News Reel

Two friends found Kathryn Woessner, 68, in wooded area almost entirely submerged in mud puddle

A woman has been rescued from a mud pit in Minnesota after becoming trapped for several days.

On 6 June, two friends, Adam Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin, were riding their all-terrain vehicles through a wooded area near Backus and Hackensack in northern Minnesota when they discovered Kathryn Woessner, 68, almost entirely submerged in a mud puddle.

Celebrations filled the streets, subways and bars as police reported some riots, damaged properties and violence

Marvita Davis, 70, was a teenager in Harlem the last time the New York Knicks won a championship, in 1973.

“I was like, Oh, I like this game. I can get into this game,” recalled Davis, who went on to play basketball at Northeastern University.

Those in favour forced to defend themselves against claims the terms of the proposal amount to capitulation

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iranian hardliners have mounted a rearguard rejection of a proposed deal with the US as backers in the regime defend themselves against charges it does not guarantee sanctions relief, compensation or control of the strait of Hormuz.

“The fact that they say we won and America has retreated is a blatant lie,” the Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari said. Meysam Nili, the managing director of Rajanews and brother-in-law of the hardline former president Ebrahim Raisi, called the deal on the table a catastrophic capitulation. He urged Iranians not to sit quietly.

President Trump endorsed Rep. Mike Collins in the Republican Senate runoff in Georgia, wading into the race days ahead of the contest that will decide who takes on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

America's Energy Department "wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI," reports Communications of the ACM: It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country's 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system researchers can access. The DOE has taken to calling it 'a national operating system for science.' That means treating compute, data, and AI models the way the country treats power lines and highways, as shared national plumbing everyone else builds on top of. If it works, Genesis will change how scientific work gets organized, checked, and scaled, with AI helping run the whole pipeline from hypothesis to simulation to experiment and back. The pitch is that this is better understood as infrastructure policy than as another research program. Genesis is now moving from announcement into execution. President Trump signed the executive order launching it in November 2025. This past February, the DOE published 26 science and technology challenges for the program, and in March it opened a $294-million call for research teams in fields like nuclear energy, quantum information science, semiconductors, and biotechnology. The program is also beginning to reach beyond U.S. borders. In June 2026, Japan moved to become Genesis's first international partner. The two governments plan to invest a combined $1 billion over five years, with Japan contributing $500 million toward joint work in quantum technology, nuclear fusion, and biotechnology. The stated goal is staying ahead of China in the fields where AI is advancing fastest. The open question is whether a federated platform this big can actually work, or whether it ends up as one more expensive coordination exercise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on June 14, 2026.

US president says ‘let’s not blow it’ before peace deal is signed and urges against any further attacks after Iran says Israeli strikes won’t go ‘unanswered’

• Iranian hardliners in vociferous push to reject proposed peace deal with US

Israel says it has struck Beirut’s south suburbs, with explosions heard in the city. The Israeli military claimed the attacks on the Lebanese capital were in response to Hezbollah firing into Israeli territory.

The military were reportedly targeting Hezbollah targets in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the group’s stronghold known as Dahiyeh, according to a joint statement by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Israel Katz.

President Trump said Israel and Iran should not "blow it" as efforts to finalize a peace deal continue.

In the realm of wildlife gremlin simulators like Untitled Goose Game, Bad Magpie marries mischievous carnage with an emotional undercurrent.

Sources say hardline measures will also prevent young users from being able to talk to strangers on gaming apps

• Why is the UK launching an ‘Australia plus’ social media ban and how will it work?

Keir Starmer will ban under-16s from major social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram and X in sweeping restrictions described as “Australia plus”, the Guardian understands.

Teenagers will be banned from all the main social platforms, and online products that are not covered by the ban – such as gaming apps – will face new restrictions such as having the option to chat to strangers removed. There will also be restrictions for older teenagers up to the age of 18 that prevent “scrolling” late at night – after 8.30pm.

Exclusive: devolving tax is part of plans to give local areas more power in areas including justice, health and education

Ministers are considering handing over billions of pounds raised by business rates to regional mayors as part of one of the biggest shake-ups of the English tax system in recent years.

Steve Reed, the local government secretary, said the government was working on plans to devolve the tax, which has been the subject of recent protests by pubs and other hospitality businesses.

For a half century, New York was the center of the universe but the joke of the NBA. In these glamour-filled finals, the franchise finally got its moment

The New York Knicks had been here before. As Jalen Brunson and his band of not-so-merry men stood at the top of this year’s NBA finals, they confronted not just the San Antonio Spurs, their foe on the court, but the very idea of what the Knicks themselves – as a team, as a franchise, as a symbol of New York City – could be. The team’s run to last year’s Eastern Conference finals was thrilling but had the aspect of an underdog romp, and ultimately ended in defeat. Was this the limit of what New York’s fans, Rabelaisian in their rages and saintly in their endless capacity for patience, could expect from their team? Brunson was dogged and clever but perhaps not quite elite, a Stakhanovite toiler in a league built for transcendent talents. Karl-Anthony Towns was elite but perhaps too soft, too sensitive, too “zesty” to carry a team to the NBA’s pinnacle. The questions hanging over the leading pair extended to a team forged in their image. The lineup was good; was it great?

Coach Mike Brown, in his first year with the franchise, had promise but no small amount of baggage, having landed at the Knicks after being dismissed by the Sacramento Kings following a horror start to the 2024/25 season. And then, of course, there was the weight of history: no title since 1973 and a litany of near-misses and false dawns in the intervening decades. New York had watched through the 1980s and 1990s as first Los Angeles, then Chicago (under the guidance of its own son, Phil Jackson, who won the 1973 championship as a Knick) propelled the NBA to global prominence, a narrative in which the Knicks filled the role of a dutiful punching bag. Hakeem Olajuwon’s block on John Starks to kill their hopes in 1994, the tragic heroism of Patrick Ewing, death by Tim Duncan in ’99, and all the fizzled promise of Carmelo and Stoudemire and Linsanity: the memories had faded but the scars lingered. The franchise was destined, it seemed, to remain forever on the fringes, a mournful witness to others’ joy. Could they do it? Surely they couldn’t: the curse of the Knicks had driven the fans, the team, the city itself to despair. Neurosis, not success, was hardwired into New York’s psychology. The center of the universe and the joke of the NBA: the city was Larry Fink off the court, and Larry David on it.

Platner’s long road ahead shows how Democrats may have fumbled the bag in Maine

The Democratic establishment’s early bet on Janet Mills, as its best hope to pick up a coveted Senate seat in Maine, now looks like a clear miscalculation – one that has left the party boxed into a far riskier general election fight than it ever anticipated. By rallying behind the septuagenarian governor, and sidelining Graham Platner for months, party leaders helped create the very predicament they face.

Platner’s primary victory on Tuesday now means the closely-watched race will be a test of fortitude for Democrats in the long road to November. One where either outcome has wide-ranging implications for the party.

Apple must pay iPhone owners to settle a lawsuit over delayed and missing AI features.

The monument excites reverence for the Declaration of Independence. Of course it is threatening to a president who doesn’t share its egalitarian vision

The Lincoln Memorial has always been special. Its siting is perfect, facing the Capitol, across the length of the Mall, as if speaking truth to power. The symmetry of its proportions adds to its moral grandeur. It feels balanced and open to all, like Lincoln’s vision of democracy.

That was consciously on the mind of the architect, Henry Bacon. It is not a towering monolith; instead, it invites the visitor in. There are some steps to climb, but not too many; 87 in all, chosen specifically because of the “four score and seven” in the Gettysburg Address, the number separating the year of Lincoln’s speech (1863) from 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.

Ted Widmer is the author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, and a new book, to be published 23 June, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text

"Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers," reports the gaming news site Aftermath: The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and other claims. Blizzard Entertainment claims that Project Ascension is a "lucrative way to exploit and profit from the popularity of the WoW game experience," according to the complaint, obtained by Aftermath. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers say in the complaint that Project Ascension purports to have "over a million players." Lawyers write that the developers have "distributed (and are continuing to distribute) millions of pirated copies of Blizzard's copyrighted WoW game software." They also allege that Project Ascension's servers are hosted on Russian "bulletproof" servers with Aeza Group, a company that was sanctioned in 2025 "for its role in supporting cybercriminal activity targeting victims in the United States and around the world," per a U.S. Department of Treasury press release... Project Ascension lets players combine pieces of World of Warcraft's different classes to build unique characters. It's free-to-play, but players can purchase in-game currency, Donation Points, to buy things in-game, such as cosmetics and experience boosts. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers assert that Project Ascension has made "millions of dollars from the sale of Donation Points...." Blizzard Entertainment successfully sued a popular World of Warcraft server called Turtle Wow last year. The project had been running since 2018, taking donations from players for the free-to-play server. Both sides announced in April 2026 that they'd reached a settlement after Blizzard Entertainment was awarded a permanent injunction to shut down Turtle WoW. The details of the settlement were not made public. Turtle WoW was shut down for good shortly after May 15; players gathered online to mourn the end of the server.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of people living in Switzerland has soared by nearly one-quarter over the last generation.

Some fighters will receive bonuses in ‘stablecoins’ issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday.

The development connects the Trump family’s financial interests to the high-profile UFC competition being promoted on government property. The competition on the south White House lawn is scheduled for 14 June, Donald Trump’s birthday.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, are expecting their fourth child. They talk about family; his book, "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith"; and his future.

Vice President JD Vance tells "CBS Sunday Morning" that he and his wife, Usha, will make a decision whether to enter the 2028 presidential race following the 2026 midterm elections.

A year ago it was the hot topic, but business owners have seen there’s a limit to the president’s royal decrees

In two weeks, I’m speaking to a group of companies in the packaging industry about issues affecting their businesses this year. I’m going to discuss the economy, navigating higher costs, leveraging new tax legislation, AI and what companies are doing to find and retain workers in a volatile job market.

You know what I won’t be talking about? Tariffs.

Coweta county could become third in state history to stage referendum, letting residents challenge a policy or decision

A post-church downpour didn’t deter hundreds of people from showing up at Morgan’s Market on a recent Sunday afternoon to sign a petition aimed at giving people in rural Coweta county, Georgia, the chance to vote on a datacenter known as Project Sail and prohibit other datacenters and cryptocurrency mining operations from moving forward.

It was one of about a dozen petition-signing events held in the area in a push that launched several weeks ago. As of Friday, organizers said they had collected about 6,500 signatures; the goal is about 14,000. Located less than an hour south-west of Atlanta, Coweta county has about 160,000 residents. Two-thirds of the county voted for Trump.

The US president has deported far more Cuban nationals during his second term than the entirety of his first

There was a time not so long ago when US immigration officials would have rolled out the red carpet for Cuban immigrants like May Díaz.

The 36-year-old native of the city of Camaguey joined thousands of other Cubans in spontaneous nationwide demonstrations against the Communist regime on 11 July 2021. Like many other protesters, Díaz was beaten up by truncheon-wielding police officers who were deployed to crush the protests, and three months later she fled the island and landed in the Mexican resort city of Cancún.

Now 72, the former child star of such classic TV series as "The Twilight Zone" and "Lost in Space" avoided the dangers that other young actors faced while pursuing a Hollywood career, as an Emmy-nominated songwriter, touring musician and recording artist.

Israel’s campaign to raze huge swaths of southern Lebanon may destroy not only people’s homes, but also their ability to even show they owned the properties, according to locals and officials from the Lebanese government — potentially leaving as many as a quarter million Lebanese unable to prove that they have property or homes at all.

Aerial imagery from Bint Jbeil, the seat of a municipality by the same name, shows what residents describe as burn marks at sites where official records were kept: civil registration files, land deeds, the paper infrastructure of a city’s legal existence.

With the notary gone, civil administration buildings bulldozed, and widespread destruction of homes that contained important personal documents, residents of the 36 villages of the Bint Jbeil district fear Israel’s total war has meant the destruction of all their records could permanently untether them from the homes they left behind when they fled under Israel’s evacuation orders.

That could make reconstruction after the war a nightmare. Bint Jbeil is Lebanon’s most southwestern district and the site of an Israeli campaign to evacuate entire populations before flattening their villages.

Some Lebanese even see it as an intentional tactic, part of Israel’s plan to empty out southern Lebanon and establish a buffer zone south of the Litani River Israeli leaders hope will put northern Israel out of the reach of Hezbollah’s rockets.

A mukhtar, or local official, confirmed to The Intercept that civil registry records had been digitized up to 2020 only, which offers limited reassurance. Much, however, remains unaccounted for. There are the last six years of records along with countless others that were not officially registered thanks to Lebanon’s notoriously chaotic bureaucracies and lax enforcement of registration rules, which are at times flouted to avoid paying taxes.

At the center of the crisis is Bint Jbeil’s Grand Serail, the old administrative building that houses land deeds for thousands of families across more than 20 villages in the district. Since Israeli forces moved in, Lebanese authorities have not been able to reach it, despite making efforts through the International Committee of the Red Cross with requests to the so-called Mechanism Committee that administers the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

“The Ministry of Interior has not yet been able to obtain the civil registry records for Bint Jbeil district, because the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) has not received approval from the Mechanism Committee, which includes Israel, to enter the area, despite submitting a request to do so, in order to retrieve the records and transfer them to the Interior Ministry in Beirut,” a ministry spokesperson told The Intercept.

In a statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the ICRC request and said the Lebanese group Hezbollah installs military assets in civilian areas.

Related

“I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon

“IDF directives permit the execution of clearing operations of structures used for military purposes, or when there is an essential operational necessity that justifies the full or partial demolition of a structure, in accordance with international law,” the statement said.

Destruction of civilian infrastructure in war is permissible by the laws of armed conflict only under narrow conditions, including that there be a military purpose and that the destruction be incidental to that military purpose.

Israel has flattened entire border towns in Lebanon. Experts have said the actions could constitute war crimes. Israel’s defense minister has previously said, “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed.”

The Grand Serail

Lebanese Finance Minister Yassine Jaber has been monitoring the Grand Serail by satellite.

“The walls are still standing mostly,” he told The Intercept, “but satellites don’t have keys to doors. We don’t know what happened inside. Were the records destroyed? Were they confiscated? The truth is still behind the front lines.”

For four weeks, Jaber ran what amounted to a crisis operations room: calls to Lebanese army command, coordination with military intelligence, repeated attempts to reach the Mechanism Committee — the multilateral body, including Israel, that monitors the its mid-April ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah — and appeals to UNIFIL, a United Nations force in Lebanon.

Their goal was to establish a corridor for a single journey to Bint Jbeil to recover the records.

“We tried everything,” Jaber said. “But Bint Jbeil today is a forbidden zone.”

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to reach the records.

“The ICRC supported the Ministry of Interior in the evacuation of some civil registries in southern Lebanon at the beginning of the escalation,” said Sally Aoun, a spokesperson for ICRC Lebanon. “It was not possible to support the evacuation in Bint Jbeil because of ongoing hostilities.”

Jaber has had some successes in other areas where recovering records proved a challenge. When fighting reached Marjayoun, in Lebanon’s south, a team of civil servants went in under bombardment to get the civil records. The same thing happened in the Hasbaya distrcit.

Records from the southern city of Tyre are now held further up the coast in Sidon. The ministry also managed to evacuate files from Meiss El Jabal, Tibnine, Jbaa, Jouaya, and Nabatieh to Beirut. The Ministry of Interior in Beirut designated one day each week for each of the district registries to process civil documentation requests from displaced southerners.

Bint Jbeil remains the missing piece.

A Legal Trap

Lebanon does have a partial digital backup. The Finance Ministry holds electronic records for most registered properties in the south — a safety net for deeds that were formally logged. Thousands of transactions, however, were never registered.

Take the case of Ali Khreizat, known by the honorific Abu Hassan, who was displaced from his home in the village of Aitaroun in Bint Jbeil district. When the village faced Israeli bombardment, Abu Hassan left — but he left behind, in a drawer in the corner, a worn leather bag holding the bill of sale for the land he had lived on for five years.

Abu Hassan has made peace with the destruction of his house, but his far more profound worry is that he will never be able to prove he ever owned the property.

“The house I built stone by stone is dust now,” he said. “And the paper that says it was mine has gone to God.”

Even five years after moving in, his bill of sale never reached the land registry. Like many in Lebanon, Abu Hassan felt no particular rush to make bureaucratic deadlines — with the legendary inefficiencies of the Lebanese state offering little encouragement to do so. Now, he has heard from locals still in the area that even the notary’s office was destroyed, leaving diminishing hopes that a copy of his bill of sale exists anywhere.

With little enforcement of registration rules — whether the failure to do so is born of a lackadaisical ethos around bureaucratic paperwork or another reason, like wanting to dodge taxes — the problem of unregistered homes could leave people with no way to show they ever bought properties.

“This will create a major legal problem in proving ownership,” Jaber said. “Who owns what? Who protects the buyer’s right if the paper contract has disappeared?”

When Jaber took office in February 2025, he said, he found a registry system unfit for our modern, online era. He is now overseeing a full overhaul to digitize documents, a project he estimates will take six months to complete.

“A digital vault,” he said, “that no shell can reach and no fire can erase.”

Erasing the Map

The damage to land records in Bint Jbeil may run deeper than any individual document.

A key concern is the fate of Bint Jbeil’s land survey division. The technical unit holds the measurement records tying property lines to fixed geographic reference points, some dating to the French Mandate. Those points are connected, through a chain of historic surveys, to a reference coordinate in Homs, Syria, which has served as an anchor for Lebanon’s national cadastral map since the 1920s.

If those physical survey markers have been destroyed, said Riyad Al-Asaad, a civil engineer from the south, the question becomes: Who holds the GPS data that defines the boundaries? Lebanon or Israel?

The risk, Al-Asaad said, is that properties could be redrawn using Israeli measurements, a new geographic reality imposed on top of the old one.

Retired Lebanese Gen. Yaarab Sakhir sees this as part of a deliberate pattern — pointing to the Dahiya Doctrine, an Israeli military strategy named for the Beirut suburb where it was first implemented. The strategy calls for disproportionate attacks and targeting civilian infrastructure to create a high cost for Israel’s enemies, thereby creating a strong deterrent.

“Israel, when it applies the Dahiya Doctrine, as it did in Gaza, dividing it into a 55/45 split between an Israeli corridor and a Palestinian zone — it is doing the same thing now south of the Litani,” he said. “First, displacement and depopulation. Second, repeated strikes. Third, when areas fall militarily — Bint Jbeil first — they mine, demolish, bulldoze, and erase every feature to make these areas uninhabitable and prevent residents from returning.”

Official buildings, Sakhir said, become specific Israeli targets under this program.

“Israel focuses on civil registry offices and government serails,” he said. “The archive in Bint Jbeil’s serail covers not just the city but all the villages in the district.”

In its statement to an Intercept journalist in New York, the Israeli military denied targeting civilian infrastructure as such.

“The IDF,” the spokesperson said, “does not operate against the institutions of the State of Lebanon, the Lebanese Armed Forces, or Lebanese civilians, and rejects allegations of intentional harm to population registries, civil documents, land registry records, or administrative institutions, or any intent to disconnect residents from their land or harm their property rights.”

Ghosts in Their Own Country

The Interior Ministry’s internal figures name 190,000 people registered on the 2025 voter rolls for Bint Jbeil district. Add the generation of young people and children not yet on those rolls, and the number approaches a quarter million — all of them, in varying degrees, affected by the disappearance of their district’s official records.

Mohamed Sarhan, the mukhtar, or local leader, of Kfarkela, a village north of Bint Jbeil district, told The Intercept that residents and civil servants from the area reported that Israeli forces confiscated land registry records belonging to Bint Jbeil district. The fate of the civil registration records remains unclear. No one can say with certainty whether they were burned in the bombardment, taken, or simply lost in the chaos.

Dalia Boussi left Bint Jbeil under the sound of shelling. Like everyone else who fled last fall, she grabbed what she could. Boussi, a local video producer, is not in a panic; she brought her documents with her. She worries, however, about those who left without papers and about what the state must do when people return.

“There is complete destruction in the city center, as we can see in satellite images. When we return, we’ll have to redraw the borders of properties from scratch and determine what public land is and what’s private before reconstruction can begin,” Boussi said. “It’s important that the state and the relevant ministries show flexibility to ease things for citizens. Within each town and city, a crisis cell should be established specifically to follow up on property files and civil registration records, and to ensure every person has their official papers.”

She paused, then added: “Whatever happens, no one is going to lose their identity and no one is going to shave years off their age.” It was a lighthearted joke that belies an underlying reality: The people of Bint Jbeil still exist. The records may be gone, but the local residents know who they are and know what was theirs.

As Abu Hassan, the Aitaroun resident whose bill of sale was likely destroyed with his home, said, “Tomorrow’s battle won’t only be reconstruction. It will be a battle to prove we exist, with an archive that has been looted or set on fire.”

The post Civil Records for Hundreds of Thousands of Lebanese Could Be Wiped Out By Israel’s Total War appeared first on The Intercept.

Fans thronged the streets to celebrate as the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973. Crowds were dancing into the night after the nail-biting 94-90 finish to game 5 of the finals against San Antonio Spurs.

As the celebrations ran late into the night, hundreds of people also swarmed a convoy of about 15 shuttle buses in Times Square used to transport soccer fans from the first World Cup game in the New York City area. At least one bus was set on fire. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured in the incident

• ‘It’s euphoria’: New York City celebrates Knicks’ NBA title win after 53-year wait

• Knicks beat Spurs as brilliant Brunson shines again

To mark America's 250th, a time capsule will be buried in Philadelphia on July 4, not to be opened until America's quincentennial. What objects made the cut to be preserved for another 250 years?

In the U.S. the percentage of obese adults is about ten times what it is in Japan. What differentiates the Japanese diet, and how are schools making it their mission to give Japanese children a taste of a healthy life?

Commentary: Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a fun and freaky series bolstered by smart writing, unpredictable twists and a standout performance by Tatiana Maslany.

Shirley Firth is hoping those responsible for Lindsay de Feliz’s death in 2019 will finally be convicted

A Cambridgeshire mother in her 90s is hoping to finally see justice for her murdered daughter when a retrial into her death is due to open in the Dominican Republic this week.

The body of Lindsay de Feliz, 64, a successful author, was found in a shallow grave, close to her home in the north-west of the Dominican Republic, in December 2019.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: Is ‘ripen at home’ fruit the supermarkets’ idea of a joke?

I’ve been struggling to get my head around the idea that a passkey, which can be a pin on your phone, or facial recognition, can be safer than using a complicated password and two-factor authentication.

I get that having something unique to your device, not stored on a company’s server, is unphishable and less hackable by cybercrims, but what if your phone is nicked and someone guesses the password? And what if you lose your phone?

The recent exodus of people – voluntary and not – from the US threatens to worsen America’s authoritarian slippage

The recent frenzy of attempts to redraw electoral districts is ultimately about voice and silence in US democracy. When districts are cut to maximize one ideological perspective, the representation of large concentrations of Americans with opposing views can be diluted or erased. In many of the new Republican-drawn state maps, it will be as if such citizens have departed entirely.

Since Donald Trump enacted a series of policies that undermine institutional checks and balances, new population data suggests that, at the same time, many such citizens have departed quite literally.

Justin Gest is a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He has authored seven books on the politics of immigration, democracy, and demographic change, including his forthcoming work, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy

From gold to water, California’s wealth was built on extraction. The AI boom is reviving an old question: who pays the price?

I was a fourth-grader in the public schools of California when I first learned about the Gold Rush. I remember our teacher, Mrs Dyer, passing down the story in the manner of lore.

On the morning of 24 January 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey boy come west, stumbled upon four shiny nuggets alongside the American River. He tried to keep his discovery a secret, but the shout of “eureka” from the dirt streets of San Francisco rang out across the shore. It unleashed a force that could not be contained.

Get ready for the longest day of the year, when one Alaska location experiences a full day of uninterrupted sunshine.

Keir Starmer ready to overrule Ed Miliband after warnings manufacturers would be penalised and jobs put at risk

The UK government is poised to water down its 2030 targets for electric vehicle sales after intensive lobbying by the car industry and unions.

The government is preparing to consult on less ambitious targets for the transition to fully battery-powered electric cars over the rest of the decade after carmakers and unions warned that they would penalise manufacturers and put jobs at risk.

Commentary: A great ESPN 30 for 30 documentary will jog your memory. It's called June 17th, 1994.

Researchers also discover that the ancient vines of Chianti, famed for its red wines, produced white fruit

DNA extracted from 2,000-year-old grape seeds found in ancient wells in Tuscany has enabled scientists to map the most extensive genetic history of grapevines recovered from a single site.

The findings revealed that vineyards of the Roman era formed part of the empire’s sophisticated agricultural network that might have influenced the development of modern winemaking.

Keir Starmer said British armed forces intercepted a Russian shadow fleet vessel in the early hours of Sunday morning

• British armed forces intercept Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in Channel

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has thanked the UK for intercepting a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the English Channel, describing it as an “important step”.

“It was Russia’s hubris, fuelled by high oil and gas revenues, that paved the way for this war, and every decision by partners that deprives Russia of money also limits the war itself” he wrote in a post on X, in which he personally thanked the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and “all Britons”.

Medications that target depression, anxiety and poor sleep could help treat pain without opioids’ addictive properties

A range of other medications could serve as alternatives to powerful opioids for pain relief in emergency departments, according to a new study.

The review paper examined non-opioid medications available in the emergency department at San Francisco general hospital and examined existing medical literature to figure out which ones might provide pain relief.

Rochford LGBTQ+ community say Reform council’s ban on flying pride flags or holding events states they’re not welcome

Before Reform gained control of Essex county council in the May elections, Chris Taylor and members of the Rochford LGBTQ+ community already felt they were witnessing a growing tide of political rhetoric around identity.

But they were still shocked when the county’s new leadership moved to ban Pride events in 74 libraries, scaling back events of “any particular groups or themes”, a decision they said was “straight out of Trumpland”.

Study of mothers in Seattle underscores ‘widespread, systemic problem’ of chemical contamination, experts say

Breast milk samples from mothers in Seattle contain alarming levels of dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals, including BPA, BPS, melamine, cyanuric acid, and triclosan, new peer-reviewed research has found.

The chemicals present a serious risk to infants because they likely interfere with hormones that are critical to newborns’ proper development, and have been found to be harmful at very low levels of exposure. About 92% of 50 samples were contaminated with at least one of the anti-microbials or plasticizers for which researchers checked.

Pixar's filmmakers discuss the challenges of bringing cutting-edge tech to a 30-year-old franchise -- and the importance of holding back.

TrueType is a widely used vector font standard for rendering text in web pages, PDFs, operating systems, and applications. Familiar fonts like Helvetica, Garamond, and Monaco are all built on TrueType outlines. The format specifies a hinting interpreter intended to help outlines rasterize faithfully on low-resolution displays. Modern high-resolution displays enable beautiful typography from outlines alone, but TrueType fonts that need hinting to render legibly remain in use and we continue to support them.

Font parsers process data from untrusted sources, making the TrueType hinting interpreter a security-critical attack surface. To make the format more resilient on Apple platforms, we rewrote its hinting interpreter from C to memory-safe Swift for the Fall 2025 releases. In addition to memory safety, we also improved performance: on average, our Swift interpreter runs 13% faster than the C interpreter it replaced.

↫ Scott Perry

This article provides a deep dive into how, exactly they did that.

The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there's more bad news, reports CNBC." "Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025." While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel Sotiroff, associate director of ETF and Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar]. Here's what he and other experts have to say about the case for holding crypto, and how much exposure is appropriate for the average investor... Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says. Sotiroff agrees that bitcoin is difficult to value using traditional financial metrics. "The best analogy I've heard is that it's more like a collectible, because it's basically worth what other people are going to pay for it," he says. Sotiroff told CNBC the recent selloff was a reminder that bitcoin's gains can be accompanied by equally dramatic declines — one reason many financial planners recommend limiting exposure to a small portion of a broader portfolio. "You just really can't make a call on what direction it's going to go," says Sotiroff.

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‘Coastal uplift’ exposes coral and kills marine life, as residents say shorelines extended by up to 200 metres

A powerful earthquake that killed at least 61 people in the Philippines this week raised the seabed by as much as 2 metres (6.6ft), exposing coral and harming marine life, the country’s environment department has said.

At least 40 people are still missing after the 7.8-magnitude quake off southern Mindanao island on Monday, according to updated tolls from the disaster agency.

Activists argue business model is ‘plantation tourism’ designed to benefit elite and disadvantage most Jamaicans

• Campaigners go to court to fight privatisation of Jamaican coast

Devon Taylor remembers when the Mammee Bay shoreline in St Ann, Jamaica, was filled with children frolicking in the ocean after school, fishers haggling with locals over the price of their daily catch and craft vendors carving souvenirs under almond trees.

“I grew up on Mammee Bay,” Taylor says. He recalls fetching seawater in bottles for his grandmother when she was no longer able to go to the beach, learning to swim in the shallows, and watching generations of fishers cast their nets. “That beach raised us. It fed us.”

Activists are challenging colonial-era law and demanding ‘free, legal, unfettered, forever rights’ to use beaches

• Jamaica’s beach access crisis: ‘We shouldn’t be forced to fight for what is already ours’

Campaigners in Jamaica are heading to court next week to try to prevent the government from cutting off access to more of their beaches.

They argue that ceding their shorelines to big hotel chains enriches private investors and benefits tourists and outsiders while depriving Jamaicans who depend on the sea for their livelihoods, leisure and health.

Our favourite music, clothes and books used to be markers of individuality – but the algorithm has made us all sheep. Meet the style rebels fighting back

What are you into? What floats your boat? What music, films, clothes, art, books – anything, really – do you actually like? Do you find these questions more difficult to answer than you would have done 10 years ago? How about 20? You do? You’re not alone.

It has become impossible to ignore: personal taste has been seriously debased – if not completely destroyed – by technological advancement. We know the internet has radically altered the way we form our opinions and beliefs. Now we’re waking up to another sobering truth: it has wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences.

Questions about the efficacy of door-knocking feel valid. But I see it as a weapon against autocracy – and a spiritual workout

In the fall of 2024, I spotted a middle-aged couple standing on their front lawn in Bucks county, Pennsylvania. I waved and gingerly approached. The woman, whose name appeared in my canvassing app, told me she had never voted in an election before, had never seen politics as relevant to her life. And her husband, she said, was a lifelong Republican. But after the return of Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, it felt like it was time to take a stand. They were both going to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot in November.

On the other side of the street, directly facing their house, were two of the biggest Trump 2024 flags I had ever seen, along with a life-size cutout of Trump on a third lawn.

Thousand of arrests last summer led to mass protests and some deaths - across the city, communities still bear the scars

Most people in Brian Gavidia’s life haven’t seemed to notice that a year has passed since armed federal immigration agents descended on their city.

In East Los Angeles, in the neighborhood where he was born and has lived his whole life, the scene this week appeared more or less normal. A family in formalwear settled into the big round table at the torta ahogada restaurant for a post-graduation celebration. The vendors selling fruit or flowers or perfumes were once again lining the streets.

For the first time ever, agentic AI internet activity has overtaken human-generated traffic, marking a historic shift online.

For the first time in 53 years, the New York Knicks won the NBA. Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, including 13 straight for New York in the fourth quarter, and the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Saturday night.

The Knicks won the series 4-1, rallying from double-digit deficits in all four of those victories

• Knicks beat Spurs to win their first NBA title since 1973 as brilliant Brunson shines again

The UFC is hosting a fight series on the White House South Lawn Sunday night.

Against Paraguay, the Monaco striker provided the ruthless finishing the USMNT have often missed in recent years

• World Cup newsletter | Daily podcast | Download the app

Even after they conceded an early goal on Friday, Paraguay kept affording the United States ample room up the channel. As the ball reached Malik Tillman and Weston McKennie in midfield, their disoriented opponents never quite seemed to know how to station themselves to stem the tide. The US’s off-ball movement further complicated those efforts, dizzying Paraguay’s defense before it could establish an ideal structure.

“I just tried to run in behind,” McKennie said after the US had completed their 4-1 victory. “I think I realized early on that they were struggling to follow my deep runs. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I keep trying to do it until they figure something out. I was able to find more space than usual, and it was fun. I really enjoyed to get on the ball as much as I did.”

Strange things are afoot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, giving rise to an obvious question: how did we get here?

Rising from the South Lawn of the White House is a 92ft-tall skeletal structure known as “the Claw”. Beneath it sits an octagonal cage surrounded by sponsor logos, temporary grandstands and thousands of seats for a mixed martial arts card on Sunday night to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and the Ultimate Fighting Championship brand.

The event has prompted comparisons to Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s satire of a future US where politics, entertainment and corporate branding become indistinguishable. Others have gone further, dismissing it as a “kleptocratic spectacle”.

The system of ocean current that moves heat in the Atlantic Ocean plays a key role in regulating climate. Today’s monitoring of it may be discontinued

Imagine we detect a large asteroid heading straight for Earth. We are able to intervene and prevent disaster, but instead we cut the funding needed to track it. A few million dollars, it was argued, was too expensive to have a chance to save society.

While this scenario isn’t real, the metaphor is alarmingly accurate. In Europe, we spend €1bn to monitor space for asteroids, even if the actual risk of a civilisation-ending asteroid strike is close to zero.

Commentary: Sure, you'll be able to run iOS 27 on an iPhone 11, but does that actually matter?

Pokemon Go Fest gave me and my far-flung family members a great excuse to play a game together that we'd all been enjoying separately. We had a lot of company.

Election of new Hungarian government in April has paved way for EU member states to agree to open talks

Ukraine and Moldova will take a decisive step towards joining the EU on Monday, as they embark on the first phase of membership negotiations.

The start of substantive negotiations, launched by senior EU officials and ministers from both countries in Luxembourg on Monday, will be a highly symbolic moment for the two countries that were both part of the former Soviet Union. It comes after Russia has intensified its bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, while sustaining huge losses for little territorial gain.

As Israel’s longest period of sustained armed conflict drags on, the country’s diminished peace movement finds itself struggling to be heard on the sidelines.

Following decades of challenges, Philadelphia embraces its role as a World Cup super host and model of affordability, accessibility and convenience.

Exclusive: Recovery efforts remain slow and passing of time makes it more likely they will be skeletonised

The International Committee of the Red Cross has said the risk that the thousands of Palestinians buried beneath Gaza’s rubble may never be identified is increasing by the day, as recovery efforts remain slow and many victims have yet to be retrieved, the Guardian can reveal.

“There is no doubt that these bodies could soon become difficult to identify,” said Pat Griffiths, the ICRC spokesperson in Jerusalem. “The longer it takes for human remains to be recovered, the more difficult it can be to identify them. The longer the deceased lie beneath the rubble, the more likely they will be in advanced stages of decomposition – even skeletonised – when eventually recovered.”

Simon Ritter joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He's now written an opinion piece for InfoWorld warning that "Between 2029 and 2032, every currently supported long-term support (LTS) version of Java will reach end-of-support within a single three-year window." That's Java 17 in 2029, Java 8 in 2030, Java 21 in 2031, and Java 11 in 2032... On paper, this looks like a manageable upgrade cycle. In practice, it creates a collision of timelines that most enterprises have failed to forecast. Organizations attempting to modernize incrementally — moving application by application, version by version — are operating on a model that the calendar has already rendered obsolete... [W]hen every major Java version expires in the same compressed window, sequential planning collapses. By the time this becomes obvious, organizations will be forced into reactive mode, making rushed decisions under extreme pressure. For organizations planning traditional stepwise upgrades — Java 8 to Java 11 to Java 17 to Java 21 — this convergence elevates a routine maintenance task into a structural crisis. Enterprises with large Java estates will be forced to upgrade multiple applications across multiple versions simultaneously to maintain security compliance and business continuity. "Parallel modernization requires parallel capacity — something most organizations haven't budgeted for," he points out. "This explains why traditional approaches struggle to scale."

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Site takes no action over hate posts against UK politicians including Kemi Badenoch, Shabana Mahmood and Zia Yusuf

X has refused to take down dozens of social media posts reported as “hate, abuse or harassment” in which prominent UK politicians, including Kemi Badenoch, have been racially abused.

In May, researchers from the social inclusion thinktank British Future reported 30 posts from this year in which the Conservative party leader was called the N-word. In each case the researchers used the platform’s “hate, abuse or harassment” reporting option. X refused to act in the majority of cases, despite repeated requests.

Increase in road deaths amid rise of e-bikes prompts Houten to test willingness of freedom-loving cyclists to slow down

As road deaths increase and cycle lanes overflow with e-bikes, the Netherlands is considering a cycling speed limit of 12mph (20km/h).

The government has started a two-week trial in Houten, near Utrecht, to gauge whether freedom-loving Dutch cyclists are willing to slow down – and whether they have any idea how fast they are going in the first place.

After falling for a scam call, ‘The Tech Chap’ host Tom Honeyands realised he’d given away vital details in social media posts

When Tom Honeyands realised he had been defrauded out of £70,000 he was furious and embarrassed – and left wondering if he had given away too many details on his social media videos.

Honeyands was on a work trip to Tokyo when he got a call from someone claiming to be from Lloyds bank. The caller asked if he had made a recent transaction in Singapore and when he said no, the scammer said his account had been compromised and that security details needed to be reset.

The New York Knicks captured their first NBA championship since 1973 with a 94-90 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Saturday night.

Forecasters were wrong about an immediate recession but right that we would be worse off outside the EU

As the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote approaches, the verdict on Britain’s economic performance is clear: voting to leave has resulted in severe costs for households and businesses.

The immediate recession predicted in the Treasury forecasts ordered by George Osborne – dubbed “project fear” by the Leave campaign – did not happen. The impact from the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Donald Trump’s trade battles also cloud the picture.

The Sunday Times reports: A criminal investigation has begun after a police officer allegedly used AI to create evidential material in a "number of cases". Derbyshire Constabulary said an officer was being investigated over an allegation of suspected perverting the course of justice. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed it was engaging with defence lawyers and the courts over potentially affected cases... It is the first known allegation of AI misuse by police in a criminal case in the UK, but it follows an incident last year in which West Midlands police relied on AI-generated material that fabricated a match involving Maccabi Tel Aviv. The material was used in intelligence supporting a proposed ban on away fans at the club's match against Aston Villa.

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Footwear and soccer balls were among the items taken, the BBC reported, but the theft did not include anything "game-critical."

A pilot survived after a fighter jet crashed into a mountain Saturday afternoon in Yakima County, Washington, sparking a wildfire, officials said.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 14.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 629 for Sunday, June 14.

A few weeks ago on a bike ride "inspiration struck" for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate... Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he's arguably the city's biggest proponent of the written word... Now age 56, Eggers' latest book is called "Contrapposto"... On writing days, Eggers bikes to his sailboat docked near the Golden Gate Bridge. He writes using a hefty 1998 Mac that has never been connected to the internet. On the boat, he keeps "banker's hours," working 9 to 5 without any meetings or interruptions except for the occasional wildlife visit. "You're there with the cormorants and the occasional porpoise and sea lions and seals, and when you want to take a break, you walk around and you're in the thick of it, one of the most beautiful spots on Earth," he said. "Especially coming from the Midwest, it never gets old." Given Eggers' decidedly low-tech existence, it's not surprising that the current state of San Francisco gives him pause, but there's a streak of hope that underlies his concerns. He abhors the growing surveillance technology that's gripping the city, refusing to get into Ubers that use recording devices, but he feels a well-written ballot measure about Flock cameras could potentially save our dwindling privacy. ChatGPT's effects on the art of writing are demoralizing, but he welcomes that teachers are re-embracing pencil and paper, with cursive making a big comeback. The wave of artificial intelligence ads blanketing bus stops imploring companies to stop hiring humans are so over the top, they'd sound cliché if he were to include them in one of his dystopian tech industry novels like "The Circle" or "The Every," but tech philanthropy has helped many of his projects flourish. Case in point, Art + Water, a new art space scheduled to open next year on Pier 29 funded largely by art world donations... Co-founded with the artist JD Beltran, the space is slated to operate as an old-school apprenticeship system, hosting 10 artists in residence mentoring 20 students, all free of charge... The ultimate goal is to break down the financial barriers that keep students from pursuing art. Thanks to Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

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Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 14, No. 1,821.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 14, No. 1,099.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 14, No. 833.

Earlier this week, a federal judge invalidated the White House's $100,000 H-1B fee policy in response to a lawsuit brought by 20 states.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off 6pm EST, 11pm BST, 8am Sun AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Email Jeff

We also have Leander Schaerlaeckens in the box at “New York/New Jersey Stadium” today!

For three hours now, the masses in yellow have been streaming into the MetLife – sorry, that’s what it’s called – outnumbering the red of Morocco by 10-to-1 or so. A huge Brazilian diaspora lives in the tri-state area. Moroccans I’ve spoken to have come from Marrakech, of course, but as far afield as Dubai, the UK and (in surprising numbers) Montreal.

• Knicks visit Spurs for Game 5 with 3-1 series lead

• New York can clinch first title since 1973 with win

• Reach out to Bryan on Bluesky or by email

The Knicks may be one win from a championship, but they have already conquered another corner of American culture: fashion. From Taylor Swift’s viral “Stevie Knicks” shirt to Timothée Chalamet’s courtside fits, Knicks fandom has become as much a style statement as a sporting allegiance. If you’re wondering how a 53-year title drought turned into the hottest look of the summer, we’ve got two reads for you.

As the series shifts back to San Antonio for Saturday’s Game 5, the mood around the Knicks remains euphoric after Wednesday’s astonishing comeback from 29 points down. But the aftermath of that victory has produced almost as many headlines as the game itself.

So happy the sun is back!
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Fire at medical supplier Medline in Tracy, city of more than 100,000 residents, is affecting the air quality

California firefighters continued to battle a blaze on Saturday that had engulfed a roughly 1m sq ft warehouse, causing officials to warn residents over unhealthy air quality.

The fire has been raging at the medical supplier Medline Industries’ warehouse in Tracy, a city of more than 100,000 residents located about 55 miles (90km) east of San Francisco. Officials expect to be battling the fire for a few more days.

Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds tore through Moneta, about 124 miles south-west of Richmond

A large tent collapsed during a Virginia church’s 20th anniversary celebration on Friday evening, killing one person and injuring nearly two dozen others, officials said.

Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds tore through Moneta, a small community about 124 miles (200km) south-west of Richmond, as the EastLake community church was holding an outdoor service, Shelley Basinger, a spokesperson for Bedford county, said in a statement. The group was in the process of leaving the event tent when it collapsed, according to Abbey Johnston, acting chief of Bedford county fire and rescue.

Keir Starmer says commercial and government agreements will create tens of thousands of jobs

The UK and Japan are set to agree £18bn worth of investment, creating tens of thousands of jobs.

Prime minister Keir Starmer will welcome his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi to Downing Street on Sunday ahead of the G7 summit next week.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Trump administration's decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic's most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said. Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic's Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off limits, Jassy told the officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Tech industry executives have been in regular touch with the administration about the power of cutting-edge AI tools. Shortly afterward, White House officials held a meeting to discuss how to respond and security researchers began testing Amazon's claims. The officials asked Anthropic to fix the vulnerabilities or take down the model, according to administration officials. The officials decided that the most direct way to address that risk was by preventing foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the tool, the people said. President Trump later signed off on the action despite reservations about it hindering innovation, a senior White House official said. The administration had long felt that Anthropic, one of the leaders in America's AI race, couldn't be trusted to manage the security risks its new model presented. Friday's call between some administration officials and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei reinforced that feeling, the people said... Anthropic has said that the vulnerabilities like those flagged by Amazon are relatively basic. The company has said that other publicly available models are capable of discovering them and that they don't represent a full so-called jailbreak, a point of view shared by some security researchers familiar with Amazon's research. The article points out that Amazon is "a big investor in Anthropic, supply Anthropic with chips for data centers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New safety measures had little effect so far, study finds, with Starmer expected to announce under-16s ban

Nearly half of girls and a third of all teenagers saw suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content on social media in a week, a study shows.

The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF) research found that 47% of girls aged 13 to 17 encountered high-risk content during a seven-day period.

Ford is recalling more than 250,000 vehicles that were incorrectly repaired under a previous recall meant to fix a problem that caused the engine to stall while driving, according to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

Convenience store employee Eileen Fox, 56, said suspect ‘banged into metal stand’ but no one was injured in incident

• Waitrose employee sacked after stopping shoplifter from taking Easter eggs

A convenience store worker was sacked after trying to tackle a woman who she suspected was shoplifting bacon.

Eileen Fox said the suspected thief was “well known” in Bootle, Merseyside, and claimed she had been stealing from the shop for years.

Police stop comes after far-right activist rose to further prominence on social media amid racial tensions in Britain

Tommy Robinson was detained by police on Saturday at Heathrow airport under counter-terrorism laws, after a week in which he rose to further prominence on social media.

It was understood the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was stopped and had his phones seized under section 3 of the Counter-Terrorism Border Security Act 2019.

Lawmakers have long sounded the alarm about the risks of letting Section 702 expire. But there's debate over what a lapse in the law actually means.

Boualem Khoukhi scored a late goal to snatch his nation’s first ever World Cu point

One of those Swiss veterans, Ricardo Rodriguez, has quite a back story. From 2018. He has 138 caps for his country and now plays for Betis.

The expected formations, are Qatar 4-3-3 and Switzerland 4-2-3-1.

Last-minute offer to be put to members is understood to include an average 6.6% pay uplift

Resident doctors in England have called off strike action after the government made a new offer which will be put to members.

They were set to stage a four-day walkout from 7am on Monday – the 16th round of strike action since 2023.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a "human-led, AI-powered" creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goal is to help creators move from idea to finished work faster [in a single application] while maintaining commercial licensing protections and contributor royalty payments... While Shutterstock repeatedly emphasizes human creativity, much of the platform's future appears centered on AI-generated and AI-modified content. An article at Nerds.xyz suggests Shutterstock's AI tools let users "transform existing content into something new," while noting Shutterstock's repeated references to human creativity "almost feel defensive." But it points out other companies including Adobe and Canva "and countless startups are all racing to integrate AI into creative workflows."

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"Battery breakthroughs will lessen AI's demand on the electricity grid," argues The Washington Post's editoral board, arguing that GM's latest moves "offer a fresh reminder that resource constraints can be solved by innovation." Or As Fortune put it, "America's electric grid is buckling under extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an AI build-out that is quietly rewriting U.S. power demand — and General Motors wants to turn that crisis into a business." They describe GM's plan as offering itself "as a distributed utility in disguise... stitching together hundreds of thousands of battery-powered cars, new grid-scale storage, and a unified charging platform into what amounts to a virtual fleet of power plants." The bet puts GM on a collision course with Ford's newly branded Ford Energy unit as both Detroit rivals race to repurpose underused EV capacity for a more urgent problem: keeping the lights on in the AI era. GM's case rests on three planks. The first is its existing fleet. GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on U.S. roads can already charge bidirectionally — pulling electricity from the grid and sending it back. "Every evening, a quiet transformation occurs across the American landscape," GM Energy vice president Wade Sheffer writes in an open letter to utilities and regulators, describing the EVs sitting in driveways as "a massive opportunity to aggregate energy storage capacity." A firmware update is rolling out to customers with GM Energy's vehicle-to-home hardware, converting those systems into full vehicle-to-grid assets with no new hardware and turning home backup systems into grid resources when utilities need them. GM is piloting the idea in Michigan with DTE Energy at 30 employee homes, and has sketched a 2030 vision with Pacific Gas & Electric in which more than 52,000 GM EVs help balance the grid out of a projected 130,000 vehicles in the area. GM is also "seeking partnerships with utility companies nationwide to assist in offering such vehicle-to-grid services for customers," reports CNBC, noting it's one of two moves "meant to address concerns about rising energy costs amid an artificial intelligence boom." Forbes reports that GM's second goal "is to leapfrog the dominant battery cell tech used for energy storage packs right now" — right past the LFP (lithium-iron phosphate) stage, "which is dominated by China." Sodium batteries are cheaper to use than LFP because they don't need an additional cooling system. They also have a 20-year usable life and are made from materials that can be sourced from within the U.S., the company said at a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday. "Sodium-ion actually is the better chemistry for that application. And when I say sodium-ion is better, I mean GM's version of sodium-ion," Kurt Kelty, GM's battery chief and a long-time Tesla battery executive, told Forbes. He said GM is seeing great results from its prototypes, even at scorching temperatures of 55 Celsius (131 Fahrenheit). "Sodium-ion-powered energy storage systems have the potential to operate without active cooling and with much less system complexity," Kurt Kelty, GM's vice president of battery and sustainability, said Tuesday in a blog post. "In large energy storage systems, that matters." Not having to cool the battery cells could lead to lower upfront costs as well as operating costs, the automaker said. TechCrunch reports on GM's big new partnership with energy-storage startup Peak Energy to develop GM's sodium-ion battery chemistry for grid-scale deployments: GM wouldn't share with TechCrunch how much money it is investing in this energy-storage effort. But we do know the company has committed $900 million to commercialize new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery-development center. .. The first GM cells are expected to enter trial production at the company's Battery Cell Development Center in 2028. "Our next-generation sodium-ion cell development will drive energy density higher," promises GM's blog post, arguing they're extending the company's battery expertise and technical infrastructure "into the electrical grid itself. If we get this right, we will not just build better batteries. We will help create a more resilient, more affordable and more flexible energy future... Every improvement we make strengthens the development stack that supports both EVs and energy storage." "The message: GM isn't just selling cars into a stressed grid; it's supplying the batteries to stabilize it," argues Fortune. And GM also announced they're augmenting their apps with an "Energy Pass" offering "seamless access to Tesla Supercharger, IONNA, Electrify America, and soon, ChargePoint and EVgo networks." Their goal is to simplify the charging experience with an app "that covers nearly 70% of all DC fast chargers in the United States, plus many Level 2 chargers, all through one app."

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Two fires in 12 years wiped out all but a handful of the mature native pines in Victoria’s Wyperfeld national park, a key breeding ground for endangered pink cockatoos

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At the entrance to Wyperfeld national park, in north-west Victoria, more than a dozen pink cockatoos are sprinkled across a hedge row of pine trees like Christmas decorations. These are Aleppo pines, not the native conifers that the birds rely on for nesting habitat and as a primary source of food.

Still, the feathered ornaments appear quite content, nestled in among the spruce and ripping into pine cones with their dexterous claws and beaks, making gentle cracking sounds that punctuate the soft roar of Mallee winds.

Ukraine's General Staff said that its forces had hit an oil preparation and pumping station overnight in Russia's Volgograd region.

This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports: The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut's CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 2026 after he objected to LLM-assisted development in Vim and Neovim. In his announcement, DeVault said he no longer wanted to use software developed with LLM assistance and introduced Vim Classic as a fork for users who want to continue using Vim without that involvement... Vim Classic follows Vim's charityware model and continues to direct users toward Bram Moolenaar's long-running support for children in Uganda. The release is distributed as a signed source tarball from SourceHut, while future important announcements are expected through the project's mailing list. "Vim is important to me..." DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed "hjkl" on his right arm.) "[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I've written, emails I've sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim." But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI's impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies: And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world's total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies... All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world's poor and marginalized classes. I don't think it's cute that someone vibe coded "battleship" in VimScript. I think it's more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don't understand how awful all of this is. I don't want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software... To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim... Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains... I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.

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An agreement would extend the ceasefire and pave the way for a longer truce, leaders said, though an Iranian official denied a deal will be signed Sunday.

NBA star James Harden was booked into jail and released on bond less than 2 hours later.

Man, 18, and boy, 17, detained on suspicion of causing serious injury by dangerous driving in Southend-on-Sea

Two people have been arrested on suspicion of causing serious injury by dangerous driving after an incident involving a loading vehicle which has left a teenage girl in a critical condition in hospital.

Police attended the Chalkwell Park area of Southend-on-Sea, Essex, at about 12.30am on Saturday after receiving a report of an incident involving a “small articulated loading vehicle”.

More than 1,500 user-contributed packages in the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" were infected with malware, reports Phoronix: The last message in the thread over this security incident is noting that Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of. Cited was this list that puts the number of malware-affected packages at 1,579... Even at 1,579 packages listed, that final updated noted, it's a "list containing many (but not all) of the affected packages". Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader couchslug for sharing the report.

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The officers in mascot costumes used a metal sledgehammer to break down a door to enter with colleagues.

James Boyard is the cabinet director of Haiti's Defense Ministry and also serves as inspector general of Haiti's police.

US president says in online post he reserves ‘ultimate alternative’ if Tehran refuses to sign agreement

Donald Trump said on Saturday that the US is set to sign a new agreement with Iran the following day, claiming that the deal would prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as well as reopen the strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said that Iran “no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement”.

• 11-time All-Star released on $100 bond

• Police spotted handgun in player’s Mercedes

Cleveland Cavaliers guard James Harden was released from a Houston jail after he was arrested early on Saturday morning on a misdemeanor gun violation.

Harden was driving through downtown Houston with four others when he was stopped by police just before 4am. When Harden drove up behind another vehicle, an officer spotted a handgun in the cup holder of his Mercedes, according to court records.

"A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter." OpenAI was served Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a broad range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies, some of the people said. The subpoena, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was sent by New York's attorney general.... Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users. Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year. The suspect allegedly turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot dispensed advice for his questions... State attorneys general have been scrutinizing OpenAI's competitors in the AI industry as well. In December, a coalition of 42 state attorneys general led by Pennsylvania's Dave Sunday sent a letter to companies including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and xAI. In the letter, the Attorneys General demanded safeguards to protect vulnerable users from harmful interactions with chatbots, warning that "developers may be held accountable for the outputs of their GenAI products" for "encouraging an individual to commit a criminal act." "We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously," OpenAI told the Journal in a statement, "and intend to engage constructively with their offices." The article also acknowledges that The Wall Street Journal's parent company "has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI."

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Police make several arrests as rival demonstrators take to streets of Brighton, Liverpool, Sheffield and Glasgow

Far-right marches took place across the UK on Saturday after violent unrest in Belfast and Southampton in recent days.

Several people were arrested on Saturday afternoon as far-right groups clashed with anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrators in Brighton, Liverpool, Sheffield and Glasgow.

Four-ton Paige, brought in as surprise for attenders, made gushing debut after governor finished keynote speech

An African elephant weighing roughly 4 tons that was brought to the Texas Republican party’s annual convention to excite attenders ended up drawing widespread attention for the wrong reasons after she urinated on the convention floor and became the focus of animal welfare concerns.

Inside the George R Brown convention center in Houston on Friday, attenders had been told to prepare for a “larger-than-life surprise” after governor Greg Abbott finished his keynote speech. Organizers also displayed a message asking people to keep the aisles clear.

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems UK factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the UK in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: the defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

Related

Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom?

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the UK, including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the UK provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the UK’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials – a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

Frederic Priestley, 34, falsely advertised property he did not own for rent on Facebook, obtaining payments and deposits

A man has been jailed after defrauding more than 30 people out of more than £77,000 in a rental scam, police said.

Frederic Priestley, 34, from Southwark, London, falsely advertised a property for rent on Facebook between April and September last year.

It's the 10-year anniversary of Britain's "Brexit" vote withdrawing from the European Union. But a new UK poll "shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain's departure," reports Bloomberg: Fifty-two percent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. That's the inverse of the mood in June 2016 when a comparable share of the electorate backed Brexit... Younger voters overwhelmingly favor reversing Brexit, whereas half of those ages 55 and above oppose returning to the bloc. "The number of people who say Brexit is going worse than they had predicted has almost doubled in the past five years," reports The Independent, " from 27% in 2021 to 48% today — more than those saying it was going as well as or better than expected." [T]here is more backing for a second referendum, with 48 per cent now saying they would support one, against 27 per cent who would oppose it. Even a fifth of Reform UK voters and a quarter of those who voted Leave in 2016 would back a second vote, the study found. Tufts University discussed the last 10 years with the European Studies chair at their international relations graduate school: Q: Have their fears of negative financial effects been realized? A: The figures are quite revealing: The British GDP has been reduced by 6-8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU... Q: What do you think happens next? A: The United Kingdom made a choice and they might have the opportunity, at some point, to revise this choice. I hope that when they have to decide again, they will be much more informed.

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ALICIA PEMBROKE
Copy Editor

When it was announced that Zara Larsson would be the university’s spring concert artist this year, my mind went right back to when “Never Forget You” was on the radio in 2015. I can still almost picture it — sitting in my mom’s backseat, the wind whipping my hair, the chorus blasting through the car. Back then, I had no idea who was behind the voice. Now, she’s impossible to forget. 

Between 2016 and 2018, Larsson dominated the charts. Hits like “Lush Life,” “Ain’t My Fault” and “Symphony” were on the radio, in your playlists and all over Musical.ly, the original short-form video platform that evolved into TikTok. Despite this success, the Swedish singer hadn’t quite established her presence in the American pop music scene. 

That changed in the summer of 2024, when a viral meme created an unexpected opportunity.  

A TikTok dolphin meme alongside “Symphony,” paired with ironic captions, suddenly pushed her back into the spotlight. Instead of ignoring it as many artists might, Larsson leaned into the memeification. It wasn’t just a meme anymore — it became part of her brand. 

And just like that, people weren’t only discovering “Symphony” — they were rediscovering the new Zara Larsson. 

From there, everything became brighter, louder and way more intentional. Her performances leaned into the Y2K-inspired, Lisa Frank-esque, beachy aesthetic — the glitter, color and playful confidence that’s impossible not to get hyped for. 

In late 2025, Larsson was opening for Tate McRae on the “Miss Possessive Tour,” giving her the ability to display her evolving stage presence. This is also where she introduced a fan-favorite moment during “Lush Life,” turning it into a moment of audience participation, where she selects a lucky audience member to join her on stage. 

With the choreography popularized by a fan’s viral TikTok, Larsson and the audience member share the stage to perform the final chorus together. In a final touch, Larsson spray paints a t-shirt onstage as a personal memento. 

Even though I may not be sharing the stage with Larsson, I can’t help but dance along with her like I’m on stage too, with 15,000 people and an icon watching me.

Then came her summer single “Midnight Sun” in June 2025, followed by the album of the same name in September. She fully embraced her Malibu Barbie, with shimmering ocean tones, floral-inspired accessories and over-the-top styling. And honestly, like many, I was obsessed. 

Another unmistakable aspect of her rebrand is her fantastical makeup, done by makeup artist Sophia Sinot. The ethereal, hyper-feminine glamour blends bold colors, rhinestones and modern aesthetics. This aesthetic has become just as central to the “Midnight Sun” era as the music itself. 

But beyond the visuals, the music has reached another level. With the release of “Midnight Sun,” Larsson builds on the momentum of her previous hits while leaning into her new era. 

My favorite tracks are “Pretty Ugly,” “Eurosummer” and “Hot & Sexy.”  Whether I’m walking across campus or running late to class, “Midnight Sun” is the kind of album that makes any day feel sun-soaked. 

“Pretty Ugly” is the perfect song to turn on when you’re getting ready for a good time. I think the lyrics “Have you ever seen a / pretty girl get ugly like this?” could awaken me from a coma. It’s like I have no choice but to get hype when it starts. “Eurosummer” is the song I go to when I want to romanticize my life. Suddenly, the streets of Newark, Delaware, feel like the beaches of Aruba when that song is playing. 

It feels almost full-circle to go from hearing “Never Forget You” in my mom’s backseat to seeing Larsson step into a new, sparkling, self-made era. As I enter a new era myself, there’s something special about an artist who has somehow been a part of both.

More than 100 UK lawmakers urge government to cancel London event, warning it is linked to land ‘stolen from Palestinians’

More than 100 UK lawmakers have called for the cancellation of an Israeli real estate event scheduled to take place in London on Sunday, which had appeared to advertise the sale of land in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In a letter sent to the foreign secretary on Friday, 101 parliamentarians and members of the House of Lords, warned the event was “firmly embedded in Israel’s project of colonial expansion by facilitating the sale of land that has been stolen from Palestinians” and called on the government to take “all necessary steps” to stop the event from going ahead in the capital.

A federal appellate court denied a last-minute attempt by the Trump administration to stop the removal of President Trump's name from the Kennedy Center on Friday.

Texas's new Republican Party platform breaks new conservative ground, calling for bans on sharia law.

Chris Farrell was given benefit for six months despite his repeated requests for payments to stop

A former unpaid carer has urged welfare officials to “get their act together” after they continued to pay him carer’s benefit for six months after the death of his husband, potentially landing him with debts of more than £1,300.

Chris Farrell, 65, who claimed carer’s allowance for four years while providing full-time care for his late husband repeatedly tried to get the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to stop paying him the £86.45 a week benefit.

A carer who has accumulated more than £2,000 of unwanted carer’s allowance since their mother went into a care home 10 months ago. They said they had contacted the DWP to cancel the benefit five times, by phone and online form, to no avail.

A carer who found it impossible to get the DWP to stop carer’s allowance payments despite reporting over a year ago she had taken on a new work contract and was no longer eligible for the benefit. She had been overpaid more than £2,650.

A man trying to manage work and care for his father, who claimed carer’s allowance for several months after being made redundant, has been unable to stop the benefit despite telling officials repeatedly he no longer needed it after finding a new job.

These apps will make it easier to squeeze in a workout during your busy schedule.

• Lima police dress as mascots in raid on suspect

• Zayu the Jaguar left out of police operation

While tensions between Canada and the United States have risen in the last few years as Donald Trump has made threats to turn his northern neighbor into a 51st state of America, there has been some mutual cooperation in crime fighting.

Earlier this week, Clutch the Bald Eagle and Maple the Moose – the mascots for the United States and Canada respectively at this year’s World Cup – helped Peruvian police in a drugs raid.

It's the U.S. law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets. And the U.S. Congress just let it lapse. Sort of. NPR reports: Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States. The government says that more than 60% of the president's daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority. The tool officially lapsed at the end of the day on Friday. What happens now? Intelligence collection under FISA's Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court's authorization, even if the law lapses before the court's next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies. Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turn over communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel. Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail, but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America's 250th celebration and the World Cup.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former congresswoman nevertheless says she hopes the fighting event will be ‘great’ and wishes president well

Marjorie Taylor Greene has criticized Donald Trump’s plan to hold a UFC fight on the White House lawn, as the president prepares to host seven fights on Sunday.

The former rightwing Republican congresswoman, a once fierce defender of Trump who turned on him towards the end of her time in office, told NewsNation the location is inappropriate for the mixed martial arts event.

President Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 ordering national parks to not display elements that "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."

Funeral procession travels to palace as people remember royal’s campaigning and work for underprivileged

As the sun began to set on the golden spires and gilded finials of Bangkok’s Grand Palace, the gates were open, waiting for the return of a princess.

Since December 2022, Princess Bajrakitiyabha had been in hospital, having collapsed while out training her dogs. After nearly four years in a coma, the princess died earlier this week.

Cuts from the U.S. and others have hit hard, with the number of people receiving PrEP dropping by 38% from 2024 to 2025, according to data from 62 countries.

Juan Hernandez, a former SpaceX employee, owns 6,500 company shares. On the first day of public trading, his wealth ballooned by $1,046,175.

Fencing removed at environmentally sensitive site, mirroring protests against Trump son-in-law’s project

About 200 protesters on Saturday tore down metal and razor-wire fences surrounding a luxury development site on Albania’s Adriatic coast, in another sign of growing anger against construction in environmentally sensitive areas.

Albanians have been protesting for weeks against a planned luxury resort backed by a company linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, near Vlora, which is famed for its flamingos and a turtle nesting site.

The Trump administration released another large batch of government UAP records, including videos of glowing orb-like objects appearing to split and rejoin, witness accounts, illustrations, and decades-old investigative documents. Axios reports: The documents indicate that government agents have spent years monitoring, investigating and documenting suspected UAP incidents. At lease some of the sightings took place near sensitive government facilities, according to the reports. Videos showing red and yellow light-emitting orbs, some of which appear to split apart and then reattach as they fly across the sky. The videos were taken by witnesses whom the government deemed "credible." Illustrations and videos showing reenactments of what observers saw, and the positions they were in when they viewed them. Memos from government agents describing their experiences seeing flying objects. An illustration of a grayish-white balloon-like object hovering above an area near Colorado Springs, Colo. An illustration depicting a series of incidents that took place in the "western United States" where government officials reported seeing UAPs in 2023. There also are decades-old records documenting the government's involvement in investigating UAPs, including a 1949 letter then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote federal agents after receiving a message from an American citizen expressing their belief they'd seen a non-human-made flying object. The records released by the administration do not express any conclusions as to whether the government believes the UAPs represent the existence of alien life. They also do not indicate any conclusions as to whether UAPs represent a national security threat to the U.S.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City mayor’s stumping is irking some Democrats, but others see a cautious strategy from a rising political star

The New York Knicks are on an epic playoff run. The World Cup is here. And amid sizzling summer weather and a sports-induced, joyful buzz that has seized New York City in recent days, mayor Zohran Mamdani has been more ubiquitous than ever – donning an Arsenal kurta, Knicks gear and an affordable, NYC-inspired World Cup soccer jersey he himself launched as he zipped across the five boroughs from one event to the next.

Early voting in New York also kicks off this weekend, in the first primary election since the November victory that cemented Mamdani as a political prodigy and hope of the left. Six months into his first term as New York City mayor and after early wins on issues like childcare and taxing the rich, he has been boosting fellow leftists in an effort to capitalize on his popularity to promote politicians – from Washington to Albany – aligned with the socialist, pro-Palestinian values that got him elected.

Haji Najibullah imprisoned for role in capture of David Rohde, New York Times journalist held for months in 2008

Haji Najibullah appeared unbothered as he walked into Manhattan federal court earlier this week to learn whether he would face life behind bars for his role in brutal violence during his time as a Taliban commander – including the 2008 kidnapping of US journalist David Rohde.

Najibullah, who walked into the courtroom in shackles at about 9.50am Monday, sporting khaki jail garb and a black skullcap, could even be seen grinning at various points before proceedings started.

Bill Ritter, anchor on WABC since 2001, said he’s stepping down but will continue to report on the disease

A longtime New York City television news anchor has announced his sudden retirement from the airwaves after revealing that he has the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Bill Ritter, a veteran of ABC New York station WABC, has presented the main evening news in New York since 2001 and become a familiar face to millions of its residents.

Time is running out to claim your payout from Google's nationwide Android settlement.

Footy Addicts helps amateur players find a game at short notice – and tackles the problem of loneliness

Cries of “Boss! Boss! Boss!” emerge from the pitch during a hard-fought game of football in a London park. There aren’t a lot of names used in this game, because most players only met just before kick-off. They were brought together by an app that’s injecting life into grassroots football.

Footy Addicts was invented to solve an infuriating problem for amateur players – the late dropout, which can lead to unbalanced teams and ruined games. The app brings together strangers who are desperate to play football, and who can step in after a cancellation to make up the numbers at short notice.

Grassroots outlet reports from New Jersey’s Delaney Hall – and helps family members connect with loved ones inside

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One voice has rung out for local communities through the horror stories, hunger strikes, protests and police at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail at Delaney Hall in New Jersey in recent times – that of a small grassroots media outlet.

The “voice” is a team using several platforms, with reporters and volunteers streaming live from outside the detention center in Newark, posting on Instagram about conditions inside and whether visitors are allowed in on any given day, and broadcasting into the cars and houses of local communities.

From Siri AI to iOS 27, Apple software is getting its biggest yet dose of AI.

Lifeguard Charlie Verco said he was on his paddleboard when he saw the 11-foot shark emerge and attack a swimmer.

Plus all the details on Monstropolis and the new Muppets-themed roller coaster.

Company said US government believes safeguards can be bypassed and product used to identify software vulnerabilities

Anthropic said it will “abruptly disable” its most advanced AI models for all users after the US government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns.

The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, without being given specific details of the national security concern, Anthropic said in a statement.

An American citizen who served in the Army and the Texas National Guard for roughly 20 years is desperately urging immigration officials to release his wife, who is facing deportation to Honduras.

The U.S. men's national soccer team made easy work of Paraguay in its World Cup opener Friday, defeating the South American side 4-1 at SoFi Stadium.

The 20th anniversary edition iPhone might feature an all-new design. It's shaping up to be a landmark moment overseen by Apple's next CEO, John Ternus.

A chance emergency room visit led to Amy Piccoli's diagnosis with late-stage colorectal cancer.

In the dead of night, behind a screen, the president’s name was purged from the facade of the Washington building

Donald Trump’s name has been removed from the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, hours after a judge rejected an emergency appeal to block the removal of the president’s name.

Work began in the early hours of Saturday, shortly after the performing arts venue missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to excise the words “The Donald J Trump and” from its exterior by Friday at 11.59pm local time.

Want to switch AI chatbots while keeping all your old information? Here's how to do it.

Government announces plans to invest billions, but questions linger over how its proposals on chips, social media and more will work

Ownership of the commanding heights of the AI economy is a political talking point around the world, as countries seek to assert some control of a technology dominated by the US and China.

London Tech Week, the showcase event for the UK tech industry, focused heavily on that theme this week. A government keen to show it has a growth story, and an assertive narrative on AI, made a number of announcements related to companies, skills and infrastructure. Some represented new commitments and ideas; others appeared to be putting a polish on already announced measures.

Naoki Hamaguchi talks about remake philosophy, DLC, combat, making the Highwind work and what FF7 Revelation incorporated from battle royale games.

Commentary: If the future of interaction is via voice, it risks excluding many of the same people that companies need to buy into AI.

Other projects include developing tools to help visually impaired people navigate video games

Parents are constantly being told to limit their children’s screen time. But when it comes to deciphering which films or TV shows are best suited to developing minds, the guidance remains largely one-size-fits-all. A relatively slow-paced programme such as Bluey offers a very different viewing experience to a fast-moving action series such as PAW Patrol, yet both are broadly considered suitable for young children.

This challenge is growing as the type of content children are exposed to evolves. “Today’s young viewers are increasingly engaging with short-form, fast-paced, highly captivating content, often created by splicing and rearranging existing episodic content into quickly digestible snippets or compilations,” said Prof Tim Smith, director of University of the Arts London’s Nerve Lab. “This evolution is not only changing how content is produced and distributed, but may also affect children’s attention, comprehension and emotional response.”

Following a failed relationship in my 40s, solitude is tempting. But I’m not giving up on finding love, warts and all

My birthday is coming up next month. I will be, by my count, even more ancient than I was last year. I’ll be far enough from 40 to make it irrational to lie and say I’m actually in my late 30s. I’m solidly, unequivocally in middle age.

And when you’re in middle age, you do a lot of looking back, soul-searching and other highly unproductive activities. I’ve been doing that even more thanks to being dumped by my girlfriend a month before my birthday. Yes, I am a 41-year-old man who uses the term “girlfriend”, a word that infantilizes me just typing it. What am I, a teenager sobbing to a Smiths song? In spirit, yes. I am.

Dmitriy Popov fatally stabbed O’Shae Sibley in Brooklyn in 2023 and was found guilty of manslaughter as a hate crime

A New York City man who was recently convicted of a hate crime in the 2023 stabbing death of vogue dancer O’Shae Sibley is facing a prison sentence of between eight and 25 years.

Sentencing for Dmitriy Popov, who was 17 at the time of Sibley’s slaying, was tentatively scheduled for 30 June following his conviction.

Bill signed into law by the president bankrolls his mass deportation campaign through the end of his second term

Donald Trump signed a new law this week that gives the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) roughly $70bn in additional funding, bankrolling his mass deportation campaign through the end of his second term in what critics say amounts to a huge blow for accountability.

What will this increase in the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) mean for the US president’s sweeping anti-immigration agenda?

I got my hands on Ooni's new spinning stone attachment, and it changed the way I make pizza at home.

We've tested the most advanced gear ourselves. See what you need for your next excursion.

The Helios Horizon has completed what its developers call the first crewed, fixed-wing flight powered by solid-state batteries. New Atlas reports: On June 5, test pilot Miguel Iturmendi lifted off from Zephyrhills Municipal Airport in Florida at the controls of the Helios Horizon -- the first crewed, fixed-wing aircraft ever to fly on solid-state batteries. The flight was neither spectacular in distance nor in duration -- it was a series of short tests to validate the aircraft's weight and balance after the new batteries had been installed -- but it didn't need to be to make history. [...] The Helios Horizon's previous lithium-ion pack delivered 260 Wh/kg (watt-hours per kilogram, a measure of how much energy a battery holds relative to its weight). The new solid-state cells hit 410 Wh/kg, a 60% jump. Chief test pilot and company founder Miguel Iturmendi expects that figure to grow another 40% within two years. Though the battery pack can be topped up over any AC outlet, no special infrastructure needed, fast-charging is also supported for up to 80% capacity in under 15 minutes. The aircraft also recovers energy in flight through wing-mounted solar panels and a regenerative system that spins the propeller as a wind turbine during glides and descents. "Regenerative flight can significantly extend the aircraft's range," Iturmendi said after the test flights. The Helios Horizon itself started life as a Pipistrel Taurus motorized glider. Iturmendi's team added proprietary battery management, a custom propulsion stack, thermodynamic controls, and solar panel wing extensions. The aircraft already holds the world altitude record for electric planes in its weight class, having reached 24,000 ft (7,315 m). The next goal is 40,000 ft (12,192 m), commercial cruising altitude, in stratospheric flights planned for later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Order represents one of the most significant actions the Trump administration has taken against a media company

Over the next few weeks, anyone in the US can plead their case that Disney’s ABC should not be permitted to renew its broadcast licenses for the eight local television stations they own.

After the Federal Communications Commission’s stunning decision in late April to force ABC to apply early to renew its licenses – a move widely seen as retaliation against critics of Donald Trump – the nation’s top media regulator opened up the pleading cycle process to critics and supporters until 29 June.

Boy, 14, among three people held after 21-year-old was found critically injured in Central Park, Chelmsford

Three teenagers, including a 14-year-old boy, have been arrested on suspicion of murdering a 21-year-old man in a park in Essex.

Emergency services attended Central Park in Chelmsford at about 7pm on Friday, where the victim was found with critical injuries.

Dinenage’s article has been on ConservativeHome since November last year.

Immersed in the daily churn of Washington DC, I found an unexpected source of hope in the Knicks’ improbable season

When it comes to the length of my relationship with the New York Knicks, I’m more Taylor Swift than Timothée Chalamet.

But it was inevitable. For months, Knicks fever was slowly drawing me in. A close friend said the team was singularly healing her from a breakup. Another from depression. I had inadvertently been subjected to playoff games through friends, or the daily turmoil of them, through colleagues.

Graham Platner’s primary victory in Maine says more about the unpopularity of the Democratic party elite than any race to date

Not long after governor Janet Mills had effectively dropped out of the primary race, a storm grew around Platner’s campaign. Rightwing operatives and liberal media mouthpieces started singing in unison that Platner was unfit for office, flimsy allegations poured in accusing the candidate of all sorts of alleged misconduct with former girlfriends.

Chris Hayes, of the uber-liberal MS NOW network, questioned whether Platner was going after underage girls. Not to be outdone, Mika Brzezinski of the same network compared his behavior with that of Jeffery Epstein. All of this after an earlier campaign that claimed the former Marine’s tattoo was indicative of his secret affection for Nazis.

Barbara McQuade’s book is a piercing exposé of how Trump is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state

“I believe in America.”

So says Amerigo Bonasera, a humble funeral director, in the opening scene of the 1972 film The Godfather. As Barbara McQuade recounts at the start of her new book, Bonasera has come to the shadowy office of Vito Corleone to ask him to avenge a brutal attack on his daughter. Ultimately, Corleone agrees, whispering: “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

Soldiers arrested university student Sama Safi, 20, along with members of Palestinian women’s national soccer team

A 20-year-old Palestinian American woman has been held in Israeli military detention for nearly two weeks after Israeli soldiers stormed her family home in a pre-dawn raid on 2 June.

Sama Safi, a psychology student at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, has not been charged with any crimes. A spokesperson for the Israeli military said she and three other women detained around the same time were arrested “after promoting hostile terrorist activity and additional terrorist-related activities”.

The next major iOS software will be available on devices as old as the iPhone 11 this fall.

Netflix has all the magic and whimsy you're looking for.

The country is ready to blow away decades of dashed hopes and celebrate, with marching bands and all-night parties

Scotland is leaning into one of its most treasured traditions: embracing the hope and anxiety of a football World Cup, with a healthy dose of self-deprecating style.

There are brash new tartans, an Edinburgh bar offering free Irn-Bru-infused “fiery ginger” beers for patrons with red hair, a collaboration between Scottish whisky firms and a Brazilian distiller, and all-night parties in nightclubs repurposed as fanzones.

A few days before my best friend’s execution date in 2006, prison administrators granted me one last chance to see him in a legal visit. We discussed his concerns about the humaneness of the lethal injection that would kill him. I will never forget his terrified look.

The day of his execution, I paced my cell hoping for the best. Without access to a telephone, my only method to monitor if or how my friend had died was through radio reports from members of the media who were allowed to witness his final breath.

News reports have historically allowed us as a society to monitor our government when it exercises its greatest power: ending a person’s life. But the state of Indiana has decided to inhibit that public access by banning members of the media from attending executions — unless the condemned person chooses to give a reporter a spot that could instead have gone to their relatives or friends. An appellate court upheld the ban this week. 

Prison officials in Indiana claim the media ban is mainly about respecting the dignity of the condemned person. But the idea that there could ever be dignity in state-sanctioned killing of a perfectly healthy human is ludicrous within itself. That would be the case even if executioners eschewed cruel and unusual methods. But they don’t, even when the media is watching. 

Angel Nieves Diaz continued moving for half an hour after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to paralyze him during a Florida execution. It took Arizona officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood. He had to be injected with 14 doses beyond the dose that was supposed to cause his death. 

Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad,” five minutes into a botched execution in Tennessee. John Marion Grant began convulsing and vomiting during his execution in Oklahoma. Prison officials had to enter the death chamber multiple times to wipe away and remove the vomit. The entire time, Grant was still breathing. Just last month, Tony Carruthers lay on a Tennessee gurney for more than hour moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein. The execution was eventually called off by government officials.

These are only a few of the botched executions that lack “dignity.” This week, a federal appellate court upheld a decision blocking Alabama from using nitrogen gas to kill Jeffery Lee. Suffocating and asphyxiating on one’s own vomit seemed like a bridge too far. 

As a result of the barbarity of these events, it’s not far-fetched to wonder if Indiana officials have an ulterior motive. Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight. 

Executions in this country were once highly public affairs. Often held in town squares, any member of the public could attend. In the 1830s, government officials began to enact laws that made executions private events. 

This was not because 19th century executioners were moved to protect the dignity of the condemned (who were disproportionately Black). It was an effort to halt a growing capital punishment abolitionist movement. A significant number of Americans found the public spectacle disgusting.

The same is occurring today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, support for capital punishment in America has decreased from 80 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2026. This division necessitates transparency — otherwise, the only nongovernment actors able to tell the public the truth are dead.

The “dignity” playbook is a well-worn one that I know well as an incarcerated journalist. As a result of restrictions placed on media access to prisons, prisons have become unjustifiably cruel, less humane and more difficult to monitor. Restricting press freedom erodes human rights and constitutional safeguards and blinds the public to the kinds of cruelty and abuse depicted in HBO’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Alabama Solution.” 

The film was made possible not because officials granted access to outside journalists, but because incarcerated people risked (and endured) severe punishment to document their reality with contraband phones. 

It’s not the first time surreptitious reporting methods revealed the real motives behind media restrictions. In 1906, a reporter in Minnesota ignored a ban on media executions and sneaked in to watch a condemned man spend 14 minutes gasping for air before he strangled to death because the rope used to hang him was too long – he hit the floor when dropped and needed to be raised back up. 

Related

False Testimony Sent Tony Carruthers to Death Row. Tennessee Wants to Kill Him Anyway.

As appellate judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Indiana case, “A government exercises its greatest power when it ends a person’s life. As I see it, such severe and irreversible punishment on behalf of ‘the people’ must be observable to comply with the Constitution.”

Lifting the media ban is the only dignified thing Indiana can do, not only for the condemned but also for the people being asked to fund irreversible punishments.

The post Indiana Banned Press From Executions for “Dignity.” It Actually Serves Repression. appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. men's national soccer team kicked off its 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign against Paraguay at SoFi Stadium on Friday.

Show goes on for Trump’s 80th birthday event – featuring a 92ft ‘Claw’, thousands of seats and a fighting cage – despite ominous weather forecasts

There may be swarms of bugs, rain showers and thunderstorms, but this isn’t Exodus, or the apocalypse: the president of the United States will host the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at the White House on Sunday, his 80th birthday.

The iconic South Lawn – typically used by presidents to board Marine One on their way to summits, funerals and wars – has been blanketed by an octagon, ringed by thousands of seats in a mini coliseum, and dominated by a 92ft, 600-ton steel structure organizers have nicknamed “the Claw”, not unlike the alien tripods from the 2005 film War of the Worlds.

Exclusive: Research in England shows people a third less likely to reoffend under decriminalisation-style schemes

Drug diversion schemes led by police that steer people away from the criminal justice system and into treatment and education services are significantly more effective in reducing reoffending than prosecution, according to a new analysis.

Researchers examined outcomes across 13 English police forces and more than 62,000 criminal incidents over the past four years, finding that people whose cases were dealt with through decriminalisation-style diversion schemes were a third less likely to reoffend than similar individuals prosecuted for drug possession.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Seb Hutchinson and Pablo Maurer as the USA begin their World Cup campaign

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On the podcast today: the USA … might actually be very good? They blew Paraguay away in their opening game in LA. Christian Pulisic, we owe you a huge apology.

Appearance of a western reef heron in north Wales is unlikely to be the last, as heating temperatures mean species can survive Britain’s winter, say experts

It is a tropical bird typically encountered between west Africa and India, but last week a western reef heron arrived in north Wales in what is believed to be the first ever sighting in the UK.

The heron was first spotted in Foryd Bay at the weekend before flying to nearby Caernarfon harbour where it fed among the boats.

UPDATE: Amazon CEO's Talks With U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models. "Anthropic said on Friday it will 'abruptly disable' its most advanced AI models for all users," reports Reuters, "after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, without being given specific details of its national security concern, Anthropic said in a statement." Anthropic's blog post writes that the directive applies to foreign nationals "whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance." "Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected." We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)... Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking" Fable 5... We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift. To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI's GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe... We are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers. As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Reuters notes that Amazon's cloud unit AWS "said late on Friday that Anthropic has asked it to revoke access to the models for 'all users in all regions.'" Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the AI Action Plan the administration issued in the summer of 2025, said in a post on X that the order suggests all "non-Americans" would be restricted from using Anthropic's latest models, including those based in the U.S. "This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models," Ball said. Several key Anthropic personnel, including co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Askell, were born outside the United States.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every World Cup needs its hosts to start well, more so this one, and Mauricio Pochettino’s team delivered on a fun day on the Pacific coast

The ball is magic, remember. Just keep watching the ball. On a lovely soft powder blue night in Los Angeles the World Cup produced an opening act on its US front that might have been conjured by the whirling hands of Gianni Infantino himself, a Fifa president who increasingly has the air and the mannerisms of an elite celebrity stage magician. Or at the very least, of a man who appreciates the power of the show.

It turns out California really does know how to put on one of those. There was even a moment before kick-off that seemed to capture the cosmically strange nature of the entire Fifa multiverse. A little later the headline act Katy Perry would appear in a silver bustle and perform on a podium alongside a 10-year-old TikToker.

These young people recognise dangers of ‘addictive’ social media but have differing views on a total crackdown

Nine in 10 parents in the UK support an under-16 social media ban, but the feeling among the children it would affect is more mixed. Or at least it is for a group of 10 preteens and teenagers who talked to the Guardian at a location in west London this week.

The 12- to 16-year-olds were well versed in the debate, with a set of views ranging from mandatory time limits to tougher controls and a full ban for under-16s. All those options have been under consideration in a government consultation on children’s online safety that is due to deliver an outcome next week, with an under-16 age limit expected for “high-risk” platforms, and restrictions on features such as livestreaming for others.

The far-right proposal would require the government to put restrictions in place to limit the population by 2050

A national ballot on an unprecedented far-right proposal to limit Switzerland’s population to 10 million concludes this weekend, amid warnings of devastating consequences for the country’s economy if voters back the initiative.

A “yes” vote would require the Swiss government to take steps to cap the population at 10 million by 2050, enacting tough restrictions on family reunification, residency permits and asylum if the number reaches 9.5 million before that date.

Other western acts have attempted to crack country’s music scene since singer’s breakout success in 2018

One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people.

On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted.

Photosynthesis does not always result in wood growth, a key factor in carbon dioxide sequestration

Trees may not be able to store as much planet-heating carbon as hoped, a study suggests, with researchers finding photosynthesis does not always lead to wood growth.

Scientists studied 137 sites across the US and found trees stopped growing months before the point in the year at which photosynthesis stopped.

Geert Wilders’ PVV altered sketch of jailed Syrian brothers to make them look more menacing

A Dutch court artist has received damages after an MP for the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) used one of her drawings without permission and manipulated it with AI to make the subjects look more menacing.

Petra Urban, a court artist for 19 years, was shocked to discover a drawing she had made last year of two Syrian brothers jailed for the murder of their sister had been reworked and used in a video on Instagram and Facebook by the party’s Noord-Brabant region.

Folarin Balogun’s double secured an emphatic victory for the co-hosts in their opener

Chris Richards is IN

A 100% record on our projected lineup, with Chris Richards getting his wish and cracking the opening lineup. So, a nominal lopsided 3-4-2-1 that plays as a 3-2-5 in attack and a 4-4-2 in defense.

The US fared better against Germany after Malik Tillman dropped deeper into midfield and Weston McKennie played more advanced. I would expect similar today, though I wouldn’t discount the potential for something closer to a 4-1-4-1 with Robinson and Freeman operating like full-backs, Tyler Adams behind an attacking line (left to right) of Pulisic-Tillman-McKennie-Dest, and Folarin Balogun taking whatever service he can get.

This blog is now closed – see our latest full report on the Middle East crisis

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) has cautioned against media speculation about a potential memorandum of understanding to end the war, particularly on claims regarding the strait of Hormuz.

IRNA reported that Iran will not surrender its control of the strategic waterway and the US will have no role in its future management.

Contrary to some bizarre claims in the media, Iran in no way makes a commitment in this text to hand over its management or to restore the strait of Hormuz to the state before the military aggression of the US and Israel. The only point mentioned is the normalisation of transit through the strait of Hormuz upon the end of the war, the establishment of maritime security by the coastal states, the end of the illegal blockade, and the removal of threats to commercial shipping by the US and Israel. At Iran’s request, the US will have no role whatsoever in the future management of the strait of Hormuz. It has been made clear that the future administration of the strait will be based on an Iranian initiative and proposal, within the framework of a matter pertaining to the countries of the region. In this framework, discussions about the future of the strait of Hormuz will not take place even in negotiations after the signing of the agreement, and Tehran will directly resolve this issue in talks with Oman.”

The U.S. military has killed Niño Guerrero, the alleged leader of Venezuela-based gang Tren de Aragua, President Trump announced Friday.

All the action from Los Angeles Stadium where the final opening ceremony preceded the USMNT’s resounding victory over Paraguay in Group D

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The first quarter of 2026 produced the most blocked and delayed data center projects on record, according to a new study shared with NBC News. The study -- conducted by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity -- found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March, the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023. "The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states," the authors wrote, noting that the total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for all of 2025. [...] The report found that legislative pushes for moratoriums on constructing data centers ballooned during the first quarter of 2026, sponsored by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The report found such proposals introduced in 14 states from January through March, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introducing a federal version. Though none of the proposals has been signed into law, one did reach the desk of Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Maine. She vetoed it in April. More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026, the authors found, saying it marked "a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer." What's more, the study found that the number of active grassroots opposition groups across the country more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March. The authors found that the states with the most opposition groups through that month were Maryland, Ohio and Texas. "In some cases," they wrote, "opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The incident occurred Friday night during an outdoor service at East Lake Community Church in Moneta, Virginia.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 13.

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• Court denies emergency appeal to retain Trump’s name on Kennedy Center

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Donald Trump and his allies have discussed pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments, the Wall Street Journal reported last night, citing people familiar with the matter.

“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump said when asked about the resolution in a phone call this week with the Journal. “It was a rigged deal — it was a whole rigged situation.”

This week's guests include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.

President says Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores killed in ‘swift and lethal’ military strike with help from Venezuela

The US military has killed a leader in the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, with the help of Venezuela, Donald Trump announced on Friday.

“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Appeals court in Washington DC rejected emergency appeal seeking to pause the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the building on Friday – key US politics stories from Friday 12 June at a glance

The ongoing fracas over the facade of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center reached a key moment Friday night in the US capital.

An appeals court in Washington DC rejected an emergency appeal seeking to pause the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the building on Friday.

He appeared on the morning show for four decades before retiring in 2010.

Officials given 21 days to comply with order after Angel Kelley condemns administration for ‘telling half-truths’

A US district court judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate any history or science materials it removed from the nation’s public monuments, finding that the White House’s actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization”.

In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, calling upon the secretary of interior to examine monuments, memorials and statues to see if they had been altered after January 2020 to represent a “false construction of American history”.

Deal still under UK scrutiny with new investigation, and could face lawsuit from state attorneys general

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has decided to approve the $111bn merger of Paramount Skydance, controlled by the Ellison family, and Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of networks like CNN and HBO.

The deal was approved by the justice department’s anti-trust division after months of review, and despite the concerns of many people in the entertainment and media industries who believe it will hurt competition by reducing the number of film studios and – most likely – merging two news networks, Paramount’s CBS News and CNN.

Rest in power: I chatted with the showrunner and star about this heartbreaking moment and the final season.

Alabama is seeking to execute a man with lethal injection hours after his nitrogen execution was prevented from going forward.

Justice department lawyers had appealed to stay a judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from facade

An appeals court in Washington DC rejected an emergency appeal seeking to pause the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the facade of the Kennedy Center on Friday.

Justice department lawyers for Donald Trump and his hand-picked Kennedy Center board filed the emergency appeal earlier on Friday, asking the court to stay a judge’s order that his name be removed from the facade of Washington’s leading performing arts venue.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 13, No. 1,820.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 13, No. 1,098.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 13, No. 628.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 13, No. 832.

After days of uncertainty and tit-for-tat military strikes, "text of the peace deal has been reached,” according to Pakistan's prime minister.

Climate minister Chris Bowen says country must prepare for changing world and can play bigger role in reducing emissions

Australia will find exporting fossil fuels increasingly difficult but can switch to exporting clean energy products, the president of the next UN climate negotiations has declared.

Speaking at a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, argued his country had led the global push to “transition away from fossil fuels” – based on the rapid growth of renewable energy and batteries in its domestic power grids – and that its economy could manage the switch.

Paramount Skydance's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would not harm U.S. consumers or weaken competition, DOJ antitrust enforcers said.

Last week’s TPC26 event brought together many of the world’s preeminent experts in using AI for science and engineering. The conference demonstrated that we have come quite far in just a few years. But it also showed us limits to the use of the technology as it currently exists, as well as possible ways the community can move forward as AI inevitably improves.

After listening to all the plenaries from TPC26 and several of the breakouts and birds of a feather (BOF) sessions, a few trends emerged that are worth noting. Let’s take them one at a time, starting with agentic AI.

How Capable Are Scientific Agents Today?

Rick Stevens recounted his experience working with AI agents during his keynote address at TPC26. The Argonne National Laboratory associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences instructed two agents, named Ollie and Kukla, to read about 100 scientific papers and come up with a way–complete with identifying the necessary tools and datasets– to replicate their findings. On a 10 point scale, Stevens rated the agents at 7.5 for coverage and 8 for agreement.

Image courtesy Rick Stevens, ANL

As BigDATAwire Editor Ali Azhar noted in his story, performance of Steven’s agents varied significantly depending on the type of research. Mathematical papers, theoretical derivations, and studies built around open source software and accessible datasets generally produced the strongest results. But the agents struggled when proprietary software and inaccessible datasets were involved, as well as with poorly documented methods or physical experiments.

Stevens postulated an idea for a hackathon that involved using hundreds of AI agents working in parallel to replicate 1,000 papers, or what he called a “graduate school for agents.” The resource demands would be considerable: an estimated 200,000 GPU hours, millions of CPU hours, and lots of storage.

How Do We Organize Agents at Scale?

As the number of agents increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and organize them. As Stevens related, he ran into some friction while working with just Ollie and Kukla.

“You’re sitting here, essentially texting two agents, and you’re trying to get them to coordinate on a simple task. It’s not so easy,” Stevens said. “They either want to both do it, or they both want to defer it. Or they want one agent to be in charge, but they don’t want to be the agent that’s not in charge. It’s like little kids, and how to get agents to split up work and then keep it coordinated over time, I think is a fundamental research problem.”

As the number of agents ramps up into the hundreds and thousands, keeping the agents organized gets even harder. “I think we don’t have a good way to think about that,” Stevens said “When you’re in this kind of unstructured space and you have multiple agents and you’re trying to get them to coordinate on a task, it’s actually quite difficult.”

How Do Skills Fit In?

During his presentation in the “AI Agents as Scientific Collaborators” BOF, Matt Baughman, an associate computational scientist in the AI4Science group at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), discussed how he gives his agents skills, or documented patterns they can refer to run code, fill out templates or accomplish tasks.

Skills are an important way to direct agents (Image courtesy Matt Baughman, PPPL)

Skills give the agent direction, while also giving it the freedom to troubleshoot or interpret the results. The skills concept was spearheaded by Anthropic, and can be coded in most foundation models using a Skills.md file, Baughman said. The Genesis Mission currently has a GitLab skills repository loaded with about 70 skills that scientists at DOE labs can share.

Closely Linked Agents or Swarm?

Another common thread of discussion at TPC26 was whether to choose bigger AI models that do well across a wide range of problems or smaller models that are trained or tuned to do specific things. Similarly, when deploying multiple agents, do you want a large swarm of agents running in parallel, or a smaller and more rigid hierarchy of specialized agents?

Matt Baughman presented two possible paths to scale up agentic workloads. On the one hand, you could carefully build LangGraph orchestrations of agents, which delivers the traceability that is often needed, but at the expense of scale.

“If you have to write an agent definition for each individual agent, you very quickly cannot get to really more than a dozen agents,” he said. On the other hand, by allowing agents to call other agents, you could create a large swarm of agents that could theoretically scale to whatever size the scientist wanted.

“Is it better to have, maybe 10 or 20 very large, very capable models or maybe hundreds in these big agentic swarms, of much smaller, lower latency models that maybe have higher interactivity because they can produce hundreds of tokens a second versus dozens,” Baughman said. “It’s a very open problem.”

Open-Weight or Foundation Models?

Another recurring topic of discussion at TPC26 was whether researchers should utilize the big foundation models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, or go with open-weight models like Apertus, OLMo, Marin, DeepSeek, Kimi, or Qwen.

OLMo scores well among open-weight models (Image courtesy Noah Smith, Ai2)

While the foundation models from deliver the highest accuracy, they’re far from open. As Noah Smith of the University of Washington pointed out in his TPC26 plenary talk, the closed nature of frontier models poses a real problem for scientists concerned about reproducibility.

“The open weight models are definitively less capable,” PNNL’s Baughman said. “The U.S.-based open weight models are particularly less capable…Unfortunately we have decided that open source, open weights models are not a priority in the U.S.”

While Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qwen deliver better results than many American open-weight models (although Noah Smith of the University of Washington showed that OLMo 3 can match Qwen 3), DOE facilities can’t utilize them due to political and security reasons.

Domain-Specific Models or Foundation Models?

Several TPC26 presenters discussed agentic frameworks they’re developing at DOE labs and universities. These agentic frameworks often integrate with existing open-weight and foundation models to accomplish specific tasks, such as working with existing modeling and simulation codes.

Argonne’s Stevens listened intently to some of these presentations, clearly impressed by the level and pace of work. He offered his thoughts on how the future might play out.

“It seems to me that, in the future, it can’t be the case that we end up building dedicated agentic frameworks for every tool,” Stevens said. “That future doesn’t seem to make sense because it creates too many things that we have to actually maintain. And what we’re seeing in general is the bitter lesson, the general stuff eats special purpose stuff. So general purpose frontier LLMs will eat other software.”

For instance, even for a complex workload like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), you could instruct an LLM to read the last 50 papers on the topic, develop skills based on them, and then use MCP to call the necessary CFD modeling codes, and the model would be developed in perhaps an hour for a billion tokens, Stevens said.

Anthropic’s model scored best with an agentic framework integrating LLMs with the OpenFOAM CFD solver (Image courtesy Shaewu Pan, Renesselaer University)

“I think the challenge for us is to figure out what can we build that actually will not be subsumed as the big models just eat everything,” Stevens continued. “I think that’s the challenge. It’s great what you’re doing, because it’s demonstrating where that boundary is. But I think the longer-term challenge is, what won’t be eaten by the big models. Because the big models will eat as much as possible.

“We have to be thinking ahead,” Stevens continued. “Imagine in the future that these big models will have read every code that’s ever been written that they can get their hands on, and they will be pretty facile at generating replicas of it on demand and modifying replicas and understanding that they’d have to do a validation suite and so forth. And so that seems not at all unreasonable.”

Cloud or On Prem?

Many of the labs and NSF-funded universities are spinning up AI inference services, which gives DOE employees access to several dozen open-weight models. Some universities instead of just paying for their workers to use foundation model coding agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude.

“If it’s a $50 a month subscription, just use the cloud service,” said Dan Stanzione, the executive director of TACC. “I think we’ll use the cloud service for a lot of these things where it’s a big enough problem to be commercially viable, and the latency allows. At the same time, I think it’s almost undoubtedly true that we’re going to have some specialized scientific models, specialized scientific agents that work for a very small subset of people and a very small subset of things that there’s not a commercially viable market.”

At some point–perhaps after the hotly anticipated IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI–TACC may have to spin up an on-prem coding agent, Stanzione said. That’s because he understands they are operating at a loss now, but that they won’t continue to operate that way once they become public.

“Right now, [we have] workflows that consume an awful lot of tokens, potentially a lot more than traditional simulation would do,” he said. “We’re not really seeing the full cost of those. We’re seeing the cost minus the venture capitalists losing a few billion dollars a month on it at the moment. So at some point, our token cost is going to go up to real. And if it’s $30,000 per employee or $40,000 per employee, we’re going to make different decisions about how we use tokens and how good those models really have to be.”

The post Exploring the Current Boundaries of AI for Science at TPC26 appeared first on HPCwire.

Data analytics company loses on 22 out of 23 counts in lawsuit disputing how Swiss government rejected firm’s services

The US technology company Palantir has lost a legal challenge to force a Swiss independent magazine to publish its responses to articles about how the Swiss government rejected its services.

The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the company and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.

When violence erupted near a New York Knicks watch party on Monday, one New Yorker stood up to the unruly crowd.

Jeff Bezos says his new AI startup, Prometheus, is working toward an "artificial general engineer" capable of helping design complex physical products such as robots, drugs, manufacturing systems, and rocket engines. The Verge reports: The NYT first reported on Prometheus last November, but now Bezos is sharing more information about the startup after a $12 billion funding round, putting the company at a $41 billion valuation. Bezos serves as co-CEO of Prometheus alongside Vik Bajaj, who co-founded Alphabet's health-focused research group, Verily. The startup currently has around 150 employees. The tools Prometheus intends to build could help develop physical products across several industries, including robotics, drug design, and manufacturing, the NYT reports. "Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools that Prometheus is building," Bezos tells the NYT. "Any company that is building sophisticated devices -- like rocket engines -- would benefit greatly from this kind of technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It comes with advanced, wire-free navigation and a promised future AI-powered mapping update.

Technique that examines fragments of foetal DNA in mother’s bloodstream could limit need for invasive screening, according to researchers

A new maternal blood test that can detect thousands of serious genetic conditions in the developing foetus could limit the need for invasive screening during pregnancy, according to scientists.

The test, to be described at the European Society for Human Genetics conference in Gothenburg on Saturday, relies on detecting tiny fragments of a foetus’s DNA that circulate in the mother’s bloodstream during pregnancy. Using advanced sequencing techniques, scientists were able to identify a very high proportion of genetic conditions, such as cystic fibrosis, that are currently only reliably diagnosed using amniocentesis or other invasive tests.

The Justice Department has approved Paramount Skydance's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery without requiring divestitures or other concessions. The deal still faces scrutiny from state attorneys general. Politico reports: The decision, expected to be announced Friday, paves the way for Paramount to combine with the entertainment and media company behind a vast film and television studio, CNN, and the HBO Max streaming service, which would be combined with Paramount+ to create a new offering boasting about 200 million subscribers. The deal, which would upend the Hollywood ecosystem by combining two historic rival studios, is opposed by many in the entertainment industry who fear it could lead to mass layoffs, among other concerns. After an extensive review, DOJ officials determined the transaction did not pose a threat to competition and declined to challenge it, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The department approved the merger without requiring any divestitures, behavioral remedies or concessions, according to one of the people. [...] The DOJ's approval does not end the merger's legal scrutiny. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has been reviewing the transaction and could still sue to block the deal despite federal regulators signing off. A spokesperson for Bonta's office told POLITICO earlier this week "the Paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers remains an active investigation." [...] Throughout those discussions, Paramount maintained that the merger would strengthen competition rather than diminish it, creating a media company better positioned to compete with streaming leaders and deep-pocketed technology rivals, according to people familiar with the matter. Hollywood workers fear the merger could trigger another wave of layoffs in an industry already reeling from years of consolidation. Critics argue that billions in promised cost savings will come at the expense of jobs, fewer opportunities for creators and greater concentration of power across film, television and streaming.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Housing and urban development department alleges fraud in administration’s latest clash with California

The Trump administration has suspended federal funding to Los Angeles’s beleaguered homelessness agency.

The announcement is the administration’s latest move rescinding funding to California, where Donald Trump has feuded with the state’s Democratic leaders.

The first big tech IPO of the summer included Starlink, xAI and X. It sets the stage for expected public offerings by Anthropic and OpenAI.

He’s now the world’s first trillionaire, after his rocket and AI company broke IPO records on its way to a $2.1tn valuation

Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX’s historic debut on the stock market on Friday launched the CEO to unprecedented levels of wealth; his personal fortune now amounts to $1.1tn, an increase of more than $62bn since the previous day, according to Forbes.

The rocket, satellite and AI company raised $75bn from its record-breaking initial public offering (IPO), and is now valued at $2.1tn after its first day of public trading.

Journalist and healthcare campaigner was driving force behind patient safety initiative after death of 13-year-old daughter

The healthcare campaigner and journalist Merope Mills has been made a CBE in the king’s birthday honours list for services to patient safety.

Mills, a senior editor at the Guardian, was a driving force behind the introduction of an initiative in England said to have potentially saved hundreds of lives. She has spent years campaigning for the introduction of Martha’s rule under which patients, relatives and staff can seek a second opinion if they have concerns about the care being provided.

Cyle Larin grabbed a historic point for the co-hosts in Toronto after Jovo Lukic’s first-half opener

Forget the World Cup just for a sec … some news from Scotland.

Canada: Crépeau, Johnston, De Fougerolles, Cornelius, Laryea, Buchanan, Koné, Eustáquio, Millar, Jonathan David, Oluwaseyi

ShinyHunters claims it exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, where it says it stole 40GB of student and billing data. "ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand," reports The Register. From the report: "University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents," a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. "We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs." They didn't say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims. A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters' claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations. Google said it spotted malicious activity, "consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273," between May 27 and June 9, and notified more than 100 global orgs "whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these, we're told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector. Oracle has released a "patch availability document," but it's unclear whether a patch is currently available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One economist says Musk’s world-first level of extreme wealth highlights massive economic disparities and could have profound effects on society

SpaceX’s shares will be supported by a number of “forced buyers”, such as tracker funds.

Richard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor, explains:

The Nasdaq index has tweaked its rules, which has allowed SpaceX to join the index on a fast-track basis. It remains to be seen whether the company will have a disproportionate effect on the index in terms of weighting, but in any event its inclusion guarantees some additional and significant buying pressure.

SpaceX's stock closed the day at $160.95 after making its debut on the Nasdaq exchange.

• San Antonio Spurs trail 3-1 in best-of-seven series

• Team blew 29-point lead to lose Game 4

Victor Wembanyama says the San Antonio Spurs have shaken off the biggest single-game collapse in NBA finals history and are ready to face the New York Knicks on Saturday.

The Knicks overcame a 29-point deficit to hand the Spurs a crushing 107-106 victory in Game 4 of the series and can win their first title since 1973 with victory in San Antonio.

Initial public offering for aerospace and AI company made Musk the world’s first trillionaire as share prices jumped

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SpaceX made the biggest stock market debut in history on Friday after nearly two and a half decades as a private company. Public trading began around midday with a starting share price of $150, which quickly jumped by a double digit percentage and sent the company’s valuation above $2tn, where it remained through market close. The company’s initial public offering made the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire.

“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said in an address at SpaceX’s headquarters Friday morning. He reiterated the company’s mission to “make humanity multiplanetary” and “take the fiction out of science fiction”.

Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire thanks to his company SpaceX, which now has the biggest IPO of all time. Public trading in the company has put it's valuation at over $2tn. The eye-watering sums of money pouring into AI are also boosting other tech titans, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are expected to go public this year with nearly trillion-dollar valuations. The Guardian’s US tech editor Blake Montgomery tells Kai Wright that with these IPOs, all our financial futures are forever tied to AI’s success, and more worryingly, its possible failure

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Eljay Crisp-Carr was arrested on Thursday, and police are still searching for another suspect in Toledo shooting

Police in Ohio have arrested a suspect in a recent shooting that wounded 12 people at a crowded weekend neighborhood street festival.

Eljay Crisp-Carr, 20, was taken into custody on Thursday and charged with 11 counts of felonious assault. Court documents do not list an attorney for him, and no one answered a call to a phone number associated with him on Friday morning.

Unidentified officer removed from frontline duties in the first known case of its kind in the UK

A police officer is under criminal investigation over the alleged use of artificial intelligence and has been removed from frontline duties in the first known case of its kind in the UK.

The officer, who has not been named, is being investigated over allegations of using the technology to “create evidential material in a number of cases” and perverting the course of justice.

June 12, 2026 — To design the next generation of smaller, more powerful electronic devices, scientists will need to understand better how the materials act at the smallest scales. In moiré superlattices, scientists lay sheets of identical or similar materials just an atom thick atop each other. These materials may promise finely tuned electronic behaviors at tiny distances. But their behavior doesn’t always match with existing theory. A team from Florida State University used PSC’s NSF-funded Bridges-2 to explore how a type of matter on a triangular moiré superlattice behaves, suggesting how scientists can improve their theory and supplying a new tool for materials engineers to use in designing devices.

Bridges-2

Apple’s M3 Ultra computer chip, which powers the latest iPhones and iMacs, contains 184 billion transistors. The tiny “metal lines” that carry electrons through the device can be as close together as 24 nanometers — about a millionth of an inch. At that scale, the weird rules of quantum mechanics, by which electrons are waves and can jump across otherwise “solid” barriers, take over.

As our electronics get smaller, it gets harder to determine how they’ll behave. Knocking together components and seeing what happens isn’t economical or effective. Instead, you first need to figure out how materials work at the most basic level.

Such basic science doesn’t always create new devices. But it gives the designers the rules they need to figure new devices out.

One set of materials that scientists would like to understand better are moiré superlattices. These materials offer enhanced tunability, because it may be possible to design them to control movement of electrons across their structure — what computer scientists call “gate voltages.” One particular moiré system has two sheets of slightly mismatched materials called transition metal dichalcogenides, each only an atom thick.

The mismatch pattern creates a large moiré unit cell. These larger structures in the material reduce the energy scales of the layers by as much as a thousand times. This allows scientists to study behaviors at energy scales that would simply not be accessible for conventional materials.

“We are interested in modeling electronic phases of matter, which are distinct from the structural phases we know from everyday life — you know, solid, liquid, gas,” said Hitesh Changlani, FSU and Maglab. “But the electrons, which you do not see with your bare eyes, have a world of their own and can transform from one phase to another … A lot of our work is motivated by the ability to predict and to understand: What do electrons do in different situations?”

Aman Kumar, a Dirac postdoctoral fellow at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Maglab), working with Florida State University’s Hitesh Changlani and Cyprian Lewandowski, wanted to better understand a kind of triangular moiré superlattice formed by the electrons in a Wigner crystal. A crucial tool in their investigation was PSC’s flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer.

In quantum mechanics, electrons don’t behave as particles. Instead, they are waves, typically spreading out and delocalizing. Everyday metals, such as copper and aluminum, conduct electricity because the electrons, despite having the same negative charge, are spread out farther apart in a kind of soup, and so don’t repel each other as strongly.

A moiré superlattice greatly suppresses that kind of electron delocalization. At certain densities, electrons suddenly “see” each other’s charge, and freeze in place. Instead of being a conductor like a metal, they are now an insulator, blocking electrical current. This behavior could allow engineers to tune the crystal by altering the density through changing the gate voltage, or by varying twist angles.

When scientists built real Wigner crystals in the lab, though, the frozen electrons melted at a lower temperature than classical theory had predicted. Also, two forms of Wigner crystals, with triangular versus honeycomb arrangements of atoms, showed different melting points, when the theory said they should be the same. The quantum rules were making themselves felt.

To understand how the system worked, Kumar would need to simulate the electrons in the Wigner crystal using the rules of quantum statistical mechanics. Each theoretical model would require dealing with matrices that have about 100 million dimensions, using hundreds of different starting points and then averaging them. To avoid slowdowns in the calculations as the computer went back and forth from data storage to its computing nodes, the system would need to store a considerable amount of memory in its RAM.

“When you are in the low temperature phase, you have this nice, ordered pattern of electrons,” said Kumar. “That is the Wigner crystal. When you are in the high-temperature phase, the crystal has melted. So, to understand this melting transition, and to locate where this transition was happening and compare it with experiments, we need to restart this algorithm many, many times.”

Bridges-2 proved ideal for the work, with regular nodes containing either 256 or 512 gigabytes of memory. That’s four to eight times as much RAM as in a hot laptop computer. And Bridges-2 has 504 of these nodes.

The simulations helped explain the melting behavior of the triangular and honeycomb Wigner crystals. The simulations also showed how and when the quantum behavior started showing up. Importantly, the results suggest that Wigner crystals naturally exist at a point very close to the metal-insulator transition. That’s the point at which the electrons switch between carrying electrical currents and blocking them. This means that small changes in the crystals can produce large changes in behavior, which could prove useful to materials engineers. The team reported their results in the journal npj Quantum Materials in August 2025.

The team is currently exploring the effects of two factors for controlling the Wigner crystals’ behavior — the temperature and the electron kinetic energy/bandwidth. Just as importantly, Kumar’s work has provided a new tool for the group to continue studying Wigner crystals in moiré superlattices, at other electron densities where patterns such as stripes have been realized. The computer models make predictions on how these materials will behave, which lab scientists can use to study them in the real world.

Source: Ken Chiacchia, PSC

The post PSC: Bridges-2 Computations Verify Weird Rules for Moiré Materials appeared first on HPCwire.

No injuries reported as fire in Tracy destroys medical equipment warehouse and authorities investigate cause

A fire at a 1m sq ft warehouse complex continued to burn out of control in California early on Friday, as authorities warned the blaze could take days to extinguish and may contain toxic hazards.

The raging inferno was pumping thick black smoke up in billowing clouds as flame and a red hot glow were visible beneath from aerial images. The fire has destroyed the medical equipment warehouse in Tracy, in northern California, and prompted evacuations of other nearby facilities, with no injuries reported.

The suspect, Victor Mata Villarreal, was wanted for attempted murder of a police officer after shooting at law enforcement during a vehicle chase earlier this week, officials said.

The Trump administration deported a group of roughly 20 migrants from Afghanistan, Iran and other nations to the Central African Republic, one of the world's poorest countries.

Midland police reported that suspected shooter was dead after two-hour standoff

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A shooting on Friday in Midland, Texas, has killed one person and sent a further nine to the hospital with injuries, according to the city’s authorities.

The possible suspect was in a standoff with officers for about two hours but later on Friday afternoon was reported deceased, police and the city’s mayor said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation. On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card numbers. Outsider Enterprise has financially scammed "hundreds of thousands of victims" with losses "estimated in the millions." The group deployed 9,000 fake websites, 1 million fraudulent web domains, and 2.5 million texts sent to Android users in a two-week period, according to Google. "55,000 spam texts were flagged by Android users in just two weeks this past May -- that's more than two text spam complaints a minute," Google said. Google said it uses "AI-powered tools to fight AI-powered scams", which enable the company to detect scams and alert users of suspicious calls and text messages, leading to the interception of more than 10 billion scam messages a month. The company said it has been collaborating with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to block the scam text messages and said it is coordinating with the FBI, which is taking unspecified law enforcement actions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four found guilty get tougher conditions as judge says actions were ‘designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public’

A judge has imposed lengthy custodial sentences on four Palestine Action activists who smashed up drones and other equipment at an Israeli arms manufacturer’s UK factory after ruling that there was a “terrorist connection” to their offending.

Charlotte Head, 30, and Leona Kamio, 30, were each jailed for five years and Fatema Rajwani, 21, was sentenced to four years and 8 months for criminal damage in relation to a 2024 break-in at the Elbit Systems UK site in Gloucestershire. Samuel Corner, 23, who was additionally convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent for striking Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer, was sentenced to seven years and eight months. Each will also spend an additional year on licence and be subject to 15 years of terrorist notification requirements.

Agents seized phones and laptops of Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group that does voter registration work

The FBI raided the office of a voting rights group in Ohio on Thursday, prompting immediate concerns the Trump administration is cracking down on such organizations ahead of the midterm elections.

FBI agents raided the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that does voter registration work, said Prentiss Haney, a board member of the group. Agents seized computers and phones, he said, and also showed up at homes of people affiliated with the group throughout the state and interviewed them.

The pope wrapped up a trip to Spain by borrowing a private jet from King Filipe VI after the Vatican's chartered plane, with the press corps on board, broke down.

A leaker with a strong Apple rumor track record says a touchscreen MacBook is "100% confirmed. If true, it would mark a major reversal for Apple, which has long argued that the Mac is built for indirect input rather than reaching up to touch a vertical screen. MacRumors reports: Instant Digital has a good track record for Apple rumors and has provided some strikingly accurate information in the past, so it's always worth noting what they have to say about Apple's plans. The claim is also backed by several recent reports. [...] Touchscreen support is expected to be one of several major upgrades coming to Apple's next-generation high-end MacBook Pro models. Other rumored features include M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, an OLED display, a Dynamic Island (i.e., no notch), and a thinner design. The new laptops could also adopt MacBook Ultra branding. Notably, macOS 27 Golden Gate also introduces a more touch-friendly interface, since Apple's Sidecar feature now allows users to tap and interact with macOS interface elements using a finger on their iPad. Apple apparently is not going to advertise the new MacBook Pro/Ultra as a touch-first device like the iPad -- it will be "touch-friendly, not touch-first," according to [Bloomberg's Mark Gurman]. In that sense, Apple will let customers use touch and mouse gestures interchangeably for all functions. Further reading: Steve Jobs Was Wrong About Touchscreen Laptops (2012)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI executed a search warrant at the office of an Ohio-based group known for its voter registration work as part of an ongoing fraud-related investigation, sources told CBS News.

June 12, 2026 — Quantum computing is entering a new phase. Across the industry, there is meaningful progress on multiple fronts at once: higher-fidelity hardware, better control systems, more practical error correction, richer software tooling, and increasingly sophisticated hybrid workflows that combine quantum, AI, and high performance computing (HPC). Useful quantum computing will not arrive from a single breakthrough in isolation; it will come from advances that work together across the full stack.

Credit: Quantinuum

Logical Qubits Made from Trapped Ions

Microsoft continues to make progress on the path to utility-scale quantum computing, as reflected in this week’s publication in Nature on logical qubits. The paper, titled “Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection,” captures a set of results that marked a significant step forward for the field. By applying the Microsoft Quantum platform to Quantinuum’s trapped-ion hardware, the teams demonstrated logical error-rate improvements ranging from 11x to 800x over corresponding physical circuit baselines. In a Bell-state preparation, the logical circuit error rate was reduced from roughly 0.8% for the physical baseline to 0.001%, yielding the now well-known 800x improvement. The work also demonstrated repeated error correction with an error rate per round 51x lower than a physical baseline, along with a 22x improvement for preparing a 12-qubit cat state.

Previously, Microsoft and Quantinuum reported the most reliable logical qubits on record, involving more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single observed error and active syndrome extraction without destroying the logical qubits. The companies then extended that progress by creating 12 highly reliable logical qubits and demonstrating a hybrid, end-to-end chemistry simulation that combined logical qubits, AI, and HPC to estimate the ground-state energy of an important catalytic intermediate within chemical accuracy. Together, those milestones showed not only that reliable logical qubits are possible, but that they can be used in workflows that begin to solve real scientific problems.

These were not isolated, single-qubit demonstrations. The paper shows fault-tolerant computation on multiple logical qubits, with circuits spanning up to 12 logical qubits. It combines two code constructions optimized for trapped-ion devices: a 12-qubit code encoding two logical qubits and a 16-qubit tesseract color code supporting larger logical computations. The result is evidence that state-of-the-art processors can use fault-tolerance techniques to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial circuits. That is a critical threshold for the entire industry.

For Microsoft, this work has also helped define a clear direction for the broader quantum community: The path to useful quantum computing relies on reliable logical qubits. More physical qubits alone are not enough. What matters is the ability to detect, diagnose, and correct errors so that quantum information can survive long enough to perform meaningful computation. Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization approach, combined with hardware-software co-design, has helped move the discussion from whether logical qubits can outperform physical baselines to how quickly these methods can be scaled across platforms.

Microsoft’s Platform Works with Multiple Types of Qubits

The Microsoft Quantum platform is an end-to-end software and systems stack designed to support multiple qubit modalities. It combines error correction, hybrid workflows, and developer tooling that can be applied across hardware architectures rather than being locked to a single approach. Microsoft’s new four-dimensional geometric codes expand the field of error correction and broaden the path to reliable quantum computing.

Microsoft’s platform work now extends across trapped ions, neutral atoms, and the company’s own topological qubits. With Atom Computing, Microsoft is co-developing Magne, the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer with 50 logical qubits. This system has been reserved by QuNorth in Copenhagen and will serve all of the Nordic countries.

The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit

Developers are a crucial part of the future of quantum computing. The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (QDK), which is part of the Microsoft Quantum platform, continues to evolve as an open-source toolkit for building quantum applications, with simulators, resource estimation, debugging tools, and a modern development experience. Integrated with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot, the QDK helps developers learn, write, test, and refine quantum code faster.  This week, Microsoft is also announcing “deq,” the company’s latest open-source package for error correction as part of the QDK.

As the industry moves from theory to practical workflows, the ability to prototype, validate, and optimize quantum programs efficiently becomes increasingly important. Microsoft encourages developers, researchers, and students to explore the QDK, experiment with hybrid quantum applications, and build the skills that will define this next era. The QDK is what enabled the results reported above, and these tools are now available to everyone.

There is still much work ahead: larger codes, deeper circuits, real-time decoding, feed-forward control, and continued advances in hardware. Quantum computing is advancing because researchers are learning how to connect hardware, error correction, software, and applications into one coherent system. That is the foundation being built at Microsoft. In the next few years, machines that are reliable enough to expand the frontier of chemistry, materials science, and scientific discovery will start to materialize. With partners, developers, and the broader research community, Microsoft is helping turn that future into something increasingly concrete—and increasingly close.

Read the paper in Nature on logical qubits created with the Microsoft Quantum platform here.

More from HPCwire: Microsoft Unveils Majorana 2 Quantum Chip, Targets Commercial-Scale Quantum Computing by 2029

Source: Dr. Matthias Troyer, Microsoft Quantum

The post Microsoft’s Application of Error Correction to Trapped-Ion Qubits Published in Nature appeared first on HPCwire.

Endorsement by former soldier, despite party’s apparent efforts to distance itself from him, is likely bid to attract Restore Britain voters

Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield byelection has been criticised for welcoming an endorsement by Ant Middleton, the former soldier and TV presenter who the party had distanced itself from over his increasingly extreme views.

Robert Kenyon shared a video of himself with Middleton, who he described as “one of my heroes”. Middleton has previously said “well done Southampton” in the wake of violence after the murder of Henry Nowak, and has repeatedly used his own X account to make anti-Muslim comments.

June 12, 2026 — The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Deborah Prentice, on Wednesday welcomed the Minister for Digital Government at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, (DSIT), James Frith MP, and Dr Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD to an event at the Ray Dolby Centre to mark the official launch of the Zenith AI supercomputer, the UK’s largest AI-for-science platform specially designed to bring together both simulation & AI communities on a single machine, funded by DSIT and UKRI.

Credit: University of Cambridge

More than 80 guests, including academics, public figures and innovators attended the event. Speakers highlighted the significant impact Zenith, designed and operated by Cambridge and built with AMD and Dell Technologies, will have in supporting research across health, energy and the environment.

Guests also learned about Sunrise, a supercomputer developed in partnership with the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), which is working to create fusion power and help the UK secure future energy independence.

The launch coincides with announcement of the Sovereign AI Innovation Lab (SAIL), a new Cambridge-led public-private initiative supported by AMD and Dell. SAIL will integrate novel AI technologies, create real-world test environments, and support a UK open-source AI software environment that enables researchers and innovators to build, validate and scale trusted AI tools on sovereign infrastructure across health, energy, environmental science, advanced engineering and the wider UK research and innovation ecosystem.

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice said, “Zenith, alongside Sunrise and SAIL, transforms what the University of Cambridge can achieve. By bringing together world leading researchers with national scale AI computing power, Cambridge is now equipped to tackle some of the most complex challenges of our time, from cancer, to climate, to clean energy and turn discovery into real world impact.”

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, DSIT and Cabinet Office, James Frith said, “The launch of Zenith marks a major step forward in the UK’s mission to harness AI for science. By bringing together world‑class compute, research and industry expertise, we will unlock new discoveries in health, clean energy and the environment strengthening Britain’s position as a global leader in AI innovation.”

Speakers also included Steve Young SVP & UK MD for Dell Technologies, and Tim Bestwick, Interim CEO of the UKAEA. Discussions explored how the new AI supercomputer ecosystem will transform AI for science in the UK.

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of the Cambridge Research Computing Service, described the launch as “a major national moment in the UK’s build-out of AI for science, sovereign AI capability and public-private technology partnership.”

He highlighted how Zenith provides national capability, Sunrise demonstrates mission focused Sovereign Compute Capability, and SAIL creates a pathway for sustained technology development and impact.

Zenith and Cambridge Cancer Centre and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Dr Sarah Burge, Director of Clinical Integration, Cambridge Cancer Centre at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spoke about how Zenith’s increased capability is essential for cancer research, helping to deliver on the ambition of the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital.

She highlighted Cambridge’s existing strength in AI for healthcare. The Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, due to open in 2029, aims to develop AI-assisted clinical decision support that can inform treatment decisions in real time at the point of care. Delivering on that ambition requires computational infrastructure at a scale the NHS does not currently have access to. Zenith will allow the Hospital to deliver the clinical insights that multimodal datasets and AI make possible, and to ensure the benefits reach patients across the whole NHS and beyond.

Zenith AI NHS Demonstrator for Cancer Diagnosis Improvement

Dr Joe Zhang, Chief Technology Officer for OneLondon and the AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare spoke about working with Zenith on MOSAIC (Multimodal Oncology Sovereign AI Collaboration) and connecting the NHS to national scale sovereign AI resources.

Dr Zhang explained how this research aims to build NHS cancer foundation models using data from leading NHS Trusts and Zenith to create a UK/NHS Sovereign AI asset that can be adapted for different clinical applications, deployed within the NHS to improve cancer diagnosis, treatment selection, outcomes prediction, and licensed for use in new therapeutics development.

Zenith and Environmental Forecasting

Dr Scott Hosking, Mission Director for Environmental Forecasting at The Alan Turing Institute, explained how they are using Zenith to help improve environmental forecasting.

He told the audience how sea ice forecasting is used to support safe maritime navigation, tracking wildlife migration across and beneath the ice, and strengthening understanding of the climate systems that shape weather across the Northern Hemisphere. IceNet, a pan-Arctic sea ice forecasting system that can outperform traditional models months ahead, is able to find further gains in accuracy achieved through retraining on Zenith. This joint research is being undertaken with the British Antarctic Survey and The Arctic University of Norway.

Sunrise and the UKAEA Accelerate Fusion Energy Development

Tim Bestwick, Interim CEO of the UKAEA explained how, rather than relying only on costly and time-consuming experiments, scientists and engineers will use Sunrise to create detailed computer models and simulations.

Using AI, Sunrise, he said, will help researchers understand the behaviours of fusion plasmas, develop materials to withstand the extreme conditions inside a fusion power plant, and test designs before they are built. This reduces development time, lowers costs, and helps bring commercial fusion energy closer to reality.

Source: University of Cambridge

The post University of Cambridge Launches Zenith AI Supercomputer appeared first on HPCwire.

Tapping home equity can offer more financial flexibility in retirement, but finding the right approach is important.

The Federal Reserve is set to meet again on June 16. Here are three mortgage moves borrowers should make before then.

We are currently experiencing a high volume of malicious package adoptions and updates in the Arch User Repository.

We are actively working to track down existing malicious commits and attempting to prevent additional malicious commits from being pushed. While this is happening, and while we work to create a more permanent solution, users may see issues with the following:

• Creating new accounts on the AUR
• Pushing package updates
• Adopting or creating new packages

We continue to encourage all users of AUR packages to review all PKGBUILD and install script changes when updating, especially during this time. If you notice suspicious commits to a package that you use, please reach out to Arch staff via the aur-general mailing list with more information.

June 12, 2026 — The HPCTRAIN project aims to strengthen Europe’s High Performance Computing (HPC) skills ecosystem by offering high-quality traineeships that provide hands-on experience in HPC technologies and their applications. The program is designed to bridge the gap between education and the labour market by supporting professional traineeships that provide practical experience for professional career paths in real HPC working environments across Europe.

The HPCTRAIN Call for Traineeships invites organizations to submit traineeship opportunities focused on HPC as the core domain, including its intersections with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing (QC). While interdisciplinary topics are encouraged, HPC must remain the central component of the traineeship, ensuring that trainees gain practical and professional experience with HPC systems, tools, or methodologies. The traineeships are expected to take 3 to 6 months.

Objective of the Call

The objective of this call is to identify, evaluate, and promote high-quality traineeship opportunities that:

• Provide practical, hands-on experience in HPC and related fields
• Contribute to the professional development of trainees
• Strengthen collaboration between academia, industry, and HPC centers
• Address skills gaps in the European HPC ecosystem
• Support the development of future HPC users, developers, operators, and high-level support specialists
• Contribute to bridging the gap between academic training and labour market needs in Europe
• Facilitate access to current and future sectors of the economy using supercomputing technologies
• Promote the acquisition of advanced digital and transversal skills relevant to HPC technologies and applications

Type of Call

This is a continuous call.

Opening: June 10, 2026

Closing: December 31, 2028

Eligibility of Applicants

Eligible applicants include:

• HPC centers and supercomputing facilities
• Universities and research institutions offering professional and non-academic long-term career opportunities (such as operations, services, etc.)
• Industry partners, including SMEs and startups
• Public sector organizations active in HPC-related domains providing clearly identified professional career paths

Applicants must be legal entities (public or private bodies) established in one of the eligible countries. Eligible countries are the members of the EuroHPC JU.

Hosting organizations will not receive financial compensation under this call for hosting trainees, but are responsible for providing supervision, guidance, and a suitable working environment for the duration of the traineeship. Exceptionally, SMEs and start-ups may receive financial support for the mentoring activity.

The full call text, eligibility criteria and details of how to apply can be accessed here: HPCTRAIN Call for traineeships – HPCTRAIN.

Project Background:

The HPCTRAIN consortium, coordinated by the Forschungszentrum Julich GmbH (FZJ), comprises 12 diverse organizations (universities, supercomputing centers and companies) such as IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Stuttgart, LuxProvide, University of Luxembourg, PRACE, CINECA, CSC, University of Gallway, INESC TEC and University of Ljubljana that offer a diversified traineeship program.

The project officially started in January 2026 and will last 48 months.

The HPC Train project has been selected following the call DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-TRAINING-03 and is funded by the Digital Europe program, with a total EU contribution of around EUR 5 million.

Project Website: https://hpctrain.eu

Funded by the European Union / European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. Grant Agreement No. 101136896.

Source: Jülich Supercomputing Centre

The post HPCTRAIN Launches Europe-Wide Call for HPC Traineeships Through 2028 appeared first on HPCwire.

The violent disturbances occurred in a nationalist area yet played out against a backdrop of union jacks

As the racially motivated violence unfolded in Northern Ireland this week, a striking dissonanace could be seenbehind the mobs and flames and smoke.

The knife attack that triggered the disturbances occurred in a nationalist area yet the mayhem played out against a backdrop of union jacks and loyalist murals.

SpaceX's arrival in the region has been good for business, some Brownsville, Texas, residents say, while others rue its impact on the local community.

US president dismisses Iranian media reports agreement is close, despite earlier suggesting a deal could be signed this weekend

Prospects for an immediate end to the war between Iran and the US remained uncertain on Friday amid a chaotic series of conflicting claims and counter-claims by US and Iranian officials about ongoing negotiations.

Donald Trump seemed to distance himself from his earlier comments that suggested a preliminary agreement could be signed as soon as this weekend, with a series of angry social media posts describing the Iranians as “very dishonorable people to deal with”.

Military planners have discussed contingencies that would involve U.S. forces helping secure Iran's nuclear materials if a deal is reached, according to U.S. officials familiar with knowledge of the ongoing planning.

Constable Marc Pinizzotto, 43, was killed while executing search warrants related to a shooting at US consulate

Authorities in Canada are investigating whether the killing of a Toronto police officer while he was executing search warrants related to a shooting at the city’s US consulate is linked a broader series of global terror attacks.

Constable Marc Pinizzotto, 43, a member of the emergency taskforce, was killed on Thursday during a dawn search of an apartment building in the west of the city.

Amid rhetoric, market uncertainty and tit-for-tat exchanges, the two sides are still trying to find a way out of the impasse

Great news! Donald Trump has said the US and Iran are on the verge of a peace agreement. Oil prices are down, and the stock market is up. This comes only hours after Trump warned Iran was about to be struck “VERY HARD”, a threat that had sent oil prices up and stocks down.

It has been another ride on the Trump rollercoaster, keeping traders on edge, most of the world poorer, and people of the Middle East constantly whiplashing between fear and hope. But whether the ride veers up or down, the management always makes money.

Longtime Slashdot reader Dotnaught shares a report from The Register: For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device. The Copilot-conjured Python script ended up rendering the researcher's laptop inoperable by overwriting the embedded controller firmware. "Copilot autonomously created and executed four progressively aggressive Python scripts during a probe for backlight control values that sent raw SSAM ioctl commands (SSAM_CDEV_REQUEST = 0xC028A501) directly to the SAM microcontroller through the SAM software path," Darcy explained to The Register. [...] "We appreciate the work of Jack Darcy and The Register for reporting this issue under a coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Our investigation found that a deprecated UEFI interface could trigger a boot loop on some devices. To trigger this loop, the user must have administrator privileges and have already disabled the Secure Boot security feature. We have released updates to address the issue for most impacted devices." That means managed devices are not at risk. But those using Linux, or Windows users who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot for gaming, or who use custom Windows drivers, or who have USB boot enabled, may still be vulnerable if their systems haven't received the update. We're uncertain about the range of Surface devices affected. Our source said it appears to be all of them (Surface Laptops 3-6, Surface Book 1-3) except for Surface Go models. ARM variants, however, have not been tested. The report notes that Microsoft is planning to move the Surface stack to a more secure architecture based on Rust code. "Our most recent Surface for Business hardware features a major architectural shift in terms of improved reliability and security that spans our embedded controller, UEFI, but also some of our drivers," said David Abzarian, chief architect for Microsoft Surface. "We're investing in the most secure foundation for a PC by building our embedded controller firmware from the ground up in Rust (as part of leveraging and contributing to the Open Device Partnership (ODP)) in addition to a rewrite of the UEFI DXE Core in Rust; these projects are known as Secure EC and Project Patina respectively." "We're also not only shipping some of our drivers written in Rust, but also helping co-develop the framework Windows Drivers in Rust (WDR) to help enable a broad set of partners in the Windows ecosystem to capitalize on these benefits. I will also note that all of these efforts are open-source promoting one of our key security principles around transparency."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bell hotel in Epping was scene of violent protests after asylum seeker living there sexually assaulted girl and woman

Asylum seekers have been removed from the Epping hotel that became a flashpoint for anti-immigration protests across England last summer as the Home Office terminates its contract with the establishment.

The hotel on the outskirts of the Essex town was the scene of increasingly large protests after an asylum seeker who was living there sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman.

Activists say the high-profile IPO shifts attention and responsibility away from sexualized images of children that Grok generated, which spread on social media.

Police call for calm before anti-racist protests in Belfast and Glasgow as MPs warn of failure over online misinformation

Police said 19 people, including a 16-year-old boy, had now been arrested after two nights of rioting in Northern Ireland following a knife attack earlier in the week.

The violence broke out after far-right activists called for demonstrations in response to the attack, which was captured in a graphic video.

A federal judge on Friday rejected a long-shot effort to block the Ultimate Fighting Championship event set to take place at the White House this weekend.

Dylan Phelan, 21, of Leeds, sentenced to more than six years for encouraging the suicide of 21-year-old Travis Dyer

A Yorkshire man has been sentenced to more than six years in jail after admitting encouraging a US citizen to kill themselves while on a video call.

Dylan Phelan, 21, was sentenced on Friday at Leeds crown court after previously pleading guilty to intentionally doing an act that was capable of encouraging the suicide of another person.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Gaudy arena is already built on South Lawn to celebrate US president’s birthday and America’s 250th anniversary

A federal judge refused on Friday to stop the White House from staging a UFC show this weekend in an elaborate ring already built on the South Lawn to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary – on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

US district judge Amit Mehta’s ruling allows organizers to use the White House lawn as the venue for Sunday’s planned UFC mixed martial arts event.

The economic principles taught in school aren’t as relevant as hype, connections and total, arbitrary control

• Share your views on SpaceX’s stock market debut

Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire, after his SpaceX exploration and satellite company went public on the Nasdaq on Friday.

With shares priced at $135 each, Musk’s aerospace and satellite maker soared to an overall market valuation of approximately $1.77tn – which raised Musk’s net worth (which had already hovered at the astronomical $813bn) into the $1tn stratosphere.

A Democratic senator has asked newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to explain the department’s racist social media presence and assure the agency has not been “infiltrated by violent extremists.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., pointed to a March bulletin from Colorado law enforcement analysts that was unearthed by The Intercept last month. It warned that DHS posts using language popular with neo-Nazis could inspire acts of far-right violence within the U.S. as well as prompt white supremacists to join the agency.

The bulletin by the Colorado Information Analysis Center cited repeated instances of DHS recruitment posts spurring discussion among neo-Nazis about enlisting in ICE with the hope of spurring a race war. It noted at least one instance of white supremacists claiming online that someone in their organization “had already been a captain at an ICE-contracted detention facility.”

Related

ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence

The DHS posts, which sometimes appeared to borrow material verbatim from racist memes, songs, and tropes, were made as part of a recruiting push under then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem and former U.S. Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, who became the public face of Trump’s draconian mass deportation agenda, were pushed out of their positions by the White House this year.

Whitehouse said that Mullin should disavow his predecessor’s “dangerous recruitment campaign.”

“I cannot believe that you support the messages associated with these recruitment campaigns, or want anyone under your supervision to use the imprimatur of the United States Government to promote those messages,” Whitehouse said in a letter dated Wednesday.

In response to a request for comment, a DHS spokesperson criticized Whitehouse and the Colorado law enforcement analysts. The analysts’ report came from a fusion center, part of a network of information clearinghouses for local, state and federal police that spread across the U.S. following 9/11.

“It is gross that Senator Whitehouse and the state of Colorado are actively weaponizing official law enforcement bulletins to promote dangerous anti-ICE conspiracy theories,” the agency wrote in a statement. “Comparing recruitment efforts aimed at filling critical public safety roles to extremist rhetoric is not only absurd, but it also dangerously undermines the mission and sacrifices of federal officers.”

Mullin also rejected criticism of the department’s social media accounts when he was questioned by Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., about the Colorado fusion center’s report at a June 3 hearing.

“I’m very concerned that your department is promoting white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments on official social media accounts,” Thanedar said.

Mullin brushed off Thanedar’s assertion that this concern was backed by the facts.

“There is no facts,” Mullin said. “You throw out ‘nationalism,’ ‘Naziism,’ and that is exactly what causes the hatred and the violence that happens to our officers every single day.”

Whitehouse initially wrote to Noem on Feb. 23 with a detailed list of questions about the origin of the ICE recruiting posts. Noem never responded, according to Whitehouse’s more recent letter.

Since Trump installed Mullin atop DHS, the former U.S. senator from Oklahoma has taken small steps to distance the department from some of Noem’s most controversial moves, including a decision to lower training standards for newly hired ICE officers. DHS also appears to be posting fewer of the most provocative posts since Mullin took office.

In his latest letter to Mullin, Whitehouse said he was still trying to get to the bottom of who authorized and crafted the posts. He’d also previously asked whether there were sufficient checks in place to prevent the hiring of individuals with connections to “violent extremist or terrorist organizations.”

“DHS and ICE have deployed recruitment ads featuring white nationalist slogans, songs, and imagery while lowering recruitment standards—facilitating the hiring of agents with histories of violent extremism. I renew my request about what DHS has done to ensure it has not been infiltrated by violent extremists, and who is responsible for this dangerous recruitment campaign,” Whitehouse said in this week’s letter.

Noem has stayed out of the public eye since her March ouster, taking a role as special envoy for Trump’s so-called Shield of the Americas program. Bovino has been more outspoken. He attended a “remigration” conference with white nationalists in Portugal. In an interview before the conference’s start, the now-retired Border Patrol commander-at-large compared himself approvingly to Nazi general Erwin Rommel, describing the Third Reich strategist as someone who captured the imagination of the public.

The post ICE Should Show It Hasn’t Been “Infiltrated by Violent Extremists,” Senator Urges appeared first on The Intercept.

Commentary: An early test of VisionOS 27's Siri AI visual intelligence already feels like a phase change, and a preview of camera-enabled wearables like glasses.

‘Lookback law’ allowed Pamela Lockridge to seek damages against late stepfather who abused her starting at age four

A north-west Louisiana jury recently awarded a staggering $1.1bn in damages to a woman who sued over childhood sexual molestation at the hands of her late stepfather in the 1960s and 1970s – a verdict that the plaintiff says “sends a message that children are precious” and “deserve protection”.

The outcome in Pamela Elaine Lockridge’s lawsuit caused waves among Louisiana’s legal community, illustrating how much civil juries are willing to award to plaintiffs for cases tried under the state’s so-called “lookback law”.

Disorder in Belfast, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the Ebola outbreak, and the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

The latest news as co-hosts USA and Canada get their World Cup campaigns under way

Five takeaways from the World Cup opener. These come courtesy of Matt Hughes who was in the Azteca (I can’t bring myself to say Mexico City Stadium).

How about this: you’re still tucking into your morning cornflakes and there’s already a World Cup daily pod to listen to. Jet-lag isn’t Jonathan Wilson’s friend but an evening in the Azteca lifted spirits, especially Raul Jimenez’s goal. Also, a glimpse behind the scenes at the first few days of Max and Barry living together in the US, insights from Barney Ronay and Jeff Rueter as well as your questions answered.

We talked to the browser maker's new boss about privacy, choice and his vision for the internet's future.

June 12, 2026 — Researchers from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Centre for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits (CASIC), have achieved a major breakthrough in cryogenic electronics. The team has developed a programmable neuromorphic hardware platform that operates near absolute zero, providing a potential solution for scaling up quantum computers and enabling deep-space exploration.

Figure 1: NDR in SiC MOSFETs and their applications in spiking neuromorphic circuits

Led by Professor Yuhao Zhang and PhD student Xin Yang, the team has discovered an innovative way to generate and control negative differential resistance (NDR) in industry-standard Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFETs. For the first time, they have demonstrated that a single transistor can mimic the energy-efficient “spiking” behavior of biological neurons at temperatures as low as 10mK.

Modern quantum computers rely on complex electronics to control qubits, which are extremely sensitive and must be maintained at millikelvin temperatures. Current silicon-based controllers generate excessive heat and consume high levels of power, forcing them to be placed far from the qubits. This separation creates a wiring bottleneck that limits the scalability and performance of quantum systems.

“Our work introduces a hardware platform that can be integrated alongside quantum processors,” said Professor Zhang. “By using the unique carrier dynamics in silicon carbide, we can create circuits that are thousands of times more energy-efficient than conventional electronics, significantly reducing the thermal load on cryogenic systems.”

The researchers discovered that when SiC MOSFETs are cooled below 2K, they exhibit a potent “S-shape” NDR behavior fueled by electron-donor impact ionization (EDII). Unlike existing technologies that rely on heat to function, this mechanism is intrinsic to the material’s atomic structure, making it exceptionally stable and repeatable across different manufacturing batches.

“This is a robust and scalable approach,” said Mr Yang. “Because SiC is already used globally in electric vehicles and power grids, we can leverage existing industrial foundries to manufacture these cryogenic chips on 300-mm wafers.”

The study proves that these neurons can be “cascaded” to form larger networks, paving the way for complex, local data processing at cryogenic temperatures. This technology is expected to enhance the performance of quantum error correction and real-time quantum control.

Beyond quantum computing, these rugged circuits are ideal for deep-space exploration, where electronics must survive the extreme cold of the lunar surface or the outer reaches of our solar system.

The discovery has been published in Nature Communications in an article titled “Cryogenic neuromorphic circuits using gate-controlled negative differential resistance in silicon carbide”.

The article is available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70963-6.

Source: HKU

The post HKU Researchers Develop Cryogenic Neuromorphic Chip for Quantum Computing and Deep-Space Missions appeared first on HPCwire.

Unsure whether a robot mower could handle my complex lawn, I signed up for a robot mower subscription service. Here's how it went.

Taylor Swift and Timothée Chalamet lead the charge in blue and orange, as courtside style hits a ‘memeable’ peak

The World Cup may have kicked off in the US this week, but America’s attention is focused on a different sport: basketball. The NBA finals could end this weekend, with the New York Knicks potentially becoming champions for the first time since 1973. And with Knicks fever comes fan style, especially courtside, where celebrities have been showing their support in different ways.

For Wednesday’s Game 4, won by the Knicks, Taylor Swift and Este and Alana Haim all wore T-shirts in the blue and orange of the Knicks with their own Knicks-related pop culture pun: Swift’s read “Stevie Knicks”, while Este’s said “Knickeback” and Alana’s read “Knickole Kidman”. This was not shop merch. Vogue reported that Alana had made the T-shirts herself.

Who has time to type, anyway? You can now record or upload short video replies directly in certain subreddits.

Sam Bankman-Fried lost his appeal to overturn his FTX fraud conviction and 25-year sentence. Reuters reports: In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said prosecutors' evidence against Bankman-Fried "was, conservatively stated, robust." "While he was publicly reassuring customers, investors and regulators that FTX customer funds were safe, he was simultaneously using FTX as his own personal piggy bank, spending customer funds on real estate, political contributions, and investments," Circuit Judge Barrington Parker wrote on behalf of the panel. Bankman-Fried's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. They may next ask all the active judges on the 2nd Circuit to hear the case, or ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. Bankman-Fried is also seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump, according to the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for "masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in American history," wrote US District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He was convicted on all charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The comprehensive guide can help companies build AI data centers that use energy efficiently to keep costs low and maintain grid stability

RICHLAND, Wash., June 12, 2026 — As more companies invest in data centers to support their shift to AI-driven systems, demand for electricity will rise significantly.

Credit: Shutterstock

To help developers, engineers, utilities and policymakers understand the complexities and best practices of building a data center, the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has codeveloped a comprehensive guide to siting, building and maintaining the facilities. The guide was written by experts from PNNL, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association and ASHRAE.

The new guide acts as a one-stop shop for anyone involved in the development of a data center, said Kieren McCord, a systems engineer at PNNL and lead author of the guide.

“Policymakers, utilities and builders of data centers can find research-backed best practices in this guide for building data centers that keep energy costs low while safely maintaining operations,” McCord said.

Data centers have been storing our data for decades, but in the last 20 years, large tech companies have been building what’s known as “hyperscaler” data centers, which house thousands of individual servers in buildings up to 1 million square feet. These servers store, process and analyze terabytes of data from all kinds of industries—from tech to manufacturing to research—as well as help to train AI models used in those same fields.

“All customers benefit from these collaborative efforts to ensure that new AI data center customers are good grid citizens,” said Steve Rosenstock, senior manager of customer technology solutions for the Edison Electric Institute. “The broad participation in this project shows how committed we all are to customer efficiency, reliability and affordability.”

Working with the Grid

As of 2023, data centers in the United States use about 4.4% of the country’s total electricity consumption, and that could rise to 12% by 2028. Because AI-driven data centers use so much power, researchers are looking into ways that the facilities can support grid stability.

“A grid-interactive design enables a data center to actively communicate and coordinate with the electrical grid. That way, they can evolve from passive energy consumers to active participants in managing electricity usage from the electrical grid,” said Srinivas Katipamula, a mechanical engineer and Laboratory Fellow at PNNL who wrote the guide’s section on grid-interactive data center operation.

The new guide describes several strategies for building a grid-interactive data center. For instance, developers could use microgrids or on-site battery systems to store and use energy when demand on the grid is high, Katipamula said.

During times when electricity demand is low, a data center’s batteries would charge. When demand for electricity starts to rise throughout the day or at different times of year (such as in the summer, when more people use air conditioning), data centers could pull power from their battery systems. A microgrid would allow a data center to isolate itself from the larger grid while continuing to operate.

Data centers can also employ smart controls that automatically decrease or increase operations in response to demand on the grid.

“PNNL brings world-class expertise on grid integration, energy efficiency, and resilience to this collaboration. Their engineering- and research-driven approach is exactly what the data center industry needs as these facilities become increasingly grid-interactive. Modern data centers are participating in demand response, integrating on-site generation and storage, and managing real-time power quality, which dramatically increases technical complexity,” said NEMA President and CEO Debra Phillips.

A major contributor to a data center’s power usage is cooling the servers—another issue addressed by the new guide.

The ‘Thermal Management’ Problem

Data centers store thousands of individual servers, each about the size of a laptop. These units are running all the time, creating heat.

“It’s hard to estimate how hot the data center interior can become, but think about when your laptop feels warm on your lap. Now multiply that by an entire room of server racks,” McCord said.

Data centers spend about 20–40 percent of their energy simply on cooling. The new guide describes several ways data center operators reduce their electricity loads while cooling, especially during times when demand on the grid is already high.

Some operators will raise the set temperature and let the space get a bit warmer, similar to when utilities ask homeowners to set their air conditioning temperatures a little higher to relieve grid pressure during a heatwave.

Some operators will pre-cool the data center in anticipation for a rise in electricity demand.

“That way, during the demand time, the room and servers are still warming up from the colder temperatures so that electricity isn’t needed for cooling,” McCord said.

Some tech companies are even working on improving the ways that individual servers can themselves cool down to the chip level, McCord added.

Industry Collaborators

The new guide “translates complex technical challenges into clear, actionable strategies that help operators enhance performance, control costs and make more effective use of energy, while strengthening reliability at both the facility and grid level,” said 2025-26 ASHRAE President Bill McQuade.

Besides grid-interactive design and cooling guidance, the new guide also covers planning and siting, operations and maintenance and integrated design, among other topics. The guide is available here.

To create the new guide, PNNL, NEMA and ASHRAE teamed up with more than 50 industry partners, including tech companies like NVIDIA and IBM, as well as heating, ventilation and air conditioning manufacturers like Carrier and Siemens.

“This guide brings together the most comprehensive industry expertise on data centers in a single resource,” said Bing Liu, director of buildings and industrial programs at PNNL, who launched this industry-lab partnership a year ago. “Rather than being frozen in time, it’s a dynamic online resource that can be updated, remain relevant and stay accessible to anyone involved in developing a data center.”

About PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Source: JoAnna Wendel, PNNL

The post PNNL: Everything You Need to Know About Building Data Centers, in One Place appeared first on HPCwire.

Users reported problems with Meta's social media platforms on Friday morning. Things seem to have improved.

Could we see more surprises from Microsoft at the Xbox Games Showcase?

NEW YORK, June 12, 2026 — KKR, together with the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA), NVIDIA and Vistra, has announced the launch of Helix Digital Infrastructure, a new company designed to deliver integrated infrastructure at the speed and scale required for hyperscalers to meet accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) demand. As building AI infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, Helix will serve as a single coordination point for hyperscalers’ data centers, power, connectivity and related needs.

Founded with anchor investments from investors including KKR, KIA, NVIDIA and Vistra, the Helix strategy has more than $10 billion in total long-duration capital commitments to date. NVIDIA will also serve as a strategic partner to support the deployment of NVIDIA DSX AI factory-aligned infrastructure with a view to maximizing tokens per watt, achieving lowest total cost of ownership and accelerating time to first token for investments pursued by Helix. Vistra, a leading integrated power generation and electricity company with operations across 18 states and Washington, D.C., will be the preferred power provider for Helix investments. Following the closing of the founding commitments, Helix is open to additional eligible institutional investors.

AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in modern history, requiring trillions of dollars in investment across data centers, power generation and transmission, connectivity and related infrastructure over the coming decade. The scale and complexity of financing and coordinating this buildout represents a key industry bottleneck, ultimately slowing hyperscalers from delivering the models, services and applications their customers demand. Delivering AI infrastructure requires credible, long-term financial underwriters capable of committing capital consistently. Hyperscalers are also seeking more integrated and repeatable infrastructure solutions that meaningfully reduce the complexity they face in building at unprecedented scale.

KKR launched Helix in response to these challenges. Helix will be positioned as a single, trusted strategic partner to hyperscalers, armed with a long-duration, multi-billion-dollar capital base, and with integrated development capabilities and coordinated execution across AI infrastructure. The company is led by Adam Selipsky, former CEO of Amazon Web Services, who brings first-hand experience scaling the world’s largest cloud business, and deep insight into hyperscaler infrastructure priorities. He is joined by a dedicated management team and Board. Waldemar Szlezak, KKR’s Global Head of Digital Infrastructure, will serve as Helix’s Chief Investment Officer. Helix will seek to invest in and manage assets critical to enabling AI, including hyperscale data center development and operations; baseload and flexible power generation; transmission and distribution infrastructure; and fiber and connectivity infrastructure, among other assets.

“Large users of digital infrastructure have an urgent need to reduce complexity and unlock new capacity. Helix combines significant long-term capital with the capabilities and expertise to deliver holistic AI infrastructure solutions with speed and scale,” said Adam Selipsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Helix Digital Infrastructure. “Helix is further strengthened by strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and Vistra across technology and power, which we believe will enable the company to deliver the infrastructure that will underpin hyperscalers’ AI strategies for years to come.”

“We view AI infrastructure as one of the defining long-term investment opportunities globally, and Helix is purpose-built to address it,” said Sheikh Saoud Salem Abdulaziz Al-Sabah, Managing Director of the Kuwait Investment Authority. “Helix reflects a differentiated model that combines proven leadership, integrated capabilities and long-term capital required to deliver the next generation of critical digital infrastructure at scale.”

“Useful AI has arrived, and demand for AI factories is extraordinary,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in modern history. With the NVIDIA DSX platform and the Helix strategic partnership, we are bringing together a proven AI factory blueprint, world-class infrastructure expertise from KKR, and long-term capital to help AI cloud providers build the next generation of intelligence infrastructure.”

“Power generation and grid interconnections are critical gating factors for AI infrastructure deployments,” said Jim Burke, president and CEO of Vistra. “Helix brings together data center development, infrastructure and power capabilities under a single umbrella, providing a one-stop shop for large load customers. By utilizing Vistra’s existing fleet to deliver near-term power, Helix will accelerate delivery of power solutions through the use of existing assets while also bringing additionality with Vistra’s best-in-class capabilities, including power generation development and power grid expertise. Vistra has a proven track record in executing more than 5,000 megawatts of power purchase agreements with hyperscalers and looks forward to leveraging our leading and diverse generation fleet and operational expertise as Helix’s preferred power partner to help deliver the reliable, affordable energy these customers require.”

“Like a DNA helix, Helix Digital Infrastructure is built on a double strand of complementary strengths—KKR’s institutional capital and infrastructure expertise intertwined with Helix’s hyperscaler leadership and execution engine. Together, with our strategic partners, we are positioned to meet the financial and operational demands of the AI era,” said Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, Co-Chief Executive Officers, KKR.

Helix is supported by KKR’s leading global infrastructure platform, which includes over $100 billion in infrastructure assets under management and more than $70 billion invested across digital and power assets. KKR’s experience across data centers, renewable and conventional power generation and transmission, fiber and related sectors provides the foundation for Helix’s integrated model. KKR’s anchor investment in the Helix strategy is funded through its balance sheet and other managed vehicles.

About Helix Digital Infrastructure

Helix Digital Infrastructure is a dedicated company focused on investing in, delivering and managing the next generation of AI-enabling infrastructure. Founded with anchor investors including KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority, NVIDIA and Vistra, the company has access to a long-duration, multi-billion-dollar pool of capital. Supported by KKR’s leading global infrastructure platform, Helix is designed to deliver integrated solutions across hyperscale data centers, power generation and transmission, fiber, connectivity and related infrastructure. Helix is led by Adam Selipsky, former CEO of Amazon Web Services, and a management team with extensive experience across cloud, digital infrastructure and energy systems. For more information about Helix, please visit www.helixdi.com.

About KKR

KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKR’s insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKR’s investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKR’s website at www.kkr.com. For additional information about Global Atlantic Financial Group, please visit Global Atlantic Financial Group’s website at www.globalatlantic.com.

About the Kuwait Investment Authority

The Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) is the world’s oldest sovereign wealth fund, established in 1953. The KIA’s main functions include managing the State’s General Reserve and Future Generations Fund. Stemming from this rich history, the KIA continues to safeguard the financial wealth of Kuwait’s current and future generations by diversifying revenue streams and ensuring a fiscally sustainable and secure future.

About Vistra

Vistra (NYSE: VST) is a leading, Fortune 500 integrated retail electricity and power generation company based in Irving, Texas. The company serves 5 million retail customers and operates a growing portfolio of generation assets expected to reach a capacity of nearly 50,000 megawatts by year-end 2026. Vistra is a leader in transforming the energy landscape, with an unyielding focus on reliability, affordability, and sustainability. The company safely operates a reliable, efficient power generation fleet of natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, and battery energy storage facilities while taking an innovative, customer-centric approach to its retail business. Learn more at https://www.vistracorp.com.

Source: KKR

The post KKR Launches Helix Digital Infrastructure with $10B to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Buildout appeared first on HPCwire.

With expanded touch support in Sidecar, you can, for the first time, navigate MacOS via touch.

Trump administration created fund to resolve his lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns

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A federal judge in Virginia has extended an order blocking the Trump administration’s nearly $1.8bn slush fund, saying the administration’s public statements that the fund was dead were not assuring enough.

The US district judge Leonie Brinkema, an appointee of Bill Clinton, said she would lift her order if the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, filed a declaration under penalty of perjury that the fund was not moving forward in the next week.

Consumer sentiment still remains at historically low levels amid Iran war and rising inflation, new survey shows

Easing gas prices are making Americans feel better about their personal finances and the economy in June, but consumer sentiment remains at historically low levels amid ongoing conflict in the Middle East, according to new survey data from the University of Michigan.

The latest numbers come as SpaceX marks its historic stock market debut, which has made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Yet many Americans still feel like they are struggling even as the stock market reaches record highs.

President is first in US history to be impeached twice, over abuse of power and inciting an insurrection

Donald Trump is pressing Congress to erase one of the darkest chapters of his political career, urging Republicans to pass a resolution that would symbolically nullify the two impeachments he suffered during his first term in office.

The effort, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a White House official, would allow Trump to claim a symbolic victory on a key grievance from his first term. But experts say it would have little legal significance, since the constitution provides no procedure for undoing an impeachment.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 12, 2026 — Vertiv, a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, today announced the completed acquisition of ThermoKey S.p.A., a leading provider of heat rejection and heat-exchange technologies with long-standing relationships across original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system integrators.

The acquisition expands Vertiv’s thermal management portfolio and manufacturing capabilities, particularly in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and strengthens its ability to deliver system-level solutions across the full thermal chain for AI factories and high-density data centers. ThermoKey benefits from Vertiv’s global scale, supporting accelerated growth and expanded market access while enhancing Vertiv’s ability to provide thermal architectures that help customers plan for multiple compute generations ahead.

Vertiv currently uses ThermoKey’s technologies in select thermal solutions. ThermoKey’s technology set includes heat-exchange solutions, dry coolers, and compatibility with low-GWP and natural refrigerants that complement Vertiv’s portfolio, giving customers flexibility to optimize for performance, site conditions, and growth. Founded in 1991, ThermoKey brings more than 30 years of engineering expertise, in-house design and production capabilities to support its customers and markets.

“Customers are scaling AI infrastructure at an unprecedented pace, and thermal performance is now a critical enabler of capacity and efficiency,” said Giordano Albertazzi, CEO at Vertiv. “With ThermoKey, we are strengthening our capabilities to deliver differentiated, integrated, high-performance heat rejection solutions that help customers deploy faster, operate more efficiently, and scale with confidence.”

The ThermoKey Rivarotta, Italy, operations will continue to be a key hub for manufacturing, engineering, and support. Giuseppe Visentini, CEO of ThermoKey, will continue to lead the business, providing continuity for employees, partners, and customers. “Joining Vertiv means bringing our heat-exchange expertise into a complete, integrated thermal chain that serves high-density data centers,” said Visentini. “We share Vertiv’s engineering rigor and customer focus. ThermoKey joins Vertiv on a path of sustained growth, and from Italy we will continue to build on that momentum and contribute to the strength of the group across EMEA and around the world.”

For more information on Vertiv’s leading portfolio of power and thermal management, infrastructure solutions, IT systems, and services for critical digital applications, visit Vertiv.com.

About Vertiv

Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv does business in more than 130 countries. For more information, and for the latest news and content from Vertiv, visit Vertiv.com.

Source: Vertiv

The post Vertiv Completes Acquisition of ThermoKey, Expanding Heat Rejection Portfolio for AI Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.

Africa Aware: Navigating Somalia’s political stalemate Audio jon.wallace 12 June 2026

Our guests discuss issues surrounding President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s constitutional amendments and possible ways out of the political impasse they created.

As 15 May 2026 drew closer, there was growing uncertainty surrounding Somalia’s next political transition: the date marked the official end of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term, yet no election date was set. 
 
Instead, the president officially signed a final set of constitutional amendments passed by majority vote in the Federal Parliament into law. He contends that this grants an extra year to his term which now expires on 15 May 2027. 

Opposition to the implementation of the constitutional amendments persists and Somalia now faces a political impasse that threatens to deepen political fragmentation. 
 
In this episode, Professor Afyare Abdi Elmi and Aweis Ahmed discuss scenarios to navigate Somalia’s current political stalemate and pathways for a peaceful political transition. 

About Africa Aware 

Africa Aware is a podcast from the Chatham House Africa Programme bringing together leading international experts to provide in-depth analysis and sharp insights on the political, economic and social issues shaping African countries, their international relations and the continent as a whole. 

You can also listen to Africa Aware on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
 

The Pentagon on Friday released a new group of documents and videos related to UFOs, or UAPs, with 72 more documents, images and recordings.

The SpaceX CEO's fortune on paper now rivals the annual economic output of many countries, according to World Bank data.

A federal judge continued to block the Justice Department's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund, expressing skepticism with the administration's claims that the program is not moving forward.

Brent crude falls as optimism rises that strait of Hormuz could reopen over the weekend

Global oil prices fell on Friday to lows not seen since the first week of the Iran crisis after Donald Trump claimed he was close to reaching a peace deal with Tehran.

The price of Brent crude began to tumble from about $93 a barrel in overnight trade after the US president called off further military strikes against Iran scheduled for the evening.

Infineon is set to open a $5.8 billion power-chip fab in Dresden on July 2, backed by about $1.1 billion in EU Chips Act subsidies. The plant will make power semiconductors for AI data centers and could eventually add up to $5.8 billion in annual revenue as demand for AI infrastructure strains global electricity systems. Bloomberg reports: Infineon, traditionally a chipmaker for the automotive industry, has increasingly benefited from soaring demand for power chips used in AI data centers, which will be produced at the new facility. "The AI data centers currently being built and planned around the world will consume twice as much electricity in 2030 as they do today," [said Chief Operating Officer Alexander Gorski]. "That's as much as the entire Federal Republic of Germany." Chip production at the Dresden fab will be scaled over time depending on demand, potentially adding as much as 5 billion euros in revenue per year, Gorski said, declining to comment on when full capacity will be reached. The company has invested around 2 billion euros on construction and the remaining amount will be spent over time to add more machines to the fab, he added. The new facility is "a key catalyst," Bank of America analysts including Didier Scemama wrote in a note last week. Demand from Al customers is materially above Infineon's current capacity, they said, adding the imbalance could improve in the 2027 and 2028 financial years. The analysts raised their Al power revenue forecast for the company by 500 million euros to 4.5 billion euros for 2028. Infineon expects data center-related revenue to rise from around 1.5 billion euros in fiscal 2026 -- roughly 10% of sales -- to 2.5 billion euros in 2027, it said last month. The hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in AI are driving the rapid expansion of data center capabilities around the world. Infineon doesn't produce advanced AI chips, like those designed by Nvidia. But the power semiconductors it plans to produce in Dresden are still needed for AI infrastructure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paris meeting draws up proposals and calls for urgent diplomacy towards two-state solution at summit next week

Palestinian and Israeli civil society groups meeting in Paris on Friday have urged G7 leaders to act at their summit in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains next week to save the narrowing chances of a two-state solution.

The groups called for specific action on enforcing a ceasefire, disarming Hamas and starting reconstruction in Gaza, and said the various peace processes including the Board of Peace initiative should be integrated into one programme.

Some major games are coming to PS Plus this month.

The advent of AI puts a premium on developing skills like critical thinking and communication, according to education experts. The liberal arts can help.

AI companies are increasingly excited about giving AI agents control of the shopping cart.

CD account interest rates are high across terms right now. Here are four of the best to consider this June.

The prime minister defended the ‘hard-edged decisions’ he has made to cut funding from other departments to spend more on defence

As armed forces minister, Al Carns was not involved in work on the defence investment plan (Dip). In his resignation letter, he said it was flawed not just because of the amount of funding involved; he also claimed it focused too much on the wrong capability. He said (and I’ve highlighted the key phrases in bold):

The character of conflict is changing faster than our procurement can keep up with. We are still purchasing capability suitable for the last war while our adversaries arm for the next one. Platforms that cost billions can be defeated by systems that cost thousands. Any serious defence investment plan has to start from that reality.

While I had no hand in the defence investment plan, that distance does allow me to say plainly that it is not built for the threat we face.

I want to see a higher percentage for uncrewed systems, AI, data – data is the new gunpowder – and we’ve got to move that forward if we are going to win the next war.

Too many working people in this country feel insecure even when they are doing everything right. They work hard, contribute, pay their taxes and still feel one setback away from trouble. Public confidence in our institutions is weakening and politics increasingly looks performative while everyday life gets harder.

The machinery of government itself has been left to decay. Decisions that should take days, take months. Departments fight each other instead of the problem. Officials and ministers who know the truth are not always rewarded for telling it. We are trying to govern a more dangerous world with processes designed for a calmer one, and the gap is now showing in the things that matter most.

City has become caught up in the drama as team stands on brink of a first NBA championship in 53 years

After the New York Knicks’ furious comeback over the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night, the last place anyone in the city wanted to be was at home. Taylor Swift and Larry David were among the celebrities who lingered at Madison Square Garden after the final buzzer sounded on the 107-106 victory as Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York washed over the arena.

The former Knick Iman Shumpert, sporting his old No 21 jersey, made a beeline from the arena to Times Square to join the stunned celebration. All over the city, car horns blared, raucous watch parties spilled on to the streets and perfect strangers greeted one another by barking “Go Knicks!”. As they might put it on Broadway: it was just one of those nights.

Public figures sign open letter calling for scheme to be moved from Home Office to independent body

• UK politics live – latest updates

The prime minister and the home secretary have been urged to remove the Windrush compensation scheme from Home Office control.

About 70 public figures have signed an open letter backing a call by the Windrush Justice Community Collective (WJCC) for a radical overhaul of the scheme, which was set up to compensate those, mainly Black Britons, who were wrongly classed as illegal migrants and stripped of citizenship rights over decades.

Multiple tornadoes touched down in Livingston county, Illinois, on 12 June. One tore through the city of Streator, damaging homes and infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of people in the region were left without power

PM promises to fight any leadership challenge, saying any successor would face same problems as him

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has said he knows he has to “turn things around” after a series of crises culminating in the resignation of John Healey, the defence secretary, but warned that any successor would face the same difficult decisions.

In an interview with the BBC after Healey’s departure in a row over defence spending, Starmer promised again to fight any leadership challenge from Andy Burnham or others, saying: “I’m not going to walk away.”

While venues could stay open until 2am, rising costs remain a far bigger concern for many landlords

Picture the scene: it’s 1am on a sultry July night and Jude Bellingham has just scored the decisive penalty to send England into the World Cup semi-final. Cue wild celebrations among millions of pub goers, fuelled by the realisation that there is still an hour until closing time.

Keir Starmer may have imagined a national morale-boosting spectacle such as this when his government told hospitality venues that they could stay open until 2am on some World Cup match days.

New leaks point to a much larger battery and a summer launch alongside the Galaxy Watch 9.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Few business leaders have been as deeply embedded in popular culture as Elon Musk, the ambitious entrepreneur who has become a central figure in internet culture and amassed a fortune that has made him the world's first trillionaire. At a time when concerns about inequality are high and public attitudes toward the ultra-wealthy have soured, Musk has managed to retain a loyal following despite his stratospheric net worth and without the folksy persona that endeared other tycoons such as Warren Buffett to the masses. While admirers view Musk's no-filter style as part of his appeal, critics have accused him of wielding oligarch-like power, raised concerns about governance at his companies and objected to his increasingly partisan political interventions. Still, SpaceX, the sprawling rocket, satellite and AI company that together with electric-car maker Tesla form the center of Musk's empire, raised a record $75 billion in its initial public offering on Thursday, highlighting investor enthusiasm for his business ventures. Prior to the share sale, Forbes pegged his net worth at roughly $780 billion, far ahead of the man next in line, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page. "The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow," said Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth. "And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion." Most of Musk's wealth now rests with SpaceX, where he holds a stake worth roughly $866 billion. Along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, his net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading Friday, according to Forbes and Reuters calculations based on company filings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive A vast area of the Bellingshausen Sea should be covered by sea ice by now, with one expert calling the loss of ice ‘depressing’

Antarctica’s west coast is missing an area of winter sea ice the size of France, sparking concerns for threatened penguins other marine life and global sea levels.

One expert said the loss of ice in the Bellingshausen Sea was “depressing” and the failure of ice to form could have intensified a heatwave over the continent’s peninsula last week that saw daytime temperatures peak at 15.4C which is more than 20C above average.

Rising artificial intelligence demand has led to a nationwide construction boom of power-hungry data centers in recent years, driving concern about rising utility costs. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., recently called for raising taxes on companies building data centers and said they’ve increased electricity bills for Americans.

"If you live near one of these large data centers, your electricity bills over the last five years have gone up by as much as 267%," Warren said in a June 5 X post.

Warren used that same figure in a December 2025 letter she and other senators sent to tech firms when announcing an investigation into their effect on utilities costs. The letter cited a September 2025 Bloomberg article analyzing data centers’ effects on electricity prices.

That article found that wholesale prices in locations near data centers have risen, in some places, by "as much as 267%" compared with five years ago. But that figure was referring to the rate utility companies pay producers, not the rates people pay to the utility companies for their monthly residential electric bills. 

Warren’s office pointed us to reporting from CBS News and Fortune that also mischaracterized the Bloomberg analysis as an increase in consumer bills. 

Warren’s office also provided examples of reporting on residents’ energy bills in states like Virginia and Maryland with sizable month-over-month increases last winter, in some cases doubling or tripling compared with the previous year or months. Some articles cited data center demand, along with abnormally cold weather, as causes of the increases. 

Residential electricity prices have risen in the last five years, and data center demand is a big driver in some areas. But Warren’s specific figure misrepresented the data.

What is included in a residential electricity bill?

The Bloomberg article analyzed local pricing points, called nodes, on the power grid, and found wholesale prices at some nodes near data centers increased by 267% between April 2020 and April 2025. Looking at the broader market, wholesale prices have more than doubled in some markets since 2020, the article said, while prices elsewhere have risen less sharply. 

That local wholesale price is not the same rate residents pay, Kenneth Gillingham, an economist at Yale School of the Environment, said. 

"There are other parts of the electricity bills, and the wholesale nodal electricity prices only raise the ‘supply’ component of electricity bills," he said in an email to PolitiFact.

The supply cost makes up about 30% to 50% of a consumer’s electricity bill, Gillingham said. Other components include the cost of transmission, distribution and taxes. 

Wholesale prices are often passed on to all the grid’s customers, including businesses. Utility companies often need to get rate increases approved by state regulators before passing that cost on, Gillingham said. 

Data centers have increased electricity bills

On average, residential electricity costs across the U.S. have risen by 42% in the last five years, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Data centers aren’t the sole reason, but they’ve been a major driver in some places where costs have risen the most. 

Between March 2021 and March 2026, average residential retail electricity prices rose 94% in Washington, D.C., 74% in Maryland, 73% in Maine, and 58% in New York, according to the federal energy data.

In some regions, wholesale capacity markets — in which power plants are paid to be available based on expected demand — have been a contributor to price increases. PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, has seen record-high capacity prices three years in a row.

The Independent Market Monitor for PJM reported in 2025 that "data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices."

The report found that current and projected data center demand increased capacity costs by $9.3 billion, or 174% for the 2025-26 delivery year, compared with a scenario with no data center demand. 

Reports from the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel and the District of Columbia Public Service Commission pointed to data center load as one cause of rising electric bills. 

Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, said Warren has a broader point that consumers could be subsidizing the data centers. 

"Data centers are causing tens of billions of dollars of price increases in wholesale power markets and driving utilities to spend tens of billions of dollars on delivery infrastructure," Peskoe said. "In general, these cost increases are spread to all ratepayers by the utility."

Costs are likely to continue increasing without policy changes. One 2024 study found that data center demand increases without investment in generation and transmission capacity could increase electricity rates in Virginia by as much as 70% in the next decade. 

Data centers aren’t the sole cause of rising electricity prices. Other factors include equipment costs, an aging energy grid and clean energy requirements, according to a 2026 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federally funded research center. 

Our ruling 

Warren said, "If you live near one of these large data centers, your electricity bills over the last five years have gone up by as much as 267%."

The figure she cited referred to wholesale prices, not the prices residential consumers pay every month. Wholesale prices are part of just one component of a residential electricity bill — the "supply" component, which makes up about 30% to 50% of a consumer’s electricity bill. 

Warren’s statement has an element of truth because data centers have driven up electricity costs, and average consumer prices have nearly doubled in areas such as the District of Columbia. 

But her statement gives the wrong impression about the precise effect on consumers’ utility bills so far. We rate it Mostly False. 

Nitenpyram is the first generic animal drug authorized to treat screwworms in dogs and cats, according to federal regulators.

Northern Ireland police say they got calls from distressed Belfast residents as a list of home addresses circulated online amid anti-immigration riots.

One man died in Iowa after a tree fell on him as nearly 700 severe weather events were recorded over three days

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An Illinois man whose home was destroyed by a tornado on Thursday was pulled from the rubble by a police officer and a photojournalist, who captured the terrifying storm and subsequent rescue in dramatic video footage.

Scott Lasker, who describes himself as a storm chaser, recorded the tornado ripping through the town of Streator and was filming the damage it inflicted when he came across the man trapped in the debris of his house.

Bradford-born painter, who made his name with sunkissed visions of California and never stopped breaking barriers, going on to become one of contemporary art’s most important figures, has died
• ‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’
• David Hockney’s life in pictures

David Hockney, the iconic British painter who cast a revolutionary gaze across 20th-century art, has died aged 88.

He made his name as a pop artist during the swinging 60s and was perhaps best known for his paintings of swimming pools that helped define the Los Angeles aesthetic. Works such as A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) depicted hedonistic scenes of love, lust and loss taking place below the city’s sun-soaked skies.

Despite no immediate evidence that they were connected, the detentions of two vocal commentators on Myanmar triggered alarm in the business and research communities.

If you want to try out a modern Amiga operating system, your choices are severely constrained. Both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 need PowerPC hardware, and at the moment, there’s little to no modern hardware available for purchase to run these operating systems on. The only AmigaOS 4 hardware you can buy is either incredibly outdated, incredibly expensive, or both, and while MorphOS does run on readily available Apple PowerPC machines, those, too, are getting quite long in the tooth and performance simply isn’t keeping up. Until the Mirari becomes available – with the project steadily progressing, I have high hopes – the reality for people wanting to try out AmigaOS or MorphOS is going to be expensive, at best.

Or is it? QEMU exists, and QEMU can emulate various PowerPC systems just fine. Shouldn’t it be possible to run these two unique operating systems in a virtual environment on your modern PC, thereby making it trivial for those of us interested in the world of Amiga to dip our toes into the water without having to spend inordinate sums for outdated hardware? It turns out that yes, this is entirely possible, and as I highlighted almost a year ago, George Sokianos has made this process effectively foolproof by developing a custom GUI frontend for QEMU specifically designed to make it incredibly easy to set up and run AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS in QEMU virtual machines.

We’re almost a year since that first version, and in that time, Sokianos has updated the tool, called Kyvos, to version 2. It costs a mere €9, and works on Linux (x86 and ARM), Windows (x86 and ARM) and macOS (x86 and ARM). You also get an incredibly detailed manual with step-by-step instructions for every supported operating system and specific emulated machine, which includes instructions for the convoluted AmigaOS 4 installation process, as well as a bunch of other information and helpful tips.

In addition, the manual includes links to where you can buy AmigaOS 4 – be sure to use these specific links to buy AmigaOS 4, because Sokianos gets a commission for sales through these links. AmigaOS 4 costs like €30, so it’s not a big investment. MorphOS can be downloaded for free, but after 30 minutes of use, the operating system will slow down and cripple itself, unless you pay for and register your copy for €79. I own a copy for my 17″ PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz, but I think copies are tied to hardware, so I haven’t tried registering it with my key yet. The MorphOS registration tool does not accept virtual machines, so you can’t use it to buy a copy for a virtual machine.

Kyvos’ graphical user interface mimics the UI of other virtual machine software like VirtualBox, and it will check to make sure you have all the correct dependencies and requirements installed. The guided setup processes for MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 virtual machines will tell you exactly which operating system ISOs and files you need and makes sure you have them, before setting up the QEMU virtual machines with the optimal settings. Once created, start the virtual machine, and they’ll boot from the installation media. Follow the included manual as you install the operating systems, including some post-install help, and you’ll end up with fully working, network-capable virtual machines running MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.

Both installation and setup procedures worked without any issues on my machine, and within like half an our I had to two fully working copies of MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 running on my Linux desktop gaming PC (I exempted myself from the Windows 11 incentive for this one, since my Linux gaming PC is by far the most powerful computer I own). Networking and sound works – AmigaOS 4 requires some post-install steps for those, listed in the Kyvos manual – and I could browse the web right away with the included web browsers. The online update tool for AmigaOS 4 also works perfectly, allowing me to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system and various included components.

I’m anything but a MorphOS or AmigaOS 4 expert, so I can’t confidently say much about performance compared to best real compatible hardware out there, but at least for MorphOS I can say it runs considerably faster in this virtual machine than it does on my old 17″ PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz. I feel like AmigaOS 4 runs a bit smoother than MorphOS does, as with the latter I experienced the occasional hiccup and stutter which were absent on AmigaOS 4. Still, both are entirely usable and a pleasure to use.

With how limited the hardware selection for these two operating systems is, using QEMU through Kyvos is by far the easiest and most straightforward way to dip your toes into the waters of the modern Amiga operating systems. For a total of around €40, you’ll be running AmigaOS 4 in a very capable and straightforward way, and if and when MorphOS allows registration for virtual machines (they really should), an additional €79 will give you a fully working installation of that unique operating system, too.

Kyvos is a complete no-brainer for anyone reading OSNews.

A manhunt is underway for an "armed and dangerous" suspect linked to a shooting at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto after an officer was fatally shot.

The goblin shark had only previously been seen when caught by fishermen and they died shortly afterward.

They came for the soccer but they're living for fast food and big box stores.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, already under investigation for alleged influence-peddling, facing questions over items found in office safe

The former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is being investigated for possible tax fraud and smuggling after police discovered jewellery valued at more than €1.3m (£1.1m) while searching his office safe as part of a separate inquiry.

Zapatero, who led two socialist governments between 2004 and 2011, is already under investigation for alleged influence-peddling and other offences relating to the state bailout of the Spanish Plus Ultra airline during the Covid pandemic. He is alleged to have overseen “a hierarchical structure of influence-peddling”, whose purpose was “to obtain economic benefits through intermediation and the exercise of influence before public bodies in favour of third parties, mainly Plus Ultra”.

With more than 177,000 people forcibly disappeared since 2011, short doc Maybe Tomorrow captures ‘the violence of waiting’ experienced by family

When Wafa Mustafa was a child, she remembers her father playing the music of Umm Kulthum non-stop at home in Syria, humming along to the legendary Egyptian singer’s melodic tones. One day, in an effort to encourage his daughter to appreciate music, he asked her to take a pen and paper and write the lyrics of a song she loved. Wanting to impress him, Mustafa chose an Umm Kulthum song called “Aghadan Alqak”, which translates to: “Will I meet you tomorrow?”

“The lyrics are literally about someone who’s gone, about the waiting for them and the love you have for them,” says Mustafa. “It feels like I knew what was coming … as if I manifested my life since I was very young.”

Cyber agency says BlackCore targeted John Swinney, as well as interfering in New York and French elections

France’s cybersecurity agency has accused the Israeli tech company BlackCore of interfering in the Scottish elections earlier this year by targeting the first minister, John Swinney.

The disinformation detection agency Viginum said BlackCore had this year used proxy social media accounts to target Swinney, the Scottish National party, and the Scottish government on four occasions.

Despite plunging border crossings, the Trump administration is circumventing laws to expedite building in a vast, pristine wilderness

The Trump administration has waived a slew of environmental and historical preservation laws that would allow it to build a towering border wall that cuts through Big Bend national park, a vast protected wilderness in south Texas.

Congress poured a whopping $46.5bn for border wall construction into the “Big, Beautiful” bill last year, supercharging Donald Trump’s ambition to wall off the southern border with Mexico. The longest unwalled stretches lie along a roughly 500-mile (800km) section of west Texas that Customs and Border Protection calls the “Big Bend sector”.

The confusion over hantavirus and Ebola is a reminder that we must do better at explaining how to respond to an outbreak

Two unfolding outbreaks continue to command global attention. As a hantavirus outbreak tied to a cruise ship appears to be petering out, Ebola cases continue to mount in Africa. Alongside them have emerged familiar artifacts of the Covid era, including dashboards, trackers, maps, risk estimates and a polarized mix of alarming and dismissive takes.

Once again, we’re able to watch disease spread in almost real time. Yet despite all the information, many people are left asking the same questions: what can I trust? How bad is this, really? What should I do?

It's the second time this year that authorities detained a stowaway holding a huge stash of drugs in the same harbor.

Decision to not overturn fallen crypto mogul’s 25-year prison sentence was handed down by three-judge panel

Sam Bankman-Fried on Friday lost his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded.

The decision was handed down by a three-judge panel of the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals.

High-resolution 3D images of the pion offer new insight into how this key particle forms the atomic nuclei of all visible matter.

June 12, 2026 — A team of researchers has leveraged a supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to reveal the internal structure of a pion in unprecedented detail. Pions are subatomic particles that help bind matter at some of the smallest scales in nature.

Graphic showing the transverse motion of a quark (green sphere) inside a proton whose spin is aligned to its direction of motion (large yellow arrow). Image credit: Valerie Lentz/Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Pions are closely connected to the strong nuclear force, the fundamental force that holds protons and neutrons together inside atomic nuclei. Understanding how pions work can help scientists explain how matter forms at its most fundamental level.

“Pions mediate the strong force that binds nucleons — that is, the protons and neutrons that account for an atom’s mass,” said Yong Zhao, an Argonne physicist and principal investigator on the project.

Scientists have long been interested in understanding how quarks are distributed within composite particles held together by the strong nuclear force. For the lightest of these particles, the pion, there are few experimental results available, so scientists rely on large-scale simulations to reveal their internal 3D structure.

The research helps resolve a fundamental mystery in nuclear physics: how visible matter forms from elementary particles such as quarks and gluons.

“Pion structure can be addressed at a profound level by quantifying its multidimensional structure,” Zhao said. ​“By probing the pion’s internal structure, we gain a deeper understanding of how quarks and gluons are confined to create visible matter.”

To investigate the pion’s structure, the team, which included scientists from DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the Polaris supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in combination with advanced theoretical frameworks to simulate the physics of the strong force. Their simulations produced high-resolution 3D images of the pion, showing how quarks are arranged inside the particle. The ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.

“Polaris allowed us to simulate how quarks move and correlate inside the pion, both along its direction of motion and across it,” Zhao explained. ​“The simulation captures hundreds of snapshots of our 4D spacetime, represented on a lattice with millions of grid points. This is a task possible only with large-scale parallel computing power like that of ALCF supercomputers. We thereby obtained high-resolution images of the quark structure inside a moving pion. These images reveal the transverse spatial distributions of quarks carrying different fractions of the pion’s momentum.”

The research team presented their results in a paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The Polaris calculations revealed the quark generalized parton distribution (GPD) of the pion, which helped the team generate a detailed 3D image of it. The pion GPD is determined with controlled systematic uncertainties across different quark longitudinal momentum values. These values are measured both along the direction of the pion’s motion and perpendicular to it.

“Our results reveal that the transverse size of the pion decreases as the momentum in the direction of the pion increases — a pattern also seen in the proton — and that the effective size of the pion is smaller than that of the proton at moderate parallel pion momentum values,” Zhao said.

Because there currently are no experimental measurements of the pion GPD, the team’s theoretical results provide valuable guidance and support for upcoming experiments, including those at the DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the future Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven.

“Our next step is to use the ALCF’s Aurora supercomputer to map the proton in three dimensions,” Zhao said. ​“Protons, together with neutrons, make up all the atomic nuclei that compose the visible matter in our universe.”

The team’s research was supported by DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

Source: Nils Heinonen, Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne Supercomputer Reveals Pion Structure in Unprecedented 3D Detail appeared first on HPCwire.

• Breaks have been added at World Cup for player safety

• Fox missed small amount of action during break

Fox is facing criticism from fans in the US after introducing full-screen adverts while players take hydration breaks during its World Cup broadcasts.

Fifa introduced the three-minute breaks for the World Cup amid fears that players could struggle in the heat of North America this summer. The breaks take place once each half in every match, regardless of temperature.

A fire at a medical equipment warehouse in northern California prompted evacuations from nearby facilities. Fire crews fought to get the blaze under control while thick black smoke poured into the sky. The company said everyone at the site at the time of the fire had been accounted for, while authorities said they were still unclear as to what caused the blaze

When President Donald Trump traveled to Suffern, New York, for a rally, he introduced the crowd to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the expected Republican nominee for governor. Trump praised Blakeman for blazing a new trail for Republican politicians in Nassau County, a populous, largely suburban district on Long Island, when he won the county executive race in 2021.

"Nassau County, it's all Democrat," Trump said at the May 22 rally. Referring to Blakeman, Trump said, "You know, when he ran years ago, he ran in Nassau. They said, you got to be kidding. It doesn't happen. No Republican wins in Nassau. And he ran and won."

It’s possible that’s the reaction Blakeman received. But it’s not the Republicans’ reality — they’ve performed well in Nassau. Seven Republicans have won the county executive position, compared with three Democrats.

Lawrence Levy — who covered Long Island politics for the local newspaper, Newsday, then became executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Long Island’s Hofstra University — dismissed Trump’s assertion as "almost laughable."

It would "certainly puzzle Nassau county Democrats who, aside from the occasional spurt of success in county and town races, have been spanked red far more often than not," Levy told PolitiFact New York.

When we reached out to the White House, a spokesperson directed us to Trump’s comments. We also reached out to Blakeman’s team but did not receive a response.

The political patterns in Nassau County throughout history

The strongest argument for Nassau County’s Democratic bona fides is its record in presidential elections. Trump won the county in 2024, but in doing so, he became the first Republican to accomplish that since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Downballot is a different story: Democrats and Republicans have both been successful for congressional and federal offices.

Portions of Nassau County have often been represented by Republicans in the House. Republican Peter King held a House seat that included portions of the county for two decades, from 1993 to 2013. Republican George Santos held King’s seat briefly before being expelled for lying extensively about his background.

Republican Andrew Garbarino has held a different district that includes Nassau County since 2021, and Republican Anthony D’Esposito held a different, more Democratic-leaning district from 2023 to 2025.

Who has won the Nassau County executive post?

Blakeman’s county executive post has been held more consistently by Republicans.

Blakeman ousted Laura Curran, a Democrat, in 2021. In the big picture, Curran was an exception: Democrats have occupied the Nassau County executive post for about 20 years out of the past 88. Here’s the list:

• J. Russell Sprague, Republican, 1938-52

• A. Holly Patterson, Republican, 1953-62

• Eugene Nickerson, Democrat, 1962-70

• Ralph G. Caso, Republican, 1970-78

• Francis T. Purcell, Republican, 1978-87

• Thomas Gulotta, Republican, 1987-2001 

• Tom Suozzi, Democrat, 2002-09

• Ed Mangano, Republican, 2010-17

• Laura Curran, Democrat, 2018-21

• Bruce Blakeman, Republican, 2022-present

Blakeman had previously served as presiding officer of the Nassau County Legislature. On the election day in which he won the executive office, Nassau County Republicans also flipped control of the county’s district attorney and comptroller offices, which Newsday characterized as "a complete sweep."

Our ruling

Trump said that when Blakeman ran for Nassau County executive, the general sentiment was that "no Republican wins in Nassau."

On the presidential level, Nassau County voted Democratic between 1992 and 2020. But for other offices, it has been competitive between the parties, and the position of county executive has generally been dominated by Republicans. Of Nassau County’s 10 county executives, seven of them have been Republican.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores information that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.

Flag bans, travel headaches and a religious regime video among bumps in road, as team prepares to be first to play in country with which it is at war

Iran will present a major challenge to Fifa’s “football unites the world” slogan on Monday by becoming the first country in World Cup history to compete on the soil of a host nation with which it is at war.

The national team’s opening match against New Zealand in Los Angeles will kick off amid continuing hostilities between Iran and the US that have intensified in recent days, as a fragile ceasefire has failed to hold and attempts at reaching a negotiated settlement have sputtered.

Guardian reporters Fabiola Cineas and Adria Walker held a Reddit Q&A about Louisiana v Callais – here’s a rundown

In April, the supreme court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais struck a massive blow to the Voting Rights Act, eliminating a key provision that gave minority voters representation in Congress.

Within days of the decision, Republican-led states in the south moved to redraw congressional maps to erase majority-Black districts. Some of those maps have already gone into effect ahead of the midterms.

President Donald Trump waded into the contentious “right to repair” your own auto debate, but he recounted a wildly inaccurate anecdote to bolster his support for consumers.

According to Trump, in remarks on June 4, “They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.”

The following day, at a roundtable on agriculture in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the president again referenced the case.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail,” Trump said. “You know that? Do you know that I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to seven years in jail because he got caught fixing his car or his truck? I said — I like to always say, ‘What did he do?’ ‘Sir, he was fixing his truck.’ I said, ‘How long is he getting?’ ‘Seven years.’ I said, ‘Say it again.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard — like two weeks ago. I gave him a pardon because he had to go to jail because he was fixing his tractor or his truck. Can you believe it?”

The White House did not respond to our request for backup, but Trump appears to be referring to his Nov. 7 pardon of Troy Lake, a Wyoming diesel mechanic who served seven months of a one-year sentence — not seven years — after pleading guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by disabling emissions monitoring systems on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks. (No other pardon in Trump’s second term fits the description.)

According to a Dec. 9, 2024, news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, Lake and his company, Elite Diesel Service Inc., instructed company employees “to disable the computerized on-board diagnostic (OBD) systems on at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. OBDs are required under the Clean Air Act to monitor emissions control hardware on vehicles to ensure that they are functioning properly.”

There were also eight co-conspirators, the release stated, who “hired Elite and Lake to manipulate the OBDs so that the OBDs would not detect the malfunctions.” Those co-conspirators, who cooperated with the investigators, were fined more than $500,000 in total.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Lake violated the Clean Air Act’s prohibition against tampering with monitoring devices.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, emissions control devices “are critical to maintaining air quality, and when these controls are disabled, the increase in excess tailpipe pollution is significant. A study of the effects of tampering with these 344 trucks showed that the conspirators in this case collectively caused an illegal increase in pollutants of at least 1,300 tons of excess nitrogen oxides, 30 tons of excess non-methane hydrocarbons, 600 tons of excess carbon monoxide, and 30 tons of excess particulate matter.”

“For years, the defendants led a large-scale conspiracy designed to violate the Clean Air Act by defeating emissions control equipment on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks,” Special Agent in Charge Lance Ehrig of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division in Colorado said at the time. “The actions by the defendants and their co-conspirators directly resulted in a significant increase in excess pollution, which diminished air quality and further placed vulnerable populations at risk of developing adverse health conditions.”

Lake maintained he was merely trying to spare small businesses from expensive and unnecessary repair bills.

“I didn’t want to be Robin Hood. I just felt that it was wrong for what the government was doing to American people that wanted to work,” Lake told Fox News on Oct. 27.

“All of us true Americans aren’t opposed against clean air. We want clean air,” Lake told Wyoming’s Oil City News in November. “But my problem with the deal was I just started seeing more and more — especially owner-operators or small companies — going out of business or struggling to keep this stuff running. It cost them $20,000 to fix it and I was charging them $2,500 or $2,800 to delete it and never have that problem again.”

Lake’s case caught the attention of Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who petitioned the president in October for a pardon, casting Lake’s conviction as an example of the Biden administration’s “overreach into the daily lives of hardworking Americans in communities across the west.”

That same month, Lummis introduced the Diesel Truck Liberation Act, which would prohibit the federal government from “requiring manufacturers to install or maintain emissions control devices or onboard diagnostic systems” and remove “EPA authority to enforce Clean Air Act requirements related to vehicle emissions controls.” It would also bar the civil or criminal prosecution of those who violate “federal law for tampering or improving emissions equipment.” The bill has not made it out of committee.

On Jan. 21, the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resource Division announced via X that it would no longer criminally prosecute cases such as Lake’s.

“Today, [the Justice Department] is exercising its enforcement discretion to no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices in motor vehicles,” the post said. “DOJ is committed to sound enforcement principles, efficient use of government resources, and avoiding overcriminalization of federal environmental law.”

The post noted, however, that DOJ would “still pursue civil enforcement for these violations when appropriate.”

The same day as that DOJ announcement, the government dropped its case against Tracy Coiteux, a Washington woman who had appealed a 2024 conviction for tampering with diesel trucks’ emissions monitoring systems.

On Feb. 12 — two weeks before Lake was Lummis’ guest at the State of the Union Address — Trump also pardoned Lake’s company, Elite Diesel Services Inc., which was sentenced to five years of probation at the same time Lake was sentenced. Trump’s pardon forgives $50,000 worth of fines levied against the company.

No matter what one thinks about Lake’s case, he was not sentenced to “seven years in jail … because he fixed his own car,” as Trump framed it.

Right to Repair

Moreover, the case is only tangentially related to the so-called “right to repair” debate to which Trump tied it.

“We had the auto industry in yesterday,” Trump said in remarks on June 4 about a meeting he had that included the heads of Ford, General Motors and Penske Corporation. “They don’t want people to fix their car. I said, that’s strange, I’ve never heard of that. They have a thing to — nobody’s allowed to fix their car. They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.

“Can you believe it?” Trump asked. “They want a bill that prohibits people from fixing. So if you’re mechanically inclined — you know, I grew up. I went to school with some guys; they were, in some cases, horrible students, but they could fix an engine blindfolded. … But they were great. And so there’s a move on to stop people from fixing their car. I didn’t understand it.”

The following day in Wisconsin, Trump asked local farmers at a roundtable, “Do you like it, the right to repair?

“It was a little strange,” Trump said. “I mean, some of you are better mechanics than the people at John Deere. … Let’s say you have a tractor, it’s broken and you know exactly how to fix it. You wouldn’t be too happy about being mandated to bring the tractor back to John Deere or wherever you got it, right? You’d like to fix it.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail. You know that? Do you know that I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to seven years in jail because he got caught fixing his car or his truck?”

Again, Lake was not prosecuted for simply “fixing his car or his truck.”

The issue of “right to repair” is contentious and also more complicated than Trump’s description suggests.

As the National Conference of State Legislatures explains, “Right to repair legislation is directed at the ability of consumers to repair their own products instead of going back to the original manufacturer for service.”

“In the context of the aftermarket, it refers to consumers’ ability to select who repairs and/or maintains their motor vehicles,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2024 report on the subject.

While, broadly, car buyers have the right to fix their own autos, or to take them to a repair shop of their choice (rather than to the dealer), a political debate has arisen over the “telematics” inside cars, “the wireless transmission of data to and from vehicles and data centers hosted by the vehicle manufacturers,” the CRS report said.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing most of the major auto manufacturers, argued in 2023 that public access to telematics would “create privacy and cybersecurity risks.”

As Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, wrote on June 8, “The conflict comes down to who has the proprietary right to all that know-how, intellectual property and access: the manufacturer, whose business model may rely on it, or the owner, who buys it.”

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

The post Trump’s Inaccurate Anecdote on ‘Right to Repair’ Cars appeared first on FactCheck.org.

As he finished a seven-day visit to Spain, the pope articulated a fuller position on migration, including the “right” of nations to protect their borders.

Purple Carrot is known as THE 100% vegan meal kit service, but it's not my favorite. Another company takes the lead.

"An unseen covert war of espionage is currently unfolding" in the waters off China, the country's minister of state security has alleged.

Investigators in Washington County, Minnesota, say they've identified the human remains found in two Twin Cities lakes more than three decades ago.

China says U.S. national U Min Zin, founder of a think tank focused on Myanmar, was detained on suspicion of "espionage and endangering China's national security."

Severe storms that swept through the Midwest late Thursday knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers, damaged buildings and canceled flights.

Nearly 40 women detained at Delaney Hall join striking men and outline demands ‘rooted in basic human rights’

Dozens of women detained inside the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in New Jersey announced their participation in a hunger and labor strike, advocates announced on Thursday.

The women, detained in unit 1 of the contentious privately run facility, also released a new list of demands. They are calling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release women under 21, women with medical conditions and mothers. They are also demanding improved conditions inside the facility and for their immigration cases to proceed more quickly.

This compact, stylish projector performs reasonably well but has an eye-watering price tag.

The JMGO N3 Ultimate lives up to its name, with impressive performance across the board.

An Iran​-linked hacker group claims to have breached FBI drones and has threatened to target the World Cup, a monitoring group says. The monitor disputes some of the other group's claims.

Jibril Rajoub attended opening match in Mexico but becomes latest football official hit by US visa issues, he says

The head of the Palestinian Football Association has said he is unable to travel to the United States with other federation heads attending the 2026 Fifa World Cup because he has not been issued a visa.

Jibril Rajoub went to the opening match between Mexico and South Africa in Mexico City on Thursday. But he is among several people accredited to attend the World Cup who have been denied visas or have yet to receive them from the United States.

Trump claims strikes called off as deal is close, but Tehran denies agreement near, while legal experts question if US targets may be a war crime. Plus 20 years of Taylor Swift’s incredible influence on pop culture

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Good morning. Yesterday, Donald Trump spent the day promising he was going to hit Iran harder than ever before, then announced – again – that the US and Iran were close to signing a deal. Iran’s foreign ministry dismissed the claim, and Tasnim, the semi-official Iranian news agency, wrote that “until a potential understanding is announced by Iran, any news from Trump on this matter should be dismissed”.

The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said large parts of the text under negotiation had been finalised but Iran would not compromise on its red lines. Two days of escalating attacks between the warring nations had threatened to collapse the fragile ceasefire.

What is the issue around the US choice of targets in Iran? Military strikes on 10 June that damaged two water storage facilities in southern Iran may constitute a war crime, legal and military experts say. The attack on the Bemani district destroyed a key reservoir serving about 20,000 people, raising critical legal questions over whether the strike hit a valid military objective or unlawfully targeted a civilian object.

Why is there a legal challenge to the method? The method has raised concerns for its apparent brutality. Eugene Smith, the first person to die by nitrogen hypoxia, thrashed and writhed on the gurney, according to witnesses. The last nitrogen execution, of Anthony Boyd, appeared to take more than 30 minutes as Boyd shuddered and gasped.

High street bank to buy UK business from US fintech company Acorns as it targets young people

• Business live – latest updates

Barclays is to buy an app designed to help children understand and manage their money, as it targets young people in affluent families.

The high street bank has agreed to buy the UK business of GoHenry, which provides children with personalised debit cards carrying their name, from the US fintech company Acorns, which will retain GoHenry’s US branch.

Plus, Brexit at 10, dinner as protest, 100 best novels and not watching the World Cup (yet)

We’re approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit referendum. Documentaries are being aired and newspaper features are being written. But one thing seems to be missing. Why aren’t all those big names who campaigned for Brexit back in 2016 now shouting from the rooftops about what a great success it has been?

A hands-on preview at Summer Game Fest revealed wry humor alongside blood-slick combat.

Desperate US parents pay up to $20,000 a session for a procedure scientists say could be bogus

Autistic children as young as 18 months old are being injected with human stem cells derived from umbilical cords in unapproved, unproven and potentially harmful “treatments” that scientists warn are proliferating across the US under the active encouragement of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Clinics in Florida, Texas and other states are selling what they bill as “regenerative medicine” to families with autistic children who have intensive care needs. Parents who have taken their children through the process talked to the Guardian about their hopes and fears for a therapy that appears to be gaining ground in the US.

Pokemon Go players' optional location scans reportedly helped train Niantic Spatial's visual positioning system, which uses camera imagery and 3D maps to navigate when GPS is unavailable or jammed. According to DroneXL, that technology is now being paired with Vantor's drone navigation software for military and intelligence use, raising questions about whether gamers understood that footage collected for in-game rewards could eventually support defense systems. From the report: The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor's aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations. I have spent years covering how drones lose their way the moment an electronic warfare unit switches on a jammer, a problem that has spread from the battlefield into civilian airspace, from Ukrainian workshops cycling through navigation generations to American programs scrambling for alternatives. The unsettling part of this story is not the technology. It is where the training data came from, and whether the people who supplied it would have agreed had anyone explained the destination. "Now as part of Scopely (the Saudi-owned company that acquired Niantic last year for $3.5 billion), Pokemon GO data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a company spokesperson said in a statement to Kotaku. "AR Scans collected through Pokemon GO were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokemon GO's move to Scopely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hockney was a globally celebrated painter who helped lead the Pop art movement in the 1960s, spent time in California, and defiantly refused to give up smoking.

Why has Albania’s Kushner controversy attracted such international attention? Expert comment jon.wallace 12 June 2026

Protests about plans for a luxury resort expose issues confronting all developing countries - over natural resources and sovereignty in an age of a triple planetary crisis. 

Last week, the streets of Tirana were filled with protesters brandishing inflatable flamingos. They had gathered in opposition to plans by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to develop a luxury resort on Albania’s largely unspoiled Sazan Island and the Zvërnec coastline near Vlora. The area is home to flamingos, more than 200 migratory bird species, Mediterranean monk seals and nesting sea turtles. The demonstrations lasted several days and spread internationally, with rallies reported in London and other European capitals.

It may seem unusual that plans for a resort in a relatively remote part of Albania generated such protest and international attention. To some extent, the involvement of Kushner is to blame – as Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama claimed when defending the project.

But the protests, held under the slogan ‘Albania is not for sale’, speak to a broader question: how much of a country’s environment and natural heritage should be sacrificed in the name of economic growth? 

This question acquires new urgency in an era defined by the accelerating triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Decisions about coastlines, forests and freshwater systems are no longer merely matters of domestic planning. They are increasingly tests of how governments reconcile development imperatives with ecological limits that are becoming harder to ignore.

Thus, what might once have been treated as a routine foreign investment project has become a flashpoint for debates about sovereignty, environmental protection and geopolitical alignment.

The government’s dilemma

For Rama’s government, the attraction of such a project, which is also backed by Qatari as well as local investors, is evident. Albania has spent decades attempting to attract the kind of foreign direct investment that wealthier European states often take for granted. 

Controversial amendments to Albania’s law on protected areas in 2024 opened the door to tourism development, enabling further expansion of a sector that has already more than tripled in size over the past decade. Large-scale tourism developments promise employment, infrastructure upgrades, fiscal revenue and international visibility. In a competitive global environment, they also signal that a country is ‘open for business’. 

In this sense, the proposed development represents precisely the kind of transformative investment that many governments in the Global South and parts of Europe’s periphery compete to secure.

Similar projects include large-scale coastal tourism projects in Egypt’s Red Sea region and major resort and infrastructure developments along Montenegro’s Adriatic coast. Both have been promoted as bringing jobs, foreign exchange and regional growth. In the case of Montenegro, EU accession is also a key aim.

Yet the very characteristics that make Albania attractive to investors are the same ones that underpin domestic and international opposition. 

The country’s relatively undeveloped coastline, rich biodiversity and ecological heterogeneity are not simply aesthetic assets. They are functional ecosystems that support fisheries, protect against coastal erosion, store carbon, and underpin climate resilience in a region already experiencing rising temperatures, water stress and extreme weather events.

In other words, what is at stake is not simply land use, but the integrity of critical ecological systems.

Development, conservation and the triple planetary crisis

Across the Mediterranean and beyond, ecosystems are under mounting pressure from habitat fragmentation, marine degradation, pollution and climate-induced stress. Rising sea temperatures are altering marine biodiversity. Coastal erosion is accelerating due to both natural and human pressures. At the same time, demand for land, water and infrastructure continues to grow, driven by tourism, urbanization and global capital flows.

The underlying question is no longer whether nature has economic value, but whether it can be converted into short-term financial gain without undermining the long-term ecological foundations on which that value depends.

The geopolitical layer

Yet Albania’s dilemma cannot be understood through economics or environmental policy alone.

The country occupies a strategically complex position. As a NATO member and a candidate for EU accession, it is embedded in Western security structures but outside the EU’s economic and regulatory framework. It is seeking deeper integration with Europe, while trying to maintain strong ties with the United States.

This dual orientation embeds environmental governance within geopolitical dynamics, as access to investment, trade relationships and international credibility is increasingly shaped by how states manage – or not – climate risks, protect biodiversity and regulate the use of natural resources.

At the same time, it complicates domestic debates about environmental governance and sovereignty over natural assets. The ‘flamingo revolution’ is a clear illustration; protesters have questioned the environmental implications of the development. But they are also unhappy about the transparency of the decision-making process, and the extent to which foreign investors influence Albania’s natural heritage. 

The dispute over a stretch of Albania’s coastline is therefore ultimately not about a single development project. It is about the evolution of the country’s development model under conditions of ecological constraint and geopolitical competition. It is also about who gets to decide how strategic natural assets are used, and in whose interest development is pursued.

Economic growth, environmental protection and strategic alignment are all legitimate national objectives. The difficulty arises when pursuing one appears to undermine the others. This is the governing dilemma of the triple planetary crisis: environmental degradation is not a side effect of development, but a constraint on its long-term viability. 

The protesters are asking whether some places should remain beyond the reach of developers. The government is asking how a country can prosper if it turns away potentially transformative investment. Neither question is unreasonable. 

The challenge for Albania – and for many countries in similar positions – is that the answers now lie at the intersection of economics, ecology and geopolitics, where trade-offs are unavoidable and increasingly irreversible.

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In our test, AI was hard to find in a sizable Spotify playlist library.

The Neo gave me very few reasons to complain during my week with it.

What I’m Discussing Today:

• Knicks Beat Spurs 107-106, Take 3-1 Series Lead: The Knicks pulled off the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history.

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: When injustice makes its demands, do you speak up or wait for a safer moment that never arrives?

• Democrats Make a Huge Bet on Platner in Maine: Dems gamble Senate control on a deeply flawed, first-time candidate.

• Trump storms out of interview with NBC’s Meet the Press: Trump’s live-TV tantrum was the familiar cowardice of a bully who cannot bear real scrutiny.

• Alexander Zverev’s French Open title receives a muted reception in France: Zverev won the trophy, but questions surrounding how sports handles violence against women did not disappear with the confetti.

• What I’m Watching: In The Polygamist, the women around a crumbling patriarch look like they might be more interesting than the man himself.

• Jukebox Playlist: Aretha Franklin turned “Respect” into a declaration so plain and powerful that no man can pretend not to understand.

Knicks Beat Spurs 107-106 in the Greatest Comeback in NBA Finals History, Take 3-1 Series Lead

It’s not every day you see a team blow a 29-point lead in the NBA finals. I played in the league for 20 years and I never saw it happen. In fact, in more than 400 games over 80 seasons, it had never happened prior to Wednesday night’s game at Madison Square Garden.

I said at the start of this series that I was rooting for the Spurs and their transcendent young superstar, Victor Wembanyama. I still am. But as a basketball fan, I have to applaud everything the Knicks have done in this series, with Wednesday night’s comeback at the top of that list. Jalen Brunson finished the game with 36 points. OG Anunoby scored 33. At the end of the game, with 4.3 seconds left, Brunson launched his desperation three from well beyond the arc and it bounced high off the front rim. He missed it. For a frozen moment, it looked like the game was over and the Spurs had won. Then Anunoby came flying through the lane, extended his right arm as high as it would go, and tipped the ball through the hoop. It was as beautiful an encapsulation of the majesty of sports as anything you’re ever likely to see. The seemingly impossible happened. We all got to witness it.

If we’re honest, we also have to concede that the Spurs made some serious mistakes down the stretch. But, to my mind, the biggest one didn’t happen in the fourth quarter, when their 20-point lead evaporated. It happened in the third quarter, when they were leading by 29, and they seemingly forgot that Victor Wembanyama is human. They forgot to give him some rest. With that large a lead, it was an inexcusable mistake. In the second half, Wemby played 23 of 24 minutes, which left him exhausted by the end of the fourth quarter. That’s on coach Mitch Johnson, not Wemby, and you can bet Mitch knows it. After the game, Wemby and the Spurs said all the right things. No, they’re not giving up. Wemby said the goal was “getting stronger through this, getting more together. I know this is what we’re gonna do.” Spurs fans certainly hope so. So do I.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.” Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), novelist and abolitionist

Harriet Beecher Stowe is remembered today for one thing and one thing only: she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold two million copies worldwide in its first five years of publication, ultimately becoming the second-best-selling book of the 19^th century, trailing only the Bible. Even before writing her novel, Stowe was an ardent critic of slavery and supporter of the Underground Railroad who hid escaped slaves at her home in Brunswick, Maine. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an act of abolitionist advocacy, humanizing Blacks for her predominantly white readers.

Today we’re somewhat dismissive of Stowe’s literary accomplishment, and for good reason by current standards: her attitudes toward Blacks are paternalistic, and Tom himself is a prototype of the “Magical Negro” trope. He’s passive, subservient, a self-sacrificing martyr whose saintliness leaves no room for an inner life. It’s no real surprise that “Uncle Tom” became a lasting insult for Blacks who sought to get ahead by ingratiating themselves to whites. Still, writing the novel was a radical act in its day and can honestly be said to have helped speed the way to abolition.

Stowe’s quote above is from a letter she wrote in March 1850 to Gamaliel Bailey, the editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era. At that time, the Fugitive Slave Act (which mandated the capture and return of fugitive slaves in free states, and made it a crime for northern abolitionists to help their escape) was barreling through Congress. In 1850, women and children were, by law and custom, not people whose words were thought to carry much weight. That didn’t matter. If everyone shared the obligation to speak out, Stowe was saying, their cumulative weight could overpower even the most hardened injustice. Everyone, she wrote, was “bound” to speak. Not by law, the way enslaved people were bound to their masters. But by a moral calling even stronger than law, an ingrained knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, and the faith that one’s humanity has nothing to do with the color of one’s skin.

Stowe was also a feminist who pushed for the education of girls and the property rights of women, if not for outright suffrage—women’s right to vote was, after all, still 70 years away, and she might rightly have seen that goal as a bridge too far to distract from the very immediate issue at hand. But stripped of its abolitionist context, the above quote can still impart a powerful message to contemporary audiences: if you see something, say something. Because silence carries a cost too. It just feels free because nobody is handing you a bill right now—and by the time they do, it will probably be too late to say the price of a comfortable life of silence was too high.

There are sophisticated internal arguments to be made for staying quiet, which you can dress up very respectably. “Someone more qualified should say this” passes as humility. “Now is not the right time” disguises itself as strategy. These are methods for outsourcing the obligation indefinitely, and what makes them so effective is that they never require you to say you won’t speak. You’re merely waiting for conditions that, conveniently, never quite arrive. Stowe recognized the obligation and knew the time to speak out had arrived for everyone—even a woman or a child.

Read more

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‘Piggy’, ‘corrupt’, ‘stupid’: the president keeps lashing out. Here’s how journalists can stand up to him

For many years now, Donald Trump has been saying awful things to – or about – the female media figures who have the nerve to ask him questions and challenge his falsehoods.

“Quiet, Piggy,” he ordered a Bloomberg reporter, Catherine Lucey, last year in a press gaggle when she pushed him about the release of the Epstein files.

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In the case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against Donald Trump’s “sudden, unilateral, and unlawful decision” to demolish the East Wing of the White House and to construct a 90,000 sq ft ballroom, “without seeking approval from Congress; without requesting review and approval from the federal commissions charged with oversight of development in the nation’s capital; without conducting the required environmental studies; and without allowing the public any opportunity for input”, Trump’s Department of Justice has countered that he can simply do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, however he wishes.

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Privacy advocates say it deserves scrutiny, and reform, regardless of who the US president appoints as director of national intelligence (DNI).

When Apple released iOS 26, it brought all these customization options to your device.

On Tuesday night, oyster farmer and combat veteran Graham Platner overwhelmingly sailed to victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Maine. His opponent, Gov. Janet Mills unofficially dropped out in late April, leaving Platner effectively unopposed. But a series of scandals rocked his candidacy, leaving his viability against Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November in question.

The veteran has repeatedly emphasized the way his combat trauma made him a worse version of himself, and how in later years he has been able to heal and evolve. In Maine, Democrats so far appear to have accepted that message of redemption, and his promise to provide a progressive economic agenda for Maine.

“It’s a very working-class state that has been very badly impacted by job loss and then, in recent years, by a pretty extreme wave of gentrification,” Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz says. “The progressive policy agenda of Graham Platner combined with the perceived authenticity of his ‘I am a fighter, I will actually do this,’ whereas Janet Mills who has been in power and overseen a lot of this and has not been perceived to bring a lot of the changes that Mainers seek” is resonating with voters.  

We also check in on California, where Intercept contributor Jordan Uhl breaks down the latest conspiracy theories about voter suppression, which conservatives have hinged on the defeat of former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, and the early results in the governor’s race. Uhl also breaks down how betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are adding to the confusion, and what that could mean come November. 

“If they don’t like the outcome, it’s rigged. If they like the outcome, it’s fine,” says Uhl. “At the gubernatorial level, you can see how Megyn Kelly pointing to prediction market data is symptomatic of a larger problem here. People weren’t looking to actual polling data. They were looking to the behavior of gamblers to inform their analysis.”

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. 

Noah Hurowitz: I’m Noah Hurowitz, I cover federal law enforcement, immigration, and elections at The Intercept. 

JW: Noah, it’s great to have you on again. This week we wanted to check in with you about the Democratic Senate primary in Maine where Graham Platner, the combat veteran and oyster farmer, faced a series of scandals.  

But before we do all of that, let’s get into the results from Tuesday night. So Maine Gov. Janet Mills had already suspended her primary race against Platner in late April, so he was effectively running unopposed in the primary. But Noah, what were the results from Tuesday night, and what do they tell us about Mainers and what they want?

NH: The results were an overwhelming win for Platner. He came in at over 70 percent of the vote. The AP called it on Tuesday night with 8 percent showing. It was just very clear that he had carried the day, and I think a big part of that was because Governor Mills had unofficially suspended campaigning earlier in the cycle in April.

But in light of some of the news that came out the week before the primary, Janet Mills had slyly reminded people that she was still on the ballot. So there was a question going into Tuesday night of what is her showing going to be and what will that tell us about general support for Platner.

She did carry about 19 percent of the vote last time I checked which does show that one in five Democratic primary voters in Maine at least had some issue with casting a ballot for Platner in the primary. I don’t know if it tells us much about what his support is going to be in the general, because that is going to be a much more pitched battle.

It’s going to be much more Democrat versus Republican, rather than a vote where people felt like they could cast, let’s say, a protest vote against a candidate that they were not sure about.

JW: Yeah, and I really want to get more into the general election, because I think that’s going to be pretty interesting.

But we obviously can’t talk about Graham Platner without talking about the scandals that have emerged in the last few months. I’m just going to read through some of them. So until October of last year, he had a tattoo of Nazi iconography. He had previously made rape apology posts on Reddit. He was accused and admitted to sending inappropriate messages while married.

And I would argue most damning, an ex-girlfriend, who we should note is currently a Republican operative, accused him of physically restraining her and locking her in a room overnight. She also claimed that he was well aware of the meaning of the Nazi tattoo. Now, Platner has denied both allegations from his ex-girlfriend, but he has admitted to having the tattoo, which he covered up last year, and making the posts.

Do you think that these scandals hurt his campaign, or do you think that people perceive these stories as political attacks from the establishment? And by the establishment, I mean both in Maine and then also, I would argue, in the form of mainstream media like The New York Times and Politico. And I’m wondering, did those attacks maybe actually increase his support? I tend to think the latter.

NH: Yeah, the stuff about the tattoos and the Reddit posts came out pretty early into the campaign last fall. To be honest, I thought that they were going to sink him. I don’t know how you survive, having a Nazi tattoo. But he steamrolled right through that.

A big part of his message about himself has been a story of redemption. He was a combat veteran. It took him a long time to overcome a lot of the effects of that. He’s talked openly about his struggles with alcohol, about his post-traumatic stress disorder, and about how he was a very angry young man and found some level of peace after he came back to Maine, where he grew up.

Related

Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins

The new stuff in the week before the primary, first there was an article about him having sexted with women after he was married, quite recently. And then, of course, as you mentioned, the The New York Times story, where there were allegations of physical abuse, allegations of him physically restraining his ex-girlfriend.

That, I think, did prompt a much more serious reckoning. A lot of his supporters were, A, yes, outright dismissive of what they saw as an establishment attack on an insurgent populous candidate. But I think it also, whether this is canny politics on his part or whether you choose to believe him, it was possible for him to say that, “Look, that’s just not who I am anymore. I regret deeply a lot of my actions when I was struggling in that way, and, here I am, a changed man fighting for you.” And that was a big part of his speech on Tuesday night when he accepted the nomination. He spoke a lot about redemption and about grace.

This was something that came up in my conversations with people in Maine in the run-up to the election was that, look, Maine is a state with high levels of substance use disorder. Maine is a state where there’s a lot of poverty, and there’s a lot of people who are veterans. And I think that the message of, “I was having a rough time, and I got my act together,” really does resonate. So I think there’s a combination of seeing this as an establishment attack, but also in accepting his story of getting his act together.

JW: It’s understandable, and I think at the same time, there is something to the narrative of an angry young man who really took it out allegedly on the women in his life, and then also making some of these posts that are obviously really offensive. I think particularly for female voters, I have to imagine there are a lot of women who are thinking, “I knew an angry young man, and I’m still living with the consequences of that angry young man. And it’s great for him to find redemption, but I’m still in this.” Those stories can be both triggering, but, and I imagine hopeful for some of those men who still find themselves in that place. But I think it’s a complicated space to walk.

NH: Yeah, no you’re absolutely right. And I think when it comes to someone running for office on a message of fighting for the common man or whatever. I think that a lot of the people who support his candidacy have this attitude of, yes, he had a messy personal life. Yes, some of these things that are described are inexcusable. But should that consign us to another Susan Collins term? Should that consign us to a more watered-down Democratic candidate who is not going to bring the same fire? And I think for a lot of people the answer is no. A lot of the people who I spoke to were wrestling with those questions. That’s something that’s going to continue to be in the discourse for sure.

JW: In your conversations, did you feel like people were more so focused on his progressive economic agenda, or did they feel more anger at the establishment? Is this about sticking it to Janet Mills, sticking it to Susan Collins, or is this about— He’s really putting forward a very progressive economic agenda for Maine. What do you feel resonated with people you spoke to?

NH: I think they go hand-in-hand. One of the biggest issues for Mainers is affordability. The state has been in a prolonged job crisis basically for decades.

Everybody knows someone who has been laid off from the paper mill. Because the paper mill closed, they lost their logging trucking route. People know lobstermen who have been forced off the water. It’s a very working class state that has been very badly impacted by job loss, and then in recent years by a pretty extreme wave of gentrification.

I  went to school in Maine in Portland, and I don’t think I know anyone who still lives in Portland. Everyone has had to move to other cities like Lewiston and Auburn, which then in the chain reaction of gentrification and displacement then sees higher prices. But the jobs haven’t really come. 

I think that the progressive policy agenda of Graham Platner combined with the perceived authenticity of his, “I am a fighter, I will actually do this,” whereas Janet Mills has been in power and overseen a lot of this and has not been perceived to bring a lot of the changes that Mainers seek. 

JW: We have seen a knee-jerk reaction from some people on the left to dismiss outright the concerns around some of Platner’s actions, and accuse those who raise the issue of being a centrist or a corporate shill.

But at the same time, it’s clear that he is not the establishment pick, and his campaign has been heavily reported on and scrutinized in the media. Noah, you’ve done a lot of really great nuanced reporting on this race, which by the way everyone should check out, but what do you make of the reaction to Platner from both sides of this political divide?

NH: There’s two things. There’s what is being talked about in Maine and what is being talked about in national media. This was something that I didn’t quite get to when we were talking about the scandals, but another thing that came up in multiple conversations with political knowers of things in Maine, is that it’s not just the establishment that people see behind these attacks, but also national media — the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. People in Maine are generally suspicious of what they call folks from away. 

Maine is a very unique political landscape. I hesitate to even call it purple because it is this mishmash of some right-leaning tendencies. People tend to be very pro-gun. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of more socially liberal or libertarian tendencies among Mainers. There’s people on the hard right who hate Platner because they think he’s a stooge, because they think he’s pro-immigrant, because they are in the tank for, if not Susan Collins for the power of the Trump administration, which would be badly affected by losing a Republican senator.

On the left in Maine the support is just generally there for Platner. He’s done very well there. More toward the center in, let’s say, national politics, I think that there has definitely been a lot of wariness around Graham Platner whether that’s because they think he’s going to be another Fetterman, which by the way, I don’t think he’s going to be another Fetterman. That’s best exemplified by John Fetterman going off nonstop against Graham Platner. 

There’s a worry that they don’t know what direction he’s going to go in, that they can’t control him or that they just worry about his electability. But knowing Maine and having reported on this now for a while, I think that if anything he’s going to be more electable than a Janet Mills. Susan Collins has fended off pretty formidable challenges in the past. In 2020, she faced a challenge from Sara Gideon, who was a very well-known Democratic politician in Maine, fairly progressive. But she didn’t have that sort of insurgent credibility that Platner brings to the race.

And despite polling well, Sara Gideon lost badly. She lost by eight points. So I think that if anything, Maine specifically demands an outside-the-box challenge to someone as entrenched as Susan Collins.

JW: What is your expectation of how these scandals will follow Platner into the general election against Susan Collins?

Obviously she’s going to use them. I also would imagine, thinking about how things have come out so far, that there could be more things coming out. How do you imagine this is going to affect him in the general?

NH: I think that people are going to be digging. I think that national reporters and local reporters are going to be looking for anything that they can find. Just based on the kind of behavior that was described in these stories, one could assume that a messy life yields a lot of opposition research. I do think that some of the main points have already been arrived at in The New York Times reporting, and the tattoo and the Reddit post.

Susan Collins will definitely use these stories against Platner in the general but frankly, I think that it might hit a little bit less than it would coming in a primary from a Democrat, because another thing that people brought up multiple times in my reporting over the last week was that there’s this double standard.

It’s not just that, oh, Trump’s behavior has lowered the bar. It’s that Susan Collins has supported Donald Trump every step of the way, despite the Access Hollywood tape. She voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh despite the allegations against him. She enabled the elimination of Roe v. Wade. One issue that I think matters a lot to people in Maine and has a distinct intersection here with issues of women’s rights and women’s health is that affordability is not just, “Oh, I can’t pay my rent.” Hospitals are closing in Maine, specifically OBGYN units.

So a lot of people in Maine are having to go either to Portland or to Boston for procedures that they might otherwise have been able to get at units that closed in the mid-coast area or farther north. This was something actually that Platner brought up in his speech. 

So I think if you’re saying that he is bad to women based on the reporting so far, I think you can definitely make that argument, and I don’t think that Graham Platner would disagree. Ultimately I think that the Platner campaign strategy is going to be, “This is not about necessarily like personal taste. It’s about what I will deliver for the people of Maine.” And what Susan Collins has delivered for the people of Maine is Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s consistent hatred of and demeaning attitude towards women, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and this affordability crisis where hospitals are closing in the state and forcing women to go for procedures to Portland or to Boston,

JW: So it sounds like we’re going to have a lot to watch in this race come November. Noah, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us.

NH: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: Next, we head to LA, where the mayoral primary has become the latest victim of right-wing panic and false claims of election fraud with Intercept contributor and my co-host, Jordan Uhl. But first, a quick break.

[Break]

JW: Hey, Jordan. Great to have you here.

Jordan Uhl: Hey, it is great to be here on the other side of the conversation.

JW: Jordan, you’ve been following the primaries for California governor and LA mayor quite closely. And because vote counting can take weeks in Los Angeles and the state generally for various reasons, including there being huge population centers and a lot of vote-by-mail ballots, it has become the latest target of claims by Republicans that there is election fraud.

President Donald Trump posted on social media, “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had.” By the way, Pratt is the Republican candidate in the LA primary. In an interview with NBC “Meet the Press,” Trump stormed off after being pressed for evidence of his claims that the California governor’s race and the 2020 presidential elections were rigged.

[Clip plays]

Kristen Welker: …presented in a court of law-

Donald Trump:  The election was rigged. It was a dirty election.

Kristen Welker: Mr. President. 

Donald Trump: And it’s happening again right now in California. 

Kristen Welker: You’ve never presented evidence that the 2020 election was rigged.

Donald Trump: It’s happening right now in California. Right now, it’s, look at what’s happening in California.

Kristen Welker: Where’s the evidence to that?

[Clip ends]

JW: As Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton and Pratt’s leads dwindled, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly parroted really similar talking points on her show.

Megyn Kelly: No one is going to trust this outcome if those two are eliminated from the general election given the leads that we’ve seen. … If you look at the betting markets, and they don’t know anything more than we do, generally they don’t, they’re all now voting against Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton even making it.

JW: We’re going to end the clip there. Kelly goes on to complain about the mail-in ballots coming in as if that’s nefarious, when it’s just a continuation of legitimate vote counting.

It’s worth noting a few days later, as more votes have come in, Hilton is now set to face Democrat Xavier Becerra in the state’s general election come November. But that hasn’t stopped loud MAGA voices from claiming the LA election was stolen from Pratt. 

Now, it seems to me that if you can believe an election was rigged in Los Angeles because a conservative former reality TV star with no experience and a reputation for wasteful spending and explosive outbursts didn’t win, you can believe anything.

But Jordan, how has the right tried to spin his defeat? What does it tell us as we head into November? Are there trends you’re seeing in the LA mayor’s race that mirror national trends in elections across the country? 

JU: I mean, that is just patently ridiculous. The trends that we’re seeing are just continuations of trends or behavior patterns that Republicans have already exhibited in elections previously.

If they don’t like the outcome, it’s rigged. If they like the outcome, it’s fine. More of the same here. At the gubernatorial level, you can see how Megyn Kelly pointing to prediction market data is symptomatic of a larger problem here. People weren’t looking to actual polling data; they were looking to the behavior of gamblers to inform their analysis.

So Hilton, now we know, is making the runoff. She was certain — based on gambling behavior — that he wouldn’t. So in her mind, the only conclusion was fraud. 

There were many people who waited until later to decide who to vote for, that may not inform who they vote for in the general. But conservatives didn’t have a menu of options.

The field was largely consolidated behind Pratt in LA, and for the most part, you had the Trump endorsement of Steve Hilton for governor. While Chad Bianco, the sheriff from Riverside, did pull some votes, for the most part, they were lining up behind [Hilton]. So it was much more clear who they would vote for, so it allowed them to cast their vote early.

JW: Thinking just about Pratt, we’ve seen him on television as this kind of outrageous figure. I want to just play a couple clips just to give an idea of what millennials have going on in their mind when they hear the name Spencer Pratt.

[Clip montage plays]

Spencer Pratt: Wah, wah, wah, wah. What are you crying about, Stephanie? What the f— are you crying about? …

That’s why you’re not in my life, you crazy bitch. …

Your mom is just the vagina that made Heidi come onto Earth. Your mom is not Jesus or God!

Brody Jenner: Dude, relax, bro. What the hell is wrong with you?

Spencer Pratt: I hate that bitch. Excuse my French. 

[Clips end]

JW: OK, so now that everyone’s gotten a taste of Pratt — if I’m being honest, I did that mostly for fun. But to talk about something a little bit more serious, as you’ve pointed out, betting markets are playing a role in this election. So Kalshi, Polymarket, can you explain briefly what Kalshi and Polymarket are, and how they’re factoring into this election and more elections around the country?

JU: These are, you could say, loopholes to current gambling laws. Well, you’re not actively betting in a sportsbook, you’re making a prediction about an outcome, and somehow — I’m not a lawyer — somehow that is legal. In California, sportsbooks are illegal. So in states like California, these platforms thrive. But they operate nationally for the most part.

They have been pumping a ton of money into advertisements, but also through influencers in paid promotional posts. Now, what that looks like is influencers or creators will point to prediction market data. The example that we saw with Megyn Kelly: Oh, well, the prediction markets are saying one thing, but then a different outcome occurred.

That’s not actual polling data. And this blurring of the lines is deliberate by Polymarket and Kalshi — not because they want people to have a clear picture, but because they want people to use their platforms. They want to bring in new customers. Ideally, they want those customers to lose money so they make increased profits.

Related

We Need to Kick Prediction Market Betting Out of Journalism While We Still Can

Now, the argument that I’ve heard against this from people who have been approached by these companies is, “I don’t want anything to do with it,” because in a sense it could be seen as a form of voter suppression.

Let’s take the New York mayoral election as an example. If betting market data said that Andrew Cuomo had a 90 percent chance of winning the election, and you are a supporter of Zohran, you might see those odds and think, “It’s not worth it. He’s going to win.” But as we saw in that election, Zohran Mamdani brought the vote out and won. He is now mayor of New York. So polling showed a much closer race.

Polling in the LA mayoral primary showed in the last reputable poll before the election that Councilmember Nithya Raman was in second place. Spencer Pratt was in third. And now as these results are counted, it matches the polling data. It did not match the behavior of gamblers. 

I think the biggest issue here, Jessica, is that Republicans only make up around 15 percent of the population in Los Angeles. If you look at the 2024 presidential election data, Spencer Pratt got, as it stands right now, within 1 percent of the vote share that Donald Trump got in the election. So the idea that he would somehow outperform Trump, just pull all of these votes from two Democrats in the city to somehow either make the runoff or, as he claimed in the eve of the election, win outright in the primary, which would be more than half of the vote — it was never rooted in reality or past elections.

JW: Yeah, it really concerns me. The idea that we would be replacing polls, which are, admittedly imperfect, but at least they’re scientific and evidence-based, not just vibes and guesses.

And not to air out the business of my co-host, but you’ve been approached by one of these companies. Can you tell us about that? What are they offering people to partner with them, and what are the expectations?

JU: They did. Kalshi has reached out to me twice with offers of “partnerships.” And what that looks like isn’t explicit pitching, “Hey, use this platform. I use this platform,” like you would in a traditional product placement.

It’s much more covert. They want you to integrate that betting market data into your content. It’s kind of a backdoor way of advertising. I had said no, just cut them off from the beginning in both offers; I’m not interested in that. But I have friends with representation who heard them out just to get a sense of what they were offering. I have heard from multiple people: They’re throwing around six-figure offers and, in many cases, multiple six-figure offers. We’re talking mid-six figures. 

The people that I’ve talked to all said, no, they didn’t feel good about it, for the concerns that we’ve laid out. In their opinion, these companies are predatory, and it could have a suppressive effect on the vote. And there just aren’t really guardrails on these platforms which allows them to prey on people.

JW: Wired reported that both Kalshi and Polymarket had to ask influencers they were partnering with to take down paid partnership tags after they falsely claimed the LA primary results were dubious. Semafor reported that Kalshi asked one of its MAGA influencers — who wrote, “Is California cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?” and “They’re stealing it, aren’t they?” to their 1.7 million X followers — to take down the post. Jordan, what do you make of that?

JU: This is a problem of their own making. I’d say a less charitable interpretation of their marketing strategy on social media would be to pay people who would likely be ideologically aligned with candidates who have no hope of winning to boost the prediction market data that shows that they are either outperforming or, in Pratt’s case, making the runoff or winning outright.

Those outcomes were not rooted in polling data. But to a client base or a customer base who would believe those things are possible based on data from bettors — that’s just free money for Kalshi. All of those people would lose their bets, and that’s a windfall of cash.

So it seems like they were trying to walk things back when they had already paid these people to promote somebody who had no real prospects.

JW: I have to say, there is something interesting to me that this is the same year I found out what a “parlay” was, and it’s also the same year that the betting markets are trying to take over the election. But just coincidence, I guess. 

So Vanity Fair just put out an article, “Spencer Pratt’s Mayoral Campaign Proves It Takes More Than Mastering the Algorithm to Get Elected.” He really did pop off with these AI videos that didn’t do it for me personally, but seemed to really be catching attention.

He had all this celebrity endorsement, but it didn’t go anywhere for him electorally. He, I think, did worse than just any kind of standard Republican probably would have done. Jordan, what do you make of the ways in which we’re maybe noticing the attention economy isn’t the exact same thing as electoral success?

JU: Spencer Pratt learned a lesson that many lefty progressive candidates over the past several years have learned the hard way, that simply running an online or Twitter-focused campaign does not lead to votes. Spencer Pratt had a lot of buzz, but that buzz was national. So of course, that’s not going to lead to votes in the city of Los Angeles.

The AI ads, some of them weren’t even made by his campaign, while they did use AI-generated images for posters and campaign art. To me, that kind of illustrates the hollowness of that campaign. It was much more sensational. It was more of a spectacle than substance. And to my knowledge, I don’t know what kind of ground game Spencer Pratt had. You need to get out and knock on doors. That it is campaigning 101. 

He threw some parties. He cut a couple videos. He had some really slick ads. But are you talking about issues that matter to all of Los Angeles? The way he talked about the unhoused population in Los Angeles was seen by many as cruel and insensitive.

When talking about the fires, the fires of last year, which were a centerpiece of his campaign, it always seemed to come back to him. He lost his home. I know multiple people who lost their homes, and they didn’t resort to demonizing homeless people. 

Even the frustration with the city’s response or the state’s response, no objective observer can look at those fires and the conditions that worsened them — the Santa Ana winds — that came in and made it difficult, and in many cases impossible, for helicopters to get into the hills to fight those fires, which is how they do combat wildfires in the hilly parts of the city. 

The speed of those winds were 70, 80 miles an hour. You can’t get a helicopter up there. No rational person is going to see that and say, “Yes, this is clearly the mayor’s fault.” This is just a tragic disaster. 

So for him to insinuate that this is all Mayor Bass and Nithya Raman’s fault is insulting to voters’ intelligence. They can recognize maybe the way it was responded to wasn’t great, but they’re not the reason the fires started in the first place.

JW: I did want to get into one positive takeaway from the LA mayoral primary that Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones editor-in-chief and my former boss, pointed out on Blue Sky, that now that the race will be between incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Nithya Raman, we might actually get a real conversation around affordable housing and housing policy in general. Jordan, can you tell us a bit more about Raman and the issues on the table heading into November?

JU: This is going to be a very fascinating race to watch, and it has already started with Karen Bass blaming problems of homelessness on Nithya Raman. I think what she’s going to need to navigate is, Bass, the current mayor, will need to navigate is helping her potential voters understand that the city council does have a lot of power, more power in LA than city councils around the country.

Now, you can’t blame all of LA’s problems on one single council member, but I’m going to be very interested to see how this plays out. Yes, I think on the policy front, that’s great. We actually can have, ideally a substantial policy debate in a general election. This is typically not something that we see.

That’s why a lot of people, I think, were hopeful that Tom Steyer could make the runoff, because that potentially could force the favorite, Xavier Becerra, into tacking to the left on some of his positions, like oil, housing, and the billionaire tax. Unfortunately, he has nothing to hold him accountable. There’s no leverage to force him to shift positions now that he’s going to be facing Steve Hilton. 

There is a shifting landscape in the LA mayoral race, which is going to be very fascinating. Nithya Raman, certainly not without critics, but she is widely seen as to the left of Karen Bass, and potentially we could see Karen Bass make promises that if she does defeat Raman in the general, will then be used to hold her accountable.

JW: Yeah, it is hard to imagine any kind of substantive debates happening in the alternate reality where we had a Spencer Pratt, Mayor Karen Bass race. Jordan, we’re going to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

JU: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

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. What issues are you following in the midterms, send us an email or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Right’s “Election Fraud” Cry for Midterms Previewed in Primaries appeared first on The Intercept.

Health reporter Nick Stonesifer joined “Beyond the Headlines” to talk about a historic moment in Delaware healthcare – the announcement of who will be running the state’s first medical school.

Nick discusses how he goes beyond the press releases and the press conferences to detail the contours of a major policy announcement, and he gets into the big unanswered questions behind the medical school project. He also details how he builds relationships – online and in-person – with industry leaders and “the person on the street” to develop thorough perspectives in his health care coverage.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Nick, you have been living down in the Lewes area for almost a year now. You also have a dog. So I want to start the podcast like this: Let’s say you are hanging out at your favorite oceanside dog park and you strike up a conversation with another dog owner who is complaining about downstate healthcare, and he hasn’t heard all about the medical school saga. How would you catch that person up on what is going on? 

I would probably say that things are bad. Things are not going to get better for a little while, but people are trying to fix it. 

In regard to the medical school, they are trying to attract more people who will come and learn how to do medicine in Delaware, but time will tell how effective that is. 

You would also tell that guy that Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University has been selected to run Delaware’s medical school. 

I might say that. Sure.

You actually broke the news that Jefferson had signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the State of Delaware even before the request for a proposal had been made public to run this school.

Given all that, how would you rank your surprise meter that Jefferson ended up winning the proposal process? 

Not high at all. It was pretty obvious, especially when I got there I recognized people from the Jefferson team and didn’t really see anybody from the main other bidders like PCOM [the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine].

And when you say “you got there,” you’re talking about the press conference where they announced…

Who was winning. Yes, when they announced who the medical school was on Tuesday – I guess it’ll be last Tuesday by the time this comes out – it was pretty obvious. You could see it coming if you were paying attention to the faces in the crowd. So I was not really that surprised. 

And frankly, the [non-binding] agreement, while the state says it has no impact or bearing on the bidding process, you’ve got to go through a lot of work to put together an agreement like that. There was a lot of talk and questions about how this was going to be done, and they already had something in place.

So you were not necessarily surprised that Thomas Jefferson University was selected to run the medical school. What about your surprise that ChristianaCare was not going to be initially involved in this process? 

Yeah, that was definitely the big news nugget of the day.

Outside of the fact that there’s a new medical school coming to Delaware, one of Delaware’s principal power players in healthcare was going to be sitting on the sidelines – at least in the intermediary – is a big deal because they had attached their name to a separate bid, through the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. 

They had put all their eggs into that basket, and it didn’t really go their way. I was surprised to see that they didn’t – I don’t know, maybe 20/20 is hindsight – but [they] didn’t really read the writing on the wall. 

A lot is unclear about how Jefferson had structured its agreements with the healthcare systems and if, frankly, ChristianaCare wasn’t pleased with those agreements and tried its luck with PCOM.

One thing that was clear from the announcements is that Jefferson University will not really be running this as a stand-alone operation. The word that everybody kept using – and it showed up in your reporting – to describe this medical school is a “consortium” with over a dozen education and healthcare institutions collaborating on bringing this school to life.

Is a medical school by consortium a typical approach in the field? 

I’m no expert on this, but I can tell you what I’ve seen in my own day-to-day life. 

A big state school like University of Delaware, if it were a bigger school and was a bigger program like a Penn State, for example – Penn State has its own hospital systems, it has its own healthcare systems, and has its own built-in medical infrastructure to sustain what is needed to run a medical school. Delaware doesn’t really have that.

We have privately-owned hospitals up and down the state. You don’t have anything with Del State [University], you don’t have anything with University of Delaware. So when an outside entity like Thomas Jefferson comes in and it’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to build a branch campus here,” financially within the bounds of this federal grant that we’re using to fund the medical school, it makes more sense to essentially take advantage of the already existing infrastructure to get it done because they can’t build a new hospital.

That would just not be the play. 

So the consortium approach is perhaps a more logical approach for Delaware since there isn’t an educational institute that already had a hospital set up with it. 

The funds that came from this Rural Health Transformation program from the federal government – you actually couldn’t build a new stand-alone institution through that grant, correct? 

There’s some wiggle room for renovations and some capital expenses that can be done through the grant, but they’re pretty muted.

So unless a huge outside philanthropic grant came in with hundreds of millions of dollars and said, “Hey, build a hospital,” that was never going to happen. 

The University of Delaware is where this school will be based, but this is not a University of Delaware medical school. 

No, they’re trying very hard to make sure that it is not perceived as such.

Jefferson’s going to be running the programs. [UD] essentially, my read of it right now, is going to be a landlord for Jefferson to host these classes. But once [the students are] done with those classes, they’re going to scatter across the state into hospitals like Bayhealth, Beebe, Trinity, a lot of these primary care clinics.

Whether or not the school moves downstate, if at one point they build a campus and move their campus downstate, is unclear right now. I don’t know if it would move to Del State at any point in the future or anything like that. 

Because in theory, these are “rural” health transformation dollars, so they shouldn’t necessarily be based in Delaware’s urban, populous county. 

Yes. That’s one way to look at it.

When a major announcement like this happens, I have to imagine that an easy temptation is just to report out the top talking points given at a press conference. In your reporting, how do you try to pierce through the hubbub of the announcement and get something to your audience that is multilayered and nuanced?

Yeah, you definitely are really working to cut through every word they’re saying. You can listen to them on the microphone and hear what they have to say and just let your recorder run and turn your mind off. But usually it’s our job to really dig in deep to what they’re saying in the moment, which takes a lot of mental energy but is beneficial to our coverage in the long term.

You’re looking at power structures to really figure out who’s in, who’s out, and what that really means for whatever initiative. So it’s a lot. And just talking to people and asking questions outside of whatever official statements are being given.

Doing your homework before you get there definitely helps,

This was outside this press conference, correct? 

Yes. 

So you weren’t necessarily working the room, but you were still working the crowd? 

When you go to these events and when you’re a beat reporter, you see a lot of the same faces. Frankly, it’s just in your best interest to go up, say hello to people, ask some questions on or off the record about what’s going on.

You know, you’re “running for mayor” all the time. It works to your benefit to talk to people. 

You talk about one of the things you’re assessing when you’re at an event like that is the power structure, the power dynamic. A good example of that is you said earlier that your biggest surprise about all this was that ChristianaCare was not involved in this winning application.

I’m guessing that was not part of the official press conference comments. I’m guessing no one said, “You may notice that ChristianaCare is not involved in this, and let us tell you why.” 

No, I mean to the trained ear they had listed out everyone who was going to be in this consortium. And one glaring absence was ChristianaCare.

So I asked about that and things got a little odd. The answer seemed a little prepared that they were welcome at any time to join. They wouldn’t really answer whether or not they had been invited or declined, but we later found out that they had put all their money into the PCOM bid, and it really didn’t go their way.

So you were the lovely reporter who brought that to everyone’s attention at the press conference? 

Um, yes. At least that’s the way I remember it, so yes. 

I’m sure all the people up at the dais were like, “That Stonesifer, why did he have to bring this up?”

I hope not. I’m not such a bad guy. 

I’m guessing there weren’t any representatives from ChristianaCare at this press conference, but you got comments for your article. Was it easy to get ChristianaCare willing to talk about this or not? 

They had come out with PCOM, jointly, in defiance of the state’s decision to pick Jefferson. They did the fair sport thing – we respect the state’s decision, but we respectfully disagree as well. We thought we were the better bid. 

You know, sometimes when people are frustrated, they’re more likely to come out and discuss what they’re feeling in that moment because they weren’t really there at the time to experience this big coming together. 

If you’re chronically online, like me, that meme of Squidward looking out the window at SpongeBob and Patrick running outside – for all the Gen Zs listening – that’s probably how ChristianaCare and PCOM were feeling at that moment.

Being chronically online takes me to the next question I want to ask you about. As we record this, you’re actually finishing up an article that is basically an unanswered questions piece about the medical school. It should be published by the time people listen to this podcast. 

One of your sourcing steps for that article was to open up a thread on Reddit – which if anybody doesn’t know is a community message board on the web – and in that message board post you basically said, “Hey, if you have any questions or comments about the medical school, drop them here and I’ll do what I can to report back.”

Why take that step? I’m sure you already had unanswered questions yourself about the medical school. Why reach out to the public in this way? 

I think it’s a good journalism exercise when you’re deeply involved in stuff for so long. Some of the very simple questions about where is this going to be, why is it here, what’s this about free education I’m hearing? You know, that gets lost in the weeds for us when we’re really looking at these high-level policy questions. 

It’s really about service at the end of the day. This information is supposed to be useful to someone. And that’s what you’re trying to get at. 

And frankly, the questions were good questions. Like, I don’t think at any point I’m above the audience that we’re trying to serve. They had great questions that were worth digging deeper into. And you learn something new from other people, too.

There are long back-and-forths in that thread, if you read it. It was definitely helpful to just parse through that, even if some of it is argumentative. A lot of it might be other people helping each other out. We’re trying to facilitate that conversation about the medical school.

I enjoyed looking back over the thread because it’s not like you just put out the question and then people responded. You were engaging. You went back and forth. You were providing information. What do you enjoy about that back and forth, and how is it useful to you as you’re prepping an article?

I mean, I’m not afraid to say I don’t know everything. I’m not a supercomputer, you know? So that is helpful for me when I see questions I don’t know the answer to. I tell somebody, “Hey, I don’t know this. Here’s what I do know that might help you.” And they might have a retort that’s like, “Here’s where to start.”

It’s just conversational in that way. So, it’s definitely good for people who may have had questions about this. If you’re a news consumer and you see a bunch of stories about the medical school – not a lot of people have access to reporters. Reporters are frankly very busy and don’t have too much time to make themselves accessible. So whenever and wherever we can be of service, that’s really the goal. 

I thought it was cool because I’m the director of community engagement. Part of my job is to get the reporters out in the community and engaging with the public. We do that in a lot of in-person ways with listening sessions in libraries or pop-up newsrooms in coffee shops.

But I thought this was a cool place where you just took the initiative yourself and basically set up your own digital pop-up newsroom there and allowed the public to engage, to get information from you, but also open up your own blind spots and go, “Oh, that is a question that I don’t know the answer to.”

It’s mutually beneficial. Everybody benefits, and that’s the goal.

So of those unanswered questions that you were being grilled about on Reddit and that made it into your article, which are the ones that you are most interested in getting to the bottom of in your next reporting steps?

I really just want to see signed agreements. I want to see budgets. I want to see commitments made by healthcare and education institutions. But those aren’t really publicly available right now, so that requires some digging on my end. 

A good question that, frankly, I hadn’t really thought of until Reddit was what happens to the already existing medical program known as DIMER (Delaware Institute of Medical Education and Research), which places Delawareans into Jefferson or PCOM classes once a year, or annually they hold reserve seats for Delawareans. 

People are wondering if it would become obsolete, now that we have a huge funnel of medical students coming into Delaware. What’s 30 seats meant to do? 

We are parsing through the differences [between] the two programs. One is really meant to give Delawareans specifically a chance to go to medical school, and the other one the goal is to bring people here. That’s what state officials are saying, at least. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum from that Reddit chain, which was engaging with a more normal public, you also played a major part in organizing Spotlight Delaware’s recent Health Care Summit that happened in late April before Jefferson University was announced as running this medical school.

The future of the medical school was really a through line in many of the conversations at that summit. The audience for that summit was very much industry leaders rather than these everyday folk that you were engaging with on Reddit. How does organizing something like the Health Care Summit aid your reporting on the medical school?

These are the people making decisions about what’s going to happen with the medical school. These are physicians who are on the front line of the specialty shortage. So there’s definitely a lot to learn and a lot of high-level stuff that we are going to try and distill down and really make it palatable, really show the impacts of these shortages in Delaware.

So it definitely helps out. It’s definitely good to be in a room with a bunch of people that know what’s going on and make connections. 

Reporting is hard work. You put in the time at the press conferences, the time editing your articles, the time making contacts. But there’s got to be some pleasure there for reporters as well. What’s been enjoyable to you about reporting on the medical school?

I think it’s a very historic time. This is the first medical school and really getting to be on the front lines of that reporting has been pretty exciting. This house is going to be built at the foundation, so to speak, and whatever we learn about at the start of these agreements… 

You know, when people are asking 30 years down the line, “Why is this this way? What the heck happened?” We want to get to that before 30 years down the line if we find there are these huge glaring problems with what this medical school was supposed to do. If there were these huge structural problems at the start, we can shed light on those. 

At Spotlight Delaware, we try to make really clear what the impact of public policy decisions is on the lives of Delawareans. So let’s end on this and just ask you, how would a medical school tangibly impact the life of a Delawarean? 

Yeah. I think in the short term, it’s not going to.

It’s definitely not right away going to make a huge impact. But either way, you know, there’s going to be this first class of 40 students. That’s going to be 40 students that are spread across the state learning medicine in doctors’ offices, doing their clinical rotations and stuff like that – really just adding bodies to what is going on. 

And then there’s the other camp that is like, this is a long way out. We’re training a few specific types of doctors, and as Delaware gets older, its healthcare needs get more specific. Specialty care is really where we’re seeing some of the largest gaps and this medical school, at least right now, won’t address those immediately.

It will benefit, but, you know, 20 years down the line. If there are people who trained here, they did their residency here and they stayed here, that’s a lot of physicians that are here. There might be a lot of specialty people who maybe went to do their medical degree here, but then went and did their training somewhere else and came back.

So who knows? I think in an ideal world, the state is hoping that people will see how lovely Delaware is and stay here forever. But that’s really to be seen. That’s to be determined.

The grand vision for the normal populace is because of this medical school, there’ll be more medical professionals in Delaware to serve you.

That’s their goal. Time will tell. 

So 30 years from now when Spotlight Delaware is still kicking and hires a new reporter from Penn State, they can move to Lewes and have good quality healthcare. 

Well, if that’s the case, the timeline is all out of whack, so…

Thank you, Nick, so much for your work helping Delawareans understand just what the medical school means for them. There’s more to come. 

Thanks for having me.

The post ‘Beyond the Headlines’ Podcast: Understanding Delaware’s Medical School  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

 Why Should Delaware Care?
The Christina School District, one of Delaware’s largest, has endured years of tensions among its top officials. In March, a judge dismissed a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the district’s former superintendent, Dan Shelton, against the school board. On Tuesday, Shelton appealed that decision. 

Three months after the chief judge of Delaware’s federal court called a lawsuit “painfully redundant,” former Christina School District Superintendent Dan Shelton brought his wrongful termination claim to a federal appeals court in Philadelphia. 

Filed Wednesday, Shelton’s appeal claims that Delaware District Court Judge Colm Connolly violated the legal standards for reviewing a case by erring in his interpretation of the facts. 

“The only factual support the lower court could draw for its erroneous conclusion was solely from outside the factual record,” the appeal stated.

The appeal marks the latest chapter in years of acrimony impacting the highest levels of leadership at the Christina School District, which covers the greater Newark area and a part of Wilmington.

In his memorandum opinion filed in March, Connolly dismissed Shelton’s wrongful termination lawsuit by stating, in part, that the former superintendent was never actually fired — rather he was placed on leave. He said Shelton’s complaint did not “ever identify an obligation” within his employment contract that defendants might have breached.

Connolly also called Shelton’s claim a “hyperbolic, painfully redundant, and irrelevancy-filled complaint.” 

Despite the scathing comments, Shelton’s attorney, Thomas S. Neuberger, doubled down in the appeal, claiming again that Shelton was wrongfully terminated and that his contract with the district was breached when the Christina school board placed him on indefinite leave in 2024. 

He also noted that the decision to place him on leave coincided with the resignation of the district’s longtime attorney James McMackin III.

Following the resignation, The Newark Post reported that internal school board emails showed that McMackin chose to end his relationship with the board due to what he described as “wholesale disregard of the law,” under then-Board President Donald Patton.

Shelton’s appeal argued that while some facts relating to Shelton’s termination are messy, it stated that is likely to be “inevitable in a situation where a 40-year attorney-client relationship implodes.”

In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Patton, who is a named defendant in the case, said he can’t comment on specific details of the lawsuit, but that he looks forward to “providing factual details about my decision/votes that the public has a right to know.” 

In a separate statement, Christina Board President Monica Moriak said the lawsuit is important, but remains an “adult issue,” and that the school board is focusing on student outcomes.

What led to the appeal? 

Shelton began his career as a teacher at the Christina School District before becoming superintendent of Dover’s Capital School District in 2015. 

He later returned to Christina as its superintendent in 2020. Two years later, he was named Delaware’s Superintendent of the Year. 

By December 2023, the Christina school board extended Shelton’s contract through June, 2026.

But just months later, the board narrowly voted to suspend him without pay for three days and to rescind the one-year contract extension. The votes then highlighted the clear tensions that had emerged between Shelton and several of the elected members of the school board, particularly Patton.

Left unclear were the exact reasons for the tensions.

Still, Shelton’s lawsuit would later hint at the depth of hostility between the sides. In it, he claimed that Patton’s history as an educator “was not distinguished.” He also said that certain incidents which occurred provide various motives for him (Patton) to dislike and retaliate against” Shelton. 

Two months after the school board’s majority bloc voted to rescind Shelton’s contract extension, the three other members of the board sponsored a vote to remove Patton as school board president. They also asked the board to censure Patton for what they called “abusive behavior and retaliatory actions.”

The votes ultimately failed. Afterward Patton said in an interview on DETV that he suspected Shelton had been involved and accused him of racism.

A litany of controversies ensued the following month, when the Delaware Department of Justice found the school board violated the Freedom of Information Act by holding an unannounced executive session for an improper purpose. It further found the board failed to provide adequate notice in meeting agendas for votes regarding a contract rescission for Shelton, as well as for a vote of no-confidence in him.

By July 2024, the board held a nearly eight-hour-long meeting, where the majority bloc voted to remove Shelton and place him on administrative leave.

That same month, McMackin told the board he was stepping down from the role as soon as the board found new counsel. 

Tensions remained high during the school board meeting that came a month after Shelton’s removal.

Items for the meeting agenda included a series of possible referrals to the Delaware commission that oversees ethics among government employees. Among those was one that sought an opinion about whether a school board member “engaged in self-dealing with the district through alternative entities.”

Ultimately, none of those referrals were discussed during the meeting. 

Instead, Patton apologized to the public for “a number of things,” stating that the board should be functioning differently. Also during the meeting, members of the public called the board “an embarrassment.”

By September, Neuberger filed a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the Christina school board stop actions he claimed were defaming Shelton and violating his rights. The letter also said the board owes Shelton for lost wages, harm to his reputation, and emotional and physical distress.

Neuberger then filed the wrongful termination lawsuit on behalf of Shelton in December of 2024, seeking $2.7 million in damages.

At the time, Neuberger told Spotlight Delaware that warnings from the school board’s own attorney make the case a “slam dunk.”

The post ‘Erroneous conclusion’: Former Christina superintendent appeals $2.7M lawsuit  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
With the upcoming closure of Wilmington’s only sanctioned homeless encampment, advocates are asking where unhoused people will live after its shutdown. City officials are currently considering sponsoring a pallet village initiative to be built by Springboard Delaware, but the plan is already facing pushback from communities. 

Wilmington’s proposal to build a village of tiny homes for the homeless is facing growing opposition from neighbors, just as city officials race to secure a site before a deadline passes that would cause the project to forfeit $1.6 million in federal funding.

The challenge was clear during a community meeting in Wilmington’s Eastside neighborhood on Tuesday when residents quickly rejected the proposal to build the village near them.

They said it didn’t make sense to put the project in a community that is underserved.

“Put them in your neighborhood!” one resident shouted at presenters during the meeting. 

Homelessness has been at the center of Wilmington politics and community concern over the past year, especially after last fall when Mayor John Carney designated Christina Park in the Eastside as the city’s only sanctioned encampment.

With Carney set to close the encampment on Monday, city officials are weighing their next steps to support the unhoused population. One option is to partner with the nonprofit, Springboard Delaware, to build and operate a tiny-home village. The group currently runs a similar community in Georgetown known as the “Pallet Village.”

But time is limited as the City Council has been directed to pick a location before July 1, to prevent Springboard from losing $1.6 million in COVID-era federal dollars that will no longer be available after this year. 

The three locations suggested by the mayor’s office for the village are in the Eastside and Southbridge. Neighbors in both communities have expressed their disapproval of the plans.

Now, the City Council and the mayor are at odds over how to move forward. Some council members insist the decision about where to place the village is not theirs to make. Others have said the timeline to make a decision is too short.

Councilwoman Michelle Harlee, who represents Southbridge and part of the Eastside, called the Carney administration’s recent assertion that the City Council was responsible for selecting the location “misleading.”

“I have not been in a meeting with anyone that shared that information — that it is in City Council’s purview to decide on the location,” she said.

Councilwoman Shané Darby, who recently passed a resolution opposing the closure of Christina Park, said the council was being “rushed” through the process.

Daniel Walker, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, said City Council members were briefed in April about the project and its three proposed locations.

“This is not new, this is not news,” Walker said. “It’s in their court.”  

He also said that a letter sent to state officials last month about the Springboard initiative was intended to be jointly signed by council members and the Carney administration. But, he said, the council’s representatives countered that the letter should come from the administration alone.  

“Despite this, we are excited to see Council is now supporting this initiative,” Walker said.

Councilman Coby Owens, who sat on Carney’s homelessness task force last year, said he was not aware that the decision would fall on the council. 

But he said the next step is to schedule a city council meeting to discuss the matter, “just to make sure that we have the proper timing.”

Where to build a tiny-home village?

Caroline Klinger, Carney’s spokeswoman, previously told Spotlight Delaware that the mayor’s office has been in talks with Springboard Delaware for more than a year. 

Those discussions picked up after the organization’s plans to build a pallet village in Dover fell through, she said. 

Since then, the Carney administration identified three potential sites. Those include 211 North Church St., which sits right across the street from Christina Park; 900 S. Claymont St., a small street lined by industrial land in Southbridge; and a parcel that faces the Christina River along the south side of the 7th Street peninsula. 

Walker said the 7th Street site would carry an additional site-readiness cost of about $1.6 million.

The council could select another location, Walker said, but the identified sites were chosen because they meet three criteria. They are controlled by the city, a community partner or a private owner supportive of the Springboard project; they are large enough for the buildings Springboard says are needed; and they can be prepared quickly.

Councilwoman Zanthia Oliver, who represents the Eastside, said she is against putting the project in her district. An area, such as Riverfront East, would be more suitable for the tiny homes, she said.

Klinger said Oliver had suggested that location to the mayor’s office, but never followed back up about it. 

“She has not followed up with a proposal or path forward for that location, but she is welcome to do so at any time,” Klinger said in an email.

Last month, Springboard Delaware Executive Director Judson Malone presented the idea of building tiny homes to the Southbridge Civic Association, but residents there argued their community is lacking too many public resources.

They also expressed a fear that a pallet village could cause loitering, panhandling, and safety risks to spill into the neighborhood. 

Similar concerns were raised on Tuesday when Malone presented to residents of the Eastside.

“It almost feels as if … the city is dumping all its problems on us,” said Miketia Edmond, who recounted a recent experience in which she said her delivered groceries were stolen by an unhoused resident.

What would the village look like?

If the city ultimately approves a site, Springboard Delaware plans to use the $1.6 million in federal COVID relief dollars for the construction. But only if they can get it done before the funding expires at the end of this year.

The nonprofit also plans to request an additional $1 million from the state government for operational costs for year one, Malone said.

The site would operate as a fenced housing village for roughly 40 to 60 people on about half an acre of land. The average stay would range between four and five months, but Malone noted that some people could stay longer depending on their needs. 

Rather than using individual tiny homes, as it does at the Georgetown location, Springboard proposes using trailers divided into four small sleeping units. Each resident would have a lockable room of about 85 square feet.

Among the amenities, Springboard would offer bathrooms, showers. meals or a place to warm food, a tele-health room, and a welcome center where residents would be screened before moving in.

Residents could be admitted even if they are actively using drugs, but drug use or sales would not be allowed on site.

Malone says safety is a major part of the model, with twice-daily wellness checks and some residents helping monitor the village overnight.

“It can be something that you embrace, because now you’ve got new people in your community who are having hope and want to make something themselves,” Malone said during the Tuesday meeting.

The post Wilmington tiny-home proposal sparks more resident pushback as a federal deadline approaches appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The U.S. Postal Service praised the “unique arrangement” that allowed the town of Bucyrus to keep delivering the mail there.

Amazon's new Sleep Studio feature for Echo smart speakers can read bedtime stories, play soothing sounds and guide kids through meditations.

Relatives of those killed on flight AI171 are still struggling to obtain answers about what happened

When Sagar Patel’s mother boarded Air India flight AI171 on 12 June last year, she called her son as she always did before takeoff. The flight was due to leave Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport in Ahmedabad, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, and was destined for Gatwick.

“We always had a little traditional thing,” said Patel, a business manager from London. “Once she got on the flight, she would sit down and call me. She’d tell me: ‘Yep, I’m on the flight. See you later.’”

For more than a decade, Dr. Joseph Mercola cautioned parents against a potentially lifesaving shot of vitamin K for their newborn babies: “Vitamin K shots are completely unnecessary for your newborn.”

But now, in a break from his past warnings, Mercola is saying he no longer believes that. 

ProPublica contacted Mercola recently as it was preparing an article about babies who died as a result of their parents turning down the vitamin K shot. Mercola’s new point of view is just as unequivocal as his old one: “The data is clear: vitamin K saves lives,” he wrote in an April article on his website two days after ProPublica contacted him. He added: “Based on the totality of the published evidence, I support vitamin K prophylaxis for all newborns.” 

He also directed parents to speak to their children’s pediatricians. 

“Vitamin K deficiency bleeding is rare, but when it occurs, the consequences can be devastating and irreversible,” Mercola wrote. “A single injection at birth can prevent it. Please talk to your doctor.”

Mercola is a leading vaccine skeptic and an ardent supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is a popular figure online, with a Facebook page that has some 1.7 million followers. He sends out a daily newsletter and sells alternative treatments for a variety of ailments. 

His reversal comes at a critical moment. Hospitals and research studies have documented an alarming jump in babies not receiving the vitamin K shot, which has been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1961 to help newborns’ blood to clot. Without it, research shows, babies are 81 times more at risk for late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can be fatal. 

Just as has happened with measles and other vaccines, vitamin K shots have become the target of a deluge of false information online. That has caused some parents to view it as an unnecessary pharmaceutical intervention amid a lingering mistrust of the medical system following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Some point to a 2010 post from Mercola, entitled “The Dark Side of the Routine Newborn Vitamin K Shot.” A doctor in Tennessee recalled reluctant families citing the article, as did doctors in Oregon. 

In the years that followed, Mercola stood by his opposition. He reiterated his position in 2014, after four babies in Nashville, Tennessee, suffered vitamin K deficiency bleeding. And he did so again in 2019, after hospital staff contacted child protective services in Illinois and took temporary custody of a newborn whose parents refused the shot for their baby.  

In place of the shot, Mercola had recommended vitamin K drops, which are taken orally and have been touted online as a popular alternative. The drops, however, are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and research shows they are not as effective as the shot, though they are used in some European countries. 

In his April article, he addressed the rampant false information online regarding the vitamin K shot and acknowledged the role his writing may have played in spreading it. “The internet contains a significant amount of misinformation about vitamin K,” Mercola wrote. “Some of it may reference my own 2010 article. That article reflected the state of a scientific debate that has since been resolved. The science moved forward, and so have I.”

In fact, the science around the vitamin K shot has been settled for decades. The discovery of vitamin K and its role in clotting blood won the Nobel Prize in 1943. Newer studies have confirmed and furthered many of the findings that were available in 2010, but they do not represent a scientific shift from previous research. Some recent studies that Mercola cited in the April article document the rise in babies not receiving the shot and the catastrophic bleeding in the brain that can follow, but again both reinforce the same science that has encouraged giving the shot for more than 60 years. 

In Mercola’s earlier posts, he wrote about what he deemed to be risks from the shot, beginning with “inappropriate” and “unnecessary” pain to the baby. He incorrectly claimed that the amount of vitamin K injected into newborns was far more than the needed dose. In addition, he wrote that the shot may contain preservatives that can be “toxic” to a baby’s immune system. 

Benzyl alcohol is often used as a preservative in vitamin K shots, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations have stressed that it’s safe. In the 1980s, doctors realized that some extremely premature babies suffered benzyl alcohol toxicity, but, according to the CDC, that was because they were on so many medications containing it. In addition, many hospitals now offer preservative-free options.

Some families have also expressed fear about a “black box warning,” which appears on a drug’s label to alert providers of serious risks. The shot does contain a boxed warning, as do more than 400 other medications, but that is primarily related to adults and vitamin K that is given through an IV, not as a shot in the thigh muscle, which is how doctors typically administer vitamin K to babies. None of the dozens of doctors interviewed by ProPublica said they have ever seen an adverse reaction in an infant who received a vitamin K shot.

Read More

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

But even back in 2010, Mercola dispelled one popular misconception that vitamin K injections increased the risk of cancer. That belief stemmed from a pair of older refuted studies. In 2010, he wrote, “that conclusion was in error.” In April, he reinforced that message.

Alternative treatments promoted by Mercola have attracted federal scrutiny. He and his companies have had to pay millions of dollars to settle allegations that he had made false claims about the safety of products. 

During the pandemic, for instance, the FDA sent Mercola a warning letter after he offered unapproved and misbranded products, including vitamin C, on his website as ways to prevent or treat COVID-19. 

In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was mailing $2.59 million to people who bought Mercola indoor tanning systems. The agency charged that Mercola and his companies claimed the tanning systems were safe and that research showed that indoor tanning doesn’t raise the risk of melanoma, a type of skin cancer. 

Mercola did not admit wrongdoing. His online posts include a disclaimer that they are intended as a way of sharing knowledge and information, not medical advice. He also has said his 2010 vitamin K article was based on an interview with a Dutch researcher who studied vitamin K.

Mercola, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, declined to be interviewed for this story but said his current stance is accurately reflected in the April article. “While I do not agree with all of the characterizations and conclusions in your summary,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, “I have nothing further to add at this time.” 

Even though Mercola has now reversed his position on vitamin K, many on social media still cling to debunked and distorted claims. On Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, unsubstantiated claims often go unchecked.

One theme that has emerged on social media is the notion that God created babies perfectly, and there must be a reason they are born without sufficient vitamin K. In one video on TikTok, a woman who identifies herself as a nurse asked, “Did God really get it wrong?” 

Responding to another, someone wrote, “Just know our creator didn’t make a mistake. Every baby is born like this for a reason.” 

Others lump the vitamin K shot, which is not a vaccine, in with vaccines. A comment on a video about the vitamin K shot declared, “My baby isn’t getting any vaccines.” It received more than 600 likes.

Mercola also is not the only doctor being cited by vitamin K shot opponents. Commenters on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit have directed people to Dr. Suzanne Humphries, who has spoken out about vaccines and the vitamin K shot for many years. 

“My opinion is that the more I read about vitamin K,” she said in a video posted in 2014, “the more I can’t believe that it’s injected into newborn infants.”

Last month, she appeared in a lengthy interview on the website of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Kennedy. She cited the pair of studies from more than 30 years ago that found an association between the shot and cancer, though they were both called into question shortly after they were published. As even Mercola noted in 2010, several additional studies found no increased risk of cancer following the shot. 

“Those of us that believe in a divine creator,” she said, “believe that maybe it is by design, or that actually it is by design, and that there’s a reason for it.” 

Humphries did not respond to requests for comment.

During Kennedy’s time at Children’s Health Defense, the group published a post in 2020 that claimed aluminum adjuvants — added components that boost the body’s immune response — in vaccines are “significant sources of early exposure” to aluminum. Some vitamin K shots contain a small amount of aluminum, but studies have not found any evidence of serious or long-lasting harm. Adjuvants, according to the CDC, have been used “safely in vaccines for decades.” 

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, said the aluminum concern remains, as does the cancer fear, despite multiple studies that found no basis for them. He said he would like to see more research on the vitamin K shot, as well as other newborn interventions like the hepatitis B vaccine. 

“I do want to look at the individual components of these shots in conjunction with everything else that the infant is getting,” he said, “and to me that body of literature is really incomplete.”

Hooker said he worked with Kennedy for many years and, while they are no longer in direct contact, he has full confidence in the country’s leading federal health official. But Kennedy’s silence has served to deepen skepticism among experts. 

“Now we’re starting to see something that I never saw, which was brain bleeds and gut bleeds in infants,” said Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington Democrat who worked as a pediatrician for more than 15 years before running for Congress. “And that’s so scary and heartbreaking.”

At an April House subcommittee hearing, Schrier confronted Kennedy about vitamin K, saying that he made parents distrust doctors and shots, and as a result some parents are refusing the vitamin K shot and other standard care. 

“Right now, Secretary Kennedy, given what I just told you about vitamin K, will you just tell pregnant women out there for the record, ‘Yes, you should get your babies the vitamin K shot’?” Schrier asked Kennedy.

Kennedy did not oblige her. He said he has never said anything about the vitamin K shot. 

An HHS spokesperson did not answer ProPublica’s questions but said the CDC recommends that parents give newborns the vitamin K shot within 6 hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She acknowledged that uptake of the shot has declined during recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”

“Rebuilding that trust,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, “requires honesty, informed consent, and respect for individual choice.” 

Schrier said she empathizes with parents who are inundated with so many conflicting messages. She said she recently stepped out of the Capitol building and overheard a woman say — inaccurately — that every childhood vaccine contains glyphosate, which was an ingredient in some forms of the weed killer Roundup. 

“I can just see how this is going to spiral right now. It gets out there, then it’s on social media,” Schrier said. “Every parent just doesn’t want to do the wrong thing.” 

The post A Popular Doctor Had Long Warned That Vitamin K Shots Are Risky for Newborns. Now He’s Changed His Tune. appeared first on ProPublica.

2027 has notably high odds of becoming the warmest year on record, with the latest projections showing nearly an 80 percent chance.

In the United Arab Emirates, there is a growing sense that the U.S.-Israeli war has taught Tehran how to menace its adversaries even without developing a nuclear bomb.

Of all the bases Scotland fans could have found for their World Cup journey, it had to be the city renowned for chasing the English out of town

Sam Adams is the beer of Boston, named after a founding father of the United States who was the fourth governor of Massachusetts. Downtown, there’s a tap room where you can drink it all day. On Thursday lunchtime the bar was packed, full of Scotland fans, and hanging over the first-floor balcony was a big yellow flag. It bore the legend “Remember Bannockburn 1314”.

Of all the bases the Tartan Army could have found for their World Cup journey, it had to be the city renowned for chasing the English out of town. Supporters dressed like William Wallace have been bonding with tour guides dressed as Paul Revere.

They’re about to get more AI rammed down their throats, stuck into their pension plans and investment portfolios

• Share your views on SpaceX’s stock market debut

Americans are growing worried about what artificial intelligence portends for their futures. Eight in 10 Americans report concern over AI, compared with a third who report being excited, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. More than half think it will do more harm than good in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 think it will reduce the number of available jobs.

Skeptical though they may be, they are about to get more AI rammed down their throats and stuck into their pension plans and their investment portfolios, whether they want it or not – binding their futures ever more tightly to the frenzied, risky, multibillion-dollar dash by technology moguls to develop machines capable of mimicking human thought processes to take over cognitive tasks.

Kenyan McDuffie stood in a dark suit and gingham tie in front of an infamous Chipotle in southeast Washington, D.C. The day before, a video of teenagers fighting inside the fast-casual restaurant had gone viral — and presented the former city councilmember a political opportunity in his mayoral campaign.

His opponent, City Council and Democratic Socialists of America member Janeese Lewis George, was “sitting on her hands and playing politics” by opposing a police-enforced curfew for minors, McDuffie said.

So-called “teen takeovers,” or large, coordinated meetups of teenagers in public spaces, have become a key political cause in D.C., where McDuffie argues the city needs to crack down to stave off the worst excesses of the federal government. His critics say he’s falling into a rhetorical trap laid by the Trump administration.

“When teen takeovers threaten the safety of residents and the young people themselves,” McDuffie wrote in a letter to the City Council, “the Council cannot afford to leave law enforcement and communities without every appropriate tool at their disposal.” 

Last summer, before the federal takeover of D.C., McDuffie and Lewis George both voted in favor of broad emergency curfew powers that allowed Mayor Muriel Bowser to create targeted zones that youth could not enter after certain hours, enforced by local police. D.C. has long had limited curfew laws on the books, and an update to the city’s permanent curfew law with new restrictions on enforcement is set to go into effect mid-July.

The candidates, who will face off in a Democratic primary to replace Bowser on Tuesday, have since split. Lewis George voted against both extending the emergency and implementing the new permanent law. McDuffie, though no longer on the council, said he supported both. 

To some, the scene at the Chipotle represented lawlessness and amplified their fears around the city’s youth. To others, the incident, which police told local media caused no injuries or damage, failed to warrant curfew policies which would increase arrests and police harassment of teenagers, primarily Black teens. 

The neighborhood around the Chipotle is beautiful, said Alex Dodds, “designed as a space where people should come and gather.”

“When Black children do that, they are seen as criminals,” said Dodds, campaign director for Free DC, an organization advocating for the city’s sovereignty that has endorsed Lewis George. “I don’t even understand what we want children to do.” 

A few miles away from McDuffie’s Chipotle press conference, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, struck an eerily similar chord to McDuffie. 

“Teen takeovers … have terrorized our neighborhoods,” said the former Fox News host. “They have shut down businesses, and they have wasted hard-earned tax dollars of law-abiding residents who just want to live and work in peace.” 

Federal law enforcement officials would soon begin a “summer surge” targeting teenagers, Pirro warned. She added that her office would begin “aggressively prosecuting parents” whose children violated curfew laws, threatening them with up to six months in prison.    

McDuffie has weaponized the teen gatherings in campaign advertisements and public comments to argue that strict curfew zones — and the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate pushing them — will help forestall more aggressive actions by the Trump administration.

But advocates for D.C. sovereignty and youth in the criminal justice system warned that his rhetoric would only legitimize the administration’s efforts to incarcerate D.C. youth on a large scale, and that there is no evidence teen curfews reduce violent crime. Instead, they say, such curfews would increase the rates of arrest and harassment, particularly of Black teens, at a time when the city is swarming with federal agents. 

“Kenyan McDuffie is much more buying into the Trump administration’s playbook of lock-them-up and using fear to gain support,” said Dodds. “It’s so frustrating for our elected leaders … to obey in advance and go out of their way to press for a youth curfew.”

Trump personally weighed in on the race on Thursday, threatening to “take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” if Lewis George were elected.

The theory in favor of juvenile curfews is that if you deter teens from gathering, they’ll have fewer opportunities to commit crime. But that relies on a misconception, said Riya Saha Shah, chief executive officer of the Juvenile Law Center.

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“Social science research has shown us that [curfews] are actually not effective at reducing crime or victimization,” said Shah. “It could result in increased crime or displaced crime in different places or at different hours of the day.” 

In 2015, research on juvenile curfews in D.C. found that they actually increased rates of gun violence among youth. Researchers theorized that the emptier streets that resulted from curfew policies could make “remaining offenders more comfortable opening fire.” 

While juvenile curfews do not reduce crime, Shah said, they do increase run-ins with police, particularly for Black and brown children. A 2011 study found that African American youths were 269 percent more likely to be arrested for violating curfew laws than white ones. The laws can also end up criminalizing teenagers for being unhoused, and an estimated 10,000 children in D.C.  experience housing insecurity or homelessness every year. 

“They may be brought into a system by virtue simply that they don’t have the ability to go home,” Shah said.

In D.C., where nearly 20 federal agencies have been deployed, these types of curfews pose immense risks for teens. “There are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now,” said Shah. “It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.”   

In his letter to the City Council urging extended youth curfews, McDuffie argued the curfews were necessary to protect “Home Rule,” the 1970s law that gave Washington, D.C., relative independence from the federal government. 

“President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard on D.C. streets and floated proposals to try 14-year-olds as adults. Every week that this Council allows curfew authority to lapse, it hands the White House and its allies fresh evidence for that narrative and justification for federal intervention,” he wrote. 

Lewis George, by contrast, has emphasized that her primary objection to the curfew extension is the intense presence of federal law enforcement in the city.

Despite the lack of evidence to support the idea that teen curfews lower violent crime rates, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with D.C. voters. A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 71 percent of voters supported imposing curfews in certain parts of the city at night.

Though her current position is unpopular, Lewis George has continued to surge in the polls, leading McDuffie by 11 points in the same poll. Internal numbers shared with The Intercept have her up further. 

But Lewis George has not done as well as her opponent with Black voters, a key constituency in the capital sometimes known as Chocolate City. In the Washington Post-Schar School poll, she trailed McDuffie by 5 points with Black voters. A spokesperson for her campaign said that Lewis George was proud of the multiracial coalition she had built, and argued that she does best in the most racially diverse areas of the city. 

The relationship between race and power is complicated in Washington D.C. Rapid gentrification has pushed out much of the city’s Black population, displacing an estimated 20,000 between 2000 and 2013. Between 2000 and 2020 Black residents went from being 59 percent of the population to 41 percent. And yet, the city’s political leadership has largely remained Black — it’s had a Black mayor since Home Rule was established. 

Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC DSA, which endorsed Lewis George, said it is understandable that people with long-standing ties to the city would be skeptical of someone promising change at the scale Lewis George is calling for. She has pledged to build 72,000 new homes in five years to deal with the city’s housing affordability crisis — double the goals set by McDuffie and Bowser; called for stronger labor protections; promised to vigorously enforce wage theft laws; and vowed to establish a Federal Workforce Transition Center to retrain the thousands of federal workers who were laid off by the Trump administration.

Lewis George strongly outperforms with voters 18-39, and she does the worst with voters 65 and older. 

“There’s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city, folks who have before promised big change and transformative change, and then have let them down,” said Hagans, referencing previous mayors Vincent Gray and Adrian Fenty. “I can imagine that’s like, OK, well, at least we know Bowser.” 

Mayor Bowser has not officially endorsed a candidate, but she has clearly made known her preference for McDuffie, who has benefited from her coalition of more centrist Democrats and the city’s business community. 

In Dodds’s view, Bowser has spent much of her final term in office attempting to appease Trump with little to show for it. 

“If appeasement was working,” she said, “we wouldn’t be getting attacked, and they wouldn’t be sending in troops, and they wouldn’t be escalating law enforcement, and they wouldn’t be overturning our laws, and they wouldn’t be attempting to destabilize our budget. But they are still attempting to do all of that, so what good has appeasement gotten us?” 

She noted that crime rates had been declining for two years and that the Trump administration still deployed the National Guard and federalized the police force in August 2025. A month later, Trump pushed a House bill to charge children as young as 14 as adults. 

Alignment between local leaders and the White House on pushing carceral policies predates Home Rule. 

In “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” scholar James Forman explains how many Black leaders in Washington and elsewhere were complicit in pushing the carceral policies of the 1970s, including teen curfews, that eventually led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans. 

As Forman and scholars like Elizabeth Hinton have noted, those leaders were asking for support services alongside these carceral policies, as McDuffie is doing now. But those large-scale investments failed to materialize. Instead, their communities were ravaged by policing and mass incarceration policies that tore families apart. 

Lewis George, who initially ran for her council seat on a platform of divesting from the police, is no stranger to attacks calling her soft on crime. But for some it’s disappointing to see those same attacks coming from McDuffie, who previously was largely aligned with Lewis George on issues of criminal justice. 

McDuffie had previously expressed skepticism over the emergency teen curfews, though he and Lewis George both voted in favor.

“The research has shown that curfews do not prevent violence,” McDuffie said at a City Council meeting last year. 

McDuffie has taken progressive actions on policing in the past. In 2020, amid heightened political energy around police brutality and broader calls to defund the police, McDuffie voted to pull $15 million from the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget. And in 2021, he said that “we need to redirect funding away from the police department.”

Dodds said it concerned her that McDuffie’s campaign appeared to be capitalizing on D.C. residents’ fears. She argued that’s what the Trump administration wants.

“They very much want us to feel afraid of young people and of Black children in ways that are inherently racist,” said Dodds, “because when we feel afraid, we fight each other instead of fighting for one another.” 

The post D.C. Mayor Candidates Are Fixating on Teen Hangouts — and Turning the Cops on Them appeared first on The Intercept.

With matches in 16 cities across the US, Mexico and Canada, players and fans face an array of weather-related challenges

With the 2026 World Cup now under way, all 48 teams face a common opposition: summer weather across North America. Matches will be played in 16 cities, from southern Mexico to Canada, with a range of weather risks possible at each venue.

Thunderstorms disrupted play before the tournament had even begun. England’s warm-up against Costa Rica in Orlando was delayed by about an hour after storms brought lightning and heavy rain that waterlogged the pitch. Safety regulations at US venues mean play is suspended when lightning is recorded within roughly 8 miles of a stadium, not resuming until 30 minutes after the last strike.

President Donald Trump withdrew threats to take Iran’s most critical oil terminal “in the not too distant future,” after fresh attacks on U.S. bases in the region.

Ministry says animals fitted with sensors by foreign agencies collect sensitive sea data, in ‘invisible secret war’

China’s ministry of state security has claimed that foreign espionage and intelligence agencies are using innovative new methods to monitor the country’s waters, including deploying “spy” animals fitted with sensors.

In a post on the Chinese platform WeChat on Friday, the ministry warned that an “invisible secret war” was quietly playing out in the seas around China as foreign agencies were collecting sensitive data “through a variety of new spying devices” to produce underwater maps that pose a “serious threat to our national security”.

Location scans from the globally popular augmented reality game have helped train AI to recognise and interpret physical spaces

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An AI model trained on data collected from users of Pokémon Go will potentially help military drones find their location in war zones.

Pokémon Go, a 2016 augmented reality mobile game, allowed players to find and catch Pokémon in the real world using the cameras on their mobile phones, and exploded in popularity. In 2018, the company reported having more than 800m downloads worldwide.

Trump says hundreds of tankers have escaped Iran’s blockade. Data suggests shipments are increasing but many questions remain

Donald Trump has claimed that the US has been conducting a “secret mission” in the strait of Hormuz to help Gulf petrostates bypass Iran’s chokehold on oil flows – which has roiled global energy markets for months.

In televised comments from the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president claimed Iran was unaware that dozens of tankers had been escorted out of the blockaded channel at night with their transmitters off.

Riverside County has launched an 8-mile "smart freeway" pilot on northbound I-15 near Temecula, using roadway sensors and an algorithm to coordinate ramp meters and suggest speeds rather than widening the freeway. Officials say the $33 million project could reduce stop-and-go traffic and travel times. According to SFGATE, similar systems in Australia and Denver reportedly cutting delays by 20% to 65%. From the report: Unlike typical on-ramp stoplights that run on a timer lasting a few seconds, Interstate 15 drivers could find themselves waiting up to four minutes or even longer while the system determines the necessary speed for traffic entering the freeway. By spacing out the cars, transportation officials hope to improve traffic flow, reduce stop-and-go traffic and decrease the amount of time that travelers have to spend on the freeway. The transportation commission spent $33 million to build the project, which will run for two years. Riverside County Transportation Commission spokesperson David Knudsen told SFGATE that if the program is successful, the agency will work with Caltrans to deploy it elsewhere in the county and then potentially to other traffic choke points in California. "This system is a lot less expensive than trying to build new lanes, and so the idea here is let's make the system that we have work better," he said. Knudsen said the program is not managed by artificial intelligence but instead uses advanced sensors in the roadway to monitor real-time traffic conditions and make adjustments. The stretch of freeway that connects Temecula at the Riverside/San Diego County line to the Interstate 215 interchange in Murrieta can be notoriously clogged. What can be less than a 10-minute drive with no traffic can take between 25 and 45 minutes during the afternoon peak period, according to the transportation commission. "The intent is to create a consistent flow of traffic on the freeway system, and the coordinated ramp metering among the three on-ramps ... will help do that," Knudsen said. "If we can manage that, then we can help prevent that stop-and-go traffic frustration that so many people feel ... on the freeway."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former street seller celebrates newfound rights after debacle in claiming €500,000 scratchcard prize while undocumented

A Nigerian man who won €500,000 in an Italian lottery – but was barred from collecting his windfall because he was undocumented – said the hardship of his more than decade-long immigration journey had been eased after he was finally granted a residency permit.

“I’ve been praying for this moment ever since I arrived in Italy,” said Imagbe Ehizomwengie, 36. “It’s a huge relief. You might think it’s incredible, but receiving the permit means more to me than winning the money. I want to work and contribute to society.”

Thailand's Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol, a lawyer and the eldest of the king's seven children, has died at 47 after three years in a hospital, royal officials said. She was an advocate for women's rights.

With beloved stars’ personal items increasingly up for grabs after they die, a new generation of fans are bidding on everything from bowler hats to dog bowls

From Diane Keaton’s bowler hats and polka dot scarfs, to Gene Hackman’s used paint brushes, to Terence Stamp’s love letters from Jean Shrimpton and even Matthew Perry’s black leather wallet (his credit cards and AAA membership card still inside), fans are being offered – at a price – increasingly personal items from the estates of dead celebrities.

The growing trend for auctions of deceased famous people’s personal items – which has boomed ever since the hugely popular Marilyn Monroe estate sale in 1999 – has even attracted its own portmanteau: “deleb” as in dead celebrity.

Green surge in local elections and recent polling of Labour members may cause government to toughen stance on Israel

Pro-Palestine activists believe there could be a “sea change” in the Labour party’s approach to the crisis in the Middle East which could result in the government taking a tougher stance on Israel.

Campaigners have pointed to the threat posed to Labour by the Green surge in the local elections, the likely departure of Keir Starmer from No 10, and new polling which shows an appetite among Labour members for a ban on all arms shipments to Israel.

This blog is now closed – see our latest full report on the Middle East crisis

Three Indian seafarers were killed in a US attack on an oil tanker earlier this week, India’s shipping minister, ‌Sarbananda Sonowal, said.

“It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello. Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified,” he wrote in a post on X.

The Middle East is being pulled deeper into crisis & the consequences reach far beyond the region.”

Ayoub Junaid, seven, given new pair but needs surgery as Gaza’s children remain unable to access treatment

A video of a seven-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza who suffers from a severe visual impairment crying over his shattered glasses has drawn widespread attention across social and international media.

The footage of Ayoub Junaid has shone a light on the plight of the many visually impaired children in Gaza who, because of Israel’s blockade and the devastation caused by the war, have been unable to access eye examinations, corrective lenses or specialist ophthalmic surgery.

Figures suggest common travel area being used in both directions, but particularly UK to Ireland

Up to 90% of asylum seekers in Ireland may have entered the country via the Northern Ireland land border in the last three years, figures suggest.

Irish government data shows the common travel area (CTA) is being exploited in both directions but suggests it may be more popular for those seeking asylum in Ireland than in the UK.

A luxury resort backed by the US president’s family may be built on a wildlife-rich nature reserve in one of Europe’s poorest nations

If the real estate dreams of a billionaire political family come true, an island in one of Europe’s poorest countries will become a luxury hotel complex, sweeping up stretches of the wildlife-rich nature reserve that sits across the water.

No public consultation has taken place, but there are signs the idea is on the way to becoming reality. Albania has been rocked by nearly two weeks of fierce protests after fences and heavy machinery came to a sensitive wetland and preparatory work began on the tourism vision of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

And the coming crisis in strategic stability.

Why Beijing can’t stop wasteful spending.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While traditional hotspots in the region such as Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia focus on services such as cosmetic surgery, IVF or physicals, China is trying to differentiate itself by providing some of the world's most advanced procedures. "There are two reasons why a patient travels for medical treatments: availability of advanced treatments and price," said Victor Cao, operations director of Joyful Medical, an agency in Shanghai that connects international patients to advanced cancer therapies in China. "Chinese people used to travel overseas for treatments that were not available at home, but now tables have turned." As expanding visa-free policies eased travel in the past year or so, videos are proliferating on social media of foreigners recounting their positive experiences of treatment in China, usually for consumer procedures like acupuncture and tooth scaling. But one treatment that's more quietly gaining traction is CAR-T, among the most promising breakthroughs in oncology but unavailable in most countries, or extremely costly. The process sees doctors collect T cells from the patient's blood then modify them in a lab to produce a special receptor, CAR, that can bind to a specific protein on cancer cells. These engineered cells are then multiplied into large numbers and infused back into the patient. The CAR-T cells seek out cancer cells carrying the target antigen and kill them. In the US, one single infusion can cost between $300,000 to $475,000, according to the American Cancer Society. In China, the equivalent costs about $150,000 to $180,000, and it could get even cheaper -- its drug regulator recently accepted a marketing application for a therapy aimed to be priced below 300,000 yuan ($44,000). China's medical tourism market remains in its infancy. Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone in Hainan, which was designated as the country's only special medical zone in 2013, treated just a few thousand foreign medical tourists last year, compared to hundreds of thousands of domestic patients who visited. There, patients can access advanced drugs, devices, and therapies approved in other countries but not elsewhere in mainland China. But China is pushing to upgrade its economy and reshape its global image from just a manufacturing hub into a provider of high-value services, and demand for medical tourism is surging. Globally, the market is estimated at around $34 billion and expected to reach $126 billion by 2035, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research. Meanwhile, China's sector is projected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2025 to $3.4 billion by 2035, according to New York-based firm Market Research Future. "The patients chose China for something they can't get at home," said Shi Haoying, the group's founder and chief executive officer. "I think the growing attention to medical tourism to China is the inevitable result of long-term accumulation and development in many areas, such as growing medical technologies, quality of service and cost-effectiveness." Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, added: "Many new treatments, including in very advanced areas, are made in China but too advanced for the state of its healthcare system and the ability of its patients to pay for these things. It's in China's interest to integrate into the international system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Carolina beat Vegas 4-2 to take 3-2 series lead

• Svechnikov scores twice as top line clicks

• Game 6 set for Sunday night in Las Vegas

Jordan Staal scored his sixth goal of the Stanley Cup final, sparking the Carolina Hurricanes to a 4-2 win over the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 5 on Thursday in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Hurricanes own a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series and will try to clinch the second Stanley Cup title in team history in Game 6 on Sunday in Las Vegas.

The Supreme Court declined a request from Alabama to move forward with a scheduled execution using nitrogen hypoxia, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.

The board move marks a shift from a June 4 memo to staff saying email signatures, letterhead and other documents must reflect the name as "The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" or "Kennedy Center."

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 12.

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• US House blocks extension of powerful surveillance law

• Jay Clayton: Trump pick has long legal résumé but few intelligence credentials

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The US supreme court has published its opinions, but none of the cases we’ve been watching for were part of the decisions today.

In comments reported by NBC News, House speaker Mike Johnson has said it is “stunning” to him that “House Democrat leadership has put out a statement saying that they’re willing to allow the number one national security tool to go dark over some political disagreement over a very short-term temporary appointment”.

• Report cites alleged contact with employee

• Club says independent probe led to action

• Mickelson spokesperson: matter resolved

Phil Mickelson has reportedly had his membership cancelled at a San Diego golf club following alleged “inappropriate contact” with a female employee.

Golf Digest first reported that Mickelson has had his membership terminated at The Farms following an alleged incident before he played there in the spring. The report, citing multiple sources, said the employee accused the 55-year-old of “nonconsensual and inappropriate physical contact” towards her before a game of golf. Mickelson is said to have been challenged on the incident mid-round and duly left the property.

Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol’s health had worsened since she was hospitalised in December 2022 with heart problems that left her gravely ill

The eldest child of Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn has died aged 47, the palace has said, after nearly four years in a coma.

Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol, known in Thailand as Princess Bha, had been in hospital since December 2022 when she became gravely ill after having heart problems while out training her dogs.

President claims US and Iran are on the verge yet again, but we’ve heard that before – key US politics stories from Thursday 11 June

Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that the US and Iran are on the verge of signing a peace agreement and announced that he will cancel fresh missile strikes.

His comments came in a new bout of public diplomacy by social media, which was not immediately confirmed by the Iranian leadership.

Board seeks to stay judge’s ruling that found Trump’s name was illegally added to Washington performing arts venue

Donald Trump’s hand-picked board at the Kennedy Center is mounting a last-minute effort to keep his name on the facade of the performing arts facility before a court-ordered deadline to remove it by Friday.

The board voted on Thursday to seek a stay of US district judge Christopher Cooper’s 29 May ruling that said Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center, according to a person familiar with the move who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

Iranian leadership has not confirmed claim, after the US president announced that planned strikes on Iran had been cancelled

Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that Washington and Tehran were on the verge of signing a peace agreement, and announced that he was cancelling fresh missile strikes, after two days of escalating attacks on Iran that threatened to collapse the fragile ceasefire.

His comments followed a new bout of public diplomacy by social media, but were dismissed by Iran’s foreign ministry, which said a final decision on an agreement had not been reached.

Tom Mueller, Elon Musk's first hire at SpaceX, expects the company's IPO to help power a new era in space exploration.

Mother and brother were rescued after wave engulfed trio in Laguna Beach, as mayor calls news ‘heartbreaking’

California officials have recovered the body of a five-year-old girl who earlier this week was swept into the ocean by turbulent waters.

On Tuesday evening, the girl, her mother and brother were walking along the shore of Treasure Island Beach in Orange county, when a wave reportedly engulfed them.

Residents packed a public hearing in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, looking to stop a nearly 70,000-square-foot data center from being built near the Nashville Zoo.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 12, No. 831.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 12, No. 1,819.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 12, No. 1,097.

President Trump said earlier Thursday he called off new military strikes on Iran, hours after threatening to escalate the war.

A mother has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the chatbot's design led to her daughter's suicide.

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

PARIS, June 11, 2026 — Pasqal, one of the global leaders in neutral-atom quantum computing, today announced the inauguration of Europe’s third Pasqal quantum computer hosted at CINECA, Italy’s largest public supercomputing operator and a member of the Italian Research Center on High Performance Computing (ICSC), Big Data, and Quantum Computing, in Bologna, Italy. The system was unveiled at the DAMA Technopole in Emilia-Romagna during a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the launch of new high-performance computing (HPC) and quantum computing systems procured by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and co-financed together with the Italy’s Ministry of University and Research through ICSC, including the system delivered by Pasqal. This milestone marks a major step forward in the deployment of Europe’s hybrid HPC and quantum computing infrastructure.

The system is Italy’s first neutral-atom quantum computer. Named SOL, it is a Pasqal Orion quantum processing unity (QPU) featuring 140 qubits. It has been engineered for tight integration with the Leonardo pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer — one of the world’s most powerful HPC platforms, ranked 10th on the Top500 list— representing an important step forward in quantum accelerated high-performance computing.

At CINECA, Pasqal deploys its HPC–quantum integration stack exposing the QPU as a native resource within the supercomputing environment, enabling hybrid workflows that combine quantum and classical computing resources through standard HPC scheduling and operational mechanisms. The deployment builds on the open-source Quantum Resource Management Interface (QRMI) and supports integration with leading hybrid quantum-classical software ecosystems including NVIDIA CUDA-Q and Qiskit, the open-source software stack for quantum computing and algorithm research developed by IBM.

The inauguration builds on Pasqal’s growing footprint across Europe, following the successful deployment of quantum processors in France (CEA-TGCC) and Germany (FZJ-JSC) under the EuroHPC JU’s pilot project HPCQS. Together, these systems form the backbone for Europe’s federated hybrid HPC–quantum infrastructure, enabling researchers and enterprises to tackle complex problems in areas such as materials science, optimization, and machine learning.

“The inauguration of this quantum computer marks a major milestone for CINECA and ICSC and for Italy’s role in Europe’s advanced computing ecosystem,” said Sara Marzella, Responsible for Quantum Computing at CINECA. “By integrating Pasqal’s neutral-atom technology with the Leonardo supercomputer, we are enabling a new class of hybrid applications that will empower researchers and industry leaders to address some of the most complex scientific and industrial challenges.”

“This inauguration is further proof of Pasqal’s ability to execute at scale and deliver quantum systems where they matter most,” said Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal. “Across Europe and beyond, we are turning quantum computing from a research promise into deployed, operational infrastructure that addresses real-world scientific and industrial challenges.”