News Reel

Ars Technica's senior security editor reports: Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period... "The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure," Microsoft said Thursday. "Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor." Microsoft said it observed Crypto Clipper spreading through .lnk file on a USB drive. These files store executable code. When an infected USB drive is plugged into a device, the code checks whether it is already installed on the machine. If it isn't, the malware downloads it through the Tor proxy. To better conceal evidence of the worm, the malware scans the infected USB drive and names the .lnk files with similar names... The stealer also replaces addresses it finds with ones belonging to attacker-controlled wallets. This allows the malware to divert payments to the attacker's pockets. Microsoft believes the purpose of the screenshots is to provide context that may be useful. "This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking," Microsoft said. "The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni traded criticism on Saturday after Italy canceled its envoy's visit to the U.S.

John Alite, 63, was once the top enforcer for the Gotti crime family and a longtime member of the Gambino family.

Spirits are soaring among the co-hosts USA, while Turkey were left to brood over the missed chances that condemned them to a shock exit

On this day in World Cup Euros history: 1976 – Antonin Panenka won the final for Czechoslovakia with the most famous penalty of all time. And 50 years on, he sat down with Gavin Newsham for a good long chat:

Antonin Panenka laughs like a bear might, a low rumble, suggesting mischief among the memories. He is sat in an office at Bohemians football club in Prague, recounting the story of his impudent, revolutionary penalty that not only won the 1976 European Championship for Czechoslovakia against West Germany but soured his relationship with the goalkeeper his spot-kick humiliated, Sepp Maier. “He went 35 years without uttering a single word to me,” he smiles.

But the feud went much deeper. “I read some articles that he even had a shooting target in his garage with my face on it that he used to fire darts at. We get on well enough now though.”

I’m not a fan of the hydration breaks that have been introduced at this World Cup, but they’re here for now and it is fascinating from a coaching perspective because the momentum has swung straight after several hydration breaks. That could suggest coach involvement has helped teams to tweak things.

Turning the game into four quarters – it felt inevitable it was going to head in that direction, and I hope it doesn’t carry on going in that direction. I don’t like it, but let me also be clear – when it’s hot, you really need it, for health and safety. So put yourself in Fifa’s shoes. If you only have drinks breaks in the hot cities you could be accused of giving certain teams an advantage with a chance for a tactical discussion over, say, a team playing in Seattle, where it’s cooler. Imagine turning around and saying: “We’ll only have VAR in some of the stadiums, not all.” You’re either going to have it or you’re not going to have it.

Report finds close ties between the Trump administration and Geo Group, which profits from anti-immigration crackdown

Jim Jordan is among the most famous names in this stretch of Ohio.

The congressman and chair of the powerful House judiciary committee is considered among the most conservative and influential members in Congress, and is a longtime loyalist of Donald Trump.

I tested them against the Apple Watch and the Polar chest strap to find out whether you can trust them for your workouts.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

A losing streak? Makerfield shows mounting dangers for Nigel Farage

From Restore and tactical voting to questions over that £5m gift, the Reform leader faces challenges on several fronts, writes senior political correspondent Peter Walker.

As those around Nigel Farage are fond of pointing out, Reform UK has now led in more than 300 consecutive national polls. When it comes to byelections, though, it is fair to say the party’s results are more mixed.

Yes, Robert Kenyon came second in Makerfield to a popular regional mayor backed by a Labour campaign so relentless that the main risk was annoying voters by knocking too often on their doors. Kenyon also increased his and Reform’s share of the vote from the 2024 general election.

Some Labour MPs still want former mayor to face ‘scrutiny’ of ideas through contested leadership race

Allies of Andy Burnham are increasingly confident of a coronation-style transfer of power after the number of MPs backing him for the Labour leadership surged following his byelection victory.

Burnham and his team are understood to have spent the last few days enlisting the support of MPs and ministers, as he prepares to challenge Keir Starmer in the coming weeks.

Iran's military accused the U.S. of not upholding the first point in the memorandum of understanding, with Israel remaining in Lebanese territory.

Two people were in critical condition after the Juneteenth shooting on the city’s South Side

At least 12 people in a crowd on a Chicago street suffered gunshot wounds after an SUV pulled up and two people inside the vehicle started shooting, police said.

The SUV drove away from the South Side neighborhood, leaving two people, both male, in critical condition following the shooting late on Friday, police said in a news release. One suffered a gunshot wound to the thigh.

The Free Software Foundation's GNU Savannah hosts thousands of free software projects — both GNU and non-GNU projects, including Drupal. But in early May, security researchers from Hacktron.AI reported vulnerabilities and demonstrated an exploit, according to a new statement Friday from the FSF: We have been working with these researchers since their initial report, and have also addressed additional security issues they submitted. All reported issues have been patched thanks to the hard work of GNU and FSF volunteers, as well as FSF staff. After thorough review, we have found no reason to believe that sensitive project data or credentials were accessed, nor that there has been any compromise of Savannah's software supply chain. Nevertheless, we take the security of the GNU system, the tools which make it possible, and the projects we host very seriously. This body of software has become essential to millions (if not billions) of users around the world. We are therefore taking additional precautionary steps. Though the initial security issue was reported to us in early May, the vulnerabilities were discovered in software that was published approximately two years prior. We will be communicating directly with Savannah-hosted projects about steps they can take to review and strengthen the security of their projects. We have also communicated with the other Savane instances we're aware of to assist their review of their own environments, and take any steps needed to help protect their users... This statement is intended as an initial notice. We expect to publish a report on the incident within 30 days. Hacktron.AI bills itself as "Your AI teammate for security." Its web page notes that its investors include Meta, DeepMind, and Perplexity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make sure you file your claim for payment from Google's nationwide Android settlement by Tuesday.

430 ICE street arrests filed over a five-month period were clustered in predominantly Latino communities across New Jersey and New York

Federal agents have arrested hundreds of immigrants off New York and New Jersey streets in recent months in a stealth enforcement campaign that disproportionately targeted people from Latin American countries, according to an investigation by the City Reporter based on a review of more than 1,200 lawsuits.

More than 93% of the people grabbed off area streets who filed suit were from Latin American countries, although Latinos make up only 66% of immigrants without legal status in the region.

His vaunted renovation of the Washington attraction has resulted in an algae bloom and peeling paint

Donald Trump has blamed “vandalism” for “real problems” at Washington’s reflecting pool after an algae bloom in the wake of a $14.2m renovation of the site he declared would turn it “American flag” blue. Paint has also been seen peeling off in the water.

Days after his administration claimed the pool was actually “crystal clear”, despite an unmistakably green hue, the US president acknowledged issues – and, without evidence, blamed foul play.

Steven Spielberg's new blockbuster coincides with real-world disclosures about the government's investigation of unidentified phenomena. But there's no proof of aliens yet.

Terry Reed, found guilty of rape and molestation of a juvenile, called ‘utter failure of a man’ by victim’s mother

A suburban New Orleans religious pastor has been sentenced to 80 years’ imprisonment after being convicted of sexually molesting two boys – the third time in which he was found guilty of abusing minors.

While Terry Reed received his punishment at a state court hearing on Thursday, the mother of one of his survivors read a victim-impact statement on behalf of her son which called him “an utter failure and a sorry excuse for a man”.

Suggestion that Scott Bessent so described a world leader included in Regime Change, by New York Times reporters

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, advised Donald Trump not to host Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, having called the Ukrainian president a “little fucker”, a “special-needs child” and “Mr Bean on crack”, according to a new book.

The suggestion that a US cabinet official described a world leader in such terms is included in Regime Change, a blockbusting account of the second Trump administration by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, set to be published worldwide on Tuesday.

I wanted beautiful macro product photos and videos for a CNET feature. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how I got them.

Trump has appeared during the Iran war to lose patience with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may now find himself "stuck."

• 24-year-old hits 104.2 mph in defeat to Braves

• Pitcher had given up one earned run over eight starts

Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy wanted to remind everyone after his team’s 3-2 loss to the Atlanta Braves on Friday night that Jacob Misiorowski is indeed human.

“He was great,” Murphy said of the 24-year-old ace. “He was dominant, fantastic. You know, you’re going to give up runs. You’re a human. Go back and look at some of the greats. They all gave up runs. We’re kind of shocked when he gives up a run.”

Police say 28 people remain in hospital after passengers were flung across carriages during rush-hour train collision

Nine people are in a critical condition after the Bedford train crash that killed the driver of one of the trains, police have confirmed.

The chief constable of British Transport Police, Lucy D’Orsi, said on Saturday that of the more than 80 people injured, 28 remained in hospital.

At least one person was killed and dozens more were injured after two trains collided north of London on Friday, British officials said.

An app notification informed Joe Gillette that he had been diagnosed with aggressive, late-stage cancer.

Colombians will choose on Sunday between two men whose lives have been very differently shaped by the militias, and whose visions for the country are poles apart

Whoever wins Sunday’s presidential runoff vote in Colombia, the country’s next leader will have a personal history intertwined with one of the criminal forces at the heart of a decades-long armed conflict that claimed nearly half a million lives.

The lives of Iván Cepeda and Abelardo de la Espriella have, in very different ways, been shaped by their relationship with Colombia’s paramilitaries – private armies originally established by rightwing landowners, drug traffickers, businessmen, mining magnates and politicians to fight leftwing guerrilla groups.

Figures including Jared Kushner and Scott Bessent named in directory of Dialog participants that was exposed online

A website leak has exposed participants in the secretive, Peter Thiel-founded Dialog retreats which includes top politicians from across the American divide, officials from foreign countries, other titans of the tech industry world and prominent media figures.

The annual Dialog retreats, which have been compared to other quasi-secret elite conferences like the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove since they began in 2006, have had some participants revealed in previous media reports. Fairly little is known about the invitation-only event, which is usually held at luxury establishments around the world and features organized discussions on global affairs.

When asked what his takeaways from the Iran war were, Trump said he believed there were no limits to his power

It’s been a busy week for the US’s birthday boy. First, there was the cage fight on the White House lawn, in honour of the United States’ 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 80th. Then, after watching sweaty men fight, the president flew to France to try to sort out the mess he’d helped create in the Middle East. I regret to inform you that despite Trump signing what Jimmy Kimmel called “the retreaty of Versailles”, it does not really look like the Iran war has been sorted out. Still, the president seems happy with himself. After Axios asked what his takeaways from the Iran war were, Trump said he believes there are “no limits” to his power.

The best thing you can do is to stay cautious and never hand over sensitive data.

Outbreak of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel has forced mediators to cancel US-Iran talks in Switzerland

Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon have killed at least 16 people, local authorities said on Saturday, despite reports of a renewed ceasefire aiming to end persistent violence that threatens the new agreement between the US and Iran.

Lebanon’s civil defence agency said its personnel transported “16 dead and 12 wounded” to hospital, adding that they had been working “since the early morning hours” in the Nabatieh district in response to “ongoing attacks targeting the area”.

Arrests after explosion and caravan fires heighten controversy over number of people living in vehicles

Jan Johnston was tucked up in the van she calls home when she was rocked by the explosion. “I heard this massive boom,” she said. “I came out and there was thick, black, billowing smoke. It was like a bomb had gone off.”

It turned out not to be a bomb, but a suspected arson attack on one of the many caravans, motorhomes and converted vehicles tucked away in side roads and industrial estates around the town of Glastonbury in Somerset.

Mona Khalil led decades-long effort to protect nesting site for turtles near her home in south of the country

The Lebanese marine activist Mona Khalil, who became a beloved figure in the country for a decades-long effort to protect a nesting site for turtles near her home, has died from injuries sustained in an Israeli strike.

Khalil, 76, ran a sanctuary called the Orange House Project near the Mediterranean city of Tyre. She hosted volunteers in her house to clean and monitor a mile-long beach and welcomed tourists to stay and learn about conservation.

Pokemon Go Fest gave my far-flung family members and me a great excuse to play together instead of separately. As it turns out, we had plenty of company.

Designer turns to the accessory that launched his empire as he invokes the golden age of Italian sport

For his second standalone menswear show in Milan, Ralph Lauren reverted to the accessory that launched his empire in 1967 – ties.

Skinny silk ties featuring subtle swirly prints were neatly knotted and used as the finishing touch to elegant pinstripe suits, while more brightly printed or striped cravats were whirled and worn like ties peeking out from under knitwear and rugby shirts.

Donald Trump presented the new, temporary Air Force One at a hangar at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Friday, a day after White House officials bade farewell to one of two Boeing 747s that have been used to transport presidents for more than 30 years. The new jet was given to Trump by the Gulf emirate of Qatar, provoking political protest as the $400m (£300m) jet exceeds the limit on unsolicited gifts of $50 in value in a single calendar year from the same source

• Trump unveils new Air Force One, a converted Qatari 747

Kennedy overrides CDC order saying an American who came into contact with hantavirus can self-quarantine

The Trump administration is employing “authoritarian” and “unconstitutional” quarantine measures for at least one person who came into contact with a hantavirus patient, health law experts say.

The mandatory quarantine, reimposed without an offering scientific evidence, reveals how the US might approach future cases of Ebola and other pathogens in the US – and sets a precedent for detaining Americans with no scientific rationale.

Exclusive: While recruits will increase headcount for now, broader adoption of AI could lead to jobs cuts in future

Lloyds Banking Group has launched an AI recruitment drive for 300 tech experts, weeks before its chief executive, Charlie Nunn, unveils a strategic plan for the 261-year old lender.

The bank said it intended the recruits to work on its use and development of agentic AI by September, referring to autonomous artificial intelligence models that can plan and execute tasks with minimal human oversight.

The England center will finish a decorated career on Sunday as his Chicago Hounds face the California Legion seeking their first Major League Rugby crown

It’s a long way from Somerset to Chicago, but it’s the Windy City where the Bath, Exeter and England center Ollie Devoto will end his career on Sunday, seeking to help the Chicago Hounds beat the California Legion for a first Major League Rugby crown.

“It’ll be a special day for the team and it’ll be a special day personally as well,” Devoto said, preferring not to predict a result. “My family are coming out for one last go. As long as we give the best account of ourselves, we’ll put ourselves in a good position.”

We’re both addicted to our screens. But at least we’re watching together – it’s dystopian bonding for the modern age

Try as I might, I think there’s no saving my son from modern technology. It’s ubiquitous, seductive and deeply ingrained in every aspect of middle-class life. Worse yet, I’m also addicted. When do I not have my iPhone out, desperately scrolling through a suite of apps, hoping they’ll offer me some manner of comfort from the security of my living room couch? Hours go by as I’m practically begging someone to notice me on Instagram, while he’s skipping from brainrot videos to basketball tutorials on our internet-connected TV. Ten years ago, I might have witnessed a scene like that and thought it was a sign of the end times. We’ve lost our way so much as a culture that a parent and a child can be simultaneously subsumed by screens, barely noticing the other person. But at some point, everyone realizes that the battle is lost. This is just how it is.

In spite of that grim diagnosis, Keir Starmer – who turned snatching defeat from the jaws of victory his personal brand – has made this losing battle a signature issue. This week, the British prime minister announced a comprehensive ban on social media for children under the age of 16. That includes Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Snapchat and YouTube (though not the kids’ version). The ban is modeled on one currently deployed in Australia, which has holes wide enough to drive a fleet of vintage Sherman tanks through. Teenagers in Australia are finding ways around their ban already, and of course they are. When I was 15, if I wanted a six-pack of Budweiser or some of those tiny airplane liquor bottles, I could figure it out.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

At his family’s Chicago funeral home, Spencer Leak Jr. handled Jesse Jackson’s services and helped families who were unable to pay. He died in May at 56.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Student loan borrowers who enroll in automatic payments will get a much bigger discount on interest starting July 1, the U.S. Department of Education says. Auto pay has long offered a modest discount off borrowers' interest rate -- .25 percentage points -- but after millions of borrowers opted out during the long COVID repayment pause, with some making no payments for years, the nation's student debt portfolio swelled to $1.7 trillion. On Thursday, the department said it will temporarily increase its auto pay interest rate discount to one full percentage point. Practically, that means an undergraduate borrower with a loan at the current 6.39% would see their interest rate drop temporarily to 5.39%. The rate cut will last for two years, from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2028. Borrowers already enrolled in auto pay do not need to act. They will automatically receive the rate cut. [...] The department says borrowers will have until Sept. 30 to sign up for auto pay and qualify for the two-year interest discount.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We asked people in the US about their customer service battles and hundreds responded on the financial and emotional costs

Guardian readers from across the US wrote in to tell us about their battles with big companies, and the time, expense and emotional toll exacted by businesses they say are prioritizing the bottom line over all else.

The top takeaway: people really, really don’t like AI customer service.

Record producer Tay Keith was found dead in his Nashville home by officers performing a welfare check, police said.

Now fighting is over, the question is how Iran’s government will behave. Early clues point to more authoritarianism and prioritising relations with China

The precise ideological lessons that Iran’s new leadership draws from the 110-day war may prove to be the overriding factor in determining whether negotiations with the US culminate in an agreement that verifiably prevents the country from developing a nuclear weapon – an outcome that could usher in a new era for the Iranian economy while also reshaping the Middle East.

Does this rapidly assembled leadership team, forged in the fire of war, still represent an Islamic ideological crusade – a description coined by Henry Kissinger – or does the acceptance of the memorandum of understanding, in the words of JD Vance, denote a desire for pragmatism?

In NY-12, four Democrats, including one Kennedy, are vying to replace Jerry Nadler – and potentially shake things up

When news broke that a safely Democratic seat in New York’s wealthiest congressional district was becoming vacant, it was inevitable that there would be a crowded field of candidates.

What people might not have expected is that the subsequent Democratic primary, would become one of the country’s most closely watched and action-packed, the race coming to reflect a range of Democrats’ national political priorities: who is the strongest against Trump; who is the most critical of artificial intelligence companies; and who is, basically, the coolest.

As Apple prepares for Siri AI and new Apple Home capabilities, it's never been a better time to buy a compatible device.

TV manufacturers may have had mixed success with projectors, but this Hisense M2 Pro makes it work.

Does a thought-experiment about US ascendancy in the technology say as much about AI jitters as it does about the reality?

It’s 2031 and the US and China are about to tear Europe into pieces.

The US ploughed vast sums into datacentres and the EU did not. China built robots and Europe did not. American companies “restructured” their workflows around AI and fired people, while EU workers went on long lunch breaks and handed over administrative tasks to the AI model Claude.

National Highways agency uses virtual reality test to see if drivers are distracted by introduction of low-flying drones

I’m barrelling down the motorway at 70mph, swerving from lane to lane, with cars speeding past me. There’s just one problem, I don’t have a driving licence.

Or at least it would be a problem were this a real road test. But despite the life-like surroundings, I am in fact trialling a complex simulation created by virtual reality company MXT on behalf of National Highways, the government-owned agency responsible for the UK’s major roads.

Literary magazine will no longer engage in ‘external publishing partnerships’ after Commonwealth prize furore

The prominent literary magazine Granta will no longer publish the winning entries of the annual Commonwealth short story prize after one of this year’s winners drew widespread accusations of AI use.

The magazine said it would no longer be involved in “external publishing partnerships” in which it had no editorial control.

From East Wing demolition and ‘restoration’ of reflecting pool to bridge and fountain renovations, US capital is ‘a different city right now’

On the edge of Lafayette Square, a landmark park near the White House, a scuffed sign proclaimed: “We are making DC safe and beautiful.”

Julie, visiting Washington DC with her husband, Robert, to celebrate their recent marriage, was unconvinced. “The irony,” she said. “It’s neither safe, nor beautiful.”

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 20, No. 1,827.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 20, No. 1,105.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 20 No. 839.

John Mark Rozendaal was just trying to play music.

On May 29, along with scores of others, Rozendaal responded to calls on social media to gather outside of Delaney Hall, the immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey.

The privately run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility had, in recent weeks, become the site of daily protests, spurred by a detainee hunger strike against alleged ghastly conditions inside.

When Rozendaal went to Delaney Hall, he took his cello with him. 

“I consider music to be a de-escalatory thing to do,” he told The Intercept. “I sat down on the concrete barricade facing north and started to play.”

That night, however, the scene outside Delaney Hall quickly took a violent turn. New Jersey State Police and ICE agents issued a dispersal order and began to clear protesters from the area by force — with officers deploying chemical weapons and charging protesters on horseback. 

“As I played, I saw this wall of plastic riot shields and cops in tactical gear advancing,” Rozendaal recalled. “There were tear gas canisters flying overhead. I could see horses behind the riot shields, flash-bangs. So it was quite dramatic.”

Moments later, Rozendaal was arrested by the New Jersey State Police and, according to an arrest report viewed by The Intercept, charged with one count of obstructing law enforcement. The charge was minor — but a week later, things took a strange turn when Rozendaal received a call from the FBI. 

“The agent said, ‘We’re calling because you were arrested at Delaney Hall,’” Rozendaal told The Intercept. (The FBI declined to comment.)

In the following minutes, Rozendaal said the agents asked if he would be willing to provide the FBI with information on protesters that they described as “anybody planning to go to Delaney Hall with not the right intentions.”

“So, I mean, they were asking me to inform,” Rozendaal said.

Mainstay FBI Tactic

Rozendaal is not the only Delaney Hall protester to receive a call from the FBI.

In the weeks since arrests began stacking up at the protests — approximately 90 people have been arrested so far — at least half of those taken into custody have received calls from federal agents looking for information, according to Benjamin Van Meter, a deputy public defender with the Essex County Public Defender’s Office who represents a number of protesters facing charges.

Van Meter lodged a complaint with authorities over the matter, claiming the FBI contact with his clients violated their constitutional rights.

The phone number used to contact Rozendaal, according to call history logs reviewed by The Intercept, is registered to the FBI’s New York field office and is posted online as an anonymous tipline.

Rozendaal said he rejected the offer immediately and, when the agent attempted to question him further, invoked his right to remain silent, ending the conversation.

Related

How the FBI Infiltrated Racial Justice Protests in 2020

The FBI has a long track record of trying to turn protesters, political dissidents, and ethnic and religious minorities into informants. The strategy, which is still commonly used today, can serve agents by both collecting information while stoking distrust among members of political movements and religious communities, according to Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s New Jersey chapter.

“With every major protest movement in United States history, there have been attempts at infiltration and attempts to disrupt them and to sow discord,” Sinha said. “The FBI has repeatedly been on the wrong side of history every time they’ve tried these tactics of infiltration.”

Sinha said it was important for anyone approached by federal agents to remember their right to remain silent and to ask for an attorney to be present for any questioning.

“Unless the FBI produces a warrant, you have the right to refuse entry, ” Sinha said. “You certainly have the right to stay silent and to demand a lawyer. You are not under any obligation to speak to them about anything — especially if they are charging you with a crime.”

“The Rights of Our Clients”

Samuel Becker, another protester facing local charges after an arrest outside Delaney Hall, told The Intercept he too got a visit from federal agents in the days following his arrest.

“The FBI would rather intimidate and punish the people protesting outside of Delaney Hall than investigate the physical, sexual, and psychological violence that ICE agents and their auxiliaries are inflicting on detainees across this country every day,” Becker said.

Van Meter, the public defender, wrote a letter to Robert Frazer, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, and two high-ranking FBI officials in New York and New Jersey, demanding that the FBI stop their attempts to question his clients without an attorney present. (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

“These attempts at contacting our clients at their homes and by phone violate their right to counsel and we ask that you immediately cease and desist from all attempts to question or interrogate our clients without their counsel present,” Van Meter wrote in the letter, dated June 9. “Any further efforts to question our clients are a continued violation of their constitutional right to counsel and our office remains ready to seek all available relief under both state and federal law.”

In a statement to The Intercept, Karen Paff, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, said Van Meter and his colleagues were simply looking “to ensure that the rights of our clients are respected.”

Related

Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It

“When law-enforcement officers seek to question individuals who are represented by counsel about matters within the scope of that representation, it is our responsibility to notify the appropriate agencies that counsel has been assigned and that any such communications must comply with the law,” Paff said. “This is not a new or case-specific practice. It is a routine part of our responsibility to clients in any matter where represented individuals may be approached for questioning.”

For Rozendaal, the intent of the FBI agents who sought him out seemed to go beyond just fishing for information.

“I think the real intent is to divide us, to make us scared to talk to each other, too scared to talk in general, scared to go to Delaney Hall,” Rozendaal said. “It won’t work.”

The post FBI Tried to Flip Anti-ICE Protesters Into Informants appeared first on The Intercept.

On-field officials typically strive for anonymity. Ma Ning — or Card Master back home — has taken a different approach.

As details emerged of an initial agreement between Washington and Tehran, Iranians voiced muted hopes for peace and prosperity.

Neither Washington nor Tehran wants the peace process to collapse completely, but diplomats say they expect a process full of challenges and distrust.

The single upgrade that transforms your home coffee the most? Your grinder. A coffee expert shared their go-to recommendation with me.

Officials expand safety measures as French capital prepares for huge annual street celebration

Paris is preparing for a street party of unprecedented scale on Sunday, as more than 2 million people are expected to gather for the Fête de la Musique amid a huge influx of music fans from the UK and warnings of record temperatures.

France’s annual free street music festival, which has been running for more than 40 years, has grown into the country’s largest cultural event. What was previously a nationwide showcase for local and amateur talent – from village choirs to classical ensembles and techno acts in the capital – has evolved into a vast international open-air celebration.

Exclusive: Tourism minister says another likely record year of visitor growth is not a worry amid move to welcome tourists out of season and market less frequented areas

Spain is redoubling its efforts to push its tourist appeal beyond the familiar “sun and sand and coast” model as it prepares for another record-breaking year in which the number of foreign visitors could reach 100 million for the first time, the country’s tourism minister has said.

Speaking to the Guardian, Jordi Hereu rejected suggestions that Spain was now saturated with tourists but said it had become clear that the “old formulas no longer work”, especially amid growing concerns about overtourism and the effects of the climate emergency.

Tournament has completed its first week and while the logistics have sometimes been challenging, the people and the football have been good

It was quite a contrast touching down in sleepy Kansas City hours after having witnessed the bedlam on the streets of New York when the Knicks won the NBA Finals and Brazil drew with Morocco. But this is a World Cup full of contrasts, from Fifa’s never-ending quest to make a quick buck ($5 a pop for a bottle of water in the media centre) to the warmth shown by locals I’ve encountered in the Big Apple, Kansas City and Dallas. Then there’s the football. It’s been hard to keep up with the volume of matches, but the opening round served up some classics, with DR Congo’s draw against Portugal on the same day as England beat Croatia capping a thrilling first week of action. Let’s hope it continues. Ed Aarons

It took nearly the full opening round, but a US scene that is usually focused on other sports has fully turned its eyes to socc– sorry, I mean football, forgot to code-switch. Fitting, actually, because at times this state of affairs has been awkward, like when the standard “loud men yelling” sports talk shows are forced to reckon with international football being the No 1 talking point and employing nobody that knows the scene. But these are growing pains. The sport is on at bars and delis, it is being discussed at school pickups and on the rides home. It’s beautiful and exactly what so many of us here in the States have been fighting for. Alexander Abnos

Three Amazon employees have filed a civil-rights complaint alleging the company retaliated against them for publicly supporting Seattle regulations on data centers. "The complaint was filed on the workers' behalf by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an independent group of corporate employees at Amazon that since 2018 has organized around climate issues," reports The New York Times. "It said the company started investigations and told the employees that they could face discipline, in one case up to potential termination, in an act of intimidation that violated the city's civil rights protections against discrimination for political beliefs." Amazon says it launched the internal investigations to determine whether the employees appeared to be speaking on the company's behalf rather than as private citizens. "As we looked more closely at how these employees represented themselves, and how their comments were received by others, it became clear that they may have been speaking in their capacity as Amazonians and not as private citizens," said an Amazon spokesperson. They said that the company does not allow retaliatory behavior and that when the investigation is concluded, Amazon "may or may not take action based on what we find." The New York Times reports: Five Amazon tech workers affiliated with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice testified at several different hearings before the Seattle City Council and two of its committees. Their testimony in the company's hometown drew national attention, and it put the tech giant in the awkward position of responding to public criticism of data centers and artificial intelligence from its own employees. Patrick Schloesser, who has worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services since 2020, said in an interview with The New York Times that Amazon told him he was under investigation last week, when he was called into a meeting with no notice. He had testified at two City Council hearings in early June. "I had this rising sense of anger that Amazon is attempting to infringe on my rights to speak out politically in my city," he said. "If we allow corporations to decide which speech is or is not allowed, that absolutely hurts democracy." [...] [...] The Amazon employees testified that Seattle should consider conditions on allowing new data centers, such as requiring new renewable energy sources of power, banning the use of nondisclosure agreements between the city and developers, and limiting public subsidies. They offered to help create new rules based on their experience as tech workers. "Seattle needs to set the terms so the way any new data centers get built here actually moves us closer to the future we want," Darius Irani, who has worked as a software engineer in Amazon's grocery business since 2021, said at a June 3 hearing before the Council's Parks and City Light Committee. He suggested requiring public reporting of water and power use, banning shell companies and harnessing the heat emitted from the chips in data centers to warm nearby buildings. Amazon told news organizations at the time that it respected 'our colleagues' right to voice their opinions and that the company did not have plans to build data centers within the city limits. On June 9, the Council unanimously voted for a one-year moratorium on new, large data centers in order to give it time to develop regulations. The next day, an Amazon employee relations staff member met the three workers in individual meetings and told them that they were under investigation for their testimony, according to the complaint. Mr. Irani said he was repeatedly questioned about his testimony and who else at Amazon was present at the hearings. "It feels like they say one thing publicly and try to silence and intimidate me privately, which I think is wrong," Mr. Irani said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive: European Commission planning to rewrite key law to allow water-intensive mines in regions suffering from drought

The European Commission plans to rewrite the EU’s flagship water protection law to speed up the development of critical minerals mines, despite many being located in drying and water-stressed regions, analysis has found.

Mining is a water-intensive industry, requiring large volumes of water for ore processing, dust suppression, waste management and mine dewatering. While modern projects recycle water, they still require significant amounts, and in water-stressed regions those demands can add to pressure on already stretched rivers, aquifers and water supplies.

At least five killed in Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon on Saturday morning, as US envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly prepares to open talks with Iranian foreign minister

• What lessons will Iran’s new leadership draw from the 110-day war?

• ‘It’s a big mistake’: Israelis feel betrayed and angry after Iran peace deal

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to renew a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after 24 hours of intense violence that posed an early challenge to the new agreement between the US and Iran to end their conflict.

A meeting that was scheduled to take place on Friday between Washington and Tehran in Switzerland to discuss implementation of the new deal was cancelled when Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley that killed at least 47 people.

Ten-man Paraguay clung on after Matías Galarza’s early strike to secure a famous win and ensure Turkey will go home at the end of the group stage

A surprise start for attacker Isidro Pitta, who was so certain he wouldn’t be called up to Paraguay’s squad for the World Cup that he had already booked a holiday to Spain with his family during the tournament.

Nicknamed ‘Viking’ due to his long hair and big ginger beard, he’s found form at Red Bull Bragantino and is described as “a fighter, a tireless worker and a constant nuisance for opposition defences” in the Guardian’s World Cup player guide.

In ‘middle Israel’ there are fears Iran could rebuild stronger – and there is particular ire for Donald Trump

In the Tree brasserie off Herzl Street in Rehovot, there was much that almost everyone agreed on. Few contested that the ceasefire deal concluded by Iran and the US a few days earlier was very bad for Israel. “We were betrayed by President Trump,” said Avi Perez, 55.

They believed, too, that Israel, more than ever, was surrounded by danger that it would have to confront alone. “It is strange. One day we were in the [bomb] shelters with our children … The next day, everything is supposed to be normal. But nothing has been resolved,” said Shaham Nowick, 35, as he studied the menu.

Twenty years ago I briefly became the victim of a viral pile-on – all because of a silly YouTube video. But I’m glad I had the chance to embarrass myself and move on. Are today’s teens so fortunate?

As a teenager, I went kind of viral – and the most amazing thing about that is it had absolutely zero effect on my life. It was the summer holidays in 2006, and my friends Jessie, Emma and I decided to film ourselves singing along to our favourite song. We were overheated and hyperactive, jumping up and down and headbanging, stretching our arms to the heavens as we confessed to our mamas that we’d “just killed a maaaaaan” before asking Scaramouche if he’d do the fandango.

Later, I added a couple of captions to the video implying we were drunk, even though I was 14 and the closest I’d been to buzzed was the pure placebo of clutching a glass bottle of J2O. Then – for reasons that are now lost to me – I uploaded the video to YouTube a month later, on 19 September 2006, under the title “Bohemian Crap-sody”.

Apart from effort to electrify, there were geopolitical tensions around climate science and the 1.5C goal at pre-Cop31 climate talks

Electrifying the world – with electric vehicles, electric heating and cooling, and modernised heavy industry – could be the next biggest step towards phasing out fossil fuels, replacing the 80% of global energy that still comes from hydrocarbons. As using electrical energy is much more efficient than combustion, the move would save billions of dollars for consumers and businesses – global energy demand could be halved, according to one estimate.

For decades, electrification has been a nerdish backwater of global climate action. But in the last two weeks, at preparatory talks in Bonn before the forthcoming UN Cop31 climate summit, the subject finally took centre stage.

Developments in Ukraine and Iran show that the military superpowers are not getting it all their own way

Our age of what Mark Carney called global rupture is also often described as following the “law of the jungle”, in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, with international law shattered and multilateral organisations hollowed out. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, and the US and Israel’s attacks on Iran and Lebanon seem to confirm this bleak outlook. On closer inspection, however, these wars offer a different, and far brighter, clue to the way forward.

Russia, once seen as a formidable military power, was expected to overwhelm Ukraine, a much smaller and weaker country backed by a divided, fearful and hesitant west. Even after the war settled into a protracted stalemate, the prevailing belief was that Ukraine was doomed to lose. But the narrative has shifted.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

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

Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency to use International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition for ‘regulatory work’

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Australia’s health watchdog has adopted a contested definition of antisemitism to guide its regulatory work.

The move has been welcomed by the nation’s peak Jewish body while the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (Apan) has warned it could silence health professionals from criticising Israel’s human rights record.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 20, No. 635.

just downgraded from v6.06 to v6.06 firmware and everything was solved

Researchers developed an ultrasonic espresso process that uses high-frequency sound waves instead of hot water to produce espresso-strength coffee at room temperature. And, not only did coffee drinkers find it comparable to traditional espresso, but the brewing process cut energy use by up to 75%. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavor, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but needing far less energy than the conventional method. Saving up to 75% of energy by not heating the water is a minor benefit for home users or small coffee shops. But for companies making ready-to-drink coffee products at industrial scale, it could be very significant indeed. A concentrated room-temperature coffee could be used directly in bottled drinks, milk-based beverages or cold coffee products. It can also be shipped as a concentrate and diluted later. This would reduce not only energy use, but potentially processing time as well. The key to the new process is ultrasound. These are sound waves above the range of human hearing. In our system, a small metal device called a transducer presses against the side of a traditional espresso basket and makes it vibrate rapidly. Those vibrations move through the water and coffee grounds. This creates a phenomenon known as acoustic cavitation. Tiny bubbles form and collapse in the liquid. When these bubbles collapse near coffee particles, they produce microscopic jets and forces that act a little like scrubbing brushes. They pit and fracture the surface of the coffee grounds, helping flavor compounds, oils and caffeine move into the water much faster than they normally would at room temperature. In other words, ultrasound helps us replace heat with mechanical energy. [...] In earlier work, we used ultrasound to speed up cold brew dramatically. But the challenge in this project was different: could we produce something with the strength, body and intensity of espresso, without heating the water? To do that, we adjusted several variables. Brew ratio was one of the most important: how much water we used for each gram of coffee. Too much water and the drink becomes diluted; too little and extraction becomes difficult. Grind size also mattered. Finer grounds allowed us to extract flavor more rapidly. Finally, we tested how long the ultrasound should be applied. We found the sweet spot was about two-and-a-half to three minutes. Of course, making a concentrated coffee in the laboratory is one thing. The real test is whether people want to drink it. [...] For the espresso samples, participants could not reliably tell the traditional and ultrasonic versions apart. There were no significant differences in aroma, flavor, bitterness or overall liking. For filter coffee, the ultrasound version was actually preferred overall, with participants rating its bitterness more pleasantly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 20.

The Trump administration told a federal judge that the Kennedy Center is still weighing whether to offer a full slate of performances or more limited programming over the coming months.

US-Iran meeting in Switzerland cancelled because of Lebanon fighting; Trump unveils new Air Force One – key US politics stories from Friday 19 June at a glance

After a meeting due on Friday in Switzerland between the US and Iran to hammer out details of a peace plan was cancelled because of renewed violence in Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to renew their ceasefire.

The diplomatic back-and-forth between Washington and Tehran about a Middle East peace deal has sent energy prices soaring and threatened global economic chaos. Clashes between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have threatened to damage Donald Trump’s efforts to extricate the US from the Middle East war.

One person was killed and several others were hurt when a fire broke out at a luxury beach resort in the Dominican Republic on Friday, local officials said.

This week's guests include Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Rep. Jason Crow.

In 2022, at the age of 14, Dylan Mwaniki was diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney cancer. Four years later, he graduated from high school.

In front of a roaring Seattle crowd, the U.S. men's soccer team​ on Friday defeated Australia in its second World Cup match, clinching a spot in the Round of 32 in the process.

The federal government awarded a company owned by a Trump donor $1.7 million to install a new water cleaning system for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, records show.

June 19, 2026 — The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) will once again be well-represented at this year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC26), which runs June 22–26 in Hamburg.

All three GCS centers—the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ)—will be participating in many parts of the conference program as well as staffing the GCS booth (#K02). Additionally, JSC staff will be at a separate stand, (#Z01) to celebrate JUPITER, Euope’s first exascale system.

GCS centers’ staffs will participate in a variety of poster presentations, birds-of-a-feather sessions, tutorials, and workshops, highlighting how GCS centers are supporting researchers in the age of exascale and the rise of artificial intelligence from scientific and technical perspectives. They aim to highlight how our centers are combining classical modeling and simulation with cutting-edge AI and quantum computing workflows to enable high-performance hybrid workflows.

For an overview of each center’s participation, please visit their respective ISC26 web pages:

• https://www.hlrs.de/event/isc-2026
• https://www.lrz.de/lrz-isc-2026
• https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/jsc/news/events/exhibitions/isc26

At the GCS stand, visitors can expect interesting exhibitions, exciting live demonstrations, and interactive visualizations. Among other topics, the booth has a particular focus on the continued expansion of current and future GCS computing systems and the massive potential they hold for driving new AI developments.

Visitors will learn more about how the GCS centers are driving scientific progress across various disciplines—from climate simulations to vehicle and aerospace design. Additionally, staff will be on hand to give visitors more information about the two European-Union-funded AI factories located within GCS centers: HammerHAI, which is led and supported by HLRS and LRZ, respectively) and JAIF (coordinated by JSC). Finally, GCS experts will highlight how the centers are working with pan-European initiatives like the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, helping Europe maintain its leadership in high-performance computing.

Furthermore, GCS would like to invite attendees to the GCS Industry Reception@ISC26 on June, 24, starting at 3pm CEST (#K02), supported by HPE and NVIDIA.

Enjoy refreshments, great conversations, and networking with colleagues and partners from across the HPC ecosystem.

More from HPCwire

• HLRS to Showcase Supercomputing Advances and Industry Collaboration at ISC 2026
• JSC to Spotlight Exascale, Quantum and AI Advances Across ISC 2026 Program

Source: GCS

The post GCS Centers Spotlight Europe’s HPC Leadership at ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

DÜSSELDORF, Germany, June 19, 2026 — Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (Toshiba) will showcase how high-capacity HDD technology is enabling scalable storage infrastructures for next-generation research at ISC High Performance 2026 from June 23 – 25 in Hamburg. With scientific computing and AI generating increasingly large and complex datasets, organisations are seeking storage solutions that can scale efficiently to support growing performance and capacity demands.

Credit: Toshiba

At booth Z06, Toshiba will present two live demonstrations featuring its MG Series 24TB enterprise capacity hard drives, highlighting scalable storage architectures for scientific computing, research data management and AI-driven applications.

“Scientific research and AI applications are generating unprecedented volumes of data, creating growing demand for scalable storage infrastructure,” said Rainer W. Käse, Senior Manager Business Development, Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronics Europe. “High-capacity HDDs remain indispensable for organisations seeking to store, manage and derive value from increasingly large scientific datasets while maintaining efficiency and reliability at scale.”

The first demonstration features a petabyte-scale scientific storage system built with 78 MG Series 24TB SAS HDDs integrated in AIC’s J4078 SAS4 JBOD platform. The system showcases how research institutions and HPC environments can deploy high-capacity storage to accommodate rapidly growing scientific datasets.

A second demonstration will feature an integrated storage server with 60 MG Series 24TB SATA HDDs designed for scientific AI applications, demonstrating how organisations can support data-intensive AI workflows with scalable storage infrastructure.

The demonstrations are being presented in close cooperation with Toshiba’s booth partners AIC, providing server and storage enclosure chassis, and Broadcom, providing Network Interface Cards (NICs) and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).

The role of HDDs in long-term data infrastructure will also be addressed in the presentation “Designed for Decades – The Sustainability of Hard Disk Drives”, delivered by Rainer W. Käse on Wednesday, 24 June, from 4:20pm to 4:40pm at the HPC Solutions Forum, Exhibition Hall H, Booth L01. The presentation will trace the evolution of SAS and SATA HDD technology, examine the importance of standardisation, outline why HDDs remain indispensable for cloud infrastructures, and explore future technology paths towards ever-higher storage capacities.

To read more, visit: https://www.toshiba-storage.com/events/isc-2026.

About Toshiba Electronics Europe

Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (TEE) offers European consumers and businesses a wide variety of hard disk drive (HDD) products plus semiconductor solutions for automotive, industrial, IoT, motion control, telecoms, networking, consumer and white goods applications. Next to HDDs, the company’s broad portfolio encompasses power semiconductors and other discrete devices ranging from diodes to logic ICs, optical semiconductors as well as microcontrollers and application specific standard products (ASSPs) amongst others. In addition, TEE offers SCiB battery cells and modules with lithium titanium oxide (LTO) for heavy-duty applications.

TEE has its headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany, with branch offices in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom providing marketing, sales and logistics services.

Source: Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH

The post Toshiba Demonstrates Storage Infrastructure for Scientific AI and Research at ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

June 19, 2026 — As in the previous year, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) will be present with two exhibition stands:

Booth #Z01, run by JSC, is once more dedicated to the new exascale supercomputer JUPITER, showcasing JSC’s extensive supercomputing activities. Booth #K02, run by GCS, showcases the joint activities of the German partners within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). Alongside JSC, these include the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).

The JSC team at ISC 2025

JSC’s focus topics at JSC will be the immense potential of the JUPITER exascale supercomputer, JSC’s quantum machines, the integration of quantum and HPC systems, and technical and scientific developments, for example in the field of artificial intelligence.

At the JUPITER booth (#Z02), JSC’s most striking attraction continues to be Europe’s first exascale supercomputer JUPITER, developed and hosted by JSC. On a video wall, visitors will learn about scientific flagship projects already profiting from its exascale power.

JSC’s unique original LEGO exhibits will also be on display again: Models of JUPITER and the Modular Data Centre (MDC) including the innovative cooling system on the roof – as well as a blade of the JUPITER Booster.

In addition, JSC will be showing videos of JUPITER and the JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF). As in previous years, JSC’s proven monitoring tool LLview will provide live insight into the computing jobs.

At the GCS booth #K02, JSC will showcase the growing Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), including live access at the booth, giving visitors a glimpse of its potential. Moreover, JSC will illustrate the steadily increasing importance of AI in HPC, as reflected in developments such as the Helmholtz AI Cooperation Unit. On top of that, parts of the new LEGO model of JUNIQ as well as an D-Dave Chip will be on display.

Numerous JSC Contributions: Talks, Tutorials, and Workshops

JSC researchers once again contribute extensively to the ISC programme in 2026: Andreas Herten organises the tutorial “Efficient Distributed GPU Programming for Exascale”, while Sebastian Achilles leads the tutorial “Introduction to EESSI: the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations” and also co-organises the corresponding Birds-of-a-Feather session later during the conference week. Brian J. N. Wylie contributes to the “3rd International Workshop on Readiness of HPC Extreme-scaling Applications”.

Estela Suarez plays a key role, contributing to sessions on advanced memory architectures and co-designing next-generation supercomputing systems, as well as participating in community activities at the conference.

The JSC directors Thomas Lippert and Kristel Michielsen are prominently represented throughout the conference programme. Kristel Michielsen contributes to the Birds-of-a-Feather session “Quantum-Computing-as-a-Service: What Do Users Want Today and How Can One Provide It?” and presents the projects “QEX & QEC4QEA” at the EuroHPC JU booth, while Thomas Lippert joins the NHR Sofa Talk on teaching with quantum computers.

JSC colleagues contribute to several Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions on European HPC strategies, AI ecosystems, dynamic resource usage, user support in the AI and exascale era, and future workforce development in quantum technologies, including Benedikt von St. Vieth’s BoF on “Deploying Next-Generation HPC Systems with NVIDIA Superchips: Early Experiences, Challenges, and Best Practices”, Mathis Bode’s session on “A European HPC Ecosystem for AI: Challenges and Opportunities”, as well as the user-focused BoF by Thomas Breuer and Ilya Zhukov on “Rethinking HPC User Support for the AI and Exascale Era”.

In the ISC Poster Sessions, JSC researchers share their contributions on continuous benchmarking from HPC clusters to quantum processors, the JUNIQ Benchmark Suite for quantum technology readiness, and advances in large-scale density functional theory. Further contributions are “The JUPITER AI Factory”, highlighting ongoing developments in Europe’s exascale and AI infrastructure, as well as the “JUNIQ Benchmark Suite” poster by Ashwin Kumar Karnad, which focuses on tracking quantum technology readiness within the JUNIQ infrastructure.

JSC is also represented at the EuroHPC JU stand, where colleagues contribute to numerous presentations on European HPC, AI and quantum-computing projects, such as HPCQS, or HPC-TRAIN. In “JUPITER, exascale supercomputer & JUPITER AI Factory”, Benedikt von St. Vieth and Mathis Bode highlight JSC’s key role in the Europe’s AI factory initiative.

Events with JSC participation – All times are Central European Time (CEST)

Monday, June 22

Tutorial: Efficient Distributed GPU Programming for Exascale
Andreas Herten
Time: 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM | Hall X1 – 1st Floor

Tutorial: Introduction to EESSI: the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations
Sebastian Achilles
Time: 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM | Hall X3 – 1st Floor

Tuesday, June 23

BoF: Aligning HPC Strategies: PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case for HPC in Europe in Light of the ETP4HPC SRA and Other European HPC Initiatives
Florian Berberich ,Hans-Christian Hoppe & Estela Suarez
Time: 2:15 PM to 3:15 PM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

BoF: Sharing Experiences and Challenges in the Dynamic Use of Resources in HPC/AI
Hans-Christian Hoppe
Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

Wednesday, June 24

BoF: Quantum-Computing-as-a-Service: What Do Users Want Today and How Can One Provide It?
Kristel Michielsen
Time: 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM | Hall F – 2nd Floor

BoF: Super(computing)heroes
Cristina Manzano
Time: 10:45 AM to 11:45 AM | Hall F – 2nd Floor

Meet and Greet: Sabine Mehr and Estela Suarez
Estela Suarez
Time: 1:00 PM to 1:30 PM | Hall H, Community Stage – Ground floor

BoF: Quantum Classical Hybridization : Where Quantum Fits in the Continuum
Carlos Gonzalez
Time: 5:15 AM to 6:15 AM | Hall F – 2nd Floor

Thursday, June 25

BoF: European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI)
Sebastian Achilles
Time: 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

Panel: Advanced Memory Architecture
Estela Suarez
Time: 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM | Hall 4 – Ground Floor

BoF: Deploying Next-Generation HPC Systems with NVIDIA Superchips: Early Experiences, Challenges, and Best Practices
Benedikt von St. Vieth
Time: 10:45 AM to 11:45 AM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

Vendor Roadmaps
Sarra Refai
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:55 PM | Hall 4 – Ground Floor

BoF: A European HPC Ecosystem for AI: Challenges and Opportunities
Mathis Bode
Time: 2:15 PM to 3:15 PM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

BoF: Rethinking HPC User Support for the AI and Exascale Era
Thomas Breuer & Ilya Zhukov
Time: 2:15 PM to 3:15 PM | Hall F – 2nd Floor

BoF: Quantum Computing and the Future of the Technical Workforce: A Cross-Sector Birds-of-a-Feather Session
Bernd Mohr & Orkun Sensebat
Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM | Hall F – 2nd Floor

BoF: Co-Designing Next Generation Supercomputing Systems
Estela Suarez
Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM | Hall G1 – 2nd Floor

Friday, June 26

Workshop: 10th International Workshop on In Situ Visualization
Thomas George
Time: 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM | Hall 10 – 1st Floor

Workshop: 7th ISC HPC International Workshop on “Monitoring, Observability, and Operational Data Analytics”
Filipe Guimaraes
Time: 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM | Hall X11 – 1st Floor

Workshop: QRUCH: Quantum Resources for Unified Computing Hub, 2nd Edition
Carlos Gonzalez
Time: 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM | Hall X3 – 1st Floor

Workshop: Workshop on Sustainable Practices for Reproducibility in HPC
Thomas Breuer
Time: 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM | Hall X8 – 1st Floor

Workshop: 12th Annual High Performance Containers Workshop
Krishna Kant Singh
Time: 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM | Hall X1 – 1st Floor

Workshop: 2nd International Workshop on Energy Efficiency with Sustainable Performance: Techniques, Tools, and Best Practices
Adel Dabah
Time: 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM | Hall X2 – 1st Floor

Workshop: 3rd International Workshop on Readiness of HPC Extreme-scaling Applications
Brian J. N. Wylie
Time: 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM | Hall X7 – 1st Floor

Workshop: International Workshop on RISC-V for HPC at ISC
Daniel Seibel & Prateek Chawla
Time: 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM | Hall X10 – 1st Floor

ISC Poster Sessions

Research Posters on Display
Tuesday, June 23, 2026 2:15 PM to 6:15 PM
Foyer D-G – 2nd Floor

Research Poster Pitch
Wednesday, June 24, 2026 3:00 PM to 3:45 PM
Hall F – 2nd Floor

Project Poster Reception
Wednesday, June 24, 2026 3:45 PM to 5:15 PM
Foyer D-G – 2nd Floor

JSC posters:

Topic: Centralised Dashboard for Continuous Benchmarking: From HPC Clusters to Quantum Processors
Filipe Guimaraes
Research Poster Presentation | Hall F – 2nd Floor – 2nd Floor

Topic: JUNIQ Benchmark Suite: Tracking Progress in Quantum Technology Readiness
Ashwin Kumar Karnad
Research Poster Presentation | Hall F – 2nd Floor – 2nd Floor

Topic: Next Steps in Large-Scale Density Functional Theory
Paul F. Baumeister
Research Poster Presentation | Hall F – 2nd Floor – 2nd Floor

Topic: The JUPITER AI Factory
Mathis Bode
Project Poster on Display | Foyer D-G – 2nd Floor

Booth Talks (GCS #K02)

Tuesday, June 23 | 5:30 PM – 6:00 PM

SEANERGYS – Middleware for efficient HPC/AI System Operation
Speaker: Hans-Christian Hoppe

HANAMI – HPC Alliance for Applications and Supercomputing Innovation: The Europe – Japan Collaboration
Speaker: Florian Berberich

Thursday, June 25 | 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM

POP3 – Performance Optimisation and Productivity Center of Excellence
Speaker: Bernd Mohr

HPC-Train – Supporting Europe`s next generation of HPC professionals
Speaker: Veronica Teodor

Other Events

NHR Sofa Talk
Topic: Teaching with Quantum Computers
Speaker: Thomas Lippert
Tuesday, June 23 | Time: 1:30 PM | booth #J10

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: QEX & QEC4QEA
Speaker: Kristel Michielsen
Tuesday, June 23 | Time: 2:30 PM to 3:00 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: HPCQS
Speaker: JSC
Tuesday, June 23 | Time: 4:30 PM to 5:00 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: HPC-TRAIN
Speaker: Veronica Teodor
Tuesday, June 23 | Time: 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM | booth #J30

WHPC Chapters + Affiliates Update!
Cristina Manzano et al
Tuesday, June 23 | Time: 19:05 PM to 19:20 PM | HPC Solutions Forum – booth #L01

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: EUPEX
Speaker: Etienne Walter
Tuesday, June 24 | Time: 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: DARE
Speaker: Osman Unsal
Tuesday, June 24 | Time: 12:00 AM to 12:30 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: JUPITER, exascale supercomputer & JUPITER AI Factory
Speaker: Benedikt von St. Vieth & Mathis Bode
Tuesday, June 24 | Time: 12:30 PM to 1:00 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: HANAMI
Speaker: France Boillod-Cerneux
Tuesday, June 24 | Time: 4:00 PM to 4:30 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: SEANERGYS
Speaker: Hans-Christian Hoppe
Tuesday, June 24 | Time: 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: POP 3 Centre of Excellence
Speaker: Marta Garcia-Gasulla
Tuesday, June 25 | Time: 12:00 AM to 12:30 PM | booth #J30

Presentation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Topic: EPICURE
Speaker: Alberto Lanzanavo
Tuesday, June 25 | Time: 1:00 PM to 1:30 PM | booth #J30

Source: JSC

The post JSC to Spotlight Exascale, Quantum and AI Advances Across ISC 2026 Program appeared first on HPCwire.

New craft, called VC-25B Bridge, had provoked protest since $400m jet wildly exceeds limit on unsolicited gifts

Donald Trump unveiled the new, temporary Air Force One at a hangar at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Friday, a day after White House officials bid farewell to one of two Boeing 747s used to transport presidents for more than 30 years.

The new jet, designated VC-25B and decked out in a punchy red, white, dark blue and gold livery, was gifted to Trump by the Gulf emirate of Qatar, provoking howls of political protest since the $400m jet wildly exceeds the limit on unsolicited gifts of $50 in value in a single calendar year from the same source.

Amazon MGM has dropped Luca Guadagnino's nearly completed Sam Altman biopic Artificial and is seeking another distributor for the film. The move comes months after Amazon expanded its multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, fueling speculation about a potential conflict given the movie's reportedly unflattering portrayal of Altman. The Independent reports: Artificial would have marked the Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name director's third Amazon film, following the critically acclaimed Zendaya-led tennis romance Challengers (2024) and the academic scandal drama After the Hunt (2025), starring Julia Roberts. The new movie is said to chronicle the brief period when Altman was abruptly ousted as OpenAI's CEO in 2023 and subsequently rehired. Monica Barbaro and Ike Barinholtz star alongside Garfield as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, while Yura Borisov, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O'Dowd, Mark Rylance and Margo's Got Money Troubles breakout Thaddea Graham round out the cast. It is unclear exactly why the film was dropped, but according to Variety, the news came after it had already undergone positive screen tests. An early viewer told the publication that the film's portrayals of Altman and newly minted trillionaire Musk are the two characters audiences would "like the least." It was also reported that Amazon had already seen every early iteration of the script before Guadagnino was hired to direct. Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have developed a high-profile friendship over the years. In fact, the former was in attendance at Bezos's wedding to Lauren Sanchez, which took place in Venice, Italy, in 2025. In recent months, the two have continued to deepen their professional partnership that began in 2015, when Amazon became one of OpenAI's first investors. Ten years later, the companies closed their first major deal in November 2025, allowing the ChatGPT maker to run its systems on Amazon's U.S. data centers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

June 19, 2026 — For years, quantum computing was defined largely by scientific breakthroughs, laboratory demonstrations and long-term promises. Today, it’s increasingly viewed as a strategic technology. Governments, research institutions and enterprises are investing billions of dollars on quantum computing’s potential – in roles from economic competitiveness and scientific leadership to national security.

Quantum won’t replace classical computing; it will accelerate it through a hybrid architecture. Credit: AMD.

The U.S. Department of Commerce in May announced plans to invest more than $2 billion in quantum computing and quantum manufacturing initiatives. The investment reflects a growing confidence that quantum tech is nearing practical impact and a national priority to build a domestic quantum ecosystem.

But the future of quantum computing will not be built on quantum processors alone. Its foundation will be the convergence of quantum computing, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

Quantum computing systems are evolving toward hybrid architectures. It’s at this intersection of quantum and classical technologies where AMD lives.

With AMD’s long history and broad portfolio, the company is uniquely qualified to enable quantum and all it promises. For nearly a decade, AMD has engineered technologies that make quantum computing practical. The company’s CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, networking and open software provide critical classical infrastructure needed to develop, operate and scale next-generation quantum systems.

Quantum’s Next Step is Hybrid

Quantum computers are not faster versions of classical computers. They are a fundamentally different computing model designed to use the properties of quantum mechanics to explore certain problems that classical systems struggle to solve efficiently. Promising long-term applications include chemistry, materials science, drug discovery, energy research, optimization and advanced scientific modeling. In each of these areas quantum systems could unlock new discoveries and new economic opportunities.

Yet today’s quantum systems remain constrained by factors such as error rates, coherence limitations, scaling challenges and system complexity. As a result, most current quantum workloads depend heavily on classical computing for functions that include control, calibration, orchestration, simulation, data preparation, post-processing and error correction. Even as quantum processors become more capable, classical requirements are expected to grow rather than disappear.

As AMD sees it, the future is increasingly centered on hybrid quantum-classical computing, where quantum processors serve as specialized accelerators within larger computing environments. Quantum systems tackle the portions of problems where they may offer an advantage – the beyond-classical or many-body problems – while classical systems handle the surrounding computations that make those results useful.

It’s the same idea in high-performance computing, where workloads are assigned to CPUs or GPUs based on how much parallel processing they require. The existing suite of AMD ROCm software for HPC is evolving and is expected to provide support for orchestrating quantum accelerators in addition to GPUs.

Why AMD Technologies Matter

Every approach to quantum computing – superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, photonic and others – presents different control, timing and integration requirements. It’s not a single technology stack.

But what every approach shares is a need for powerful classical infrastructure. And that aligns across AMD’s portfolio:

• AMD EPYC server processors support orchestration, workflow management and high-performance computing workloads.
• AMD Instinct graphics processing accelerators power simulation, modeling and AI-assisted research.
• AMD FPGAs and adaptive computing technologies support low-latency control, readout and real-time error correction.
• AMD networking, software and system-level technologies connect these resources into scalable platforms.

AMD supports all quantum approaches. The company is not tied to one quantum modality or one vertically integrated architecture. Instead, AMD helps provide the heterogeneous compute foundation that different quantum approaches can build upon.

Collaboration Moves the Ecosystem Forward

Quantum computing progress requires collaboration across hardware, software, systems, research institutions and application developers. The role of AMD – working with ecosystem leaders to explore how quantum systems can be integrated with classical computing infrastructure – reflects that reality.

AMD collaborates with leaders in quantum computing, financial services and scientific research – including JPMorganChase and Oak Ridge National Laboratory – to explore the integration of quantum systems with AI and high-performance computing environments.

And AMD’s work with IBM focuses on quantum-centric supercomputing architectures that bring together quantum processors, HPC and AI resources. AMD’s collective efforts explore how AMD CPUs, GPUs and adaptive computing technologies can work alongside IBM quantum systems to support emerging hybrid workloads.

This collaborative approach recognizes a fundamental truth about the industry: Quantum innovators typically need powerful classical infrastructure, and classical infrastructure providers play an essential role in helping the ecosystem advance.

Building the Infrastructure for the Quantum Era

Quantum computing is approaching a critical transition.

Large-scale fault-tolerant systems remain a long-term goal, but meaningful progress is happening through hybrid workflows, quantum simulation, error correction research and quantum-classical integration. Success in this space depends less on raw qubit counts and more on system architecture, software integration and compute efficiency.

AMD’s strategy is to support broad quantum workflows and enabling technologies. It’s a platform strategy, not a component strategy. And in an emerging market, platform strategies tend to create more durable strategic leverage than point solutions.

AMD is not betting that one qubit modality will win quickly or that the market will settle around one vertically integrated provider. The company is building infrastructure to support a broad range of quantum modalities. The Commerce Department’s investment initiative signals that governments believe the time to build the supporting ecosystem is now.

As the quantum era transitions from ambitious laboratory curiosity to commercial necessity, AMD isn’t just participating in the ecosystem. It is building foundational computing technologies to support quantum computing at scale.

More from HPCwire

• OQC, JPMorganChase and AMD to Explore Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing in Finance
• Commerce Takes Portfolio Approach with $2B Quantum Investment Initiative

Source: AMD

The post AMD Backs Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing to Accelerate Commercial Quantum Adoption appeared first on HPCwire.

A judge on Friday cleared the way for the DOJ to disclose former President Joe Biden's conversations with his biographer to the Heritage Foundation. Later in the day, she blocked the release for three weeks.

Norway will largely prohibit generative AI use for elementary kids ages 6 to 13 beginning with the new school year, while allowing limited, teacher-supervised use for older students. The government says the restrictions are intended to prevent children from skipping foundational reading, writing, and mathematics skills amid declining test scores. Reuters reports: Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom. Using AI increases the risk that young children skip important steps in their education, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a press conference on Friday. "The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere said, adding that the new standards will be imposed from the new school year beginning in late August. Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added. In a related statement, the Norwegian government also said it would propose legislation to fund the use of more books in classrooms, reversing the trend towards computer tablets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video game composer and sound designer Bobby Prince has died at age 81 following an illness. Developer id software shared the news. Engadget reports: Prince was perhaps best known for his pioneering work on the Doom series. The Library of Congress inducted his soundtrack for the original game into the National Recording Registry just last month. "Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back," the Library of Congress stated. "Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies." Prince also worked on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D. In 2006, the Game Audio Network Guild honored Prince with a lifetime achievement award.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This year researchers look to ​“Connect the Dots” at ISC. Argonne speakers will present research and key findings across topics like artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and quantum.

June 19, 2026 — Argonne researchers will speak at ISC High Performance in Hamburg, Germany June 22 through 26. Attendees will hear from leaders across Computing, Environment and Life Sciences about agentic AI, reproducibility in HPC, quantum computing, and more.

Registration is required to attend any session.

Monday, June 22

Tutorial — Building Scalable Agentic Systems for Science: Concepts, Architectures, and Hands-On with Academy
Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
Learn more

Tutorial — Programming Novel AI Accelerators for Scientific Computing
Murali Emani, Varuni Katti Sastry
Learn more

Tuesday, June 23

Panel — Optimizing the Lifecycle: Performance, Efficiency, and Sustainability in HPC
Valerie Taylor
Learn more

Research Paper — Ranking Before Serving: Low-Latency LLM Serving via Pairwise Learning-to-Rank
Mike Papka
Learn more

Wednesday, June 24

Panel — AI Factories and Gigawatt Datacenters
Jini Ramprakash
Learn more

BoF — The Next Wave of Confluence: Agentic Workflows in HPC and Cloud
Mike Papka, Rick Stevens
Learn more

Project Poster Reception — European Systems and Software Summit (EQS3): Four Years, Four Themes and Eight Insights
Laura Schulz
Learn more

Research Paper — MonteQ: A Monte Carlo Tree Search Based Quantum Circuit Synthesis Framework
Paul Hovland
Learn More

Panel — The Role of AI and the HPC-Edge Continuum in Urgent Science
Nicola Ferrier
Learn More

Thursday, June 25

BoF — Co-Designing Next Generation Supercomputing Systems
Valerie Taylor
Learn More

BoF — Quantum Computing and the Future of the Technical Workforce: A Cross-Sector Birds-of-a-Feather Session
Laura Schulz
Learn More

Research Papers — Understanding Large-Scale HPC System Behavior Through Cluster-Based Visual Analytics
Shilpika, Yan To Linus Lam, Yun-Hsin Kuo, Venkatram Vishwanath, Mike Papka, Kwan-Liu Ma
Learn More

Friday, June 26

Workshop — 7th ISC HPC International Workshop on ​Monitoring, Observability, and Operational Data Analytics
Kevin Brown
Learn More

Workshop — Workshop on Sustainable Practices for Reproducibility in HPC
Kate Keahey
Learn More

Workshop — Multi-Agent Orchestration for High-Throughput Materials Screening on a Leadership-Class System
Thang Duc Pham, Harikrishna Tummalapalli, Fakhrul Hasan Bhuiyan, Álvaro Vázquez Mayagoitia, Christine Simpson, Riccardo Balin, Venkatram Vishwanath, Murat Keçeli
Learn More

Workshop —3rd Trillion Parameter Consortium Workshop at ISC: Bridging the AI and HPC Gap
Murali Emani, Carlo Siebenschuh
Learn More

Workshop — 5th Workshop on Quantum and Hybrid Quantum/Classical Computing Approaches
Laura Schulz
Learn More

Source: Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne Brings AI, Quantum and HPC Expertise to ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

June 19, 2026 — Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G7 instances, delivering high performance GPU acceleration for AI inference, graphics, and data analytics workloads.

AWS is the first major cloud provider to support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7 instances are accelerated by these GPUs with custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering up to 4.6x AI inference performance and up to 2.1x graphics performance compared to G6 instances. G7 instances also deliver faster performance for GPU-accelerated analytics on Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). G7 instances are well suited for a broad range of GPU-enabled workloads including AI inference, graphics rendering, video transcoding and analytics, spatial computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and data analytics.

Here are improvements of G7 instances compared to previous generation:

• Faster GPU memory: NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs offer 1.33 times the GPU memory capacity and 2.45 times the GPU memory bandwidth compared to G6 instances. With 32 GB of GPU memory per GPU, 5th Gen Tensor Cores, and 4th Gen RT Cores, G7 instances deliver enhanced AI inference and graphics performance.
• High performance networking and storage: G7 instances come with 700 Gbps of EFA-enabled networking throughput (7x compared to G6) enabling the low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity that AI inference, graphics-intensive applications, and GPU-accelerated data analytics workloads need to perform at their best. G7 instances support up to 7.6 TB local NVMe SSD storage, enabling you to keep large models and datasets close to compute, reduce data transfer overhead, and improve throughput.
• Advanced video encoding and decoding engines: Ninth-generation NVENC and sixth-generation NVDEC engines support 4:2:2 encoding and decoding for high-resolution video workflows, delivering 1.5x concurrent video streams compared to previous-generation G6 instances.

G7 instances feature up to 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs with up to 256 GB of total GPU memory (32 GB of memory per GPU) and custom Intel Xeon Scalable processors. They also are available in 7 sizes and support up to 192 vCPUs, up to 700 Gbps of network bandwidth, up to 768 GiB of system memory, and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage.

G7 instances support NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P for multi-GPU sizes, NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA with EFA, and GPUDirect RDMA with EFA for Amazon FSx for Lustre, enabling low-latency GPU-to-GPU communication for multi-GPU and multi-node workloads.

To get started with G7 instances, you can use the AWS Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMI) or NVIDIA Workstation AMIs with prepackaged GPU drivers for your AI inference and graphics workloads. To use G7 instances with Amazon EKS, build EKS AMIs with NVIDIA driver version R595 with EKS-provided automation. G7 instances support multiple operating systems including Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, and Windows Server, with comprehensive NVIDIA driver integration providing compatibility with industry-standard graphics libraries including DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.

Amazon EC2 G7 instances are available in two AWS regions: US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). To check future Regional expansion plans, look up the instance type in the CloudFormation resources tab on the AWS Capabilities by Region page.

Source: Daniel Abib, AWS

The post AWS Announces Amazon EC2 G7 Instances Accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.

The Altoids were a callback to a viral moment between former first lady Michelle Obama and former President George W. Bush.

June 19, 2026 — At ISC 2026, NVIDIA is unveiling the latest HPC and AI breakthroughs. Learn how GPU cloud computing, HPC networking, machine learning, and quantum computing are transforming computer science and AI.

Immerse yourself in exclusive sessions with industry leaders, engaging discussions, and powerful demos. Stop by NVIDIA’s main NVIDIA booth E30 in the Exhibition Hall to see how the latest advancements in tech are accelerating discovery and sustainability or check out the Slurm booth Z10 in the foyer to engage with the experts from the HPC community’s leading open source workload manager.

Schedule:

Monday, June 22

Efficient Distributed GPU Programming for Exascale
Tutorial | Hall X1, 1st floor — 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Python for HPC
Birds of a Feather | Hall X10, 1st floor — 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CEST

Leveraging SmartNICs for HPC Applications
Tutorial | Hall X11, 1st floor — 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CEST

C++ Standard Parallelism for HPC Performance Portability
Tutorial | Hall X10, 1st floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Online Deep Learning Training and Inference in HPC Programs with TorchFort Library
Tutorial | Hall X9, 1st floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Advanced MPI Programming
Tutorial | Hall X5, 1st floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Accelerated Quantum Supercomputing: A Hands-On Tutorial on Quantum-Classical Hybrid Workflows Executed on QPUs and GPUs
Tutorial | Hall X4 1st floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Tuesday, June 23

Mastering GPU Topology: Optimize Multi-Node Workload Placement
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 12:30 p.m. — 12:50 pm. CEST

Quantum Computing in Supercomputing: A Complex Multimodal Challenge
Birds of a Feather | Hall F, 2nd floor — 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. CEST

CUDA-Q ML: Enabling End-to-End Differentiable Quantum-Classical Computing
Project Poster Reception | Foyer D-G, 2nd floor — 3:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. CEST

What’s new: Latest Slurm and Slinky Release
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 5:00 p.m. — 5:20 pm. CEST

Real-Time Scientific Data Streaming to HPC Nodes: Challenges and Innovations V
Birds of a Feather | Hall G1, 2nd floor — 5:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. CEST

Slinky: Slurm for Kubernetes 101
Tutorial | Hall X10, 1st floor — 7:00 p.m. — 7:20 pm. CEST

Wednesday, June 24

Mastering GPU Topology: Optimize Multi-Node Workload Placement
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 11:00 a.m. — 11:20 am. CEST

AI Factories and Gigawatt Datacenters
Panel | Hall 4 – Ground Floor — 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. CEST

Slinky: Slurm for Kubernetes 101
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 2:00 p.m. — 2:20 pm. CEST

What’s new: Latest Slurm and Slinky Release
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 3:00 p.m. — 3:20 pm. CEST

AresBench: Automated HPC Cluster Validation with Interactive Performance Analytics
Project Poster | Foyer D-G – 2nd Floor — 3:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. CEST

Redefining Resiliency for HPC Research and AI Factories: Slurm and NVIDIA Mission Control
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 5:00 p.m. — 5:20 pm. CEST

Python for HPC
Birds of a Feather | Hall E – 2nd Floor — 5:15 a.m. – 6:15 p.m. CEST

Thursday, June 25

Slinky: Slurm for Kubernetes 101
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 10:00 a.m. — 10:20 am. CEST

Walking Talk Sustainability
Registration Counter I Entrance Hall – Ground Floor — 10:00 a.m. — 10:45 a.m. CEST

Mastering GPU Topology: Optimize Multi-Node Workload Placement
Booth Talk | Slurm booth Z10, located in foyer — 11:00 a.m. — 11:20 a.m. CEST

Converging Simulation and AI: NVIDIA’s Platform Roadmap for Accelerated Scientific Discovery
Vendor Roadmaps | Hall 4 – Ground Floor — 1:02 p.m. — 1:22 p.m. CEST

Towards a Common European AI Hub: Storing, Sharing, and Operating AI/ML Models, Applications, and Vector Data at Scale
Birds of a Feather | Hall F – 2nd Floor — 1:00 p.m. — 1:20 p.m. CEST

We’re here to talk about what’s real, what’s ready, and what’s coming fast
Birds of a Feather | Hall F – 2nd Floor — 3:00 p.m. — 3:20 p.m. CEST

Confidential Supercomputing: Essential Evolution or Elegant Illusion?
Birds of a Feather | Hall 4 – Ground Floor — 4:00 p.m. — 5:00 p.m. CEST

HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition 2026 Award Ceremony
Student Cluster Competition | Hall Z – 3rd Floor — 5:15 p.m. — 5:35 p.m. CEST

Friday, June 26

7th ISC HPC International Workshop on “Monitoring, Observability, and Operational Data Analytics”
Workshop | Hall X11 – 1st Floor — 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CEST

Stream2HPC 2026: Orchestrating High Performance Computing with Real-Time Scientific Data in the Age of AI
Workshop | Hall X7 – 1st Floor — 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CEST

Arm HPC User Group
Workshop | Hall X10 – 1st Floor — 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CEST

12th Annual High Performance Containers Workshop
Workshop | Hall X1 – 1st Floor — 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Digital Twins for Science & Industry — from Data Scientist to Data Center
Workshop | Hall X9 – 1st Floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

2nd Advancing Autonomous Scientific Discovery Workshop (A2SD-2026)
Workshop | Hall 10 – 1st Floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

The Future of Benchmarks in Supercomputing
Workshop | Hall X11 – 1st Floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

3rd Trillion Parameter Consortium Workshop at ISC: Bridging the AI and HPC Gap
Workshop | Hall X4 – 1st Floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

5th Workshop on Quantum and Hybrid Quantum/Classical Computing Approaches
Workshop | Hall X3 – 1st Floor — 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CEST

Source: NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA’s Packed ISC 2026 Program Spans AI, HPC and Hybrid Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

TACC, RIT supercomputers serve as “virtual laboratories” for the extreme universe

June 19, 2026 — While scientists know supermassive black holes collide, these events have remained invisible to telescopes. Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have now identified a specific spike in light that occurs at the moment of merger, providing the roadmap needed to finally observe these cosmic giants in action.

Distinguished Professor Manuela Campanelli and her collaborators use supercomputer simulations to study black hole mergers and binary neutron star mergers, leading to important discoveries about the universe’s most extreme phenomena. Shown here, Campanelli works with graduate students in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. Photo credit: Scott Hamilton, RIT.

Led by Lorenzo Ennoggi and his advisor Manuela Campanelli, distinguished professor of astrophysics, members of RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) have published two papers in American Physical Society journals.

In the first paper, the team looked at two spinning black holes accreting gas and generating powerful electromagnetic signals. Through complex simulations, it was confirmed that there is a steady decrease in the system’s luminosity, but then at the time of merger, there is an abrupt spike.

“People were not able to do this simulation with the full physics that Lorenzo has been able to include, so they were not getting this rise in luminosity at the merger,” Campanelli explained. “What Lorenzo has discovered is that there is a bump at the merger, and the bump is correlated between both the jet and the light from the disk. That bump is important because it will allow mergers to be identified for the first time.”

Campanelli further explained that while it is known that galaxies collide and their central black holes collide, they have not been observed. Getting the right signal for these events, as Ennoggi calculated, is needed to be able to identify the mergers and then observe them.

“I had to repeat the simulations quite a few times,” said Ennoggi. “When I finally had something that worked and we managed to find something of relevance from the physics point-of-view, I was very happy.”

Current astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student, also advised by Campanelli, and co-author Maria Chiara de Simone further explained, “We are in the process of getting ready to help in observations because the gravitational wave emission and the electromagnetic emission together help with localization so we can get more information about galaxy evolution in a broader aspect.”

This research was supported by computational resources at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), including the Frontera and Vista supercomputers, and by additional resources from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s BlueSky, Green Prairies, and Lagoon clusters.

“I would love for the public to understand that supercomputers act as the ultimate ’virtual laboratories’ for the extreme universe,” Campanelli said. “High performance computing provides the only method we have to solve the fundamental equations governing gravity and matter in these environments.”

Seeing the Light From Black Holes

In the second paper, researchers conducted simulations that may provide a new way to identify supermassive black hole mergers through photon emissions.

Black hole mergers are identified primarily by gravitational waves, but these events also radiate photons from thermal gas and photons from relativistic electrons energized by relativistic jets. The simulations conducted showed that during a merger of two black holes with the same mass and spin, photon radiation decreases as the black holes are drawn together, but the light increases sharply during mergers. Such a distinct signature could help identify such mergers.

Computational resources were provided by TACC’s Frontera supercomputer, with additional support from RIT’s BlueSky, Green Prairies, and Lagoon clusters. The publications capped four years of Ennoggi’s Ph.D. research. He moved back to Italy after graduating from RIT and now works in high performance computing applied to oil and gas. De Simone is continuing his work on her Ph.D. journey.

“I’m continuing Lorenzo’s work and extending the parameter space of our simulations,” de Simone said. “The idea is to produce simulations that help us with observations. We can work together with the observation side of the astrophysics world and get more exciting results.”

Gamma-ray Burst Mysteries From Star Mergers

Campanelli and colleagues also recently published findings that shed new light on the long-standing question of how binary neutron star mergers generate short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), among the most energetic phenomena in the universe.

By employing an unprecedentedly low-density numerical atmosphere, their simulations demonstrated that a metastable massive neutron star remnant collapsing into a black hole 25–50 milliseconds post-merger successfully launch incipient jets. These outflows exhibit terminal Lorentz factors and Poynting-flux luminosities consistent with those observed in short GRBs.

Probing space for cosmic collisions: NASA James Webb Space Telescope (top left), NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (top right), NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (bottom). Image credits: NASA, NSF, DOE

“This is a crucial finding because it highlights the critical role of the highly dynamic post-merger environment in shaping jet propagation, directly linking our computational models to the violent bursts telescopes observe in the night sky,” Campanelli said.

Simulating these events proved to be an immense undertaking, requiring the coupling of Numerical Relativity to solve the full Einstein equations with 3D General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) across vast spatial and temporal scales.

Cosmic Heavy Lifting From Frontera, Vista, Horizon Supercomputers

“For supermassive black hole binaries—as explored in our recent Physical Review Letters paper and companion work on post-merger recoil—a major challenge is accurately modeling incredibly complex gas dynamics, circumbinary disks, and radiation transport,” Campanelli explained. The challenges involved tracking intricate fluid mechanics, such as gas “sloshing” between minidisks, and predicting the sudden luminous flares that occur at the exact moment of merger.

“National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded supercomputers Frontera and Vista provided the essential, heavy-lifting CPU and GPU architectures necessary to handle these high-resolution, multi-scale computations,” she said. “Without their immense processing power and memory capacity, smoothly tracking these systems from the long inspiral phase completely through to post-merger relaxation would be impossible.”

The team’s work will continue on Horizon, the flagship system of the U.S. NSF Leadership Class Computing Facility​, as it enters its early user phase at TACC in summer 2026.

“We are continuously developing open-source, exascale-optimized frameworks (like the Einstein Toolkit) to push these models further, and the transition to Horizon will be a true gamechanger,” Campanelli concluded. “It will enable us to explore a vastly expanded parameter space—including highly unequal mass ratios, extreme black hole spins, and orbital eccentricities—at unprecedented resolutions and over much longer physical timescales. Horizon’s capabilities will allow us to drastically improve the precision of our synthetic multi-messenger predictions, allowing us to transition from modeling idealized scenarios to creating highly accurate templates for specific, real-world astronomical observations.”

Adapted from a press release by Mollie Radzinski, RIT.

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post TACC Resources Drive Research Linking Black Hole Mergers to Sudden Light Flares appeared first on HPCwire.

Judge finds public interest outweighs privacy rights in request made by staffer at Heritage Foundation

A federal judge on Friday rejected Joe Biden’s attempt to block the Trump administration from releasing to a conservative group the recordings that Biden made with a ghostwriter.

The US district judge Dabney Friedrich found that the public interest in the material outweighed whatever privacy rights Biden had.

When Intel ceased development of the Omni-Path interconnect spun the tech off to Cornelis Networks six years ago, some assumed that Omni-Path was done. InfiniBand, which Nvidia obtained with its acquisition of Mellanox in 2020, seemed poised to dominate the space. But the announcement this week that Lawrence Livermore National Lab chose Omni-Path for the new Lynx supercomputer shows that the interconnect is still in the game.

It’s no secret that Intel struggled to gain traction with Omni-Path, which it started developing in 2014 and brought to market in 2015. Like its main competitor InfiniBand, Omni-Path was a proprietary technology aimed at providing high-speed, low-latency connection for scale-out HPC clusters.

However, when Intel struggled to gain market share against InfiniBand, it gave up on the technology, cancelling development of the 200 Gbps version. In 2020, it transferred ownership of the IP to a collection of Intel engineers who worked on Omni-Path, including Philip Murphy, Vladimir Tamarkin, and Gunnar Gunnarson. Intel received an ownership stake in the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based company in exchange for the IP.

The Omni-Path CN5000 Director Class Switch supports up to 576 ports of 400Gbps bidirectional bandwidth 

Cornelis continued to develop Omni-Path, reviving the 200 Gbps version and charting a path forward to 400 Gpbs and beyond. In 2022, the company inked an $18 million contract with the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to fund R&D on OmniPath, which at the time was used on anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 nodes at the DOE tri-lab (LLNL, Sandia, and Los Alamos). As Cornelis then-CEO Phil Murphy said, the company worked closely with LLNL on traffic management techniques like dynamic adaptive routing and congestion control architecture.

Cornelis’ goal was to give InfiniBand some competition. That has been tough to do at the high end, as InfiniBand offers speeds up to 800 Gbps, while Cornelis’ CN5000 Omni-Path offering tops out at 400 Gbps. InfiniBand has traditionally offered lower latencies, with lag measured in under 1 microsecond (although Cornelis says the CN5000 made big headway in that department). These impressive stats are due to InfiniBand’s sophisticated traffic-managing capabilities.

InfiniBand owned 51% of the market for independent system-to-system interconnects, according to Hyperion Research’s 2024 site survey. That was followed by Ethernet at 34%, while Omni-Path had about 3% of the market, down a percentage point from the 2021 survey. The numbers were similar for system-to-storage interconnects, with InfiniBand at about 49%, Ethernet at 41%, and Omni-Path at 2%.

While InfiniBand offers stiff competition at the high end, Cornelis has an advantage in the market outside of that high-end space, thanks to Cornelis’ willingness to build networks, switches, and NICs for smaller clusters. CN5000 is also substantially less expensive than InfiniBand, with at least one customer saying they saved $30,000 to $40,000 on a $500,000 HPC system by going with Omni-Path rather than InfiniBand.

The Lynx deployment at LLNL is a bit bigger than that, even if it’s not massive by supercomputer standards. LLNL will use the CN5000 fabric to connect 952 Dell PowerEdge nodes running Intel Xeon processors. The cluster will be used by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) on a range of missions.

The Lynx deployment is significant because it demonstrates that the technology is operating in one of the world’s most demanding HPC environments, said Cornelis CMO Brandon Draeger.

“Lynx validates the capability and scalability of the Omni-Path architecture,” he told HPCwire. “Its core design principles of low latency, lossless communication, congestion management, and efficient scaling are more critical than ever for today’s HPC and AI workloads.”

The workloads at LLNL place extraordinary demands on the underlying network, which CN5000 was designed to handle, Draeger said.

“Large-scale modeling and simulation applications depend on thousands of compute nodes exchanging data continuously, making latency, congestion, and communication efficiency critical to overall system performance,” he said. “The Cornelis CN5000 fabric was designed specifically for these environments.”

Cornelis is currently developing the CN6000, which will offer 800 Gbps connectivity and support emerging processor technologies, including data processing units (DPUs), Risc-V chips, and Compute Express Link (CXL). The company formally announced CN6000 at SC25, and plans to ship it later this year.

Omni-Path cabling

The company is also a member of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which launched in 2023 with the goal of developing a network mesh alternative to InfiniBand for large AI and HPC clusters that scale up to 1 million endpoints while maintaining sub microsecond latency.

“Cornelis has long believed that the industry benefits from open standards and broad ecosystem collaboration,” Draeger said. “Our participation in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium reflects that commitment. AI and HPC infrastructures continue to scale in size and complexity, and industry-wide efforts to improve performance, efficiency, and interoperability are important for customers across the market.”

The big challenge with UEC will be developing the end-to-end telemetry to monitor network conditions as well as the intelligence, such as adaptive routing and packet spraying, that allows proprietary interconnects like InfiniBand and Omni-Path to maintain throughput and latency standards when networks become congested.

Clearly, UEC and Cornelis share similar goals, which is why Cornelis is planning to support UEC. In the future, Cornelis plans to support the UEC Ethernet protocol within its interconnect, which will open Omni-Path to the large and diverse UEC ecosystem and put it on a path to supporting 1 million nodes.

Cornelis has already done some of the leg work required to support UEC, including adopting the libfabric library developed by the OpenFabrics Alliance, which it adopted back in 2021. UEC is also utilizing the libfabric library, which should make the transition to UEC easier.

InfiniBand dominates today, but Omni-Path and UEC are making inroads into the upper echelons of interconnect capabilities. That’s good news for national labs, universities, and private companies that like to have alternatives.

The post Omni-Path Tapped for New Lynx Supercomputer at LLNL appeared first on HPCwire.

I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway.

I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.

Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it’s worth pointing out.

↫ movq.de blog

Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user interfaces were back in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’ve lost so many affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn’t really matter where you look – user interface design has deteriorated since the early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the advertising people took prominence over the design people.

I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.

Book also details Trump’s ‘enthralled’ reaction to pictures of injuries caused by Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah

Donald Trump declared he would not go to war with Iran last year, according to a new book, which claims he told Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk: “We’re not doing that.”

The US president is said to have provided the assurance during an Oval Office meeting with rightwing commentator Carlson and SpaceX CEO Musk – the world’s richest person, who recently became its first trillionaire – early last year.

"This is considered the world's most luxurious plane," the president said in front of the enormous new jet.

President Trump's efforts to spruce up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool faced a snag this week, with algae turning the water green while rips appeared in an "American Flag Blue" surface picked by the president.

James Burrows directed more than 1,000 episodes of television, including every episode of the original "Will & Grace."

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

Clashes in Lebanon seemed to imperil the U.S.-Iran peace deal, and U.S. and Iranian officials postponed negotiations planned in Switzerland before the agreement.

Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was labeled Europe’s “Trump whisperer,” but the war in Iran turned their friendship into a liability for her.

Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, "closing out SoftBank's last piece of Boston Dynamics and turning the Waltham, Massachusetts robotics company into a wholly owned Hyundai business," reports Startup Fortune. From the report: The price is $325 million for the remaining stake, according to the deal terms, and it follows the put option SoftBank retained when Hyundai bought control of Boston Dynamics in 2021. You should read that as a signal, not a footnote. Hyundai paid about $880 million for an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics in the 2021 transaction, valuing the company at roughly $1.1 billion at the time. SoftBank had bought Boston Dynamics from Alphabet in 2017, after Google had acquired the robotics lab in 2013. It was a strange ownership path for a company whose robots became famous on YouTube long before they became obvious commercial products. That part is changing. At CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the electric Atlas humanoid robot in public, with the Associated Press reporting that the life-sized robot stood up, walked around the stage and was remotely piloted for the demonstration. The useful detail was not the stagecraft. It was the deployment plan. A production version of Atlas is expected to begin work at Hyundai's electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028. [...] If Hyundai can turn that into repeatable manufacturing value, the SoftBank exit will look less like a tidy cleanup and more like the moment Hyundai stopped borrowing a robotics future and decided to own it outright.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

⚽️ Kick-off time: noon local/3pm ET/8pm BST/5am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Beau

The atmosphere here at Lumen Field (excuse me, Seattle Stadium, how dare I) is positively electric a full 30 minutes before kickoff. This was predictable — the stadium has a well-earned reputation for being among the loudest in the United States — but it is still a sight to behold. The place is nearly full, and there are no shortage of Aussie fans as well, very prominently sat behind the goal at the south end of the stadium. Truly incredible atmosphere.

Pre-anthem mailbag

️ Updates from the second round at Shinnecock Hills
️ Day one report | Follow us on Instagram | Mail David

Matt Fitzpatrick has to hole a 27-footer to save par at 3. It keeps him at -3 and in a tie for third. Great work. But not so good for playing partner DeChambeau, who misses the fairway, comes up short with his approach and looks utterly baffled as his par putt from 30 feet drifts five feet past. He completes an error-strewn hole by missing that one so it’s an ugly double bogey and Bryson tumbles down to +2.

The average score in round one was 73.280 which isn’t too exteme for a US Open. Here’s how it compares to the last five years.

This live blog is now closed.

• Israel and Hezbollah agree to renew ceasefire after flareup of violence

Inside the city of grief hit hardest by Israel strikes on southern Lebanon

As the procession wound its way through mounds of rubble, the crowd chanted and beat their chests, their lamentations echoed by the dull thud of shelling in the foothills just beyond the city.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A report from Canada's Transportation Safety Board has highlighted regulatory failures that allowed OceanGate's unregistered, unflagged, and uncertified Titan submersible to operate out St. John's, Newfoundland, for years before it imploded on a tourist trip to the wreck of the Titanic in 2023. "When it came to the Titan, critical information existed across multiple federal government organizations, but no one was responsible for connecting the dots," says TBS chair Yoan Marier in a statement. "Without a complete picture of the operation, the Titan continued to operate in Canada without regulatory oversight." [...] As OceanGate continued to operate from St. John's in 2021 and 2022, the Titan made successful dives to the Titanic and several sites within Canadian waters. The company eventually interacted with a total of 10 Canadian federal agencies, including Parks Canada, the Department of National Defense, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But the company's operations were never directly reported to the team responsible for marine safety. "In terms of the actual people that were responsible for marine oversight, their focus was on the Canadian support vessel," says TSB investigator Jason Melvin. While TSB investigators did not have access to the wreckage of the Titan itself, which remains with the US Coast Guard, they did analyze portions of the carbon fiber left over from its manufacture. They calculated that a hull made to OceanGate's exact specifications might have been able to make hundreds of millions of dives to Titanic depths before failing. However, the composite samples as built had porosity and waviness between layers and were ground down in a way that might have introduced defects. When the TSB tested the compressive strength of the carbon fiber, it indicated the material could fail in as few as 30 deep dives. [...] The TSB is recommending increased oversight of the riskiest vessels and improvements in information sharing between departments, and is requiring that all human-occupied submersibles be subject to international construction and safety standards.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A senior Justice Department official called a judge's demand for a declaration on the status of the "anti-weaponization" fund "unnecessary."

Lines closed between Luton and Bedford as emergency services attend scene

Two trains have collided in the Bedford area, authorities have said, with a number of people injured and police and other emergency services at the scene.

The collision, which is reported to have caused injuries, has also caused major delays to the evening commute, with lines closed between Luton and Bedford, Thameslink said.

Makerfield victory gives Andy Burnham a path back to Westminster and a chance to challenge Keir Starmer

• Celebrations and a swift exit after a Burnham win ‘beyond our wildest dreams’

“We know no king but the King in the North”, declares the young Lady Lyanna Mormont in the hit HBO series Game of Thrones. In the early hours of Friday morning, in a nondescript conference hall in the north of England, it appeared that the electorate agreed.

About 70,000 voters in a post-industrial region of north-west England may have changed the face of British politics this week, after electing the charismatic Labour politician Andy Burnham to represent them in London.

Matthew Ankrum wanted to build wealth for his daughters and teach them about financial stability. A new book shares how.

Researchers have disclosed a new unpatchable BootROM exploit affecting Apple devices with A12, A13, S4, and S5 chips. The attack requires physical USB access and DFU mode, but can let an attacker run code before iOS loads, bypass signature checks, and boot modified software. 9to5Mac reports the details: In a highly detailed technical post published today, the Paradigm Shift Team details usbliter8, a new exploit that "leverages both a hardware bug in the USB controller and a specific configuration flaw present in the device firmware" and cannot be patched. The PS Team explains that ahead of today's disclosure, it shared its findings and worked with Apple Product Security to coordinate the release. The researchers also thanked Apple's security team for its "prompt response, constructive engagement, and cooperation throughout" the process. In a nutshell, this bug affects the following Apple SoCs: A12, S4, S5, and A13. [...] They add that "technical support for A12X/Z is possible," but "it is not currently implemented." That could add the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro lineups to the list. The way usbliter8 works is: it sends specially crafted data to a device over USB while it is in DFU mode, confusing the USB controller and causing it to write data to the wrong part of memory. That gives an attacker with physical access to the device control over its startup process. From there, they can run their own code before iOS loads, bypass signature checks, and boot modified system software. Importantly, the exploit does not affect or compromise the device's Secure Enclave, which in practice means that data such as passcodes and encrypted user data remain secure. That said, PS Team says that "although usbliter8 doesn't affect SEP itself, it opens up wider attack vectors to compromise the Secure Enclave," adding that "by releasing this exploit publicly, we hope to highlight the real-world impact of these hardware flaws and contribute to a broader understanding of modern SecureROM security." [...] Given that this is also an unpatchable exploit, the researchers note that "affected users should be aware that migrating to newer hardware remains the most effective mitigation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cambridgeshire police say 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder is not fit to be interviewed

A man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a three-year-old boy ended up in a crocodile enclosure has been released because he is not fit to be interviewed, police have said.

The 30-year-old man from Norfolk has been bailed while detectives from the major crimes unit conduct further inquiries, Cambridgeshire police said.

June 19, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will participate in the ISC High Performance Conference (ISC26) on June 22–26. The event brings together the HPC community—from research centers, commercial companies, academia, national laboratories, government agencies, exhibitors, and more—to share the latest technology of interest to HPC developers and users.

Start times are listed in UTC +2 (Hamburg, Germany’s local time), which is 9 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time.

Monday, June 22

• 9:00am | Tutorial | Compiler-Assisted Floating-Point Error Analysis and Profiling with FPChecker | Ignacio Laguna
• 9:00am | Tutorial | Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack | Todd Gamblin, Gregory Becker, Kathleen Shea, Alec Scott
• 9:00am | Tutorial | Mastering Tasking with OpenMP 6.0 | Bronis de Supinski
• 2:00pm | Tutorial | Advanced OpenMP: Performance and 6.0 Features | Bronis de Supinski
• 2:00pm | Tutorial | Reproducible Benchmarking Techniques for High-Performance Computing | Gregory Becker, Olga Pearce, Stephanie Brink
• 2:00pm | Tutorial | Rigorous Evaluation of LLM Components in HPC Research | Daniel Nichols, Harshitha Menon

Tuesday, June 23

• 4:00pm | BoF | Sharing Experiences and Challenges in the Dynamic Use of Resources in HPC/AI | Daniel Milroy

Wednesday, June 24

• 10:45am | Invited Talk | Mixed Precision in HPC – Balancing Accuracy, Speed, and Energy | Kathryn Mohror

Thursday, June 25

• 1:00pm | BoF | Spack Community BoF | Todd Gamblin, Gregory Becker, Kathleen Shea

Friday, June 26

• 9:00am | Workshop | 2nd International Workshop on Energy Efficiency with Sustainable Performance: Techniques, Tools, and Best Practices | Bronis de Supinski
• 9:00am | Workshop | The Second International Workshop on Foundational Large Language Models Advances for HPC | Ignacio Laguna

LLNL Committee Participation

• Kathryn Mohror: Steering Committee; Algorithms & Performance

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Researchers to Present HPC, AI and Software Advances at ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

The situation has only gotten worse for Dalton Eatherly, the race-baiting online pest better known as “Chud the Builder.” Earlier this spring, Eatherly was out on bond after being arrested in Nashville on theft, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest charges after allegedly walking out of a restaurant on an almost $400 tab. Days later, prosecutors say he went on to do something far more serious: allegedly shooting and nearly killing a man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee. 

On Wednesday, a Davidson County judge revoked his bond after reviewing his conduct and new evidence surrounding the shooting.   

“It sounds premeditative, like he’s going to kill somebody,” one Montgomery County investigator said at the hearing, pointing to Eatherly’s videos and social media posts. 

There’s no mystery about what drives Eatherly, who livestreamed his violent, racist goals to thousands of supporters every step of the way. 

In an age where racist rhetoric can not only be mainstreamed but can also be monetized, Dalton Eatherly represents its newest and lowest violent common denominator. He’s part of a new wave of right-wing streamers who profit by coaxing donations to push out racist hate speech via social media.

But Chud has taken the gambit even further than his counterparts. He’d carry out his antics in public, streaming himself hurling the N-word at minorities while armed with a pistol and pepper spray. His videos show him threatening to blow his targets’ “brains out,” often fantasizing that his escalation would end in violence, legal impunity, and the start of a race war. “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” he wrote in a now-deleted X post on May 7. 

A week later, he’d be strapped to a gurney after allegedly shooting a Black man, as well as himself, during the courthouse altercation. 

Both men survived, but Eatherly now faces a torrent of charges, including attempted murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, and employing a firearm during a dangerous felony. He also faces up to 60 years in prison. 

Related

Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination

Eatherly’s online notoriety has also translated into real-world support. In the weeks since the shooting, supporters descended on Tennessee courtrooms, turning routine hearings into spectacles. At one appearance, Jake Lang, the Trump-pardoned January 6 rioter and far-right activist, was removed by bailiffs after disrupting the court proceedings. (He received a 10-day jail sentence for contempt, the maximum sentence under state law.)

All this attention has done little to improve Eatherly’s legal position. A judge set Eatherly’s bond at $1 million in the Montgomery County shooting case. While supporters raised more than $300,000 for his defense, judges repeatedly rejected efforts to leverage that support into his release before his bail was revoked.

Part of Chud’s online appeal rests in how this new generation of white supremacists have morphed into online personalities to reach new followers. The far-right internet has spent the last decade learning how to refine the raw materials of extremism into entertainment. 

Related

The Right Wing Desperately Wants to Make Charlie Kirk Its MLK

Trump institutionalized hate speech into a legit political currency, but the new brand of online white supremacy often eschews institutions or electoral politics completely. Instead of espousing militant insular doctrine, figures like Nick Fuentes have used social media to soften their appeal to a broad group of nihilistic young men. 

Young conservatives came of age during a period of collapsing institutional trust. Surveys from Gallup, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have found young Americans increasingly distrust government, media, political parties, and other traditional institutions. For a segment of the online right, that disillusionment has curdled into political alienation — a belief that the system is not merely failing, but fundamentally incapable of delivering the future they were promised. Figures like Chud offer them convenient explanations for why those promises have been broken by pointing to anyone who isn’t a white American. 

They have also seized on this edgelord disillusionment for their own personal gain and notoriety. Envisioning an America that isn’t white or right fast enough. Often wrapping their rhetoric in a plausible deniability of shock content and prank. In this era, online racist rhetoric did not simply become more visible, it became more permissible, migrating from the internet’s fringe communities into mainstream political and social media culture.

Chud frequently targeted Black neighborhoods in his livestreaming, constantly hurling racial epithets and labeling his enemies “chimps” while framing these racist stunts as renegade expressions of “free speech.” In one video, he’d antagonized a pedestrian before pepper-spraying him and a crowd of onlookers.

In the initial Nashville incident, Chud livestreamed himself hurling racist insults at a restaurant before staff kicked him out. Police later arrested him for allegedly leaving without paying his sizable bill. 

Eatherly’s story is less remarkable than many would like to believe.

The internet is now littered with young men and women chasing some version of the same racist, rage baiting, and accelerationist fantasy. Chasing hate can now yield significant online clout and even revenue. Researchers who study online hate have found social media’s reward systems can reinforce and escalate extremist behavior, with an audience’s approval often encouraging users to produce more hateful content.

Federal prosecutors have spent the last several years prosecuting people who moved beyond posting. In September 2025, prosecutors charged organizers of “Terrorgram,” a white supremacist online group, with soliciting hate crimes and soliciting the murder of public officials. Authorities have subsequently linked recent racially motivated shooters in San Diego and Buffalo as adherents of the online extremist ecosphere. 

Fortunately, Chud the Builder was blunted before any stunt went too far off the rails. 

Now, instead of broadcasting from a sidewalk, Eatherly sits in custody facing charges that could keep him behind bars for decades. He didn’t start the “race war” he framed as inevitable, and the legal immunity he joked about has yet to materialize. What remains is a criminal case and a growing pile of evidence documenting months of public provocation.

Eatherly’s days of online shock content may be over, at least for now, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others ready and willing to step up to fill the void. We exist in a social media-driven world that rewards the Chuds of the world, and where, at a moment’s notice, you too could be unwillingly cast as the subject of someone’s livestreamed hate stunt.

The result is a generation of online personalities chasing attention through violent escalation, with each trying to outdo the last for their chance at virality. Most will never pull a trigger. But as Eatherly’s case demonstrates, when your audience rewards and even craves confrontation, eventually someone will try to turn the fantasy into reality.

The post Chud the Builder Fantasized About “Race War.” Now He’s Charged With Attempted Murder. appeared first on The Intercept.

June 19, 2026 — The Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform Division of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) has installed a new JHPC-quantum GPU supercomputer, ROQUO, at R-CCS in Kobe and has begun its mission to accelerate the integration of quantum computing and high-performance computing (HPC).

ROQUO

ROQUO is a new computing platform for the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform, named after Mount Rokko, the mountain that symbolizes Kobe. It was introduced as part of the NEDO-commissioned project Research and Development of Quantum-Supercomputers Hybrid Platform for Exploration of Uncharted Computable Capabilities (JHPC-quantum project) and was built primarily by DTS Corporation as the Supercomputer for the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform announced on November 18, 2025. Construction has now been completed as planned, and the system has reached the stage of operational launch.

“The JHPC-quantum project aims to advance hybrid computing technologies that integrate quantum computers with high-performance computing (HPC) systems,”said Mitsuhisa Sato, director of the R-CCS Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform Division. “In recent years, the integration of GPU-accelerated computing and AI technologies has attracted significant attention, and the deployment of this new GPU supercomputer comes at a particularly opportune time. We expect that this system will contribute to further advances in quantum-HPC hybrid computing and enable the exploration of new application area.”

In the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark measurement conducted as part of operational preparations, ROQUO achieved 19.80 petaflops (PFLOPS; 1 peta = 10^15) in double-precision floating-point (FP64) operations.

“The next era of scientific discovery will be shaped by systems that unite quantum computing and accelerated supercomputing, opening new paths to problems beyond the reach of either technology alone,” said Tim Costa, general manager of industrial engineering and quantum at NVIDIA. “With ROQUO, RIKEN is bringing that vision into operation by connecting NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand with Fugaku and quantum computers through its Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform.

System Overview

ROQUO comprises 135 compute nodes equipped with the NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 (540 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in total). The nodes are interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking, enabling high-speed communication of up to 3.2 terabits per second (Tbps; 1 tera = 10^12), and the adoption of warm-water-cooled servers achieves both high performance and high energy efficiency.

ROQUO is among the world’s first systems in full-scale operation to adopt the GB200 NVL4, and—together with RIKYU, the AI-for-Science supercomputer announced by RIKEN on the same day as this release—it is among the first systems in full-scale operation in Japan to adopt the GB200 NVL4. In contrast to the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, a 72-GPU configuration specialized for large-scale training and inference of generative AI, the GB200 NVL4 is a 4-GPU configuration designed with HPC (scientific and technical computing) applications also in mind. While retaining the ability to handle AI workloads, its design emphasizes a balance among the FP64 performance heavily used in HPC, flexibility in installation and operation, and cost performance, making it well suited to a research platform that handles diverse workloads with differing computational characteristics.

In addition, NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and the NVIDIA Quantum-X800 switches that constitute this fabric were deployed for the first time in Japan, together with RIKYU. This realizes the low-latency, high-bandwidth inter-node communication required by the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform.

The system is installed at R-CCS in Kobe and is connected, via the SQC Interface, which draws on platforms like NVIDIA CUDA-Q to allow the development of hybrid systems of supercomputers and quantum computers including Japan’s flagship supercomputer Fugaku.

Performance Measurement Results

As part of operational preparations, an HPL benchmark measurement was conducted using the entire ROQUO system (135 compute nodes, 540 GPUs). The measured performance (Rmax) in double-precision floating-point (FP64) operations reached 19.8 PFLOPS, demonstrating performance that exceeds the design target for the core computing resource of the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform.

The NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand platform—adopted in Japan for the first time by ROQUO together with RIKYU—plays a key role in achieving this performance. The Q3400 switches, based on the InfiniBand standard, which support a communication speed of 800 gigabits per second (Gbps) per port, couple the compute nodes with low latency and high bandwidth, efficiently handling the collective communication that HPL requires.

The HPL benchmark is a communication-intensive workload that involves numerous data transfers and synchronization across compute nodes. In ROQUO, the combination of the latest-generation NVIDIA Grace Blackwell accelerators and the NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand fabric forms a system with a well-balanced ratio of computational to communication performance, providing the stable performance required of a computing platform for the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform.

Anticipated Outcomes

With the launch of ROQUO, the following initiatives will move into full swing:

• Enhancement of quantum-computing simulation environments on supercomputers, and acceleration of quantum-algorithm development and performance evaluation.
• Demonstration of quantum-HPC hybrid computing through tightly coupled integration with Fugaku, the IBM
• Quantum System Two ibm_kobe, and the Quantinuum trapped-ion quantum computer Reimei.
• Pioneering of new application areas that combine quantum computers and GPUs, such as quantum machine learning.
• Flexible response to advanced computational needs that are difficult to meet with Fugaku alone.

In addition, ROQUO is operated primarily by R-CCS. By directly operating a system with such an advanced configuration—the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform and the NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand fabric, deployed in Japan for the first time—R-CCS will reliably accumulate, within the organization, the operational expertise needed for next-generation supercomputers.

Through this accumulation of operational experience, R-CCS will improve the efficiency of future supercomputer operations, and the results obtained will also be applied to the next-generation flagship machine FugakuNEXT (development codename), currently under development. The knowledge accumulated in this project—including operational know-how for large-scale GPU clusters and demonstration data on energy-saving operation through warm-water cooling—will form a cornerstone of Japan’s next-generation supercomputing.

Construction and Operation Structure

ROQUO was built primarily by DTS Corporation in accordance with the requirements specified by R-CCS. NVIDIA provided the accelerated computing and networking platform; Giga Computing Technology was responsible for the design and manufacture of the compute nodes; and DataDirect Networks provided the high-speed file system. Using these components, ScaleWorX carried out the overall system integration.

Following the start of operations, R-CCS will take the lead in operating the system, making it available to the research community and to industry as the core computing resource of the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform. R-CCS will apply to ROQUO the operational expertise it has cultivated through operating supercomputers such as Fugaku, while accumulating and systematizing the new operational knowledge it gains.

Source: RIKEN

The post RIKEN Brings ROQUO Online to Advance Quantum-HPC Hybrid Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

The temporary discount applies to eligible federal Direct Loan borrowers who use automatic payments.

The allocated payment will go to your PlayStation Network wallet after the final approval hearing.

Birds have been in the park since the Russian ambassador gave King Charles II two in 1664 – but none ever bred there

They arrived in the royal park shortly before the Great Fire of London, when the Russian ambassador presented a pair to King Charles II as a gift.

But although pelicans have been living in St James’s Park since 1664, none ever learned the art of courtship – until now, when for the first time in more than 360 years, chicks have been born.

Social Circle announces homeland security has canceled plans to convert warehouse to detain up to 10,000 people

The small town of Social Circle in rural Georgia has announced that the Department of Homeland Security has cancelled plans to turn a warehouse into what would have been one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country.

The cancellation appears to be one of seven around the country, according to reporting elsewhere, and part of a reversal under new homeland security director Markwayne Mullin in the Trump administration’s plans to buy up warehouses and boost detention capacity – after spending $1bn on the effort in recent months.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here:

• Cabinet loyalists tell PM he has weekend to set out timetable for exit

• ‘Now is the change moment’: Burnham staff have no doubts

• Podcast: will Burnham become prime minister?

• What would ‘change’ look like if Burnham becomes PM?

David Blunkett, the former Labour cabinet minister, has suggested that Keir Starmer should stand down after the Makerfield byelection.

In an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight, Blunkett suggested that Starmer standing aside would be the best option for the party regardless of whether Andy Burnham wins tonight or loses.

Call for formal apologies from countries that benefited from transatlantic trade slave included in 19-point roadmap

More than money: the logic of slavery reparations

A global framework for reparatory justice has been adopted at a conference in Ghana, as African and Caribbean leaders demanded formal apologies from countries that benefited from the transatlantic slave trade.

Heads of state and government and other officials formally approved the strategy on Friday at a gathering in a hotel in the capital, Accra, which was the first major meeting since the adoption of the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.

June 19, 2026 — From June 22-26, 2026, representatives of HLRS will travel to Hamburg for the annual gathering of the global high-performance computing (HPC) community.

HLRS, together with its partners in the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), is pleased to participate in ISC High Performance 2026 (https://isc-hpc.com/), Europe’s largest conference for the HPC community. HLRS team members will be on-site to share updates on the center’s current activities, research, and innovations in supercomputing and AI.

Location: Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) booth K02

HLRS will once again be represented at the shared GCS booth alongside Jülich Supercomputing Centre and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Stop by to explore the latest systems, recent projects, meet the team, and pick up the latest editions of the HLRS Annual Report and InSiDE Magazine.

Sessions & Events

Beyond Exascale: AI, HPC, and the Quantum Horizon
Event: NVIDIA ISC26 Executive Briefing
Date: Monday, June 22, 2026
Time: 4:30 – 5:10 pm
Location: Venue NORD EVENT Panoramadeck, Emporio (Freiraum I & II), Dammtorwall, Hamburg HH 20355, Germany
Speakers: BSC, CINECA, HLRS, Stockholm Uni. Moderator: Christelle Piechurski
Further information: https://nvevents.nvidia.com/isc26-executive-briefing

Bridging HPC Operations and Users from Industry and Academia: Let’s Talk
Session: Community Stage Meet Up
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Time: 5:15 – 6:00 pm
Room: Community Stage, Hall H, ground floor
SwapCard Link here

RESEARCH POSTER AWARD FINALIST: SpMV for the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine
Session: Research Poster
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 6:07 pm
Room: Hall Z – 3rd Floor
SwapCard Link here

CASTIEL, presenting the ‘HPC in Europe Portal’
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 6:30 pm
Location: EuroHPC JU booth J30

GCS Industry Reception @ ISC26
Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Time: 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Location: GCS booth K02

EuroHPC Virtual Training Academy (EVITA): HPC Training for Everyone
Session: Community Stage Meet Up
Date: Thursday, June 25, 2026
Time: 1:00 – 1:45 pm
Room: Community Stage, Hall H, ground floor
SwapCard Link here

Physical AI & Robotics
Session: Invited Talk
Date: Thursday, June 25, 2026
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 pm
Room: Hall Z – 3rd Floor
SwapCard Link here

Workshop on Sustainable Practices for Reproducibility in HPC
Event: Workshop
Date: Friday, June 26, 2026
Time: 9:00 am – 1:00 pm
Room: Hall X8 – 1st Floor
SwapCard Link here

AI on HPC: Performance Engineering, Challenges and Opportunities
Event: Workshop
Date: Friday, June 26, 2026
Time: 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Room: Hall X6 – 1st Floor
SwapCard Link here

Source: HLRS

The post HLRS to Showcase Supercomputing Advances and Industry Collaboration at ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

Dawa Sherpa was airlifted to Kathmandu, where doctors treated him for frostbite, severe dehydration and a fractured thigh bone.

Ukrainian strikes on a Moscow oil refinery, protests at the G7 summit, wildfires in Spain and Messi at the World Cup – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

Working at a tournament brings its own demands but nothing like the pressure on home players for a good showing

Greetings from Los Angeles – from your own podcasting correspondent. England aside, it’s been 20 years since I was in the host country for a major tournament. Professional commitments make this a marginally different experience from driving around Germany with Ian, Matt and Oli in 2006 just wondering when the next stein was going to be thrust into my hands – dancing with Trinidad and Tobago fans, feeling lucky to miss out on Brazil v Australia tickets because my hangover was too much for the sun.

The question you are asked most by people back home is along the lines of: “Is there World Cup fever in the States?” I am reminded of a local TV crew who walked around central Cambridge on the eve of our FA Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace in 1990 asking people how they felt about the game, and being rewarded with lots of nice middle-class people who didn’t even know there was a football team in Cambridge.

‘Historian’ claims ‘overwhelming difference’ between him and rogues’ gallery of autocrats is that Trump is more powerful

Donald Trump has enthusiastically agreed with a public assessment by a man he met while golfing that the “overwhelming difference” between the current US president and historical figures who incited fear – such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler – is that Trump is more powerful.

The US president reposted a short text in the early hours of Friday morning, in which the author writes:

The European Commission is reportedly preparing to provisionally classify Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act, bringing cloud infrastructure under the law's stricter competition rules for the first time. The designation could require greater interoperability and data portability, making it easier for customers to switch providers, with a final decision expected by the end of 2026. Heise reports: This investigation began in November 2025, when the EU targeted the cloud power of US tech giants. The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft Azure also struggled with an outage, preventing air passengers from checking in and interrupting votes in the Scottish Parliament. As a result, European antitrust authorities have also scrutinized cloud services under the Digital Markets Act for the first time. The major cloud providers, primarily from the US, have so far evaded the EU's Digital Markets Act because a large part of their business is handled through corporate contracts. This makes it difficult to determine the number of individual users. However, this is one of the EU's most important criteria for determining the market power of companies. [...] As gatekeepers, AWS and Azure would be obliged to ensure interoperability and data portability. This would, for example, simplify switching cloud providers and allow customers to link other services with AWS or Azure clouds, instead of being limited to AWS and Azure offerings. Significant fines could also be imposed if the cloud services are found to be in violation of existing regulations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NEW YORK, June 19, 2026 — Five members of the R Core Team have been awarded the prestigious Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics for their decades of work building and maintaining the R Project, “R,” a free and open-source statistical computing language used across global research institutions, healthcare systems, financial organizations, and technology companies. The Rousseeuw Prize is an international award recognizing major contributions to statistical research.

The $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes three decades of foundational work that transformed how statistical methods are developed, validated, and shared globally.

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize honorees are:

• Brian D. Ripley, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford
• Martin Maechler, emeritus professor at ETH Zurich
• Kurt Hornik, department chair at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
• Peter Dalgaard, professor at Copenhagen Business School
• Luke Tierney, professor at the University of Iowa

The five laureates receive half of the prize money because they are deemed to have made the longest sustained contributions to the R project; the other half of the prize is shared among the many others who have been active on the R Core Team.

Together, the R Project volunteers have spent the last 27 years and a collective 28,000 coding hours on R, developing an open-source programming language and software environment that transformed statistics from a proprietary corporate tool into a global public good. The software is relied upon by organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies, and central banks such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of England.

The award recognizes the team’s role in making advanced statistical tools widely accessible. By keeping R free and open-source under the GNU General Public License, the R Core Team removed many of the financial barriers that have historically limited access to advanced analytics software. Due to this increased accessibility, hundreds of thousands of users including researchers, students, hospitals, public health organizations, and governments around the world are able to utilize the same statistical tools regardless of institutional resources. In addition, they use R to share transcripts of their data analyses, allowing one user’s workflows to power other users data analyses everywhere around the world. The frictionless spread of these transcripts has powered countless educational data science projects globally and hundreds of course textbooks at the PhD and Master’s level. In a recent twist, it’s not only humans who use R: AI data analyst `agents’ have been learning from the massive volume of published R transcripts and are now able to assist with many everyday data analysis tasks.

“Long before AI became a global conversation, the R Core Team was building the statistical infrastructure that made today’s data-driven world possible,” said Stanford University statistics professor and leading statistician David Donoho, PhD. “This team’s stewardship of R created an open and trusted foundation for research across disciplines and continents. Few innovations have had such a profound effect on how knowledge is produced, shared, and validated in the modern era.”

Named after Professor Peter Rousseeuw, a pioneering Belgian statistician known for his foundational work in robust statistics and data analysis, the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes innovations that have transformed the understanding and application of data for the benefit of society. Past laureates include internationally renowned statisticians and researchers whose work has advanced fields ranging from epidemiology and artificial intelligence to public policy and scientific discovery.

For more information, visit https://www.rousseeuwprize.org.

Source: The R Project

The post Rousseeuw Prize Recognizes R Core Team’s Role in Advancing Global Data Science appeared first on HPCwire.

Kalshi has enlisted Lionel Messi and Timothée Chalamet as prediction markets compete to attract new users and cement their place in the mainstream.

submitted by /u/sarahschultzd
[link] [comments]

More than half of France’s population under severe weather warning with temperatures expected to exceed 40C

More than half of France’s population is under a severe weather warning as large swathes of western Europe endure the second extreme heat event of the year, with temperatures expected to exceed 40C (104F).

The French president called for “extreme vigilance”, urging people to “take care of our oldest and most vulnerable people” and follow government advice. “We are going through difficult days,” Emmanuel Macron said.

The Italian prime minister posted a video on X saying that Donald Trump's claim she begged him for a photo was 'completely made up'. The US president made the comment to Italy’s La7 TV channel after the G7 summit in France, saying: 'She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her'

• Italy PM Meloni ‘stunned’ by Trump’s claims she begged him for a photo

Any UK prime minister faces deep foreign policy challenges – whether Starmer, Burnham or another Expert comment thilton.drupal 19 June 2026

Whoever is leading the country must deal with a fundamental shift in the UK’s most important relations – with the US and Europe – in an increasingly dangerous world.

After securing a strong victory in the Makerfield by-election, Andy Burnham has returned as a Labour MP and looks set to mount a leadership challenge against UK prime minister Keir Starmer. While there is still a possibility Starmer holds on, it seems likely that the UK will have a new leader before long.

Much of the debate around how Burnham, or other potential challengers, may differ from Starmer has focused on their approach to pressing domestic issues, especially the cost of living and growth, public services and immigration. Future relations with the EU have made the occasional appearance.

These issues are crucial. But Starmer’s time as prime minister has been largely consumed by foreign affairs. Any potential new prime minister will face a relentless deluge of international issues and challenges.

This is not just the result of unexpected overseas crises, although there have been many of those. It is tied to the fact that the UK’s most critical post-war relationships – with the US and Europe – are shifting.

There are positive lessons to take from Starmer’s track record so far. But his government has struggled to address the deeper strategic questions – and find the resources – needed to tackle this fundamental shift and its impact on defence and security.

A new prime minister would have the opportunity for a reset. This would need to address the US’s increasing reluctance to underwrite European security, the intensification of US-China rivalry, and the resulting increase in threats facing the UK.

What Starmer has done well

Starmer has been consistent and reliable when it comes to personal diplomacy. He has navigated a difficult relationship with President Donald Trump by correctly reading, and managing, the MAGA camp’s extreme sensitivity to apparent European condescension. He has refused to be publicly baited into conflict with the administration if it doesn’t serve the UK’s interests.

As pieces of diplomatic theatre, reciprocal US–UK state visits have been handled well. And Starmer has sought to learn from the past, carefully delimiting the UK’s role in the US–Iran war in recognition of the lessons of Iraq – and the subsequent Chilcot Inquiry – about not committing limited UK resources to US missions with no clear strategic end goal.

Starmer has also been a credible European ally. He has continued the approach of previous UK governments in being a long-term and clear-eyed supporter of Ukraine. He has recognized that the UK’s security priority should be in Europe and coordinated with European counterparts effectively, signing a new security treaty with Germany and refreshing the existing one with France.

A longer-term plan for European defence and security

While Starmer’s personal diplomacy as a European ally has been a relative success, it is at threat of being undermined by the failure of his government to reckon with the costs of rising defence and security commitments.

Defence spending challenges are by no means a new phenomenon, and are shared across Europe. Previous UK governments similarly said they would hit ambitious defence spending targets without explaining how. Part of the difficulty for Starmer’s government has been untangling a long history of British governments making too many commitments for UK defence without an honest assessment of the total costs.

Related work

John Healey’s resignation highlights profound strategic failure in the UK government’s approach to defence

But the defence spending issue is about more than just litigating competing claims on the public purse – though this is challenging enough. With the US no longer such a reliable European security backstop – and Washington planning to withdraw some resources from Europe – the UK needs a longer-term defence and security relationship with European allies.

The UK’s active and immediate response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 increased Britain’s credibility as a contributor to, and shaper of, the future of European security. The UK sent weaponry and helped train Ukrainian forces, in some cases before other partners, and played an important role in coordinating support. It worked closely with Nordic and Baltic countries, particularly via the Joint Expeditionary Force, to build an increasingly active European defence coalition. Post-Brexit, the UK has made it clear that it can play an important strategic and security role in Europe. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities to the White House it identified in Fable 5, a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9. The Amazon researchers claimed that it was possible to circumvent some of Fable 5's guardrails and access Mythos' formidable cybercapabilities, though Anthropic and outside cybersecurity experts have argued these risks are not unique to Claude. The confluence of events is what ultimately led the White House to determine that it could not trust Anthropic to safeguard its most advanced AI technology, according to a person close to the administration. On Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals, including immigrants inside the US. Rather than gate access to its technology based on nationality, a process that would be difficult to implement while also preserving privacy, Anthropic decided it was better to disable access to the models entirely. The White House and Anthropic still remain at odds after days of negotiations about bringing Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back online. SK Telecom was one of roughly 150 organizations granted early access to Anthropic's vulnerability-detection model Claude Mythos through Project Glasswing, notes Wired. The White House later asked Anthropic to revoke the company's access, reportedly amid concerns about alleged China ties, and Anthropic immediately complied. There was, however, no mention of the telecom in the government's formal demand to restrict Mythos and Fable 5 to U.S. nationals. SK Telecom told a Korean newspaper that the "anonymous insider's remarks in foreign media lack verified facts, and our company has no ties to China."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Actress Emaa Hussen, who played alongside Jason Statham in "Redemption," is accused of trying to smuggle 700 pounds of methamphetamine into Australia.

The Justice Department says it's released "every document required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act," but CBS News has identified numerous gaps.

Some on the internet are tiring of the American’s antics with Les Rouges. But there’s an argument that he is taking the heat off his players

Some corners of the internet were determined that Canada’s totemic and traumatic 6-0 World Cup victory on Thursday would be remembered mostly through Jesse Marsch memes.

The American’s handsy sideline shuffle after Jonathan David rifled the first goal of a hat-trick past Qatar duly racked up social media views by the million. Shots of Marsch holding up six fingers to Canada fans at the end of the match were chopped and put side by side with Michael Jordan in identical pose after winning his sixth NBA title with the Chicago Bulls.

Scientists say the "hyperparasite" preys on "zombie fungus" known to infect insects before subjecting them to a gruesome death.

A police shooting in Senatobia, Mississippi, that left a 1-year-old child dead has ignited simmering tensions between police and Black residents in the small town.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Meta has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters. If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year. While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s. Meta has reportedly proposed the language in exchange for dropping its opposition to KOSA. Under the law, platforms would be required to mitigate harms to minors tied to features such as infinite scrolling, notifications, and appearance-altering filters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

Another close Meloni ally and undersecretary in her office, Giovanbattista Fazzolari, also heavily criticised Trump’s attack on the Italian PM.

“It is unclear whether out ​of intent or ineptitude [Trump] is wrecking the historic ​relations between the United States and Europe,” he said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

Former president nevertheless said in an interview that he was happy to see a ceasefire with Iran and hopes it holds

• Analysis: Iran peace deal makes clear how far US has been forced to retreat since 2025

Barack Obama has said that after 15 weeks of war with Iran, the US is now “worse off” than before the conflict started in February.

“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military. A lot of people have died. And it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse off,” the former US president told NBC News in an interview that aired on Friday.

US president provokes outrage as PM says he ‘totally invented’ story in interview with Italian media

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said Donald Trump “totally invented” a story about her after the US president claimed she begged him to take a photo with her during the G7 summit.

The two former allies had appeared to be getting their relationship back on track by having several one-to-ones on the sidelines at the gathering in Évian after falling out in April over the US-Israeli war in Iran.

While genetic testing promises answers and connection, those findings can upend long-held beliefs about your identity and family.

Want to prolong the life of your TV? A wireless TV box could be the answer. Our expert put top devices – from Freely streamers to Sky and Amazon Fire – through their paces

• Do you really need a new TV? Simple ways to upgrade your current setup

TV is changing – and so is the way we watch it. Forget that dusty aerial or unsightly satellite dish, you can now stream mainstream channels such as the BBC, ITV and others via Freely, alongside premium services such as Sky Atlantic, over wifi – and it doesn’t need to cost the earth.

Freely comes from the creators of Freeview and Freesat. It’s backed by the UK’s main public service broadcasters and is supported by a growing list of TV providers. Scroll the Freely programme guide, and you’ll find familiar channels such as Dave, Yesterday and W. To watch them, you just need a wireless TV box and wifi.

Best Freely TV streamer:
Manhattan Aero

Best budget wireless TV stick:
Amazon Fire 4K Max

In his new memoir, the vice-president covers his conversion and politics – at a time when hardline Catholicism is ascendant in the US

When JD Vance became Roman Catholic, he wondered what his dead grandmother would think.

His grandmother Mamaw did not have anything against them, but growing up in Ohio he had sometimes heard that Catholics were servants of the antichrist. And although the people he knew as a child professed personal relationships with Jesus, most rarely went to church. The Church of Rome – with its rituals and costumes, foreign leadership, veneration of Mary and the saints – seemed exotic, even alien, to his family from Appalachia.

‘We have come too far to turn around now,’ the monument on Alabama’s Montgomery Square reads

At the recently opened Montgomery Square in Alabama, bronze hands rise from the pavement, holding a placard against the sky. It reads 7053, the booking number displayed in Rosa Parks’s 1956 mugshot after she and other leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott were arrested.

Often with booking numbers and mugshots, the viewer is trained to see criminality before circumstance, guilt before resistance. But at Montgomery Square, a number meant to reduce Parks to an arrestee, has been remade into a monument to what her arrest exposed.

Our picks for the best gaming TVs of 2026 boast great image quality and minimal delay for a competitive edge.

ORNL, Southern California Edison to demonstrate unusual detection capabilities

June 19, 2026 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed advanced tools to detect abnormal power grid conditions that lead to wildfires, equipment damage and blackouts. The approach incorporates artificial intelligence to rapidly analyze grid data and automatically alert a utility to dangerous grid behaviors requiring immediate response.

ORNL’s arcing detection platform offers utilities new capabilities to rapidly recognize electrical arcing that can cause wildfires and blackouts. Credit: Morgan Manning/ORNL.

Researchers tested the platform against a small utility data set and are now validating it against five years of field-collected data at Southern California Edison (SCE). The partnership will scale detection algorithms from the lab to the grid, strengthening its reliability and resilience in wildfire-prone regions.

“The faster we realize what’s happening, the faster we can respond,” said Ali Ekti, leader of the ORNL project and the lab’s Grid Communications and Security Group. “This tool is designed to provide utilities with a continuous pathway from signals to analytics to decisions.”

The approach involves an analytics pipeline to identify and characterize seven different types of faults — disturbances that cause abnormal current or voltage. Notably, it detects dangerous arcing faults, which happen when electricity jumps through an air gap between a conductor, like a power line, and a poor conductor, like the ground. Low conductivity prevents any noticeable current increase, allowing electrical arcs to persist undetected by conventional sensors without triggering circuit breakers.

Arcing can ignite wildfires that endanger lives, damage property and infrastructure, and cause cascading outages. Examples include the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed 85 people and caused $16.5 billion in damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the 2023 Maui wildfire, which killed more than 100 people and caused $5.5 billion in damages, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

Amplifying Waveforms, from the Lab to the Grid

Although SCE’s digital fault recorders (and soon its smart meters) monitor the grid, today it has no automated way to rapidly process the data, said SCE senior engineer Michael Balestrieri. “We want to know not only if an anomaly has occurred, but exactly what kind it is, so we can take action to prevent a fire or an outage,” he said. “Having more insight into the specific meaning of these signals will allow us to approach issues like arcing with a sense of urgency, so we know when we need to get a crew of first responders on the scene as soon as possible.”

Balestrieri said the framework will also flag signs that equipment might need repair or replacement before overheating or failure causes outages or fires.

The approach begins with applying advanced signal processing to waveform data — visual representations of shifts in voltage, current and frequency on the grid. Arcing faults are too subtle to be visible in waveforms, but ORNL’s AI-assisted algorithms highlight and amplify these signals. In a test using real utility data, waveform signal strength increased from only 6 percent to 72 percent using the ORNL algorithms, revealing previously hidden grid disturbances.

The platform was trained using waveform data from the Grid Event Signature Library, a web-based repository of over 5,700 waveform signatures hosted online by ORNL for the DOE Office of Electricity.

Researchers validated the system against SCE’s historical outage records, finding strong correlation between detected grid disturbances and real events. The team is building a more robust version trained on SCE data and will test its accuracy, speed and sensitivity on an SCE demonstration circuit. The final step will integrate the detection codes into an internal data analysis platform under development at the utility, Balestrieri said.

“ORNL brings expertise in signal processing and analytics to tackle this very complicated use case,” Balestrieri said. “It takes collaboration from people across research fields to accomplish this.”

Data Analytics Tools Beyond Arcing

Beyond arcing, the ORNL platform can detect and classify overcurrent faults, recloser operations, blown fuses, short-lived faults, capacitor switching, motor starts and line switching.

Other utilities have also expressed interest in the ORNL detection and classification framework. Additionally, sensing companies such as GridVisibility are collaborating with ORNL to explore incorporating its detection algorithms into their grid sensor products.

The ORNL analytics platform will soon be available in a new open-source “data analytics toolbox” for use with waveforms in the Grid Event Signature Library, Ekti said. The toolbox of statistical signal processing methods and machine learning approaches will be available for free use by utilities and researchers.

Other ORNL staff contributing to the project include Ozgur Alaca, Ali Boyaci, Aaron Wilson and Omer Aziz. The research was supported by the DOE Office of Electricity through the Grid Event Signature Library, Grid Data Analytics, Low-Current Arcing Detection and Wildfire Prevention, and Arcing Detection and Warning for Advanced Resiliency and Electrification for Wildfire Prevention projects.

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

Source: S. Heather Duncan, ORNL

The post ORNL: New AI-Enhanced Tools Detect Electrical Arcing, Reduce Wildfires appeared first on HPCwire.

Age verification means that the sector’s biggest players will now have access to information that will only make them richer and more powerful

This week, the UK announced a wide-ranging ban on social media that will soon block users from communicating or accessing information on apps such as X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat unless they prove that they’re over the age of 16.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the policy “a line in the sand”. “Tech giants had their chance and failed,” he said, “but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations.” All internet users, especially children, should be protected from exploitative systems online, but this new law will only foster more harm and help the largest and most powerful tech companies consolidate power and influence over everyone’s lives.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

New RP6000 and H200 bare metal GPU servers extend OpenMetal’s Xeon 6000-series, DDR5-6400 v5 platform to AI training, inference, and HPC workloads with dedicated GPUs and predictable monthly billing

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., June 19, 2026 — OpenMetal has announced the expansion of its v5 hardware catalog with two private GPU server lines: the RP6000, built on the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, and the H200, built on the NVIDIA H200 NVL. Both servers run on OpenMetal’s Intel Xeon 6000-series and DDR5-6400 v5 platform, bringing dedicated, single-tenant GPU acceleration to AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing workloads.

The new GPU servers extend the foundation introduced with OpenMetal’s v5 hardware catalog earlier this month. Each system pairs dual Intel Xeon 6530P processors with 1TB of DDR5-6400 memory standard, expandable to 2TB, PCIe 5.0 connectivity, NVMe storage options, and 40Gbps private networking. The result is a GPU server whose CPU, memory, and I/O subsystems match the rest of the v5 lineup, rather than a separate, bolted-on accelerator tier.

“With v5 we modernized the foundation of our bare metal and private cloud catalog. Adding the RP6000 and H200 was the natural next step,” said Jamie Tischart, CTO of OpenMetal. “Customers running AI and HPC workloads get fully dedicated GPUs on the same modern Xeon 6000 platform, with transparent monthly billing and infrastructure they actually control, not throttled, metered slices of someone else’s cluster.”

The RP6000 supports one or two NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs per server. Each GPU provides 96GB of GDDR7 memory, 1.79 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and 24,064 CUDA cores. The platform is designed for inference serving, fine-tuning, rendering, and mixed AI and visualization pipelines that benefit from high VRAM capacity at a favorable cost per GB.

The H200 supports one or two NVIDIA H200 NVL PCIe GPUs per server. Each GPU provides 141GB of HBM3e memory and 4.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth for large-model training and memory-bound inference workloads. Every H200 server includes a five-year NVIDIA AI Enterprise software subscription, giving teams a supported, production-grade stack for deploying AI in their own dedicated environment.

Both GPU server lines are delivered as single-tenant bare metal infrastructure with no shared hypervisor between the customer’s workload and the hardware. Customers can run common AI and ML frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, and Hugging Face Transformers, and can deploy the servers standalone or as part of multi-node GPU clusters over OpenMetal’s private network.

The RP6000 and H200 are available now in OpenMetal’s US East data center in Ashburn, Virginia, with additional locations planned. Proof-of-concept deployments are available for teams that want to validate workloads before committing.

View GPU server specs and pricing here.

About OpenMetal

OpenMetal provides open source cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions, including Bare Metal Dedicated Servers, private GPU servers and clusters, Ceph storage clusters, and hosted private clouds powered by OpenStack and Ceph. OpenMetal serves hosting providers, SaaS companies, managed service providers, and enterprises that need dedicated, single-tenant infrastructure with transparent pricing and full operational control.

Source: OpenMetal

The post OpenMetal Expands v5 Hardware Catalog with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell and H200 Private GPU Servers appeared first on HPCwire.

Head of Federal Housing Finance Agency who investigated Trump’s enemies takes over top intelligence role

• Timeline of Bill Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence

Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, became the acting director of national intelligence (DNI) on Friday, following a tug-of-war between Donald Trump and Washington lawmakers over the short-term future of the cabinet intelligence post.

Tulsi Gabbard, the outgoing DNI, initially planned to leave her post on 30 June, but Trump shortened her tenure to Friday. Senators planned to confirm Jay Clayton, the president’s DNI nominee, by Friday, which would have denied Pulte an opportunity to serve as acting director. But Trump abruptly called off on Wednesday a Senate confirmation hearing for Clayton and directed him not to appear in front of Senate lawmakers.

Trump loyalist’s rise to lead US spy agencies sparked firestorm over his lack of experience and partisanship

• Bill Pulte assumes role of US acting director of national intelligence

Bill Pulte took the reins on Friday as the acting director of national intelligence, placing the staunch Trump loyalist in charge of America’s intelligence apparatus.

Pulte’s path to the job began with the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard last month, and Trump’s selection of Pulte for the interim job set off a firestorm in Washington as senators from both parties criticized Pulte’s almost total lack of experience for the job, as well as his practiced dedication to retaliating against Trump’s political rivals.

Tanker owner trade body says centre of strait will stay shut for ‘some time’, and vessels forced to hug Omani coast risk running aground

The centre of the strait of Hormuz is blocked with about 80 mines that will need clearing for normal shipping to resume, the independent tanker owner trade body has said.

Several vessels began to exit the Gulf through the key maritime chokepoint on Thursday after the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the US and Iran.

Are we in the opening scenes of a disaster movie? There’s something going on with insects

It’s the start of the G7, guaranteeing us a week of either serious commentary or hot mic moments that may, in their way, prove more revealing than all the thousands of words of analysis. Previous summits have delivered a steady flow of off-the-cuff remarks from world leaders, including President Obama, at the G20 in 2011, grousing to the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, about Benjamin Netanyahu (“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day”), and Jacques Chirac, who, at a European summit in the early 2000s, said of the UK: “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.” Rude!

These CGM's will alert you as your glucose levels shift throughout the day.

Despite its catchy name, the Strawberry Moon isn't named for the moon's appearance.

You'll be missing these long, sunny days come winter, so soak it up now.

Donald Trump has signed a 14-point agreement with Iran, claiming it delivered a 'major win' for the US – even as it made significant political and financial concessions to Tehran to reopen the strait of Hormuz

• Trump’s Iran deal is result of unrealistic ambitions for an untenable war

• Iran announces plans to bring in maritime fees for strait of Hormuz

• Iran peace deal makes clear how far US has been forced to retreat since 2025

JD Vance lambasts Israeli critics of proposed deal but does not travel to Europe as planned. Plus, at 82 years old, Keith Richards still gives some of the best interview quotes in town

Good morning. Talks due to take place today between the US ⁠⁠and ​Iran to implement a peace deal were abruptly cancelled. The White House said the US still looked forward to “beginning technical talks as soon as possible”. Hezbollah-linked media reported Tehran was delaying sending its delegation due to Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Lebanon.

The talks had been set to begin in the Swiss village of Obbürgen two days after the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that opened a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme, while reopening the strait of Hormuz. The centre of the strait is blocked with about 80 mines that will need clearing for normal shipping to resume, the independent tanker owner trade body has said.

What is happening in Lebanon? Hezbollah targeted Israeli forces near Nabatieh with several salvoes of rocket fire after Israeli shelling. Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes, killing at least 18 people and injuring 33. Iran has said Israel’s attacks on Lebanon must end as part of any peace deal.

What did JD Vance say to Israeli critics of the deal? In sharp words, the vice-president said: “Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world ‌who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this ‌moment in time. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left ‌in the entire world.”

Why does Trump’s Iran entanglement echo the Jimmy Carter years? In this excellent analysis piece, Robert Tait reminds us that one of Trump’s earliest political forays was lambasting the Democratic president during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. Tait says Trump now finds himself in a position that uncannily resembles that of his predecessor – unable to bend Iran to his will despite superior US military power.

A fascinating novel approach by researchers at MIT, called Fractal, to study in-depth how processors actually work.

A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different. Fractal, an operating system kernel written from the ground up, treats the hardware itself as the object of study. Its first major use, a deep look at branch predictors — a CPU’s way of guessing what code to run next, before it knows for certain, so it doesn’t have to waste time waiting to find out — inside Apple’s M1 processor, has already turned up findings that prior work missed, including the first evidence that a class of speculative attack known as “Phantom” affects Apple Silicon.

“We’re using hardware in ways it wasn’t designed for,” says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who led the project. “It’s not even obvious that this is a possible thing you could do with the hardware. But we found a way to pull all these different primitives off. It’s like a microscope. If you’ve got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we’re really talking. That’s what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems.”

↫ Rachel Gordon at MIT News

While Fractal is small, its creators also added POSIX system calls, a C library, vim, GCC, a shell, and more. This way, it feels more familiar, and makes it easier for researchers to get started with the tool. Fractal is open source and hosted on GitHub, it has its own website, and there’s a detailed research paper with more in-depth information.

Outcry as experts from African and Asian countries – where mortality is highest – prevented from attending Portugal conference on prevention

Visa rejections have threatened progress on mother and baby health after experts from struggling countries were barred from talks, global midwife leaders have said.

Politicians, donors and UN agencies convened this week at the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) congress in Lisbon, Portugal, a key conference to discuss the millions of avoidable mother and baby deaths every year.

Emily Maclean is a midwife

Macron’s Evian summit shows the limits Trump places on the G7  Expert comment jon.wallace 19 June 2026

France achieved as much as could have been expected at its G7 Summit, but this was well short of what the world needs. A new approach is needed.

French President Emmanuel Macron appears to have had two goals for France’s Evian G7 summit which concluded on 17 June. First, to facilitate a constructive dialogue between President Donald Trump and the G7’s other members (or ‘G6’) on a limited number of issues. And second, to strengthen cooperation between the G7 as a whole and leading emerging economies. 

In the event, he achieved both these goals. In contrast to last year’s Kananaskis Summit, Trump did not leave early. There were no public spats of the kind that marred the 2018 Canadian G7 summit. And the guest countries attending – Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya and the Republic of Korea – took part in at least half the sessions, explicitly endorsing some of the policy statements. 

But Evian also shows the limits of what can be achieved at the G7 with President Trump in the US chair. A new format is urgently needed to address pressing global challenges. 

Main outcomes

Arguably France’s biggest success was that Trump joined the opening session with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump signed up to a statement which reaffirmed the G7’s ‘unwavering support’ for Ukraine, committed to increase the supply of air defence systems, and promised to strengthen sanctions against Russia, including on its oil and gas sector.

The G6 supported Trump’s agreement to end its war with Iran, despite the memorandum of understanding’s vagueness and critical unresolved issues. And they avoided repeating their criticism of the decision to launch the war. In return the US gave a qualified endorsement of a UK–France naval initiative designed to assist a resumption of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. 

The summit also produced statements on several French economic priorities, although these were often constrained by US ‘America first’ positions.  

A summit declaration recognized the risk from growing macroeconomic imbalances, a key factor underpinning the global financial crisis of 2007-9. However, no specific offer was made to try and persuade China, the other essential player, to help address these imbalances. 

Nor did G7 countries make their own domestic policy proposals to help address the problem – a particular issue for the US, with respect to its burgeoning fiscal deficit. There was only a bland statement that ‘countries with large and persistent external deficits should undertake policies that include supporting domestic savings and fiscal consolidation’ and a commitment to continue discussions in the G20. 

Another declaration promoted collective approaches by the G7 and its allies in responding to China’s dominance of critical minerals supply. This contrasted with the strongly bilateral approach that characterized a US-hosted critical minerals ministerial in February.  The G7 statement set out high level goals on industrial cooperation, market structure, transparency, stockpiling and recycling. It also announced a non-binding G7 Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance. 

A statement on creating a safe digital space for children and youth focused, for the most part, on calls for the digital technology industry to take (essentially voluntary) action to protect young people from online harms. G7 leaders also requested that finance ministers and central bank governors further ‘discuss’ emerging opportunities and potential risks arising from artificial intelligence, including in the financial sector.  

But the urgent need for stronger public guardrails on AI development generally – and the desire of many countries to establish sovereignty over the way digital products developed by the US and China are used in their jurisdictions – were not addressed. The apparent support of the CEOs of Open AI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind for enhanced G7 cooperation and equitable access to AI products would, however, have been welcome to the G6 and partner countries. 

A further statement reiterated the importance of development finance while calling for reform of the way it is delivered.       

How did France do it?

To deliver these outcomes France refined the approach adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for the Kananaskis G7 Summit in 2025. 

To try and ensure President Trump’s attendance, President Macron moved the summit date – avoiding a clash with the president’s birthday celebrations on 14 June. 

The agenda was structured to avoid all subjects where the US would not engage or where its position was likely to be unacceptable to G6 countries – such as climate change, the future of the world trading system, maintaining monetary and financial stability and the need for broad-based digital technology governance. And France invited Kenya to the summit rather than South Africa, after Trump threatened to boycott the summit if South Africa attended. 

Related work

Saving global economic governance from the ‘Trump shock’

France was also helped by the timing of the US ceasefire agreement with Iran. Trump’s poor domestic poll ratings, the approaching midterm elections, and the Supreme Court’s restrictions on his ability to deploy tariff hikes at will may also have contributed to the US president’s relatively constructive approach to the summit. 

Meanwhile France deepened the involvement of guest, or ‘partner’, countries. They were invited to send representatives to preparatory sherpa meetings. And the summit outcomes were structured around nine declarations, allowing partners to choose which to back. In the event, all partners endorsed the statement on creating a safe digital space for young people, while support for the other G7 statements varied. 

The limits of today’s G7

France achieved as much as might reasonably have been expected from this summit. But the flaws in the G7 format with President Trump representing the US were again highlighted in Evian. 

That weakness is not about the reduced size of the G7 economies relative to the world economy – the group is still large enough in economic terms and has the technological and financial capabilities to be highly influential. But it can only wield its influence if members share core values, trust each other sufficiently and there are no policy areas which are barred from discussion.  

None of these conditions have held since President Trump started his second term. As a result, many of the most important issues facing the world economy today are excluded from the group’s agenda.  

Juneteenth will affect banking, mail service and financial markets, although retailers and restaurants are largely staying open.

A new book recounts one of the most rambunctious moments on the floor of the House in modern history.

Over 40 years, Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – or ‘rediscovered cinema’ – has evolved into an influential international gathering

Bologna will be transformed into an open-air museum of cinema on Saturday as a nine-day festival dedicated to restored, rediscovered and overlooked films – some dating back more than a century – gets under way in the northern Italian city.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Il Cinema Ritrovato, or “rediscovered cinema”, has evolved from its niche origins into an influential international gathering captivating a new generation of cinephiles.

Stand Up for Science founder says proposal to control how grants are spent would ‘dismantle US science ecosystem’

While waiting to board her flight home at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport recently, Colette Delawalla was reviewing a list of possible impacts from a proposed Trump administration rule on controlling federal money, including grants for research.

Delawalla, the founder of the group Stand Up for Science, had just completed a three-day visit to Capitol Hill, where she met one by one with more than 30 members of Congress, part of a full-court press the organization has launched in recent weeks, sounding the alarm on the office of management and budget (OMB) proposal.

State government project among range of works celebrated for community-centred design that goes beyond utility

The reimagined St Kilda pier has added more accolades to its burgeoning trophy cabinet, taking out some of the top gongs at the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects’ Victorian awards.

The $53m Victorian government project by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, alongside Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, took home the Victorian architecture medal on Friday, the award given to the most outstanding project of the year.

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

Guardian readers in the US share concerns about how the SpaceX IPO and AI boom affect their retirement accounts

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week after SpaceX debuted on the stock market with a valuation of $1.77tn.

Millions of Americans could soon become indirect investors in SpaceX and other emerging AI-focused companies as US markets increasingly shift toward AI-driven investments.

Simone Venturini says proposal aimed at discouraging arrivals in ‘periods of heightened tourist pressure’

Venice’s new mayor has said he hopes to raise a controversial entrance fee for day-trippers to the lagoon city to as much as €50 (£43).

Simone Venturini, the rightwing former tourism councillor who was elected mayor in late May, said the proposal was aimed at further discouraging arrivals “during periods of heightened tourist pressure”.

Fifa has defended its Aramco sponsorship, saying revenues are reinvested back into football at all levels

As scorching temperatures beat down on World Cup soccer games across North America, climate activists – including former and current professional athletes – are calling for Fifa and other professional sporting organizations to cut ties with the oil and gas industry.

“Sport, especially football, has the power to influence and inspire billions of people,” said David Wheeler, an English former professional footballer, who supports the campaign. “Fifa should be harnessing that power to do good.”

Tories’ Douglas Lumsden says city has spoken ‘loud and clear’ in support of the North Sea oil and gas industry

• UK politics – live updates

The Scottish National party has lost the formerly safe seat of Aberdeen South in a shock loss to the Scottish Conservatives.

Douglas Lumsden beat the SNP’s Richard Thomson by 6,050 votes, with a 14.69% swing away towards the Scottish Tories, whose vote share was 49.51%. Lumsden’s vote tally was 14,308, with Thomson on 8,258. Jo Hart for Reform came a distant third with 2,478 votes. The turnout was just 38%.

Nancy Napoles denied the accusation and said she was willing to cooperate with authorities to clarify what happened.

Scams are more advanced than ever, in large part thanks to AI. But there are still ways to identify them.

At every stage of childhood, the Trump administration is withdrawing a protection. It is also dismantling the tools that would measure the harm

A newborn’s first hours in a US hospital used to carry a quiet set of guarantees. A vitamin K injection against catastrophic bleeding. A hepatitis B vaccination. The assumption that whatever a family could afford, the country had already decided this child was worth protecting. I have spent more than 40 years in pulmonary and critical care medicine. I have seen children harmed by disease, poverty, by bad luck. I had not, until now, seen them harmed so methodically by their own government.

Read the headlines one at a time and the pattern disappears. A vaccine rule one week, a food program the next, the reorganization of an agency most people could not name. Each change arrives wrapped in a reasonable rationale: fiscal discipline, local control, parental choice. But arrange them in the order a child actually grows, and the rationales stop mattering. What you see instead is a sequence.

Depending on AI can also potentially decrease the ability to discern misinformation, research says

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves.

As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content – but there’s a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests. An over-dependence on AI to help figure out what’s real on the internet can lead to trouble making those judgments.

From premium steaks to budget-friendly bundles, these are the meat delivery services worth ordering from this summer.

If you're looking to escape ChatGPT or welcome it with open arms, here's how to export and import your data.

NASA has selected Relativity Space to build and launch Aeolus, a 2028 Mars orbiter that would provide daily global measurements of dust, winds, and atmospheric temperatures to support future robotic and human missions. TechCrunch reports: The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the Moon. The government agency handles the science, while the private company provides low-cost infrastructure. Aeolus, as the mission is dubbed, will contain four instruments to measure and image Mars from orbit, providing what NASA expects to be the first daily, global view of dust, winds, and temperature in its atmosphere. The agency said that data will make it safer for landers and, someday, astronauts, to visit the surface of the Red Planet. By pairing NASA's world-class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in statement. The mission is set to launch in 2028 -- a rapid pace that will require Relativity to design and build the spacecraft to carry the Aeolus instruments, and finish building the rocket that will carry it to space, all on a tight timeline. NASA did not disclose how much it is paying Relativity for the mission, and Relativity did not respond to questions from TechCrunch. Relativity was founded in 2015 by two former SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers, with the idea of using 3D printing to its maximum potential as a path to building a cheaper rocket. The company's first design, Terran-1, launched in March 2023 and failed mid-flight. Relativity doubled down by moving on to a larger design, dubbed the Terran R. Before Relativity could get it to the launch pad, the company ran into fundraising challenges, and Schmidt took a majority stake in the company in it last year, installing himself as CEO. He's been tight-lipped about the investment but has expressed interest in orbital data centers, and is thought to be using Relativity to launch a space telescope, Lazuili, financed by his family philanthropy, Schmidt Sciences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As datacenters’ connections to electric grids are held up, big tech is forced to throw money at producing its own power

Datacenters are driving unprecedented growth in the US clean energy industry, paradoxically boosting a sector that was sputtering before the artificial intelligence boom even as AI’s rollout creates immense environmental challenges.

However, observers caution that while the centers are propelling wind, solar, and other clean energy companies, datacenters remain a climate nightmare.

McKenna Wendel was last seen alive on March 14 and her body was found outside Brookings, an hour's drive north of Sioux Falls, on March 19.

This popular CGM can now be marketed for children 2 years of age and older who do not use insulin.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Construction trades are one of the last well-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware, regardless of whether working for a union or not. But a new legislative proposal could prioritize some of the most lucrative, taxpayer-funded projects in the state to a smaller number of unionized workers, which has drawn criticism from competitors.

A bill that would require school districts to use unionized laborers on major construction projects has split Delaware’s construction industry as lawmakers near the finish line in the debate.

While leaders of the competing factions have framed the issue in dramatic terms, interviews with 18 construction workers at various sites in Delaware this month showed that rank-and-file workers largely were not as ideological. Many workers said they are indifferent to being in a union, saying instead that they support whatever arrangement would bring them the biggest paychecks.

Senate Bill 272 would mandate that a school district sign an agreement with the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council – the umbrella organization for the state’s various unionized trades – to use union labor for construction projects that cost at least $5 million and have at least two bidders. Those deals are known as project labor agreements, or PLAs.

If merit shops – or non-unionized construction companies – win a project bid covered by the bill, they would be required to hire a percentage of unionized workers. That percentage would be negotiated with the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council, whose president, Jim Maravelias, told Spotlight Delaware that they would seek half of the available jobs.

An analysis using data from the monthly household Current Population Survey estimated that Delaware’s private construction industry was roughly 15% unionized, totaling about 4,000 members.

Multiple major industry groups, including the Associated Builders and Contractors of Delaware and organizations representing minority-owned businesses, are starkly opposed to the bill, and have been holding protests over it for months.

An evolving proposal

The prioritization of unionized labor on publicly funded projects has become a growing trend in the legislature in recent years. 

Lawmakers piloted a version of SB 272 in 2023, when they required project labor agreements be used in the construction of three major state construction projects.

Since then, Sen. Jack Walsh (D-Stanton), a leader in the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council, has continued to push for more requirements to support union labor.

Over the past year, he has filed and amended several versions of the current bill, settling on a proposed minimum of $5 million in aggregate project cost, limiting the requirement to school construction, and finally limiting PLAs to projects that have at least two bids.

Rep. Edward Osienski, the lead House cosponsor and a retired union tradesman, testified at a June 10 committee hearing that the bill aimed to resolve frequent claims of unpaid claims to construction workers.

According to data from the Department of Labor’s Construction Enforcement Office, 66% of sites it inspected led to investigations. The department has $385,000 in outstanding wages owed to workers – a big reason why he helped propose the legislation.

“The Department of Labor has been very active, but they can’t go to them all – that’s one of the issues,” Osienski said. “We can’t just depend on the Department of Labor to police what’s going on out there.”

Construction workers express concerns

On the grounds of construction projects, many workers said they are indifferent to being in a union.

About five non-unionized workers told Spotlight Delaware they don’t think much about the union versus non-union issue. A couple unionized workers said they benefit from protections like the ability to walk off a job out of safety concerns without being fired. 

A few workers had strong opinions.

A group of commercial plumbers expressed disapproval of unions. One plumber who used to be in a union remembered when he was sent two hours away to do work for $7.50 an hour, which he felt he could not do comfortably.

Brian Valdelamar, another one of the plumbers, argued unionized workers are less efficient – and may even “milk jobs out.” 

“They might take three years to build this, we did it in roughly three or four months,” Valdelamar said.

Asked about the implications of the bill on his work, Valdelamar said he does not think the requirement of a project labor agreement would be fair.

James Mitchell, a non-unionized electrician, said he had heard about the bill and believes it is unfair because it could cut small companies, like his, out from bids.

“I guess they would get dibs on all of it then,” Mitchell said. “It cuts the other guys out.” 

In particular, Mitchell said the cost of living was so high right now that it was financially “hard to live.”

“Paying [union] dues for somebody else to retire sounds crazy to me right now. I need that money for myself,” he said.

Local non-unionized general contractor Tommy Ogden said he’s conflicted on whether he’d support the measure, believing the state’s prevailing wage – an average of all wages paid in an industry in each county –  is a “happy compromise.” Delaware law requires workers on state-funded projects that meet certain cost thresholds to be paid fairly.

For example, carpenters would earn about $62 an hour and electricians nearly $87 an hour for prevailing wage work in New Castle County or $52 and $87 in Sussex County, respectively.

However, unions have helped raise wages and standards for union and non-unionized workers alike, Ogden noted. He believes that if it had been solely left up to “the businesspeople,” tradespeople may be working 80 to 100 hours per week to support their families.

“Now, they can work 40 hours and be home for dinner,” Ogden said.

Leaders debate inclusiveness of PLAs

During public comment in the June labor committee hearing, a couple union workers voiced support for the bill citing fair wages and worker protections, but most speakers were opposed to the measure.

State Budget Director Brian Maxwell warned legislators that the cost of school construction projects with PLAs would be higher than without the agreements. A fiscal note on the impact of the bill likewise suggested more costs in negotiating the PLAs but couldn’t estimate an impact.

Mary DuPont, the executive director of La Plaza, a nonprofit advocacy organization for Delaware’s Latino community, opposed the bill, citing Delaware’s 2022 Disparity Report which found that less than 3% of state construction contracts went to minority-owned businesses. 

She told Spotlight Delaware that in Sussex County, a large proportion of construction projects are done by small Latino-owned businesses that are not likely to be unionized. DuPont added that some minority-owned businesses have told her of unpleasant experiences in unions.

“They’re not exactly waiting with welcome signs for minorities to join the union,” she said.

Ayanna Khan, founder and CEO of the Black Chamber of Commerce, told Spotlight Delaware that because minority-owned businesses are more likely to operate in a deficit, they wouldn’t want to pay the additional expense of union dues, especially when the cost of living has significantly increased due to gas and utility prices.

She also said unions are historically composed of “middle-aged white men,” as unions discriminated against Black workers in the early 20th century. 

However, according to an analysis, Black males were more likely to be in a union than White males in 2025. Nationwide, 10.3% of white men were union members compared to 12.3% of Black men  and 8.6% of Hispanic men.

Maravelias, the leader of the trade union organization, denied the assertion of minority groups and associations that because most Black and Latino workers are not part of unions, the bill would harm them.

“We don’t need a minority contractor to hire minority workers,” Maravelias told the committee. “Let’s not bring race into this.” 

Maravelias told Spotlight Delaware he believes that the business owners’ race or ethnicity does not have as much of an influence on who they hire,

“That little riff they want to put in there about Black, white, Latino, brown, whatever, they can take that and throw it in the garbage, because it doesn’t exist,” he added.

The bill includes a provision where PLAs could include protections for minority-owned businesses, which Maravelias hopes contractors see through. But one of his biggest problems with non-unionized labor is the proliferance of out-of-state workers who would contribute less to the state’s economy.

“Unlike the out-of-state worker, the Delaware worker will pay taxes and spend his money in Delaware, where the other guy stays here for the week in a motor lodge and then takes off,” he said.

The post Lawmakers debate whether to prioritize union labor on major projects appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

What I’m Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: Are we building museums that let people truly inhabit the past, or just warehouses for history’s leftovers?

• Back where we started: Instead of unconditional surrender from Iran, we’ve settled for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

• Newsom says DOJ is investigating him and his wife: When investigations start to look like presidential score-settling.

• When sports integrity becomes negotiable: College football’s gambling fiasco lands on the NFL’s doorstep.

• The Manchurian Candidate (2004): Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep are worth watching, but the remake can’t match the original’s menace.

• “I Can’t Get Started With You” (1938): Billie Holiday and Lester Young turn a song that began as a joke into a gentle exploration of heartbreak.

  ---

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.” Orhan Pamuk

There’s a museum in Istanbul where a single glass case holds 4,213 cigarette butts, each one catalogued, each one pinned. Orhan Pamuk created The Museum of Innocence as a physical companion-piece to his 2008 novel of the same name, winning the European Museum of the Year Award for 2014 to go with his 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. He was proving a principle through accumulation and intention: the most throwaway object imaginable can become something you have to stand in front of and reckon with, resurrecting vanished worlds through the emotional resonance of artifacts that have survived the elements and time.

But what does Pamuk mean when he makes a distinction between “real” and unreal museums? What is the difference between a building that merely stores the past and one that allows you to inhabit it? Most of what we call museums are, if we’re being honest, impressive warehouses with good lighting. A real museum, in the sense that Pamuk is getting at, invites you into the world where the objects it holds were once alive. The air in the room changes. The weight of the room changes. What you’re experiencing is a kind of resurrection rather than mere storage, and those are fundamentally different interactions with the past.

Which leads to a harder question: whose time gets transformed into permanent, walkable space, and whose time gets left on the cutting room floor of history? Every museum is an argument for this and against that, whether its curators acknowledge it or not. The choice about what deserves its own display case and what gets a footnote in the catalogue represents a distinct worldview. When I was deep in the weeds of my book On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, I realized that I needed to render the full texture of the period—the music pulsing out of this legendary nightclub doorway, the argument enlivening that specific corner barbershop. Strip out those real world elements and you’re left with formal commemoration: accurate perhaps, but airless. Without that texture, a book or a museum can only honor a period at a respectful distance; it can’t break down that distance between the past and the present.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington gets this right in a way that stops you cold. They have a restored railroad car from the Jim Crow period in there, full scale. Walk up to it, and the meaning lands without explanation: who built the railway line, who carried the luggage and stoked the engine, who drank cocktails in the club car and dozed in a sleeper? The thing itself does something that mere language or pictures can’t ever approach.

The Obama Presidential Center, which opens this Juneteenth on Chicago’s South Side, will test this principle of “real” museums. Outside, it’s as real as can be, a fortress-like edifice that has divided public opinion. But inside, it contains the first truly digital presidential library, with no official papers on display. Can digital simulations perform the same alchemy as actual artifacts? The objects around us are witnesses. A cigarette butt, a rail car, a worn book with someone else’s handwriting in the margins, a document signed by the President of the United States: each holds the minutes of a life that actual people lived. Carefully curated in what Pamuk calls a “real museum,” they can transform present space into the closest replica we can achieve of the past.

Read more

Do we really want to play dice with our planet?

A series in the Guardian recently declared “it’s time to talk about geoengineering.” So let’s talk about it. And let us start with some simple truths about this cluster of techno-optimistic “quick fixes” which purport to somehow offset our slow progress towards zeroing out planet-warming carbon emissions.

Solar geoengineering proposals – reducing sunlight – have received the most attention, but a host of desperate schemes have been proposed in an effort to “fix” the disruption of climate caused by the growing burden of carbon dioxide human activities add to the atmosphere.

South Siders voice concerns about gentrification, housing and affordability as they celebrate opening of the Obama Presidential Center

Pastor Jeffery Campbell has deep ties to Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. He was raised in the South Side neighborhood, and has served as pastor at Woodlawn Baptist Church for 22 years.

And for the past decade, he’s attempted to protect its residents from displacement and gentrification. He’s seen rising rents, residents squeezed by university development and life becoming more unaffordable. Now, there’s a new challenge: the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center – part of a 19-acre, $850m campus – that has transformed life in the neighborhood, as well as the adjacent South Shore and Hyde Park, long before this Friday’s opening to the public.

Marine veteran James Brown rescued a driver with a piece of metal lodged in his leg

A US military veteran and trucker recently used his battlefield medical training to save the life of a fellow truck driver whose leg was impaled by a piece of metal after a crash, earning him official recognition as an “angel” of the nation’s highways.

As the organization honoring him tells it, James Brown was driving for Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Melton Truck Lines through torrential rain – as well as low visibility – on 22 May when he saw another trucker lose control, leave the roadway and overturn about 40 miles east of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Over the last few years, the world has seen unspeakable violence, death, and devastation from Israel’s war on Gaza. During that time, global perception has shifted as the scale of Israel’s destruction grew, with the death toll climbing to more than 73,000 people. Since the October 2025 “ceasefire,” Israeli military attacks have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

“Spending years building a movement for an end to this genocide around the slogan ‘Ceasefire now’ alone, it was successful in building quite a substantial following,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, an associate fellow at Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, tells The Intercept Briefing. “It was vague enough to bring a lot of people into the movement against genocide — because who’s going to disagree with calling for an end to war?”

“But at the end of the day, what it really laid the groundwork for was … the potential of signing this empty ceasefire agreement, in which there is an agreement on paper, there is a framework, and a phased approach to this.”

Since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire last year between Israel and Hamas, Gaza has largely fallen out of the news, as Israel, along with the U.S., launched attacks on Iran and Lebanon. But Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians never really stopped. “Palestinians continue to be killed every single day, albeit at a more piecemeal slower pace that is more difficult for the international community to oppose,” says Kenney-Shawa.

This week on the podcast, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Kenney-Shawa about how the fight for Palestinian rights and sovereignty can’t end at demands for ceasefires and conditioning aid — and should shift to sanctions and arms embargoes — and about how Gaza fits into Israel’s ambitions for the region and efforts to more deeply enmesh the U.S. and Israeli military.

Related

Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech

“This is the most important thing to look at in the course of the next few months and few years,” says Kenney-Shawa, warning of new Israel-led initiatives like Section 224, an unprecedented integration of the U.S. military–industrial complex and Israeli defense and technology sectors. Israel and American leaders “recognize the fact that criticism of Israel in the U.S. is skyrocketing. … In many ways, they’ve recognized the need to shift this U.S.–Israel relationship from one of dependency, both militarily and financially, to one of further entrenchment.”

“Obviously, it’s a very strategic move by the Israelis to take advantage of this period in time where there is this huge chasm between public opinion and actual policy,” says Kenney-Shawa. “They’re essentially recognizing that, ‘Hey, we might not have total impunity in the United States forever, but we do for now while establishment Democrats and Republicans are running the ship. We have a Trump administration that’s essentially willing to do whatever we want.’ So what they’re trying to do now is essentially push this process through while Trump is in power, while Republicans have a majority in the Senate and the House.”

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. 

Jonah Valdez: I’m Jonah Valdez, also a reporter at The Intercept, and I cover politics and Israel and Palestine.

JW: Glad to have you here, Jonah. 

So on Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an interim ceasefire to end military operations in both Iran and Lebanon for 60 days. The agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and bars Iran from having a nuclear weapon. The White House agreed to end their blockade and waive economic sanctions against Iran. 

The deal also requires the U.S. and regional partners to develop a “mutually” agreed upon reconstruction and economic development fund worth at least $300 billion. However, the U.S. is not required to contribute.

Jonah, earlier this week on a special live Intercept Briefing, you spoke to Al-Shabaka U.S. Policy Fellow Tariq Kenney-Shawa about the particulars of ceasefires especially when it comes to Iran, Lebanon, and most notably Gaza.

In your conversation, you talk about the role the term “ceasefire” plays in our political imagination. Jonah, should a “ceasefire” be the end goal, or is there something more we need to push for here if what we’re really looking for is an end to the suffering? 

JV: I think anyone should see even the recent deal between the U.S. and Iran with some skepticism as far as whether it will hold, given previous ceasefires it’s been a part of.

Something that Tariq Kenney-Shawa and I talk at length about during our conversation is how this term “ceasefire” has been — in many ways, in an Orwellian way — weaponized against those that it’s supposed to bring peace to. That’s exactly what we saw in Gaza.

The term “ceasefire” was this massive slogan — a very effective slogan — throughout the 2024 presidential campaign cycle, as well as congressional races that year. Pro-Palestinian protesters, the movement at large, was really pushing and using a ceasefire as a rallying cry to get people to care about Palestinian rights.

What conversely happened is you get this Trump-concocted ceasefire with a lot of hands from the Israeli government, which is essentially a fake ceasefire. They’ve continued the bombing campaign in Gaza. Since the ceasefire that was signed in October of last year, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes. So I think the term “ceasefire” just completely doesn’t apply in Gaza.

Related

Stop Calling It a Ceasefire

As a part of the Iran war, they have also invaded and are occupying southern Lebanon, and of course, Israel and the U.S. and their joint strikes in Iran. I think it’s important to see Gaza in this context of a broader conflict that Israel is trying to push on the region.

JW: On a related note, I know that you’ve consistently covered a lot of the momentum around calls for an arms embargo to Israel. I know this came up in your conversation with Tariq as well.

Are we giving an arms embargo too much weight, or to put another way, are we giving politicians who say they agree with an arms embargo the ability to skirt the actual issue here, which is our decades of perpetuating and being complicit in violence in the Middle East? What’s your take on that?

JV: This is a difficult one that Tariq and I had a really good back and forth about. An arms embargo, similar to a ceasefire, has been a huge rallying cry for the movement for Palestinian rights, for Palestinian sovereignty, really for decades now. Past U.S. governments have used an arms embargo [at] varying degrees of effectiveness of leverage against the Israeli government when the U.S. government wants Israel to do certain things.

It is still worth mentioning that Israel is still very reliant on the U.S. government for its military capabilities. Just the very fact of defending against Iranian attacks, that’s made possible because of U.S. weapons. Its ability to have a chokehold on Gaza and the West Bank, also due to U.S. weapons. Its ability to even strike in Iran and Lebanon, a lot of that is U.S. weapons capabilities. A lot of the aggression we’re seeing is because of its partnership with the U.S. 

Again, there’s this danger, though, similar with the ceasefire, where an arms embargo might not be enough, and that’s what Tariq gets at as well, which is something he’s been saying since even before October 7, which is, the movement might have to go further than an arms embargo. 

The reason is what we’re already seeing with certain conversations in Congress is there’s real efforts by Israel supporters and the Israeli government to further enmesh the U.S. and Israeli militaries in a way where even if we were to have a halt to weapon sales to Israel, even if we were to stop the flow of taxpayer dollars to Israel, they can still acquire weapons through a new kind of partnership they’re trying to form through the Pentagon directly.

This is something where, it could also be the case, where the movement gets what it wants. Again, this is a very effective rallying cry. We’re having an arms embargo, at least calls for stopping offensive weapons to Israel as a huge litmus test in the midterm elections. And it’s I think affecting the outcome of a lot of elections as we’ve seen in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and beyond.

It is having a lot of ripple effects in U.S. politics right now, and halting it would be a big deal. But, further down the line, Israel is already anticipating the halt of the flow of weapons or at least the flow of taxpayer dollars to Israel and is looking to create an even deeper relationship with the U.S. that could last indefinitely, really.

JW: This does really seem to be a cyclical issue in U.S. politics and in organizing. You pick an endpoint and of course, your enemies, they move around that endpoint. So, you may reach the goal, but what you actually wanted to achieve still feels elusive. 

Jonah, thanks for giving us that preview. We’re going to hear your conversation with Tariq Kenney-Shawa, an Al-Shabaka U.S. policy fellow and co-host of Al-Shabaka’s Policy Lab series. Let’s listen to that now.

JV: Tariq, to start, I just want to give a little background on when you and I first connected. It was last summer, so July 2025, thereabouts, and it was the height of Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza that, at the time, there seemed to be a huge shift toward how people in the U.S. were viewing Gaza.

You had mainstream media airing images of starving Palestinians. You had even more moderate Democratic leaders criticizing Israel. More lawmakers were referring to the conflict as a genocide for the first time. In the Senate, a historic vote, a majority of Democrats for the first time voted to block some weapon transfers to Israel.

Related

“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

But amid all that, you told me even then you were worried about a scenario where Israel would enact what you called a “performative ceasefire,” where Israel would continue the bombing and the blockades on humanitarian aid, the ethnic cleansing, but in your words, “a bit more piecemeal and gradual.” 

So sure enough, several months later, last October, we got this iteration of a ceasefire, and here we are. The scenario you worried about is unfolding. So question to you, I’m wondering: In the last seven months, what’s been affirmed for you, and what has been more surprising?

Tariq Kenney-Shawa: It’s pretty clear that, yeah, everything that we were as a movement warned about — that these meaningless, toothless ceasefires can be agreed to and then not actually implemented — that has actually, as we’ve seen over the last couple months since October ’25, that’s played out exactly as expected.

What it’s really showed me was that, or what it’s really confirmed, was that spending years building a movement for an end to this genocide around the slogan “Ceasefire now” alone, it was successful in building quite a substantial following. It was vague enough to bring a lot of people into the movement against genocide because who’s going to disagree with calling for an end to war, calling for a ceasefire, right?

But at the end of the day, what it really laid the groundwork for was — again, like you just mentioned, and like I said last year — the potential of signing this empty ceasefire agreement, in which there is an agreement on paper, there is a framework, and a phased approach to this.

However, Israel has refused to implement any steps of the ceasefire agreement, and that includes continued carrying out daily airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. They’ve continued expanding the land they control. At the beginning Israel controlled about 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, delineated with that yellow line that people keep talking about that chopped Gaza in half. And now they’ve been, bit by bit, inching that line further and further westward and forcing 2 million Palestinians into an ever-shrinking strip of land that is now about 40, 30 percent of what the Gaza Strip was prior to the genocide.

Israel has also refused to let in the full agreed amount of humanitarian aid. They flood the Strip with commercial aid that people can’t really afford, but they refuse to let in sustainable products and things that people need to survive. Tents, building material, equipment to dig people’s bodies out of the rubble. What that has done is put those 2 million Palestinians who are caged in on that other side of the yellow line into a state of deliberate purgatory.

Related

International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened?

Since October 2025, that’s what we’ve seen. Palestinians continue to be killed every single day — albeit at, again, a more piecemeal slower pace that is more difficult for the international community to oppose. A lot of people within the now quite large movement in support of Palestinian rights and an end to a genocide, they look at the situation now and they say, “Well, they agreed to a ceasefire. What else can we do? What’s the next step for us?” At the end of the day, this is exactly what we were worried about last year. 

We know Israel’s history of how Israel engages with ceasefires. The fact that Israel doesn’t abide by ceasefires historically and often uses it as a period to expand the facts on the ground that fundamentally change the equation of the conflict.

Now we’re in this really difficult position in which other regional issues have come to the fore in terms of attention and media coverage, and Gaza has really slipped away from the public’s attention. Not that at the end of the day that really stopped a genocide, but there was a lot of movement in terms of this gradual push to hold Israel accountable.

The fact that we really predicated our entire movement around nothing really more than achieving a ceasefire has really come at the detriment of the Palestinians who are now living under this pseudo-ceasefire, while the movement in support of them abroad is a little bit in limbo, immobilized, and unsure of how to move forward.

JV: It’s this Orwellian situation of language being weaponized in a way.

TKS: Absolutely. 

JV: Out of that came the “Board of Peace” set up by the Trump administration that is supposed to govern this so-called ceasefire. Speaking of deals, this week we’re seeing a deal between the U.S. and Iran in, supposedly, ending the war there.

That war itself dominated the headlines and drew a lot of the attention away from Gaza. But now that the U.S. and Iran seem very close on this deal to end the war, Netanyahu, for his part, he said that he won’t withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon despite this deal. And of course, the Israeli military continues to occupy more than half of Gaza.

How should we be viewing Gaza in the context of the Iran war or vice versa? 

TKS: It’s important to see Gaza as the elephant in the room and just really part of this cycle of war. The fact that Israel was able to agree to this pseudo-ceasefire in Gaza allowed it to direct and move a lot of its attention, a lot of its resources, a lot of its military manpower to these other fronts that opened up. It was able to dedicate more time and energy to fighting this war in Iran, to going on this offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. And also, can’t ignore the fact that Israel is also holding occupied territory in Syria. So it’s really important to view this as a cycle.

Related

The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades

It’s obviously very early, we don’t quite know what’s going to happen with the MOU [memorandum of understanding] between the U.S. and Iran. But if it does move forward, and if that front does shut down and quiet down — unfortunately, what that likely means is that Israel is going to have a lot more resources, a lot more manpower to turn its attention back to Gaza.

That shift in the regional wars that are ongoing is also coinciding with the fact that we’re basically in the run-up to Israeli election season. The opposition is really in a dead heat against the current far-right Israeli government. But the opposition in Israel isn’t criticizing Netanyahu because they’re against these forever wars that Israel is fighting. They’re criticizing Netanyahu because they just don’t like the way he’s conducting them. Just the other day, one of the main opposition candidates posted about how basically the war against Iran is going to basically reignite when there’s a new government in power in Israel. 

That just goes to show that Israelis by and large are supportive of these war processes. They are supportive of this concept of total victory that is quite elusive. Netanyahu in particular, and the far-right coalition that he leads, is going to be particularly thirsty to, again, prove themselves in the face of these narratives that are coming out in light of the potential Iran deal that this was a strategic loss for Israel.

What Netanyahu and his coalition are thinking is, “OK, if we have to wind down our offensive activities in Iran and potentially even Lebanon, how else are we going to prove that we are the right party and the right people to defend Israel from our perceived threats?” They’re going to do that by reigniting their assault and genocide in the Gaza Strip. How they’re going to justify that is where we are at right now in terms of the ceasefire process itself. Despite the fact that Israel has not implemented any of the phase one parts of the agreement, they’re now demanding that Hamas agree to a component of phase two, which was disarmament.

Related

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

But Hamas is basically putting its foot down and saying, “Listen if you guys aren’t going to adhere to stopping the bombing campaigns, if you guys aren’t going to let in humanitarian aid like you allowed to, if you guys are still eating up land every single day and not even adhering to phase one of the agreement, then basically why should we agree to phase two if there’s no mutual engagement on that side?”

Unfortunately, it does not bode well for Palestinians in Gaza because they’re the punching bag that Israel will turn its attention to undoubtedly.

JV: Thanks for walking us through the political landscape in Israel. Sometimes we in the U.S. run the risk of overstating the influence of U.S. politics on Israel, specifically when it comes to Netanyahu’s decision-making and how he’s coming to those decisions. And we don’t talk enough about Israeli politics.

But I wanted to zoom in on something that you mentioned just a second ago about Hamas and their position right now and why ongoing negotiations with the “Board of Peace” continue to fall apart. For those who don’t know: The “Board of Peace” was set up as a part of the ceasefire and is supposed to, on paper, move the ceasefire process and rebuilding process of Gaza forward. It has a footnote essentially of like toward some further-off notion of Palestinian statehood.

I don’t think we talk enough about Hamas as a political entity and what its position is right now. What leverage does it have right now? What are they actually trying to argue for? Also, with other Palestinian factions, as trying to be a voice of what they see as this is the last remaining resistance of Palestinian freedom, in this context here, what does that look like? And, how is that stalling within this “Board of Peace,” very flawed structure? 

TKS: It’s pretty obvious that Hamas itself doesn’t really have much leverage at all. They never had many offensive weapons to begin with. If you could consider the homemade makeshift rockets that they fire at Israel to be offensive; many of them have been depleted. I think it’s also important to be clear that Hamas is open, has explicitly stated that they are open to handing over their offensive weapons.

But they have clearly tied this to the process that was agreed upon. They very much see that as the only tidbit of leverage that they have left in this process. Basically, their argument is saying, “Listen, we’re open to handing over our weapons, but Israel has to withdraw as agreed upon in the ceasefire agreement, or there have to be steps that make it clear that Israel will be held accountable to the standards that was agreed upon.”

Related

Plans Call for “New Rafah” Built in Israel’s Image — Without Palestinians

It’s really important to bring in the role of the “Board of Peace” here. It’s a misconception that the “Board of Peace” has been designed and will operate with the objective of building a new Gaza for Palestinians. What the “Board of Peace” exists to achieve is to create, effectively, this wonderland that Trump and Israel have agreed to.

What that looks like if you look at the presentations that, for example Jared Kushner has pushed out and the Trump administration has presented on how they view the Gaza Strip in 10, 20 years down the line — very little of it is actually for the Palestinians who live there, who will be basically concentrated into these disparate camps that are spread out throughout the Gaza Strip, put under intense surveillance, and basically serve as cheap labor for these luxury resorts and hotels and apartment complexes and data centers that Israel and the U.S. envision building in the Gaza Strip.

When we think about the “Board of Peace” is, that shrinking territory that Hamas does still control of is basically the only thing that is stopping the Trump administration and Israel from embarking further on that dystopian future of, again, herding Palestinians into these effectively concentration camps distributed throughout the Gaza Strip and having them just serve as cheap labor for this personal enrichment opportunity for the Trump administration and his Israeli partners.

JV: You’ve written about your own experiences growing up a Palestinian American. Your grandfather, I believe, was the former mayor of Gaza City, Rashad Shawa. Your father is from Gaza. Your aunt, Laila Shawa, is a renowned Palestinian visual artist, also from Gaza. You have another aunt, Rawya Shawa, a Palestinian journalist and legislator.

There’s a lineage to the work you do. Could you talk a bit about your family, your father, how you came to start doing this work advocating for Palestine? 

TKS: I’m Palestinian American. I was born in New York. Something that I’ve asked my parents about — they never wanted to make me feel like I had to advocate for Palestinian rights. They were always hoping that I wouldn’t have to do any of this and that eventually it would be figured out someday, and that we wouldn’t have to make this our lives or our careers. But I first started becoming aware of the politics of my heritage when I was very young. 

I was in middle school. I remember this one time I went to a friend’s place. He introduced me to his parents, and his dad asked where I was from, and I said, “Palestine.” He said, “What is that? It doesn’t exist.” I was a middle schooler, so at the time it was shocking, and I didn’t really understand it. Only later in life did I realize that that was pointed and had a lot of history behind it.

As you mentioned, my father grew up in Gaza until he was about college age and came to the U.S. Just hearing about the stories about growing up in Gaza and then seeing his reaction to later events, for example, the 2008 Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip — really, that kind of ended up awakening me to the real weight behind being Palestinian and pushed me to obviously get involved.

The past two years have been extremely difficult just because there’s always been that hope of being able to return to Gaza and see the land that my father grew up in, my grandfather grew up in, my great-grandfather grew up in and played these really central roles in governance.

But it’s now — Gaza effectively doesn’t exist in the way it once did. So part of that process is just wrapping your mind around that as well. That’s been one of the most difficult parts of, in addition to obviously just all the loss, is just knowing that we might never, never go back. And if we do, it won’t be the Gaza that my father left and my grandfather led and all that. 

JV: Your Aunt Rawya, she lost her home in that 2008 offensive from an Israeli strike? 

TKS: Yep. And it wasn’t the first time. Israeli tanks had shelled her home before. That was the culmination of that whole process.

So it was very visceral for me at a very young age. But also, the fact that I was witnessing it all from a distance also played another role too. Because as a Palestinian American growing up in New York City, again, it very quickly became about defending myself. I very quickly had to become an expert in Palestinian history in order to defend myself from the people like my friend’s father who claimed I didn’t exist and my people didn’t exist.

Related

What You Can’t Say About Israel (with Marc Lamont Hill)

So it’s also interesting to just look back at how much has changed in the discourse around Israel and Palestine, in New York City, in the United States, since I became politically aware and started getting involved in these debates in middle school, early high school.

Something that gives me hope in terms of the direction things are headed is that back in 2011, 2012, when I was a high schooler, the parameters for discussion around the Palestinian right to resist occupation, around some of the myths of Israel’s existence — for example, the myth that they made the desert bloom, or that it was a land without a people for a people without a land — so much of those have been eroded.

So much of American public opinion has, over the course of obviously two and a half years of genocide, shifted. There is much more space for having real conversations about this. More importantly, sharing the Palestinian perspective, which is very fundamentally different than it was even five, 10 years ago.

JV: Those shifts are incredible. Recent polling has shown time and time again that the vast majority of Democratic voters, somewhere north of 70 — more than 70 percent — in the U.S. see Israel unfavorably. 

It’s playing a big role in U.S. electoral politics, whether or not a candidate supports blocking military aid to Israel has really become a litmus test in many of these races.

Related

They Tried to Smear Zohran Mamdani as an Antisemite. Voters Saw Right Through It.

Some Democrats have found success in their primary elections running on that as a part of their platform and winning. You have Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza; he won his primary against a moderate Democrat a couple weeks ago. Last month in Pennsylvania, you have Chris Rabb, whose campaign not only called for an arms embargo on Israel, but also — controversially for a lot of people — the right of return for Palestinians under international law.

I’m wondering, how would you diagnose this moment the Democratic Party is in with its attitude toward Israel–Palestine? Or do you see this as more than a moment? I’m curious how lasting you think these shifts will be. 

TKS: I definitely see this as more than just a moment. It’s not just Democrats and people on the left who are feeling more pro-Palestinian than ever before. It’s across the political spectrum. It was Pew or Gallup, I forget which one, their most recent poll on where American sympathies lie between Israelis and Palestinians. For the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, and that’s across the political spectrum. Obviously that’s a lot more skewed when it comes to Democratic voters or progressives and people on the left. But it very much is across the political spectrum.

It’s more useful to look at the polling that we’re seeing around actual policy measures. For example, arms embargo or “block the bombs” and calls to actually either at the very least condition U.S. military aid to Israel, but, even better, cut it entirely. We’re seeing upwards of 60, 65 percent of Americans, again, across the political spectrum, who support these types of actual, solid policies.

That’s the difference right now between when you’re looking at just sympathy and people who are actually willing to potentially even make voting decisions out of what they’re seeing right now and out of the outrage that they’ve been witnessing when it comes to two and a half years of genocide. They also are now more cognizant of the fact that we send Israel billions of dollars to do that genocide and to engage in forever wars across the region that many Americans see or believe Israel is dragging the U.S. into. That is the bigger change that we’re seeing, and that arguably might be a little bit more lasting, is that more and more Americans today are critical of Israel and critical of that “special U.S.–Israel relationship.”

What concerns me sometimes is that a lot of the shift in public opinion isn’t necessarily tied to support for Palestinians, and we’re obviously seeing that on the right. On the far right, where we’re seeing a rise in actual antisemitism. Across the right, we’re seeing just a general rise in the “America-first — MAGA — we don’t want to be sending anyone our tax dollars,” and they’re now starting to include Israel in that.

Related

The Real “Divide” Among Democrats Over Israel Is Between Party Leadership and Voters

But the other thing I will mention is, what we’re seeing right now in the Democratic Party is really a widening chasm between the Democratic establishment and the voting base. The Democratic establishment, some of the older representatives that we have in Congress — Chuck Schumer is a great example of some of these more old-school politicians who are resistant to recognizing this new reality. What I’m trying to say is that, there is this very, very big generational gap that is emerging. So despite the fact that we are seeing such a substantial shift in U.S. public opinion, we’re not seeing it in policy. That’s largely because these establishment Democrats remain in power.

But what I hope to see over the next five, 10 years is that that starts to fundamentally change when the younger generation emerges as the bigger voting bloc. Unfortunately, these policy changes are glacial. It’s too late to end the genocide.

The one thing I am hopeful for in that long-term process, is that long-term movement that we have built and are continuing to build that will be borne out by these younger generations as they rise into political power. 

JV: All this discussion around blocking military aid to Israel is as old as the state of Israel itself. You had President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s threatening an arms embargo as leverage against Israel and other presidents after that. 

We’ve been mostly talking about a post-October 7 world where it’s been this rallying cry for anti-genocide protesters, progressive lawmakers in the U.S., and, as I’ve mentioned, we saw Democrats win primary elections running on this. The message is pretty clear: Our taxpayer dollars are being used to help Israel acquire weapons from American companies to commit a genocide. All the while, there’s this economic side of it — all the while our economy suffers, people are struggling to afford rent, just daily life, healthcare. So let’s use the leverage we have as Americans and stop the flow of weapons. 

To your point, a lot of it is leaning toward anti-Israel, not so much for the Palestinian people. And yet there is this huge shift. But now we’re increasingly hearing Netanyahu and the Israeli government, and supporters of the Israeli government signal that they are getting ready and almost championing a world without the same funding from the U.S., and basically a post-State Department funding mechanism where the same amount of taxpayer dollars isn’t flowing into Israel as much so that they could buy these weapons.

And in Congress you’re seeing a lot of pro-Israel lobbying happening around a new bill, and it would essentially intertwine the U.S. and Israeli militaries and weapons industries in a new way — we don’t do this with any other ally, it’s worth mentioning — in a new way that will reshape how Israel gets weapons. Could you talk about the dangers of that and where things are headed? 

TKS: To be completely honest with you, and we’ve talked about this before, this is the most important thing to look at in the course of the next few months and few years. That’s the difference between conditioning U.S. military funding and aid to Israel, and completely cutting U.S. military weapons to Israel through an arms embargo.

I argued as early as summer 2023 — and this was before the genocide — that even conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel would not go far enough if the objective is for Israel to end the occupation. And that was prior to the genocide. It’s also important to recognize that the Israeli military is deeply dependent on U.S. weapons, U.S. military cooperation, intel sharing.

Related

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

If the U.S. withdrew that relationship or fundamentally changed it or stopped providing Israel with the weapons — whether through conditioning that aid or cutting it entirely — that would fundamentally alter Israel’s ability to get away with whether it’s genocide in Gaza or regional wars.

However, conditioning doesn’t go far enough because if Israel’s committing a genocide, and if we recognize that, then selling Israel the weapons on the open market is arguably just as bad as giving those weapons to Israel for free with U.S. tax dollars.

It’s avoiding another movement trap that is reminiscent of the “Ceasefire now” trap. Because if we get stuck in limiting ourselves — our movement — to simply calling for conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel on Israel adhering to international law, or U.S. law even, then there are so many ways for Israel to wriggle around that. 

More importantly, at the end of the day, Israel can continue to buy the weapons it needs to get away with genocide on the open market, and that’s the problem.

Right now, there are a couple Israel-led initiatives that actually recognize this moment we’re in. So Israel’s leaders Benjamin Netanyahu, and a lot of American — some of the most stalwart pro-Israel figures in the U.S., Lindsey Graham comes to mind — recognize the fact that criticism of Israel in the U.S. is skyrocketing; and potentially the future of this formerly special “U.S.–Israel relationship” is not sustainable in the long run, especially as more Republicans turn against this status quo. In many ways, they’ve recognized the need to shift this U.S.-Israel relationship from one of dependency, both militarily and financially, to one of further entrenchment.

Related

Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech

How they’re going to do that, there’s basically two concurrent initiatives that are ongoing right now. The first and the most important one probably, is the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. In specific, Section 224, which is proposing basically an unprecedented integration of the U.S. military–industrial complex and Israeli defense and technology sectors. That’s dangerous because what that does is that entrenches the U.S. military within the United States military–industrial complex, and gives it access that no country has, not even the U.K., not even France, not even these core allies that the U.S. has built their relationships with over decades. 

Apart from that, why that is dangerous is that it becomes much harder for the pro-Palestine movement, or the movement in support of Palestinian rights and an end to genocide, to decouple that new much more entrenched relationship. That would mean that we would have to then go up against the U.S. military as well as the Israeli military and make that case to Americans.

Obviously, it’s a very strategic move by the Israelis to take advantage of this period in time where there is this huge chasm between public opinion and actual policy. Because they’re essentially recognizing that, “Hey, we might not have total impunity in the United States forever, but we do for now while establishment Democrats and Republicans are running the ship. We have a Trump administration that’s essentially willing to do whatever we want.” So what they’re trying to do now is essentially push this process through while Trump is in power, while Republicans have a majority in the Senate and the House.

Another example is the negotiations that are ongoing around the memorandum of understanding, the MOU, between Israel and the US. The last one being signed under the Obama administration, which was a 10-year MOU that agreed to basically be giving Israel $3.8 billion every year of U.S. tax dollars. What the new MOU that they’re thinking about is a 20-year MOU in which a couple years of increase in U.S. military aid before it eventually decreases. They also pursue this entrenchment approach, making the two militaries more dependent on each other rather than this Israel dependency relationship.

JV: There’s this really fantastic archival footage you shared on Twitter sometime last year showing your grandfather, former mayor of Gaza City — again, Rashad Shawa — talking about the annexation of Gaza. This was in the 1980s, more than 40 years ago. Here we are having similar discussions, if not in a more dire place.

I’m wondering where you think the movement goes from here. And, with thinking about BDS — Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — if Israel doesn’t care about its place on the international stage as much as it used to, as that increasingly isn’t playing a factor, as the U.S. is more officializing its entrenchment with the Israeli military, where do you see the movement going from here?

TKS: Israel remains very much dependent on the United States and its relationship with the West, and I’m talking about mainly Western Europe. Yes, they are recognizing that their relationships based on impunity are not a given forever, which very much explains why they are effectively going so hard across the region right now. They very much see this as a moment of opportunity for them that they might not have forever. They might not have a Trump administration in the White House forever that is effectively willing to allow them to get away with whatever they want. That’s why they are taking these unprecedented steps ranging from the genocide in Gaza to the war in Iran that no other U.S. president agreed to, except for Trump.

That is why it’s all the more important that we recognize that the movement itself — the movement in support of Palestinian rights — has made huge strides over the last couple of years. And now, however, it’s increasingly important to shift our efforts to punitive measures — sanctions — everything in our power to hold Israel accountable through actual punitive measures like economic sanctions, arms embargoes that make it more difficult for Israel to get away with the war crimes and atrocities and genocides it’s committing.

That’s why I spend so much time advocating for arms embargoes, for economic sanctions, anything that goes past these previous demands that we’ve had — the “Ceasefire now” demands, the conditioning aid demands.

It’s increasingly important now that we take these steps and hold Israel accountable through arms embargoes and sanctions so that we don’t get to the point in the future where Israel can live its “super Sparta” strategy that it is really investing in. Basically creating a world in which Israel can carry out these forever wars and these genocides without the U.S.’s and the West’s permission. It’s really imperative that we see these changes sooner than later because time is not on our side in terms of that process.

JV: I hate to be the pessimist in the room here, but aren’t we there already where Israel can just — maybe it’s not its fullest iteration, not fully evolved Sparta form, as you mentioned — but aren’t we there already where they’re acting outside of the U.S. interest? 

TKS: Yeah. Everything we’re doing, it’s too late to stop the genocide in Palestine. An inconceivable number of Palestinians have been killed, and they’re not coming back. Gaza is — we’ve lost so much of it. A lot of this accountability is already too little too late.

But it’s also very important to recognize that, again, Israel remains very much dependent on the United States in particular, not even to mention just Europe and Western Europe, for its military activity and military prowess and being shielded on the international stage.

Just look at the Iran war, for example. There’s no way that Israel would have been able to sustain this type of regional conflagration without the U.S. This ranges from the offensive strikes that the U.S. was partnering directly with Israel on, the intelligence sharing, and the defensive capabilities that the U.S., its vassal states in the region, like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and then even other European countries that ended up sending missile defense systems and naval ships to defend Israel from the rockets that were coming from Iran.

So it’s very much like, we’re in this moment right now — and we will be for many years to come — in which Israel is still extremely dependent on U.S. on the U.S. military umbrella. Israel is very much still basically like a U.S. military outpost. So these types of actions — arms embargo and sanctions — can have an effect on Israel.

The timeline for Israel to be fully self-sufficient in its military procurement system and its own economy — that’s a far way off. Israel is a very integrated economy, and economic sanctions would have a very substantial effect on Israel’s ability to wage war and genocide. However, it is imperative that the sooner we can do this, the better. 

JW: That was Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez and Al-Shabaka U.S. Policy Fellow Tariq Kenney-Shawa speaking at a special live Intercept Briefing earlier this week. If you don’t want to miss the next Intercept Briefing live, sign up for our newsletter at theintercept.com.

Also we want to know what issues you’re following in the midterms. Send us an email or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Performative Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Overharvesting once threatened the horseshoe crab population, which is a staple to the Delaware Bay’s ecosystem. But state protections put in place over 20 years ago appear to be helping Delaware’s “living fossil” rebound.

On a windy night in mid-May, about a dozen volunteers gathered at the James Farm Ecological Preserve near Ocean View, wielding charts, thermometers and a white square made of PVC pipe. 

The volunteers placed the plastic square on sections of the beach, then counted the number of male and female horseshoe crabs inside of it.

“I like seeing the surprise on everyone’s faces when they see how many there are,” said Lorie Whitehaus, a team lead on the survey.

The scene was part of a statewide effort to monitor the horseshoe crab population in Delaware, run jointly by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, and by the Center for the Inland Bays.

And these counts recently have sparked optimism among marine biologists about the 450 million-year-old species, often referred to as “living fossils” because they are one of the oldest living species on the planet, dating back to about 100 million years before dinosaurs appeared.

The Delaware Bay’s horseshoe crab population is close to reaching its historic population, said Jordan Zimmerman, a horseshoe crab biologist for the state of Delaware.  

The bay hosts the world’s highest concentration of the species. They also remain a key part of the local estuary ecosystem. But the number of horseshoe crabs in the Delaware bay dipped drastically in the 1990s due to overharvesting.  

In response, Delaware and neighboring states imposed restrictions about 30 years ago on harvesting the arthropods. The population has now almost reached its 1990 levels, Zimmerman said.  

The rebound marks a rare success story in environmental management. 

“We don’t get too many of those,” Zimmerman said. “It’s very difficult to manage natural resources.”

DNREC monitors commercial horseshoe crab fishing through a mandatory reporting system and check stations. There is a cap on the number of male horseshoe crabs that can be harvested. It is illegal to catch and keep females. 

Blood harvesting affected population

The drop in the horseshoe crab population happened for two main reasons: fishermen harvested them to be used as bait, and biomedical companies harvested them for their blood. 

In the 1960s, scientists discovered horseshoe crab blood contains an extract called limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, which clots in the presence of pathogens. 

This substance helps scientists detect bacteria and toxins in virtually every drug, making horseshoe crab blood one of the most valuable liquids in the world. LAL can sell for up to $60,000 a gallon. 

Scientists collect the blood without killing the animal and return them to the ocean, although studies suggest about 15% of crabs die during the process.

Still, Zimmerman said it is hard to know if that number is accurate because the horseshoe crabs are treated differently in the studies than in the actual blood collection process. 

“If we want to get an idea of the industry impacts on them, then we need to use crabs that are handled the exact same way,” he said. 

Scientists have also developed a synthetic alternative to the LAL in horseshoe crab blood, which may decrease the need to harvest them. 

Last year, the U.S. Pharmacopeia, which helps to ensure drug quality, determined the synthetic alternative is just as effective at detecting pathogens as the extracted material from horseshoe crab blood.  

A volunteer effort

Every full or new moon in the horseshoe crabs’ peak mating season of May and June, volunteers go out whenever the tide peaks at night — whether that be 7 p.m. or midnight. 

The volunteers often find the beaches covered in dozens or even hundreds of horseshoe crabs. 

“There’s nothing that can replace the experience of seeing them in the wild,” said Nivette Pérez-Pérez, manager of community science at the Center for Inland Bays.  

People come from all over the country to volunteer, Zimmerman said, hoping to experience the unique phenomenon for themselves. 

Center for the Inland Bays volunteer Cathy Hutchins said some people don’t like having horseshoe crabs on their beaches, especially during the surge of mating season.

“But I know if you don’t have them, you’re not going to have the birds,” Hutchins said. 

Female horseshoe crabs lay about 80,000 eggs per year, Pérez-Pérez said, providing an important food source for migratory shore birds like red knots or sanderlings. 

While the horseshoe crab population is increasing, other factors like climate change, pollution and coastal development could threaten their numbers in the future, Pérez-Pérez said. 

The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for failing to classify horseshoe crabs as a threatened or endangered species.  

Pérez-Pérez said the main way people can help horseshoe crabs is by flipping them over if they are on their backs. Many die when they are unable to flip themselves over and become stranded on the beach at low tide.  

The best way to flip them over is by grabbing the edge of their shells, not by their tails, she said. 

The post Delaware Bay horseshoe crab population nears recovery, surveys find appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Defendants in the Minneapolis case say the Trump administration labeled them “antifa” to criminalize dissent.

The US–Iran memorandum of understanding nods to international law. Can that be taken seriously? Expert comment jon.wallace 19 June 2026

The memorandum restores the prohibition on the use of force, seeks a binding resolution at the UN to endorse a ‘final deal,’ and relies on multilateral institutions to implement it. But are the US and Iran really returning to compliance with international law?

Making peace is more difficult than starting wars. President Donald Trump has found this to be painfully true over the past months.

Now that a ceasefire arrangement, or memorandum of understanding (MoU), has been made public, it is possible to measure what has been agreed against the standards of international law and practice. 

The 14-point document accommodates virtually the full catalogue of Iranian demands, which would have seemed entirely unrealistic when made during the active conflict. The US is losing its key pressure points, whether economic or military. And Iran’s nuclear obligations are yet to be determined. Other war aims, like stopping Iranian support for proxy forces, do not feature in the instrument.

But is this a legally binding agreement at all? An MoU can be a political or a legal undertaking. But a formal treaty would require advice and consent from the US Senate. In its opening sentence, the MoU confirms that the US and Iran ‘have jointly agreed,’ which might suggest an informal legal agreement – one which rests on ‘good faith’. This is probably as far as the sides could go to avoid giving the impression of a formal treaty, while indicating their intention to comply.

The sides commit to negotiating a ‘final deal’ – not exactly a technical legal term for a comprehensive peace settlement – within a maximum of 60 days.  The ‘final deal’ is to be endorsed by a ‘binding’ resolution of the UN Security Council. This would compensate for the ambiguous legal nature of any final settlement by confirming that its legally binding character will ultimately emanate from the UN Charter.

But the Trump administration and Iran have shown contempt for the UN Charter: The US attacked Iran without permissible cause and assassinated much of its leadership; Iran attacked its neighbours – non belligerents – and closed the Strait of Hormuz. It has also massacred thousands of its own citizens. How seriously can an agreement between such parties be taken? And what does the MoU tell us about the state of international law?

How will peace be maintained?

Parts of the memorandum cover the initial period of 60 days until the final deal is reached. However, many of its provisions are permanent.

This includes the declaration of a ‘permanent’ termination of military operations on all fronts, which is not contingent on achieving the final deal. There is also a pledge by the parties not to initiate any war or military operation against each other in the future. 

By doing so, the sides are restoring the obligation under the UN Charter that prohibits the threat or use of force among states other than in self-defence. This undertaking is to be ‘confirmed’ in the final deal – though Iran will have little faith in US commitments, having been attacked twice over the past year.

The MoU promises that the US will not deploy additional forces to the region, thus renouncing further threats of force to enforce the final deal. Indeed, it will remove ‘its forces from the proximity’ of Iran within 30 days after the final deal. How does this relate to US deployments in the region? Presumably it includes naval assets, but how about its Gulf military bases, and what precisely lies within the ‘proximity’ of Iran? But, by accepting that its deployments of whichever kind will be limited in deference to Iranian security concerns, the US has made a major concession.

The MoU also extends beyond the US and Iran, as it references their ‘allies in the current war.’ This would exclude further Israeli strikes against Iran. Israel, not a party to the deal, must also refrain from the use of force against Lebanon and respect its territorial integrity. Such restraint by Israel looks unlikely, rendering this provision a permanent, destabilizing element in the deal.

The US also expressly undertakes to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran as required by international law – another rather extraordinary turn of events, given President Trump’s encouragement of a popular revolt in February. 

Can Iran charge fees for passage of the Strait of Hormuz?

In the memorandum the US pledges to remove its naval blockade of Iranian harbours within 30 days. During that period, Iran will restore traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels. The troublesome element arises afterwards: the MoU obliges Iran to use ‘its best efforts’ to allow the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only. 

The World Today

Related work

The maritime chokepoints that could be worse than Hormuz

Beyond that, the instrument could entitle Iran to define the ‘future administration of maritime services’ in the Strait of Hormuz in dialogue with Oman. This can be seen as an implied licence for Iran and Oman to impose a fee for the administration of passage. 

It is accepted in international law that countries bordering straits that require complex navigation or are subject to a special treaty regime can charge modest fees to cover pilotage charges or the cost of maintaining navigations aids.

However, there were no fees charged for maritime services relating to the Strait of Hormuz before the war. And no needs for additional services have arisen since. 

Yet the MoU implies that Iran may begin collecting a disguised toll after all. This would further dilute the firm obligation in international law that coastal states must not interfere with maritime traffic through straits used for international navigation. 

Does the memorandum oblige Iran to abandon nuclear weapons?

The US will now immediately lift restrictions on Iranian oil exports and associated services, allowing vast income to flow into the Islamic Republic. The US also pledges to lift all sanctions according to a schedule to be agreed in the final deal. There is also provision for early work on releasing Iranian frozen assets. 

Short of the option of threatening or using force again, or re-instituting a blockade, which the US has now disowned, this prospect alone seems to be the incentive for Iran to abandon plans for a nuclear weapon – supposedly the principal war aim of the US. 

Iran pledges in the memorandum that it will not acquire nuclear weapons. But this is no achievement – that has been its formal position for many years.

The US opened the negotiations demanding that Iran must surrender all highly enriched nuclear material for treatment abroad. But according to the MoU, the material may now be down-blended in Iran under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The US had also wanted Iran to renounce future nuclear enrichment for several decades. This is now to be discussed in view of ‘Iran’s nuclear needs’ – hardly a pointer towards total abandonment of enrichment.  

Is this a real agreement then?

Has the Trump administration really embraced the UN principle that the use of force must not be used to settle international differences? It seems unlikely: the president threatened to attack Iran again on signing the agreement.

It is possible to conclude that the MoU is more of a face-saving device, with the purpose of allowing the Iranian military to accept a deal. Many US commitments to restoring compliance with key obligations under international law in relation to Iran are words only. If so, there is in fact little agreement and there seems little prospect the gaps in the MoU can be filled over the next 60 days. 

Much is left impossibly vague. This lack of detail is already creating political problems in Washington and among US allies, particularly the $300 billion the MoU allocates ‘for the reconstruction and economic development of Iran’. Where will this money be collected, and from whom? 

Moreover, the MoU relies on the agreement of others not involved in it. Sanctions relief beyond the US requires agreement from the UN Security Council and from the European Union. Frozen Iranian assets are held in many jurisdictions beyond the US. Peace in Lebanon relies on compliance from Israel, when ties appear strained. 

Perhaps most importantly, the MoU requires the IAEA to arrange for the supervision of Iran’s nuclear programme. This is an independent agency loosely within the ambit of the UN – precisely the kind of multilateral institution the Trump administration distrusts. 

Ironically, to extricate itself from its war, the US has been forced back into reliance on international cooperation and the institutions of the international system. And it is being forced to accept, at least nominally, the  principles of the international order it had cast aside. 

After January’s forcible extraction of President Maduro from Venezuela, it may have seemed to the president that force was once again a useful tool. But this memorandum suggests war is every bit as undesirable as the founders of the UN system believed.

Prime minister suggests he will not ‘walk away’ despite Burnham’s comfortable victory in Makerfield byelection

• UK politics – live updates

• How quickly could Burnham become PM?

Keir Starmer has said he will stand in a Labour leadership contest should one be triggered after Andy Burnham’s decisive victory in the Makerfield byelection, adding he will not “walk away”.

He also warned that such a contest would “plunge us into chaos” and that Labour needed to “pull together” to contest the byelection to replace Burnham as the mayor of Greater Manchester.

From public ownership to devolution and the cost of living, the policies of the potential Labour leadership challenger will face intense scrutiny

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield sets up a battle for Downing Street. Allies of the outgoing Greater Manchester mayor want him to be installed as prime minister as quickly and painlessly as possible, while those close to Keir Starmer want the Labour leader to fight on.

If he does become prime minister, Burnham will be expected to deliver on the “change” he promised after his win on Thursday night. But what would that look like, and what policies would his government be likely to pursue?

Thangam Debbonaire and Sarah Pochin argue in Sky News interview at Makerfield byelection count

• UK politics live – latest updates

The Labour peer Thangam Debbonaire has clashed with Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin at the Makerfield byelection count, asking the MP: “You don’t like being on television with brown people, do you Sarah?”

The row erupted during a testy interview on Sky News that included an exchange about the £5m personal gift that Nigel Farage accepted from Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne in the months before he stood as an MP in the 2024 general election. The gift, first revealed by the Guardian, is now under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner, which will examine whether or not it ought to have been declared.

JD Vance’s staff were at an airbase ready to fly to summit in Obbürgen before trip was suddenly cancelled

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Talks due to take place on Friday between the US ⁠and ​Iran in Switzerland to implement a peace deal were cancelled as Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory airstrikes in south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley that killed at least 18 people.

The talks had been due to begin in the Swiss village of Obbürgen two days after the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that opened a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent understanding over Iran’s nuclear programme, while getting oil traffic moving through the strait of Hormuz.

A crypto super PAC that has praised President Donald Trump and previously endorsed an all-Republican slate of candidates has finally found a Democrat it can get behind: New York Rep. Ritchie Torres.

The Fellowship PAC dropped $300,000 on Monday to boost Torres in the final days of his reelection primary campaign, funneling its ad spend through a firm co-founded by Trump’s former top crypto adviser.

The super PAC’s largest funder is Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank helmed by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

Torres is not expected to face serious opposition in the June 23 primary in New York. The sole public poll of the race put him far ahead of his leading opponent, former Democratic National Committee vice chair Michael Blake.

Torres, the Fellowship PAC, and Blake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The spending is another sign of bond between crypto firms and Torres, a member of the key House Committee on Financial Services who has been one of the industry’s most vocal Democratic supporters. Torres was a co-founder of the Congressional Crypto Caucus.

Still, the primary intervention still comes as something of a surprise given that, in the past, the Fellowship PAC only doled out campaign funds on behalf of Republicans. Reporting on its creation, the New York Times described the PAC as “more aligned with the Republican Party and President Trump than Fairshake, which is the dominant, pro-crypto super PAC.”

The PAC signaled support for Trump in a press release announcing its creation in September, praising him for putting “America on the path to become the global crypto capital.” In the months since then, however, the odds that Republicans will control the House after the midterm elections have dimmed.

The Fellowship PAC, which spends on ads rather than giving directly to campaigns, put Torres’s picture on its endorsement page in recent weeks, according to an archive of its website. Other candidates the group has endorsed include Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, R-Texas, in their Senate races.

Big Crypto Bucks for Shoo-in

The Fellowship PAC is not the only crypto campaign organization spending on behalf of Torres. Protect Progress, which is affiliated with the juggernaut crypto super PAC Fairshake, buoyed the Bronx Democrat with nearly $1.4 million in advertising.

The two super PACs are aligned with different factions of the crypto industry. The Fellowship PAC’s chair is the vice president of regulatory affairs for Tether, a massive stablecoin company that is trying to break into the U.S. market after years of scrutiny over its use by money launderers, including terror groups.

Although Tether has not donated directly to the Fellowship PAC, the PAC received $10 million from the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which is the custodian of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury bills on behalf of Tether. Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, stepped down as the head of the banking firm and divested his assets to join the Cabinet.

Related

This Commission That Regulates Crypto Could Be Just One Guy: An Industry Lawyer

The media buy on behalf of Torres was made through Nxum Group, which was co-founded by Bo Hines, a former Republican congressional candidate who served as the executive director of Trump’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets last year. Hines is the CEO of Tether U.S., the American division of the El Salvador-based firm.

Protect Progress and Fairshake, meanwhile, have been funded by the crypto exchange Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Fairshake and its affiliates have spent money on both sides of the aisle, although it was criticized in 2024 for helping tip the Senate in favor of Republicans.

The post Trump-Loving Crypto Super PAC Finally Backs a Democrat: Ritchie Torres appeared first on The Intercept.

When a company decided to shut down an online game’s servers, there wasn’t much the players who had bought that title could do – until a group called Stop Killing Games began lobbying for new consumer protection laws

You can never be sure how long an online video game will last. Developer BioWare shut off sci-fi shooter Anthem’s servers in January, after seven years. Electronic Arts discontinued access to The Sims Mobile the same month. Wildlight Entertainment shuttered its Highguard servers in March, mere months after the game’s release. Activision Blizzard took Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile offline in April. Dozens more games have had their servers shut down in the first six months of 2026, adding to an already long list of video games that are no longer playable.

There is little that players can do when a company decides to stop supporting online play. Communities work hard to keep their favourite games online, sometimes keeping dead games running on private servers, though that may not necessarily be entirely legal. Generally, though, when a game goes offline it is dead and it’s not coming back.

The Braves pitcher has always been different from the average baseball player. He talks to Joseph Palmer about his motivations on and off the field

Spencer Strider made an impression in 2022, his first full season in Major League Baseball: he was runner-up for National League Rookie of the Year. In 2023 he was ever better, leading the majors in wins and strikeouts and earning a spot on the All-MLB first-team.

But what set him apart from many of his peers wasn’t his athletic ability but his life away from baseball. In a sport that is often socially conservative, the Atlanta Braves pitcher was a vegan Bernie Sanders supporter who was just as likely to discuss indie music as his fastball.

Few grill brands command more respect from seasoned pitmasters and backyard cooks alike. Here's what sets Weber apart, and why it keeps earning our recommendation year after year.

Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is now positioned to challenge Prime Minister Keir Starmer for leadership of the governing Labour Party and to seize the top job.

The remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur were battering parts of the southeastern U.S. with heavy rain, sparking flash flooding.

Strong winds and heavy rain batter Slovenia, while France experiences atypical heatwave

Severe thunderstorms swept across the Balkans last week, bringing widespread destruction to parts of the region. The storms developed as unstable hot air lingered over the Adriatic Sea while a cold front plunged south-eastward.

The front began its journey on 10 June in Slovenia, where the Slovenian Environment Agency recorded 65mph gusts at Ljubljana airport. Heavy rain also fell widely across the region with 23mm reported in Kranj.

People in Nabatieh mourn the recent dead in religious ceremony held amid empty streets and shattered buildings

As the procession wound its way through mounds of rubble, the crowd chanted and beat their chests, their lamentations echoed by the dull thud of shelling in the foothills just beyond the city.

“This is the tragedy of Karbala, O Imam Hussein, look. This is the tragedy of Karbala,” the crowd cried in the opening procession of Ashura, in the city of Nabatieh, southern Lebanon.

He lambasted Jimmy Carter during the 1980 hostage crisis; now Trump’s presidency could be similarly blemished

It began with the fate of hostages.

Donald Trump’s first recorded foray into politics was sparked by the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, which saw 52 American diplomats held incommunicado for 444 days.

The negotiations were expected to start as soon as this weekend, but Vice President Vance's trip there was put off and Switzerland said the negotiations have been postponed.

Investigation: The entrepreneur was once the toast of London’s tech scene, a ‘global leader of tomorrow’ who starred on Dragons’ Den and promised untold riches for the startups she championed. But people she worked with in the last decade, from Malta to Switzerland, describe a very different reality

Julie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes. A California blond in a crisp, white shirt, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knee, she listens intently to the young man standing before her. As he talks, she sizes him up. Eventually, she tells him: “I’m going to make you an offer.” It could be a scene from a heist movie, but Meyer is in a BBC studio, shooting a 2009 episode of the TV show Dragons’ Den. A celebrated entrepreneur with a venture capital fund, she is ready to invest in whichever contestants catch her eye. For the viewers, she has some advice: “What is success? A lot of it is self-belief. Continuing on when most rational people would stop.”

This is an online spin-off from the original Dragons’ Den series, so the stakes are a little lower. But for Lex Deak, a 23-year-old with a big idea for a social media website, what happens in this room today could be make or break. He desperately wants to work with Meyer.

Rolls-Royce SMR has secured a multibillion-pound agreement to build three small modular reactors on Sweden's west coast, "marking a major step in the British engineering group's ambition to become a leading supplier of the technology in Europe," reports Euronews. From the report: Following a rigorous selection process that started in 2022, UK engineering giant Rolls-Royce's nuclear division, Rolls-Royce SMR, won the contract to build nuclear reactors for Sweden. As part of the deal, the group, selected by Videberg Kraft as its partner, will deliver three Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) to Sweden's west coast, at the Varo Peninsula. "The Videberg Project will build Sweden's first new nuclear power plant in more than forty years, supporting industries and households in southern Sweden," a press statement from Rolls-Royce said. The partnership with utility Vattenfall and developer Karnfull Next is seen as one of the most advanced opportunities for deployment outside of the UK. [...] The European Commission considers small modular reactors (SMRs) to be a promising low-carbon technology that could help support the bloc's clean energy and energy security goals. In order to remove regulatory barriers, the EU's SMR strategy was adopted in March 2026 to accelerate the development and deployment of the technology across Europe. SMRs are smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, typically generating between 20 and 300 megawatts of electricity. At the upper end of that range, a reactor could produce around 7.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per day -- enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that more than 1,000 small modular reactors could be deployed worldwide by 2050 under a supportive policy scenario, requiring cumulative investment of around $670 billion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

submitted by /u/NervouslyHEHEHEHS
[link] [comments]

It’s an excellent time to stock up on your essential beauty products and support Black businesses with these brands.

Exclusive: Telegram urged to clarify how it detects illegal incitement after attacks were coordinated using app

Telegram is facing questions from Ofcom over how it detects and prevents illegal incitement after a Ukrainian man was found guilty of carrying out arson attacks on a car and property associated with Keir Starmer.

A spokesperson for the regulator said it had contacted the messaging app “to seek further clarification” because the arsonist had been directed on Telegram by a handler linked to Russia.

Soccer – football to many – may be the most played youth sport in the US but it still sits behind the NFL, basketball and baseball in the battle for mainstream attention. Longtime sports writer John Shea of the San Francisco Standard says the current World Cup buzz resembles the fleeting interest generated by the Olympics before Americans return to their sporting staples. That imbalance shapes the experience of players and fans alike. Bernardo Ramallo, who works with non-profit Soccer Without Borders says young soccer players have long endured jibes that the sport is ‘weak’ compared with American football.

Forget the confected World Cup hostility, the US and Australia mirror each other

Progressive Jewish group calls for more focus on the threat from the far right and the recognition of a diversity of views within the community

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Far-right extremism and the conflation of Jewish identity with Israel are the main drivers of antisemitism in Australia, the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) says.

In its submission to the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion, the liberal Jewish group calls for more focus on the “often overlooked” threat from the far right, and recognition of the diversity of views within the Jewish community instead of the “tendency to treat Jews collectively as representatives of Israel”.

Equilibrium with Iran is the best America can do.

How to counter an insidious global threat.

The right time to refinance depends on a few factors, experts say, including your current mortgage loan rate.

HELOC and home equity rates have been on the move lately. Here's where those rates could head next.

Cuban lawmakers Thursday adopted nearly 200 historic free-market reforms aimed at rescuing the communist island from a severe crisis aggravated by a U.S. oil blockade.

At Summer Game Fest, the mechanics of the cozy horror game become more clear -- both in murder and in love.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change. But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month. [...] The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.) Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration's policy. Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today's decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing. The National Science Foundation formally announced the decision, stating: "effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance." The agency added that it "appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data" from the OOI. The NSF also said it would "issue a Dear Colleague Letter to collect input from stakeholders and convene an expert panel to assess observational needs, evaluate available data sources, consider responses ... and help the agency identify a sustainable path for NSF's ocean observing systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

submitted by /u/OutlandishnessLong28
[link] [comments]

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware is finalizing its Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which hovers right around $7 billion. It’s an increase compared to the previous year as two of the state’s largest departments continue to grow. 

The Delaware Senate approved on Thursday a $6.99 billion operating budget for Fiscal Year 2027, which starts July 1 – exceeding a spending goal set by Gov. Matt Meyer earlier this year. 

The final budget proposal written by the General Assembly would increase spending by 6.32% over the current fiscal year. The governor had sought to keep spending growth below 5%, while the state’s independent financial analysts recommended growth of no more than 3.9%.

The ballooning amount of spending has become a major point of contention for some legislators, particularly

Lawmakers also approved $146.2 million for the annual supplemental budget, which is how the state funds one-time expenditures like equipment and technology purchases, pilot programs, and short-term projects.

The final operating budget adds $58.4 million to a previous version of the budget presented earlier this year by Gov. Matt Meyer. Both the supplemental and operating budgets require approval in the House of Representatives, and will likely be heard early next week, as lawmakers look to tie up the legislative year that ends June 30.

Delaware’s operational increases were relatively modest compared to previous years, but increases in education and health spending contributed to some of the largest spikes in this year’s budget. 

Delaware will spend $2.51 billion on public education, a 5.38% increase compared to FY 2026’s operating budget, with $100 million going to increase teachers’ salaries and $26 million allocation toward district operations.

The budget for Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services, the state’s second largest department, will grow by 11.2% in 2027 following a $128 million increase in Medicaid spending. Spikes in Medicaid represent the first year Delaware has to reconcile with federal cuts to the program, as well as rising healthcare costs. 

What’s in the budget?

For Fiscal Year 2027, like other years, health and education spending are the largest budget items for the state. Both of the departments will consume more than 63% of the total operating budget in the coming year. 

Still, the state invested in multiple programs within its other agencies. One of the largest allocations includes pay raises for state employees and teachers, totalling more than $146 million.

Outside of the operating budget, Delaware spent an additional $100 million in its one-time supplemental bill to fund adjustments to its state education funding formula as it tries to reconcile an allocation method that has historically left smaller, poorer districts with inadequate funding.

The supplemental budget would allocate millions of dollars to multiple education initiatives across the state including SAT reform, operational support for Delaware State University, as well as funding for teacher projects. 

This year’s budget also marks a first for a new state agency, which was signed into law last summer. The Office of Inspector General, which is meant to be a government watchdog independent from other agencies, received its first budget appropriation of $1.4 million this year. 

The budget vote

During the Senate hearing, Sen. Trey Paradee (D-Dover), the top Senate lawmaker on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, said this year’s budget bill represents “thousands” of hours of work and said both healthcare and education were some of the key cost drivers.

He also expressed appreciation for the governor’s office and for delivering lawmakers a “really excellent” budget earlier this year. 

During his presentation, Paradee pointed to efforts by the state to save taxpayers money and bring down its overhead as spending continues to outpace revenues. He said the state eliminated 37 different positions that had sat vacant for multiple years and found $5 million in contractual savings.

Still, Senate Republicans pointed to the gap between spending and revenues, saying the state needs to work to lower recurring expenses. 

Sen. Eric Buckson (R-South Dover) pointed to progress made in this year’s budget to close the spending gap, and said lawmakers should continue to reconcile the difference so they don’t have to ask taxpayers for more money every year. 

Paradee agreed, adding that legislators passed “very few bills” with recurring expenses, and that dozens of bills may not pass this year because of their fiscal impacts. 

A spokesperson for Meyer’s office said they want to see the final budget passed in the House of Representatives before commenting on the governor’s position on whether he’d sign it.

In an interview after the hearing, Paradee said of all the budgets he’s worked on in eight years on the powerful Joint Finance Committee he’s “most proud” of this one.

He was optimistic about Delaware’s finances, pointing to its revered corporate franchise, as well as its low tax burden to constituents. But he also said that lawmakers have to continue making “smart investments” to keep the state stable. 

“It’s all very fragile, and, and we need to make sure that good decisions are made in this building,” he said.

The post Education, healthcare costs drive 2027 Delaware budget increases appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 19.

Vice-president says Israeli cabinet members shouldn’t attack the country’s ‘only powerful ally’ left; Iran says it will impose fees on strait of Hormuz – key US politics stories from Thursday 18 June

JD Vance has sharply rebuked Israeli government critics of the US deal with Iran, saying the cabinet members should remember that two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected Israel “have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars”.

The US vice-president, asked about a report that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was fuming over the agreement, told reporters at the White House: “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left ‌in the entire world.”

This blog is now closed.

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

He calls the situation a “win-win” for the US.

Vance is here, and he starts by claiming that Trump’s peace deal with Iran “is already bearing real fruits for the American people”, with 12.5m barrels going through the strait of Hormuz last night and gas prices dropping below $4 today for the first time since the conflict began.

The "Pink Planet," formally known as GJ504b, was discovered in 2013 and is technically not a planet but rather a "planetary-mass companion."

Attack brings to at least 211 number of people killed as Trump administration targets alleged ‘narcoterrorists’

The US military attacked a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, killing three people, as the Trump administration wages a months-long campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.

The latest attack brings the number of people the US military has killed in boat strikes to at least 211 since the Trump administration began targeting people it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.

Carlos Mencia is accused of failing to report $8.7 million in income over a six-year period.

Still using Microsoft Office 2019 for MacOS and iOS? Your files may soon become read-only.

This meal kit service turned me into a confident cook.

Wealth tax criticized by billionaires and Gavin Newsom would levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth over $1bn

A popular proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.

The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor union backing the measure.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 19, No. 1,826.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 19, No. 1,104.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 19, No. 634.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 19, No. 838.

When the U.S.-Iran conflict began, President Trump laid out a litany of aggressive war aims. Here's what the president and his top aides said then — and how their views have changed.

If you're searching for an espresso machine for your dad this Father's Day, here are the best options, tested and reviewed by CNET editors.

Republican Senators Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton have been critical of the 14-point memorandum of understanding signed on Wednesday.

In a sharp rebuke to critics of Trump’s deal with Iran, the vice-president referenced the billions in defence aid Israel recieves from the US

• News: Iran announces plans to bring in maritime fees for strait of Hormuz

• Analysis: Iran peace deal makes clear how far US has been forced to retreat since 2025

US vice-president JD Vance has lashed out at Israeli critics of the Iran deal, saying Donald Trump is Israel’s only ally left in the world, in a sharp rebuke that referenced the billions in defence aid ⁠the country receives from America.

Vance was defending the deal ⁠reached this week to end the war ​with Iran that critics in the US and Israel have slammed for failing to curb Iran’s missile program and providing no clear path to dismantling its nuclear facilities, while constraining Israel in its war with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

️ Updates from the opening round at Shinnecock Hills
️ Preview | Follow us on Instagram | Mail Matt

Good news! “Round 1 of the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills will resume at 9:05 a.m. ET.” So says the official tweet. That’s just over 15 minutes away.

Weather delay in the golf but they’re playing at the Oval. Should be the other way round surely?

⚽️ Kick-off time: 7pm local/9pm EDT/2am BST/11am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Jonathan
⚽️ Jonathan Wilson: From frustration to party time: Mexico ready for lift-off

Lionel Messi began the World Cup with a brilliant hat-trick but concerns over his father’s health threaten to overshadow his participation.

Lionel Messi’s father is undergoing medical treatment for an undisclosed illness and his family asked the media for “humanity” on Thursday amid rumours about Jorge Messi’s health while his son competes at the World Cup. “Jorge is going through a health situation,” the Messi family said in a statement.

The family did not specify the illness that the 68-year-old Jorge Messi is suffering from. “He is currently under medical observation, recovering and progressing favourably within his current condition,” the statement said.

Mexico moved the ball upfield slower than any other team. They could afford to take their time as South Africa offered next to no threat.

South Korea were worthy winners, with the 25-pass buildup to Hwang In-beom’s equaliser the joint-fifth longest passing sequence leading to a goal in the World Cup since records begin in 1966.

Musical stars and retired politicians from less polarised era seeming antidote to cage fights on White House lawn

The Barack Obama presidential center opened in Chicago on Thursday after more than a decade in the making amid a musical fanfare and paeans to democratic principles that evoked a previous age, all while delivering an implied rebuke to Donald Trump.

Featuring appearances by a cast of musical stars and retired politicians from a less polarised era, it was a seemingly perfect antidote to the crass spectacle of cage fights on the White House lawn.

Shark's three-in-one ChillPill personal fan shines because of its three cooling attachments.

• Pulisic has been training individually all week

• US face Australia at 3pm ET in Seattle on Friday

• World Cup newsletter | Daily podcast | Download the app

US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino offered very little clarity on the injury status of playmaker Christian Pulisic on Thursday, casting further doubt on his availability before the Americans’ second World Cup group-stage match against Australia on Friday.

“I think as you know he was training individually all week,” Pochettino told reporters at his pre-match press conference. “Like always, I think tonight or the day before the game we have a meeting with our medical area, we will assess the whole group, and tomorrow we will communicate if we agree on something tonight. He is evolving, he is much better from Friday, we’ll see.”

Adobe is expanding its Firefly AI assistant into Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, where it can automate all sorts of tasks such as organizing clips, renaming assets, adding interview markers, rearranging layers, and finding missing fonts. It's available starting today as part of a public beta. TechCrunch reports: Adobe is slowly transforming Firefly to increasingly resemble Canva, at least when it comes to AI features, loading up the app with AI tools that can generate images, videos and storyboards. The company is now adding a new feature called Elements that can save AI-generated characters, objects and locations for later use. Firefly is also getting a Projects feature that can store existing assets in one place, and share context. This could be useful for teams creating a video series or brand campaigns. Both of these features are currently available in a private beta. The company said users can now describe a brand and its style, or upload existing collateral, in Firefly to have it generate a brand kit, complete with logos, brand identity and color palettes, or even generate product videos from photos. Users can also create storyboards to create videos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Score one for effective e-waste recycling.

Officers arrest man on suspicion of attempted murder as child is treated in hospital for serious injuries

A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a three-year-old boy ended up in a crocodile enclosure, Cambridgeshire police said.

The force said officers were called to Johnsons of Old Hurst zoo in Huntingdonshire at 1.24pm on Thursday over “reports of an incident involving a three-year-old boy, during which he ended up in the crocodile enclosure”.

In a ceremony at the White House, the president paid tribute to retired Marine Corps Maj. James Capers Jr., retired Army Maj. Nicholas Dockery and Marine Col. John W. Ripley, who died in 2008.

Legal team of alleged gunman, 28, reverses position on ‘extreme emotional disturbance’ defense after one day

In a stunning reversal, Luigi Mangione’s legal team said on Thursday they would no longer pursue a psychiatric defense in his upcoming state trial over the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Just one day earlier, Mangione’s lawyers told Judge Gregory Carro they would pursue a defense claiming the 28-year-old was suffering an “extreme emotional disturbance” at the time of Thompson’s killing on 4 December 2024.

Luigi Mangione's legal team says they withdrew a psychiatric defense​​ in his New York state murder trial one day after telling the court they would use it.

Several inches of rain expected in south-eastern US as forecasters expect storm to cause life-threatening flooding

Tropical Storm Arthur was downgraded from a cyclone to a low pressure area along the upper Texas coast as it made landfall and lost wind intensity on Thursday.

Forecasters still expect the storm to cause life-threatening flooding, property damage and disruptions to commerce and travel.

The Office of Legal Counsel opinion released Thursday said states aren't required by law to integrate mentally disabled patients with their peers by providing community or home-based care.

Judge’s order finds officials probably retaliated for Salah Sarsour’s advocacy for Palestinian rights

A federal judge has ordered the release of the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, after finding that immigration officials probably detained him in retaliation against his public advocacy for Palestinian rights, suppressing his first amendment rights in the process.

The US district judge James Patrick Hanlon’s order on Thursday marked a sharp rebuke against Trump officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who had tried to paint Salah Sarsour as a national security threat.

An ad by Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff says his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, revealed information about President Donald Trump and the Epstein files.

The ad said Collins covered for Trump and other powerful men when he voted against releasing the Epstein files, a cache of documents and recordings released by the federal government beginning in December 2025 from investigations of financier and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Collins "even admitted Trump was in the files," the June 17 ad said.

Ossoff’s ad includes a clip of Collins saying: "Yeah, I’m sure he’s in there." 

The Collins audio was leaked in August 2025, when little was known about the files’ contents and speculation was rampant. Collins’ comments were recorded at an Aug. 13, 2025, campaign stop at a Muscogee County GOP meeting on the Tennessee border, and the media outlet Heartland Signal released the full exchange.

The ad gives the impression that Collins is saying Trump is in the files for nefarious reasons. Many powerful political and business people have been linked to files and stepped down or were fired from their jobs.  But the ad omits what Collins said next. Here are his comments in full:

Unidentified speaker: "…the Epstein files, do you think Trump’s in there?" 

Collins: "Yeah, I’m sure he’s in there. Because he was the one telling the FBI about it. He’s the one that kicked the guy out of Mar-a-Lago and then called the FBI. Yeah, yeah, he’s in there." 

As Epstein's crimes became public in 2006, Trump told a South Florida police chief that he was glad Epstein was being investigated and that "everyone" knew of his crimes, the Miami Herald reported that the chief said.

Collins later said in the conversation with at least one other person that he wanted the Epstein files to be made public: "Oh, we need to release them."

Ossoff’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Our ruling

An Ossoff ad says Collins "admitted" Trump was in the Epstein files.

Collins did speculate that Trump was in the files. But the ad omits that Collins said it’s logical Trump would be in there because he had flagged Epstein’s criminal behavior. Without this information, the ad gives the impression that Collins thinks Trump is in the files because of criminal behavior.  

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

The robotaxi company issues a recall on 3,871 vehicles that could make incorrect decisions while driving in highway construction zones.

California's proposed "billionaire tax" has gathered enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, setting up a major fight between labor unions and some of Silicon Valley's richest figures. From the report: The California Billionaire Tax Act, colloquially known as the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time 5% tax on any California resident worth more than $1bn. The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West as a means of funding California's strained healthcare and education programs. The proposal has become one of the state's biggest political flashpoints as it gained momentum throughout the year, with prominent billionaires, such as the Google co-founder Larry Page, making moves to cut ties with the state and Newsom vowing to block it from going to a vote. Although it has gained enough signatures for the ballot, the groups backing the measure have until June 25 to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal with the state. While unions backing the group have framed the proposal as a way of getting the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, many of the state's tech elites have condemned the tax and spent millions attempting to crush it. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent $82m alone on efforts to fight the tax, while joining other Silicon Valley billionaires in declaring he will leave California if it goes through. The Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and Ring founder James Siminoff are among the other tech moguls who have made huge political donations to groups opposing the tax. California has the most billionaires out of any state, many of whom have increased their wealth in recent years amid the AI boom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reports say Texas recruits ill from outbreak, which comes weeks after defense secretary made flu vaccine optional

An influenza outbreak has reportedly sickened more than 150 recruits in training at Lackland air force base in San Antonio, Texas.

The outbreak comes just weeks after the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ended mandatory flu vaccination for the military, citing the need for bodily autonomy for servicemembers.

Dozens of service members at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas have fallen ill with the flu in the weeks since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rescinded the vaccine mandate, sources familiar confirmed to CBS News.

As US lifts its blockade, Tehran says fees to cover cost of managing waterway will come into effect at end of 60-day negotiation period

Iran has announced plans to introduce a system of maritime fees in the strait of Hormuz in two months, after the 60-day period of negotiation that has been triggered by the signing of the memorandum of understanding.

Tehran, claiming a historic victory over the US, said the strait was under its control and a European plan for a naval mission to escort ships though the strait would not be welcome. The US on Thursday lifted its blockade of Iran, and oil tankers began freely moving through the critical channel.

Five years after releasing the Amiga 1000, Commodore was about to launch the Amiga 3000, their first real high-end Amiga. With a 68030 processor, on-board SCSI and a slightly updated graphics chipset, all in a sleek desktop case, the Amiga was truly ready for the era of professional 32-bit computing. But Moore’s law wasn’t the only thing thad had been pressuring Commodore since the release of the Amiga 1000: The desktop metaphor had matured even further, and the competition had been hard at work. IBM had launched OS/2, Windows 3.0 had turned Microsoft’s offering from a proof of concept into something actually usable, and new players had entered the scene – among them NeXTStep, with its polished 3D look.

It was time to bring AmigaOS, too, into the 1990s.

↫ Carl Svensson

It’s interesting – there’s a lot of focus on the first version of the Amiga operating system and the third one, but you don’t hear a lot about AmigaOS 2.x. It turns out this is rather odd, because as Svensson details, this version came with an absolute ton of changes and improvements, from an entirely new widget toolkit to a brand new file system, and so much more. The new widget toolkit and accompanying style guide also ensured that the operating system looked, felt, and behaved consistently.

Remember when we cared about that?

There’s so much more cool features, though, like command history, line editing, universal clipboard support and more just for the CLI, as well as something called Commodities. These were tiny little programs managed from a central location, which didn’t even need a GUI to work. Commodities included by default were things like ClickToFront, a focus-follows-mouse option, and more. Oh and of course, BASIC was replaced by ARexx.

The list just keeps going, and you should really read Svensson’s article.

Even with an open-ended viral prompt, the chatbot "immediately went to the darkest pits of humanity."

June 18, 2026 — Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) is excited to announce a packed program of events for ISC High Performance 2026, June 22-26 in Hamburg, Germany. WHPC is looking forward to connecting with colleagues, collaborators, and community members from around the world next week.

June 22-26, Hamburg, Germany

Where to Find WHPC at ISC 2026

Tuesday (June 23, 2026) is all about community – reconnecting with familiar faces, welcoming new members, and creating spaces where people can learn from and support one another.

• Finding Your People in HPC: A WHPC Community Meet-Up – A relaxed and inclusive space to meet people, share experiences, and discover support networks that extend far beyond the conference itself.
• Tech Talks by Women in HPC – Taking over the Exhibition Opening Reception, WHPC presents a dynamic mix of invited and lightning talks, showcasing the many ways the community collaborates, innovates and grows together.

On Wednesday (June 24, 2026), WHPC celebrates its mission and the people who are shaping the future of the community.

• Celebrating Diversity Day – The WHPC community comes together to celebrate the strength of diversity in HPC, increase the visibility of women and other underrepresented groups, and demonstrate its shared commitment to a more inclusive future.
• Women in HPC Poster Pitch and Networking Reception – Meet the WHPC Rising Stars through a poster series dedicated to women and individuals from underrepresented groups who are students or in the early stages of their HPC careers.
• Super(computing)heroes Birds of a Feather (BoF) – Hear from influential and well-recognized female HPC “superheroes” from academia, research labs, HPC centers, and industry. Join to be inspired, discover relatable role models, and help build a more inclusive and connected HPC community.

WHPC Moderators

This year, the WHPC x ISC partnership is taking an exciting step forward. WHPC is delighted to announce that select volunteers from the community have been working with ISC to help shape some of this year’s most popular sessions, stepping into roles in panel moderation and audience facilitation.

Across the Vendor Showdown, Vendor Roadmaps, Midweek Keynote, Technical Papers and Fishbowl Panel, WHPC volunteers will be part of the sessions that bring energy, challenge ideas, and connect communities. All of this is made possible not only by those stepping into visible roles but also by ISC leadership and the support network that enables it.

Learn more about each event through the ISC 2026 webpages: https://womeninhpc.org/events/isc-2026

Thank You to ISC 2026 Sponsors and Supporters

Sponsors and Supporters power everything WHPC does, helping to connect, support, and elevate people across the global HPC community. WHPC’s work is all about opening doors, building networks, and supporting career growth at every stage.

• WHPC Champion – AWS and AMD
• Community Leaders – DAWN at the University of Cambridge Research Services and Google
• Rising Star – HPE
• Advocate – Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre

Learn more about WHPC sponsorship levels and how to get involved in future events through the 2026 Prospectus.

Thank You to the Volunteer Committee

Last but not certainly not least, thank you to WHPC’s amazing volunteer committee.

It truly takes a village to bring the WHPC program of events to life. Behind every session, meet-up, and initiative is a dedicated group of volunteers working tirelessly to support the community.

Thank you to each and every one of you for your dedication, friendship, and continued support: Ayesha Afzal, Buket Benek Gursoy, Cristin Merritt, Eleanor Broadway, Elsa Gonsiorowski, Sarah Johnston, Karina Pesatova, Valerie Rossi, Vijeta Sharma, Katya Zossimova

Explore the WHPC ISC 2026 Committee here.

About WHPC

Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) was created with the vision of encouraging women to participate in the HPC community by providing fellowships, education, and support to women and the organizations that employ them. Through collaboration and networking, WHPC strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models.

About ISC 2026

ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 – 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for the HPC community, and increasingly for AI and quantum professionals interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

Source: WHPC

The post WHPC Announces Event Program for ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

Building on the Pilot edition of the BSC AI Factory Acceleration Programme, this initiative now expands to give BSC AI Factory startups direct access to the NVIDIA ecosystem, with Pier07 in Barcelona as the physical hub where these teams and startups will collaborate

June 18, 2026 — The BSC AI Factory, the European high-performance AI infrastructure powered by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), today announces a broader initiative with NVIDIA aimed at maximizing the impact of its services for startups, SMEs, and public sector organizations, following the BSC AI Factory’s mission to democratize access to AI tools and HPC across Spain and Europe.

The initiative spans multiple areas of activity and is designed to deliver a more comprehensive, higher-value experience for all the customers of the BSC AI Factory, from advanced technical training to business mentoring and startup acceleration.

A Multi-Dimensional Cooperation Effort in Service of the AI Ecosystem

These are the key areas where this joint activity will start to take shape:

• Bi-directional Startup Referral Channel: An active referral channel from the BSC AI Factory to the NVIDIA Inception program, that supports early-stage AI startups with technological resources, expert access and global visibility. On the other way around, NVIDIA’s extensive network of startups, SMEs, and ISVs will gain access to BSC AI Factory services, including high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, AI development tools, training and expert support, upon eligibility and compliance with the general terms and conditions of the BSC AI Factory, accelerating BSC AIF adoption by the startup community.
• Access to Frontier AI Models: The BSC AI Factory will make high-performance AI models available to startups, SMEs and public sector entities that require them, facilitating the development and deployment of AI-powered solutions across their processes and products.
• Mentoring: BSC AI Factory startups will have the opportunity to work side-by-side with NVIDIA mentors, provided through the Open Hackathon program to accelerate and optimize their AI and HPC workloads, and advance their development roadmap closer to production
• AI Engineering: Direct channel to NVAITC, NVIDIA’s applied research arm, enabling collaborative technical engagement with NVIDIA and BSC AI engineers and scientists on advanced AI projects developed within the BSC AI Factory ecosystem.

As the BSC AI Factory and NVIDIA initiative deepens, so will the value delivered to BSC AI Factory customers.

The BSC AI Factory Acceleration Programme Pilot Initiative: 15 Startups, Two Months of Transformation

The Pilot edition of the BSC AI Factory Acceleration Programme is the foundation on which this broader initiative with NVIDIA has been built. Organized by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with the cooperation of NVIDIA, AWS and SeedRocket, and the support of ACCIÓ, Cuatrecasas and Tech Barcelona, this first edition has shaped the joint working model the two organizations are now scaling across the BSC AI Factory Services.

This Programme is supporting 15 startups over more than two months through an intensive, multidisciplinary programme. As a key partner, NVIDIA will provide Business and Technical Excellence by leveraging expertise from NVIDIA Inception, NVIDIA Technology Center (NVAITC), NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and the Open Hackathon program.

Selected startups will receive after eligibility and compliance with the general terms and conditions of the BSC AI Factory:

• High-level technical training, including access to NVIDIA and BSC AI Factory training resources and certifications.
• Specialized technical support for the development and optimisation of their AI solutions on supercomputing infrastructure plus continuous technical mentorship alongside the 2 months program.
• Business and strategy mentoring, with the support of experts in entrepreneurship, startup scaling and internationalization.

The program will conclude with a DemoDay on July 23 at Pier07, Tech Barcelona, where participating startups will showcase their progress and projects to investors, corporations, media and key actors from the Catalan, Spanish and European tech ecosystem.

Cristian Canton, BSC Associate Director, commented: “Europe’s AI future depends on equipping startups, SMEs and public bodies with the infrastructure, talent, and support networks they need to compete at a global level. This initiative with NVIDIA, AWS and SeedRocket means combining world-class supercomputing capabilities with one of the most powerful ecosystems in the industry and placing that combination at the service of the innovators building the next generation of AI solutions in Europe. ”

Howard Wright, NVIDIA Senior Startups VP, said: “Startups are critical to turning AI breakthroughs into real-world impact,” said Howard Wright, vice president of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. “Through our collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the BSC AI Factory, we’re helping give Europe’s startups access to the AI expertise, technical resources and high-performance computing infrastructure they need to accelerate innovation, scale their solutions and strengthen the region’s AI ecosystem.”

About BSC AI Factory

The BSC AI Factory is Spain’s high-performance artificial intelligence platform, selected and co-funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and powered by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS). Conceived as a one-stop-shop for access to AI in Spain and Europe, the BSC AI Factory provides startups, SMEs, researchers and public sector organisations with the supercomputing infrastructure, AI models, training services and expert support needed to develop, scale and deploy artificial intelligence solutions in a sovereign, ethical and competitive way.

The BSC AI Factory is headquartered at Pier07, Tech Barcelona, the epicenter of Barcelona’s technology and innovation ecosystem, and operates in close collaboration with the Catalan, Spanish and European academic, institutional and business communities.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC AI Factory and NVIDIA Collaborate to Accelerate AI Adoption for Startups appeared first on HPCwire.

Labour’s Greater Manchester mayor predicted to beat Reform but Keir Starmer is unlikely to easily step aside

• Makerfield byelection – latest updates

Polls have closed in Makerfield, Aberdeen South, and Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, with the result in the north-west of England constituency byelection poised to decide the future of UK politics.

The population of Makerfield, a constituency sitting just outside Wigan, has found itself at the centre of the British political world in recent weeks after Andy Burnham quit as mayor of Greater Manchester to contest the seat that he hoped would lead him not only to Westminster, but to the front door of 10 Downing Street.

Midjourney is expanding beyond AI image generation with plans for a medical-imaging business built around a water-based, full-body ultrasound scanner that uses hundreds of thousands of sensors and AI to reconstruct MRI-like images. "As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task," Midjourney explained in the announcement. "By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or 'image' which basically lets us figure out what's in there." The company hopes to open a San Francisco scanning "spa" in late 2027, with 50,000 or more deployed around the world by 2031. The Register reports: It's not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute. "We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs," the company added. According to a "technical" video included in the announcement, there's a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney's dunk tank up to a thousand times a second. [...] Midjourney said that it's planning to open its first ultrasound scanner spa at the end of 2027, but it has another hurdle to jump: FDA approval. Beyond improving its tech so that the second-generation scanner is ready for its 2027 spa date, "regulation is the next limit," the company said. "Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval," Midjourney explained. "We're starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps -- and we'll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities." Midjourney also fails to mention how it will store and secure those scans, whether it will use said scans to train its body composition-detection algorithms, and how it's ensuring those algorithms get things right that it usually take a human a few years of education and training to learn.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Labour mayor giving advisory roles to ex-Bank of England economist and others seen as attempt to reassure markets

• Makerfield byelection – latest updates

Three economic heavyweights have been brought in to advise Andy Burnham as he attempts to reassure the markets before his possible return to parliament on Friday and challenge to Keir Starmer.

Burnham is understood to be getting advice from Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, as well as Richard Hughes, a former chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Jim O’Neill, a crossbench peer and former Treasury minister who worked on George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”.

Interior department insists water at Washington landmark is ‘crystal clear’ as witnesses report murky green pool

US federal government workers continue to take on the green hue that has swept across Washington’s reflecting pool, an increasingly fiendish battle the Trump administration compared to its war with Iran.

After Donald Trump ordered a $14.2m refurbishment to turn the monument “American Flag blue” in time for the country’s 250th birthday celebrations, the administration encountered a formidable foe: algae.

Discovery isn’t slated to go online until 2028. But the Department of Energy is already lining up applications to run on the exascale machine, which will be the successor to Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a key asset of the Genesis Mission and its goal to accelerate science and engineering through AI.

The DOE announced Discovery and another supercomputer called Lux last October, just before the Genesis Mission was unveiled by the White House. Discovery will be based on HPE Cray’s new GX5000 platform and will be powered by AMD’s new “Venice” EPYC CPUs and upcoming AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs. The water-cooled system will utilize the HPE Slingshot interconnect, the Cray K3000 storage system, and utilize the new Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) parallel file system as well as Lustre.

Development of the system is ongoing, but scientists are already champing at the bit to get access to the new super. Today, the DOE announced the first nine projects that will be developed through the Discovery Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR), a program at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).

“Our goal is to develop a suite of leadership-class computing applications that are ready to run science campaigns on day one,” Reuben Budiardja, CAAR programming lead and group leader for ORNL’s Advanced Computing for Nuclear, Particle, and Astrophysics Group, said in a press release. “We want to demonstrate Discovery’s full potential from the very moment it becomes available to users.”

Here are the first nine applications that will be running on Discovery as part of the CAAR project, as described by ORNL and the Discovery CARR team:

GlennHT

Large eddy simulations (LES) are being used to evaluate flows in gas turbine engines and to capture the effects of turbulence, secondary flows, and film cooling flows on performance and component temperatures. They offer better accuracy than standard Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulation, but it’s still rather computationally expensive.

This program, which is being led by Kenji Miki of NASA, is targeted at enabling NASA’s GlennHT solver to run on Discovery and take advantage of its AMD GPUs, thereby enabling NASA to “perform routine LES for turbomachinery at unprecedented scale and complexity.”

GIZMO

We know some things about dark matter, but many aspects of dark matter remain a mystery. The purpose of GIZMO, which is being led by Philip Hopkins of the California Institute of Technology, is to model cosmological physics across the full range of elements, from the cosmic web down to supermassive black holes.

Specifically, the project will utilize the massive computational power of Discovery to build a larger, more detailed simulations with richer physics, as well as testing GIZMO’s ability to link small, fast effects, like jets and accretion flows, to large cosmic structures.

QMCPACK

Gaining better understanding of how quantum materials behave, including magnetism and conductivity, could enable the creation of new technologies, such as new materials and quantum computing. However, current modeling and simulation is limited by the amount of computational power available to it.

The goal with QMCPACK, with is being led by principal investigator Paul Kent of ORNL, is to unleash the power of Discovery to run more accurate, larger, and faster simulations. The hope is that Discovery will also allow QMCPACK to test new ideas, benchmark other methods, and deliver results that can accelerate the development of new technologies such as quantum computing and new materials formulations with fewer critical elements.

QUDA_LAPH

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the fundamental theory of the strong force that binds quarks to form subatomic particles. The theory is needed to explain phenomena, including how protons and neutrons interact.

Scientists attempting to model QCD interactions have been limited in part because of the huge computing power required to calculate quantum masses with any degree of accuracy. However, with QUDA_LAPH, which is headed by Principal Investigator Andre Walker-Loud of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the hope is that Discover will enable scientist to run larger simulations with far fewer approximations.

ALF

Discover will also assist with the Active Learning Framework (ALF), a project that helps scientists run atomistic simulations, which is useful in a variety of fields. Getting accurate simulations requires precise calculation of total energy and atomic forces. One useful technique for atomistic simulations is called machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs), which bridges classical force fields and quantum mechanical (QM) methods. However MLIPs requires large, high-quality QM training datasets.

The hope with this project, which is overseen by Richard Messerly of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is that Discover will speed up ALF’s entire workflow, including selecting data, running QM calculations, and training models, enabling scientists to build MLIPs faster using smaller, more manageable datasets.

S3D-Regent

Next-generation flex-fuel gas turbines could help with the energy crunch, but the amount of nitrogen oxides pollutants they generate is not well understood. The goal with S3D-Regent is to build a better model to simulate the turbulent flame mixing and complex chemistry that takes place inside the turbine.

Specifically, this project, which is being led by Jacqueline Chen of Sandia National Laboratories, will utilize the massive computational power of Discovery to run direct numerical simulations at both the large-scale turbulence and small-scale instabilities, thereby capturing extreme turbulence and detailed chemistry, leading to cleaner, safer, and more efficient turbines.

GENESIS

The advent of open-fan engines holds the possibility of reducing fuel consumption for planes by 20%. However, detailed simulations that examine airflow around the engine and the entire aircraft are so demanding that no current supercomputers can run them.

General Electric is seeking to run such a simulation on Discovery. The project, which is led by Principal Investigator Eduardo Jourdan de Araujo Jorge Filho of GE Aerospace Research, will integrate machine learning and AI models with a state-of-the-art LES solver. The goal is to track trillions of variables over billions of time steps to capture the full complexity of turbulence, potentially paving the way for new planes based on open-fan engines.

PIConGPU

Fusion energy holds the potential to provide nearly unlimited amounts of clean energy, but there remain major technical obstacles along the way. One of those obstacles is figuring out what is the optimal design for fusion reactors, including materials and geometries for advanced nanostructured targets, one promising technique for laser-driven fusion reactors.

The goal with PIConGPU project–which is headed up by Principal Investigator Sunita Chandrasekaran of the University of Delaware and also includes Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf research laboratory in Dresden, Germany–is to use the unprecedented horsepower of Discovery, along with AI optimizations, to perform high-fidelity simulations to identify the most effective target designs faster and with fewer simulations.

SPARC

Converting methane into methanol is a longstanding goal in the energy industry, but serious chemical engineering barriers exist that have thus far prevented a path from being discovered. The challenge is that scientist don’t fully understand the exact copper-oxygen structure inside the copper-zeolite catalysts that facilitate the carbon-hydrogen bond activation. Experimental results don’t aling with density functional theory (DFT) calculations.

The goal with SPARC, which is headed by Principal Investigator Phanish Suryanarayana of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is to run many-body random phase approximation calculations, which are more accurate than typical DFT approaches, thereby delivering more reliable benchmark reaction energies and activation barriers and pointing the way to truly stable and catalytically active sites.

The post Genesis Application: Here Are the First Nine Programs Slated for ORNL’s New Discovery Supercomputer appeared first on HPCwire.

More than 500 guests gathered at the Obama Presidential Center along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the city that launched Barack Obama’s trajectory to the White House as the country’s first Black president.

Pennrose and JPMorganChase help neighborhoods – and residents – thrive.

Finding an affordable place to live continues to be a challenge for many as widespread housing shortages persist across the U.S. Rising home prices and high interest rates have made homeownership inaccessible for a large portion of the population. Meanwhile, as rental demand increases, the number of renters facing affordability challenges is also on the rise.

The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025 by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reveals that cost burdens for renters reached another record high in 2023. Similarly, the JPMorganChase Institute reports that renter affordability is declining and forcing people to devote more of their take-home pay to housing costs. There is a growing need for affordable housing across the U.S., and that rings true here in Wilmington.

To close that gap, it’s essential that all Wilmington residents share in its growth with housing options that accommodate a range of needs and budgets. For the Pennrose real estate firm, this meant delivering a concrete solution to the local community, resulting in housing for individuals and families who otherwise might not have been able to live in the area. 

Reinvesting in Wilmington’s Riverside 

In Wilmington, the Riverside redevelopment initiative is focused on neighborhood stability at a scale that can be felt across generations – bringing housing, education and community resources together so families can remain rooted and move forward. Imani Village, developed by Pennrose in partnership with the Wilmington Housing Authority and nonprofit community organization REACH Riverside and constructed with support from JPMorganChase, is part of this broader effort, which is expected to create more than 600 high-quality, mixed-income homes while also enhancing and expanding EastSide Charter School and Kingswood Community Center to help establish a “cradle to college/career readiness education pipeline.” 

By tying new housing to strengthened local institutions, the redevelopment aims to reduce the pressure that forces families to relocate and instead keep children closer to school, neighbors closer to one another and residents connected to the services that help them thrive. In practical terms, Imani Village represents not just additional homes, but a commitment to building a neighborhood where opportunity is easier to access and easier to keep. 

“We’re proud of the far-reaching impact this project will have. It reflects Pennrose’s mission to uplift our communities and expand the supply of high-quality, affordable homes,” said Brett Macleod, Community Development Banking, J.P. Morgan. “Every additional housing unit matters – and increasing the number that are affordable is critical.”

A broader commitment to Wilmington’s future

While Imani Village is foundational, the vibrancy of a community depends on much more. In Delaware, the firm provides banking services to 215,000 customers and works across sectors to expand economic opportunity. Over the last five years, JPMorganChase has invested more than $25 million in local nonprofit organizations, supported 25,000 small business clients and delivered financial health education to thousands of residents to broaden access to banking, financial health resources, homeownership and other wealth-building tools.

“As we work with local stakeholders to expand housing options, JPMorganChase’s goal is to create inclusive economic opportunity for all,” said Don Mell, Location Management, Americas East Region Lead and member of the Delaware & Philadelphia Market Leadership Team at JPMorganChase. “When our communities thrive, we all thrive.”

Learn more about affordable housing and community development at jpmorgan.com/commercial-real-estate.

The post From blueprint to breakthrough: Tackling affordable housing in Wilmington  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Musicians and production team understood to be facing same punishment after livestream of patriotic song

The Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi and eight members of a production team, including musicians, have been reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for performing in a concert livestreamed on Ahmadi’s YouTube channel in 2024.

According to court documents, the criminal court of Qom province sentenced the artists to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on engaging in artistic activities on charges that include offending public decency through the production and publication of “vulgar and immoral content” online.

June 18, 2026 — At VivaTech, AI Factory France (AI2F), led by GENCI, announced the launch of a program—unprecedented in Europe—to accelerate AI innovation in France in partnership with NVIDIA. This initiative, initially announced during the Adopt AI Summit in Paris in November 2025, is now entering an operational phase by providing startups and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) with streamlined access to cutting-edge computing infrastructure and specialized AI services to accelerate their development and readiness for market entry.

The program bridges NVIDIA’s global innovation ecosystem with France’s national and European AI resources. NVIDIA Inception members conducting open research with R&D based in Europe can now freely leverage French and European NVIDIA AI supercomputers alongside a comprehensive suite of services including data and software services, training programs, expert support and co-development opportunities to accelerate the development, deployment, and adoption of artificial intelligence across a diversity of sectors.

Early access to this program has already benefited several startups including Pleias, Nebula and Ryax Technologies to accelerate their roadmap. “What makes this program meaningful for a startup like Pleias is that it goes well beyond compute. The combination of infrastructure, tools, engineering environments, and the direct support of NVIDIA’s solution architects is what created the foundation for transforming a compute grant on Jean Zay into Nemotron-Personas-France and Nemotron-Personas-Belgium. For European startups building open AI Software infrastructure, that kind of end- to-end support is the difference between access and acceleration, ” said Anastasia Stasenko, Pleias CEO.

This pioneering collaboration underscores France’s leadership and driving role in shaping the European AI Continent. This announcement will be followed swiftly by another European AI Factory’s enrollment in the program under the same model, marking its first European-scale expansion. “Building on our long-standing partnership with NVIDIA and the many successes we have supported across our startup and SME community, this joint program will nurture our ecosystem and accelerate the momentum towards broader AI-driven innovation and transformation.” Cédric Auliac, AI Program Manager at GENCI and Coordinator of AI Factory France.

“France has a strong foundation for the next wave of AI innovation — world-class research, ambitious startups and SMEs, and a growing open ecosystem,” said Howard Wright, vice president of Startup Ecosystem at NVIDIA. “Through this collaboration with GENCI and AI Factory France, NVIDIA Inception is helping connect entrepreneurs with the accelerated computing infrastructure, technical expertise and startup support they need to move faster from experimentation to deployment and bring real-world AI innovation to market across France and Europe.”

About AI Factory France (AI2F)

AI Factory France is a European-scale platform co-funded by the French government and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. It sets a one stop shop providing public and private actors with the computing resources and related services (training, mentoring, technical support) they need to accelerate their research on AI development and deployment. Led by GENCI, it brings together a consortium of 16 prestigious partners including large research organizations (Inria, CNRS, CEA, AMIAD), French Universities and innovation partners, fostering AI adoption among 12 verticals including Health, Materials Science, Robotics, Defense & Cybersecurity, Finance, Earth Science or Aerospace.

Source: GENCI

The post NVIDIA and GENCI Expand Access to AI Compute Through AI Factory France appeared first on HPCwire.

The dating app company Match Group asked 1,000 singles about AI and dating. Some things are fine. Some are deal-breakers.

The New York Knicks went up New York City's famous Canyon of Heroes for a massive ticker-tape parade celebrating the 2026 NBA champions.

The Obama Presidential Center's grand opening ceremony featured a lineup of tributes from his family and closest colleagues, and musical performances by Bruce Springsteen, The Roots and more.

US president says he encourages Middle East countries to ‘maintain commitment to allowing our negotiations to beautifully unfold’

• Reaction: Donald Trump’s Iran deal met with anger, relief and incredulity

• Analysis: Trump’s Iran deal is result of unrealistic ambitions for an untenable war

Donald Trump had urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “stop blowing up buildings” during a phone call about Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper cited sources who overheard the phone conversation between the two leaders, whose relationship has grown increasingly hostile as the war raged on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As artificial intelligence companies reshape the economy and race toward trillion-dollar valuations, Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a sweeping transfer of wealth and power from the industry to the American public. The legislation, shown first to The Associated Press, would create a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. Sanders estimates that the tax would create a nearly $7 trillion fund that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing. [...] The 50% tax would apply to AI companies that reach $200 million in annual AI sales. Any new AI company that reaches that benchmark would also be subject to the tax. It would create a sovereign wealth fund -- similar to those used by countries around the world and some U.S. states -- that Sanders estimates would be worth around $7 trillion. Unlike a traditional tax, the proposal would require companies to transfer stock rather than cash, effectively making the American public a major shareholder in the country's largest AI firms. A seven-person independent commission -- nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate -- would manage the fund and use its voting shares "to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them," the bill summary says. Sanders proposes that a 5% annual dividend from the fund would provide direct payments of more than $1,000 to every American. If companies grow, the gains would be used for public goods such as education, housing and health care. Sanders argues taxpayers would not bear the losses if AI company valuations decline. "We're not going to lose any money, even if there is a bust in the bubble," Sanders said. The commission would be directed to "to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them," according to the summary. "The benefits cannot simply go to the handful of wealthy corporations. They will be shared by the American people," the independent Vermont senator said in an interview Wednesday. "The public has got to have a significant seat at the table to make sure that terrible things do not happen to ordinary people, and that in fact, AI benefits ordinary people, not hurts them," Sanders said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Mauricio Pochettino’s passionate half-time speech last October, the USA shaped up and started on the path to a rematch against the Australians in Seattle

Haji Wright’s finish was cool, but Mauricio Pochettino’s reaction was cooler. It was the 35th minute of the US men’s national team’s friendly against Australia last October, and the Coventry City striker had just equalized after Jordan Bos put the Socceroos up earlier in the half. Wright celebrated by walking calmly away, while his coach had a blank expression on the sideline.

Pochettino’s mind may have been on Australia’s aggressive approach, including one challenge that forced Christian Pulisic out of the match midway through the first half. Or he may have been focused on his team’s reaction.

Drivers feel some relief but prices still a dollar more per gallon overall since before US-Israel attack on Iran

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

The average price of US gasoline fell to just under $4 a gallon on Thursday for the first time since March, following the announcement of a preliminary agreement between the US and Iran to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The development has provided some relief to drivers who have seen soaring costs amid Washington’s war with Iran. But filling up still remains more expensive than it was before the conflict began.

MP for Tewkesbury understood to have been arrested by Gloucestershire police on Wednesday night

A Liberal Democrat MP has had the whip and membership of the party suspended after he became the subject of a police investigation.

Cameron Thomas, the MP for Tewkesbury, was arrested by Gloucestershire police on Wednesday night, it is understood.

If you're F1-curious, this is a great chance to start your engines.

Not every savings account is favorable in today's high-rate climate. Here's one you should specifically avoid now.

Kenyan McDuffie said he called Janeese Lewis George "to congratulate her on her victory and wish her success as she prepares for the general election."

Move to dismantle $368m sea observatory initiative faced opposition from experts and lawmakers

The Donald Trump administration has reversed its decision to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system following an outcry from lawmakers and ocean experts.

On Thursday, the National Science Foundation announced that it would halt plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, stating: “effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance”.

Hundreds of thousands of fans packed lower Manhattan after team’s historic NBA championship win

Former first lady Michelle Obama delivered a loving and heartfelt tribute to her husband at the Obama Presidential Center's grand opening ceremony in Chicago Thursday.

City councillor who ran on expanding childcare, education and housing slated for office after opponent concedes

Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is slated to be the next mayor of Washington DC after her opponent conceded on Thursday.

Lewis George, a city council member, ran on a platform of expanding childcare, education and housing, and revoking the district’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Apple is allowing iPhone developers in Brazil to distribute apps through authorized alternative marketplaces and use third-party payment systems following action by the country's competition regulator. "In other words, developers in Brazil will be able to circumvent the App Store and Apple's in-app purchase system, but there are still fees," reports MacRumors. Apple will collect commissions ranging from 5% on externally distributed apps to as much as 26% for some App Store transactions using its payment system. From the report: Alternative app marketplaces will have to be authorized by Apple and will need to meet ongoing requirements. For apps that are still distributed through the App Store, developers will be able to include an alternative payment processing method in their app and/or link users to a website to complete a transaction. These changes are available on iOS 26.5 and later, and they are the result of regulatory action from Brazil's competition regulator. Apple has added a new page on its website with additional details for developers in Brazil. Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18. Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey will return to Congress on June 30, his spokesperson said, after being away since March in an unexplained absence that has confounded Capitol Hill.

Number of people infected now tops 1,000 though health officials say the global risk remains low

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will tap $107m in emergency funding for Ebola outbreak response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, officials said on Thursday.

The continued Ebola outbreak in the DRC comes as Canada, Mexico and the US jointly host the Fifa World Cup, attracting visitors from around the world. The officials said the outbreak, now the third largest on record, required “strong immediate support”, but that the global risk remained low.

The Fed held rates steady again this week, but a few borrowing options are still cheaper than you may expect.

Supermodel ‘completely abdicated’ her trustee responsibilities at Fashion for Relief, Charity Commission tells hearing

Naomi Campbell showed herself to be unfit to run a charity after the supermodel “completely abdicated” her responsibilities as a trustee of her now defunct Fashion for Relief project, according to the charity watchdog.

The Charity Commission told a tribunal that Campbell, who is trying to overturn a five-year ban on running a charity, was “highly culpable” for mismanagement and misuse of funds at Fashion for Relief, the former charity she founded in 2015.

The tech was developed at University of California, Berkeley, and it's currently still in the testing phase.

The memorandum of understanding requires numerous steps by Washington including lifting sanctions and freeing billions in frozen assets, while Iran was required only to open the Strait of Hormuz.

BBC says vetting process ‘clearly failed’ after Guardian reveals presenter’s past comments about women

Warning: this article contains sexually explicit, offensive language

The BBC has pulled a documentary series with its controversial presenter Ashley Cain after revelations over his history of abusive and misogynistic comments about women.

In a statement late on Thursday, the BBC said its vetting requirements had “clearly failed” in the case of Cain, who was lauded by executives at the corporation for his ability to connect with young men. It added the BBC had “no plans” to broadcast a new series of Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone, a BBC programme that was filmed earlier this year at various locations across the world.

• York Revolution were celebrating Pride Night

• MLB players have also pushed back on Pride

A professional baseball team has chosen to forfeit a game after some of its players refused to participate in the club’s Pride Night.

York Revolution had arranged for players to wear uniforms with rainbow sleeves during their game against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs on Thursday as part of the team’s 11th annual Pride Night. However, the Revolution said several players had refused to wear the jerseys and the club cancelled the game. The team instead made the night “a free and fun celebration of recognition and inclusion”.

Daryl McLune was 16 when he was held for 23 hours on suspicion of attempting to murder his mother after she tried to take her own life

A teenager who was wrongly arrested for the attempted murder of his mother minutes after she had tried to kill herself has won a race discrimination claim against the Metropolitan police.

A jury found that the Met discriminated against Daryl McLune, who was 16 at the time, because he was black.

US defence secretary addresses allies in latest attempt to get Europe to raise military budgets

Pete Hegseth has announced a review of the US military presence across Europe, in a combative address to Nato allies where he threatened to cut force numbers in countries spending the least on defence.

The US defence secretary, speaking at a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels, accused some countries of “free riding” and others of being shameful for not allowing their airbases to be used by US jets bombing Iran in the spring.

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18, 2026 — Architect Labs, a foundational lab to accelerate custom silicon development, emerged from stealth today with $24 million in seed funding. The round was led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from TQ Ventures, Race Capital, Together Fund, and key figures in modern computing and AI, including Srinivas Narayanan, Lukasz Kaiser, Aravind Srinivas, Kunle Olukotun, Trevor Blackwell, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, Shaad Khan and other executives from NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, and more. Kindred founder and managing partner Steve Jang joined Architect Labs’ board.

Architect Labs was founded by Ebrahim Hussain and Aaditya Subedi (pictured left to right).

The World Needs More Chip Designs Than Can Be Produced Today

The rapid growth of AI has fundamentally changed the economics of hardware infrastructure. Computing has shifted from a basic GPU-CPU-memory configuration into massive, scalable, integrated environments built around custom silicon. General-purpose hardware can no longer keep up with AI’s complex demands for specialized compute, advanced networking, and high-speed connections. This trend isn’t just limited to datacenters; it’s expanding into robotics, autonomous systems, spatial computing, defense, personal devices, and wearables.

Yet designing a chip remains one of the most gated efforts in technology: years of development, hundreds of millions in investment, and a shrinking pool of experts concentrated in a few companies.

Architect Labs is building the AI system to design custom chips and full-stack silicon solutions for organizations pushing beyond the limits of off-the-shelf hardware. Architect Labs partners with companies, AI labs, and nations to turn demanding workloads into purpose-built chips, dramatically accelerating the chip development timelines.

Two decades ago, the fabless model let companies design chips without owning a fab. TSMC made world-class manufacturing available to anyone with a chip design. Architect Labs will do the same for design itself: make world-class chip design available to anyone with a workload. The company calls this the designless semiconductor industry, a world where organizations no longer have to become chip companies, make decade-long bets on an architecture, or carry the risk of a failed tape-out just to get the silicon their workload demands.

“AI models have advanced dramatically across nearly every field, yet chip development cycles remain equally slow and painful,” said Ebrahim Hussain, co-founder of Architect Labs. “Unlocking AI-first semiconductor design requires a first-principles rethink of the entire design process, not forcing AI agents into workflows that were never built for them.”

Closing the Loop Between Hardware and AI

Over time, the company plans to extend its partnership and the capabilities of its AI system across the full computing stack, from silicon to co-designing compilers, runtimes, system software, and eventually co-optimizing the AI models themselves. When chip design moves closer to the pace of software, models, architectures, and silicon can be truly co-optimized together. Hardware stops being a constraint that AI must work around and becomes part of the iteration loop itself: a tightening flywheel that accelerates the industry’s path to superintelligence.

“We are just now entering into an era of custom chips for various systems and workload types. To achieve this ideal diversity of AI infrastructure, research labs, software platforms, robotics makers, and cloud operators all need to be able to iterate on novel chip hardware at the same pace and creativity as model development,” said Steve Jang, founder of Kindred Ventures. “Using AI for chip co-design, Architect Labs proposes to deliver on this vision of ultra-low latency, energy-efficient, and affordable intelligence at scale.”

This shift expands access to custom silicon far beyond a small set of companies, enabling more organizations to build specialized hardware infrastructure superior in economics, performance, and power efficiency.

The Team

Architect Labs was founded by Ebrahim Hussain and Aaditya Subedi. Hussain skipped high school to enroll in college at 15 and went to work on custom chips at Apple and Tesla. Subedi was an AI researcher at Harvard, working on code verification using AI. The two met at Stanford, where their research focused on building AI systems for chip design and verification. Noticing the gap between the rate of AI progress and underlying hardware, they dropped out of school to start Architect Labs.

The founders have assembled a team of frontier AI researchers, former professors, chip designers, and systems engineers. The team has collectively taped out 80+ production chips, ran $10B+ product lines at Intel’s Data Center Division, taped out one of the first neuromorphic chips at Intel’s AI lab, been core contributors to Meta’s custom silicon, led ML research teams at Anthropic, DeepMind, and xAI, and contributed to core AI research at nearly every frontier lab.

Architect Labs will use the funding to scale its compute infrastructure, deepen its AI research, and co-design production silicon with early industry partners.

About Architect Labs

Architect Labs is building an AI system that designs and verifies chips end-to-end, enabling partners to transform demanding workloads into production-ready silicon while dramatically accelerating development timelines. By making custom silicon more accessible, Architect Labs aims to enable a future where every important workload can run and co-evolve alongside the hardware purpose-built for it. Beginning with chip design and expanding across the broader compute stack, the company is reimagining how computing systems are built for the age of superintelligence. Architect Labs was founded by Ebrahim Hussain and Aaditya Subedi and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Source: Architect Labs

The post Architect Labs Raises $24M Seed to Democratize Custom Chip Design appeared first on HPCwire.

The memorandum of understanding signed in Versailles lays bare US failure and the pointlessness of this illegal war

Donald Trump’s wishful thinking, as much as Benjamin Netanyahu’s persuasion, was responsible for their illegal war on Iran. The US president wanted regime change, the eradication of Tehran’s ballistic missiles programme, to prevent it from ever building a nuclear bomb, and demilitarisation of its proxies. He announced that he would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.

The memorandum of understanding with Iran which Mr Trump signed on Wednesday – in Versailles; perhaps not the best augury of lasting diplomatic achievement – was evidence that even he can only deny reality for so long. Given the human and broader costs of the war, a deal to end it has been long overdue. But the text exposes the sheer pointlessness of this conflict. Continuing the war might have led to “worldwide depression”, the US president said, though his concern is for the impact on the pockets of his voters rather than the poorest and hungriest globally. A disgruntled base and the looming midterms have forced him into compromises loathed by Republican hawks. Mike Pence, his former vice‑president, said that it “smacks of appeasement”.

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

Interest rates on CDs will stay high after this week's Fed meeting. Here's how to find the highest ones right now.

Media-shy financier Stephen Feinberg has quietly amassed extraordinary influence over US military spending

The only available video over the last 15 months of the official who really wields power in Donald Trump’s Pentagon is a cartoon animation. Released in May on X by the US government, it shows a silver haired figure in a grey suit lighting up a cigar and sitting at a massive wooden desk with a nameplate: DEPSECWAR FEINBERG.

Stephen Feinberg, the 66-year-old billionaire founder of the private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, has served as the deputy secretary of defense since March 2025. His boss, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, makes frequent appearances working out with troops or insulting reporters at press conferences, and posts often on social media. But Feinberg does not show his face. He has been obsessively media shy for decades, and is so reclusive that since his confirmation hearing he has not testified to a single committee on Capitol Hill, has held no press conferences and given no interviews. His press spokesperson left the government months into his tenure and has not been replaced.

Former negotiator believes in an unstable world, it is ‘perfectly possible’ the UK can rejoin the EU with old opt-outs

• UK could keep special pre-Brexit terms if it rejoined EU, Michel Barnier says

A couple of years ago, Michel Barnier spent a weekend with Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. It was not some ghoulish Brexit spin-off of The Traitors, but the result of the former EU negotiator’s wife, Isabelle, being a close friend of Johnson’s French cousin, Anne du Boucheron, the owner of Château de la Baronnière, a 19th-century estate in Mauges-sur-Loire, in western France.

“We spent a weekend together in a French castle. Very friendly. Long promenades in the forest,” Barnier recalls of Johnson senior, with whom he discussed the former prime minister’s motivation to back Brexit. “It was interesting. Boris was much more European at the beginning. Even if he was critical. I don’t see it as a motivation but it is, perhaps, a method or attitude: to be pragmatic in some way. Cynical. Cynical to get power.”

Exclusive: Former chief Brexit negotiator says staying out of euro and Schengen area would be ‘perfectly possible’

• ‘Cynical to get power’: Michel Barnier on Boris Johnson, Brexit and the EU’s future

Michel Barnier has said Britain could regain its special terms if it rejoined the EU and claimed it was becoming clearer every day to the British people that they would be stronger in Europe.

In an interview before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum next week, the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator said he could not see any obstacle to the UK keeping the pound and remaining outside the passport-free Schengen travel area should the country rejoin.

Sunscreen protects you from UV rays, but the message is getting lost in translation on social media.

Google has begun rolling out Android 17, the June Pixel Feature Drop, and Wear OS 7 simultaneously across supported Pixel phones and watches. Highlights include floating app bubbles, improved foldable multitasking and gaming, tighter location and contact permissions, stronger lost-device protections, new Pixel AI tools, and up to 10% better Pixel Watch battery life. PhoneArena reports: Pixel owners are the clear winners, since everything here reaches Pixel first and a lot of it goes back to the Pixel 6. Fold owners get the most toys, with the Bubble Bar and foldable gaming mode built for the big screen. Watch wearers get the quietly important upgrade. Better battery and Live Updates make an everyday wearable easier to rely on, especially if you keep it on overnight. Google's latest Pixel Drop combines several AI-powered tools with a broader slate of Android 17 upgrades. Pixel owners gain Lyria 3 for generating music from text or images, Gemini Omni for creating custom video clips, enhanced call translation and screening, AirDrop-compatible Quick Share, expanded Magic Cue support, and conversational photo editing. Android 17 builds on those additions with floating app Bubbles, selfie-camera Screen Reactions, and a split-screen gaming mode for foldables, while also strengthening privacy and security with more granular location and contact permissions, improved lost-device protection, tighter PIN-guessing limits, and enhanced threat detection. Other additions include expanded parental controls, separate assistant volume and app memory settings, and an option to hide app names for greater privacy. You can read more about everything new in Android 17 in Google's blog post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive: Richard Hermer’s office understood to be first in government to restrict use after recent riots

The attorney general for England and Wales has told his office to no longer post on X, making it the first UK government department to stop using the Elon Musk-owned platform amid increasing worries about its use to incite violence and racism.

Richard Hermer’s office last posted on X on Friday, and it is understood that officials have been told to no longer use the site, unless for the specific purpose of combatting disinformation there.

Updated document, which emphasises harm done to African women, is being considered by other Caribbean countries

Barbados’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, has announced a new manifesto from Caribbean leaders asserting the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations over damage caused by hundreds of years of enslavement.

Mottley was speaking at a “historic” conference in Ghana to advance the push for reparatory justice after the United Nations adopted a landmark resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.

Gallup found that only 49% of Americans were "cost-secure" last year, with concerns about medical bills and prescription costs rising across income groups.

The Pentagon is launching a six-month review of U.S. forces and bases in Europe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday at a meeting of NATO defense ministers.

Many people are spending more time on screens, but also doing more physical activities, a new CBS News poll finds.

Sennheiser's Accentum Clip open-ear true wireless earbuds are set to ship on July 23, but not to the US.

On Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court said that part of a federal law could not be used to prosecute a man solely for possessing a gun and a controlled substance at the same time.

In United States v. Hemani, the Court upheld a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit bench opinion that struck down part of a federal law, U.S.C. 922(g)(3), known as the “unlawful user” provision.” It banned anyone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing firearms or ammunition.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ali Danial Hemani after it obtained a warrant to search his home. Agents found a 9mm pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine in Hemani’s possession, according to court documents. The government believed that Hemani was a habitual marijuana user.

A grand jury found that Hemani had violated the unlawful user provision by possessing a handgun while in possession of marijuana. Hemani said that U.S.C. 922(g)(3) didn’t apply to his case and that the arrest violated his rights under the Second Amendment, which protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. The Fifth Circuit court agreed with Hemani.

In his opinion for the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that “the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani under §922(g)(3)’s unlawful user provision is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.”

“The Second Amendment protects the right of ‘all Americans’ to keep and bear firearms for self-defense, though like most individual rights it has its limits,” Gorsuch said. “The government bears the burden of showing its regulatory efforts are ‘consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,’” he added, quoting the Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen.

“The government construes §922(g)(3) to automatically ban an individual from possessing a gun from the moment he becomes an unlawful user of any controlled substance and remains in effect until he ceases being one, regardless of what controlled substance an individual uses, in what amounts, whether his drug use has ever made him a danger to himself or others, why he keeps a gun, or how safely he does so,” Gorsuch stated.

Rejecting the government’s use of “habitual drunkard” laws to make its case, Gorsuch concluded that “the government’s analogy fails on every metric it invites the Court to consider. Taken cumulatively, these problems prove fatal to the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani.”

Gorsuch also added that the decision was narrow and did not apply to laws that ban addicts or those intoxicated from possessing a firearm, or other laws “Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms.”

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the Court’s opinion, and he also thought the law violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. “Congress lacks the power to regulate the possession of firearms solely on the ground that they crossed state lines at some point in the past,” he stated.

In another concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote to confirm that the appeals court properly applied the Bruen precedent and United States v. Rahimi (2024), another ruling that an individual found to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another person may be temporarily disarmed. However, Jackson still argued that the Bruen ruling was flawed, and its “history and tradition” requirement was problematic.

And Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said he would have rejected the appeal because the government’s reliance on the habitual drunkard laws ignored substance use in a current context. “Marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the founding. It is widespread and increasingly considered socially acceptable in many quarters. And from a practical standpoint, law enforcement widely tolerates the use of marijuana,” he concluded.

The case had attracted a considerable amount of attention, with groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, and the Cato Institute filing briefs supporting Hemani. In addition to United States Solicitor General John Sauer, a group of 19 states, Everytown for Gun Safety, and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence support the federal government’s position.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Security researcher Justin O'Leary says Google initially accepted his Config Connector privilege-escalation report as a high-priority, high-severity bug, then denied a bounty by declaring the behavior "working as intended." According to The Register, a Google rep initially praised O'Leary's report with a "Nice catch!" before the cloud giant reversed course, declaring that no vulnerability existed and therefore no fix or reward was warranted. "The bug report, however, is still marked high-priority and accepted," the publication notes. The alleged flaw, dubbed ConfigConfusion, could let a Kubernetes namespace user exploit an overprivileged service account to become a GCP organization owner with only a few lines of YAML and little apparent audit visibility. O'Leary details the incident in a blog post. The Register reports: According to O'Leary, Config Connector doesn't perform an authorization check, and this allows any Config Connector service account with org-level permissions to bypass Identity and Access Management (IAM) authorization and gain the highest level of control (roles/owner) to an entire GCP Organization -- the root node of all of a company's resources within Google Cloud. On March 27, a Google security engineer accepted O'Leary's report and told him: "Nice catch!" The employee said that they filed a bug based on O'Leary's report with the relevant product team and assured him the Chocolate Factory's security squad would work with relevant Google Cloud people to fix the flaw. "We'll work with the product team to ensure this issue is address. We'll let you know when the issue was fixed," the engineer said. "In the meantime, review the payment option selected in your bughunters.google.com profile." Google assigned the bug P1 priority and S1 severity, signifying a flaw worthy of urgent repair because it affects a large percentage of users and can disrupt core organizational functions. "I figured that was the end of that," O'Leary said in a phone interview with The Register. Eleven days later, on April 7, he received a new message from a Google Security Bot reversing the earlier decision. The Reg viewed the email, and O'Leary included a screenshot in his Thursday writeup. The message said that the Cloud Vulnerability Reward Program panel decided that the "security impact of this issue does not meet the criteria to qualify for a reward." After reviewing the bug report, Google determined the software "is working as intended," the message continued. It also noted that the program's decision not to pay a bounty "does not mean that the product team won't fix the issue." Nearly three months later, the case remains P1/S1 with the status "in progress (accepted)." Google hasn't assigned a CVE or issued a fix. O'Leary didn't receive any reward for his research. [...] "This is a pattern," O'Leary told [The Register]. "This is just how these trillion-dollar companies deal with people like me. In my day job, we use GKE, and it's incredibly frustrating on my end, when I find a critical vulnerability in the system that's being widely used, and I can't even get the vendor to patch their own stuff." A Google spokesperson told The Register: "The issue reported does not qualify for a reward because the GCP IAM authorization bypass is only exploitable if an attacker has access to a Config Connector Service Account that's been granted the Organization Admin role by the organization (i.e., it is privileged). Additionally, an attacker would first need to gain entry to an organization's environment (e.g., an exposed container) in order to leverage the privileged Config Connector instance and execute commands with administrative authority, such as the IAM bypass. Granting this level of access to the Config Connector Service Account goes against Google Cloud's publicly shared best practices and the principle of least privilege."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Achieves a maximum speed of 16Gbps per pin with improvements in both performance and efficiency

SEOUL, South Korea, June 18, 2026 — SK hynix Inc. has announced that it has shipped samples of HBM4E, a next-generation DRAM for AI, to major customers.

“The company was able to deliver samples of the 12-stack HBM4E on schedule thanks to its advanced HBM development and production expertise for HBM,” said SK hynix, adding that “We will work closely with partners for mass production in a timely manner.”

The 12-layer HBM4E shows improvements in both performance and power efficiency. The product features a maximum data processing speed of 16Gbps per pin and power efficiency that is up more than 20 percent from previous models. These enhancements improve data processing capabilities for AI training and inference.

The HBM4E reduces data transfer latency through its latest interface and design optimization while maintaining stable operation in high-bandwidth environments. This enables customers to increase efficiency in processing data for AI data centers and large-scale computing systems.

SK hynix utilizes Advanced MR-MUF technology for HBM4E products to achieve a 48GB capacity in a 12-layer stack while ensuring structural stability. In particular, the company has also improved heat resistance by 17 percent, compared to the preceding HBM4, enabling stable operation of memory chips in high-performance computing environments.

SK hynix has successfully supplied optimized memory solutions to customers based on its expertise in the mass production and supply of HBM3, HBM3E, and HBM4. Leveraging its market-proven product reliability and supply capabilities, the company will support the development of next-generation infrastructure while helping address AI system bottlenecks.

“SK hynix has laid the foundation to strengthen its AI leadership with HBM4E based on its market-leading technological capabilities and manufacturing expertise,” said Ahn Hyun, President and Chief Development Officer, adding, “Through close collaboration with our partners, we will deliver the value needed in the market while reinforcing our technology leadership as a full-stack AI memory creator.”

About SK hynix Inc.

SK hynix Inc., headquartered in Korea, is the world’s top-tier semiconductor supplier offering Dynamic Random Access Memory chips (“DRAM”) and flash memory chips (“NAND flash”) for a wide range of distinguished customers globally. The Company’s shares are traded on the Korea Exchange, and the Global Depository shares are listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.

Source: SK hynix

The post SK hynix Ships 12-Stack HBM4E Samples to Major AI Customers appeared first on HPCwire.

Award-winning research unveiled at ICDE 2026 could help scientists, businesses and AI systems analyze complex data faster and more efficiently across multiple database platforms.

June 18, 2026 — Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new system designed to solve one of modern computing’s growing challenges: how to efficiently analyze data spread across multiple types of databases.

Xiuwen Zheng started her research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) as a CSE M.S. student and then continued into the Ph.D. program at CSE. She was co-advised by Amarnath Gupta of SDSC and Arun Kumar of CSE and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), which is part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.

The team’s paper, MICRO: A Lightweight Middleware for Optimizing Cross-Store Cross-Model Graph-Relation Joins, won the Best Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), one of the field’s leading conferences.

Today, organizations rarely store all of their data in a single system. Traditional relational databases manage structured information such as financial transactions and medical records, while graph databases specialize in mapping relationships between entities — an increasingly important capability for applications such as fraud detection, cybersecurity, recommendation engines and scientific knowledge graphs.

But querying data across both platforms is often slow, expensive and technically difficult, especially when a query requires data movement across platforms.

“Our work addresses a problem affecting industries ranging from healthcare and finance to scientific computing and artificial intelligence,” said lead author Xiuwen Zheng, a doctoral graduate from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE).

To address that challenge, Zheng and her collaborators developed MICRO, a lightweight middleware platform that enables relational and graph databases to work together more efficiently without requiring organizations to rebuild existing infrastructure.

“Instead of forcing all data into a single platform, MICRO intelligently coordinates how queries run across multiple systems,” Zheng said. “The middleware analyzes workloads, determines where operations should execute and optimizes how data moves between graph and relational stores.”

The result is faster, more efficient analytics across increasingly complex data environments — an advance with significant implications for high performance computing, AI and data-intensive scientific research.

Modern scientific workflows routinely combine diverse forms of information, including simulation outputs, sensor streams, metadata catalogs and relationship-based knowledge graphs. Fields such as fusion energy research and drug discovery all depend on connecting structured datasets with complex networks of relationships.

AI systems face similar challenges. Large language models, recommendation engines and autonomous agents increasingly rely on interconnected data ecosystems rather than isolated databases. As data volumes continue to grow, efficiently linking these specialized systems has become a major bottleneck.

Rather than replacing existing databases, MICRO is designed to improve interoperability across heterogeneous and distributed data systems. The approach reflects a broader shift in modern computing, where organizations increasingly rely on specialized tools working together instead of one-size-fits-all platforms.

“By reducing the complexity of cross-system analytics, our goal is for systems like MICRO to help scientists and organizations spend less time managing infrastructure and more time extracting insights from data,” Zheng said.

MICRO is part of a longer research arc at UC San Diego known as Project AWESOME to help domain scientists analyze large multi-model social media datasets and later extended to applications in cybersecurity and beyond. The path to ICDE 2026 was not a straight line: the broader line of work faced multiple close rejections at major database venues before this paper was recognized.

“Xiuwen soldiered on, resolutely believing in the project vision, demonstrating technical creativity, and delivering on its potential,” said CSE and HDSI Associate Professor Arun Kumar about the work’s trajectory. “Her tale of perseverance is one I hope is helpful to students and researchers everywhere. This work also exemplifies the interdisciplinary research ethos across SDSC, HDSI and CSE. I am excited to see more such fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations across campus spanning engineering, the sciences, and the new Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.”

SDSC Research Scientist Amarnath Gupta, who leads Project AWESOME, added that collaborations with domain scientists — including Professor Molly Roberts in Political Science and HDSI, whose group works with large-scale social media data — were instrumental in surfacing the cross-store, cross-model challenges that MICRO ultimately addresses. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Xiuwen Zheng received her Ph.D. and M.S. from UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering CSE Department in 2025 and 2019, respectively. Her Ph.D. work was co-advised by her publication co-authors Amarnath Gupta of SDSC and Arun Kumar of CSE and HDSI.

Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, UCSD

The post UC San Diego Researchers Win Best Paper Award for New Approach to Connecting Complex Data Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Donald Trump is claiming his Iran peace plan is a victory for Washington, despite the 14-point agreement revealing significant concessions to Tehran. Under the deal, Iran will reopen the strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets, while talks will continue over the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme. Nosheen Iqbal speaks to the Guardian diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour

Detectives with the Newark Police Division of the city’s Department of Public Safety went undercover to infiltrate protests outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Delaney Hall detention facility earlier this month, according to court records obtained by The Intercept.

At the June 3 protests outside the detention center sparked by a hunger strike inside, detectives in plainclothes worked alongside uniformed officers to arrest Samuel Becker, a protester alleged to have thrown items into a fire days earlier, according to a criminal complaint. 

The protests had taken place for nearly a month outside Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE facility located on an industrial corridor in Newark, New Jersey, where detainees and their families have complained of poor conditions and retaliation by staff.

The operation was strictly aimed at arresting Becker, 30, who is accused of dragging a tarp into a fire during a raucous protest several days earlier, according to the complaint filed in Newark Municipal Court by police officer Elddy Torres.

“A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO DEPLOY TWO UNDERCOVER NEWARK POLICE DETECTIVES TO MONITOR AND REPORT REAL TIME INFORMATION TO SURVEILLANCE UNITS,” Torres wrote, describing what happened after Becker was identified. “AS THE UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES REMAINED WITHIN THE CROWD, BECKER WAS OBSERVED COORDINATING PROTESTERS PAST THE BARRICADED PROTEST ZONE.”

Law enforcement presence at protests can have a chilling effect, said Amol Sinha, the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who declined to discuss the specifics of the arrest, with which he was not familiar. The psychological effect of undercover officers — and the fear of undercovers — stands out as especially problematic.

“The use of plainclothes officers presents the concern of people constantly being surveilled when they are engaging in First Amendment-protected activity,” Sinha told The Intercept. “These are moments that should be celebrated as part of democracy and not viewed through the lens of suspicion.”

While the use of undercover officers at protests is not unusual, advocates said the tactic could raise questions about suppression of speech if the aim goes beyond keeping the peace, according to Aedan Neary, a defense attorney in Kearny, who is not involved in the case.

“The concern arises out of the question of, at what point do the actions of these undercover agents become a pressure tactic as opposed to a law enforcement tactic?” Neary told The Intercept. “Is this being used to ensure that things remain peaceful? Or is this more about gathering intelligence?”

ICE Role Unmentioned

The arrest and police report also raise thorny questions about cooperation between ICE and local authorities, which is prohibited for immigration matters by a New Jersey state law passed in March.

According to Becker and two eyewitnesses to the arrest, ICE agents led the ambush that led to Becker’s detention and initially took him into custody.

“An ICE agent chased and grabbed me and quickly handed me over to an NPD officer,” Becker told The Intercept in a written statement. “The NPD officer brought me back over to the other side of the street and sat me down on the side of the ICE minivan that led the ambush.”

While Newark police and Becker’s accounts align on basic details — such as the time and location of the arrest behind Delaney Hall, where protesters had gone to monitor vehicle traffic in and out of the facility — the complaint by Torres, the officer, says the arrest was the work of Newark police with the support of Essex County Police, omitting ICE’s role.

“ONE OF THE NPD UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES ADVISED US THAT THE GROUP WAS PLANNING TO LIGHT THE DUMPSTER ON FIRE AND PUSH IT IN THE REAR FENCE EXIT. A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO INTERRUPT THE GROUPS CONDUCT AND DISPERSE THEM BEFORE THEY COULD HURT ANYONE OR CAUSE ANY DAMAGE,” said Torres’s complaint. “NUMEROUS NPD DETECTIVES AND ESSEX COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE SWAT PERSONNEL RESPONDED TO THE AREA TO MOVE THE GROUP ALONG.”

At least one of the vehicles that arrived in the convoy to make the arrest, Becker told The Intercept, was driven by ICE agents, converging on the group at the rear of Delaney Hall.

According to Becker, his interaction with that initial ICE agent making the arrest indicated some degree of intelligence sharing between federal authorities and local police.

Related

The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes

“As I was surrounded by ICE agents and the arresting officer, one of the ICE agents accused me of [setting a] fire a different night,” Becker told The Intercept in a statement. “The ICE agent’s words matched the language NPD used when it put out a statement about my arrest the next day.”

In a statement made in a Facebook post announcing Becker’s arrest, Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda said, “He was identified by Newark Police as the individual responsible for setting a dumpster fire during the weekend protest at Delaney Hall and also attempting to start a second fire there on Wednesday night.”

The two eyewitnesses, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, confirmed Becker’s account of the arrest in interviews with The Intercept.

No Sanctuary

While no law in New Jersey prohibits local police from cooperating with ICE on non-immigration matters, such collaboration has become a hot button for Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who oversaw a zealous crackdown on protests outside the facility despite publicly opposing President Donald Trump’s deportation blitz.

The recent sanctuary law prohibits New Jersey police from assisting immigration agents in enforcement of federal immigration law, but leaves room for exceptions, including the enforcement of state criminal law.

Related

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

The ACLU’s Sinha said that his organization had pushed for a broader version of the law that would have prohibited any collaboration between police and ICE.

“This is why we were advocating for an end to collaboration, period,” said Sinha. “We wanted to make sure that there was no instance of collaboration between immigration enforcement and law enforcement, and the fuller version of the law that did not ultimately make its way through the legislature would have prevented that sort of collaboration.”

Catherine Adams, a spokesperson for Miranda, the public safety director, told The Intercept, “To ensure that public safety is provided to peaceful protesters in accordance with their First Amendment rights, and for the safety of other members of the public, as well as the Officers at Delaney Hall, we deploy plainclothes officers, cameras, drones, etc., to identify those at the protest site who unlawfully damage property, start fires, or commit other crimes.”

Lifeline for ICE Operations

Demonstrations outside Delaney Hall were relatively small but attracted attention due to the ferocious responses from ICE agents and employees of GEO Group, the private prison firm that operates the jail.

Over the course of several weeks, ICE agents repeatedly charged protesters in an effort to clear them from the entrance to allow vehicles to move in and out of the facility, often deploying batons, pepper spray, and pepper balls against demonstrators, as well as taking some into custody.

Becker suffered an injury during a charge by ICE agents, when one agent swung a baton so hard that it fractured Becker’s shoulder, according to his account. On the night of his arrest, Becker’s arm was in a sling.

Related

“Warehousing Human Beings”

After initially keeping a wide berth from the clashes, state and local police operating under orders from Baraka and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — both of whom are Democrats who have spoken out against ICE crackdowns — involved themselves in policing the protesters in late May. The scene immediately became even more volatile, with police firing tear-gas canisters, charging protesters on horseback, and kettling dozens of protesters for mass arrest. 

On May 31, Baraka instituted a curfew in the vicinity of Delaney Hall, and Newark police set up barricades to keep protesters more than half a mile away from the facility for several days. In the weeks since the curfew ended, protests have continued sporadically, but with less intensity or energy as in the initial weeks.

Baraka has repeatedly sought to minimize the city’s role in policing the protests, claiming he was trying to “bring down the temperature,” not bring an end to protests. That posture eventually shifted.

“It is not the responsibility of the Newark Police Division to secure a private facility,” Baraka said in a June 4 statement. “Our intention was never to protect Delaney Hall or HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “but to bring calm. It is a clear contradiction to the city’s position with GEO group to remain there.” 

For Becker and many other protesters, the presence of police from various agencies in New Jersey were a godsend to ICE and GEO Group — not to public safety.

“State and local police ramped up their repression of the protestors because ICE agents were having an increasingly difficult time carrying out their daily operations at Delaney Hall by themselves,” Becker said. “Without the ramped-up support of the state and local police, ICE and GEO would have continued to encounter growing difficulty suppressing the strike and operating the concentration camp.”

The post Undercover Cops Infiltrated Delaney Hall ICE Protest to Spy and Make Arrest appeared first on The Intercept.

When a spouse dies with debt, creditors could still come calling. Here's what surviving spouses should know.

Parents and their kids, new and old fans and a few celebrities gathered to honor the team’s NBA Championship

Thousands of Knicks fans – decked out in blue and orange jerseys, shorts, hats, necklaces and more – gathered in downtown New York City on Thursday to celebrate the team’s NBA championship in a lively ticker-tape parade.

All along Church Street, the street running parallel to the parade route, fans lit joints, threw back shots of Fireball whiskey and drank Coronas, within view of bemused and outnumbered New York City police officers. Some fans climbed atop police cruisers and posed for photos.

It isn't easy being green: The UK's net zero trilemma Audio sseth.drupal@c… 18 June 2026

In this episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss the decline of the cross-party consensus on net zero.

Can Labour’s prized plans to decarbonize power generation by 2050 withstand growing demands for extra defence spending – an acrimonious argument that has already claimed two senior defence ministers? Or pressure to preserve and extend welfare benefits from the party’s left and the unions, many of whom see net zero as a job killer? Plus: China’s colossal subsidization of green technology has created a surplus of cheap equipment for clean power. Would Britain be wise to take advantage?  

Bronwen Maddox is joined by Pelin Zorlu and Chris Aylett of Chatham House’s Climate and Energy team, plus special guest Archie Hall, acting economics editor of The Economist.

Produced by Podmasters for Chatham House, with thanks to Stephen Farrell and Sara Seth.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

President Donald Trump has touted more than $500 billion in prescription drug savings over 10 years from his policies. But the savings are largely aspirational, and not based on the more limited actions the administration has taken so far.

The administration’s most favored nation policy seeks to bring down drug prices to levels paid in other countries. The bulk of the savings, estimated in a May 5 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, comes from assuming that all new drugs will be sold in the U.S. at MFN prices going forward, saving $529 billion. A smaller amount of savings, $64.3 billion, comes from applying MFN pricing to Medicaid.

“People are saving a lot of money,” Trump said at a May 18 event announcing the addition of more drugs to TrumpRx, the administration’s website directing people to cash prices for prescription drugs. “Over the next 10 years, the Council of Economic Advisers estimates that our most favored nation drug policies will save Americans over $500 billion. And this has been the greatest breakthrough in lowering healthcare costs in modern history.”

“Think about the $600 billion of savings to the average American over the next 10 years,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said on June 2 at an event announcing further additions to the TrumpRx website, while calling on Congress to codify MFN pricing.

“It’s just a massive number that they voluntarily, sort of, gave back because the president went after them and said: ‘You got to deal with this problem,’” Oz continued, referring to the president’s negotiations with drug companies. 

There isn’t evidence that drug companies have agreed to give back $600 billion in savings to Americans, much less savings that will go to “average” Americans. So far, the administration has made voluntary deals with 17 drug companies to lower drug prices. The White House and the companies have reported commitments to launch new drugs at MFN prices, as well as to offer MFN prices to states for Medicaid. However, the details of the deals have not been disclosed, and some companies have reported that they end after three years.

“Right now we just have a lot more questions than we have answers, and that makes it really difficult to assess the validity or accuracy or even ballpark-ness of this very large estimate of savings in the White House report,” Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the Program on Medicare Policy at the health policy organization KFF, told us. She added that it’s difficult even to evaluate the impact of the current voluntary deals given a lack of answers to key questions, such as “how many of these manufacturers’ drugs are subject to MFN pricing.”

When asked for more details on what has been done so far to achieve the savings in the report, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told us that “the research report lays out all of the assumptions underlying this analysis.” CMS did not respond to our request for comment.

The hundreds of billions in savings calculated in the CEA report do not come from offering people discounts on TrumpRx. As we’ve written previously, the prices on the site for brand-name drugs negotiated under the administration’s voluntary deals only represent savings for individuals in a few specific situations, such as when paying for fertility or weight loss drugs not covered by insurance, since many people will get better prices by using insurance rather than paying in cash. The CEA analysis only attempted to calculate 10-year savings from TrumpRx for Americans paying for fertility treatments, estimating these savings at $4.6 billion.

TrumpRx also recently started pointing people toward existing websites to access discounts on generic drugs. But as the CEA analysis itself acknowledged, generics are already cheaper in the U.S. than in other high-income countries, and they are not a target of MFN policies.

The U.S. does generally pay more for brand-name drugs than other nations. Prices in 2022 for these drugs were more than three times higher in the U.S. than in other high-income nations after adjusting for rebates, according to an analysis from the research organization RAND. But it is not clear how policies aiming to equalize drug prices will play out. As we have written previously, the president has repeatedly claimed broad victories over drug prices, even though they are hardly a done deal. There are significant uncertainties with his MFN approach, which still requires legislative action to further implement.

“We’ve seen no indication from pharma, from other key stakeholders, that this $600 billion number is real,” Jeromie Ballreich, an associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us, saying that one would expect companies to disclose to shareholders such an impact, which would be about 10% of U.S. pharmaceutical company revenue. “You would hear it outside of the White House, because $600 billion is, as Trump would say, huge.”

Missing Details From Trump’s Deals

Experts told us that it is difficult to evaluate the estimated nearly $600 billion in savings without more information on the president’s current or future MFN policies.

“This report is partly a report and mostly a press release,” Joseph Antos, a senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told us, adding that it is not possible to do an independent analysis based on the information provided.

Andrew Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, told us that the hundreds of billions in savings are theoretically possible with a broad MFN policy but he said the administration’s actions so far only have “semblances” of accomplishing such a policy.

“Other countries’ prices are much lower than ours, and if policies are designed to piggyback on those prices, you can get savings in this order of magnitude,” he said. “That said, I don’t think that what’s happened so far — or plans for what will happen in the future — will align with that estimate in the CEA report for a variety of reasons.” 

One key question is the length of the voluntary deals the administration has made with drug companies.

To get to nearly $600 billion in savings, the “key assumption” is that MFN pricing “will be implemented through legislation and affect all new product launches going forward,” Jens Grueger, a partner at Boston Consulting Group and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, told us in an email. The deals, however, appear to be limited to Trump’s time in office, he said. 

Filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission from some of the companies have indicated the deals are limited overall, with two companies specifying they only last three years, STAT reported.

“It’s very unclear how you can estimate savings over a 10-year period based on deals that we understand to be lasting only for three years, unless you assume that Congress will actually codify MFN pricing,” Cubanski said. Meanwhile, she added, many Republicans in Congress even oppose legislation that allows the government to negotiate drug prices, much less price-setting.

Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, told us that the assumption of MFN legislation was “hypothetical at best, as there is no movement in Congress to pass legislation.”

A second question is what exactly the companies agreed to in their commitments to price newly launched drugs at MFN prices. As we’ve said, the bulk of the savings — $529 billion — estimated in the report come from assuming new drugs will be broadly offered at MFN prices over 10 years.

While Trump has claimed his administration has achieved the lowest drug prices in the world, the CEA report explained that his administration’s MFN pricing policies ask that companies offer U.S. payers the second-lowest drug prices among those paid in a small collection of countries: the G-7 nations, plus Switzerland and Denmark. The approach uses net prices after adjusting for gross domestic product per capita in comparison to the U.S., the report said.

The CEA report estimated the 10-year savings from new drug launches at MFN prices by comparing historical prices in these countries between 2021 and 2025 and imagining that this MFN policy had been applied, the report explained. (The analysis omitted Denmark due to a lack of data.) The White House economists then extended their estimate to 10 years, assuming a 3% growth rate.

In coming up with the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, the CEA report “essentially said it’s going to be the second-lowest price out of the reference basket,” said Ballreich, the pharmaceutical policy researcher from Johns Hopkins. “There’s a number of question marks about whether or not these drug companies that came and met with the White House and did this agreement actually agreed to this.” 

Some of the White House announcements of the deals specify commitments companies have made to provide MFN prices on “all new innovative” or “all new” medicines. However, SEC filings have sometimes indicated limitations, saying that companies agreed to “price certain future medicines” at or below MFN levels or mentioning “certain exceptions” to promises to price new products at these levels.

Three companies recently declined to tell STAT whether three new drugs would be launched at MFN prices.

Questions About Medicaid Savings

There are similar questions about the $64.3 billion in estimated savings for Medicaid.

Press releases on the voluntary deals with drug companies indicate that the companies will provide MFN prices to state Medicaid programs for at least some drugs. CMS is launching GENEROUS, a voluntary Medicaid initiative running five years, and the companies that have signed deals are expected to participate for at least some of this time, according to a May 8 analysis from KFF. However, the KFF analysis said that it is unclear how many drugmakers and states will ultimately participate in GENEROUS and for how long, as well as which drugs will be included.

The prices states pay for Medicaid drugs are not publicly disclosed, but they are generally already the lowest in the U.S., researchers have previously told us, making it difficult to assess whether the MFN deals will be better than existing Medicaid prices.

“It feels very difficult to believe that companies are actually giving up a good chunk of revenue with these deals,” Mulcahy said. “What seems far more likely is that they are finding a way to formalize the discounts they are already offering” to Medicaid. 

Ballreich said that in a study that has not yet been published, he and his colleagues had estimated savings in the first year of the GENEROUS program at “just about a third” of what the CEA report projected for that timeframe. His group’s estimate assumed complete participation in GENEROUS by drug companies and states but also attempted to take into account some mechanisms Medicaid already has to reduce drug prices.

Roadblocks to Achieving MFN Savings

Even assuming the Trump administration enacted policies to require all drug companies to offer MFN prices to all payers, it’s not clear how much money the U.S. would save. MFN policies could affect global drug prices in ways the report did not take into account.

Trump has suggested that companies would make up for losses in revenue in the U.S. by increasing prices in other countries. However, researchers expressed skepticism that other high-income countries would agree to significantly higher prices.

In addition, Antos of AEI pointed out that MFN policies could lead some drugs to never make it to market. “I don’t believe they try to take into account the effects of this process on future innovation,” he said, referring to the CEA estimate.

A June 10 release from the White House listing Trump’s “recent wins” said his MFN initiative was “projected to save Americans $500 billion over the next decade while protecting innovation and expanding access.”

Cubanski, however, said that if the report is correct, and prices fall some 30%, “we’d be looking at a pretty significant hit to revenues for pharmaceutical companies, and that could translate to somewhat less innovation, or maybe significantly less innovation.”

The estimate also doesn’t take into account how drugmakers and other countries might push back against the policies.

The CEA report “assumes that companies continue launching products in reference countries and that prices in these countries would converge towards US prices,” Grueger said. He suggested that this could happen for some products “that address a high unmet medical need and provide transformative benefits for patients.” Other countries consider benefits to patients relative to costs in determining what they will pay for drugs.

“However, for the majority of products this will be difficult to achieve, and companies might consider not launching these products outside the US to protect US prices,” Grueger said, citing recent statements from pharmaceutical executives suggesting such delays. “As a consequence, lower prices in reference countries would not be available and prices in the US would not drop as much as projected in the CEA report.”

“Not only would you potentially impede access to new medications in other countries, but we wouldn’t end up with lower prices here in the US either,” Cubanski said. She added that it is already typical for drugs to launch in the U.S. before they are in other countries, making it difficult to figure out how to set an MFN price for new drugs in the first place.

The researchers also questioned the administration’s ability to assess whether companies had fulfilled promises to offer drugs at MFN prices. 

Companies provide list prices for drugs, but these are rarely paid. The CEA analysis said that drugmakers will report net prices, taking into account various forms of discounts. But experts said it was unclear how the government will independently evaluate these prices.

“The government obviously can try to compel [drug companies] to report this information, and there is some wording in there about auditing, but I don’t know how you audit something when you don’t have full disclosure or any basis for really determining in a systematic way whether numbers are correct or not,” Antos said.

Antos called it “telling” that the CEA analysis itself does not rely on net prices for its analysis. Rather, the report says, because of “the confidential nature of rebates, there are no existing data sets with net pricing information.”

Mulcahy explained that instead, the data the CEA used has gross prices a healthcare data company derives using complicated and varying methodologies in different countries. In general, he said, the numbers are based on invoices at various stages of the drug supply. He said that this dataset is the “best we’ve got” and is what he and his colleagues at RAND have used for international comparisons of drug prices, but it has limitations. 

“If you can put whatever number down you want on an invoice and then negotiate something secret later, you can make it look like you’re saving a ton of money,” Mulcahy said, expressing concern that the MFN pricing deals would incentivize even more secrecy about international drug prices.

“I think there will be ways to hide discounts and backchannel funds for this,” Ballreich said, suggesting various ways drugmakers could give money back to payers outside the U.S. For example, they could institute rebates or taxes that are not drug-specific. He also said that drugmakers will be restricted from disclosing the true price of their drugs in other countries due to confidentiality agreements and laws in those countries.

“If you want to make a claim about how launch prices are going to change or if a company wants to promise to change launch prices … that’s easy to fudge,” Mulcahy said. “And then you find creative ways on the back end to make yourself whole again.”

“It’s kind of like everyone wins except for consumers,” he added.

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

The post The Shaky Assumptions Behind Trump’s Over $500 Billion in Projected Drug Savings appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The Obama Presidential Center, museum and library opens in Chicago with a star-studded grand opening ceremony and public watch party on Midway Plaisance.

‘Mastermind’ Dawie Groenewald given fine of 2m rand or four-year jail term almost 16 years after arrest

Two traffickers of rhino horns have been sentenced by a South African court in what police said was the world’s largest such case, partly bringing to an end an almost two-decade legal saga.

Dawie Groenewald and Tielman Erasmus had faced more than 1,700 charges ranging from illegally hunting and dehorning rhinos to racketeering and money laundering.

With sanctions-relief and a US promise to avoid further meddling, the conflict has been settled on Tehran’s terms

Donald Trump is running fast to escape the catastrophic war on Iran that he and Benjamin Netanyahu started four months ago. He is saying anything that appears to suit the moment. In fact, he clearly feels he can now ditch his friend, the Israeli prime minister. He is offering Tehran’s military regime a $300bn rebuilding fund, an end to economic sanctions and a promise not to interfere in its internal affairs. All this is declared a “major win”. If so, fine. The next 60 days of negotiations will be tortuous and unpredictable. But at least they are pointing in a plausible – and hopefully irreversible – direction.

For once, a US president seems ready to accept defeat in a potentially forever war before it gets out of hand. Iran is not to be another Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. More than that, in the course of the past week, Trump seems to have soured on America’s closest ally. Furious at Netanyahu’s ceaseless bombing of Lebanon, he remarked: “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody” – somebody to kill, that is – because “there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah”. For all this moral grandstanding, Trump’s military forces, along with Israel, have killed more than 3,300 Iranians, according to the country’s authorities – among them more than 100 children in a girls’ school – and injured many more.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

All you need to take to the virtual skies now is a browser.

The national average for a gallon of regular gas in the U.S. drops to $3.99, the lowest since March 30.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a Texas man who challenged a federal law that bars certain drug users from having firearms.

The recall follows multiple incidents in which Waymo robotaxis drove past ramp-closure signs and into freeway construction zones.

Tornadoes were reported in Illinois, Iowa and several other states Wednesday as severe weather slammed a large swath of the Midwest​ and Southeast.