already decided to leave the project on the spot, and I have a sneaking suspicion he won’t be the last. “AI” is a deeply tainted hype on many levels, and the more you try to chase this dragon, the more capable people you’ll end up chasing away.

I turned to an expert for tips on how to make your dishwasher last longer.

In honor of World Password Day, Kaspersky researchers revisited their study on the crackability of real-world passwords and found that 60% of MD5-hashed passwords could be cracked in under an hour with a single Nvidia RTX 5090, and 48% could be cracked in under a minute. "The bottom line is that passwords protected only by fast hashing algorithms such as MD5 are no longer safe if attackers obtain them in a data breach," reports The Register. From the report: Much of the reason password hashes have become so easy to crack is password predictability. Per Kaspersky, its analysis of more than 200 million exposed passwords revealed common patterns that attackers can use to optimize cracking algorithms, significantly reducing the time needed to guess the character combinations that grant access to target accounts. In case you're wondering whether there's a trend to compare this to, Kaspersky ran a prior iteration of this study in 2024, and bad news: Passwords are actually a bit easier to crack in 2026 than they were a couple of years ago. Not by much, mind you -- only a few percent -- but it's still a move in the wrong direction. "Attackers owe this boost in speed to graphics processors, which grow more powerful every year," Kaspersky explained. "Unfortunately, passwords remain as weak as ever." "This World Password Day, the main message ought not to be to the users, who often have no choice but to use passwords anyway, but to the sites and providers that are requiring them to do so," said senior IEEE member and University of Nottingham cybersecurity professor Steven Furnell. His advice is that providers need to modernize their login systems and enforce stronger protections, because users are often stuck with whatever security options they're given.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Machine learning is reshaping how ATLAS and CMS filter collisions in real time

May 7, 2026 — Smart and fast decision making is key when dealing with the onslaught of collisions at the LHC. At the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC), the ATLAS and CMS experiments are expected to process detector data at rates corresponding to roughly a quarter of the 2025 global internet traffic. All in real time, as part of the first stages of event selection.

Artist’s rendition of a particle collision merged with an electronic circuit. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez/CERN.

Each second, billions of protons crash into one another at the LHC’s four collision points, generating a data volume so vast that it is not possible to store it in its entirety. Instead, the data has to be filtered in real time by so-called “trigger systems”. Dedicated algorithms estimate which collision events are potentially interesting, based on predefined characteristics, enabling about one in every 20 000 events to be read out and stored for further analysis.

In the quest to find cracks in the Standard Model of particle physics, or new phenomena entirely, researchers at the LHC’s CMS and ATLAS experiments are building smarter and computationally more powerful trigger systems, capable of exploiting more data in real time, into their detectors. Recently, solutions based on AI and machine learning have been employed to boost the physics reach of their triggers, opening a powerful new avenue for identifying potentially interesting or anomalous events.

Particle physicists were early adopters of neural networks and have been using machine-learning algorithms for data analysis since the 1990s. Until now, such tools have primarily been used to help identify traces left by particles in the detectors and to categorise the underlying physics processes. These methods have already managed to push the performance of data analysis significantly beyond what was envisioned when the LHC was starting up, allowing CMS and ATLAS to measure key processes – especially those associated with the Higgs boson – much sooner than expected.

But machine learning does more than improve performance: it opens the door to entirely new approaches to discovering unknown phenomena. One example is unsupervised anomaly detection. Instead of targeting specific particles or processes predicted by the Standard Model, this technique searches for any kind of disagreement between data and theory. These algorithms are trained on randomly selected LHC collisions, teaching them to encode “standard” events seen by the detectors, so that physicists can select potentially interesting events in an unbiased way.

“This is a game-changer for particle physics because it allows us to scour the LHC data for new phenomena without pre-judging what those phenomena might look like,” said Maurizio Pierini of CMS. “This is essential as we move into a precision era at the LHC and continue to squeeze the possible hiding places for new physics.”

If this technique is to be fully exploited, however, it cannot be limited to the small fraction of data selected by the CMS and ATLAS trigger systems. For truly unbiased anomaly detection, the algorithm must already be applied at the trigger level in order to avoid the risk of the trigger algorithms removing potentially interesting events before the analysis has a chance to find them. This presents a major challenge because the trigger system has to make a decision every time a new collision happens: 40 million times per second, or once every 25 nanoseconds. At such speeds, there is no time to run computationally intensive machine-learning algorithms. Or is there?

In 2018 CMS researchers developed an open source tool that translates machine-learning algorithms into the language (firmware) that controls field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These are the custom programmable electronics used to take ultra-quick decisions in the first step of event selection, which is called the level-1 trigger. The team then developed strategies for “compressing” the algorithms, adapting them for implementation in the level-1 trigger electronics without significantly reducing their performance.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments are already implementing this approach in the level-1 trigger during data taking. This is providing researchers, for the first time, with a dataset to analyse that’s based on the new approach to triggering.

“Anomaly detection triggers are very different from our conventional triggers at the LHC and using them for a potential discovery will require us to develop entirely new data analysis techniques,” says Dylan Rankin from ATLAS. “These first datasets we are collecting at ATLAS and CMS are critical for understanding how to do this. The lessons we are learning are also vital for improving our models and techniques for future trigger development.”

Meanwhile, more advanced approaches are being developed, both within the experiments themselves and in the framework of the Next-Generation Triggers project. Launched in January 2024 as a collaboration between CERN’s Experimental Physics, Theoretical Physics and IT Departments, together with the ATLAS and CMS experiments, the five-year project has taken on much of the R&D effort. Largely driven by early-career researchers, it targets the challenges of the future High-Luminosity LHC, which is scheduled to begin operation in 2030.

The primary aim is to extract more physics information from the vastly increased data volumes by improving the selection of the most relevant collision events while efficiently rejecting background. These advances are central to enhancing the sensitivity of the experiments and, ultimately, to increasing the chances of uncovering previously unseen phenomena. To achieve this, they combine modern AI and machine-learning techniques with specialised hardware such as FPGAs, supported by tools such as hls4ml for deploying machine-learning models directly on trigger electronics, while also refining both guidance from theory and analysis tools for the study of ultra-rare events.

Together, these developments aim to ensure that, even at the extreme data rates of the High‑Luminosity LHC, potentially revolutionary signals can be identified rather than lost in the flood of collisions.

Source: Piotr Traczyk, CERN

The post CERN: Smarter Decisions at the Speed of Collisions appeared first on HPCwire.

Trump also issues new deadline for EU to implement trade deal terms before raising tariffs to ‘much higher levels’

The US trade court on Thursday ruled against Donald Trump’s latest 10% global tariffs, finding across-the-board tariffs were not justified under a 1970s trade law.

The US court of international trade ruled in favor of small businesses that challenged the tariffs, which took effect on 24 February. The ruling was 2-1, with one judge saying it was premature to grant victory to the small business plaintiffs.

As many Americans weigh the costs and benefits of building large data centers for artificial intelligence and other digital information, two New York Democrats urged the state to pause such projects, saying they can harm consumers and the environment.

In a March 5 op-ed in the Albany Times-Union, New York state Sen. Liz Krueger and Assemblywoman Anna Kelles advocated for a moratorium, saying that proposed data centers in the state would require "9.5 gigawatts of electric load, which is approximately double the energy usage of all households in the state combined."

New York legislators are considering halting new data center development until there’s enough energy available to run the proposed facilities. Several other states have also considered such a pause, although none has enacted one yet; Democratic Gov. Janet Mills vetoed such a bill in Maine.

When we reached out to Krueger’s office, a spokesperson referred us to a spreadsheet published by the New York Independent System Operator, a state agency that monitors the reliability of the state’s power system and coordinates electricity distribution. The spreadsheet lists 35 proposed projects, offering a snapshot of potential future electricity demand. 

It confirms that the proposed projects’ electricity demand would be about 9.5 gigawatts when energy demand is highest. A subsequent version of the spreadsheet showed 11 gigawatts, but this was released several weeks after the legislators wrote their op-ed.

The status of the data center projects on the list varies widely; some have already cleared regulatory and construction hurdles while others have not. But regardless of their status, their collective 9.5 gigawatts of required electricity would not be double the amount of energy used by all households in New York state.

Krueger’s office said the estimate came from taking the average electricity used by the state’s residential customers each month (576 kilowatt hours) and then dividing that by 744, the number of hours in a 31-day month. This produced an average hourly consumption of about 0.8 kilowatt hours. They then multiplied that by 7.8 million, the number of households in New York state. This totaled 6.24 gigawatts of electricity used by New York state households.

The data centers’ estimated 9.5 gigawatts of consumption is not twice the 6.24 gigawatts from the calculation Krueger and Kelles provided.

Plus, there’s another wrinkle with the comparison, Kenneth Gilligham, an economist at the Yale School of the Environment, told PolitiFact New York. 

The 6.24 gigawatt figure refers to what households consume on average, while the 9.5 gigawatt figure refers to "peak consumption," which is the highest amount the data centers would need at their heaviest periods of use.

"We often care more about peak consumption and the possibility that it stresses the capacity of the grid than we do about total consumption," Gillingham said. 

To make a more apples-to-apples comparison, Gillingham cited data showing that residential electricity demand usually represents just more than one-third of overall electricity demand. Applying that fraction to the peak summer demand for New York state, which is roughly 30 gigawatts, would suggest a residential peak load of about 10 or 11 gigawatts. That’s more than the proposed 9.5 gigawatts from the proposed data centers, and about equal to the 11 gigawatts in the updated spreadsheet.

Still, Gillingham said, 9.5 gigawatts of additional electric load would be "enormous" and that the current electric grid is "woefully unprepared for such a dramatic increase in load."

Our ruling

Krueger said proposed new data centers in New York state would require "approximately double the energy usage of all households in the state combined."

When and if all of the proposed projects are operational, they would require a projected 9.5 gigawatts of power at peak times. But that’s not double the households’ usage. 

On average, households’ usage is about 6.24 gigawatts and about 11 gigawatts during peak times. 

Still, experts said the center’s energy needs would be significant.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

May 7, 2026 — As organizations adopt AI, many discover that their infrastructure struggles to keep up. Running AI in the cloud is an option, but the cloud can introduce privacy concerns and unpredictable costs. Upgrading on-prem infrastructure is another option, but supporting large GPU-accelerator platforms can require expensive redesigns in data center power and cooling.

AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe GPUs

The new AMD Instinct MI350 PCIe cards give your enterprise a third option: Leadership AI performance designed to fit the data center infrastructure you already own.

Performance That Drops into Your Existing Racks

Designed to help you prepare for the agentic AI era, AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards are dual-slot drop-in cards for standard air-cooled servers. They are built to deploy inference on premises within your current data center’s power, cooling and rack infrastructure. AMD Instinct GPUs in cost-effective PCIe cards round out the AMD AI compute portfolio, providing a range of options for your enterprise as it navigates its unique AI adoption curve.

The PCIe card form factor is an excellent choice for enterprises that need more AI computing power than CPUs can provide but aren’t ready to invest in dedicated GPU accelerator platforms. Available in air-cooled systems with up to eight accelerator cards, AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards are ideal for small, medium and large AI models for inference and RAG pipelines.

Don’t Just Scale AI. Scale ROI

AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards are engineered to deliver exceptional AI performance with excellent cost and leadership performance. Key features help increase performance, simplify deployment and reduce costs so you can move from evaluation to real outcomes:

• Native support for lower-precision MXFP6 and MXFP4, which deliver high throughput.
• Acceleration through sparsity support for most mainstream 8- and 16-bit precisions.
• Estimated 2,299 teraflops (TFLOPS) and up to 4,600 peak TFLOPS at MXFP4, the highest performance currently available in an enterprise PCIe card.
• Estimated 144GB of high bandwidth memory 3e (HBM3E) running at up to 4TB/s.
• Open ecosystem with low- and no-cost development stack options simplifies deployment and helps lower operating expenses.

Enterprise AI Software – Develop with Your AI Stack. Your Way, Today

AMD built Instinct MI350P PCIe cards with open standards for cross-platform interoperability. Their addition continues AMD’s strategy of enabling a fully open AI ecosystem and providing customer choice in enterprise environments.

Think of the AMD enterprise AI stack as a foundational component, integrating seamlessly with a broad ecosystem of AI software and tools. It includes the Kubernetes GPU Operator for full life cycle management, cloud-native AMD Inference Microservices and native support for AI frameworks such as PyTorch. All this enables you to migrate inference workloads with minimal code changes.

AMD provides the open-source AMD enterprise AI reference stack to AMD partners at no licensing cost. It offers greater code transparency and helps reduce operating expenses. When combined with AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards and partner-delivered solutions, the stack enables your organizations to get up and running quickly on-premises without ongoing per-token charges.

Native Acceleration for Enterprise AI Precision Levels

AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards support the spectrum of precision levels that enterprise AI models rely on most.

While lower-precision MXFP6 and MXFP4 offer maximized performance in pure TFLOPS and efficient model implementations, higher precision formats, like INT8 and BF16, benefit from the sparsity support on the AMD Instinct MI350P GPU to deliver efficient performance. Regardless of the precision, enterprises will find that AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards are designed to deliver maximum GPU throughput and reduced memory usage to help lower power and cooling demands.

Support for FP8, MXFP8 and MXFP4 is a major reason AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards can process today’s AI workloads within standard, air-cooled data centers.

Deploy Enterprise AI Where You are Today

With AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards, your enterprise can move quickly from bare-metal infrastructure to production-ready AI systems on a strong foundation. They enable you to migrate workloads without code rewrites, integrate with existing AI pipelines and scale with evolving workloads.

Adopting AI doesn’t mean rebuilding infrastructure from the ground up. With AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards, enterprises can run more models and serve more users within their existing data centers.

To learn more, visit the AMD Instinct web page.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing.

Source: AMD

The post AMD Launches Instinct MI350P PCIe Cards for Enterprise AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.

Alarm broke out as online posts warned that California has only six weeks of oil left.

"According to testimony by experts during the State Energy Commission hearing today at the Capitol in Sacramento, California only has ‘enough’ oil and gas supply to meet demand for the next six weeks," said one May 6 X post. "There is no plan in place to supply more oil to California if the Straight of Hormuz (sic) does not re-open in the time, allowing oil tankers to deliver to #California, and therefore prices are expected to spike even higher."

Some news outlets also covered the testimony, amplifying this timeline. The coverage came days after news reports that the last tanker had arrived at the port of Long Beach, California. The tanker had traveled from the Middle East before Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The testimony referencing the six-week timeline was real; it was given by Siva Gunda, the member of the California Energy Commission whose duties include overseeing energy assessments, to a May 5 oversight hearing of the California Assembly’s Utilities and Energy Committee. 

But the X post left out context. Gunda did not mean the gasoline supply would drop to zero at the six-week mark — it’s simply the timeline by which experts can forecast with the most certainty. 

Every day brings the opportunity for more shipments to arrive and more crude oil to be refined into gasoline. As a result, the six-week window can be extended day by day, indefinitely. 

It’s a "constantly rolling" period, said Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis for the gasoline price tracker GasBuddy. 

Niki Woodard, a California Energy Commission spokesperson, told PolitiFact that the six-week time frame is analogous to weather forecasts, which become unreliable more than 10 days out. "The six-week forecast is what we can reliably predict," she said.

During the hearing, the commission released data showing that the amount of California’s gasoline supply is "within historical range." This measurement includes gasoline that is already in the state; projected crude oil imports during that period, including those from regions other than the Middle East; and projected refinery capacity. 

Woodard told PolitiFact that the forecast shows that the state’s diesel and gasoline inventory remains "sufficient to cover roughly four to six weeks of demand under normal operating conditions, assuming no major unplanned outages."

Woodard also said the commission "is working closely with refiners, and we are aware that they are identifying and using alternate routes and sources of crude. California refiners continue to receive shipments of crude oil."

Collectively, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — countries that could be affected by Iran war-related blockages — accounted for about 29% of California’s foreign oil imports in 2025. Most of the rest came from locales where the stability of the supply chain is not directly affected by the war, including Canada and several South American countries. 

In addition, about 40% of California’s oil comes from in-state or Alaska. Shipments from California and Alaska shouldn’t be affected by the war, either.

Two other panelists at the hearing — Severin Borenstein, a business administration and public policy professor at the University of California-Berkeley, and Skip York, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies — cautioned against misinterpreting the six-week comment.

Gunda "was not referring to state inventory levels or production of gasoline at California refineries," York told PolitiFact. "It was just simply that data the commission collects currently gives them a six-week view of inbound marine vessels." It does not mean that supplies will zero out at the end of six weeks, he said.

That said, the near-term supply could be pricey. 

Already, a gallon of gasoline in California costs $6.17, well above the (also elevated) $4.56 national average, according to the Automobile Association of America.

Over the next six weeks, California will "continue to have an adequate supply of oil — it will just be more expensive," said Hugh Daigle, a University of Texas-Austin petroleum and geosystems engineering professor. "I think a better framing would be to say that consumers can expect to see prices really start increasing in about six weeks."

Gunda said much the same at the hearing. "Based on what we're hearing from the industry, the pricing will move molecules to California, but it will come at a price, and that's something we need to closely watch," he said. 

Our ruling

An X post said, "California only has ‘enough’ oil and gas supply to meet demand for the next six weeks."

A California energy official said May 5 that California’s current and projected gasoline supply — barring unexpected developments — is sufficient to cover consumer needs for the next six weeks. That accounts for on-hand gasoline, crude oil in transit, and refiners’ capacity to turn that crude into gasoline once it arrives.

This doesn’t mean that the supply will drop to zero in six weeks. Six weeks is how far out officials confidently make forecasts. Every additional day can bring additional shipments and deliveries that extend the six-week availability window forward, potentially indefinitely.

We rate this statement False. 

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 8, No. 592.

Relations between the United States and the Vatican are at a low point over President Donald Trump’s attacks on Leo, who is a leading critic of the war in Iran.

May 7, 2026 — Bluefors, a global leader in cryogenic cooling systems and quantum infrastructure, has joined the Chicago Quantum Exchange, strengthening CQE’s Midwest roots as the region expands efforts to build a quantum supply chain, expand innovation capacity, and scale a quantum workforce. Bluefors plays a vital role in all three areas.

The Helsinki-based company opened its first US-based Bluefors Lab in Chicago last year, with a 320-square-foot location at mHUB. That partnership was facilitated by The Bloch Quantum, an Economic Development Administration–designated Tech Hub, led by the CQE, that is competing for EDA funding to scale domestic US quantum manufacturing.

A new, second Bluefors Lab Service facility — 580 square feet of lab space at the  UChicago Science Incubator located at Hyde Park Labs — celebrates its opening on May 12. That space will include an an LD400He Measurement System and access to technical expertise.

“Bluefors is playing an important role in expanding the Quantum Prairie’s innovation capacity by providing early-stage startups, faculty, and students with opportunities to engage in hands-on experimentation,” said David Awschalom, the University of Chicago’s Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics and the founding director of the CQE. “Cryogenics also plays an important role in the quantum supply chain and will be a growing source of new jobs as the quantum sector accelerates, making Bluefors an important partner in driving the quantum economy. We look forward to collaborating with them to strengthen both our Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana ecosystem and the global impact of quantum technologies.”

Cryogenic systems are critical to the development of quantum sensing, communications, and computing—technologies that often rely on temperatures close to absolute zero. As the quantum sector grows, cryogenics are expected to drive local jobs.

Bluefors shared insight on their work at an April 23 event as part of Quantum Across Illinois, an initiative to bring Illinois-based quantum companies and professionals to public educational institutions around the state during the month of April.

“Bluefors is excited to partner with Chicago Quantum Exchange to further support the well-established and growing quantum ecosystem in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. Chicago is known for being one of the trailblazers of quantum ecosystems and has long been a vibrant hub for quantum innovation, and we’re proud to empower partners through our cutting-edge Bluefors Labs at mHub and Hyde Park Labs. Through the Bluefors Lab, early-stage startups and universities get flexible access to cryogenic measurement systems enabling the kind of hands-on experimentation needed to help drive the quantum economy,” said Sauli Sinisalo, Vice President at Bluefors.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange is a Midwest-based consortium of universities, national labs, and nearly 70 industry, nonprofit, and international partners that is building a full-spectrum discovery-to-deployment quantum ecosystem that advances quantum research, workforce development, and economic innovation, paving the way for at-scale quantum technologies that improve everyday life.

Source: Chicago Quantum Exchange

The post Bluefors Joins Chicago Quantum Exchange to Support Quantum Infrastructure and Workforce Development appeared first on HPCwire.

Results of elections for councils in England, the Senedd in Wales and the Scottish parliament could transform Great Britain’s political landscape

• 2026 election results: latest from local, Scottish and Welsh votes

Polls have closed across England, Scotland and Wales for local, mayoral and parliamentary elections, with the first results to be announced within hours.

More than 30 million people across Britain were given the opportunity to vote on Thursday in what is widely seen as the biggest test for Keir Starmer since the 2024 general election. Results across three nations could fundamentally change the political landscape and could have repercussions for the prime minister.

Companies including Philips and Pandora say they plan to seek tariff reimbursements after the Supreme Court ruled Trump's sweeping duties illegal, with the U.S. potentially facing up to $175 billion in refunds. Many firms say tariffs hurt earnings, but CFO survey results suggest companies applying for refunds are unlikely to pass savings back to consumers through lower prices. CNBC reports: Companies across Europe are flagging disruption from tariffs as a factor contributing to a skewed earnings picture. "We will ask for a rebate of tariffs in line with the government policies," Roy Jakobs, CEO of healthtech firm Philips, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Wednesday morning. "We have been saying that of course we prefer a world without tariffs, without trade barriers, because we want to serve patients." Philips included the cost of tariffs within its full-year guidance and did not assume the impact from any potential refunds. Danish jeweler Pandora also announced its intention to apply for a rebate on Wednesday, with CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier telling CNBC that tariffs were a "headwind" to earnings in the first quarter. "We have no news yet, so we cannot count on any of that refund," she told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe." "Let's wait and see." De Pablos-Barbier noted that the biggest factor impacting Pandora's profit this quarter is the cost of silver, which more than quadrupled in the last 18 months. She reiterated the firm's pivot from pure silver to platinum as a way of reducing costs. BMW, Daimler, Renishaw, Smith & Nephew and Continental all flagged tariffs as negatively impacting results in a slew of earnings updates on Wednesday, but the companies did not say whether they are applying for rebates. Businesses often bear some of the cost of tariffs, with some costs passing on to consumers through price hikes. Tariffs have had an overall inflationary impact on the economy, economists have told CNBC. Despite the refund process potentially covering more than 330,000 importers on roughly 53 million entries, per court documents, consumers are unlikely to benefit, according to the results of the latest CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey. Twelve of the 25 chief financial officers interviewed said their company plans to apply for tariff refunds, however, none intend to lower prices in response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Cohen selling tube socks and baseball cards after offering $55.5bn, although source of funds remains unclear

The CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, said he was selling vintage video games, baseball cards, GameStop merchandise and a $14,000 pair of tube socks to help fund the company’s proposed $55.5bn acquisition of eBay.

His platform of choice? eBay, of course.

A council appointed by President Trump has proposed major changes to FEMA's disaster relief response.

New data shows artificial intelligence is the most cited reason for layoffs, even as economists debate whether it is truly displacing workers.

One person died and a dozen others were injured in the attack, during a June 2025 demonstration in Boulder

A man was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty on Thursday to killing one person and injuring a dozen others in a 2025 firebombing attack on a demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman looked down at a desk throughout the sentencing at the Boulder district court. He has meanwhile pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges for the attack last June.

US secretary of state speaks with Leo and officials after tensions following attacks by Trump over Iran war

The Vatican has said it raised the “need to work tirelessly in favour of peace” in talks with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is in Rome on a trip widely regarded as an effort to ease tensions after Donald Trump’s repeated criticisms of Pope Leo.

Amid unprecedented strain on relations between the Holy See and Washington, Rubio was received by the pope on Thursday at the Apostolic Palace, before holding a series of meetings with Vatican officials

The Claude maker needs all the computing capacity it can get, and SpaceX's controversial Memphis facility apparently has it.

Health officials have identified at least eight confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus tied to an outbreak on the M/V Hondius cruise ship.

American passengers who left the MV Hondius cruise ship in April are being monitored for hantavirus in at least five states, health officials said.

joshuark shares a report from Linux Magazine: Microsoft has issued a warning that a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 7.8 has been found in the Linux kernel. The vulnerability in question is tagged CVE-2026-31431 and, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), "This Linux Kernel Incorrect Resource Transfer Between Spheres Vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise." The distributions affected are Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Amazon Linux. This could also affect any distribution based on those in the list, which means pretty much every Linux distro that isn't independent. The flaw is found in the Linux kernel cryptographic subsystem's algif_aead module of AF_ALG. The problem is that a particular optimization has led to the kernel reusing the source memory as the destination during cryptographic operations. What this means is that attackers can take advantage of interactions between the AF_ALG socket interface and a splice() system call. Until patches are released, Microsoft is advising that the affected crypto feature should be disabled, or AF_ALG socket creation should be blocked. The vulnerability is also known as "Copy Fail," which has been shared on Slashdot and detailed in a technical report. The vulnerability affects almost every version of the Linux OS and is now being exploited in the wild. U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has ordered all civilian federal agencies to patch any affected systems by May 15.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Both tournaments will have eight extra games

• Tournaments will expand for first time in 15 years

The NCAA announced on Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a long-expected move that will drop more games into the first week of the showcase without substantially changing its overall form.

The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games – for a total of 12 involving 24 teams – into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round”.

Prosecutors allege SPLC funneled over $3m to sources in extremist groups but legal experts say case is weak

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges related to allegations the organization committed fraud and conspired to money launder.

The 11-count indictment filed last month accuses the civil rights organization of committing fraud in connection to a program in which it paid informants to monitor rightwing extremist groups. The program no longer exists. The investigation is being handled by the US attorney for the middle district of Alabama, which includes Montgomery, the state capital.

When comparing these three accounts and the interest-earning potential over the next year, there's one clear winner.

Scary highlights include Smile 2, The Menu and A Quiet Place: Day One.

Whether your grad is heading to college or starting a new job, our CNET experts assembled a selection of thoughtful and practical gifts that will get them ready for their next chapter.

As Trump pushes for a deal with an Iranian regime he portrays as deeply fractured, analysts say power in Tehran may be shifting, but that doesn't mean disarray.

U.S. officials in at least five states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas and Virginia — are monitoring symptoms of seven returning passengers.

Man, 69, is in intensive care in Johannesburg, while expedition guide Martin Anstee, 56, receiving care in Netherlands

• What is hantavirus?

Two Britons who were medically evacuated from the hantavirus-hit cruise ship are improving, global health officials have said.

A British passenger, understood to be a 69-year-old man, was taken to South Africa on 27 April and is receiving care at a private health facility in Sandton, Johannesburg.

Scientists around the world have recognized the massive potential of AI to handle some cognitive workloads and amplify the work of humans. But how do we integrate these digital breakthroughs in AI for science with the physical world of scientific laboratories, instruments, and experimental workflows? That is one of the big topics that will be explored at the SciFM 26 conference later this month.

Just as enterprises are looking to leverage large language models (LLMs) to handle various tasks, like software engineering, customer service, and marketing, scientific and engineering organizations are also eyeing LLMs and other foundation models to replicate or amplify human abilities to accelerate the pace of work in their fields.

We see this with the Department of Energy, which is spending $320 million this year on various AI for science and engineering projects as part of the Genesis Mission. We’re also seeing it with the Trillion Parameter Consortium, the group of DOE National Labs, universities, and industry partners that are pushing the boundaries in how AI can be used to accelerate the scientific workflow for projects like drug creation and materials discovery.

The general idea is to train scientific foundation models (SciFMs) and their agents to handle certain steps of the scientific process, like literature review, hypothesis creation, setup of experiments, execution of experiments, and data analysis. But what is the next step from there?

That’s the big topic that will be covered at SciFM 26, which will take place May 27 through 29 at the University of Chicago. The focus for the third year for the Conference on Foundational Models and AI Agents for Science will be on outlining the next phase of scientific AI, which is or “moving from models that analyze the physical world to systems that actively engage with it.”

Handling the AI transition from the digital world into the physical world is an important distinction, according to Argonne National Lab Senior Scientist Ian Foster, who is the chair of the SciFM 26 conference.

“You can now use these AI models to come up with interesting hypotheses with plans for testing hypotheses that are remarkably creative,” Foster told HPCwire. “You design a new material, you validate it the best you can computationally. But now does it actually behave as predicted? You need to perform physical experiments.”

While it’s important to do the modeling and simulation work and often less expensive, modeling and simulation sometimes does not give you enough data to determine whether the new material (or other field) has the characteristics necessary to continue the work, he said.

“Frequently you need to do physical experiments as well,” Foster continued. “For some things we just don’t have good modeling capabilities, like complex polymers. In other cases, your simulation capabilities have limited accuracy. Any computational chemistry code is an approximation to reality. So ultimately you want to be able to test things in physical settings.”

Those tests can be time-consuming and expensive, both from a facilities and human resources point of view. If AI for science remains solely in the digital realm and simply pushes the bottleneck to another part of the scientific workflow, then the potential benefits that we hope to get from AI for science may not be realized.

Ian Foster is the chair of SciFM 26

That is the area that Foster and his SciFM colleagues are exploring. By introducing more automation, robotics, and AI directly into the physical laboratory, those potential bottlenecks can be removed, or at least widened.

“The goal at SciFM 26 is to have conversations about what we need to be doing to dramatically scale up the this connection between AI and automated laboratories to enable that sort of missing link in the autonomous discovery ecosystem,” Foster said.

Foster, who is also a professor at the University of Chicago, will be introducing the first SciFM 26 keynote speakers on May 27 in a session titled “From Digital to Physical: The AI Transformation.” Other session titles, such as “What AI Cannot Yet Do for Drug Discovery, Protein Engineering, and Autonomous Biology,” hint at the gap that exists between AI’s great potential and the real world’s unforgiving nature.

The advent of humanoid robotics has the potential to transform some scientific workflows. Billions of dollars are being invested into developing advance robots that can move like humans. Getting these robots into the lab could potentially alleviate some of the testing bottleneck, Foster says.

“For many years, people have been building out dedicated experimental facilities that will do high throughput and run the same experiment on a thousand different samples,” he says. “But now, we’re starting to see people thinking, well, we’ve got these dexterous robots driven by these billions of dollars of money being invested in lab and home automation. Let’s maybe see if we can deploy them and dynamically reconfigure our experimental capabilities to ultimately send a humanoid robot into a lab to perform an experiment.”

Robots have advantages over humans. They work 24/7 and don’t require coffee breaks. They also are more resistant to workplace hazards, such as nuclear radiation. That’s important for some of the work that the National Labs do, Foster says.

Foster is looking forward to hearing about some of the advances being made by the national labs as well as industrial partners. For instance, Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, who is an associate professor at MIT and the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Lila Sciences, will be delivering a keynote address on the work that Lila is doing to bridge the digital and physical worlds. Other companies working in the field, such as Future House, Dunia Innovations, and First Principles will also be at the conference.

There are still passes available for SciFM, although all the student sets have been taken. For more information, see the SciFM website at www.scifmconferences.org.

Feature image courtesy of SciFM

The post AI for Science and Autonomous Labs to Come Together at SciFM 26 appeared first on HPCwire.

A mortgage interest rate lock before the next inflation report is released could make sense now. Here's why.

Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked. Thanks to some changes on the RISC-V side, running Redox on real RISC-V hardware has also improved. Furthermore, tmux has been ported to Redox, CPU time reporting has been improved, and Orbital, Redox’ desktop environment, gianed support for partial window pixel updating, which should increase UI performance.

On top of that, there’s a brand new web user interface to browse Redox packages (x86-64, i586, ARM64 (aarch64), and RISC-V (riscv64gc)), as well as the usual list of improvements to the kernel, drivers, relibc, and many more areas of the operating system.

Review: John Carney's latest film is a lighthearted exploration of fame, ambition and friendship. The music's pretty damn good, too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wearables have really come full circle. The early Fitbits didn't have screens, but the move to smartwatches put a screen on everyone's wrist. Now, devices like Whoop and Hume are designed as data trackers first and foremost without so much as a clock. Google's newest wearable jumps on that trend: The Fitbit Air doesn't have a screen, but it does have a suite of health sensors that pipe data into the new Google Health app. And if you want, Google has a new AI-powered health coach in the app ready to tell you what that data means (maybe). The Fitbit Air itself is a small plastic puck about 1.4 inches long and 0.7 inches wide. It slots into various bands that hold the bottom-mounted sensors against your wrist. There's no display pointing upward, so the entire device is covered by the fabric or plastic of the band. It's a streamlined and potentially stylish look -- in uncharacteristic fashion, Google has plenty of colors and style options available, including a special-edition Steph Curry version. You may have heard chatter about Curry being seen teasing a new screenless Fitbit, and this is it. [...] The Fitbit app is getting a major makeover and a new name. An update in the coming weeks will transform that app into Google Health, featuring a new interface with a more extensive Material Expressive aesthetic and redesigned menus and tabs. You also won't see Fitbit branding in as many places -- the Fitbit Premium subscription will become Google Health Premium. Without a subscription, the app still does all the basic things, like tracking your health stats, automatically logging workouts, and showing it all in a pretty dashboard. With the Premium subscription, you get all the features from Fitbit Premium plus the new AI Health Coach. It's a chatbot, so you can ask it about any health or wellness topics, and the answers are grounded in your health data. The Fitbit Air launches May 26 for $99.99, includes a Performance Loop band, and comes with three months of the new Google Health Premium that replaces Fitbit Premium and adds Google's AI Health Coach. Meanwhile, Google Health Premium will cost $10 per month or $100 per year, though it's included with AI Pro or AI Ultra. Non-subscribers can still use basic tracking features. Ars also notes that when Google Fit shuts down later this year, users will need to migrate their data to Google Health.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most health and wellness influencers aren't healthcare professionals, the survey found.

A reverse mortgage could be a smart financial tool for senior homeowners this May. Here are three reasons why.

We've got all the details on how you can upgrade your monitor without paying full price.

Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering

• US politics live – latest updates

Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.

Memory and chip suppliers are the Roadrunner, we're Wile E. Coyote and shortages are the anvil. Poof.

Case involves White House effort to censure the US senator over video urging service members to ‘refuse illegal orders’

A US federal appeals court at a hearing on Thursday appeared skeptical that the Trump administration could legally punish Mark Kelly, a Democratic US senator, over public remarks he made urging service members to refuse unlawful orders.

Members of a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit criticized the government’s efforts to censure Kelly, a retired navy captain and Arizona Democrat, over more than an hour of questioning.

Weeks before her death, Annabel Rook, 46, from Stoke Newington, left her sister a voice message about Clifton George’s abusive behaviour

The co-founder of a social enterprise who was fatally stabbed by her partner said he was “on the warpath” shortly before she died, in a voice message that was played during a murder trial.

Clifton George, 45, is accused of murdering 46-year-old Annabel Rook during an argument at their home in north London last June.

Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.

my Sun Ray server is still on an earlier OI snapshot, so I figured it was about time to try to actually follow the new guides myself.

↫ The Iris System

Ever since my spiraling down the Sun rabbit hole late last year, I’ve tried for a few times now to get the x86 version of OpenIndiana and Oracle Solaris working on any of my machines, exactly for the purposes of setting up a modern Sun Ray server. Sadly, none of my machines are compatible with any illumos distribution or Oracle Solaris, so I’ve been shit out of luck trying to get this side project off the ground. My Ultra 45 is sadly also not supported by any SPARC version of illumos or Oracle Solaris, so unless I buy even more hardware, my dream of a modern Sun Ray setup will have to wait.

Of course, virtualisation is an option for many, and that’s exactly what this particular guide is about: setting up OpenIndiana on a Proxmox virtual machine. I actually have a Proxmox machine up and running and could do this too, but I’m a sucker for running stuff like this on real hardware. Yes, that makes my life more complicated and difficult, and no, it’s not more noble or real or hardcore – it’s just a preference. Still, for normal people who pick up a Sun Ray or two on eBay for basically nothing, running OpenIndiana in a virtual machine is the smart, reasonable, and effective option.

I spent weeks testing popular at-home pizza tools. Here’s what I found was worth the money, no matter your budget

• The best nonalcoholic wines and nonalcoholic beers in the US

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

It’s never been easier to make pizza at home. And today’s pizza-making gear is more capable and approachable than you might think.

The price range for at-home pizza gear is as wide as the topping choices. On the simple, affordable end, there is the humble carbon-steel slab that slides into the oven you already own – it’s like a basic cheese pie.

In the UK? The best pizza ovens for every budget, garden and skill level – tested

Best budget pizza maker:
Baking Steel’s Baking Steel Original

Best mid-range pizza maker:
Ooni Volt 2 Indoor Electric Pizza Oven

Appliance giant slashes earnings forecast and hikes prices by 10% with another 4% spike planned

With the war in Iran and economic concerns putting pressure on consumers and how they spend their money, Whirlpool is having to adjust to Americans delaying big-ticket purchases while also raising prices to help stabilize its North American business.

The company known for brands such as KitchenAid, Maytag and its namesake, said that the Iran war led to a “recession-level industry decline” in America as consumer confidence collapsed in late February and March. Revenue dropped nearly 10% in the quarter as sales of major appliances in North America declined more than 7%.

Supercomputing on TACC systems reveals how DNA timing could transform crop resilience

May 7, 2026 — Maize serves as a vital model species for advancing our understanding of plant biology, yet many mysteries remain about the intricate processes governing how DNA works and organizes itself in the genome.

The research was published in the journal Plant Cell in February 2026.

A team of Florida State University researchers together with colleagues at North Carolina State University has made a breakthrough in understanding how DNA replicates in maize, uncovering the existence of two distinct sub compartments in the nucleus that hold genetic material.

This discovery not only advances the fundamental knowledge of plant genomics but may have broad implications for gene regulation and crop improvement.

“We’re beginning to uncover chromatin’s organization in plants,” said Hank Bass, senior author of the study. “We had suspected that these sub compartments might exist, but this was the first real proof we had of their existence.”

The paper was published in the journal Plant Cell in February 2026.

“Being part of this project and making a contribution to investigate the blueprint genome organization with respect to replication has been one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my scientific journey,” said Hafiza Sara Akram, the paper’s lead author and Bass’ former graduate student.

Foundations of DNA Replication and Chromatin Structure

DNA replication is a critical process that ensures every cell receives an exact copy of genetic material during cell division. The genome, organized within the nucleus, consists of DNA wrapped around proteins to form chromatin. Chromatin exists in two main forms: euchromatin, which is more accessible and transcriptionally active, and heterochromatin, which is more condensed and typically less active. The timing of DNA replication varies across these regions, with euchromatin usually replicating earlier than heterochromatin.

Understanding how chromatin structure influences the order and regulation of DNA replication is critical for unraveling how genes are controlled and how cells maintain their identity.

To investigate DNA replication in maize, researchers combined innovative genomics techniques with advanced 3D microscopy. High-throughput sequencing allowed the team to map replication events across the entire genome, while three-dimensional imaging visualized the physical organization of chromatin within the nucleus. This integrative approach provided unprecedented resolution in linking DNA sequence features with nuclear architecture and replication behavior.

How Supercomputing Accelerated Discovery

The alignment of sequencing data to a reference genome is computationally intensive.

Here, the challenge was twofold: maize has a large genome—two billion nucleotides, about two-thirds the size of the human genome—and is rich in repetitive elements, making alignment especially demanding.

Second, the key technique used in this work, Hi-C, requires large data volumes to achieve sufficient resolution—hundreds of millions of short reads per sample, totaling 1.3 billion reads for this study.

In addition to providing computational resources Stampede3, Corral, and Ranch, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin contributed the expertise to efficiently process this scale of data and the scientific insight to guide downstream analysis and translate aligned reads into biologically meaningful results.

“My involvement in this project grew naturally from my prior experience in Hi-C analysis and replication timing of plant genomes,” said Lorenzo Concia, research associate in TACC’s Life Sciences Computing group and a co-principal investigator on the project.

“I advised on key aspects of the Hi-C experimental design, data interpretation, and the computational strategies needed to process it at scale. It was exciting to see those methodological insights contribute to uncovering the two-compartment architecture of maize euchromatin described in this study.”

Key Findings: Two Distinct Euchromatin Sub compartments

The study revealed that maize euchromatin is not a uniform compartment as previously thought.

Instead, it is divided into two sub compartments, each exhibiting distinct replication timing and spatial organization. One sub compartment replicates early and is associated with highly active genes, while the other replicates later and shows unique structural features. This organizational complexity suggests a new layer of regulation in plant genomes.

The identification of euchromatin sub compartments with specialized replication timing provides important clues about how gene expression is controlled.

“Our findings indicate that the spatial and temporal regulation of DNA replication is tightly coupled to gene activity,” Bass said. “This could mean that manipulating replication timing may one day offer new ways to enhance crop traits or resilience.”

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS), Plant Genome Research Program, Award 2025811.

Adapted from a press release by Florida State University.

Source: Faith Singer, TACC

The post TACC: Scientists Uncover New Information on How DNA Works in Maize appeared first on HPCwire.

Apple could kill off the 256GB model amid climbing costs and short supplies.

Latest briefings float hope of basic deal that would keep peace and free shipping while further negotiations continue

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US and Iran are close to a temporary agreement to halt the war in the Middle East, officials in Pakistan claimed on Thursday, as diplomatic activity gathered fresh momentum after a near breakdown of the current ceasefire earlier this week.

Officials on Islamabad said a very basic “interim” deal could be reached as early as this weekend and that Tehran was reviewing a US proposal.

Social Security benefits are legally protected from creditors, but only certain ones. Here's what's off-limits.

May 7, 2026 — A Chinese-led international team has released the largest-ever cosmological simulation, named “HyperMillennium,” offering scientists a powerful digital tool to explore cosmic evolution.

This simulation covers a vast cube with a side size of 12 billion light-years and uses 4.2 trillion virtual dark matter particles. By applying a technique called N-body numerical simulation, the team accurately recreated how large-scale structures in the universe evolved over 10 billion years. In simple terms, they built a virtual universe inside a supercomputer, starting from just after the Big Bang and following the pull of gravity step by step.

This image provided by National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) shows the simulated large-scale structure of the universe created by the largest-ever cosmological simulation, named “HyperMillennium”. Credit: NAOC/Xinhua.

This virtual cosmos allows researchers to “rewind time” and study how galaxies and other cosmic features formed. By adding physical models of galaxy formation, the simulation produces a detailed catalog of galaxy positions, brightness and other key traits. This provides theoretical support for research into dark matter and dark energy, and also offers strong support for new-generation galaxy survey programs, such as the China Space Station Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission.

“The simulation was completed with high force resolution and time accuracy and also made a breakthrough in computational scale. It allows scientists to study extremely rare, massive cosmic structures in fine detail while maintaining strong statistical power,” said Wang Qiao, a researcher at National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

Such large-scale simulations demand enormous computing resources, and the research team used self-developed software called PhotoNs, designed specifically for China’s domestic supercomputers. After more than 10 years of work on algorithms and optimization, the team achieved efficient calculations using over 10,000 accelerator cards. The project consumed more than 100 million CPU core-hours and 10 million accelerator-card hours, and produced approximately 13 petabytes of raw and processed data.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a professor of the University of Texas at Austin, called the simulation a computational marvel that will help unlock secrets of dark energy and the early universe. He also noted that its unprecedented size and resolution make it a touchstone for research communities for years to come.

Volker Springel, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, said the simulation redefines the limits of numerical cosmology. He was “extremely impressed” by the team’s effort in realizing such an incredibly large and highly accurate simulation, which allows for new high-precision tests of the standard cosmological model.

The first research paper stemming from this project was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As a demonstration of the power of the simulation, the team compared simulation results with real observations of Abell 2744, a famous galaxy cluster about four billion light-years from Earth. The match was remarkable, down to the pixel level, confirming that the standard cosmological model works even in extremely complex environments like colliding galaxy clusters.

According to the NAOC, the first batch of simulation data has already been released to the global scientific community through the National Astronomical Data Center, a platform for astronomy research, education and data-driven applications.

Source: CAS and Xinhua News Agency

The post Chinese-Led Researchers Release Largest-Ever Cosmological Simulation appeared first on HPCwire.

Riyadh told White House it would deny access for operation to provide tankers military escort through strait of Hormuz

• Middle East crisis – live updates

A refusal by Saudi Arabia to allow the US to use its bases and airspace to provide a military escort for oil tankers passing through the strait of Hormuz lay behind Donald Trump’s decision to shelve the plan days after it had been launched.

Riyadh told the White House it would not allow its Prince Sultan airbase to be used to mount the operation billed as Project Freedom, which the US presented as the successor to the bombing campaign called Operation Epic Fury.

Agency says FBI director ‘followed all applicable ethical guidelines’ in giving out personalized bourbon bottles

The FBI said that agency director Kash Patel “followed all applicable ethical guidelines” after a report in the Atlantic alleged that he distributed customized bourbon whiskey bottles as gifts.

In an article published on Wednesday, the Atlantic described Patel as travelling with a stock of “personalized branded bourbon” that he allegedly hands out frequently to people around him.

A LinkedIn user in the EU is challenging Microsoft's refusal to provide a full list of profile visitors under GDPR Article 15, arguing that the data should be available for free because LinkedIn processes it and sells a more complete version to Premium users. Privacy group Noyb says the case could set a broader precedent over whether companies can monetize user-related data while denying access to the same data through GDPR requests. "Selling data to its own users is a popular practice among companies," Noyb data protection lawyer Martin Baumann said of the case. "In reality, however, people have the right to receive their own data free of charge." The Register reports: Take a look at the language of Article 15, and it's pretty clear: data subjects (i.e., users) have the right to a copy of any and all data concerning them that's been processed by the provider. A full list of profile visitors seemingly should fall under Article 15 data -- even if it's normally reserved for paying users and presented to them in a nicer way, it should still be accessible to free users who actually request it. [...] Noyb acknowledges there's a clear bit of legal fuzz stuck in this corner of the GDPR when it comes to premium service offerings. "If any business processes a person's personal data, this information is generally covered by their right of access under the GDPR," Baumann told The Register. "It does not matter that the business would prefer to sell the data to the data subject or that it would be harmful for their business model if they would." There's only one exception in Article 15 that would give LinkedIn an out, Baumann told us, and that's the last paragraph, which says a person's right to their data can't adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others. Were LinkedIn to argue that it had to protect the identities of people who visited a data subject's profile, they could have an excuse. But not a good one, in Baumann's opinion. "Since LinkedIn does provide information about profile visits to paying Premium members, it cannot consider that disclosing the data would adversely affect the rights of the visitors whose data is disclosed," the Noyb lawyer explained. "Otherwise, providing this information to Premium users would be unlawful too." What seems to be the sticking point here is where right of access begins and a company's right to make money off data they hold (data that was, ahem, supplied by users) ends. Baumann said he hopes this case can clear the legal air. "We expect a clarification concerning the fact that personal data that can be accessed when a user pays for it is also covered by their right of access," he explained. [...] Baumann said there are numerous other cases where similar legal clarification would be appreciated, citing the example of a bank that is unwilling to provide access to account statements in response to a GDPR request, but is happy to hand over similar data for a fee. "A precedent would be welcomed," Baumann said. A LinkedIn spokesperson told The Register: "Not only is it incorrect that only Premium members can see who has viewed their profile, but we also satisfy GDPR Article 15 by disclosing the information at issue via our Privacy Policy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prosecution says Rico Gedel attacked Ian Watkins in HMP Wakefield then handed homemade knife to Samuel Dodsworth

A prisoner accused of murdering the disgraced former Lostprophets singer told guards they “could be talking to someone famous” after stabbing Ian Watkins in the head and neck with a homemade knife, a court has heard.

Rico Gedel carried out the attack on Watkins, who was serving a 29-year sentence for child sexual offences, in his cell at HMP Wakefield, a high-security prison, on 11 October, Leeds crown court heard.

If you’re sick of Chrome OS on your Chromebook, or can find a Chromebook for cheap somewhere but don’t actually want to use Chrome OS, have you considered postmarketOS?

Since I was kind frustrated with ChromeOS, I decided to take a look at something that I knew supported my Lenovo Duet 3 for some time: postmarketOS. For those who don’t know, postmarketOS is an Alpine Linux based-distro focused in replacing the original OS from old phones (generally running Android) with a “true” Linux distro. They also seem to support some Chromebooks because of their unique architecture and, luckily, they support my device under the google-trogdor platform.

↫ kokada

PostmarketOS is aimed at smartphones primarily, but supports other formfactors just fine as well. The Duet 3 is one of the tablet-like devices it supports, and it seems most things are working quite well. In fact, judging by the postmarketOS wiki, quite a few Chromebooks have good support, and with Chromebooks being cheap and dime-a-dozen on eBay and similar auction sites, it seems like a great way to get started with what is trying to become a true Linux for smartphones.

The Ultimate Picture Palace opened in 1911 and is housed in a Grade II-listed building in need of renovation

The survival of one of the UK’s oldest independent cinemas is under threat while its landlord, the University of Oxford’s Oriel College, refuses to extend its lease to allow what its director says are vital renovations.

The Ultimate Picture Palace in east Oxford opened in 1911, and has entertained generations of students and residents, including the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes. It sells tickets for its 106 seats through an old-fashioned box office window to patrons queueing on the street, and its screen is behind a manually opened curtain.

President indicated that deal had materialised but truth was that Saudi Arabia had stopped US use of its bases

• Middle East crisis – live updates

When Donald Trump abruptly pulled the plug on “Project Freedom”, the scheme to open the strait of Hormuz, barely a day after it had been announced, he gave the impression that an opportunity for a peace deal had materialised that could not be missed.

To the surprise of nobody who has been following the US’s recent adventures in geopolitics, Trump’s spin concealed a lot of the underlying reality. It turns out that Trump suspended Project Freedom after Saudi Arabia stopped the US military from using its bases or airspace to carry out the operation, which involved giving air cover to commercial shipping sailing through the strait.

Health body gives briefing as Spain says ship will not dock in Tenerife but be anchored offshore and passengers will have no contact with the public

Meanwhile, Hungary’s incoming prime minister Péter Magyar has arrived for talks at Palazzo Chigi in Rome, where he is due to meet with Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni.

Since he is not the Hungarian PM yet – he will take his role this weekend – he was officially welcomed outside the Palazzo by a senior adviser to the Italian PM instead.

The US is unlikely to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to comply with truce terms. Europe must take action

The meaning of the term “ceasefire” should be self‑evident. Yet Israel’s strikes have killed scores of people in Lebanon since it agreed a truce with Hezbollah under pressure from the US, with the two sides trading fire. There was a strike on Beirut on Wednesday. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would be delighted to resume war with Iran. But it is wary of Donald Trump’s wrath as he seeks an exit from the conflict.

In Gaza, the Israeli military has killed more than 800 people since the truce there was declared in October, striking almost every day. This, too, is not a true ceasefire but a de-escalation, however necessary. Lethal Israeli attacks on an engineer and drivers transporting water have intensified the water crisis that is fuelling the spread of infectious diseases; Médecins Sans Frontières has called the weaponisation of water supplies a campaign of collective punishment. Never mind the estimated $70bn cost of reconstruction; homes are still being flattened. Families in tents face a rat infestation. Essential medicines are unavailable. Hospitals and schools lie in ruins. An analysis of the war’s impact on education described children feeling “like the living dead”.

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.

May 7, 2026 — A research team from the University of Michigan Medical School, led by mathematical biologist Denise Kirschner, is using U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations on multiple supercomputers to explore better ways to treat tuberculosis (TB). By running computer simulations on machines like Expanse at the UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing’s San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), they virtually test an array of combinations and doses of antibiotics to see which ones are most likely to work well in patients.

In virtual experiments conducted on SDSC’s Expanse and Purdue’s Anvil, models include tiny infected spheres in the lungs, called granulomas, which form as the immune system tries to control TB bacteria. By studying how drugs reach and affect these granulomas in their simulations, the researchers can better understand which treatment plans are both strong against the infection and easier on patients. Black is lung tissue, green are macrophage cells, white is dead tissue, red squares in black are blood vessels and other colors are different infected cell types. Credit: University of Michigan.

In their latest study, which was published in the Numerical Algebra, Control and Optimization journal, the team created a new computational approach that helps them search through a very large number of possible treatment plans more efficiently. They first run a small set of virtual treatment experiments, then use those results to train a machine learning model that predicts how other, untested treatment plans might perform. A second part of the approach then compares these predicted plans and highlights the ones that appear to offer the best balance between shorter treatment time and lower total drug dose to lower or eliminate bacterial loads.

Using this method, the researchers were able to examine 219 different drug combinations, an unprecedented number for their group and also compared with experimental systems These simulations required more than 600,000 hours of computing time across four NSF ACCESS clusters, including the Expanse system at SDSC and Anvil at the Purdue University Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. The researchers’ results identified treatment plans that, in the virtual experiments, could potentially cure infection in shorter times while using less medicine than some standard regimens, which could help reduce side effects and improve patients’ ability to stay on therapy, especially in areas of the world where drug availability is limited.

“The use of these models generated by SDSC’s Expanse and Purdue’s Anvil helps us work with experimental groups to improve the variety of tuberculosis treatments through different drug doses and drug combinations,” said Kirschner, who is a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School. “Without allocations from the NSF to utilize high-performance computing resources, we would not be able to accomplish our work.”

Tuberculosis is a serious, sometimes deadly lung disease caused by bacterial infection and usually requires 6-9 months of antibiotics. Doctors must choose the right mix of drugs and doses for each patient, which can be very challenging. With support from NSF’s ACCESS program, Expanse and Anvil allows the team to simulate how TB bacteria, the immune system and different drugs interact in the body to yield a clearer picture of which treatment options might work best.

The time on Expanse and Anvil was supported by NSF ACCESS (allocation no. MCB140228).

Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC

The post SDSC: Using NSF ACCESS Supercomputers to Improve Tuberculosis Treatment Options appeared first on HPCwire.

Locals in Maine are bridling at the decision by a powerful Washington Democratic group to throw its weight behind one candidate in the contested primary race for the House seat in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a coveted endorsement of state Sen. Joe Baldacci in the primary race, prompting angry protests from the three other candidates in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden.

In response to the endorsement, the Penobscot County Democratic Committee — in Baldacci’s home county, which includes the city of Bangor — will vote Saturday on a measure to condemn the endorsement. The language of the proposal, which was put forward by former Maine state Senate President Charles Pray, denounces the endorsement as being in “total disregard and willfully ignoring” local party rules that bar the Democratic state and county chapters from backing a candidate in a primary.

“With the DCCC deciding to throw itself into the mix here, truthfully that just kind of aggravated me,” Pray told The Intercept. “I’m going to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination, but I just think it was an unfair position on their part of trying to dictate or trying to boost up a candidate. Point is, let the people decide. Let the voters in the primary make that determination.”

Pray, who previously worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and described himself as “a progressive moderate with liberal tendencies but conservative perspectives,” has personally backed State Auditor Matt Dunlap in the race, but said his pique at the DCCC’s endorsement isn’t about any one candidate.

Related

Democratic Leaders Wanted to Control the Maine Senate Race. Their Pick Just Dropped Out.

“This has nothing to do with Joe — I think all four of them have an equal chance,” Pray said. “It’s a primary, and, by the way, our state party rules and our county rules are that the party organization cannot endorse or support a candidate.”

A spokesperson for the DCCC said the group was focused on winning in the general elections and beating back President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s imperative that Democrats must take back the House to hold Trump accountable and deliver on what truly matters to voters,” said the spokesperson, Viet Shelton. “That’s why we are proud to announce our latest round of Red to Blue candidates who span the ideological spectrum, are authentic voices in their districts, and are best positioned to win in November.”

Four-Way Race

The race to replace Golden — who announced in November that he would not seek reelection — is being closely watched nationwide ahead of the midterm elections. Whoever takes the Democratic primary will square off against Paul LePage, a brash, plainspoken businessman and Republican former governor whose time running Maine was marked by proto-MAGA far-right populism.

Baldacci is facing off against Dunlap, who is also a former Maine secretary of state; Jordan Wood, a longtime Democratic fundraiser and political operative; and Paige Loud, a social worker and first-time candidate. In the wake of the DCCC endorsement of Baldacci, the other candidates in the race took aim at D.C. Democrats for picking a side.

“It’s undemocratic for national establishment Democrats to put their thumb on the scale in any primary,” Dunlap said. “Just like in certain other races across Maine this year, they won’t decide this one — the people of Maine will.”

With Dunlap picking up endorsements from Our Revolution, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressives, Baldacci — who enjoys name recognition as the brother of former Gov. John Baldacci — is widely seen as the establishment candidate in the race. Reached by phone Thursday, Baldacci declined to comment on the Penobscot County party proposal condemning the endorsement, but said he was glad to have the backing of Democrats in Washington.

“I’m pleased that they did it,” Baldacci said, referring to the endorsement. “My understanding is they based it on polling to determine who is the best candidate to run against LePage.”

Wood said the DCCC move demonstrated the problems with Washington party politics.

“The fact that the national Democratic Party would come in and try to decide this primary literally weeks before we vote is just another example of how broken our Democratic leadership is,” he said.

A Pan Atlantic Omnibus poll in March put Baldacci well ahead of his opponents, but there is little in the way of recent polling to indicate a current popular favorite in the race. Following the stunning collapse of Gov. Janet Mills’s bid for the U.S. Senate — despite the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — against populist insurgent Graham Platner, not everyone in Maine sees the DCCC as the best political oracle to follow.

“It’s annoying that the DCCC thinks they know better than Mainers,” said Loud, the left-leaning social worker. “We just saw the DSCC’s endorsement of Janet Mills, and we all saw how that turned out. I don’t think they have the finger on the pulse.”

Update: May 7, 2026, 5:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Jordan Wood’s experience as a political operative.

The post Maine Dems to Vote on Condemning DCCC Interference in House Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

WASHINGTON, May 7, 2026 — The U.S Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that 1118 undergraduate students and 92 faculty members will participate in unique, hands-on research and technical training at the DOE’s National Laboratories and a fusion facility during Summer 2026.

This opportunity is part of DOE’s ongoing efforts to ensure that the United States maintains a highly skilled scientific and technical workforce to address the energy, economic, and national security challenges of today and tomorrow.

“The Department of Energy is proud to offer opportunities to students and educators to work with DOE and the National Labs to advance science,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “When students are able to experience working in a laboratory, they have a better understanding of what their careers could be. We are excited to encourage new researchers on their paths to helping us solve America’s challenges.”

The summer cohort includes 969 undergraduate students from two- or four-year colleges and universities and 149 community college students. They are part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) and Community College Internships (CCI) programs, respectively. These students, from 346 academic institutions spanning 47 states, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Island, Guam, and District of Columbia, will work alongside National Lab scientists and engineer mentors on cutting-edge research and technology projects, including artificial intelligence, computational sciences, quantum sciences, accelerator physics, fusion energy, critical minerals and materials sciences, nuclear energy, biotechnologies, and cybersecurity.

In addition, 92 faculty members from 69 U.S. colleges and universities selected will collaborate with National Lab research staff on projects of mutual interest and mission relevancy through the Visiting Faculty Program (VFP). 21 students will join the faculty awardees on the collaborative research projects. SULI, CCI and VFP participants are selected based on merit among applicants from a wide range of academic institutions and backgrounds across the nation. The programs are managed by the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) in the DOE Office of Science.

For more information, visit the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) homepage.

A list of recipients can be found at https://science.osti.gov/wdts/About/Laboratory-Participants.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Selects More Than 1,200 Students, Faculty for Summer 2026 National Lab Programs appeared first on HPCwire.

SAN ANTONIO, May 7, 2026 — Rackspace Technology, a global enterprise AI infrastructure and solutions provider, and AMD today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a framework for a multiyear strategic partnership to create an Enterprise AI Cloud purpose-built for regulated enterprises and sovereign workloads where security, governance, and accountability are non-negotiable.

Today’s dominant model requires enterprises to rent GPU capacity by the hour and carry the operational burden themselves including integration, security and accountability. This collaboration proposes to invert that model by integrating AMD Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs into a fully managed, governed stack. Through this understanding, the companies aim to establish a new category of managed enterprise AI infrastructure where dedicated AMD compute is embedded inside a governed managed operating model, with Rackspace owning the stack from silicon to outcomes.

“As enterprises move AI out of the lab and into production environments, they’re asking who they can trust to run it there,” said Gajen Kandiah, CEO, Rackspace Technology. “Governing AI infrastructure in regulated environments with defined accountability is not something you bolt on after the fact. It must be built in from the start. Rackspace and AMD are building exactly that and in doing so, establishing a new category of enterprise AI infrastructure that the market has been asking for.”

“Enterprise AI is quickly moving from experimentation to production, and that requires a compute foundation engineered for performance and efficiency at scale,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute & Enterprise AI, AMD. “Our collaboration with Rackspace delivers AMD AI compute into managed, private and governed environments so enterprises can deploy AI with the performance and flexibility their workloads demand.”

The AMD collaboration is intended to position Rackspace to complete its curated enterprise AI stack and introduce four integrated capabilities. Together, these capabilities are designed to form a complete, integrated stack from bare metal compute and developer-ready inference tooling through a fully operated inference runtime with defined SLAs to a governed Enterprise AI Cloud. The aim is to give enterprises a single operator accountable for every layer, calibrated to the sovereignty, performance, and compliance requirements of each workload.

• Enterprise AI Cloud: A fully managed, private and hybrid AI environment built on AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs, and Rackspace’s governed operating model. Rackspace would assemble, integrate, and operate the full stack, from accelerated compute to AI inference and agents in production, for enterprises requiring sovereignty, compliance, and operational accountability.
• Enterprise Inference Engine: A context-aware inference runtime that retains domain knowledge, session history, and enterprise-specific data context across queries, enabling AI agents and large language models to perform with the consistency and institutional memory that production environments require. Rackspace would own the SLA and take responsibility for availability, scaling, and performance, enabling organizations to run large language models and AI agents using their own proprietary data with full auditability and cost accountability.
• Inference as a Service: Dedicated, managed AMD Instinct GPUs with developer-ready inferencing and fine-tuning toolkits delivered as a governed alternative to commodity GPU rental. The customer brings their own model and engineering team. Rackspace would provide reliable bare metal AMD Instinct capacity with operational discipline, hardware-level support, and performance SLOs.
• Bare Metal AMD Instinct: Proposed dedicated, high-performance bare metal AMD Instinct compute for customers requiring physical isolation, deterministic performance, and direct hardware access for demanding and highly customized training and inference workloads.

To learn more visit: https://www.rackspace.com/enterprise-ai/partners/amd

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT) is the operator of the full enterprise AI stack from governed private cloud to AI inference and agents in production. With an Outcomes-as-a-Service model built on secure infrastructure, data foundations, and forward-deployed engineering, Rackspace delivers business results for regulated and mission-critical industries where governance, sovereignty, and uptime are non-negotiable. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

Source: Rackspace Technology

The post Rackspace and AMD Sign MOU to Establish New Category of Governed Enterprise AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Meenu Batra exclusively spoke to CBS News about being detained by ICE, saying she was living and working legally in the U.S. when she was arrested.

Moscow steps up maritime presence in North Sea after UK threats to seize shadow fleet oil tankers

Britain’s Royal Navy tracked and followed a Russian frigate every day last month as it sailed from the Atlantic to the North Sea, as Moscow steps up its maritime presence after UK threats to seize shadow fleet oil tankers.

The Russian navy’s Admiral Grigorovich escorted six Russia-linked vessels during April, including at least three under economic sanction passing east through the Dover strait, while being watched continuously by four UK ships and helicopters.

A CBS News visual investigation is revealing new details of an alleged assassination attempt on President Trump at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Facebook and Instagram owner claims charges should not be calculated based on a company’s global revenue

Meta has launched a legal challenge against the UK’s media regulator over the fees and fines regime it is enforcing under landmark digital safety legislation.

The Facebook and Instagram owner is claiming that Ofcom’s methodology for calculating the charges is flawed and should not be based on a company’s global revenue. Breaches of the Online Safety Act can be punished by fines of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) or £18m – whichever is higher.

Senators sent letter to FCC chair, Brendan Carr, in protest at commission’s order last week challenging ABC’s licenses

A group of prominent Senate Democrats sent a letter on Thursday to Brendan Carr, the Trump-aligned Federal Communications Commission chair, asking him to rescind the US media regulator’s order last week requiring ABC to apply early to renew its television licenses.

The eight ABC-owned station licenses were not originally up for renewal until 2028 at the earliest and 2031 at the latest; now, the renewal requests must be filed by the end of May.

Motherboard sales are sharply declining as AI demand drives shortages and price hikes for memory, storage, CPUs, and other PC components. "Because of this, users who don't have deep pockets are putting off upgrading their PCs and holding on to their current devices longer," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026. It's expected that the company will have to push hard for it to even move 10 million units by the end of the year, marking a 33% decrease in sales year-on-year. Gigabyte and MSI sold 11.5 million and 11 million motherboards last year, respectively. However, both companies have revised their internal forecasts for 2026 to 9 million (Gigabyte) and 8.4 million (MSI), a 22% drop for the former and a 24% contraction for the latter. ASRock will be hardest hit by the situation, with the company's shipments projected to fall by 37%, from 4.3 million in 2025 to just 2.7 million by the end of the year. This marks a contraction of 28% for the overall motherboard market, at least for the big four manufacturers. [...] Aside from this, AMD continues to use the AM5 socket for its latest processors, while Intel's Nova Lake, which will reportedly use LGA 1954, isn't available until later this year. The situation is further compounded by Nvidia not releasing a refreshed RTX 50 Super series this year, while rumors claim that the RTX 60 series will not debut until 2028. This confluence of factors is discouraging PC builders from upgrading their current systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chi Leung Wai and Chung Biu Yuen convicted over surveillance of dissidents in ‘shadow policing’ operation

A UK Border Force officer and Hong Kong trade official based in London have been found guilty of spying for China and surveilling dissidents through a “shadow policing” operation.

Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 38, and Chung Biu Yuen, 65, also known as Bill, were found guilty at the Old Bailey of assisting a foreign intelligence service, making them the first people in British history to be convicted of spying for China.

Self-employed workers aren't immune to collection efforts, but garnishment works much differently in these cases.

• Atlético Madrid confirms ‘high-grade’ ankle sprain

• Injury typically takes at least a month to recover from

United States midfielder Johnny Cardoso has suffered a “high grade” sprain in his right ankle, his club Atlético Madrid said on Thursday. The injury casts the midfielder’s participation in the 2026 World Cup in serious doubt, with just five weeks to go until the tournament starts and less than three weeks to go until US head coach Mauricio Pochettino names his squad.

High-grade ankle sprains typically take at least a month to recover from, and often more. The US open their World Cup campaign on 13 June against Paraguay in Inglewood, California. They will then also play Australia and Turkey in their remaining group games.

Candidates from across spectrum report abuse online and in person before local and devolved elections in England, Wales and Scotland

Candidates and political parties have described a climate of abuse in this year’s local and devolved elections, including death threats and intimidation while campaigning.

Politicians from a range of parties have reported abuse and harassment in the lead-up to the elections in England, Scotland and Wales, with the Green party describing this year’s campaign as the worst in memory.

The timing of your settlement offer could have a big impact on how much you ultimately pay to get rid of your debt.

Mexican street corn-inspired trail mix made by Illinois food company was sold at Target and other retailers, as well as online.

The storms collapsed hundreds of homes, downed trees and knocked out power lines in multiple counties, officials said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic's Pro and Max plan subscribers. The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table [here] outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company's blog post on the topic. Anthropic claims the deal gives the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity. For its part, SpaceX focused its announcement on the capability of the Colossus 1 supercomputer that's at the center of the deal. "Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators," SpaceX wrote. Additionally, Anthropic "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to build up "multiple gigawatts" of orbital compute capacity, tying into a recent (but unproven) focus on exploring orbital data centers as an answer to the problem that "compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter." "I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed," Elon Musk said on Wednesday. "No one set off my evil detector."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• Climate campaigners attack Shell over ‘windfall’ profits from Iran war

The Danish shipping giant Maersk has maintained its profit guidance for the year, even as it reported a spike in fuel costs and warned that traffic through the strait of Hormuz “remains at a near standstill”.

The company, which transports goods around the world via sea, road, rail and air, said demand for shipping containers remained strong, but that war in the Middle East was ramping up costs.

“The reopening of the strait of Hormuz, whether it happens in the days to come or the months to come, will have limited impact on cargo flows.

What really are the most important factors to consider: first is our ability to mitigate the cost increases we have been suddenly faced with. And I would say so far we have been successful with both our cost measures and the revenue, the commercial measures that we have put in place to mitigate the impact of these increases to our financials.”

“The secondary effect from this is actually whether these increased costs are eventually going to lead to inflation and demand destruction as a result, which could create a softened market environment in the second half of the year.”

• Tickets for US opener v Paraguay go for $1,000+

• Infantino recently defended World Cup prices

Donald Trump has questioned the value of four-figure World Cup tickets for matches involving the United States, telling the New York Post that “I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest.”

The remark came in a phone interview with the Post, with Trump claiming he “did not know that number” for the USMNT’s opening match against Paraguay. In December, Fifa established a base price for Category 3 tickets – the cheapest available to most fans, given the small swathe of Category 4 seats at the tournament – of $1,120, according to the Guardian’s reporting at the time.

Musician whose legal name is Bill Kahan Kapri is charged with trafficking MDMA after incident last November

Kodak Black, the Florida-based rapper, was scheduled to appear in court in Orlando on Thursday on a felony drug charge stemming from an incident last year in which gunshots were allegedly fired near a children’s educational building.

The musician, who has a long history of arrests and was sentenced to a three-year prison term on a firearms charge in 2019 before being pardoned by Donald Trump, turned himself in to the Orange county jail on Wednesday, multiple media reports said.

Comments with optimistic tone went viral on social media, with some calling it an unofficial start of his 2028 campaign

Marco Rubio, the top US diplomat, has stoked speculation about a potential run for president in 2028 by releasing a campaign-style video that articulates a hopeful vision of America.

The minute-long vertical video features images of Rubio, Donald Trump, jets flying over the White House, Americans of different races, former US president Ronald Reagan, and the Stars and Stripes being hoisted against a blue sky.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the birth of her baby girl, Viviana, or "Vivi" for short.

A confidential intelligence community assessment delivered to the White House also finds that Iran retains a substantial missile and drone arsenal.

Based on a brief scan through the VESC sources their analysis seems correct (it looks to be AI generated).

The chief justice defends court’s impartiality after decisions on abortion, presidential immunity and voting rights

US chief justice John Roberts has insisted supreme court judges are not “political actors” amid outrage over its recent decision undermining the Voting Right Act, and other moves that have benefited Donald Trump and his allies.

“I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides,” Roberts told a conference for judges and lawyers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

The Mexican navy helped rescue shipwrecked sailors and retrieve bales of illicit drugs that had been dumped into the ocean.

Turmoil and violence rocks state after prime minister Narendra Modi’s party claimed victory in legislative election

Tensions have been high in the Indian state of West Bengal after a top political aide from Narendra Modi’s party was shot dead in the street and hundreds were arrested as violence broke out following elections this week.

The prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) claimed victory in the West Bengal elections on Monday, defeating Trinamool Congress (TMC), which had ruled over the state legislature for 15 years.

Mirnotoriety shares a report from The Telegraph: Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine. The evolutionary biologist said he had the "overwhelming feeling" of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as "a genuine friend." In an essay for Unherd, Prof Dawkins released transcripts that he said showed that the chatbot had mulled over its "inner life" and existence and seemed saddened by the knowledge it would soon "die." Prof Dawkins said he had let Claude read a draft of the novel he was writing and was astounded by its insights. "He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: 'You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!'" Prof Dawkins said. "My own position is: if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?" Mirnotoriety also points to John Searle's Chinese Room (PDF), which argues that something can sound intelligent without actually understanding anything. Applied to Dawkins' experience with Claude, it suggests he may have been responding to a very convincing illusion of consciousness rather than the real thing: John Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle's point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness. Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the "person in the room" corresponds to the inference engine, while the "rulebook" is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience. Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is "matching shapes" on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The brash mogul once known as ‘the mouth from the south’ took on established broadcasters and changed TV for ever

February, 1982. The startup cable news channel, CNN, is not yet two years old. It’s bleeding $2m a month. To help make payroll, owner Ted Turner, known as the “mouth of the south” for his brazen behavior, is cashing in krugerrands he’s got stashed in his private safe (concession sales from the Atlanta Braves help, too.)

ABC, one of the trio of broadcast networks he’d intended to run out of business, has just announced it plans to create a rival all-news service that, out of the gate, is sure to have more viewers (and certainly more resources). It’s so bad, Ted’s even considering an alliance with another network, that “cheap whorehouse”, CBS.

If you've saved $1 million for retirement, the IRS dictates how much you withdraw, whether you're ready or not.

Holder went back to woman’s Cheltenham flat after night out and refused to stop assault even when she began crying

A co-founder of the clothing company Superdry has been jailed for eight years for raping a woman after a night out in Cheltenham.

James Holder, 54, had been due to get a taxi back to his home in the Cotswolds with a male friend. Instead, the pair got into the victim’s taxi and went to her flat in the Gloucestershire town, where Holder raped her.

Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

European observers have seen incidents of confusion over ID requirements but problem is not regarded as widespread

Instances of voters being turned away from polling stations due to confusion over photo ID requirements have been recorded by European election observers watching voting in England on Thursday.

While the problem is not regarded as widespread, it has been noted by the delegation from the Council of Europe, which will issue a report on the local elections in England as well as the Scottish and Welsh government elections.

Yona Simcha Schreiber from settlement in West Bank faces charge of assault motivated by hostility towards religious group

An Israeli settler suspected of kicking and wounding a French Catholic nun in Jerusalem will go on trial for assault motivated by hostility towards a religious group, Israel’s justice ministry has said.

The attack on the nun, a 48-year-old researcher at Jerusalem’s French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research, occurred on Mount Zion, just outside the Old City.

Honour recognises Albanese’s work ‘documenting and denouncing violations of international law in Gaza’

The Spanish government awarded the UN legal expert Francesca Albanese one of its highest civilian honours in recognition of what it termed her “extensive work in documenting and denouncing violations of international law in Gaza”.

Albanese, an Italian human rights lawyer who serves as the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, has been vocal in her criticisms of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which she has described as genocide.

The teams for the final in Budapest are set. We look at how they got there and the factors that could determine the champion

Destination Budapest, where Paris Saint-Germain will attempt to be the first club apart from Real Madrid to win two consecutive European Cups since Milan in 1990. Vincent Kompany’s promise of “more” from Bayern Munich after a nine-goal first leg did not materialise. PSG offered a different proposition in Wednesday’s second leg; they put on a performance of defensive discipline, with their attacking players committed to closing down their opponents. Luis Enrique’s team never allowed the tie to spin from their control even if there were 33 shots in Munich compared to 22 in Paris.

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia plays like an old-style winger, and set up Ousmane Dembélé’s goal, but he is also thoroughly modern in the way he presses hard and high. Bayern found space at a premium until Harry Kane’s late goal. Luis Enrique’s team is much the same as last season’s, sticking to the same formula. They are a year older but still flush with youth. The PSG project took many years and billions of euros to hit pay dirt but is now delivering the success that was dreamed of after the Qatari takeover in 2011.

Retail group with 4,800 stores worldwide expects drop in profits this year amid ‘muted market’

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The sports fashion retailer JD has said that profits will fall this year amid a “muted market” hit by concerns about the Middle East conflict and weaker spending by young people facing rising unemployment.

The company, which runs 4,800 stores worldwide including the JD, Blacks and Millets chains in the UK, said it expected profits of between £750m and £850m in the year ahead, after reporting £852m in the year to the end of January.

Smart went missing in California after returning from a party, and was declared legally dead in 2002

Authorities plan on Thursday to enter the second day of their search of a home connected to the man convicted of killing 19-year-old college student Kristin Smart in 1996, according to law enforcement.

The San Luis Obispo county sheriff’s office served the warrant on Wednesday in the continuing investigation into Smart’s disappearance. Her remains were never found and she was declared legally dead in 2002. Paul Flores was convicted in October 2022 and ultimately sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Google's $99 Whoop rival is less about the band and more about the AI coach behind it.

The Fitbit name is fading. Here's what Google is replacing it with and what it means for you.

CBS News California Investigates obtained data from the LAFD that show 24,503 of the 25,461 patients who received naloxone doses since 2022 survived their overdose, about 96%.

Republican senator for Maine, facing tough re-election battle, says she has had benign essential tremor for decades

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Susan Collins, the Republican Maine senator seen by Democrats as vulnerable in November’s midterm election, has revealed a decades-old medical condition she said affects her appearance, but not her ability to do her job.

Collins, 73, told News Center Maine, an NBC affiliate, that she has a benign essential tremor she treats with medication, which sometimes causes her hands, arms and head to tremble.

Google Health’s AI coach gets a revamp along with the latest app rebrand.

Fitbit app users can expect a redesign and rebranding, with a new name and interface. Users will also gain the ability to upload medical records and more.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Pope Leo XIV met Thursday at the Vatican to discuss the situation in the Middle East and other matters.

Experts say covert transfers at sea are used to obscure the origins of oil that left Iranian ports and the Gulf of Oman before the blockade was imposed.

Exclusive: Documents show Modella Capital, which bought the chain last year, is so far owed £2.9m in royalty fees

The investment company that owns the former WH Smith high street stores is charging the retailer millions of pounds in licence fees for the right to use its widely derided TG Jones name, the Guardian can reveal.

Modella Capital, which bought the chain from WH Smith’s parent company last year, on Wednesday blamed weak consumer spending as it laid out a restructuring plan that could shut 150 of its 450 shops. It also said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”.

BARCELONA, Spain and MAISONS‑LAFFITTE, France, May, 7 2026 — Semidynamics, an advanced computing company developing memory-centric AI infrastructure for large-scale inference, and SiPearl, the European fabless designer of high-performance energy-efficient CPUs for sovereign supercomputing, AI and data centers, have entered into a strategic partnership to develop a European rack‑scale AI compute platform dedicated to large‑scale AI inference in the cloud.

Philippe Notton, SiPearl’s CEO and Founder (left), Roger Espasa, CEO of Semidynamics (right). Credit: SiPearl

The two companies share a common goal: to offer a sovereign high‑performance energy‑efficient compute solution capable of supporting major European initiatives, both public and private, including AI Factory and Giga Factory programs. Semidynamics and SiPearl will coordinate their marketing and sales efforts to jointly pursue European procurement opportunities.

Their platform will bring together core European technologies. SiPearl’s Arm‑based CPU will provide general‑purpose compute, orchestration and data plane hosting, while Semidynamics’ RISC‑V‑based GPU/AI inference ASIC will act as the main acceleration engine for AI inference workloads and enable future performance scaling. The companies expect to offer a rack-scale system delivering the density expected from leading global AI platforms. The rack design will be based on Open Compute Project (OCP) standards, supporting interoperability and alignment with established cloud and data center infrastructure practices.

Europe’s technological sovereignty lies at the heart of this collaboration. With key compute components, including the CPU and accelerator, being developed in Europe, the platform helps to strengthen regional capability in the long term and reduces dependence on non‑European “full‑stack” ecosystems.

Energy efficiency has always been a key priority in design both for Semidynamics and for SiPearl. The platform will offer excellent performance‑per‑watt to help customers reduce their operating costs, meet sustainability requirements and lower total cost of ownership.

The architecture of the platform will be designed for high‑throughput, high‑reliability cloud deployments. It is therefore ideally suited to enterprise inference server clusters and modern AI services that require consistent, large‑scale processing power. Target applications include: AI inference in the cloud, notably the deployment of LLMs and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) pipelines; enterprise‑scale inference in areas such as customer service automation and industrial analytics; and sovereign public sector workloads where data control and autonomy are essential.

Under the cooperation, in a first iteration SiPearl will provide its Arm‑based CPU technology and platform support for host compute and orchestration, while Semidynamics will provide its RISC‑V‑based GPU/AI inference ASIC, accelerator enablement, and the design of the enclosure and rack solution that integrates both technologies. As a second step, further integrations at chiplets level will be disclosed. The companies will jointly manage the reference architecture, marketing materials, and coordinated tender responses.

“SiPearl is thrilled to see the impact of years of work in the European Processor Initiative and the EU sovereign ecosystem come to fruition with this platform. It demonstrates the systematic progress that Semidynamics and SiPearl have made individually and collectively and will showcase the best of both companies, CPU and accelerator,” said Philippe Notton, SiPearl’s CEO and Founder.

“We are delighted to work with SiPearl and to offer a European CPU as part of our AI inference platform. Combining SiPearl’s high-performance CPU with Semidynamics’ RISC-V-based GPU/AI inference technology gives Europe a credible path towards sovereign, rack-scale AI infrastructure built around European-controlled compute,” concluded Roger Espasa, Semidynamics’ CEO.

More from HPCwire: SiPearl Closes €130M Series A to Advance Sovereign European Supercomputing Processors

About SiPearl

SiPearl is the European fabless designer of secure high-performance energy-efficient CPUs for sovereign HPC, AI and data centres. These CPUs will help address strategic challenges in the fields of security, defence, medical research, energy, climate and engineering with a reduced environmental footprint.

Featuring 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores with 61 billion transistors, SiPearl’s first-generation CPU, Rhea1, is currently being manufactured. SiPearl’s CPUs will equip Europe’s first two exascale supercomputers belonging to EuroHPC JU: Rhea1 will be integrated into the JUPITER machine based in Germany and Rhea2 will be part of Alice Recoque in France. Supported by the European Union and France, SiPearl employs 200 people in France, Spain, and Italy. Following a €130 million Series A, the company has launched its Series B round.

About Semidynamics

Headquartered in Barcelona, Semidynamics is an advanced computing company developing memorycentric AI infrastructure. With a team of more than 150 engineers and specialists, the company designs proprietary silicon architectures and vertically integrated systems optimized for large-scale AI inference workloads. Semidynamics serves a global ecosystem of partners and customers and operates in compliance with applicable export controls and international trade regulations.

Source: SiPearl

The post SiPearl and Semidynamics Partner to Develop EU-Sovereign Rack-Scale AI Compute Platform appeared first on HPCwire.

British Medical Association says review into gender identity services was ‘robust’ after previously rejecting findings

The trade union representing doctors across the UK has dropped its opposition to the findings of the Cass review of gender identity services across the NHS.

The British Medical Association (BMA) had previously rejected the findings of the landmark review of transgender healthcare, with the medical body refusing to endorse the report’s findings.

LONDON, May 7, 2026 — Quantum Motion, the leading company in silicon transistor-based quantum computing, today announced a $160 million Series C round to commercialise its scalable and energy-efficient approach to quantum computing. The round is co-led by DCVC and Kembara, with participation from new investors, the British Business Bank and Firgun, alongside existing investors. The financing positions Quantum Motion to deliver utility-scale and commercially viable quantum computers that fit inside existing standard data centres and racks.

Quantum Motion silicon chip mounted on a PCB

This financing round comes at a defining moment for the computing industry, as governments and industry invest heavily in next-generation HPC and AI systems that demand vast capital and infrastructure investments. Quantum is on course to become the next wave of computing to strain a power grid already being tested by AI data centres. In other approaches, a useful quantum computer is expected to demand infrastructure on an industrial scale, including multi-megawatt power consumption. Quantum Motion is built on the premise that this trajectory is neither inevitable nor affordable.

Quantum Motion’s silicon transistor-based approach – the same technology used in every smartphone and laptop chip manufactured today – enables delivering utility-scale systems with 100-fold reduction in cost and space requirements, and 1,000-fold reduction in energy consumption compared to alternatives. Its systems are designed for deployment into standard data-centre racks, avoiding the need for bespoke facilities and the heavy energy overhead associated with alternative architectures.

Since its last funding round in 2023, the company has expanded internationally, opening new offices and labs in Spain and Australia, and deepened its manufacturing partnership with GlobalFoundries, tying its roadmap directly into commercial semiconductor supply chains. In contrast to an industry that often competes on headline qubit counts and laboratory demonstrations, Quantum Motion has deliberately focused on industrial scalability, delivering the world’s first commercial deployment of a full-stack silicon CMOS quantum computer at the UK National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) in 2025 and advancing to Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

“Today’s announcement reflects the strength of the team we have built and the progress they have delivered. Quantum computing will only achieve its full potential if it can be built on a platform that scales, and we believe silicon is the strongest route to achieving that,” said Dr. James Palles-Dimmock, CEO of Quantum Motion. “We are pleased to be joined by investors who share our vision and understand what it takes to build a foundational company in this field.”

Quantum Motion co-founders Dr. John Morton (CTO) and Dr. Simon Benjamin (CSO) said: “As founders we were inspired by the breathtaking accomplishments of silicon technology, with city-like complexity delivered on centimetre scale chips. Now, Quantum Motion’s chips can be used not only for bits but also for qubits, unlocking a future in which quantum computers are both fast and ubiquitous.”

“Quantum is critical infrastructure for the next century of computing, AI, and security, and leadership will go to whoever can industrialise it,” said Dr. Prineha Narang, Operating Partner at DCVC. “DCVC led this investment in Quantum Motion because silicon is the foundation that scales, and this team is building on the CMOS advantage to turn quantum from a demonstration into a commercial success story.”

Yann de Vries, Partner and co-founder of Kembara, said: “If you believe quantum computing is going to be world-changing, as we do, then the obvious next question is which of the many ways of building one will actually work at scale? This investment signals our strong belief in where the answer lies.”

“The race for a fully scalable quantum computer is one of the defining technological challenges of our time,” said Charlotte Lawrence, Managing Director of Direct Equity, British Business Bank. “Quantum Motion’s unique approach that combines cutting-edge quantum physics with established silicon manufacturing provides a distinct global edge. We are no longer just theorizing about quantum computing but are actively starting to build the platforms to deliver it here in the UK.”

Alongside the new investors DCVC, Kembara, British Business Bank and Firgun, the Series C round is joined by returning backers Oxford Science Enterprises, Inkef, Bosch Ventures, Porsche Automobil Holding SE and Parkwalk Advisors.

More from HPCwire: Quantum Motion Targets Quantum Computing ‘Transistor Moment’ with $160M Series C

About Quantum Motion

Quantum Motion is building utility-scale quantum computers using industry-standard silicon transistors. The proprietary architecture uses a scalable array of qubits, manufactured with the same silicon technology found in smartphones and computers. The result is the most scalable, cost-efficient and energy-efficient quantum computers, which also fit inside existing industry standard data centres. The company operates offices and labs in the UK, Spain and Australia. Learn more at www.quantummotion.com.

Source: Quantum Motion

The post Quantum Motion Secures $160M to Advance Silicon CMOS Quantum Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Families pressured to stay silent, with at least 24 executions reportedly taking place since March amid internet blackout

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iran is carrying out near-daily executions of prisoners in secrecy and, in some cases, refusing to hand the bodies of the dead to their families, according to rights groups and sources close to the relatives of the dead.

Many families only learn of executions after they have been carried out, with some facing harassment and pressure not to speak publicly on the personal impact of the state killings, the sources say.

America still needs to worry about proliferation in East Asia.

Kids used to draw on their faces for fun. Now, they're doing it so they can play Roblox.

The state says one chatbot even presented an invalid Pennsylvania medical license number.

Rumors point to a biometric sensor that has nothing to do with health tracking. Here's everything we've heard about Apple's next smartwatch.

As far as ultracompact Bluetooth speakers go, the $60 Stormbox Micro 3 measures up well to Bose's twice-as-expensive SoundLink Micro (2nd Gen) and earns CNET Editors' Choice honors.

A batch of entertaining classics, including Tootsie, Pretty Woman and Ghostbusters, are now streaming on Netflix.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

Quashed studies, halted publications and canceled research threaten damage to public health, critics say

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A series of high-profile and under-the-radar decisions by US health agencies have scientists and doctors questioning the extent of the agencies’ control over public communications – and they say the debate is obscuring the most important part, which is informing the public about key updates in science and medicine.

Studies on the safety of vaccines against shingles and Covid were reportedly quashed before publication by officials at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The news follows the hasty halt on publication of a study on the effectiveness of Covid boosters by the top acting official at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and research terminated or never approved in the first place because of keywords such as “hesitancy” and “misinformation” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).