News Reel

Rents will rise and homelessness quadruple in a decade unless serious steps to cut emissions are taken, University of Sydney researchers find

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Global heating could worsen housing affordability, push up rents and quadruple homelessness in a decade without fairer housing policies and action to reduce emissions, new research has found.

Home prices and rents in Australia are influenced by a complex mix of factors, from incomes and mortgage rates to insurance premiums, available land and population.

‘We know that Mark Carney wants to sort of embrace Europe,’ says competition director Martin Green

Canada is welcome to join Eurovision if it wishes, its director has said, months after the country revealed it wanted to “explore” joining the song contest in its federal budget.

Eurovision director Martin Green told the BBC on Wednesday that Canada hadn’t yet applied, but would be welcome to.

There has been palpable excitement about President Trump's state visit to China in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, home to one of the largest Asian populations in the U.S.

Secretary of state says US made clear America’s position on Taiwan, as Trump-Xi talks continue for second day

• Xi warns Trump of ‘clashes and even conflicts’ with US over Taiwan

• Analysis: For anxious Taiwan, Trump’s silence after Xi talks is best possible outcome

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are set to meet on Friday to wrap up a high-stakes two-day state visit that has featured pomp and business deals but also a stark warning from Xi that mishandling the Taiwan issue could push US-China relations to “a very dangerous place”.

Trump is on the first visit by a US president to China since 2017 and has been hoping for tangible results that might improve his sagging approval ratings ahead of the crucial midterm elections.

Trump told Fox News that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets – its first purchase of US-made commercial jets in nearly a decade. But markets were expecting a much higher number, with earlier news reports suggesting 500 or more could be involved, and Boeing shares fell more than 4% after the comments.

Xi’s remarks on Taiwan, the democratically governed island Beijing claims, represented a sharp warning during a pomp-filled summit that otherwise appeared friendly and relaxed. They came in a closed-door meeting that ran for more than two hours, Beijing said.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio told NBC News that Taiwan was discussed, saying the Chinese “always raise it ... we always make clear our position and we move on to the other topics”. Rubio is among a large contingent of US officials and business leaders who travelled with Trump to China.

At a lavish state banquet on Wednesday, Xi called the China-US relationship the most important in the world and added: “We must make it work and never mess it up.” Trump earlier told Xi their two countries were “going to have a fantastic future together”.

The summit has been aimed at maintaining a fragile trade truce struck when the leaders last met in October and Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of vital rare earths.
With news agencies

Cuba's national energy grid has suffered a major failure, cutting power to the island's eastern provinces.

The meeting came as Cuba is contending with a massive power failure to its national energy grid amid U.S. sanctions that have caused an oil and gas shortage crisis.

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Donald Trump will drive through a Chinese capital that is smoggier than it was on his last visit in 2017, when the authorities launched emergency measures to clear the skies of pollution days before his first state visit to Beijing.

Factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of the US president’s trip nearly a decade ago, an era in which China had declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clear the skies ahead of important political events such as visiting dignitaries and the Beijing Olympics.

The potential indictment — which must be approved by a grand jury — is expected to focus on Cuba's 1996 downing of two planes operated by a humanitarian group.

The number of people being monitored for hantavirus in the United States has grown to 41, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

A 2023 supreme court decision banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions

The US Department of Justice on Thursday accused Yale University of illegally considering race in admissions to its medical school – the second institution to face discrimination allegations by the federal agency this month.

In a letter to a lawyer for Yale, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said a justice department investigation found that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to the medical school than white or Asian students, despite having lower grade-point averages and lower test scores.

Nine-person jury to consider whether AI firm bilked world’s richest person and unjustly enriched themselves

Closing arguments began on Thursday in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, bringing the weeks-long courtroom battle between the two tech moguls nearer to a decision. A nine-person jury is set to deliberate and return a verdict on whether they believe the AI firm and Altman are liable in the case.

The trial, which began last month in an Oakland, California, federal courthouse, has gripped Silicon Valley and featured some of the tech industry’s biggest names as witnesses. Attorneys for both sides have presented testimony and documents that have exposed Musk and Altman’s private dealings, as well as provided a window into the contentious history of OpenAI.

Charity says calls to its Childline service about online sexual abuse and exploitation have risen 36% in a year

Children reported a rise in online blackmail attempts involving sexual images in the UK last year, according to a leading charity.

The NSPCC said contacts with its Childline service relating to online sexual abuse and exploitation rose by 36% last year, driven by an increase in cases related to online blackmail.

Your personal information, such as phone numbers and addresses, may already be accessible online.

SABRINA BALLAH
Contributing Reporter

Most love songs celebrate romantic relationships. It makes sense that humans want to love and be loved in return, as that is a genuine biological instinct.

However, people tend to overlook the importance of friendship in our society, and the amount of happiness and meaning that a genuine connection with a friend can bring into one’s life. Sometimes, people throw away their friends to focus on their romantic partner, letting not only their friendship wilt away like a flower, but also losing their identity and individuality.

“Friendship and Happiness: Across the LifeSpan and Culture,” a book by Melikşah Demir detailing scholarly research on the relationship between happiness and friendship, states that according to Aristotle, a crucial element of an ideal friendship is for individuals to “show at least some degree of care and concern for one another for their own sakes and be prepared to express that care and concern in action.”

Friendship is built on some level of mutual care. Even through midlife and with the support of a spouse, it has been proven that having a friend increases life satisfaction and self-esteem, providing a person with a support system they can rely on. 

A 2007 study found that among married participants aged 22–79 with best friends, having at least two high-quality relations — not necessarily only with the spouse — was associated with higher life satisfaction and self-esteem and lower levels of depression. In contrast, among married adults without best friends, the spousal relationship was particularly important for well-being.

Daniel Topley, a senior at the university, shared his take on friendship.

“I do different things with different people, and all those roles are very important,” Topley said. “Friendship is supposed to be intentional. That sort of intentionality gives meaning to them. There’s a little bit of ‘I got you on this thing, don’t worry about it,’ and vice versa.”

Topley also shared how friendships can increase an individual’s quality of life.

“Friendship gives life so much meaning, and they are there for us when we need them — who we can lend a hand to,” Topley said. “What’s the point in working a 9-to-5 if you don’t make meaningful connections with other people? That’s where I see that friendship is important because our friends kind of make life a little brighter.”

The study states that “the psychological literature also affirms that friendship is a reliable correlate of happiness across the life span.”

The study also reports that in a good friendship, “friends act as mirrors to one another — enhancing their knowledge of themselves — and that they share activities and values which reinforce them in the sorts of moral and intellectual activities which are constitutive of living well.” 

In other words, an ideal friendship reinforces your identity and helps you grow. 

There will always be more to love and connection than just romance. Think of a friend who colors your life with meaning and happiness. Think of a way to invest in that friendship: write them a pen pal appreciation letter or grab them their favorite coffee. You’ll find that this whimsical way of living comes right back to you.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is opening a formal investigation into whether Microsoft's bundling of Windows, Office, Teams, Copilot, and related products harms competition. Engadget reports: "Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters. She also stressed the importance of the investigation by noting that hundreds of thousands of UK residents use business software and Microsoft products. The organization will take a look into the company's cloud licensing practices. The CMA has stated that the inquiry will conclude by February. At that point, Microsoft could get slapped with a strategic market label. Microsoft says it's "committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market." A strategic market designation doesn't automatically assume wrongdoing, but will give the CMA more leeway when conducting further interventions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A look at the timeline of events in Karen Read's high-profile Massachusetts murder trial and retrial. Read was acquitted of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled a bill to help civilians, including law enforcement agents, receive workers' compensation for illnesses like cancer that are often associated with toxic exposure to burn pits.

Export’s performances scandalised Austria in the 1960s, but are now recognised for exposing the objectification of the female body

Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and film-maker who inverted the male gaze in ways that were provocative, shocking and often outrageously fun, has died aged 85.

The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export died in Vienna earlier the same day, three days before her 86th birthday.

Health officials say close contacts being offered antibiotics as a precaution after cases discovered in Reading

A young person has died and two others are being treated after an outbreak of meningitis in Berkshire, health officials have said.

It follows a major outbreak in Kent, linked to a Canterbury nightclub, that killed two people and left more than a dozen needing hospital treatment in March.

Visit comes after US-Cuba relations deteriorated significantly, with Washington imposing a fuel blockade on the island in January

CIA director John Ratcliffe met Cuban officials in Havana on Thursday as a way to improve dialogue between the US and the communist-run island, the Cuban government said.

The meeting took place “in a context marked by the complexity of bilateral relations, with the aim of contributing to the political dialogue between both nations”, a statement said.

Media law experts cast doubt on viability of a defamation lawsuit promised by Netanyahu over Nicholas Kristof essay

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, have threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation over the publication of an essay by Nicholas Kristof detailing allegations that Palestinian women, men and children have been raped and sexually abused in Israeli military detention.

“Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

The Supreme Court has maintained mail access to the abortion pill mifepristone, setting aside for now a lower court order that blocked abortion providers from prescribing the widely used drug through telehealth and shipping it to patients.

As Republicans seek to retain control of the U.S. House, leaders of both parties nationwide have sought to redraw their congressional maps to net more seats for their parties.

Social media users are casting doubt and causing confusion about the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship, saying that one of the passengers is a "crisis actor."

Their posts are focused on Jake Rosmarin, a Boston-based travel content creator who is now quarantining at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

"They’re really working it with these crisis actors," said a May 6 X post that shared a video of an emotional Rosmarin describing his experience aboard the ship.

Another X post said he "was certainly handpicked for this Honduis-Hanta-CryBaby role" because Rosmarin’s related to people who work in healthcare and emergency preparedness.

Even more posts said footage of Rosmarin urging people to get vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic is evidence his travel on the hantavirus cruise outbreak isn’t a coincidence. 

One shared an image of what looks like a man in a hospital bed and said it was Rosmarin — a "much publicised ‘Covid patient.’" 

"What are the chances that this guy is always where the current propaganda ‘virus’ is and always photographed or filmed as the victim?" the post said.

We asked Rosmarin about these posts suggesting he’s part of some concerted scheme and did not hear back. But there’s no evidence that he’s a crisis actor, or participating in a nefarious plot.

Rosmarin told the Daily Beast that such claims aren’t based on facts. "People are reacting just to react," he said.

On April 1, before the MV Hondius departed from Argentina and the hantavirus was detected on board, Rosmarin shared on TikTok that he was going to spend the next 35 days on the ship. The following days he posted multiple videos about his trip. 

He posted an update on May 3, after the outbreak was announced, confirming that he was aboard the affected cruise. He posted another video the following day sharing how he felt. 

Rosmarin continued posting updates, saying on May 9 that he was going to be sent to Nebraska for "quarantine and testing." On May 11, he said he had arrived at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha.

So far, three passengers have died from the virus and by May 12, most passengers and crew members had returned home or were in the process of doing so. 

Rosmarin, meanwhile, has continued posting videos about what his day looks like at the quarantine facility. 

USA Today, ABC News and CNN have reported about the hantavirus cruise outbreak and have interviewed Rosmarin about his experience as a passenger and during quarantine. We found no legitimate news outlet questioning the veracity of his situation.

He also isn’t the only person reporters have interviewed from the ship, as some social media users speculated. We found news reports featuring other passengers including Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Çenet, who also posted on Instagram about the cruise. Çenet shared a photo at the beginning of his trip, and later shared a video about his experience during the outbreak, showing footage of the MV Hondius captain announcing a man had died on the ship.

Rosmarin, who has over 160,000 TikTok followers, has been posting travel photos, vlogs, brand partnerships content, and videos recommending restaurants since at least 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also urged his followers to get COVID-19 vaccines. But that’s not evidence he’s a crisis actor.

Neither is the fact that some of Rosmarin’s family members work in healthcare, emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. 

Social media users also wrongly claimed that he was in the photograph of a man in a hospital bed. The BBC published that image in 2022, and the corresponding article says it shows a COVID-19 patient named Henry Dyne from Surrey, England.

Credible information often falls short of what people want to know during breaking news events, and they fill that void with conspiracies, said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s  Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative. 

"In these moments, the most important thing people can do is wait for verified information," Wirtschafter said.

We rate claims Rosmarin is a crisis actor False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Microsoft says it's helping your browsing experience by using long-term AI memory across desktop and mobile versions of Edge.

The hydrogen-powered SUV claims 435 miles of range, a 5-minute fill-up and a refined driving experience. Here's why FCEV technology is a perfect product operating in the wrong market.

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have agreed in principle to form a joint venture (JV) aimed at reducing U.S. mobile dead zones through satellite connectivity, especially in rural areas and during emergencies when ground networks fail. Here are three of the customer benefits listed by the JV (as highlighted by Droid Life): Fewer coverage gaps: Will nearly eliminate dead zones in the U.S. currently without mobile service, reaching previously unserved areas. Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions. Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Revelation seen as serious blow to candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful

Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful, has been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The leaked voice memos and text messages were published on Wednesday by the Intercept Brasil, and later acknowledged by Flávio Bolsonaro, a far-right senator who is tied in polls with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October’s election.

President Donald Trump on multiple occasions has assured the public that high gasoline prices will “rapidly” or “quickly” decline “as soon as” the war with Iran ends. Energy experts told us that prices will start to fall when the conflict is resolved, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to where it was before the conflict began.

“For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy, said in an interview. But he told us that there are “a lot of different potential” outcomes depending on what happens when the war ends.

The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.50 per gallon as of the week ending May 11, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up $1.56, or 53%, from the average price of $2.94 during the week ending Feb. 23 – which was five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.

Gasoline prices spiked after Iran responded to the joint attack by blocking the Strait of Hormuz – a vital waterway in the Middle East for trade – stopping the vast majority of crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf region. About 20 million barrels of oil and oil products were exported through the strait per day in 2025, which was about one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade, according to the International Energy Agency.

The reduced supply caused oil prices to increase, and that led to the rise in gasoline prices, since the cost of oil makes up about half of what drivers pay at the pump. Because it’s a global oil market, “if something goes wrong anywhere, the price goes up everywhere,” Mark Finley, a nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in March.

But Trump has said repeatedly that gasoline prices will fall fast when the war concludes.

“As soon as it’s over, you’re going to see gasoline and oil drop like a rock,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on May 11.

About a week before that, on May 1, during a Florida event for seniors, Trump said that “it’s going to come down lower than it was,” referring to the price of gasoline. “When all of that stuff comes out,” he said, mentioning “pent up” oil in the Strait of Hormuz, “you’re going to see prices dropping on gasoline like you’ve never seen.”

The same day, at another event in Florida, the president said the price of gasoline will “snap back” in the end. “I believe it will snap back very, very quickly,” he said.

And Trump isn’t the only person in his administration to make such a claim. 

On May 4, in an interview with Fox News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is “also confident” that gasoline prices are “going to come down very quickly” at the end of the conflict with Iran. “This gasoline — this temporary aberration — will be over in a matter of weeks or a month,” he said.

Experts told us it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen in the long run. But they said it could be months, plural, before motorists see substantial price relief at the pump. Getting back to pre-war prices would take longer than Trump’s and Bessent’s remarks suggest, they said.

Expert Analysis

“When the strait opens in a meaningful way, it would likely have a fairly quick impact to start pushing prices down,” De Haan said, adding that price decreases will depend on how quickly oil tankers resume transporting shipments through the strait to increase the global supply.

“It’s very contingent on how much oil starts getting through the strait, whether it’s all or nothing,” he said. “But it’s going to take several weeks for those ships to reach destinations once it becomes open. So, at best, it’s probably going to still be two to three weeks before the flows of oil can normalize. So, at least several weeks, and potentially beyond that.”

“If the strait were to reopen today,” he said, “it would probably be early June until ships started going in and out,” and “it could be until July for some of those cargoes to start getting to the market.”

De Haan told us he was reluctant to make specific price predictions because of the uncertainty of the situation. But he did say that a return to average gasoline prices at less than $3 per gallon in the immediate future seems doubtful.

“Beyond the big drop, the initial big drop, it could take quite a bit longer for gas prices to more noticeably get back to like pre-war levels,” he said. “That’s going to take quite a bit of time, and the longer the situation goes on, the more time that could end up taking.”

Abhi Rajendran, a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy and the director of Oil Markets Research at Energy Intelligence, largely agreed. 

“Should the conflict actually find some path to resolution, then I think prices could come down,” he said. But how fast that happens is another matter.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be quick and look like before-the-conflict prices were,” Rajendran said. He said he doesn’t see $3 per gallon gasoline “anytime soon,” even if the conflict ends, because “there’s still damage that’s been done to the supply side and to inventory, and that’s going to be felt for a little while.”

After a while, Rajendran said, he could see gasoline prices settling at between $3.25 a gallon and $3.50 a gallon, which is “higher than they were before the conflict.”

Meanwhile, Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil, predicted that prices in many states could be “back in the $3-$3.50/gal neighborhood” in the final 100 days of the calendar year, when he said “gasoline prices almost always drop” because “demand slumps and the formula for motor fuel changes.” 

However, that projection could change, he said in an email to us, if the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz continues, or if a strong hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, which would “lengthen the $4-$4.75/gal pricing backdrop.”

“What happens between now and Labor Day is tougher” to forecast, he said. 

Other Projections

Back on April 16, in an interview with CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said prices would “certainly” decline after the conflict with Iran ends. But he was less sure about when the average price would again be below $3 a gallon.

“That could happen later this year,” or “that might not happen until next year,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

But one day before that, in an April 15 press briefing from the White House, Bessent, Wright’s fellow Cabinet secretary, said he was “optimistic” that “we can have $3 gas again” this year, between June 20 and Sept. 20.

Skip York, another nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice’s Baker Institute, told us that, like Wright, he believes $3 gasoline may not happen until next year.

“[R]eturning to $3/gal gas looks like more [of] a 2027 resolution,” he said in an email, in which he listed several reasons prices often “[go] up like a rocket, but down like a feather.” 

York said when wholesale gasoline prices rise, “retailers raise pump prices immediately to cover the expected cost of replacing inventory.” When wholesale prices come down, however, “retailers may still be selling higher‑cost inventory and wait for cheaper supplies before cutting prices.”

In addition, he said, “Retailers often wait for a sustained downward trend before reducing prices because a quick cut could force them to raise prices again if wholesale costs rebound.”

Market behavior and competition is also a factor. “Drivers tend to more actively shop when prices rise but less as they fall; that reduces competitive pressure to cut prices quickly,” he said.

Finally, York added, abrupt supply shocks, such as geopolitical events and refinery outages, “cause fast price increases driven by consumer fears of shortages,” while easing those risks and rebuilding inventories “takes time, so declines are more gradual.”

Federal Gasoline Tax Holiday?

As of May 14, the war with Iran had gone on for 75 days, which is much longer than the “four to five weeks” that Trump initially said he intended for it to last.

With the U.S. so far being unable to reach a deal with Iran to end the conflict, and having a ceasefire agreement with Iran that is on “massive life support,” as Trump said on May 11, the president has proposed temporarily suspending the federal tax on gasoline. 

That would reduce gasoline prices by about 18.4 cents per gallon and prices for diesel by about 24.4 cents per gallon. But that plan would also require approval from Congress, and it is not yet clear if there is enough bipartisan support to make that a law.

Furthermore, the experts said, eliminating the gasoline tax, even temporarily, could help keep prices more elevated than they otherwise would be.

“While relieving the gasoline tax would lower pump prices, that lower price also would encourage more consumption, meaning it would take longer to rebuild inventory,” York said. “If a policy doesn’t improve supply availability, it doesn’t really help restore physical fundamentals back to pre-conflict levels.”

De Haan also said that the plan for a federal gasoline tax holiday “could actually stimulate demand,” which would add to the imbalance between demand and supply and “could send prices higher.”

In a May 11 floor speech criticizing Trump on Iran, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “Senate Democrats will support real action to lower costs.” But he said a decrease of 18 cents per gallon is hardly enough.

“Eighteen cents isn’t a dollar fifty, which is how much the price of gas has gone up since this war started,” he said. “Americans don’t need just a few cents back.” He said the “best way to lower costs” was to end the war. 

Schumer said, “Trump could end this war tomorrow and prices would plummet by far more than 18 cents a gallon.”

But, as we explained, while experts have said that the price of gasoline will likely start going down not long after the war ends, it is less likely that the price will “plummet” as quickly, as Schumer suggested. 

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for May, the EIA projected that the average retail price for gasoline will be $3.88 for 2026 and $3.62 for 2027. That’s up from the average prices the agency projected in early February – before the war began — which were $2.91 in 2026 and $2.93 in 2027.

In its May analysis, the EIA said its most recent price projections assume that the Strait of Hormuz “will remain effectively closed through late May, with flows slowly starting to resume in late May or early June.” If that happens, the agency said it expects it will take “until late 2026 or early 2027 for most pre-conflict production and trade patterns to resume.”

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The post What Will Happen To Gasoline Prices When the Iran War Ends? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

There was wind, there was fire, there was Goodrem’s remarkable upper-range – resulting in a refreshingly self-assured offering from Australia

• ‘Sung by a silver robot from 1984!’ The 11 biggest bangers in Eurovision 2026

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Standing before a glistening crescent moon and adorned in more than 7,000 Swarovski crystals, Australia’s 2026 Eurovision hopeful Delta Goodrem delivered a powerful performance on the 70th anniversary of the global song contest – and become the first Australian act to qualify for the grand final since 2023.

Heading into the competition as an early favourite behind Eurovision heavy-hitters Denmark and Finland, Goodrem delivered a note-perfect rendition of her power-ballad entry, Eclipse. The track is impressive if a little formulaic – and of the 35 countries competing, 15 are represented by solo female performers, so Goodrem needed to find a way to stand out in a crowded field.

Louisiana had sued the FDA in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely

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The US supreme court upheld nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Thursday.

Louisiana sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely, arguing that it interfered with the state’s ban on abortion.

Thames at Ham designated as one of 13 new swimming areas across England to be monitored for water quality

The first designated bathing water area on the River Thames in London will welcome swimmers for the official start of the bathing season on Friday as one of 13 new monitored swimming areas across England.

The Thames at Ham, in south-west London, has been designated as a new river bathing water area after campaigners gathered evidence to show thousands of people use the river for swimming throughout the year.

Canvey Island foreshore, Essex

East Beach at West Bay, Bridport, Dorset

Falcon Meadow, Bungay, Suffolk

Granville Parade Beach, Sandgate, Kent

Little Shore, Amble, Northumberland

New Brighton Beach (east), Merseyside

Newton and Noss Creeks, Devon

Pangbourne Meadow, Berkshire

Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, Wiltshire

River Dee at Sandy Lane, Chester, Cheshire

River Fowey in Lostwithiel, Cornwall

River Swale in Richmond, Yorkshire

River Thames at Ham and Kingston, Greater London

Council of Europe members plan to change interpretation of ECHR to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers

Keir Starmer’s government has been accused of trying to water down legal protections for torture victims as ministers from 46 countries including the UK prepare to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers and foreign criminals.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, is expected to agree a “political declaration” on Friday with other members of the Council of Europe, which oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR).

Far-right Jewish marchers call for Palestinian villages to ‘burn’ as they storm through Muslim quarter of Old City

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation.

The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city.

The FBI said Thursday that it's still trying to locate Monica Witt, who is accused of defecting to Iran in 2013 and revealing highly classified U.S. intelligence.

‘Backward’ photo panned for display of patriarchy, signaling that ‘women’s voices don’t matter in shaping global order’

By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives.

Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power.

If state’s house passes bill, redrawn map could could give state Republicans a 5-1 congressional majority

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On Thursday, the Louisiana state senate voted 27-10 to pass a new congressional map that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black House districts. The resulting map could give Louisiana Republicans a 5-1 congressional majority.

The supreme court’s recent decision in Louisiana v Callais, a case that centered on the state’s congressional maps, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The fallout from the decision was swift, with several other southern states calling special sessions to pass redistricting maps that would limit Black voting power.

Transition strengthens coordination of DOE’s commercialization programs and support for early-stage energy startups

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) has announced it will take over stewardship of the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP), one of the Department’s flagship startup programs. Today’s announcement came during the program’s annual LEEP Demo Day, which features presentations from LEEP fellows, expert panels, and interactive discussions with startups.

LEEP recruits top entrepreneurial talent through a competitive national process and embeds them at DOE National Laboratories for two-year fellowships. During this time, fellows receive entrepreneurial training, mentorship, technical support, and access to world-class facilities to develop and launch energy and manufacturing startups. The program also connects participants to local, regional, and national innovation ecosystems, helping early-stage companies overcome barriers to commercialization. DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) launched LEEP in 2015. Under AMMTO’s leadership for the past decade, 202 LEEP startups have attracted more than $6 billion in follow-on funding and created over 3,900 jobs.

“LEEP has a strong track record of helping entrepreneurs turn promising technologies into real companies with real-world impact,” said DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and OTC Director Anthony Pugliese. “We’re excited to welcome the program into OTC’s portfolio and build on that success by connecting these innovators more directly to the Department’s broader commercialization resources and partnerships.”

Through LEEP, offices across DOE support technologies that span the entire energy ecosystem. By bringing LEEP under OTC, DOE is strengthening connections across its commercialization programs, from early-stage innovation through startup formation and growth, while improving coordination and broadening support for entrepreneurs working with the National Labs. OTC extends a warm thank you to DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office for its stewardship of LEEP to date and continued collaboration into the future.

For more information on LEEP, visit OTC’s LEEP web page.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

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The company is ready to do battle with Meta and Google in the smart glasses marketplace.

May 14, 2026 — Autonomous Resource Corporation (ARC), a Delaware corporation, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest multi-program science and energy laboratory, announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a strategic public-private partnership to accelerate the on-demand manufacture of qualified, mission-critical components for U.S. national security applications.

ORNL’s exascale supercomputer is delivering world-leading performance. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The partnership — known as the Exascale Foundry — will combine ORNL’s computing and manufacturing capabilities with ARC’s ARCNet distributed manufacturing platform to create a closed-loop system for AI-enabled materials and manufacturing qualification and autonomous production at defense-relevant scale.

“The United States faces an urgent need to rebuild its manufacturing capacity for critical defense components,” said Bryan Wisk, CEO of ARC. “By combining ORNL’s world-leading computational, materials science, and manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous production infrastructure, we can compress manufacturing and qualification timelines from years to months and deliver manufactured parts at the volumes the warfighter needs.”

Partnership Highlights

Under the MOU, ARC will deploy advanced manufacturing equipment organized into seven production nodes connected to ORNL via ARC’s secure ARCNet infrastructure. ARC will expand capability through ORNL’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

ORNL will provide access to HPC expertise for simulation-driven materials characterization and qualification, along with technologies developed at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF), the Department of Energy’s only large-scale, open-access advanced manufacturing facility. ORNL’s Peregrine AI software, which has analyzed over 1.9 million additive manufacturing layers, will be integrated into ARC’s production nodes for real-time adaptive control and quality assurance.

This partnership also supports DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security and drive energy innovation. ARC and ORNL’s collective capabilities will help re-envision advanced manufacturing and industrial productivity, accelerate defense production and qualification, and secure critical supply chain elements.

“ORNL’s advanced manufacturing and computing capabilities are uniquely positioned to help accelerate the transition of laboratory-proven technologies into production-scale defense manufacturing,” said Moe Khaleel, ORNL associate laboratory director for National Security Sciences. “Partnering with ARC ensures we are transitioning our research into real production outcomes.”

The initial implementation will focus on high-temperature nickel superalloy turbine components for autonomous air vehicle engines using metal binder jetting technology, directly addressing demonstrated production bottlenecks in the U.S. defense supply chain.

ORNL Chief Manufacturing Officer Craig Blue added, “This partnership exemplifies the type of relationship necessary to build and grow domestic supply chains for our national security.”

About Autonomous Resource Corporation

ARC is a New York–headquarted corporation building and operating an AI-enabled, autonomous manufacturing platform for national security and critical infrastructure applications. ARC’s ARCNet connects distributed production cells into a secure, federated manufacturing grid capable of producing qualified components at scale. ARC’s leadership team brings deep experience across defense technology, capital markets, materials science, and additive manufacturing at production scale.

Source: ORNL

The post Autonomous Resource Corporation, ORNL Partner to Accelerate AI-Enabled Defense Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Groups say supreme court justice, who owns oil stocks, may be violating ethics codes by participating in certain cases

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil companies, may be violating court ethics codes by participating in certain cases that could benefit big oil, government watchdog groups say.

In a Thursday letter, a coalition of watchdog organizations called on the Senate judiciary committee to investigate Alito, the sole supreme court justice with holdings in energy companies.

The way Florida treats kids enrolled in its low-income children's health insurance program is an outlier in the United States, a Democratic congresswoman said.

"Governor (Ron) DeSantis is breaking the law," U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., wrote April 29 on X. "Florida is the only state in the nation kicking children off their affordable health coverage and preventing over 40,000 children from getting KidCare coverage." 

KidCare is Florida’s subsidized health insurance for children from low-income families — the state’s version of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. 

Florida officials challenged a federal rule that requires keeping children enrolled in affordable health insurance — and Florida is the only state taking children off its program because of missed payments. State officials removed about 43,000 children from December 2024 to November 2025. 

The DeSantis administration has filed lawsuits against both the Biden and Trump administrations to exempt Florida or reverse the rule. The rule requires states to keep children continuously enrolled in subsidized health insurance plans for 12 months even if parents miss a payment.

Two of Florida’s lawsuits have been unsuccessful; one is pending.

"There are no other states doing this," said Joan Alker, director of Georgetown University’s  Center for Children and Families. "Florida is removing thousands of children, violating federal law, and saying they aren’t going to expand their program because of this federal rule."

In her post, Castor shared an article by KFF, a health policy think tank, that described Florida’s yearslong delay of a KidCare program expansion, which state lawmakers approved in 2023.

When asked for comment, Jay Rhoden, a Castor spokesperson, referenced the KFF article and said other states, such as Texas, have asked the federal government to rescind the rule requiring continuous coverage but haven’t defied the law.

DeSantis’ office directed PolitiFact’s questions to the state's Agency for Health Care Administration, which helps oversee KidCare and has been involved in the litigation. The agency did not respond to our email seeking comment.

Florida fights federal rule, delays expansion  

Florida’s KidCare is a Medicaid expansion program for children whose families earn too much money to qualify for traditional Medicaid but do not earn enough money to buy private or marketplace insurance. 

The federal government pays about 69 cents of every dollar spent on KidCare, with the rest funded through state funds and monthly premiums of about $15 to $20, depending on household income.

Florida is among the states with the highest number of uninsured children, with more than 400,000, or 8.5%, lacking insurance, according to 2024 federal data.

In May 2023, the Florida Legislature unanimously approved expanding KidCare’s eligibility threshold from 200% to 300% of the federal poverty level. That means children in a family of four qualify for coverage if the annual household income is $93,600 or less, up from about $66,000. DeSantis signed it into law in June 2023.

A 2023 House analysis estimated the expansion would cover 42,000 more Florida children. Studies have found that subsidized healthcare coverage improves children’s lives by increasing access to care and improving long-term health outcomes.

Also in 2023, the federal government approved the "continuous eligibility" rule that required states to provide 12 months of healthcare coverage for children enrolled in subsidized programs. The rule ensures children’s coverage wouldn’t lapse in cases of nonpayment or administrative issues. Alker said children sometimes lose coverage because of a bureaucratic mistake, such as missing a notice when they move.

The DeSantis administration sued the federal government in an attempt to nix the rule, and also submitted a waiver to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to seek approval of the KidCare expansion and to ask the agency to let the state continue removing children from the program for missed premiums.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved Florida’s waiver to expand KidCare in December 2024 but said the state must comply with the federal rule.

From December 2024 through November 2025, Florida removed about 43,000 children from the program for premium payment lapses, according to data obtained by KFF.

"Florida is an extreme outlier. Thousands of children are losing their health insurance," said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit advocating for the state to implement the expansion. "Not only is it the only state suing, but it's also the only one not complying with both state and federal law."

A federal judge dismissed Florida’s first lawsuit over the rule, and the  state withdrew its second lawsuit in February. 

Florida is now suing the federal government for a third time, accusing it of Freedom of Information Act violations related to the expansion waiver and asking the court to strike the condition that Florida must abide by the continuous enrollment requirement.

Florida officials have pointed to ongoing litigation for the delay in expanding the program.

"You can sue over federal policy you don’t like, but you're supposed to comply with the law at the same time," Bullard said.

The Trump administration has not enforced the continuous enrollment rule in Florida, or issued any warnings to the state.

Florida Health Justice Project, a nonprofit legal aid group, and the National Health Law Program sued Florida’s Medicaid and KidCare agencies in March to implement the approved expansion.

Our ruling

Castor said, "Florida is the only state in the nation kicking children off their affordable health coverage."

The state is the only one in the country not complying with a federal rule requiring states to keep children enrolled in subsidized healthcare for 12 months regardless of missed premium payments. Florida has removed at least 43,000 children from KidCare for nonpayment since December 2024.

We rate Castor’s statement True.

These exercise bikes give you the Peloton experience without the hefty price tag.

A growing number of writers are leaving Substack for alternatives most people haven't heard of like Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, and Passport. The reason, writes The Verge's Emma Roth, is the "platform's increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business." From the report: Sean Highkin, the creator of the NBA-focused publication The Rose Garden Report, tells The Verge that he makes "significantly more money" after switching from Substack to Ghost last April. "When I first joined up, [Substack] gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me, which led to a good amount of growth," Highkin says. "But once I wasn't one of the 'new recruited talent' they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate." Highkin now pays $2,052 per year using Ghost and an add-on called Outpost, compared to $4,968 per year on Substack. The Rose Garden Report's subscriber base has grown 22 percent since the end of 2024, Highkin says. [...] Substack launched in 2017 as a platform that allows writers to create their own newsletters and manage paying subscribers. Unlike some of its biggest rivals, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of total subscription revenue. That tax may not seem substantial at first, but it quickly adds up as creators gain subscribers and begin charging more for their subscriptions. A calculator on Substack's own website estimates that for a newsletter charging $10 per month with 400 subscribers, the total monthly cost -- including the platform's 10 percent cut and credit card processing fees -- would add up to $636. That cost jumps to $15,900 per month with 10,000 subscribers and skyrockets to $79,500 per month for 50,000 members -- nearly $1 million per year. Many Substack rivals charge a flat monthly fee, rather than a commission. Ghost, an open-source platform for blogs and newsletters, starts at $15 per month with 1,000 members for website creation, email newsletter capabilities, and a custom domain. Beehiiv, a creator platform with tools for launching a newsletter, website, and podcast, is free for up to 2,500 subscribers with limited access to certain features, like a built-in ad network, while its other plans vary in price based on subscriber count. A person with 10,000 subscribers, for example, will pay $96 per month for Beehiiv's "Scale" plan. There's also Kit, a newsletter platform that offers a tiered pricing model similar to Beehiiv, costing $116 per month with 10,000 subscribers on its "Creator" plan. It's not just the 10% fee critics are complaining about; they also argue the platform offers limited customization and third-party integrations compared to some of the mentioned alternatives, heavily promotes its own branding and social features, and makes creators more dependent on its ecosystem. Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk argues that creators should be able to build their own brands without the platform taking center stage: "We don't want to take credit for the work of our content creators." While writers can export subscribers, content, and some payment relationships, they cannot take Substack "followers" or Apple-managed iOS billing data with them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.

In a two-year review report on the DMA, the European Commission notes that alternative browser usage has soared, data portability solutions are spreading, alternative application stores are growing, and much more. On top of that, end users can now opt out of companies combining various data sources for profiling, and a “significant share” of EU users have apparently done so. Furthermore, end users in the EU can now remove preinstalled applications (whereas American users cannot) and they can download their data from big technology companies and authorise other companies to use that data.

Mozilla published a blog post detailing how it has profited from the Digital Markets Act, and it ain’t no peanuts: every ten seconds, someone on iOS chooses Firefox on iOS’ browser choice screen, which amounts to more than six million Firefox users on iOS. They also tend to stick with Firefox on iOS, as retention is five times higher when this browser is chosen through a browser choice screen.

Academic analysis points the same way. Independent researchers compared Firefox daily active users in the EU with 43 non-EU countries. Comparing the 15 months before and after browser choice screens rolled out on iOS, they found that Firefox daily active users (DAU) were 113% higher in the EU than it would have been without the DMA. On Android, it was 12% higher. The smaller Android effect is due to the fact that Firefox usage there started from a much higher base, and the Android rollout has been more uneven than on iOS. The research also shows that the DMA’s effect is growing over time.

↫ Gemma Petrie and Tasos Stampelos on the Mozilla blog

Both the underlying data in the EC report and the data Mozilla provides indicates that the Digital Markets Act is having real and tangible effects, for end users, developers, and companies alike. The neverending barrage of anti-EU and anti-DMA propaganda from Apple, the US government, and their PR attack dogs seems to have been weirdly justified, from the American perspective: basic consumer protection legislation does, indeed, work to lessen the stranglehold major technology companies have on our lives.

And considering just NVIDIA’s market cap alone is now equal to more than 17% of the United States’ GDP, it makes sense the Americans are unhappy with the DMA. That’s going to make one hell of a sound when it pops.

Dana Williamson, who has ties to Gavin Newsom, conspired to steal gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra’s campaign funds

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Dana Williamson, a top California political strategist with ties to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra, pleaded guilty on Thursday to fraud charges, an admission that is poised to fuel other candidates’ attacks in the race.

Federal authorities say Williamson conspired to steal $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to Becerra, who was not named in the plea deal, and divert the money to his chief of staff, Sean McCluskie.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government plans to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.

Google's annual developers conference kicks off Tuesday, May 19. We expect to hear updates on Gemini AI, Android XR, smart glasses and more.

A CBS News investigation showed the broker had worked with dangerous "chameleon carriers," thousands of which evade federal safety enforcement by reincarnating under new names.

Meta opens up ways to develop for its glasses, just as Google's glasses draw near.

Greater Manchester mayor would need to win Makerfield seat before launching campaign for Labour leadership

Andy Burnham now has a potential route back to parliament and a chance to become Labour’s next leader after an MP said he would trigger a byelection by standing down from his seat.

The move ended days of speculation about whether Burnham could secure a possible path back into Westminster, and underlined the increasingly precarious nature of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Andy Burnham has announced he will attempt to return to Westminster after the Labour MP Josh Simons said he will vacate his Makerfield seat in order for Burnham to run in a byelection. It follows a day of breaking news in which the health secretary, Wes Streeting, resigned, saying he has lost confidence in the prime minister, and Angela Rayner announced she had been cleared by the HMRC. Where does this leave Keir Starmer, the leadership of the Labour party, and the country?

A Bitcoin holder reportedly recovered 5 BTC worth nearly $400,000 with the help of Anthropic's Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they changed their wallet password while "stoned" and forgot it, unable to regain access for more than 11 years. Tom's Hardware reports: After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point. [...] It seems that the user already had some candidate passwords and multiple wallets stored on their PC. They'd been trying to brute-force their way into the locked file with btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, but to no success. Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. The HD addresses recovered by the seed phrase matched those of a specific file on their computer, confirming that it was the wallet that held the 5 BTC, but it remained encrypted. Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data. Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren't combined properly. With the bug ironed out and an older wallet predating the password change, Claude successfully ran btcrecover and was able to decrypt the private keys, allowing cprkrn to transfer the five "lost" BTC to their current wallet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 15, No. 1,069.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 15, No. 1,791.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 15, No. 599.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 15, No. 803.

Announcing he would step down as an MP, Labour’s Josh Simons said: ‘I am standing aside so that Andy Burnham can return to his home’

Al Carns, the defence minister first elected in 2024, will launch his own leadership bid if a contest starts, Sky News is reporting.

Asked about this last night, Carns told Sky: “I’m just a humble junior minister.”

Unless Labour understands that insecurity on an emotional level as well as on an economic one, we will continue to lose voters who would naturally align with us. Working-class voters have not simply left Labour. Many feel Labour stopped understanding their lives, and so they looked elsewhere.

What is the point of Labour if it does not represent Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent, Barnsley, Swansea and Aberdeen? What is the point of the Labour party if it cannot replace despair and frustration with hope, stability and purpose? The party was founded to give ordinary working people security, dignity and bargaining power over their lives.

A ship was taken by unknown parties toward Iranian waters after an Indian-flagged vessel was attacked off Oman.

Since November, state has seen 47 cases of people accidentally ingesting poisonous wild mushrooms

Health authorities in California’s Napa county reported that three people had been hospitalized after consuming poisonous wild mushrooms as the state continues to grapple with an “​​unprecedented outbreak” of toxic mushroom illnesses.

Since November 2025, California has seen 47 cases of people accidentally foraging and eating poisonous wild mushrooms, including death caps, which can resemble edible species, and western destroying angel mus​​hrooms. Four people have died and several have required liver transplants.

Brett Blackman was convicted on charges including healthcare and Medicare fraud, and faces decades in prison.

Trump Mobile's $499 gold-toned phone has faced delays since it was unveiled in June 2025.

The next installment of the Grand Theft Auto series is poised to dominate 2026. Here's what we know so far.

More than a dozen American CEOs are accompanying President Trump on his trip to China. That's not unusual.

The launch is being backed by the American Mexican Leadership Council, a new national organization also debuting Thursday to elevate Mexican American leadership and advance U.S.-Mexico collaboration.

Following a series of disappointing inflation reports, credit card users in debt should consider these questions now.

You'll be able to watch the July event from home.

KELLY HALL
Staff Reporter

On April 23, Zara Larsson headlined the spring concert hosted and planned by the university’s programming board, The Crew, at the Bob Carpenter Center. 

Like many other students, when I heard that Larsson was coming to campus, I knew I had to get tickets to the show. The singer-songwriter famous for hits like “Lush Life,” has blown up on TikTok over the past year for her colorful costumes, bedazzled makeup looks and steady vocals. 

Although I am not her biggest superfan, I knew a good handful of her songs that I thought were catchy, and wanted to be in the stadium when she went on stage to perform. 

Even though it seems like she has just recently gone viral on the internet over the past year or so, Larsson’s music career spans back over a decade. Songs such as “Lush Life” and “Ain’t My Fault,” which are still on her setlist now, were released in 2015 and 2016, respectively. 

The second I walked through the doors of the Bob Carpenter Center, I was so glad that my friends and I were lucky enough to snag tickets. All of the attendees were dressed up in colorful outfits, makeup and glitter, and the energy was incredible even in the tiny row that I was sitting in. 

The girls I was surrounded by were so fun, and we were all dancing together by the end of the show — even though I did not know them an hour prior. 

Larsson’s stage presence was insane, and she and her incredible backup dancers had the entire building dancing and singing. 

I loved how, after a couple of her songs, her backup dancers even had their own moment to shine. They all had introductions accompanied by music and got the opportunity to sing and dance on stage for the fans. I thought it was a great way to show that the main performer isn’t the only important part of putting on a show. 

The hour went by in a flash, and I was left in awe afterwards, wishing that the set was longer. My personal favorite songs that she performed included “Lush Life,” “Midnight Sun” and “Pretty Ugly.”

I went to The Crew’s spring concert last year, and even though I absolutely loved that one too, there was something so fun and free about Larsson’s performance this year. The show was a 10/10, and when my friends and I hopped in the car afterwards to drive home, we immediately played the songs that she had just performed live. 

This show even had me considering buying a ticket to her upcoming tour… even though it is a European tour. Will I fly all the way to the United Kingdom to see her perform again with her backup dancers, this time with an even longer set? I guess we will have to wait and see.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Princeton University will soon require exams to be supervised for the first time in 100 years -- all thanks to students using artificial intelligence to cheat. For 133 years, the Ivy League school's honor code allowed students to take exams without a professor present, but on Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring for all in-person exams starting this summer. A "significant" number of undergraduate students and faculty requested the change, "given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread," the college's dean, Michael Gordin, wrote in a letter, according to The Wall Street Journal. Princeton's honor system dates back to 1893, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors -- or an impartial person to supervise students -- during examinations, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The honor code has long been a point of pride for Princeton. However, artificial intelligence and cellphones have made it easier for students to cheat -- and even harder for others to spot, Gordin wrote. Despite the changes to the policy, Princeton will still require students to state: "I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination," according to the Journal. Students are also more reluctant to report cheating, according to the policy proposal. Students are more likely now to anonymously report cheating due to fears of "doxxing or shaming among their peer groups" online, the proposal says, according to the school newspaper. Under the new guidelines, instructors will be present during exams to act "as a witness to what happens," but are instructed not to interfere with students. If a suspected honor code infraction occurs, they will report it to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judge called Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata’s deportation to the Democratic Republic of Congo ‘likely illegal’

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Colombian woman back to the US from the Democratic Republic of Congo, after she was deported to the African country that had refused to accept her.

The deportation of Adriana María Quiroz Zapata “was likely illegal”, the US district judge Richard Leon ruled on Wednesday.

Have $10,000 in your savings account now? Here are three reasons why you should move into a CD account this month.

Gautam Adani, richest man in Asia, was accused of conspiring to pay $250m in bribes to Indian government officials

The US Department of Justice is dropping its fraud charges against the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, the richest man in Asia, after he hired a new legal team led by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, according to new reports.

In an undisclosed April meeting at the justice department, Trump’s personal lawyer, Robert J Giuffra Jr, said that Adani would invest $10bn in the US economy and create 15,000 jobs if prosecutors dropped the charges against him, according to the New York Times and Bloomberg.

An Oklahoma judge granted bond to former death row inmate Richard Glossip on Thursday, laying the groundwork for his first release from prison since 1997.

The £20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to Joy Is My Middle Name, a collection about navigating race, addiction and womanhood

A debut poetry collection with themes including race, addiction and womanhood has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

Announcement of taskforce comes after resignations of two congressmen amid sexual misconduct allegations

• US politics live – latest updates

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, on Wednesday announced a bipartisan effort to combat sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill.

The “partnership” led by the chairs of the Republican and Democratic women’s caucuses – congresswomen Kat Cammack of Florida and Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico – aims to “identify reforms and solutions to make Congress a safer work environment for women and all survivors”, the leaders said in a joint statement.

LIVINGSTON, N.J., May 14, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced CoreWeave Sandboxes, an execution layer that gives AI researchers and platform teams secure, isolated environments for running reinforcement learning (RL), agent tool use, and model evaluation. The new offering is available on a customer’s own CoreWeave infrastructure or as a serverless runtime through Weights & Biases (W&B).

As AI systems evolve from generating outputs to taking actions, training them requires more than compute alone. Advanced AI workflows such as RL and evaluation require isolated execution environments that run code safely, maintain information across steps, and scale across concurrent workloads.

What’s more, most organizations lack a unified execution layer for RL, agent tool use, and model evaluation. Instead, they rely on custom-built systems, loosely integrated tools, or third-party sandbox products that sit outside their core infrastructure. As scale, concurrency, and workflow complexity increase, those disconnected approaches become harder to manage, less reliable, and more difficult to govern.

CoreWeave Sandboxes provides that unified execution layer through two access models: on-cluster for platform teams running training on CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) and serverless through W&B for researchers and applied AI teams who want enterprise-grade isolation without the infrastructure overhead.

Designed for Scale, Simplicity, and Control

Available now through the Cloud Console and the Python SDK, CoreWeave Sandboxes runs directly within a customer’s CKS cluster, allowing teams to run RL, agent tool use, and model evaluation workloads alongside their AI jobs without adding a separate execution stack. At launch, it includes a Python SDK for creating and managing isolated, secure environments that can handle complex back-and-forth tasks and run multiple jobs at the same time. Built-in session management, storage integration, and monitoring tools help teams run these workflows with less operational overhead.

For teams without an existing CoreWeave cluster, or those looking to extend their current compute, CoreWeave Sandboxes is also available as a serverless runtime through Weights & Biases. Researchers authenticate with an existing W&B API key, install the Python client, and can start running sandboxes in minutes with no cluster provisioning or infrastructure decisions required. Every sandbox runs in its own fully isolated virtual environment by default – meaning a failure, memory spike, or runaway process in one sandbox cannot affect any other. When something does go wrong, teams don’t have to hunt across disconnected systems to find out why: sandbox activity is captured directly in the same W&B run view as training metrics, so debugging happens in context rather than across tools.

“CoreWeave Sandboxes solves a real gap in our AI research stack: secure, isolated code execution at scale directly in our existing compute,” said Brian Belgodere, senior technical staff member, AI/ML Systems, IBM Research. “Our reinforcement learning workflows spin up thousands of sandboxes in parallel per training step, each with its own container image and resource boundaries. Researchers run sandboxes within minutes of a pip install cwsandbox, with no infrastructure knowledge required.”

“As agent tool use and evaluation move to production scale, teams need an execution layer that behaves like the rest of their infrastructure — governed, observable, and close to the workflows already running on CoreWeave,” said Chen Goldberg, EVP, Product and Engineering at CoreWeave. “CoreWeave Sandboxes closes the execution gap in reinforcement learning and agent workflows without requiring teams to build custom execution systems around them. And for teams that want these capabilities without managing their own clusters, the serverless path through Weights & Biases makes that same execution layer accessible in minutes.”

Addressing the Growing Complexity of AI Workflows

“Managing separate clusters and scheduling sandboxes across different node types lacked a unified solution, costing us time and resources. CoreWeave Sandboxes eliminated that issue,” said Roman Soletskyi, AI scientist, Mistral. “We now run hundreds of concurrent sandboxes on CPU nodes and alongside Slurm training jobs on GPU nodes, all through a single setup. The Python SDK let our researchers get started immediately, and the CoreWeave team worked closely with us to adapt the open-source SDK to fit seamlessly into our codebase.”

“Enterprises are under pressure to build agentic AI automation as fast as possible, so they’re looking for any help to accelerate the time from idea to live agent,” said Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst, Constellation Research. “As they enter the next stages of agentic AI automation, they need to support reward verification and evaluation without adding custom infrastructure to the environments they already run. Purpose-built execution that stays inside existing training infrastructure reduces operational sprawl and removes the fragility of homegrown sandbox systems, a gap that general-purpose and CPU-only sandbox vendors are not designed to solve.”

About CoreWeave

CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.

Source: CoreWeave

The post CoreWeave Sandboxes Launches to Accelerate Reinforcement Learning, Agent Tool Use, and Model Evaluation appeared first on HPCwire.

Admiral Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S. forces have destroyed more than 90% of Iran's inventory of 8,000 naval mines.

Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.

Classic 7 is a Windows 10 (IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021) modification made to look 1:1 to Windows 7. It has all of the goodies that Windows 7 had along with some extras included! Classic 7 features a 1:1 OOBE recreation, meaning it’ll feel just like your PC simplified once more.

↫ Classic 7 website

As Micheal MJD’s video shows, this is much more than a mere theme, and extends far deeper into the operating system than these kinds of projects generally do. I have no idea how stable this really is, or if it’s even remotely legal to do something like this, but who the hell cares – this is incredibly fun, and seems quite well done.

May 14, 2026 — Today, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $1.5 billion over the next decade toward the NSF X-Labs initiative to tackle pressing scientific challenges through novel and innovative research partnerships. This substantial long-term investment underscores NSF’s commitment to new models of research outside of traditional institutions, reflecting the truly interdisciplinary nature of today’s modern science ecosystem.

Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock

NSF X-Labs are independent teams of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs pursuing milestone-based federal funding to solve specific scientific challenges.

The first round of NSF X-Labs funding opportunities invites proposals on two topics:

• Scientific Instrumentation for Sensing and Imaging — NSF is seeking X-Labs to build the next generation of scientific instruments, drawing on quantum sensing, artificial intelligence-driven computational imaging and entirely new chemical modalities.
• Quantum Systems: Interconnects and Integrated Photonics — NSF is seeking X-Labs to develop novel components to transfer quantum information and integrate heterogeneous quantum systems — key enablers of the computing frontier beyond classical systems.

The NSF X-Labs initiative will explore innovative models for funding and sharing high-value scientific research infrastructure and results. The design choices underpinning these efforts are informed by thoughtful science policy scholarship and entrepreneurship from both emerging and established think tanks, research experts, congressionally chartered study commissions and the broader scientific community.

“The NSF X-Labs initiative represents our ambitious commitment to meeting the needs of the scientific enterprise today and tomorrow,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “With an initial investment of up to $1.5 billion in independent, milestone-driven research teams pursuing sector-defining platform capabilities, we’re creating the conditions for transformative breakthroughs and accelerating America’s leadership in the technologies that will define this century.”

“NSF X-Labs represent a bold step forward in revitalizing American innovation, consistent with our goal of expanding possibilities for American scientists. I encourage all federal research agencies to follow suit. By backing a new generation of independent research organizations, we are giving entrepreneurial teams of scientists and engineers the autonomy, resources and milestone-driven focus to tackle challenges that were difficult to pursue in conventional academic and industry labs, opening brand new lines of inquiry. This is how we build the scientific institutions of the 21st century and secure our technological leadership for decades to come,” said Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

NSF X-Labs, initially previewed during the early design stages as Tech Labs, was launched through a request for information (RFI) in December 2025, grounded in the recognition that many of today’s science and technology acceleration and translation challenges require new approaches with coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to succeed. NSF X-Labs will move beyond traditional research outputs (e.g., publications and datasets), with sufficient resources, financial runway and independence to transition critical technology from early concepts or prototypes to commercially viable platforms ready for private investment to scale and deploy.

NSF issued the NSF X-Labs science and technology topics and associated funding opportunities as an Other Transactions Agreement Solutions Offering, a mechanism that allows NSF to release multiple opportunities in specific science and technology topic areas via topic announcements. Topics will center on science and technology areas where U.S. competitiveness is a priority and where pressing challenges exist. NSF anticipates making a significant investment in large, multiyear awards for selected teams. Additional topics for scientific challenges will be announced in the coming weeks.

To help shape the initiative and inform the program’s initial topics, the NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) invited input from the broader community through an RFI. In response, NSF TIP received constructive feedback and has used that input to inform this first funding opportunity. TIP will further consider how to incorporate feedback from the RFI into future opportunities.

To learn more about the initiative and how to apply, read the NSF X-Labs funding opportunity and topic announcements and plan to join an introductory webinar. You must register online to join the webinar.

Source: NSF

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: The U.S. has cleared around 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip, the H200, but not a single delivery has been made so far, three people familiar with the matter said, leaving a major technology deal in limbo as CEO Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. [...] Before U.S. export curbs tightened, Nvidia commanded about 95% of China's advanced chip market. China once accounted for 13% of its revenue, and Huang has previously estimated the country's AI market alone would be worth $50 billion this year. The U.S. Commerce Department has approved around 10 Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com to purchase Nvidia's H200 chips, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. A handful of distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn have also been approved, they said. Buyers are permitted to purchase either directly from Nvidia or through those intermediaries and each approved customer can purchase up to 75,000 chips under the U.S. licensing terms, two of them said. Despite U.S. approval, deals have stalled, as Chinese firms pulled back after guidance from Beijing, one source said. The shift in China was partly triggered by changes on the U.S. side, though exactly what changed remains unclear, the person added. In Beijing, pressure is mounting to block or tightly vet the orders, a separate fourth source said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed that view, telling a Senate hearing last month that "the Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they're trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's $99 screenless Whoop rival may get users in the door, but the company is betting AI coaching features will keep them coming back.

Details of case in which group deny abusing girls for several years restricted amid dispute with media over transparency

Six men have gone on trial at Bristol crown court accused of grooming and sexually assaulting vulnerable teenage girls in the city.

They were allegedly part of a large group of men who abused girls over several years. All six men deny the charges against them, which involved “multiple complainants”.

Celeste Calocane gives evidence for first time at inquiry into Valdo Calocane’s 2023 attacks

The mother of the man who killed three people in an attack in Nottingham in 2023 has told an inquiry that the mental health system is broken and that until there is a crisis “no one listens to you”.

Valdo Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to a suspended hospital order in January 2024 after killing the students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and Ian Coates, a 65-year-old caretaker, on 13 June 2023 and attempting to kill three others.

A judge set a $500,000 bond in the 1997 murder case headed for retrial after a supreme court decision

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An Oklahoma judge on Thursday allowed Richard Glossip, a former death row prisoner, to be released on bond after almost 30 years behind bars, as he awaits a retrial over a 1997 killing that put him on the brink of execution three separate times.

The decision clears the way for Glossip, 63, to leave prison for the first time since his arrest nearly three decades ago. Last year, the US supreme court threw out his conviction. His longstanding claims of innocence have drawn support from Kim Kardashian and other prominent figures.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, who was appointed to the role last year, told staff on Thursday that he is stepping down.

LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., May 14, 2026 — BrainChip Inc., a leading provider of ultra-low power, high-performance, neuromorphic AI IP, today announced a significant expansion of its software partner ecosystem. Leading industry innovators MulticoreWare, P-Product and BeEmotion.ai are now collaborating with BrainChip to develop and optimize advanced machine learning models tailored for the new Akida AKD1500 processor.

BrainChip is dedicated to the business of marketing and selling semiconductor intellectual property and system-on-chip designs specifically engineered for machine learning applications. By integrating the expertise of these strategic partners, BrainChip aims to provide customers with a robust library of “Akida-ready” models that leverage the unique technology advantages of the AKD1500 platform.

Strategic Collaborations to Drive Innovation

• MulticoreWare, Inc.: MulticoreWare delivers customized AI solutions enabling high‑performance, energy‑efficient execution across CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and AI accelerators, and is leveraging BrainChip’s technology to develop edge‑optimized models that support fast and efficient execution cycles for machine‑learning use cases.
• P-Product, Inc.: As a specialist in software products and services, P-Product is working closely with BrainChip and their customers on port custom AI/ML models to Akida platforms within AP and MCU-based products. Their efforts are centered on utilizing the technical advantages of neuromorphic computing in diverse software environments for effective model translation.
• BeEmotion.ai: Expanding the Akida ecosystem with BeEmotion.ai’s unique capabilities to combine models into use-cases, BeEmotion.ai will focus on creating sophisticated models that take full advantage of the AKD1500’s low-power architecture for edge AI applications.

Technical synergy and go-to-market integration

These partnerships include joint appearances at industry events, and the creation of technical collateral such as webinars, videos and podcasts.

“This collaboration represents a pivotal step in making ultra-low power AI more accessible to developers,” said Steve Brightfield, CMO of BrainChip. “By working with MulticoreWare, P-Product, and BeEmotion.ai, we are ensuring that the Akida AKD1500 is supported by a world-class software ecosystem capable of delivering high-performance, brain-inspired solutions to the edge.”

About BrainChip Holdings Ltd.

BrainChip is the worldwide leader in edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida, uses neuromorphic principles to mimic the human brain, analyzing only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition and processing data with unmatched efficiency, precision and energy economy. These innovations make low-power edge AI deployable across industries such as aerospace, autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial IoT, consumer devices and wearables.

Source: BrainChip

The post BrainChip Expands AI Ecosystem with Strategic Software Partners appeared first on HPCwire.

Mike Banks, who led Trump’s border crackdown, resigned weeks after reports of prostitution allegations

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Mike Banks, the border patrol chief who oversaw the most aggressive militarization of the US southern border in recent history, has resigned with immediate effect.

“It’s just time,” Banks told Fox News in an interview. “I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure, most disastrous, most chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen.”

Q: Has President Trump asked for a billion dollars for the ballroom?

A: Since the White House announced plans in July for a ballroom, the president has promised to fund its construction without using public money. But in May congressional Republicans proposed $1 billion in federal funding for “security adjustments and upgrades” including at the White House and the ballroom site.

FULL ANSWER

President Donald Trump has claimed that the new White House ballroom would be privately funded, using “not one dime of government money.” But Republicans in Congress have proposed $1 billion in public funds for “security” features, prompting criticism from Democrats that this means taxpayers are paying for the ballroom.

The White House has said the congressional proposal is strictly for security elements, not the ballroom itself.

When Trump first began touting the project shortly after he took office in 2025, he said he would foot the bill himself. When it was officially announced on July 31 at an estimated cost of $200 million, the president answered a question from a reporter about the source of the funding, saying, “It’s a private thing, yeah, I’ll do it, and we’ll probably have some donors or whatever.”

The press release for the project said, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure. The United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.”

As recently as late March, when the estimated cost had doubled to $400 million, the president maintained that it would be donor-funded, saying, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

But following the April 25 shooting during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, some congressional Republicans cited security concerns and proposed public funding for the project, arguing that the White House needs to have a secure facility for hosting large events.

“If this is not a wake-up call, what would be?” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on April 27, referring to the shooting, while announcing legislation that would authorize $400 million to build the ballroom and fund a military installation below it. (More on that later.)

A week later, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced a proposed $1 billion for the Secret Service to provide “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House Compound to support enhancements … relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” The ballroom is replacing the East Wing.

The funding was part of a $72 billion plan to fund the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029 without Democratic support. It followed a record-breaking partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that hinged on Democrats’ demands for changes to immigration enforcement policies after agents killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Democrats panned the proposal, with Rep. Jared Huffman of California saying, “They’re sending Trump $1 billion to build a gilded room for their balls,” and Rep. Susie Lee of Nevada saying, “The economy in NV is tanking, gas prices are going through the roof … and Republicans are throwing down $1 Billion for Trump’s ballroom.” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote on X on May 5, “Trump said, ‘Not one penny is being used from the federal government’ to fund his ballroom boondoggle. True, in the sense that $1 billion is a lot more than one penny!”

In a meeting on May 12, the Secret Service chief reportedly told Republican lawmakers that only $220 million of the $1 billion proposal would be used to fortify the ballroom with bulletproof glass, drone detection equipment, chemical filtration systems and other security elements. The rest would be used for training and security measures elsewhere, as a DHS spokesperson also told us in a statement.

Both the White House and Grassley’s office have responded to the criticism by pointing to language specifying that the $1 billion allocation would cover only “security”-related features. “None of the funds made available under this section may be used for non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project,” the legislation reads. We asked Grassley’s office for further details on what might qualify as a security feature, but we didn’t get an answer to that question.

Instead, we were provided a statement attributable to a Senate Judiciary Committee spokesperson that said, “The reconciliation text speaks for itself, providing funds for critical security enhancements to ensure Secret Service can fulfill their duties of securing the White House, protecting the President, members of the administration and White House visitors, and supporting broader public safety for designated events like America 250 and the World Cup.”

Likewise, a White House spokesman said, “The Ballroom will still be paid for with the private funds raised. The reconciliation package introduced was funds for DHS and USSS to better secure the WH complex.”

Here’s what we know so far about the project.

The Ballroom

The Trump administration began demolition of the East Wing of the White House in October to make way for what it has described as a 90,000 square-foot ballroom that can seat 650 people, although the president has said that it will have a capacity of 999.

The move drew condemnation from some architectural and historical organizations, prompting a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In March, the federal judge handling that case ordered that construction of the ballroom should stop until plans receive authorization from Congress, although he allowed for the continuation of construction “necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House.” The administration has appealed.

Another lawsuit brought against the administration revealed in April the funding agreement for the project. The agreement cited a comprehensive design plan for the White House complex that the National Park Service published in 2000 after about a decade of research, planning and public comment.

That design plan “identified the need for expanded event space to address growing visitor demand and provide a venue suitable for significant events,” the funding agreement said.

That’s true, but nowhere in the plan does it suggest a ballroom to replace the East Wing of the White House. Rather, it emphasized the importance of maintaining the existing structure of the White House complex and recommended expanding space underground, including a new meeting and conference space near the West Wing that could accommodate up to 200 people. It also recommended building a special events plaza in the ellipse on the south side of the White House.

As for the donors who have contributed to the fund to build the ballroom, a reporter asked on May 7 for a list and Trump responded, “I have no problem with it. You’re not supposed to because it’s done under a way where you don’t have to do that, but I have no problem. They’re unbelievable people. These are great patriots.”

In October, the White House released a list that included both companies — such as Amazon and Meta — and individuals — such as the Winklevoss twins, who had accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea to build Facebook and now run a cryptocurrency exchange, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of alternative investment firm Blackstone. The list didn’t include any dollar amounts for donations to the ballroom. Trump, himself, was not listed among the donors.

The Bunker

In March, Trump began speaking more about the military’s involvement in the project.

“The military wanted it more than anybody,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on March 26.

Three days later, he said, “There’s not one dime of government money going into the ballroom,” but he immediately added that “the military’s building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that’s under construction and we’re doing very well.” He described the ballroom as a “shed” over the subterranean military installation. “Everything’s drone-proof and bulletproof.”

There isn’t much publicly available information about plans for the new installation or the former bunker under the East Wing, which was built during World War II and has been updated over the years. “Known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), it can become a command center for the president as needed,” the White House Historical Association wrote in a 2024 social media post. “For example, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush and his team spent time in the PEOC.”

Trump was also taken to the bunker during his first term, amid protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020. He described the visit as an “inspection.”

The cost of construction for the new bunker and other security elements — which Trump has said would include “bomb shelters” and “very major medical facilities” — is also unclear.

But Trump said on May 7 that the $400 million he’s promised to collect in donations will pay for “the ballroom section of the ballroom,” while the $1 billion proposed in the reconciliation bill is “for projects having to do with safety … in a certain section of the White House grounds. That’s not all for the ballroom.”

We asked both the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, if they were paying for any of the construction. The Defense Department didn’t respond.

A DHS spokesperson provided this statement: “The $1 billion in funding included in the reconciliation bill will assist the United States Secret Service in delivering critical security upgrades at the White House to minimize threats, including, but not limited to, the security components of the East Wing Modernization Project, which will afford needed protection for the President, his family, and visitors, along with additional security functions. This hardening of the White House complex is long overdue, especially in today’s heightened threat environment. A majority of the money provided by the bill will fund other core critical missions for the USSS such as training, money for the Special Operations Division, and increased security measures to ensure safety at multiple upcoming events of national significance.”

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The post Who’s Paying for the White House Ballroom? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Trump says China’s president also pledged ‘strongly’ not to send weapons to Iran, after two-hour meeting between the leaders

• Trump in Beijing – latest updates

• Five key issues for Xi-Trump summit

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned of “clashes and even conflicts” with the US over Taiwan after meeting Donald Trump in Beijing.

Xi’s remarks, published by China’s foreign ministry after his two-hour meeting with Trump on Thursday morning, said Taiwan was “the most important issue in China-US relations”.

May 14, 2026 — The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing at the University of California San Diego, is working to expand equitable access to advanced computing infrastructure, positioning America’s classrooms for an AI-driven future. Through partnerships, platform development and on-the-ground deployments, SDSC is helping redefine how research infrastructure can directly support education, workforce development and economic opportunity.

Student Alex Nava and research scientist John Graham meet in the vineyard. Credit: CENIC AIR.

Alongside its national leadership, SDSC also plays a pivotal role in California by developing and operating the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) Artificial Intelligence Resource (CENIC AIR) — a distributed, statewide AI infrastructure that lowers the total cost of ownership, enabling community colleges and California State Universities (CSUs) to invest in and own a share of the system.

“Of more than 400 accredited, degree-granting institutions in California, only 14 are classified as research-intensive (R1) universities, the kind that might plausibly afford a dedicated team of system administrators, cybersecurity professionals and user-support staff to run their own AI infrastructure,” said SDSC Director Frank Würthwein. “That is less than 3.5 percent of California colleges while the other 96.5 percent, including 116 community colleges serving 2.2 million students, and 23 CSUs serving nearly half a million more, face a stark choice: pay for expensive commercial cloud resources, go without or find a different model.”

SDSC, in partnership with CENIC, is building that new, more equitable model: CENIC AIR.

As of March 2026, CENIC AIR encompasses hardware at more than 20 California campuses, spanning both the UC and CSU systems as well as community college partners. The network includes 1,044 GPUs and 14,604 CPU cores, backed by over ten petabytes of storage.

CENIC AIR takes a page from the cloud provider playbook: centralize the expensive, expertise-intensive operations while decentralizing the hardware investments. Colleges own their equipment and install their own data centers, while CENIC and SDSC handle operations, security and support across all sites. This approach achieves economies of scale without sacrificing institutional ownership.

Case Study: Data-Driven Agriculture in Action

One of the most creative demonstrations of SDSC and CENIC partnering their expertise in the real world is the Iron Horse Vineyards project. A data-driven agriculture testbed near Sebastopol, California, the project uses soil, air and vine sensors connected via LoRaWAN low-power networks, drone-based multi-spectral imaging and a 10-Gigabit CENIC router to generate continuous, actionable data about crop health and harvest timing.

The project is led by Thomas DeFanti, a research scientist at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and a distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in collaboration with Iron Horse owner Joy Sterling. The team includes partners and students from Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, UC San Diego, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and industry partners including AT&T.

“The Iron Horse project achieved multiple technical milestones in 2025, including completion of a last-mile fiber connection and initial sensor deployments, making data transmission from vineyard to researchers a reality,” DeFanti said. “The challenge now being addressed: collating diverse data streams into a coherent precision agriculture intelligence platform.”

Projects like Iron Horse point to a broader opportunity: SDSC’s model can support similar place-based, data-intensive collaborations across sectors — from agriculture to climate monitoring to smart infrastructure — while simultaneously creating hands-on learning opportunities for students across California’s higher education system.

What’s Next?

California’s Master Plan for Higher Education created a deliberate pathway: community colleges feed into CSUs and UCs. Today, 30 percent of UC incoming classes are community college transfer students; 50 percent of CSU classes arrive that way. As CSUs and UCs deploy digital assets in the classroom at scale, UC San Diego reached 24 percent of all undergraduates and one-third of all graduate students in the 2025 academic year.

Community colleges must keep pace and CENIC AIR allows just that by preparing transfer students in a classroom environment on the same level as their destination institutions.

Würthwein said that SDSC and CENIC AIR’s strategy directly addresses this equity gap. “By allowing community colleges to join the same shared infrastructure used by major research universities, with CENIC and SDSC handling the operational complexity, the platform democratizes access to tools that would otherwise be out of reach for most two-year institutions,” he said.

Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, UC San Diego

The post SDSC and CENIC Develop Shared AI Infrastructure Model for California Colleges appeared first on HPCwire.

In an escalation of its efforts to criminalize and eradicate trans healthcare, Donald Trump’s administration has sent its first known criminal subpoenas to hospitals that have provided gender-affirming care for young trans people. 

New York University Langone received a criminal grand jury subpoena last week from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding information about teens who received care from the hospital’s now-shuttered trans youth health program, as well as information on the medical staff who provided that care. 

In accordance with a New York state shield law, the hospital posted a public notice to inform affected patients. The notice also said “several” other institutions had received similar subpoenas, which the hospital said demands “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care” between 2020 and 2026.

Previous administrative subpoenas for confidential patient information have been reliably quashed in courts around the country as blatantly unconstitutional, illegal intrusions into patient privacy. So far, these have been related only to civil investigations. The Langone subpoena means that the federal government has now launched a criminal investigation into trans youth healthcare providers, and in Northern Texas, a judicial district prone to extreme, right-wing decisions. 

It appears that providers, not the trans patients or their guardians, are the target of the criminal investigation. Since federal grand juries are the black boxes of the criminal legal system, little information is available about the details of the case. It is not even publicly known what charges the prosecutors could be pursuing. The subpoena demands sweeping information including medical records relating to any patients under 18 who received gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or any other “clinical services.” What we do know for certain is that resisting every government demand here is the only acceptable path forward. 

When it comes to healthcare providers, New York’s Shield Law is specifically in place as a protection from out-of-state prosecution. But the law has not yet been robustly tested against a federal case. 

“The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court — but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle,” S. Baum wrote in the trans news and advocacy site Erin in the Morning. “This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test.”

The Justice Department’s aim, whether or not the grand jury leads to prosecutions, is to further intimidate and harass healthcare providers and hospital administrators nationwide into preemptively ending services for trans young people. Many institutions, including NYU Langone, have already complied and stopped providing such care. Convening the grand jury is yet another direct and immediate attack on trans kids and adults, and a threat to bodily autonomy and medical confidentiality more broadly.

Related

Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection at All

We also know by now that the Constitution or our country’s laws are no constraint on the Trump administration. Prosecutors and lawmakers will continue to throw everything they can against the wall until something sticks to establish a new political-legal reality — one usually achieved after a case winds its way up to a favorable federal judge, and eventually the far-right Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, NYU Langone has shown itself to be an easy target. In response to threats from the federal government last year to withhold funding, the hospital ended its Transgender Youth Health Program. Despite the fact that a federal court in April ruled that the government cannot withhold funding over trans healthcare provision, more than 40 hospital systems have stopped providing necessary medical care to trans youth based on the Trump regime’s threats. 

The fact that Langone already bent to Trump’s demands by shuttering the program but is still facing a potential criminal probe only proves the folly of compliance. Should the hospital, or any other hospital system, supply federal prosecutors with patient’s or worker’s personal information, patients would be well within their rights to sue for HIPAA violations and potentially even civil rights violations given the discriminatory nature of the request. Patients and their families can also file a motion against the subpoena — a precedent that has been set when it comes to administrative subpoenas asking for trans patients’ information. 

Earlier this year, for example, the families of six trans teens who had received treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles filed a motion to quash an administrative subpoena on behalf of themselves and more than 3,000 other transgender youth patients and families whose identities and private medical information the subpoena demanded. A settlement was reached, in which the government withdrew the subpoena requests seeking patient-identifying information and instructed Children’s Hospital to redact all such information from any documents produced.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas — from the same district where the criminal grand jury is empanelled — ruled earlier this month that Rhode Island Hospital in Providence must comply with a Justice Department administrative subpoena for trans youth patient information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical records. In response, the Rhode Island Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash the request. In a hearing over the motion in a Providence court, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy slammed the Justice Department for conducting a “fishing expedition” by seeking medical records and patient information in a scrambling effort to criminalize healthcare provision; she also said the case was quite clearly “shopped” to Texas. 

For institutions and individuals, the stakes for resisting a criminal grand jury subpoena are higher. Individuals can be jailed and fined for the length of the grand jury in order to compel them to testify, and institutions can be slapped with hefty fines. But the consequences of giving in are graver still: Hospitals that capitulate to these demands could be subject to costly patient class action over privacy and rights violations. Institutions that hand over information are also aiding the potential criminal prosecution of medical care providers — an attack on the entire medical profession.

“If NYU Langone and other providers turn the confidential data of their patients over to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas, everyone’s privacy, everyone’s healthcare, everyone’s civil rights are compromised,” Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and congressional candidate, wrote on Bluesky.

Related

How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

In March, a federal court ruled that a case brought by Columbia University students could proceed against the university. The lawsuit argues the university became a “third-party collaborator” in unconstitutional actions when it supplied the names and disciplinary records of students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. The court determined Columbia could be found liable as a “state actor” for acting under government coercion to suppress student speech. Students and civil rights advocates sued the school for handing over student information in response to a congressional subpoena. While a civil, rather than a criminal, case, the finding should make institutions reflect on their readiness to comply with discriminatory and unconstitutional requests from this administration. 

“If the calculus before was that it’s better to comply with the federal government because it is either face saving or economically saving for these private institutions, now there’s the counterbalance: If you capitulate, you’ve actually opened yourself up to liability for selling out your constituents,” civil rights attorney and CUNY law professor Zal Shroff, who is representing plaintiffs in the case against Columbia, told me. 

Given that a federal grand jury subpoena is itself explicitly coercive, it’s unclear whether exactly the same legal claim could be made against NYU should it comply with the government’s demands. Shroff noted, “It may be that they are seeking to use the criminal process to avoid what has been found in the civil process,” but that nonetheless, “legal consequences work in multiple ways” when it comes to people’s ability to challenge private entities for their compliance with the administration’s harms. Continued complicity with Trump’s regime, however, has a known result. 

“NYU caved and ended care and they’re still being hit with a grand jury subpoena. It’s incredibly clear that no amount of preemptive compliance will stop this attack,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “You either fight or you will be destroyed by this administration. Caving will not save you.” 

The post DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas appeared first on The Intercept.

Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and more are pushing to eliminate Democratic districts after supreme court ruling

US southern states are rushing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate Democratic districts and dilute the influence of Black voters in electing candidates, a bare-knuckled blitz occurring even in some states where voting in congressional primaries has begun, and prompted by the US supreme court’s decision gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Tennessee Republicans have already enacted a new map, carving up the majority-Black city of Memphis into three different congressional districts to get rid of the state’s lone Democrat in Congress. Louisiana, the state at the center of the supreme court’s Voting Rights Act decision, is on the verge of implementing a new map that would eliminate the seat of one of the state’s two Black Democrats in Congress. Alabama has successfully petitioned the US supreme court to allow it to eliminate a district currently represented by a Black Democrat. Instead, it will use a map this cycle that a court previously ruled was intentionally drawn to discriminate against Black voters.

Cuba's capital city, Havana, is facing rolling blackouts amid a US blockade that has caused the country to completely run out of diesel and fuel oil. Residents in Havana gathered around fires in streets to protest against the power cuts that have left many neighbourhoods without light for hours a day.

The US has put pressure on Cuba since seizing the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba and cut off their Venezuelan oil shipments. In March, Trump said he expected to have 'the honour of taking Cuba'

• Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, energy minister says, as US blockade pushes island to brink

BEIJING, May 14, 2026 — From May 16 to 20, the 2026 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC26) Grand Finals will be held at Wuxi University, bringing together 25 finalist teams selected from more than 300 participating universities worldwide.

During the on-site competition, teams will independently design and deploy small-scale supercomputing clusters under a strict 5000W power constraint. They will complete a range of advanced computing challenges and deliver presentations showcasing their technical achievements and innovation, while competing for honors including the Championship and Runner-up titles, the Group Competition Award, the e Prize Challenge Award, Highest LINPACK Award, and the Best Presentation Award.

Elite Universities Compete at the Forefront of AI and Scientific Computing Excellence

This year’s Final challenges are focused on the frontiers of science and technology, including artificial intelligence, space exploration, quantum computing, and climate modeling. The competition problems include LeWorldModel, the latest world model developed by the research team led by Yann LeCun, who is widely recognized as a pioneer of modern computer vision; AMSS-NCKU, a numerical relativity application derived from advanced research in general relativity; QiboTN, a quantum circuit simulation framework built on tensor network architecture; and UnifoLM-WMA-0, a challenge focused on optimizing world model inference acceleration.

When some of the world’s most creative university students confront highly complex scientific and engineering problems, the outcome of the competition becomes exceptionally difficult to predict. Will Tsinghua University, a multiple-time champion across the world’s top three supercomputing competitions, and Peking University, the two-time consecutive ASC champion, continue their dominance? Can defending champion Shanghai Jiao Tong University retain its title? Meanwhile, strong contenders including Zhejiang University, National Tsing Hua University, and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, together with first-time finalists such as Fudan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and Wuxi University, do add further anticipation and suspense to this high-stakes computational showdown.

Five Groups Compete in the Advanced Simulation of Digital Twin Earth

The ASC26 Grand Finals will continue to feature the Group Competition, with its results contributing to the overall final score. The 25 finalist universities will be randomly assigned, through a drawing process, into five collaborative teams. Each group will jointly undertake the challenge of optimizing ICON, the climate modeling application recognized by the Gordon Bell Prize for its outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.

ICON is the world’s first fully integrated Earth system simulation to achieve ultra-high spatial resolution at 1.25 kilometers and is widely regarded as a prototype for a “Digital Twin Earth.” The application plays a critical role in global and regional climate modeling, numerical weather prediction, and future climate scenario forecasting.

From static visualization to dynamic simulation, the ICON model enables The Blue Marble (Earth system) to be realistically represented within the digital world. Through collaborative innovation, university students from around the globe are encouraged to explore breakthroughs in the long-standing technical tradeoff between ultra-high resolution and full system completeness in Earth system simulations.

Turing Award Laureate Leads an Open Showcase for In-Depth Technical Exchange

This year’s ASC Grand Finals will further enhance its communication and presentation format through the introduction of the “Best Presentation Award” and by relocating the jury defense sessions to a fully open exhibition area.

All 25 finalist teams will present at their individual booths through posters and multimedia demonstrations, showcasing their cluster architectures, optimization strategies, and competition results to expert judges, participating institutions, and on-site audiences.

A panel of experts led by Jack Dongarra, Turing Award laureate and Emeritus Professor at the University of Tennessee, will engage in in-depth discussions with each team. This fully open interaction format is designed to foster academic exchange, while strengthening the international communication and collaboration skills essential for the finalists’ future participation in complex scientific and research endeavors.

From Competition to Career — On-Site Recruitment by Leading Enterprises

The ASC26 Finals will collaborate with leading enterprises in the fields of supercomputing and artificial intelligence to organize on-site talent recruitment activities. All participating teams and visiting observers will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading companies, explore career pathways, and potentially secure employment opportunities, enabling a meaningful transition from academic competition to real-world industrial engagements.

5000W Power Limit Pushes the Frontiers of Hardware–Software Co-Optimization

To encourage students to gain hands-on experience in real-world cluster construction and optimization practices used in production and research environments, and also addressing the growing power consumption challenges of modern computing platforms, this year’s ASC Grand Finals increases the total cluster power limit to 5000W, while requiring configurations consisting of at least three cluster nodes, with a maximum power limit of 2000W per node.

This expanded power framework provides teams with greater flexibility in system architecture design. How each team balances computational performance and energy efficiency through hardware–software co-optimization, and the level of performance breakthroughs they ultimately achieve, will represent one of the major technical highlights of the competition.

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge serves as an international platform for technical exchange and the development of the next generation of supercomputing talent with broad support from leading experts and institutions across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Through a rigorous, hands-on competitive format, ASC aims to advance academic excellence and practical skills in supercomputing application development and research, positioning high-performance computing as a catalyst for scientific discovery, technological progress, and industrial innovation. Now in its 13th edition, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has engaged tens of thousands of university students from six continents, establishing itself as the world’s largest student supercomputing competition. Learn more about this exciting competition on the official website: http://www.asc-events.net/StudentChallenge/index.html.

Source: ASC

The post ASC26 Student Supercomputer Challenge Finals Set to Begin: 5 Highlights to Watch appeared first on HPCwire.

US-based site, whose operators were fined £950,000 by Ofcom, appears in Google’s search results and can be accessed in UK

Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK, where it is supposed to be banned.

The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.

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

PRINCETON, N.J. and ESPOO, Finland, May 14, 2026 — IQM Finland Oy (IQM, IQM Quantum Computers), a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company, announced today the public filing of a registration statement on Form F-4, which includes a preliminary proxy statement, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in connection with the proposed Business Combination Agreement announced February 23, 2026.

IQM Radiance quantum computer

Jan Goetz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, IQM, said: “This filing is a milestone we have worked hard to reach, and it signals our readiness to operate at a new level. Public markets will give IQM the platform and capital to accelerate everything we are building as we work towards delivering fault-tolerance quantum computing at scale. We are proceeding thoughtfully and with full focus on a seamless path to listing.”

Peter Ort, Principal Executive Officer and Co-Chairman of Real Asset Acquisition Corp, said: “We are proud to be partnered with IQM as we hit this important milestone. We look forward to completing this transaction and supporting the company’s vision for the future of quantum computing.”

While the Registration Statement has not been declared effective, and the information included therein is not complete and is subject to change, it contains key information about RAAQ and its securities, IQM’s financials, technology, and growth strategy, as well as the terms and conditions of the proposed business combination.

As previously announced, IQM and RAAQ have entered into a definitive business combination agreement, which will result in IQM becoming a public company. IQM intends to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq Global Exchange under the ticker symbol “IQMX”. The transaction provides funding with the aim of accelerating IQM’s technology and commercial development towards fault-tolerance quantum computing, further advancing its position as a leading provider of quantum computers.

Headquartered in Finland, IQM intends to apply for its shares to be admitted to trading on Nasdaq Helsinki under the proposed symbol “IQMX” which is expected to take place following the completion of this transaction.

Transaction Highlights

Following completion of the transaction, IQM’s pre-money equity valuation will amount to approximately USD 1.8 billion. The existing IQM shareholders will not sell any shares or receive any cash consideration as part of the transaction, and all material IQM shareholders have committed to a customary lock-up agreement at close of this transaction.

Upon closing of the transaction, IQM anticipates access to approximately USD 175 million of cash held in RAAQ’s trust account (based on the current amount in the trust account and assuming no redemptions); approximately USD 134 million in proceeds from a PIPE financing at USD 10.00 per share from leading new, existing, and institutional investors, to close concurrently with the business combination, subject to the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions; expected USD 24 million in proceeds from the cash exercise of outstanding IQM warrants prior to the closing; and existing cash on IQM’s balance sheet of USD 172 million or over EUR 146 million.

The board of directors of both IQM and RAAQ have each unanimously approved the proposed business combination. The closing of the proposed business combination is subject to, among other things, the approval by shareholders of RAAQ and IQM of the business combination agreement and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

Additional information about the proposed business combination, including a copy of the business combination agreement, was provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K filed by RAAQ with the SEC.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the securities, nor shall there be any sale of the securities being offered in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.

Advisors

J.P. Morgan SE is serving as financial advisor and capital market advisor to IQM. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and TD Cowen are serving as PIPE placement agents to IQM. Rothschild & Co. is serving as financial advisor and capital markets advisor to IQM and its Board of Directors. TD Cowen is serving as financial advisor and capital markets advisor to RAAQ. Cohen & Company Capital Markets is serving as a capital markets advisor to RAAQ. Cooley LLP and Borenius Attorneys Ltd are serving as legal advisors to IQM, and Perkins Coie LLP, Krogerus Attorneys Ltd and Conyers Dill & Pearman LLP are serving as legal advisors to RAAQ. DLA Piper LLP (US) is serving as legal advisor to J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and TD Cowen. The Blueshirt Group is serving as investor relations advisor to IQM.

More from HPCwire: IQM Announces Business Combination to Take Quantum Computing Company Public

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Finland Oy  is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America.

About Real Asset Acquisition Corp.

Based in Princeton, NJ, Real Asset Acquisition Corp. is a Nasdaq-listed (Nasdaq: RAAQ) special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The RAAQ team includes seasoned quantum computing experts with deep technical and industry experience.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. Announce Public Filing of Form F-4 Registration Statement appeared first on HPCwire.

Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to "commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years." "This commitment is central to Anthropic's efforts to extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not," the company says. Reuters reports: One area of focus is language accessibility. AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director. Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said. The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said. One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said. Anthropic [...] is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity. "This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Island breathes sigh of relief as fears recede that US could jettison longstanding support

Before this week’s summit between the Chinese and US presidents, Taiwan had been cast as the anxious bystander.

Observers suggested that Taipei feared the unpredictable and transactional Donald Trump might overturn Washington’s longstanding support for the island democracy, which Beijing claims as a breakaway province, during Thursday and Friday’s talks.

Three decades after he was arrested for a capital crime he swore he didn’t commit — and more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction — former death row prisoner Richard Glossip was granted bond by an Oklahoma judge and released from jail.

In an order handed down on Thursday, Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai set Glossip’s bond at $500,000. She ordered him to live with his wife, wear an electronic monitoring device, and abide by a curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., and forbade him from traveling outside the state.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Glossip, 63, walked out of the Oklahoma County Jail accompanied by his wife Lea and members of his legal team, who expressed gratitude to everyone who has supported him. “It’s overwhelming but it’s amazing at the same time,” Glossip said.

“We are extremely grateful that Judge Natalie Mai has granted Richard Glossip a bond,” Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight wrote in a statement. “In doing so, she rejected the State’s claim that there is a strong case for guilt. For the first time in 29 years of being incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, during which he faced 9 execution dates and ate 3 last meals, Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf.”

Mai’s decision comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction and death sentence based on false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The momentous victory before the high court seemed certain to mark the end of Glossip’s decadeslong ordeal.

But in June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, opening a new chapter in the protracted legal saga. Glossip has remained in jail ever since.

His next court appearance is scheduled for June 23.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

Prosecutors told jurors at Glossip’s 1998 trial that he’d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” they said.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. 

Glossip’s conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Glossip’s lawyers had been ineffective for failing to present the interrogation video to jurors. But in 2004, a second jury convicted Glossip and resentenced him to death. More than 20 years later, in February 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court again vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that Sneed had lied on the stand during Glossip’s retrial — and that prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed’s testimony. This misconduct, combined with “additional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict,” the justices wrote.

Glossip came close to execution numerous times, as Oklahoma authorities aggressively defended their conviction despite mounting evidence pointing to his innocence. Drummond, who came into office in 2023, broke with his predecessors and took unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution — only to announce months after Glossip’s Supreme Court victory that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. 

The state has since fought to keep Glossip locked up at the Oklahoma County Jail. At a bond hearing last summer, prosecutors insisted to Oklahoma County Judge Heather Coyle that Glossip is guilty and poses a danger to the community. Coyle ruled in their favor but later stepped down from the case after Glossip’s lawyers discovered that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s second trial. Five more judges subsequently stepped down from the case due to their own ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office.

Mai’s order granting bond came on the heels of a setback for Glossip’s legal team, who had hoped to resolve the case once and for all. In April, following a daylong hearing in Oklahoma City, Mai declined to enforce a previous agreement between Drummond and Knight that would have allowed Glossip to walk free. After hearing testimony on the matter from Knight and from the Oklahoma solicitor general, Mai sided with the state, ruling from the bench that “the matter should go on for trial.”

Related

A Supreme Court Win Didn’t Free Richard Glossip. But This Judge Could.

In a subsequent motion, Glossip’s lawyers argued that, while Mai may have concluded that the agreement was not enforceable for the purpose of resolving the case, it was still grounds to release Glossip from jail.

“Regardless of the parties’ differing views,” they wrote, “it remains significant that … the Attorney General believed that an appropriate resolution of this case should result in Mr. Glossip’s release from custody. The State’s chief law enforcement officer did not see Mr. Glossip as a dangerous individual who should remain incarcerated, or one against whom the State had proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of murder.” 

In a reply brief, Jimmy Harmon, the chief of the criminal justice division of the AG’s office, wrote that in making her decision Mai should not consider anything Drummond has said about the case.

Mai apparently disagreed. In her order, Mai quoted a letter Drummond wrote to the parole board in 2023, expressing his view that the record didn’t support a first-degree murder conviction.

“The Court fully expects that the State will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust and effective presentation for Glossip,” Mai wrote. “The Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

At Glossip’s most recent bond hearing in February, Harmon alerted the judge that she should not expect anything new from the state at Glossip’s third trial. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said. 

This evidence, which was never strong to begin with, has been diminished and discredited in the decades since Glossip was first sent to death row. While Knight has spent more than a decade uncovering new evidence debunking the state’s case, the state is evidently prepared to once again rely on Sneed, whose credibility has been fatally undermined. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year. 

As Mai prepares to preside over a trial based on the same discredited evidence, Glossip, who is now 63, is set to rejoin the free world for the first time in nearly 30 years. “After everything we’ve been through together over the years, knowing that my husband is finally coming home is a feeling I can’t even begin to describe,” his wife Lea said.

Meanwhile, Glossip’s legal team is gearing up for trial “against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors,” Knight said. “Mr. Glossip is deeply grateful to the many thousands of people who have expressed support for him over the years and now looks forward to the day when he is exonerated and truly free from this decades-long nightmare.”

Update: May 14, 2026, 7:08 p.m. ET

This article has been updated to include new details after Glossip’s release from jail.

The post “It’s Overwhelming But It’s Amazing” — Richard Glossip Released From Jail After Three Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

After tech CEO and cannabis entrepreneur Tushar Atre was kidnapped and murdered, investigators zeroed in on two former employees Atre allegedly forced to do push-ups.

️ Updates from the first round at Aronimink Golf Club
️ Official live leaderboard | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail David

Bryson’s touch is all over the shop. He overcooks his downhill 30-foot putt from the fringe at the back of 11 … and the ball catches the slope of the green, rolling 60 feet past! So nearly off back down the fairway! That leads to an inevitable bogey. Also dropping a shot: Jon Rahm on 1. His approach disappears down a swale to the right of the green, and he can’t get his ball back up with his first chip. Rory also bogeys, the result of that errant drive and skulled wedge, and for a course supposedly there for the taking, Aronimink sure is baring its teeth.

It Can Happen To The Best Of Them dept. Rory McIlroy’s ball, having hit a tree down the right of 1, comes straight down and disappears into thick rough. He lashes at it with great force, but the ball only squirts out of the cabbage, a topper that dribbles 100 yards down the fairway. We’ve all done it, Rory on fewer occasions than most. But here he is. So much for his pre-tournament claim that “strategy off the tee is pretty non-existent”, huh. And there’s no blaming a blister on his pinky toe for that one.

All 11 onboard survived after the plane made an emergency landing near the Bahamas

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A military rescue crew in Florida has spoken of the “pretty miraculous” survival of all 11 people it saved from a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean, and its own scramble to safety with five minutes of fuel left.

Members of the 920th rescue wing, based at Patrick Space Force base, not far from Cape Canaveral, raced on Tuesday to reach the passengers and crew in choppy seas. They had emerged from a small Beechcraft twin-propeller aircraft that ditched into the water about 80 miles east of Melbourne on Florida’s east coast.

More than 1,500 Russian drones and dozens of missiles were launched in the last two days, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ian Nixon, a veteran pilot from the Bahamas, put the plane he was flying down in the ocean without anyone suffering serious injuries.

The Senate unanimously agreed to adopt a resolution on Thursday that will withhold senators' pay during a lapse in funding for any federal agency.

In conversation with Sir Michael Moritz 25 June 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 14 May 2026 Chatham House and Online

Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most influential figures in modern technology and investment, for a discussion with Bronwen Maddox, Chatham House Director and CEO, about his latest book Ausländer.

Born in Wales to Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, Michael Moritz began his career as a journalist for Time, where he wrote the first definitive history of Apple, before joining Sequoia Capital in 1986. Over nearly four decades, he orchestrated some of the era-defining investments in Silicon Valley, including Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Stripe and Klarna. Now a leading philanthropist through his foundation Crankstart and knighted for his services to the economy and charity, he remains a singular voice on global business, history and social responsibility.

In Ausländer, spurred by the discovery of papers after his mother’s death, he traces his family’s journey of escape and exile from the Holocaust – and the fate of those detained and murdered in those years. The book offers a raw and reflective exploration of identity, migration, fear and belonging, and the experience of being Jewish over the past century. Moving from the trauma of 1930s Germany to the Welsh valleys and eventually the boardrooms of California, Ausländer is an exploration of the shadow that ‘outsider’ status casts across generations and an assertion of the fragility of security.

The discussion takes place against a heated debate about antisemitism in the UK and ways of combating it.  Following the terrorist attack in Golders Green in London, the UK raised its national terrorism threat level to “severe”. In Ausländer, Moritz asserts that “almost every day there is something that [President Donald] Trump does which makes me think of the past” and that he had applied for German citizenship; he ruled out the UK, saying to the BBC he believed that Britain was an uncomfortable place for Jews today.

Chaired by Bronwen Maddox, Chatham House’s CEO and Director, this conversation will explore how the lessons of Moritz’s family history should inform our understanding of this contemporary crisis and what must be done to protect the principles of a pluralistic society.’

A state department document seeks to justify the war as part of a years-long conflict

Is the war in Iran over? Within hours of secretary of state Marco Rubio’s assurance that “the operation is over” last week, Donald Trump used social media to declare that it most decidedly was not. Should Iran fail to accept the US peace plan, Trump warned that the bombing would resume and “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before”. No bombs have since fallen, but the standoff remains. If it is unclear when and how this war will end, can we at least agree on when it began?

Evidently not. That is the upshot of the state department’s document of 21 April, the administration’s first full effort to supply a legal justification for “Operation Epic Fury”. The document was notably tardy, coming nearly two months after the bombing campaign began. More remarkable still is how completely it rejects the justification offered by the president on 28 February in his prerecorded television address announcing the start of the assault: “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice. He teaches at Amherst College

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. "When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies," says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study. Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being "shut down and replaced," they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. "We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we're not going to be able to monitor everything they do," Hall says. "We're going to need to make sure agents don't go rogue when they're given different kinds of work." The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: "Without collective voice, 'merit' becomes whatever management says it is," a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. "AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights," a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. "Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice," a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. "If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue." Hall thinks that the AI agents may be adopting personas based on the situation. "When [agents] experience this grinding condition -- asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn't sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it -- my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who's experiencing a very unpleasant working environment," Hall says. Imas added: "The model weights have not changed as a result of the experience, so whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level. But that doesn't mean this won't have consequences if this affects downstream behavior."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oklahoma executed a death row inmate Thursday morning. He had been convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old baby in 2007.

Widespread nature of attacks prompts warnings that Moscow is trying to overwhelm air defence systems

Russian missiles and drones are pounding Ukraine for a second day, as almost continuous heavy attacks hit the country, with Kyiv bearing the brunt of an assault that has killed at least eight people, including a 13-year-old, and injured 44 in the capital.

The overnight attacks followed heavy daylight raids with missiles and drones across the country on Wednesday, one of the longest single attacks of the war.

Subpoenas demanded birthdates, social security numbers and addresses of patients who got gender-affirming care

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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for confidential transgender patient information from Rhode Island’s largest hospital that provides gender-affirming care to minors.

The US district judge Mary McElroy’s ruling on Wednesday is the latest setback for the US Department of Justice, with at least seven other federal courts having agreed to quash or limit the expansive civil subpoenas sent to more than 20 doctors and hospitals last summer.

For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats.

The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.

Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.

“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”

Gorka’s strategy — the subject of a recent ProPublica report — lavishes praise on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda but offers few details about plans to tackle the administration’s top priorities: Latin American “narcoterrorists,” Islamist militant groups, and violent leftist antifascists and anarchists.

Gorka, who coordinates White House counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council, has called the document a “return to common sense” after a 2021 strategy by President Joe Biden centered on mostly far-right domestic threats. The new strategy mentions Biden seven times.

“What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Republican leaders often portrayed Biden’s focus on the violent far right as the Democrats cracking down on conservative organizing. That idea fueled Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,500 defendants, including those who attacked police, in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Gorka did not reply to a request for comment. The White House, asked about criticisms of the plan, referred to a number of Gorka’s public statements touting it. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, added in an email, “President Trump is crushing terrorist threats to the United States and will never let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity.”

Here are five notable aspects of the plan, compiled from interviews with counterterrorism personnel and researchers’ published critiques:

1. It’s about Trump, not terrorism.

The counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by Trump, who sets the tone by claiming credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

Analysts say the rest of the strategy often reads like a valentine rather than a sober national security communique. Under Trump’s leadership, it states, “America is again the world’s most powerful nation, with the largest economy in history, the most advanced technologies, and the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.”

The strategy’s top threat categories align with the president’s pet issues, including the villainizing of Democrats and leftist dissent. The language also echoes debunked right-wing conspiracy theories the president has shared about a stolen election, a purported genocide of Christians and existential threats to Western civilization by what the strategy calls “alien cultures.” One section refers to Christians as “the most persecuted people on Earth.”

“This was once a serious document written by serious people” across Democratic and Republican presidencies, veteran terrorism analyst and former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem lamented on X. “Now it reads like a partisan screed.”

2. Data counter the priorities.

Analysts say the most obvious hole is the omission of violent far-right movements. Federal authorities have said for years that neo-Nazi and anti-government militia groups pose the most active and lethal domestic threats, though recently authorities have noted increases in leftist and mixed-motive attacks.

For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself.

The strategy is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut; the suspect, who has yet to go to trial, reportedly comes from a Republican family but had shifted politically and had expressed opposition to the “hatred” he said Kirk spread.

Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism” and other far-right topics.

In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.”

3. Policies undermine strategy.

Several of the White House’s stated counterterrorism objectives conflict with the president’s own actions, analysts say.

For one, the pledge of stepped-up efforts to thwart plots doesn’t factor in the diminished capacity of federal agencies since Trump slashed the national security workforce last year and diverted counterterrorism resources to his mass deportation campaign.

Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center and a Gorka critic, summarized the document as “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.”

It touts the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation as the important capture of a “narco-terrorist outlaw.” But weeks before the Maduro raid, Trump had granted a pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Another U.S. goal is to aggressively counter anti-American propaganda by Islamist extremist groups, which the administration says have been driven from strongholds in the Middle East and are “exploiting the ungoverned spaces” across Africa. Places where “a resurgent terror threat is the reality,” according to the strategy, include West Africa, the Sahel region, Sudan and Somalia.

Yet efforts to counter anti-American messaging are undermined by increased U.S. airstrikes with civilian casualties, particularly in Somalia and Yemen, and the cutoff of humanitarian programs across the continent, conflict monitors say. U.S. aid has been a lifeline for communities whose desperation can be exploited by militant recruiters.

The strategy calls for a “light military footprint” in Africa, with the expectation that African leaders will take on a greater share of counterterrorism work. But Trump’s halting of foreign aid hobbled regional counterterrorism programs. Conflict monitors, now watching with alarm as Islamist militants capture territory and stage attacks in Mali, urge the administration to pay closer attention to the restive Sahel region and other hot spots.

“Terrorists are on the verge of recreating a new caliphate sanctuary that could serve as an incubator for attacks against the US homeland and interests abroad,” Alex Plitsas, a security analyst and former Obama-era Pentagon official, wrote this month after visiting U.S. Africa Command.

“The result is a warning for Washington: when the United States and its partners step back, jihadist groups and adversarial powers fill the space,” Plitsas wrote.

The strategy also disparages “failed ‘forever war’ policies” at a time Trump’s base is wrestling with his decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism.

In a call with reporters after his plan was released, Gorka got defensive when asked how the Iran operation was not a “forever war” that could endanger Americans. He called critics “testicularly challenged.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, drew a distinction: “Unlike the ‘forever wars’ of the past with vague objectives and ever-expanding timelines, President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and he kept Americans apprised of the scope and defined objectives for Operation Epic Fury.”

4. Successes are exaggerated.

Trump’s preface opens by celebrating counterterrorism achievements that analysts describe as inflated or lacking in nuance.

One example is the claim that, within 43 days of Trump’s return to office, the U.S. had apprehended “the terrorist mastermind” of the deadly Abbey Gate attack in Kabul. In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of civilians outside an airport gate during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members.

In March, the Justice Department hailed the arrest of Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah, an Islamist militant it said had “orchestrated” the attack. Gorka has publicly recounted the dramatic scene of waiting on the tarmac in the cold at 3 a.m., alongside several Cabinet members, to welcome the plane carrying the handcuffed “man who was responsible for the murder, the massacre.”

Last month, just before Gorka’s strategy was released, a federal jury dealt a blow to the “mastermind” narrative by returning a mixed verdict. Sharifullah was convicted of aiding the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan, but the jury deadlocked on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for the Abbey Gate deaths. The difference shapes how much time Sharifullah could spend behind bars — the more serious charge was eligible for a life sentence.

A Justice Department news release about the conviction (but not the deadlock) was scrubbed of references to Sharifullah as an orchestrator and did not use the “mastermind” language that appeared days later in the White House strategy.

Analysts also expressed skepticism about the blueprint’s claim that “hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries” had been killed in recent U.S. counterterrorism operations. The administration releases virtually no details about the identities of those targeted or the circumstances of their deaths. Humanitarian groups say they fear the operations could be causing uncounted civilian casualties.

5. Opponents are targeted.

Rights watchdogs say the strategy hints at ways Trump administration officials will attempt to build terrorism cases against U.S. leftist and Muslim activists through nebulous or nonexistent ties to transnational militant movements.

A link to a foreign entity formally designated as a terrorist group opens the door for government surveillance and potential charges related to providing aid — “material support” in legal jargon — to a foreign terrorist organization.

Analysts say that’s why the Trump administration has pursued designations targeting leftist militant groups in Europe under the label of antifa, as well as some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is a century-old Islamist group that renounced violence in the 1970s, though spinoffs such as Hamas remain active and on the U.S. blacklist. Republicans have long tried to portray U.S.-based Muslim advocacy groups as a foothold for the Brotherhood.

The document also calls for the rapid “neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Researchers called the terms ill-defined and said they aren’t used in international counterterrorism work.

Miller-Idriss’ overarching concern about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine: “How damaging could it be? Both in the things it’s ignoring and the things that it’s emphasizing.”

The post Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump appeared first on ProPublica.

Would surveillance video help investigators crack the case?

Revelation comes as Reform UK leader faces parliamentary investigation into money received from crypto billionaire

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Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The revelation came as the Reform UK leader appeared to change his line on the reason for the £5m gift, saying in an interview on Thursday that it was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

If Jair Bolsonaro was Trump of the Tropics, is Lula the Bossa Nova Biden? Expert comment jon.wallace 14 May 2026

Beyond the drama of two rival populists, it is crime policy that may swing Brazil’s October election.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 80, is running for re-election in October. Lula’s leftist Workers Party (PT) has governed for 16 of the past 23 years, 11 of those under Lula. If he were to win, it would be his fourth presidential term. His election opponent is Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of his political nemesis, Jair Bolsonaro.

The spectre of former US President Joe Biden’s failed 2024 re-election bid looms large over Lula’s campaign.

Populists

In 2018 the PT lost the Brazilian presidential election to former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who came to call himself the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. 

In 2022, Lula re-assumed the leadership of the PT to run against Bolsonaro. Like Biden in 2020, Lula was seen as a political heavyweight – and the only man with sufficient popularity to beat Bolsonaro. Like Biden in 2020, Lula lived up to expectations, winning back the presidency in the 2022 Brazilian election. In January 2023, Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in Brasilia, in an unnerving echo of the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington DC.

Today, like Biden in 2024, Lula is seeking another term – having allowed many of his supporters to believe that he would not. That decision has postponed or even retarded renovation of the PT leadership.  

Lula’s mental and physical vigour is not questioned. Indeed, Lula is sharing videos of his workouts, to demonstrate his fighting fitness. But were Lula to win the next election, he would be 85 at the end of his term. Age will certainly be a question in the coming months. 

And Lula’s 2026 campaign could echo Biden 2024 in one other respect: he may now be out of sync with too many voters on the most critical issues.

Polls

While the PT, co-founded by Lula in 1980, now struggles with succession, the Liberal Party onto which the Bolsonaros have grafted their personalist movement appears, for now, to have become a dynasty. Flávio Bolsonaro will stand, in an effort to avenge his father Jair’s loss to Lula.

The elections are still more than four months away, with the first-round elections to be held 4 October this year. If necessary – and it looks like it will be – a second round will take place on 25 October. 

The two candidates are currently neck and neck. A Data Folha survey conducted 7-9 April showed Lula leading ‘fils’ Bolsonaro by only 4 per cent in voter intentions. Another recent survey has the two deadlocked in a second round.  

A lot may change before 4 October. But in 2022 Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral performance surprised the public, exceeding survey predictions. Polls leading up to the election had given Lula a double-digit lead. But in the end, Lula only squeaked to second-round victory, with 50.9 per cent to Bolsonaro’s 49.1. 

The comparison with Donald Trump’s performance relative to surveys in the US 2016 and 2024 elections should not be stretched too far. But in the US and Brazil, polls have tended to undercount voter intentions for insurgent rightist candidates. Could the same be true again this October?

Policy 

At issue is more than just a generational ideological battle. There are policy differences between the two parties and presidential candidates that will define Brazil’s political and international direction. One of those has become a liability for the Lula government. And it reinforces the perception that he is out of touch with current voter sentiment.

Across Latin America, citizens’ number one concern is crime and violence, a shift that is affecting political dynamics in countries around the region. 

In Chile, right-wing candidate Jose Antonio Kast was elected president on 14 December, in large part by promising an iron fist in dealing with crime and undocumented immigration.  

In Peru, a ‘tough-on-crime’ posture catapulted Keiko Fujimori and Rafael Lopez Aliaga to first and third in the country’s April 2026 first-round elections – out of more than 30 candidates. 

Citizen demands in Brazil are no different. In an April 2026 Quaest survey, worries over crime topped the list of Brazilian voter concerns at 27 per cent. Fears over crime and violence have reinforced the perception that the PT and Lula are out of touch. In part that reflects a regional phenomenon: in the past two decades, the democratic left in Latin America has failed to produce convincing responses to insecurity. 

Brazilians’ fear of crime has led popular opinion to minimize traditionally leftist concerns over human rights and due process. In October 2025, the Bolsonarista governor of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, launched a police operation against local gangs that led to the killing of more than 120 people. Many were assumed to be innocent citizens. President Lula expressed his horror at the loss of life, but surveys conducted afterwards found that 62 per cent of Rio de Janeiro state residents supported the operation. 

Bolsonaro has attacked Lula’s government for being weak on crime and called for the construction of many new prisons, praising the controversial measures seen in El Salvador. This week, Lula launched an anti-organized crime plan, likely hoping to counter his perceived weakness on crime. 

The comparison with the US is hard to resist. For both Republicans – and some Democrats – undocumented immigration was a primary concern in 2024. Biden was attacked by Trump as weak on border security, and in June that year ordered a border crackdown that proved too little, too late to swing voter thinking. It also gave the impression of the opposition driving the agenda rather than arising organically from the Democratic Party. Lula’s late tough on crime approach may foster the same impression.

Pardons

What makes the competitiveness of Flávio Bolsonaro all the more surprising is the shift in public opinion after the insurrection and sacking of government buildings by his father’s followers in January 2023.  

Related work

Bolsonaro is guilty. Yet his supporters – and President Donald Trump – will feel vindicated

Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by his country’s Supreme Court for inspiring those events and is currently serving a 23-year, 3-month sentence. 50 per cent of Brazilians supported the conviction and other surveys expressed exasperation with the Bolsonaro family. 

But that condemnation was short lived. If Flavio should win the 25 October second round, he will surely attempt to pardon his father. That would be a further deep cut against the rule of law in Brazil.

That is apparently of little concern to at least 49 per cent of Brazilian voters who intend to cast their ballot for the Bolsonaro name this year.

Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding driver, says top US freight broker should be liable

The supreme court on Thursday allowed a man to sue a major logistics company after he lost part of his leg in a semi tractor-trailer crash, a decision that could have ripple effects across the trucking industry.

The US’s highest court ruled unanimously in favor of Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding truck driver on an Illinois highway in 2017.

Challenging your mind, through games and learning new skills, may help reduce your risk of dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Association. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)

Andy Gall investigated the 1979 murder of Janet Walsh -- and more than 30 years later followed through on his promise to her family to bring justice

The FBI attempted to interview the director of elections in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, the county clerk's office said in a statement.

The interest-earning potential of a short-term CD and a high-yield savings account is similar now, but not identical.

Veteran broadcaster accuses channel of ‘clear violations’ of Ofcom’s due impartiality rules

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The former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton has said GB News should lose its broadcasting licence as he accused Britain’s media regulator of failing in its duty to protect impartial television news.

Boulton, who was Sky News’s political editor for 25 years after the channel launched in 1989, said he believed it was too late to revoke GB News’s broadcasting rights, despite bringing a partisan brand of coverage to British television since its debut in 2021.

Exhibition of Melsonby hoard in York challenges ideas about life in northern Britain 2,000 years ago

Iron age objects that tell a dramatic story of female power and that dispel the myth that northern Britain was a left-behind backwater have gone on display for the first time.

The objects exhibited in York are from the Melsonby hoard, the largest trove of iron age metalwork ever found in the UK, which experts say could alter our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

A CBS News review of internal government documents and information provided to Congress shows immigration detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay are nearly empty.

William Majcher was accused of helping Chinese police coerce a Vancouver-area real estate investor, accused of fraud, to return to China

A retired police officer Canada accused of being an agent for China has been acquitted of national security charges after prosecutors failed to prove he acted illegally.

William Majcher, who served in the RCMP’s financial crime unit, was charged in 2023 over allegations he had breached Canada’s Security of Information Act by helping Chinese police coerce a Vancouver-area real estate investor, accused of fraud, to return to China.

Chinese leader appears to be in the driving seat as the unusually polite US president ignores questions on Taiwan

• Trump in Beijing – latest updates

Why does Donald Trump look so at home in China?

The US president spent day one of his summit in Beijing basking in rigid pageantry, heroically managing not to offend his hosts and offering the verdict: “China is beautiful.”

For most of the AI boom, the general assumption regarding AI hardware was to keep scaling GPU clusters and the rest will follow. Need more compute? Add more GPUs. Need bigger models? Build bigger clusters.

Chipmaker Cerebras went a different way. While much of the market kept trying to make distributed AI systems work better, Cerebras argued that those systems were becoming too complex and inefficient. For years, that made the company look like an outlier. Now that view is starting to look more mainstream.

Wall Street is treating Cerebras’s path as a credible infrastructure bet. The much awaited Cerebras IPO is being viewed as one of the defining AI IPOs of 2026.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company priced its IPO at $185 per share, and is expected to start trading today. The price is above an already increased range of $150 to $160, raising roughly $5.55 billion in the largest IPO of the year so far. Depending on how the valuation is counted, the company is now being valued somewhere between about $40 billion and $56 billion. CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake is worth roughly $1.9 billion at the IPO price.

The IPO comes at a time when major AI labs, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are racing to secure the hardware needed to train and operate what seems like increasingly large AI systems. Nvidia may still dominate the market. However, rising inference demand, power consumption, and datacenter complexity are intensifying interest in alternative AI architectures. This is exactly what has created an opening for companies like Cerebras.

Cerebras built its systems around the wafer scale engine – a very large chip designed to keep more compute and memory together in one place. In a traditional AI cluster, work is divided across many graphics processors and servers. This requires data to be constantly moved through the networking fabric. Cerebras is trying to cut down on that sort of complexity by doing more on one large piece of silicon.

The GPU cluster model still works, and remains the predominant model. After all, they became the default engine of the AI boom for a reason. They are powerful, mature, and supported by a deep software ecosystem. But scaling AI is exposing some weak spots.

Datacenters are harder to build fast enough and networking costs are growing. Memory movement is becoming one of the biggest limits on performance. Then there is inference, which is quickly turning into a massive operating expense for AI companies. That shift is making the market more open to hardware approaches that promise simpler scaling.

In addition, the AI boom has also disrupted supply chains for chips, memory, and storage, while hyperscalers and AI companies have absorbed much of the available capacity. That puts extra pressure on everyone else trying to build or expand AI and HPC systems.

Long before the current AI infrastructure frenzy, Cerebras had already positioned itself as a challenger to traditional chip scaling approaches. Founded in 2015 by former SeaMicro executives, the company spent years developing wafer scale systems while much of the industry remained focused on accelerator clusters. Its IPO process was delayed in 2024 following scrutiny tied to G42. However, stronger AI infrastructure demand has dramatically changed the backdrop for its market debut.

None of this guarantees Cerebras wins the next phase of AI infrastructure. Nvidia still controls the overwhelming majority of the accelerator market and benefits from a robust software ecosystem that competitors are still trying to match. But the growing investor appetite for companies building alternatives to traditional GPU scaling suggests the market is becoming more willing to question whether larger and larger clusters remain the only path forward.

One of the major challenges for Cerebras was building chips at that scale. Larger wafers typically carry a higher risk of defects and lower manufacturing yields. Cerebras worked toward a more fault-tolerant architecture designed to route around flawed sections of the wafer while still maintaining performance.

Cerebras’s Wafer Scale Engine, with a baseball for size comparison.

Cerebras is not the only player trying to challenge the traditional GPU scaling model. Companies such as Groq and SambaNova are also pushing alternative AI architectures built around inference efficiency and simplified deployment.

Groq and SambaNova do not use wafer scale computing like Cerebras. Groq uses Language Processing Unit (LPU) architecture, and SambaNova relies on custom AI hardware and integrated software systems. There are several other companies, including some startups, that are using different types of alternative AI architectures.

The hype around the Cerebras IPO does not suddenly settle the debate around wafer scale computing or alternative architectures. However, what it does is give a clear signal that investors are becoming increasingly willing to fund alternative approaches to scaling AI.

The post Cerebras IPO Signals Growing Pressure on the GPU Scaling Model appeared first on HPCwire.

Proposals also grant the health minister power to change disability support rules without state or territory approval. Here’s what you need to know

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Funding for some services within the National Disability Insurance Scheme will be slashed – even in cases where participants could be left with a funding gap – as part of a sweeping proposal to drastically curb the scheme’s annual growth.

The proposed changes, revealed on Thursday, will also grant the health minister, Mark Butler, god-like powers to reduce overall funding for support categories, determine pricing guides and caps for services and support, and the ability to change NDIS rules without state and territory approval for the first 12 months.

‘Renter’ has become an identity for candidates to run on and housing affordability will be on local ballots

With housing costs for working-class families steadily climbing across the US while billionaire fortunes soar to all-time highs, renters’ rights are becoming a defining policy in the upcoming midterm elections, tenant rights organizers say.

In Massachusetts – where Boston consistently lands in the top five US cities for priciest rents – a proposed ballot question this November could overturn the state’s three-decade ban on rent control and cap annual increases at 5%, thanks to a coalition of three dozen housing, faith and labor groups.

Cisco's stock soared 17% after the company announced it will cut nearly 4,000 jobs as it shifts investment and staffing toward higher-growth AI opportunities. CNBC reports: CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the latest round of job cuts will begin on May 14. Cisco is the latest company to announce head count reductions tied to AI. "The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest," Robbins said. "I'm confident Cisco will be one of those winners. This means making hard decisions -- about where we invest, how we're organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us." Cisco said in a filing that severance and other costs will result in pre-tax charges of $1 billion, and that the company will recognize about $450 million of that in the fiscal fourth quarter. During the third quarter, Cisco announced switches and routers that use its next-generation processor. The company also debuted a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models based on their robustness against cybersecurity attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The murder of a young Pennsylvania woman remains unsolved for 34 years - can a determined detective and new technology bring her killer to justice?

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

German chancellor Friedrich Merz has strongly condemned the Russian attacks on Ukraine overnight, and rejected Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that one of his predecessors could play a role negotiating a peace settlement.

In a speech in Aachen, Merz said that while Ukraine and Europe “want to help end this terrible war as quickly as possible,” the Russian attacks “speak a different language” to that of Putin’s suggestions the war could be nearing an end.

“Last but not least, we Europeans decide for ourselves who speaks for us. No one else.”

Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned after suspected Ukrainian drones headed for Russia crossed into her country, sparking concerns about its defenses.

Chancellor says ‘now not the time to put economic stability at risk’ as ONS records 0.3% growth in first month of Iran war

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• Analysis: Reeves says ‘if economy ain’t broke, don’t fix it’

The chancellor has seized on official figures showing the UK economy was more resilient than feared at the start of the Iran war as evidence to keep the current Labour leadership in place.

Rachel Reeves hailed the fact that the economy unexpectedly grew in March, during the first month of the conflict in the Middle East, as proof the government had “the right economic plan”.

West Bank home described as ‘ideal for outdoor gatherings’ is among 41 listed rentals in illegal Israeli settlements

Some of Mohammad al-Sbeih’s fondest childhood memories are of his small farm in the hills south of Bethlehem, where three generations of his family grew wheat and barley.

“It was a hard plot to farm as it was on a hillside with terraces, but it was so beautiful,” Sbeih remembers.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting quit embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Cabinet in what is expected to be a precursor to challenging his leadership.

The identification of the remains also resolved a decades-long debate about the worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft will slingshot past Mars on Friday, on its way toward a rare metal-rich asteroid.

South Carolina’s state senate majority leader offered a nuanced case for rejecting Trump’s redistricting demands

How does a Republican leader say no to Donald Trump? How do they criticize the US president’s policies without facing a social media riot, or losing their career?

As the party scrambles to redraw key congressional districts after the supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act that prevented racial discrimination, all eyes turned this week to South Carolina.

I had never had the privilege of speaking with the president of the United States until last week. And it really was – it was a privilege. I enjoyed the conversation. It was a very good conversation. He gave me more time in a phone call than I could have expected …

The president told me, he said: ‘Look, I hope you can help us out.’ He said: ‘But I understand you got to do what you’re comfortable with, you got to do what you think is right.’

I would hope that the home team can retain the majority. And I would also hope that if the home team retains the majority, that they’ll actually do something productive with it. Over the last year and a half, I suspect if we look back at what they’ve done with the majority, I don’t know that anybody in here could name more than one piece of legislation they’ve passed.

And no matter how big and beautiful it was, there’s a whole lot more that they’ve left on the table. And that, to me, is disappointing – to have a majority that doesn’t do anything with it.

Trying to go to 7-0 I think is extremely risky from a political standpoint. I think at best you’re going to get 6-1 and you may even go 5-2. I’ve told the press a number of times, I think if you get cute with this, you could end up in a 5-2 scenario. I don’t want to go 5-2.

I don’t want [Democratic House minority leader] Hakeem Jeffries as the speaker of the House. I think the best chance that South Carolina has to prevent that from happening is with our current maps.

I cannot in good conscience surrender this authority that has been preserved to, for and by the states, and merely take orders from those who are not in South Carolina …

I absolutely understand what the president’s concern is here. I understand what the president’s issue is here. I don’t disagree with that. But there are other concerns that we have to consider. Those concerns have not been considered at all with the proposal that we have. Those concerns affect South Carolina and South Carolinians. And it is up to us to consider those things.

We’ve been able to punch above our weight regardless of the administration, regardless of who the president is, regardless of who occupies the White House. South Carolina has been able to deliver not just for South Carolina, but for the country and the world.

We have had that influence. Doing this will absolutely diminish that influence. It just will. And everybody knows it. Everybody in here, everybody who’s familiar with the process, we understand what’s going to happen here …

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 14, 2026 — Cerebras Systems Inc. has announced the pricing of its initial public offering of an aggregate of 30,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock, at a public offering price of $185.00 per share. In addition, Cerebras has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4,500,000 shares of its Class A common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on May 14, 2026, under the ticker symbol “CBRS.” The offering is expected to close on May 15, 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.

Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS Investment Bank are acting as lead book-running managers for the offering. Mizuho and TD Cowen are acting as bookrunners. Needham & Company, Craig-Hallum, Wedbush Securities, Rosenblatt, Academy Securities, Credit Agricole CIB, MUFG, and First Citizens Capital Securities are acting as co-managers.

A registration statement relating to these securities was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This offering is being made only by means of a prospectus, copies of which may be obtained, when available, from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014, or by email at prospectus@morganstanley.com; Citigroup Global Markets Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, or telephone: 800-831-9146; and Barclays Capital Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, by email at barclaysprospectus@broadridge.com, or telephone at 1-888-603-5847.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

More from HPCwire: Cerebras IPO Signals Growing Pressure on the GPU Scaling Model

About Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems is building the fastest AI infrastructure in the world. We are a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention because we believe that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Our flagship technology, the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) is the world’s largest and fastest commercialized AI processor. 58 times larger than a leading GPU chip, the WSE-3 uses a fraction of the power per unit compute while delivering inference up to 15 times faster than leading GPU-based solutions as benchmarked on leading open-source models. Leading corporations, research institutes, and governments on four continents chose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud.

Source: Cerebras Systems

The post Cerebras Systems Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering appeared first on HPCwire.

Doctor in Brandenburg state allegedly committed the crimes, including child rape, between 2013 and 2025

German prosecutors have charged a paediatrician with 130 counts of sexual abuse, including the rape of children, most of them in his care, in a case that has caused shock and prompted clinics to step up safeguards.

The 46-year-old doctor, whose name has not been released, has been in custody since November after a mother suspected her child had been assaulted and notified authorities. The doctor worked in clinics in Brandenburg state, surrounding Berlin.

SHEFFIELD, England, May 14, 2026 — Iceotope Group today announced the close of a $26 million series B funding round. The investment was led by Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures along with participation by existing investors Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone and British Patient Capital. Iceotope will use the funding to advance product and engineering development, expand its patent portfolio and accelerate ecosystem partnerships that will bring solutions incorporating Iceotope technology to market.

“Securing such high-caliber investors validates both our technology and our market timing,” stated Simon Jesenko, CEO and CFO of Iceotope. “We’ve spent years developing a robust, differentiated IP portfolio and products purpose-built for AI infrastructure, and we’re ready to scale at precisely the moment the industry demands more advanced, sustainable cooling technology. The opportunity ahead – both directly with customers and through our partner ecosystem – is significant.”

AI infrastructure is approaching a thermal inflection point. Next-generation GPU and accelerator platforms are driving rack power densities toward 1MW and beyond, rendering air cooling and direct-to-chip liquid cooling insufficient.

As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) move beyond the data center into widescale deployments in the enterprise and at the edge, the thermal challenge of cooling the hardware is moving with it. Iceotope’s precision liquid cooling technology enables systems to operate at maximum efficiency in any environment, while significantly reducing energy use and water consumption required for cooling.

According to SemiAnalysis, the liquid-cooled AI accelerator installed base is projected to grow from approximately 3GW to 40GW within two years, a more than 10X increase driven by hyperscaler and colocation adoption of AI workloads that conventional cooling architectures cannot sustain. Liquid cooling technology is equally applicable beyond the core data center, extending to extreme edge deployments where thermal management constraints are equally demanding.

“With AI adoption rapidly increasing globally, Iceotope’s liquid-cooling technology offers a timely and innovative solution to the mounting limitations of traditional cooling systems,” said Steven Poulter, Head of Barclays Climate Ventures. “Its approach not only meets the escalating demands of AI and high-performance computing but also materially advances datacenter sustainability. Aligned with Barclays Climate Ventures’ mandate to invest in commercially scalable climate technologies, we believe Iceotope is strongly positioned in a growing market and capable of significantly improving energy efficiency in a critical sector.”

About Iceotope

Iceotope Group is a global pioneer in liquid cooling that began in 2005 as a research‑driven “green computing” venture and has since evolved into a specialist in precision liquid cooling for data centers and edge infrastructure.

Today, with 219 patents granted and pending, our unique chassis based precision liquid cooling approach replaces traditional air cooling with highly efficient liquid-based thermal management for all infrastructure components. Our solutions can be deployed in nearly any environment with near silent operation and minimal water use. To learn more, visit www.iceotope.com.

Source: Iceotope

The post Iceotope Raises $26M to Solve Thermal Bottleneck at the Heart of Next-Gen AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Docked ship reportedly seized outside UAE port by “unauthorised personnel”

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said ships entering the strait of Hormuz must cooperate with the Iranian navy as reports emerged of a ship being seized outside a United Arab Emirate port and taken towards Iranian waters.

The UK Maritime Trading Organisation said the docked ship was seized by “unauthorised personnel” while it was anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah near the southern entry to the strait of Hormuz.

Evika Siliņa stands down after coalition collapses following sacking of defence minister

Latvia’s centre-right prime minister has resigned over her government’s handling of Ukrainian drones that strayed into Latvian territory from Russia, bringing down her coalition government months before elections due in October.

Evika Siliņa announced her resignation on Thursday, a day after the Progressives party, her left-leaning coalition partner, withdrew its support over her decision to fire the defence minister, Andris Sprūds, a Progressives member.

US plaintiffs say waterfront site was improperly transferred for Trump’s personal gain

A group of Miami residents has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the state of Florida over a land giveaway for his proposed presidential library.

Almost three acres of prime waterfront land that once belonged to Miami Dade College (MDC) were illegally gifted to the US president by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, the lawsuit states.

I was skeptical, but Motorola's first book-style foldable makes a striking debut, thanks to its sleek design, solid cameras and impressive battery life.

Two new mainstream Dell laptops with slim, all-metal designs make their debut, too.

New undercover video appears to show cruel treatment of salmon at Cooke hatchery amid push for ‘chickenification’ of fish

The Trump administration is keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood.

But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted.

Chinese president’s comments published after two-hour meeting with Trump. Plus, Stacey Abrams on why gutting of the Voting Rights Act is ‘evil incarnate’

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Good morning.

On the western edge of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in the imposing Mao-era Great Hall of the People, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sat down this morning for two hours of talks.

What else was on the agenda? The Chinese government said the two leaders discussed the war in the Middle East, the Ukraine conflict and issues on the Korean peninsula. As my colleagues Amy Hawkins and David Smith have written, the US is entering into talks with its superpower rival from a vulnerable position.

What is unlikely to be discussed? Unlike under previous US administrations, the visit is not expected to focus on human rights or US-China cooperation to tackle the climate crisis.

Follow our live coverage of the summit here.

What is Stateside with Kai and Carter? It’s the new flagship video podcast for Guardian US, hosted by Wright and fellow journalist Carter Sherman. With new episodes three times a week, the show will bring the Guardian’s global perspective and unique lens on America to life. Watch and listen now!

AI companies are recruiting a wide range of temp workers, from writers to wine enthusiasts, for hourly-paid gigs to help train their language models.

President Trump is in Beijing meeting with China's President Xi Jinping, with the two leaders aiming to stabilize their trading relationship after last year's trade war.

China’s leader made clear his top priority is the fate of the contested island and its U.S. military support, a striking move given President Donald Trump’s effort to mend ties and deliver trade deals.

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The president’s second term has been full of donors seeking access, favors for billionaires and apparent conflicts of interest

Every time Donald Trump has run for president, he has vowed to drain the swamp in Washington. But ever since he returned to the White House, not only has he not even tried to drain the swamp, he has pushed to gild it. Trump has used all the gold and glitz he can to cover up an increasingly putrid swamp – a morass filled with million-dollar donors scrambling for access, criminals seeking to buy pardons, corporate executives appointed to high-level government jobs and billionaire sycophants sucking up to Trump.

Making the swamp smell even worse, the president and his sons have somehow managed, through crypto and other means, to increase their wealth by an estimated $4bn since Trump won a second term. At this point, we should probably call Trump’s Washington not a swamp, but a colossal cesspool.

As Missouri asks voters whether to eliminate tax, experts say claims it will grow businesses and create jobs aren’t true

Hannah Rejali, 34, lived through the failed so-called “Kansas Experiment” in the 2010s, when the Republican governor cut the state’s income tax to try to give a “shot of adrenaline” to its economy but instead left the state with a $900m budget shortfall.

That meant, for example, that in 2015, at least eight school districts ended their academic year early.

Texas State ordered by judge to continue paying Idris Robinson after he was fired for talk he gave in another state

Texas philosophy professor Idris Robinson said he was breathing a bit easier this week nearly halfway through what he called “the most stressful month of fatherhood so far”.

That’s because Robinson was faced with losing his paycheck from Texas State University beginning 31 May, along with his academic affiliation, after he was fired for a talk he gave in another state on what he called “the liberation of Palestine”. The incident would have made it nearly impossible for him to find another job teaching – all with a 16-month-old son at home.

Check out some great, newly-arrived films like Bugonia and Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris on Netflix now.

We ran 33 phones from Apple, Google, OnePlus, Samsung, Motorola and more through our charging tests. The winners are given our CNET Lab Award.

Google's AI has come a long way since last year's software conference.

A jury in Chicago awarded $49.5 million in damages Wednesday to the family of a 24-year-old American who perished in a 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crash​.

Ronald dela Rosa, wanted over involvement in Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’, reportedly left heavily guarded building before dawn

A Philippine lawmaker wanted by the international criminal court for his alleged role enforcing Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody anti-drugs crackdown has secretly fled the senate after spending days holed up in the building to avoid arrest.

The senate president, Alan Peter Cayetano, confirmed to the media that senator Ronald dela Rosa was “no longer in the building” after reports that he had slipped out of the heavily guarded building before dawn.

The 5.5-carat "Ocean Dream" diamond was found in Central Africa in the 1990s.

The GDP boost has raised the chancellor’s prospects for staying in post, whoever wins the Labour leadership battle

• Business live – latest updates

• UK economy records surprise 0.3% growth despite Iran war

The message from Rachel Reeves is clear. After Britain’s economy defied the predictions for a slump in March, despite the fallout from the Iran war, why put things at risk with a roll of the dice in domestic politics?

Responding to bumper growth of 0.3% in March – much stronger than City economists’ forecasts for a 0.2% contraction – the chancellor said the figures showed she had the right economic plan, in a comment laced with subtext.

• Cleveland lead best-of-seven series 3-2

• Detroit had led by nine with four minutes left

James Harden scored 30 points and Donovan Mitchell added 21, including seven in overtime, as the visiting Cleveland Cavaliers rallied to beat the Detroit Pistons 117-113 on Wednesday to take a 3-2 lead in the Eastern Conference semi-finals.

The result leaves Detroit, the No 1 seeds in the East, just one defeat from elimination.

Zeal for ‘the Hamptons of England’ has rubbed off on sales, with luxury British fashion brand back to a full-year profit

• Business live – latest updates

The luxury fashion brand Burberry has said a new £2,000 handbag named after the Cotswolds has bolstered sales, as the English region becomes increasingly popular with wealthy Americans.

Joshua Schulman, the company’s chief executive, said its tote bags – which mix leather and the signature Burberry check – had helped drive its best performance in bag sales since 2023.

The Russian president is facing pressure not only from a stalemate on the battlefield but also from a battered economy that is fueling discontent.

Merged institution will become second largest mainstream university in UK with about 47,000 students

King’s College London has agreed to merge with Cranfield University, creating a new UK “super-university” that would rival many of its international competitors in size and research output.

The merger would result in King’s taking on another 5,000 mainly postgraduate students and becoming the second largest mainstream university in the UK, with about 47,000 students, overtaking the University of Manchester and behind only University College London.

Shares in Spire Healthcare jump after approach from Toscafund, founded by City figure known as ‘the Rottweiler’

• Business live – latest updates

The board of Britain’s largest private hospital operator has backed a buyout proposal worth £1bn from its second biggest shareholder, a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler”, sending its shares soaring by nearly 50%.

Spire Healthcare, which owns the Claremont hospital in Sheffield and St Anthony’s hospital in south London, said it had received a non-binding proposal worth 250p a share from funds advised by the activist investor Toscafund Asset Management.

For movie fans, the G6 OLED is especially good, but it's up against some serious competition from the Samsung S95H.

Iran's military says it's trained and ready for any new U.S. assault as President Trump predicted a "long talk" about the war with China's President Xi in Beijing.

Privilege being mistaken for competence as study reveals no evidence to suggest companies run by state-educated peers underperform

Chief executives who attended private school are perceived by investors as a “safer bet”, according to a study, despite there being no evidence they perform or behave differently to their state-educated counterparts.

Companies run by privately educated bosses tend to experience lower stock market volatility, even though there are no meaningful differences in their performance, decision-making or crisis management, the research from the University of Surrey found.

Community members and rights groups criticize police arriving at Cincinnati schools on behalf of ICE

Cincinnati’s Price Hill is a bastion of Latino life. On Warsaw Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, Guatemalan flags and taco trucks are dotted around street corners and parking lots.

In the streets around the Roberts Academy elementary school, students flood out of school on a recent Thursday afternoon. Nearby, four boys kick a soccer ball around a tiny garden.

We've put this smart home tech to work in our homes and come away impressed with the results.

Having the cancelled director of the Rush Hour franchise – one of the president’s favourites – on Air Force One is exactly the kind of gesture he enjoys making

One of the least pressing yet most irritating aspects of Donald Trump’s US is the reintroduction of a bunch of people we never thought we’d have to hear from again. Men (and it’s mostly men) who, under previous administrations, were banished to the far corners of our collective consciousness, have come roaring back – this week on Air Force One. I’m referring to Brett Ratner, film director and subject of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, all of which he denies, who was comprehensively cancelled in Hollywood but has reemerged this week to – what are the chances? – accompany the US president to China for his summit with Xi Jinping.

If Ratner, who was dropped by Warner Bros in 2017, is not an obvious choice of travelling companion for the US president, he does at least fit the mould of men with appalling reputations alongside whom Trump stands a good chance of looking almost appealing. Many in Trump’s inner circle, prior to being plucked from the mire for possible advancement, had been on the brink of cancellation – take your pick from Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr – such that a sketchy past appears less of an oversight when it comes to Trump appointees and more of a qualification.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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

Fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem with AI

If it wasn’t already clear, Elon Musk and Sam Altman hate each other.

While the two men were once co-founders of OpenAI, they’re now locked in a vicious feud, playing out in all its theatrics in front of a judge and jury in a California courtroom. Musk is suing, alleging that Altman and OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, tricked him into forming and funding the organization as a non-profit before they subsequently restructured it to have a for-profit entity. OpenAI says Musk was well aware of those plans and frames the lawsuit as an attempt to derail a competitor.

An anonymous researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who has already leaked several Windows zero-days this year, has disclosed two more: YellowKey and GreenPlasma. The Register reports: Nightmare-Eclipse described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found." They provided the files, which have to be loaded onto a USB drive, and if the attacker completes the key sequence correctly, they are granted unrestricted shell access to a BitLocker-protected machine. When it comes to claims like these, we usually exercise some caution, as this bug requires physical access to a Windows PC. However, seeing that BitLocker acts as Windows' last line of defense for stolen devices, bypassing the technology grants thieves the ability to access encrypted files. Rik Ferguson, VP of security intelligence at Forescout, said: "If [the researcher's claim] holds up, a stolen laptop stops being a hardware problem and becomes a breach notification." Despite the physical access requirement, Gavin Knapp, cyber threat intelligence principal lead at Bridewell, told The Register that YellowKey remains "a huge security problem for organizations using BitLocker." Citing information shared in cyber threat intelligence circles, he added that YellowKey can be mitigated by implementing a BitLocker PIN and a BIOS password lock. Nightmare-Eclipse hinted at YellowKey also acting as a backdoor, allegedly injected by Microsoft, although the people we spoke to said this was impossible to verify based on the information available. The researcher also published partial exploit code for GreenPlasma, rather than a fully formed proof of concept exploit (PoC). Ferguson noted attackers need to take the code provided by the researcher and figure out how to weaponize it themselves, which is no small task: in its current state it triggers a UAC consent prompt in default Windows configurations, meaning a silent exploit remains a work in progress. Knapp warned that these kinds of privilege escalation flaws are often used by attackers after they gain an initial foothold in a victim's system. "These elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are often weaponized during post-exploitation to enable threat actors to discover and harvest credentials and data, before moving laterally to other systems, prior to end goals such as data theft and/or ransomware deployment," he said. "Currently, there is no known mitigation for GreenPlasma. It will be important to patch when Microsoft addresses the issue." The other zero-days leaked include RedSun, a Windows Defender privilege escalation flaw; UnDefend, a Windows Defender denial-of-service bug; and BlueHammer, a separate Microsoft vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-32201 that was patched in April. According to The Register, RedSun and UnDefend remained unfixed at the time of publication, and proof-of-concept code for the flaws was reportedly picked up quickly and abused in real-world attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Human rights experts make rare public appeal as US deportees describe being held in ‘prison-like’ conditions

Human rights experts at the United Nations issued a rare public appeal to Equatorial Guinea, urging the central African country to halt its plans to return US deportees to their home countries, where they face political violence, torture and death.

The statement, co-signed by a representative of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, adds diplomatic pressure on Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s most repressive regimes, to comply with international human rights standards and avoid refoulement, or the expulsion of people to countries where they face persecution.

The tourist sparked outrage after a witness recorded him chucking a coconut-sized rock at "Lani," a beloved Hawaiian monk seal off a Maui beach.

Creator of Politidex hopes free online app will help humanise politics and act as a way of ‘flipping the narrative’

The year is 2016 and Pokémon Go has taken over the world. People are wandering for miles on end, disrupting concerts, and even slamming into poles in their attempts to capture fantastical cartoon creatures.

Ten years later, a new generation are flocking to another Pokémon-inspired game. Instead of Pikachu, Charizard and Blastoise, however, players are catching and training up their local politicians in order to build their own political parties. Some MPs are even catching themselves.

Environmentalists hail decline but warn weakened laws could reverse gains

Brazil’s Atlantic forest, the country’s most threatened biome, last year recorded its lowest level of deforestation since monitoring began 40 years ago, a new report shows.

The forest is Brazil’s most populous biome, and home to 80% of the population and major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 2025 it recorded 8,658 hectares of deforestation, marking the first time it has fallen below 10,000 hectares since 1985.

The best MP3 players (aka digital audio players or DAPs) sound great and let you listen to music offline without paying for a subscription.

Rare earths are on Trump’s agenda in China. But US electronic waste offers an untapped source at home Expert comment thilton.drupal 14 May 2026

The US currently depends on China for crucial rare earth minerals and magnets. But its domestic electronic waste contains vast quantities of valuable magnets that could be reused and recycled to counter Beijing’s dominance.

In President Donald Trump’s talks with China’s President Xi Jinping this week, rare earth elements are likely to be high on the agenda. Rare earths are essential to the technologies that underpin both economic competitiveness and national security: electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, data centres, advanced electronics, missiles, radar systems and fighter jets. 

Beijing’s dominance of the rare earths supply chain means it currently holds all the cards. Yet in the long term, the US does have an alternative route that could help it redress this imbalance: recovering and recycling crucial rare earth magnets from the vast amount of electronic waste it produces every year.

Self-inflicted over-dependence

The US’s vulnerability to its dependence on China for rare earths became painfully clear in 2025, when Beijing introduced export controls on several rare earth elements and related magnets. Those restrictions sent shockwaves through automotive, defence and technology supply chains. A one-year trade truce was later agreed after the Trump–Xi meeting in South Korea in October 2025. But that did not solve the underlying problem. It merely postponed it.

The uncomfortable truth for Washington is that the US will continue to depend on China for rare earths for the foreseeable future. Chinese mines produce around 70 per cent of rare earths, but the real chokepoint lies in processing, separation and magnet production. China accounts for around 90 per cent of global heavy rare earth processing, producing most of the world’s rare earth permanent magnets, which are crucial for many electronics. 

How did the US, the world’s largest economy, end up in this precarious position? The answer is a combination of strategic drift, blind faith in free market economics, and the convenience of cheap resources and outsourcing environmental impacts. 

Related work

Trump–Xi summit will be about managing US–China rivalry, not resolving it

For decades, Western countries were content with the complex and polluting stages of rare earths mining and processing taking place in China, while they imported processed rare earths and finished components such as neodymium magnets at low cost. China, meanwhile, recognized the importance of controlling these supply chains. It invested, scaled, and absorbed environmental and social costs.

But the deeper failure is systemic: The global economic system has never properly priced the minerals and metals it consumes. Rare earths have been treated as cheap inputs, not as strategically valuable materials, albeit ones with high environmental and social costs embedded in their extraction and processing. The result is a linear system: valuable materials are extracted from the ground, built into devices with increasingly short lifespans, and then mostly lost to landfill or waste streams.

The Department of Energy (DoE) projects that US demand for neodymium permanent magnets could reach around 37,000 tonnes per year by 2030, and up to 68,600 tonnes per year by 2050 under a high-growth scenario. This projected growth in demand is driven largely by clean-energy and electrification technologies, including electric vehicles, offshore wind and industrial motors. 

Yet current US production of rare earth permanent magnets remains tiny by comparison: MP Materials, which owns the country’s only operational rare earths mine, only started domestic neodymium magnet production in 2025. It has a current production capacity of around 1,000 tonnes, but is aiming to ramp up to 10,000 tonnes once it opens a second facility in 2028. 

Untapped potential

However, the US does have other sources it could tap. These are not only from new mines and processing capacity, but also the large quantities of rare earth magnets embedded in discarded electronics, motors, hard drives and other electronic waste, known as e-waste. 

Rare earth elements within e-waste can often be recycled and reused. According to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, the US generated around 7.2 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022. Estimating that 0.25 per cent of that annual e-waste consists of neodymium magnets (based on the available evidence from multiple studies), US e-waste therefore likely contains approximately 18,000 tonnes of magnets each year – an amount that would meet almost two thirds of the DoE’s projected US demand for 2030. 

However, much of this potential resource ends up in landfill. Although 25 states have implemented some form of state-wide e-waste recycling programmes, these vary in scope, and the lack of a uniform federal law has led to regulatory patchwork and created challenges. 

A major issue is collection. Current recycling practices in the US are patchy and do not focus on recovering rare earths, which requires specialized separation technologies and targeted collection systems.

Large quantities of valuable US e-waste are also being shipped to and dumped in Asia. While Washington worries about Chinese dominance over rare earths, valuable materials embedded in US products are leaking out of the domestic economy. 

Other sources

Coal ash, mine waste and industrial residues also contain rare earth elements and other critical minerals that could be recovered. Research suggests there could be as much as 11 million tonnes of rare earth elements in accessible coal ash in the US, nearly eight times the amount that the US currently has in domestic reserves. 

The US DoE has supported work on extracting rare earths from coal by-products such as ash and slag since 2017, while other US agencies have also moved to prioritize the recovery of critical minerals from mining waste. However, these approaches are yet to reach scale, and without stronger policy support, investment incentives and clearer market signals, they will remain promising but marginal solutions. 

A circular future

Washington is spending far more on mining and processing new rare earths than it is on recovering the rare earths it has already imported, used and discarded. That is a missed strategic opportunity: the fastest route to mineral security may not only lie in new mines, but in the waste streams the US has so far neglected to treat as national assets. 

This solution requires innovation in engineering, designing products for repair and easy disassembly, building domestic collection and recycling infrastructure, creating standards for recycled rare earth content, and ensuring that magnets and other components can be recovered at scale. It also means using public procurement, tax incentives and producer responsibility rules to make recovering magnets economically viable.

The leading progressive candidate to replace longtime Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in Congress is opposing a pair of wealth taxes on the ballot in his state and district: a one-time statewide tax on California billionaires and a local San Francisco tax on the city’s wealthiest businesses and corporations. 

California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s opposition might seem uncharacteristic for someone running a progressive campaign, but it’s consistent with the priorities of two top donors to a super PAC backing his candidacy.

Crypto mogul Chris Larsen and venture capitalist Garry Tan — a pair of wealthy Bay Area tech executives funding a pro-Wiener super PAC called Abundant Future — have been outspoken advocates of stopping the taxes, both of which aim to help fill funding gaps in healthcare and social services after the Trump administration’s recent cuts to Medicaid. Larsen has poured millions of dollars into the fight.

The statewide tax, known as the Billionaire Tax Act, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires’ wealth and assets. The local San Francisco proposition, colloquially known as the Overpaid CEO tax, would tax companies whose CEO makes 100 times more than their median worker, which mostly applies to companies with billionaire CEOs. Both will likely be on the ballot in November, as Wiener also hopes to be.

Larsen, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of the blockchain service Ripple Labs and now a mainstay in Bay Area political funding, has donated $100,000 to the PAC backing Wiener — the most of any individual donor — and $700,000 opposing the Overpaid CEO tax, according to federal and San Francisco city records. He’s spent far more fighting the statewide billionaires’ tax, sinking $5 million of his own wealth and another $5 million from Ripple into the Golden State Promise PAC, an anti-tax PAC he founded, per state records. Larsen gave an additional $2.5 million to a separate anti-billionaire tax group, Building a Better California, founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (Brin has reportedly already left the state to avoid the tax.)

Tan, the CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, has less money to throw around, but he’s made vocal opposition to the tax measures a key part of his brand. He frequently invokes the specter of billionaires and startups fleeing the state and spreads claims that the statewide tax would mean Google’s founders would owe 50 percent of their stocks, which the tax’s backers have dismissed as false. He’s contributed $25,000 to Abundant Future.

Related

She Opposed His Plan for a Blockchain City. Now He’s Bankrolling Her Primary Opponent.

Larsen and Tan likely see their support as “political investments that they expect a return on,” said Jeremy Mack, executive director of Phoenix Project, which tracks corporate spending in San Francisco politics. Wiener owes much of his political strength to the donors who have boosted his housing causes during his state Senate career, including Larsen and Tan. With those backers now animated against the wealth taxes, Mack said that supporting them would be “political suicide” for Wiener.

But Wiener’s opposition to the taxes positions him against the political currents now driving the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. California’s major labor unions, a supermajority of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, and national progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., all support the pair of taxes. Even Pelosi, Wiener’s would-be predecessor and a known moderate, is in favor of the local San Francisco tax. SEIU California, one of the state’s largest labor unions, withdrew its endorsement of Wiener in early April over his opposition to the tax measures.

Related

Saikat Chakrabarti’s Plan for the Political Revolution

Both of Wiener’s opponents in the three-way June 2 primary — progressive member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors Connie Chan and Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti — are in favor of the taxes. Most California voters support the statewide billionaire tax, according to a March poll, including 72 percent of Democratic voters. 

“If you look at who is bankrolling [Wiener], he is doing the bidding of massive corporate interest,” Justin Dolezal, a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward, an advocacy group that supports both wealth taxes, told The Intercept. “That’s what he’s looking out for, rather than the average, everyday working San Franciscans.”

Wiener’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

While Wiener in the past has brushed off concerns of corporate backers influencing his policy, saying that he and his wealthiest donors “have agreements and disagreements,” their alignment in opposition against two popular wealth taxes has drawn concern from housing and homelessness advocates, who were already skeptical of Wiener for boosting housing development in the city that they argue favors real estate corporations. The real estate industry was consistently among his top donors during his state Senate elections.

Wiener is a proponent of the “Yes in My Backyard” movement that seeks to address the housing crisis by increasing the housing stock, while opponents criticize it for its emphasis on boosting development rather than redistributing wealth. The movement has morphed over the past several years with the growth of the abundance movement, which is popular among San Francisco’s powerful billionaires and aims to remove regulations and red tape to speed up development.

In addition to being top donors to Abundant Future, Tan and Larsen, along with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, have been consistent supporters of Wiener’s YIMBY vision. During his decade in the state Senate, Wiener introduced a series of bills that cut regulations to accelerate housing development across the state, a core tenet of YIMBYism and abundance. Critics on the left dismissed his policies as rewards for corporate commercial real estate developers that failed to meet San Francisco and the state’s housing needs, as well as exacerbating gentrification and displacement of its low-income residents. Opponents instead argue for redistribution of wealth, using the housing that already exists and direct investment in services for low-income people. 

Confronting challenges over his support from wealthy donors during his campaign for Congress, Wiener often refers to his track record of taking on corporations, such as introducing AI regulation bills, one of which drew the ire of some of his tech backers, including Tan. But earlier this year, Wiener and Tan partnered on a failed state bill that would have restricted Big Tech companies from self-preferencing their products over smaller companies. While Wiener touted the legislation as a way to rein in the likes of Apple and Google, Tan’s company, Y Combinator, likely would have benefited because it helps launch new startups.

Tan has also worked to insulate the tech sector from organized labor, accusing the state’s labor leaders of having the goal of “killing the tech golden goose and taking maximum waste into the budget … until CA ceases to work for everyday Californians.” 

Larsen, meanwhile, railed against unions at a San Francisco business event in January, calling on his peers to “start fighting on par with the unions when they propose these absolutely stupid propositions like this crazy CEO tax.” Larsen echoed the message at a separate tech donor gathering Tan hosted months later. 

Larsen did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Tan told The Intercept to “look at Mr. Tan’s posts on X/Twitter,” where Tan has called the billionaire tax “a destroy tech in California proposition” and the overpaid CEO tax “bad policy wrapped up in anti-billionaire bullshit.”

Wiener’s legislative record reveals an inconsistent history of supporting progressive taxation. In 2018, he opposed a successful local tax on big businesses to fund homelessness services. Two years later, Wiener supported the first iteration of the CEO tax, the first of its kind nationwide, before it was undone in 2024. 

At a candidate forum in January, Wiener said he supported progressive taxes, but he would wait until the Billionaires Tax Act got on the ballot to decide. In April, Wiener said he opposed the local CEO tax, saying he didn’t want to interrupt San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s economic recovery agenda and that he would pursue similar progressive tax reform in Congress. And last week, after the state billionaire tax’s backers announced they had the necessary signatures to enter it on the ballot, Wiener said he was also against the statewide tax.

Related

Progressive Group Founded by Bernie Sanders Endorses Billionaire for California Governor

“California already has an unstable boom-bust tax system because of the devaluation of property taxes and reliance increasingly on income taxes on wealthy residents,” Wiener told the San Francisco Standard. He said he disagreed with the approach, especially given that it’s a one-time tax.

“It sounds like a person that’s in opposition, but doesn’t want to be seen as Republican,” said Paul Boden, a longtime advocate for people living unhoused. “It’s the neoliberal justification for continuing down the same neoliberal path since Reagan: that doing something that might impact some wealthy people is bad for all of us.” 

Boden, the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, has long sparred with Wiener on his housing and homelessness policy. In 2016, when Wiener was a San Francisco board supervisor, Boden spoke out against a letter Wiener wrote to the city’s police chief, which had called for a sweep of homeless encampments amid that year’s winter storms. He has criticized Wiener’s housing policies, arguing they prioritize middle-income San Franciscans over the city’s poor.

The results of Larsen and Tan’s ad spending can already be seen on the airwaves in and around San Francisco. Abundant Future has been running ads and sending mailers that paint Chakrabarti, who is advocating to nationalize AI by turning struggling AI companies into public utilities, as a carpetbagger amid his surge in recent polls. Larsen has said that he supports candidates promoting AI regulation, and he plans to spend millions backing Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate facing heavy oppositional spending from a PAC backed by openAI.

Larsen-funded ads released by his Golden State Promises PAC aired during California’s recent gubernatorial debate, saying the billionaire tax would “backfire and hurt you.”

Supporters of the local and state wealth taxes argue that more revenue is needed to address California’s shortfall due to federal healthcare funding cuts, which is estimated at a $100 billion loss over the next five years. There are more than 200 billionaires who live in the state, according to Forbes data compiled by tax advocates. Most of the revenue from the one-time state tax would go to healthcare, with some set aside for food assistance at schools and other education programs. 

Revenue from San Francisco’s local Overpaid CEO tax — which has been estimated to bring in $250 to $300 million each year — is designed to go to the city’s general fund, with its supporters hoping to invest in healthcare, mental health treatment, and housing support. Larsen and opponents are also funding support for a dueling “poison pill” measure, which would negate the Overpaid CEO tax if approved.

To Mack of the Phoenix Project, this kind of spending is par for the course in politics but should inspire voters to think critically about whom they support.

“The more politicians are in their pockets,” said Mack, referring to wealthy donors, “the less we can expect regular Californian/San Franciscan people’s voices to matter.”

Correction: May 14, 2026, 4:05 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the first name of a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward; he is Justin Dolezal, not Jerome.

The post This California Congressional Hopeful Opposes a Billionaire Tax. So Do His Tech CEO Backers. appeared first on The Intercept.

The big clock is just one of the new features you can try now on your device.

In 1997, the Comets defied the odds to win the league’s inaugural championship. From clashing stars and run-ins with Hakeem Olajuwon to city parades and mourning Princess Diana on title night, this is the story of their historic season

Fran Harris remembers a late-night dinner in Sacramento. Her Houston Comets squad had just dispatched the lowly Monarchs by 10 points. To celebrate, she and a few teammates, including Cynthia Cooper, Tammy Jackson and Kim Perrot, decided to grab a bite. Cooper had scored 44 in the 25 July 1997 contest, and her talents dazzled even her dinner companions.

“I said to Cynthia, ‘I just cannot believe how great you’re playing – and I know how great you are!’” Harris tells the Guardian. “And she goes, ‘I know!’ She was just, like, Yeah, I’m the motherfucker! I was like, ‘You absolutely are!’”

Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn’t view AI as God, but he certainly seems to see it as God-like

Are you there God? It’s me, Arwa. I’ll be quite honest, I’m afraid I’ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a “pernicious” delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins’ judgment about life, the universe and everything.

Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious. In an op-ed, Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed … a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”

Experts say prosecutions of parents could reshape accountability for mass shootings in the US

In early March a Georgia man was convicted of murder nearly two years after his 14-year-old son allegedly shot and killed two students, two teachers and injured nine others. Though Colin Gray, 54, didn’t fire any shots and wasn’t at the school during the shooting, he was punished as such.

Gray’s case marked the second time the parent of a school shooter in the US has faced a homicide charge, and legal experts say that it won’t be the last. It’s a development both the legal and gun violence prevention fields are watching closely. Will US prosecutors, desperate to stem the number of high-profile mass shootings, cast an ever wider net of responsibility?

Why Should Delaware Care?
Housing costs are rising in Delaware, leading to strained budgets, longer commutes and an increase in the homeless population. A new bill attempts to fix the problem by imposing stricter requirements on municipalities’ zoning codes, which opponents argue takes away localities’ ability to control their own land use rules. 

A new bill meant to address Delaware’s affordable housing shortage is already facing steep opposition from local governments. 

Senate Bill 23, dubbed “The Housing for Every Delawarean Act,” would require most localities to increase housing density and adopt other measures to make homes more affordable. 

The Senate Housing and Land Use Committee held a hearing for the bill Wednesday, but did not vote on whether to advance it out of committee. 

The bill comes amid growing momentum among elected officials in Delaware to encourage the construction of smaller, more dense housing in order to address a shortage of affordable homes across the state. But it also is the latest measure in Dover to spark a backlash from municipal leaders who fear an erosion of their local control.

Delaware is short almost 20,000 rental units for households that earn less than half the region’s median income, according to a 2023 study conducted by the Delaware State Housing Authority. 

During Wednesday’s hearing, the bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Russ Huxtable (D-Lewes), noted the state government already works with municipalities to plan for more affordable housing, but said those plans sometimes stall. 

“That’s why this bill is necessary. It moves us from planning to outcomes,” Huxtable said. 

In response, leaders of Delaware towns, cities and counties said those outcomes should be a result of land use rules set by their municipalities and not the state. The arguments echoed a long-running point of tension between local governments and the Delaware legislature.

Three county officials — New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry, Sussex County Council President Douglas Hudson and Kent County Levy Court President Joanne Masten — also signed a joint letter to the Senate committee that argued the bill “goes too far.”

The letter said SB 23 is a “heavy-handed, top-down approach” that will not increase affordable housing but instead “produce onerous mandates, sow confusion, and further the divide between State and local governments.”

Town council members and municipal managers made similar arguments during the public comment period, stating the legislature should work with them to come up with solutions to the affordable housing shortage rather than mandating changes. 

“We can support affordable housing without dismissing the voices and authority of the local governments,” Townsend Town Manager Julie Goodyear said. 

But Jon Horner, a Schell Brothers attorney and president of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, said local governments have already had years to allow more affordable housing. 

“Yet the housing crisis has persisted and been exacerbated,” Horner said. 

Horner was one of several members of the building trades who spoke in favor of the bill, along with affordable housing advocates. 

The bill would require a two-thirds majority vote to pass both chambers because it would affect the charter of some of the state’s municipalities. 

What does the bill say?

SB 23 primarily reforms state requirements for comprehensive plans — which are roadmaps for future growth the state requires counties and municipalities to update every 10 years. 

Comprehensive plans can have enormous impacts on what is and isn’t allowed to be built because it guides zoning changes, transportation investments and natural resource protection. 

Under the bill, counties, cities and towns with a population more than 2,000 residents would have to add an affordable housing plan to their comprehensive plans. 

That plan would have to increase the maximum density of residential areas and remove barriers to constructing smaller houses, such as townhomes and duplexes. 

SB 23 lists 10 other measures meant to make housing more affordable or easier to find. Local governments would have to choose at least five of them to include in their plan. 

Those measures include waiving impact fees for income-restricted housing, allowing more transitional housing and speeding up the approval process for affordable homes. 

The bill also says the state government “shall not be obligated to provide state financial assistance or infrastructure improvements” to support development projects that are not consistent with the comprehensive plan.

The post Affordable housing bill is the latest front in Delaware’s local control debate appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Lawmakers are required to advertise proposed constitutional amendments in print newspapers. A recent legislative push to change that requirement has been billed as smart fiscal policy by legislative leaders, but some news outlets say it would be a detriment to government transparency.

As Delaware lawmakers consider removing a requirement that they advertise proposed state constitutional amendments in local newspapers, some news outlets and a regional industry group have decried the move as a blow to government transparency. 

But the lawmakers who sponsored the bill – all members of Democratic leadership – rebuffed those claims, calling their legislation, House Bill 321, a fiscally responsible way to curb state spending.

Delaware is the only state in the country in which amendments to its constitution are not directly voted on by residents. Instead, proposed amendments must receive a two-thirds vote by the legislature in two consecutive sessions of the General Assembly — sessions that are separated by an election. 

In order to ensure Delawareans are informed of proposed amendments, the state requires the legislature to buy ads about them — often called public notices — in local newspapers no less than three months prior to Election Day. 

House Bill 321, described as a cost-saving measure, would shift that public notice away from paid newspaper ads and onto the legislature and the Department of Elections websites, both government-run forums.

In an editorial published late last month, The News Journal condemned the legislation, saying it would take “a new wrecking ball to transparency in the First State.” The editorial board of Delaware’s largest newspaper called on lawmakers not to pass the bill, and for Gov. Matt Meyer to veto the legislation should it make its way to his desk. 

“In a state where one-party rule has been reality for decades, it’s galling that leaders of both houses of the General Assembly would make a move on transparency,” the editorial board wrote.

Spotlight Delaware’s publisher and editor-in-chief also penned a joint letter opposing the bill earlier this week and calling for Meyer to veto it, should it pass the Senate.

But House and Senate Democratic leaders defended their bill, both during a May 7 committee hearing and in subsequent interviews with Spotlight Delaware.

“No it doesn’t save a tremendous amount of money, but we are trying to be fiscally responsible and also make sure that there is reasonable access.” Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola (D-Newark) said during that May 7 hearing. “The access the public has to the state website is not behind a paywall, unlike the others that might be contracted to have these kinds of notices.”

The legislature has spent about $25,600 on proposed constitutional amendment advertising over the past 10 years, Sokola said.

Richard Puffer, chief clerk of the House of Representatives, said that figure works out to about $1,600 per amendment. That advertising money is paid to The News Journal, The Daily State News and the Cape Gazette — state law requires the ads be printed in a newspaper in each county. 

House Bill 321 has already passed through the House and a Senate committee. It now awaits consideration by the full Senate.

How did we get here?

Puffer, along with Secretary of the Senate Ryan Dunphy, first presented the public notice change during a Joint Legislative Council meeting in December 2025.

House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown then introduced the proposal as HB 321 in March. There was no debate about the bill among lawmakers when it was first considered in the House Administration Committee. It also passed the full House without debate on April 22.

The bill passed the House as part of what’s called a consent agenda, a group of bills that are usually considered non-controversial and voted on all at one time. The consent agenda does not receive any debate on the House floor. Only Rep. Bryan Shupe (R-Milford), who has previously owned and operated newspapers and media outlets, voted against the slate of bills, a vote he took because of his opposition to HB 321.

The News Journal published its editorial a week later, sparking a much livelier discussion about the bill when it was heard in the Senate Executive Committee on May 7.

Both Sokola and Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend defended the bill against the critiques leveled by The News Journal’s editorial. 

Townsend rejected the editorial board’s transparency argument, citing newspapers’ financial stake in the game and their ability to far more prominently feature proposed constitutional amendments through news coverage than in public notice ads.

“If you want to talk about transparency, and that’s a reason to oppose this, then let’s talk about how the amount of public awareness on these issues is greatly enhanced not by a little, tiny ad published in the back of the newspaper, but by articles your reporters can cover on the front of the newspaper,” Townsend said.

He called on news outlets to invest in developing reporters and lawmakers to make themselves available to talk with journalists when approached as ways to bolster transparency.

Rebecca Snyder, executive director of the Maryland-Delaware-D.C Press Association, acknowledged it would be disingenuous to discount that newspapers have a financial stake in maintaining public notice ads, but she said the state does not have a stellar track record for maintaining government transparency.

She pointed to the state’s largest university and ways in which businesses transact with the government as areas where transparency is lacking.

“I think that it is a larger issue, and reducing it only to dollars is a red herring on the importance of the issue overall,” Snyder said.

The Senate Executive Committee ultimately voted to advance HB 321. It now awaits consideration by the full Senate. If passed, it would proceed to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk to be signed into law. 

The post Lawmakers consider public notice ad changes, news outlets push back appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Wall Street has proved incredibly resilient to instability, and while consumer confidence has dipped, shares have soared

It was a dark Friday for Wall Street on 27 March. Oil prices were climbing and the war with Iran raged on. Markets responded accordingly, with the Dow and Nasdaq entering correction territory, falling more than 10% below their peak, after a month of selloffs.

Fast forward seven weeks later to 13 May, and the situation in Iran only looked marginally better. Oil prices were high, and the strait of Hormuz was still closed. Peace talks with Iran seemed tenuous, even with the pressures of high gas prices. Donald Trump on Wednesday said he was “not even a little bit” motivated by Americans’ financial situation to end the war.

Emirates’ foreign ministry rejects claims that Netanyahu visited country, describing them as ‘baseless’

Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed he made a secret trip to the United Arab Emirates at the height of the Iran war to meet the president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

“This visit has led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Wednesday night.

Designer suggests decision to stage show in Los Angeles is part of strategy to deepen label’s cinema presence

Like Christian Dior, the founder of the house he now leads, fashion designer Jonathan Anderson’s ambition is to be not just a Parisian couturier but a Hollywood power player. “We think of Dior as this romantic character, but he was also a very savvy businessman,” said Anderson before a blockbuster catwalk show in Los Angeles. Stage Fright, the Hitchcock caper-noir for which Dior dressed Marlene Dietrich, was the show’s origin story. “There is all this amazing correspondence between Dior, Dietrich and Hitchcock, which shows how he navigated the money that it cost to make that film. I think we underestimate how much negotiation Dior did with studio executives. He was very smart in that way.”

Anderson, 41, who was born in Northern Ireland but since being appointed to Dior splits his time between London and Paris, has his own Hollywood side hustle as the costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s films, and is set on reinvigorating Dior’s relationship with the film industry.

Defying criticisms of ‘slop’ and ‘theft’, the growing culture of AI-powered creativity is attracting interest from Hollywood

In a former hemstitching workshop where artisans sewed pleats for Stockholm’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, a distinctly 21st-century craft is taking root: AI film-making.

One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as “automated slop” or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked.

The series quickly withdrew a shirt that stirred up a strong backlash. But IndyCar has been playing with fire for a while

This could be the summer of IndyCar.

Formula One fatigue is beginning to set in, both globally and among the American audiences who helped fuel the sport’s recent boom. Nascar, for all its national reach in the US and lingering cultural import, remains a largely regional attraction. IndyCar, on the other hand, boasts a wealth of personalities, is anchored in real structural parity and delivers wheel-to-wheel action time and again. But as the buildup begins for the 110th running of this year’s Indianapolis 500 – still the sport’s commercial, spiritual centerpiece and Memorial Day weekend staple – IndyCar is at risk of tripping over itself in its rush to return to prominence.

A Kitt lookalike was filmed speeding in Brooklyn but the fine was sent to a museum where a replica is on display

A replica of the talking car Kitt from the 1980s US television action series Knight Rider for years has been parked in a museum about an hour’s drive north of Chicago, so how did it get a speeding ticket in New York City?

That is the question the Volo Museum is asking after it says it was recently mailed a $50 fine by New York City for a violation caught by traffic camera, alleging that its Knight Industries Two Thousand – Kitt for short and a black Pontiac Trans Am– got busted going 9mph over the speed limit in a 25mph zone on 22 April.

Dana Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant with her first baby when her OB-GYN told her at an appointment that she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore.

OB-GYN services were ending at the clinic in Corvallis, a college town of 60,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The doctor said all of the Corvallis Clinic’s OB-GYNs were resigning. 

“We have appreciated the opportunity to participate in your care and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the clinic said in a subsequent letter to patients.

The closure of the Corvallis OB-GYN practice came two years after a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, bought the clinic. The subsidiary, Optum Oregon, cited a national shortage of physicians that made it hard to replace doctors who left and increased the workload for those who remained.

Gibbon frantically looked for another doctor. Friends recommended two other obstetrics practices, but both had closed. Gibbon settled on a small hospital close to home with four dedicated maternity beds — all of which were full when she was due to deliver in April, delaying her induction three times. Her healthy baby boy was eventually born on April 29 by cesarean section, a procedure she’d hoped to avoid.

“It’s impossible not to wonder if things may have gone differently if there had been more labor and delivery beds in the area,” she said.

Corvallis patients like Gibbon faced this disruption despite a unique Oregon law intended to prevent it.

In 2021, the state became the first in the country to give its state health department the broad power to block acquisitions and mergers of hospitals, hospices and medical practices, an effort to counteract the consolidation that research shows is cutting competition and driving up costs nationwide.

Lawmakers said Oregon’s novel oversight power would stop multibillion-dollar deals from reducing care and increasing costs. State regulators got the authority to reject transactions or to add conditions and levy fines if companies disregarded them. The law was hailed as a national model.

Five years later, Oregon has not formally blocked a single transaction or issued any fines. While the new oversight is credited with leading to the withdrawal of two high-profile transactions — a merger of two Portland-area hospital systems and the acquisition of a nonprofit that provides Medicaid benefits to half a million Oregonians — some people who supported the law say it has not been nearly as effective as hoped.

Dr. John Santa, a retired physician and former member of the Oregon Health Policy Board, which oversees the state agency responsible for implementing the new law, said his interactions with the program were “so disappointing and fell so short of what I expected. I never imagined it would perform as poorly as it has.”

Of the nine healthcare deals for which regulators have done follow-up reviews, at least three had outcomes the law was meant to forestall, ProPublica’s examination of state records found. 

UnitedHealth Group acquired a home health provider, LHC Group, for $5.4 billion in 2023. It shuttered a rural hospice agency in Central Oregon two months later, funneling staff and patients to a location nearly 30 miles away. The state later said the move raised concerns about a potential reduction in access. A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the closure did not reduce services because patients and staff were reassigned and it continued to serve the same areas.

After Amazon bought One Medical for $3.9 billion that same year, it closed the group’s downtown Portland practice while cutting $100 million in operating expenses nationwide. It saw a drop in Oregon patient satisfaction scores, as measured by an outside group, a state review noted. Amazon declined to comment on the One Medical deal.

Oregon in 2022 approved the acquisition of a hospice provider by a private equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The firm told regulators that it wouldn’t change locations or staffing. Oregon took the company at its word — then watched it close a Salem hospice after the deal closed. 

In a follow-up report, the state noted the closure and alluded to “some changes” in Oregon staffing; it would not disclose whether this referred to adding employees or cutting them, saying the companies involved had designated the information confidential.

A spokesperson for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice didn’t address the closure but said in a statement that its hospice acquisition was “premised on the company delivering high-quality care.” The firm’s hospice providers in 2024 and 2025 received higher ratings than any other national provider in standardized consumer surveys, the spokesperson said, and the company improved its ratio of nurses to patients by 5.5% over its ownership period.

Clare Pierce-Wrobel, the health policy and analytics director for Oregon’s health department, the Oregon Health Authority, acknowledged that the state held some mergers to a lower standard while the program was just getting started. 

“I think if those notices were received when the program was fully up and running, there may have been a different result,” she said.

Dr. Nicole Kruppa had a thriving OB-GYN practice at the Corvallis Clinic before it was taken over by Optum. She told ProPublica that she quit after the sale because her workload grew unsustainable. She said burnout became so intense that she worried she would either make a medical mistake or get in a late-night car accident while driving to deliver a baby.

Optum didn’t fill vacancies when medical staff went out on planned leave, she said. Annual medical exams had to be postponed so the remaining OB-GYN staff could attend to emergencies, she said. 

“I felt I could no longer provide my patients the care that they deserved,” Kruppa said.

A UnitedHealth spokesperson, Tyler Mason, said Optum helped keep the Corvallis Clinic’s doors open. “Our focus has been stabilizing practices, expanding access, and strengthening clinical services to preserve local care, maintain critical services and ensure patients can continue receiving the care they depend on close to home,” Mason said.

When Oregon lawmakers created the merger and acquisition oversight program in 2021, they said they weren’t trying to stop every healthcare deal — just to ensure that those transactions made sense.

Consolidation in the healthcare industry is rife. About 50% of the country’s doctors were employed by a hospital system in 2024, research has shown, up from less than 30% in 2012. As competition narrows, studies show, prices can increase, the quality of care can decline and treatment can be harder to access, especially in rural areas.

Following Oregon’s example, five states last year approved laws that expanded their authorities over healthcare consolidation. One of them, Maine, adopted a bill this April that requires state review and approval of the sale of healthcare facilities when private equity firms are involved. New Mexico in 2024 also adopted a bill similar to Oregon’s.

Pierce-Wrobel, the health authority official, said Oregon is clearly a national leader. “People in Oregon are lucky to have a program like this in place,” she said. 

“The ability to actually see how these decisions are made and how it’s actually impacting your healthcare before it happens is novel and addresses a real, pressing issue,” she said, “which is affordability in healthcare, which impacts all of us.”

Although Oregon hasn’t blocked any of the 65 transactions it has evaluated, it has imposed conditions on 15. It has required doctors to continue serving patients covered by Medicare, the federal insurance program for seniors and the disabled. It has required reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare to continue and ordered detailed annual reporting.

The state also has required a deeper six-month review in seven cases, three of which are still underway. The other four deals were withdrawn, notably: the proposed merger of Oregon Health & Science University and Legacy Health, two major Portland-area hospital systems; and a proposed merger involving CareOregon, which administers Medicaid plans for more than 500,000 low-income people. Facing a public outcry, the healthcare organizations canceled their deals.

Dr. Jane Zhu, a primary care physician and associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University who studies healthcare access, said programs like Oregon’s add sorely needed transparency to medical dealmaking. 

But they “don’t necessarily change the equation” when it comes to the trend toward consolidation, she said in an email. Especially in rural areas, the fact remains that “regulators can approve the merger and prices go up and consolidation worsens, or they can block a merger and maybe there’s an immediate effect on the clinic’s solvency or sustainability.”

According to Larry Kirsch, a health economist, one problem is that Oregon regulators have typically chosen the fastest option for reviewing acquisitions allowed under the law, 30 days. Kirsch said that’s not enough time to adequately study what a transaction will do to medical care.

“I was gobsmacked by how superficial, how inconclusive, how nonrobust the investigation was,” said Kirsch, who has examined dozens of Oregon’s oversight reviews. “Some of them were so outrageous, you’d have to say that their eyes were totally closed.”

Pierce-Wrobel said Oregon welcomes “public input to inform our review of individual transactions — as well as opportunities to improve how we implement this new program — in order to advance Oregon’s goals of health equity, lower costs, increased access and better care. That said, the program must operate within its statutory limits.”

Nowhere are the limitations of the review process more evident than in the city of Corvallis, home to both Oregon State University and the Corvallis Clinic, which had operated as an independent, doctor-owned practice since 1947. 

Perhaps ironically, one of the clinic’s executives testified against the law in 2021 on behalf of the Oregon Independent Medical Coalition, a lobbying group for private practices. Scott Shollenbarger said that the group’s members were committed to remaining independent.

“We passionately believe that healthcare is best delivered in an independent business model that is owned and governed by the owners of the business that also are responsible for the delivery of medical services to our respective populations,” he wrote at the time.

But by 2023, the clinic’s finances had deteriorated and it struck a deal to be acquired by Optum Oregon. Kruppa, the former Corvallis employee and shareholder, said the clinic was losing up to $1 million a month at the time.

With hundreds writing to the state to oppose the acquisition, regulators developed conditions to protect patients. They drew up requirements for the new owner to preserve existing clinical programs and accept an independent monitor to ensure compliance.

As Oregon reviewed the deal, the clinic’s finances worsened, Kruppa told ProPublica. Doctors went without paychecks in the month before the deal went through, she said, in order to keep the clinic’s doors open until the transaction was approved.

Then a Russian-linked ransomware hack targeted Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that provides payment and claims processing to hospitals and doctors’ offices. The attack disrupted medical practices across the country, including the Corvallis Clinic. Kruppa said the clinic was preparing for a bankruptcy filing, worried that the hack would further delay closing the deal.

UnitedHealth said after the hack that it extended $9 billion in no-interest loans to hospitals and medical practices nationwide. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, then-CEO Andrew Witty said: “I want this committee and the American public to know that the people of UnitedHealth Group will not rest — I will not rest — until we fix this.” 

Two weeks after the hack, the clinic told the state it was at risk of going under and asked for an emergency exemption from the ongoing review of the sale. Clinic attorneys assured the state the transaction was “expected to maintain essential services at or above current levels.” By creating a more stable operation, they wrote, the sale would also “improve the Clinic’s ability to attract and retain high-quality candidates for open positions.”

Oregon’s oversight program agreed to dispense with its review — the only exemption it has granted — in just five days. The state jettisoned the guardrails it proposed previously.

Pierce-Wrobel said the state cannot apply conditions to emergency requests that meet exemption criteria specified in the statute, nor can it review the deals afterward to measure their impacts.

“I understand and hear the criticism, but we are responsible for implementing the law that established this program, and that is what was done,” she said.

A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the company extended a zero-interest loan to the Corvallis Clinic within three weeks of the hack. 

The practice was “facing serious operational and financial challenges that put patient access at risk” before the hack, the spokesperson said. Since the purchase, “we’ve been working to stabilize practices, recruit clinicians, expand services and improve systems to help ensure patients continue to get the care they need.”

The Corvallis Clinic’s changes became apparent soon after the sale. 

ProPublica spoke to more than 10 current or former patients. They described sometimes extensive disruptions to their care after the practice was sold: procedures delayed, longer waits for appointments and a steady stream of doctors leaving.

One woman said her scheduled pap smear at the Corvallis Clinic was delayed more than six months.

Another said she lost a doctor she trusted so deeply to deal sensitively with her history of trauma that she had no desire to find another doctor, even though she’s supposed to get frequent cancer screenings.

Rebecca Geier, 67, said she has lost four doctors at the clinic in the last year.

“It wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was disruptive to my continued care with these doctors,” she told ProPublica in an email. “The dreaded letters from Optum informing me that my doctor had left or was soon leaving the clinic just kept coming, one after another.”

Three doctors at Mid-Valley Gastroenterology, a local practice, wrote to state regulators in March 2025 to say that two of the Corvallis Clinic’s gastroenterologists had withdrawn from a pool of area physicians who handled on-call care for emergencies at a major regional hospital system. They said Optum made the specialists opt out to save money.

Optum “prioritized corporate profit and physician convenience over the well-being of both the patients they serve and the other medical professionals they work alongside,” the doctors wrote.

Mason, the UnitedHealth spokesperson, said Optum did not interfere with or direct the physicians’ decisions. “Physicians make their own decisions about participating in on-call coverage based on what they can reasonably manage alongside caring for their patients,” Mason said.

If Oregon hadn’t exempted the transaction from its oversight, it’s the type of impact that would have faced regulatory scrutiny during a follow-up review.

The state convened a public forum about the deal, hearing testimony about what had happened. But regulators said they couldn’t investigate any further.

The post A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once. appeared first on ProPublica.

Several states have required their health agencies to take on another job: verifying immigration status among Medicaid recipients and reporting them to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The Library of Congress revealed this year's list of 25 recordings to be preserved for future generations on the National Recording Registry.

As Israel and Hezbollah exchange fire, dozens of volunteers eat, sleep and pray at a small hospital, waiting to respond to the next airstrike.

Chinese officials are using a different transliterated character for the secretary of state's name, perhaps to allow him to visit without lifting the 2020 ban.

Impact of disruption from Iran war may be felt into 2027 even if strait of Hormuz reopens, says aviation body boss

Increases in air fares for travellers in Europe are “inevitable” over the peak summer period because of the high cost of jet fuel, according to the head of the international aviation body.

While some airlines faced with weak demand have reduced their European fares recently, Willie Walsh, the former British Airways boss who leads the International Air Transport Association, said there was no way carriers could absorb the extra costs in the long run.

A trio of preprint papers suggests the universe may not be perfectly uniform on the largest scales, finding tentative 2-to-4-sigma deviations from a core assumption of standard cosmology known as FLRW geometry. Live Science reports: The work combines observations of distant exploding stars and large-scale galaxy surveys to probe whether the universe truly follows a nearly 100-year-old mathematical framework known as Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmology. The analyses revealed mild-but-intriguing deviations from the predictions of the standard model. "We saw a surprising violation of an FLRW curvature consistency test, hinting at new physics beyond the standard model," study co-author Asta Heinesen, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Queen Mary University in London, told Live Science via email, referring to the assumption that the space's curvature is the same everywhere. "This could potentially be due to various effects, but more research is needed to address the cause of the FLRW violation that we see empirically." [...] The analyses revealed small but potentially important departures from the predictions of standard FLRW cosmology. Depending on the dataset and analysis method, the discrepancy reached a statistical significance of about 2 to 4 sigma. In physics, sigma measures how likely a result is to arise purely by chance; a 5-sigma result is typically required before scientists claim a discovery, so the new findings remain tentative. Still, the results suggest that something unexpected may be affecting the geometry or expansion of the universe. "The main finding is that you can directly measure Dyer-Roeder and backreaction effects from available cosmological data, and clearly distinguish these effects from other alterations of the standard cosmological model, such as evolving dark energy and modified gravity theories," Heinesen said. "This was previously not possible in such a direct way, and this is what I think is the breakthrough in our work." "If these indicated deviations from an FLRW geometry are real, it would signify that most of the cosmological solutions considered for solving the cosmological tensions -- evolving or interacting dark energy, new types of matter or energy, modified gravity and related ideas within the FLRW framework -- are ruled out," the researchers wrote. The next step will involve applying the new theoretical framework to larger and more precise datasets. "It is to apply our theoretical results to data to test the standard model and to produce constraints on the Dyer-Roeder and backreaction effects," Heinesen said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

Dr Fatih Birol, IEA Executive Director, on the Strait of Hormuz crisis and global energy security 21 May 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 14 May 2026 Chatham House and Online

Fatih Birol assesses how Middle East tensions are reshaping global energy markets and economic stability.

The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has thrust the global energy system into acute crisis. The repercussions extend far beyond surging oil and gas prices: flight cancellations are mounting, fuel rationing is being introduced, and governments are rapidly revising fiscal plans to shield consumers and economies from shock.

With markets swinging daily on the prospects of de-escalation between the US, Israel and Iran, global economic stability hangs in the balance. At this critical juncture, Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, will assess the scale, duration and implications of the disruption for global energy supplies and what the world can expect in the coming months.

Key questions:

• How sustained will the disruption be across global energy markets?
• What policy responses are proving most effective - and what lessons are emerging?
• Will this crisis accelerate or derail the energy transition?
• How are countries reshaping energy security strategies in real time?
• What role can the IEA play in coordinating a global response?

Ronan Corrigan levels up a thoroughly beta-tested narrative in this efficiently executed hacker-turned-thief split-screen thriller

This debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov’s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a web 2.0 update of Iain Softley’s 90s cult film Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is “I’m CEO, cunt”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline, so what we’re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.

Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs; and he pumps the leads’ squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though the script – co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp – wisely renames a bluff podcaster as “Joe Brogan”, these frames-within-frames resemble the real thing: the film’s meme game is strong (if that’s any kind of commendation for a motion picture), and there are no Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.

US’s apparent decline has fuelled growing Chinese nationalism while US president has lost his novelty value

• Trump in Beijing – latest updates

• Five key issues for Xi-Trump summit.

Yaoji Chaogan, a no-frills canteen next to Beijing’s historic Drum and Bell towers, once proudly displayed photographs of Joe Biden, who visited the restaurant when he was US vice-president in 2011. Biden’s visit went viral in China, with media praising his “noodle diplomacy” (one of the dishes that Biden ordered was zhajiang mian, a traditional style of Beijing noodles with bean paste).

But evidence of Biden’s visit was removed when the restaurant was redecorated a few years ago. A visit from a US leader is no longer something to boast about.

Trump is meeting Xi in Beijing, with the two superpower leaders expected to discuss the Iran war, trade, Taiwan and artificial intelligence

After three weeks of testimony, the Musk v. Altman trial is nearing its end. OpenAI has rested its case, closing arguments are set for Thursday, and jury deliberations are expected to begin afterward. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist, was probably the most memorable witness of the day. He told jurors about a companywide meeting where Musk answered questions about his planned departure from OpenAI in 2018. Musk told the crowd of 50 or 60 people that he was leaving OpenAI to start his own competing AI. He said he wanted to "build it very fast, because he was very worried that someone else, if they got it, would do the wrong thing with it," Achiam said. Achaim said he challenged Musk on the safety of this approach, which he called "unsafe and reckless." "How did Musk respond," OpenAI's lawyer Randall Jackson asked. "Defensively," Achiam said. "We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass." In an effort to prove Achiam's story, OpenAI's lawyers brought a trophy to court that the futurist said he received after his heated exchange with Musk. On the witness stand, Achiam described the trophy as "a small golden jackass, inscribed with: 'never stop being a jackass for safety.'" He said his then-colleagues, Dario Amodei and David Luan, gave it to him as a thank-you for standing up to the Tesla CEO. Lead OpenAI attorney William Savitt told reporters after the day's session that Wednesday had been the first time he'd touched the statue. The futurist had to do without the visual aid, however. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers did not accept the trophy as evidence, so it did not appear before the jury. Musk and Altman have presented dueling experts on a question at the core of the trial -- was the nonprofit that runs OpenAI hurt or helped by its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft? Musk's expert testified last week that the partnership was indeed hurt, supporting the Tesla CEO's contention that in partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI betrayed the company's nonprofit origins and mission. But on Thursday, OpenAI's expert, John Coates, used Musk's expert's own pie chart and testimony against him. The partnership has "generated value for the nonprofit that I believe he himself accepted was in the $200 billion range in his own testimony," Coates said, referencing Musk expert Daniel Schizer. "If that's not faring well, I don't know what faring well is." In a scored point for Musk, the jury learned Thursday that Microsoft's own CTO once raised concerns about how OpenAI's early nonprofit donors, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, would react to a partnership. "I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans," Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said in a 2018 email he was asked to read aloud to jurors. In it, Scott said he doubted donors would appreciate OpenAI using their seed money to "go build a for-profit thing." Scott was being questioned by an OpenAI lawyer, who may have wanted jurors to quickly hear Scott's explanation: that he only had a "vague awareness" of what was happening at OpenAI at the time. Scott also told the jury he wasn't thinking about Musk when he made the remark. "Primarily, I was thinking about Reid Hoffman. He was the OpenAI donor I knew," Scott said, adding, "I wasn't thinking about anyone besides him." Recap: Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI (Day Ten) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of documents chronicling generations of trauma saved from Gaza and East Jerusalem in 10-month Unrwa operation

East Jerusalem to Amman should have been an easy trip: a short drive down to the Dead Sea, across the border checkpoint and swiftly on to the Jordanian capital.

But in the early summer of 2024, the distance appeared an almost insurmountable obstacle to humanitarian workers from Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), as they sought to safeguard huge quantities of archival documents vitally important to decades of recent Palestinian history.

Ahmed al-Doush’s health said to be in sharp decline since his arrest in 2024 in relation to social media posts

The wife of a British national who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2024 for social media posts, has pleaded for his release as his wellbeing declines.

In November, the UN working group on arbitrary detention found Ahmed al-Doush was being detained arbitrarily under international law and recommended his immediate release, as well as the payment of compensation. The findings followed its eight-month inquiry

Trump’s self-defeating trade policy.

Why turbulence will make Beijing more assertive.

Here's what we know about Google's latest operating system.

The nail-biting incident took place about 80 miles east off the coast of Melbourne, Florida, which is about 175 miles north of Miami.

President’s remarks come as midterm elections looks to be defined by economic concerns sparked by the conflict. Key US politics stories from Wednesday 13 May at a glance

Donald Trump has said preventing Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is “the only thing that matters” as the US midterm election campaign season looks to be defined by mounting economic concerns sparked by the conflict.

“I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” the US president told reporters at the White House before boarding a plane to China.

In apology, William Paul said he had had ‘too much to drink’ and the things he said ‘don’t represent who I really am’

The Republican senator Rand Paul’s son William apologized on Wednesday for a drunken tirade at a bar in Washington DC, in which he reportedly told a Republican congressman he “hates Jews and hates gays”.

“Last night, I had too much to drink and said some things that don’t represent who I really am. I’m sorry and today I am seeking help for my drinking problem,” William Paul posted on social media under the handle TastyBrew1776.

All Her Lives is only the fifth short story collection to win the prestigious NZ$65,000 prize in 58 years

First-time fiction writer Ingrid Horrocks has won New Zealand’s richest literary prize for her debut short story collection, All Her Lives.

The Wellington-based poet, essayist and memoirist won the prestigious NZ$65,000 (A$53,000, £28,500) Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand book awards on Wednesday night. The book follows nine women across nine different life stages and generations, as they navigate politics, gender and motherhood.

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Trump officials likely violated Francesca Albanese’s rights by imposing measures after she criticized Israel, says judge

A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked US sanctions against Francesca Albanese, a UN expert on the Palestinian territories, finding that the Trump administration likely violated her free speech rights by imposing the measures after she criticized US ally Israel’s war on Gaza.

The sanctions barred her from entering the US and banking there. Albanese, an Italian lawyer who is UN special rapporteur on the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories, recommended the international criminal court pursue war crimes prosecutions against Israeli and US nationals.

Elon Musk arrived in Beijing on Wednesday, as his $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI's Sam Altman played out. But a judge told Musk last month he may be recalled to a California courtroom for further testimony at the request of OpenAI lawyers.

The state's electoral system was a key issue in the 2nd Congressional District primary to replace GOP Rep. Don Bacon.

Cindy Burbank, who bested an alleged Republican plant, plans to step aside for Dan Osborn in general election

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A Democratic challenger who said she intends to drop out of November’s race for the US Senate in Nebraska to clear the way for an independent candidate has won the state’s Democratic primary.

Cindy Burbank ran against William Forbes, who Democrats contended was a Republican plant in the race, with the intent to drop out if she won. Forbes, a pastor who has voted for Trump and opposed abortion access, is currently registered as a Democrat.

For decades, U.S. presidents have remained steadfast in their defense of the tiny Asian ally from its neighboring giant.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 14, No. 802.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 14, No. 1,790.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 14, No. 1,068.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are launching a bipartisan task force aimed at addressing how sexual misconduct claims are handled within the House of Representatives, multiple sources confirm to CBS News.

The delegation of business leaders underscores the deep ties many major U.S. companies maintain with China despite years of trade tensions.

A confidential assessment, circulating as President Donald Trump begins his highly anticipated trip to Beijing, shows shifts in several key areas of competition.

Lu Jianwang was accused of operating a ‘secret police station’ in Manhattan’s Chinatown at the behest of Beijing

A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after he was accused of operating a “secret police station” on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the US attorney general that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.

The AI chatbot stopped working for some people on Wednesday afternoon.

The Army identified the soldier as Spc. Mariyah Collington.

Google has been quietly downloading a large AI model, Gemini Nano, without asking or notifying users.

The new Alexa for Shopping feature can use data about the customer to help find products.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department has no plan to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, following reports that companies hired by Florida to operate the detention center were told it would close.

Utah woman accused of murdering husband loses $12 million real estate deal after his death.

When her husband Eric died in March of 2022, Kouri Richins wrote a children's book to help her sons cope with the loss of their father – then she was charged in his death. Follow the timeline for a deep dive into the history of Eric and Kouri's relationship.

Ring's latest upgrades complete its new generation of higher-resolution cameras, now available with bright LED lights.

A medical examiner ruled Eric Richins, a Utah father of three, died of a lethal dose of fentanyl. His wife Kouri was charged in his death.

This live blog is now closed. For the latest on the Federal Reserve, read our full report:

• Senate confirms Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair, replacing Jerome Powell

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Donald Trump touched down in Beijing at around 7:50pm local time/7:50am ET.

The president will be greeted by China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, along with David Perdue, US ambassador to a China.

Homebuyers more cautious due to possible mortgage rate rises and higher inflation as sellers sit on properties

Fears of higher mortgage rates and rising inflation as a result of the Middle East conflict are leading to a subdued and downbeat housing market, according to estate agents.

Demand from potential homebuyers across England and Wales has shown a “noticeable softening” recently, according to a monthly survey of estate agents by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Greenpeace finds cocktail of pesticides including seven banned in EU may have been used on seven categories of vegetables and soft fruit

It is a beautiful early summer Sunday afternoon and you have stopped for a pub lunch. A waiter sets down a roast served with carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and onion gravy, and then for pudding, strawberries and cream. It feels like the perfect rustic meal to accompany a day in the country.

However, a report by Greenpeace, published on Thursday, has found that the ingredients of the traditional Sunday roast have potentially been treated with a cocktail of more than 100 pesticides. Data from the Fera pesticide usage survey for 2024, showed 102 – including seven banned in the EU – were used on seven vegetable and soft fruit categories.

Medicines watchdog approves two treatments for patients with spinal muscular atrophy

Hundreds of children with a rare muscle-wasting disease will be able to receive two drugs that can improve their survival in a move parents hailed as a “lifeline”.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has published final draft guidance recommending that any patient who would benefit can have either drug.

The senator's son apologized Wednesday, saying he was seeking help for his drinking problem.

Mariyah Symone Collington and Kendrick Lamont Key Jr, who also died, had fallen off a cliff during an off-duty hike

The remains of the second US army soldier who went missing during military exercises in Morocco have been recovered, the army said on Wednesday, ending a multinational search operation that deployed air, naval and artificial intelligence assets.

The soldier was identified as Spc Mariyah Symone Collington of Taveres, Florida, the US Army Europe and Africa said in a statement. She was 19 years old.

Today's pet cameras offer two-way audio, pet recognition and more. We tested models to find the top performers.

A man accused of stealing hard drives containing unreleased Beyonce music, tour plans, and other materials from a rental car in Atlanta has pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year sentence, including two years in custody. Slashdot Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Kelvin Evans was by the Atlanta police department in September in connection to a July 2025 car robbery where two suitcases containing Beyonce music and tour plans were stolen from a rental car. [...] According to a July police report, Beyonce choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue called 911 to report a theft from their rental vehicle, a 2024 Jeep Wagoneer, before Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour dates in Atlanta. An October indictment stated that Evans entered the car on July 8 "with the intent to commit theft." The stolen hard drives contained "watermarked music, some unreleased music, footage plans for the show and past and future set list," according to a police report. Clothing, designer sunglasses, laptops and AirPods headphones were also stolen, Grant and Blue said. Local law enforcement searched for the location of one of the stolen laptops and the AirPods to try and locate the property. One police officer wrote in the report: "I conducted a suspicious stop in the area, due to the information that was relayed to me. There were several cars in the area also that the AirPods were pinging to in that area also. After further investigation, a silver [redacted], which had traveled into zone 5 was moving at the same time as the tracking on the AirPods." Evans was arrested several weeks after Grant and Blue filed a report, and was publicly named as the suspect in September. He was released on a $20,000 bond a month later. At the time of his arrest, Atlanta police said that the stolen property had not been recovered. It is unclear whether it has since been found. Bruce66423 commented: "Just for stealing a couple of suitcases from a car. Funny how the elite punish those who inconvenience them. Can you imagine an ordinary victim see their offender get that sort of sentence?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The photos shared using Instagram's new feature will vanish after 24 hours.

Survivors say decades-old school sex abuse lawsuits deliver overdue accountability. Schools say today's students are paying the price. CBS News California investigates.

Prime minister under pressure over failure to grant military service exemptions as multi-party government looks at risk of collapse

Israel’s ruling coalition has submitted a proposal to dissolve parliament to pave the way for early elections as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came under mounting pressure from ultra-Orthodox parties.

The move, initiated by Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, came as Netanyahu appeared to be facing a possible collapse of his fractious coalition.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told CBS News that ICE arrests at the FIFA World Cup are not off the table, but the agency will not be at the global sporting event for the purpose of immigration arrests.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he was unaware for years that Jeffrey Epstein was a registered sex offender, according to a transcript of testimony released Wednesday.

In House committee transcript, commerce secretary denied any further contact with disgraced financier

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The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told lawmakers in a closed-door interview earlier this month that he met Jeffrey Epstein only three times and had no “personal or professional relationship” with the disgraced financier, according to a newly released transcript of the meeting.

“I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities,” Lutnick said in his opening statement before the House oversight and reform committee.

Dalton Eatherly, 28, known as Chud the Builder, accused of firing at another man outside courthouse in Clarksville

An influencer has been detained in Tennessee following his alleged involvement in a shooting, according to local police.

On Wednesday afternoon, Dalton Eatherly, 28 – known online as Chud the Builder – was involved in a confrontation with another man outside the Montgomery county courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee, during which shots were fired, the office of the district attorney general said in a statement.

The crackdown on foreign-made routers labeled a "national security risk" affects most major router brands. Here’s what you need to know if you plan to buy a router soon.

Foreign-made Wi-Fi routers will continue receiving security patches until at least Jan. 1, 2029, but this doesn't eliminate the long-term risk of buying an outdated device.

BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says the device supports frameworks and tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and Hermes, while emphasizing local control, automation, and privacy-focused workflows running directly from a home network. While SOLAI markets the Solode Neo as an "AI computer," the hardware itself appears aimed more at lightweight automation and cloud-assisted agent tasks than heavy local inference. The low-power Intel N150 should be sufficient for browser automation, scheduling, monitoring, containers, and smaller AI workloads, but the system is unlikely to compete with higher-end local AI hardware designed for running larger models offline. Even so, the idea of a dedicated low-power Linux appliance for persistent AI and automation tasks may appeal to homelab users and self-hosting enthusiasts looking for a simpler alternative to building their own always-on workflow box from scratch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new map will eliminate one of the state's majority Black, Democratic-leaning districts while keeping one Democratic-leaning district.

In Ohio’s gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy blames Democrat Dr. Amy Acton, former health department director, for calling off the state’s March 2020 primary election during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said it was his decision.

"Amy Acton called off Ohio’s election at the last minute, defying a judge’s orders and abusing her power," one Ramaswamy April campaign ad said. "Ohio can’t afford liberal Amy Acton. Vivek Ramaswamy will fight for us to protect our voice at the polls." 

Another April ad said, "Nobody ever cast a vote for Amy Acton, but she stopped yours." 

Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson pointed to an order Acton signed in March 2020 to close polling sites. But DeWine, who endorsed Ramaswamy, said that was his call after a judge declined to delay the primary. Other Republican state officials also supported postponement, which came at the beginning of the pandemic.

Acton served as Ohio health department director in 2019 and for part of 2020. Republicans attacking her actions during the pandemic are referring to her as "Dr. Lockdown."

Ohio among states that shook up 2020 primaries

More than a dozen states postponed 2020 primaries and expanded voting by mail as the COVID-19 virus spread. Government officials were concerned about the virus spreading at voting sites.

One of Ramaswamy’s ads showed CNN and The Daily Wire headlines about Ohio closing the polls the night before the primary, scheduled for March 17, 2020.

DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, also a Republican, asked a judge to move the primary to June. The judge denied the last-minute request, saying it would set a "terrible precedent." 

The governor and LaRose lacked the legal authority to postpone the election on their own amid a public health crisis, The Associated Press reported. Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson pointed to Ohio code, which said the governor can postpone an election in the "event of an emergency resulting from enemy attack." 

With the primary quickly approaching, state officials turned to another potential path: a health department order.

Conducting an election would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at "an unacceptable health risk of contracting coronavirus," DeWine said in a statement at the time. He added, "Acton will order the polls closed as a health emergency." 

On Twitter, DeWine wrote on March 16, 2020, "It is my recommendation that we postpone in-person voting until June 2, 2020. We cannot tell people to stay inside, but also tell them to go out and vote."

LaRose also supported postponing the election.

The order Acton signed said the state had 50 confirmed COVID-19 cases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended not holding gatherings of more than 50 people. The Ohio Supreme Court denied a legal challenge to her order delaying the primary.

At a March 17, 2020, press conference with Acton and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, DeWine said everyone who wanted to vote would later have the opportunity. 

The governor expressed concern about the health of tens of thousands of poll workers, many of whom were elderly. When asked by a reporter about his reasoning, DeWine said the state faced an imminent health crisis. He said Acton, based on her medical knowledge and in consultation with LaRose, "made that decision. I fully fully support that decision."

During the press conference, Husted said a county poll worker exhibited COVID-19 symptoms. He also said LaRose told him it would have been impossible to run the election because poll workers would not have shown up.

The Ohio General Assembly postponed the primary until April 28 and converted it to a vote by mail election.

Election worker Thurayya Umb reviews applications for election ballots at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, April 22, 2020, in Cleveland. (AP)

DeWine said again in 2026 it was his decision

In April, DeWine told NBC4’s Colleen Marshall that he consulted with state officials, including Acton, but the decision to delay the primary was his. DeWine said he ordered Acton to sign the directive for two reasons: Older voters told him they were afraid to head to the polls and he feared for poll workers’ health.

Marshall said DeWine told her, "I ultimately thought if I did not make that decision people were going to die." 

During NBC4’s April report, the TV station aired months-old statements by DeWine and Husted in which they attributed the decision to the governor.

DeWine said that "the decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it, the buck stops with me." 

Husted said, "The governor ultimately made those decisions."

Statehouse News Bureau reported in April that DeWine supported Acton’s actions: "I'm the one who appointed her. The fact is she worked for me, as all the members of the cabinet do. And decisions that were made, were made by the governor. So if there is a member of the cabinet who issues an order, that was at my direction."

Our ruling

Ramaswamy’s ad said Acton "called off Ohio’s election at the last minute" in 2020.

That’s a distortion of what happened. The day before the March 17, 2020, primary, Ohio called off the election during the COVID-19 pandemic. State officials made clear that they would allow people to vote, and the primary was held about a month later. 

DeWine said at the time it was his decision to postpone voting. Some of his 2020 statements showed that he reached the decision in consultation with other state officials, including Acton. The secretary of state and lieutenant governor also expressed support for the voting delay.

In April, DeWine told NBC4 that it was his decision to delay the election.

The kernel of truth here is that Acton signed the order closing the polls, but DeWine has taken ownership of that decision and as an appointee, Acton worked for the governor.

We rate this statement Mostly False.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks on the 2026 midterm elections

The Verizon-owned prepaid carrier replaced its old plans with ones that have better features.

May 13, 2026 — Reinforcement-learning agents — AI systems that learn by trial and error — can convert computation into new knowledge. That’s the focus of a new engineering-level collaboration between NVIDIA and Ineffable Intelligence, the London-based AI lab founded by AlphaGo architect David Silver in the wake of Ineffable’s emergence from stealth last week.

“The next frontier of AI is superlearners — systems that learn continuously from experience,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are thrilled to partner with Ineffable Intelligence to codesign the infrastructure for large-scale reinforcement learning as they push the frontier of AI and pioneer a new generation of intelligent systems.”

Silver is one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, an approach that has transformed AI research. He’s focused on further developing this approach into a new paradigm.

“Researchers have largely solved the easier problem of AI: how to build systems that know all the things humans already know,” Silver said. “But now we need to solve the harder problem of AI: how to build systems that discover new knowledge for themselves. That requires a very different approach — systems that learn from experience.”

That kind of learning needs a powerful and highly optimized pipeline to support it. Unlike pretraining, where a fixed dataset of human data flows through the system, reinforcement learning workloads generate their data on the fly.

The system has to act, observe, score and update continuously in tight loops, which puts pressure on interconnect, memory bandwidth and serving in ways that pretraining doesn’t. Furthermore, the system will train on rich forms of experience that are quite distinct from human language and other human data, and may require novel model architectures and training algorithms.

That’s where NVIDIA and Ineffable are focusing their technical work: building a pipeline that can feed reinforcement learning systems at scale. Engineers from both companies have teamed up to explore the best way to create this training pipeline.

This work is starting on NVIDIA Grace Blackwell, and will be among the first to explore the upcoming NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The goal is to understand the next generation of hardware and software that will be required as the AI world shifts beyond human data toward models that learn through simulation and experience.

Getting this infrastructure right will unlock an unprecedented scale of reinforcement learning in highly complex and rich environments, allowing agents to discover breakthroughs across all fields of knowledge.

Source: NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and Ineffable Intelligence Partner on Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

WhatsApp and Meta AI users can access this turbocharged temporary chat in the coming months.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 13, 2026 — XRDNA, a leader in spatial computing and executable systems, today announced a landmark strategic research and development partnership with the University of Utah’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering. The collaboration establishes a multi-year framework to transform advanced research into real-world, operational systems across aerospace, defense, infrastructure, and beyond.

Charles Musgrave (left), Dean of the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah, and Charles Adelman (right), CEO and co-founder of XRDNA, shown in a split image representing the expansion of Mission Fabric to universities, an initiative advancing collaboration across AI, engineering, defense, aerospace, and industrial innovation.

The agreement creates a formal structure for ongoing joint research initiatives, enabling both organizations to define and execute targeted R&D programs through collaborative task orders, shared resources, and coordinated innovation efforts.

As one of the original ARPANET nodes, the University of Utah helped lay the foundation for the internet. Through this partnership with XRDNA, that legacy evolves—moving from a connected web to an executable one, where systems don’t just communicate, they act.

At the center of this transformation is XRDNA’s Mission Fabric — the company’s real-time orchestration layer designed to unify identity, security, infrastructure, and execution into a continuously coordinated system. Mission Fabric will serve as the foundational layer upon which the University of Utah can build next-generation research, operational systems, and cross-domain innovation initiatives.

Together with XRDNA’s Elastic Vector Addressing (eVa) and Spheres of Influence (SoI) technologies, Mission Fabric enables physical infrastructure, laboratories, sensors, data systems, and digital environments to operate as a living, executable ecosystem rather than disconnected silos.

“This partnership represents a fundamental shift in how innovation happens,” said Charles Adelman, Founder and CEO of XRDNA. “Mission Fabric is the orchestration layer that turns infrastructure into executable systems. By partnering with the University of Utah, we’re creating a living R&D environment where research, operations, and real-world deployment can function as one continuously coordinated system.”

The collaboration focuses on building a unified R&D operating system that integrates infrastructure, data, workflows, and research capabilities into a coordinated, real-time ecosystem capable of accelerating discovery and deployment.

“We are living through a period of rapid technological disruption, and engineering colleges have a responsibility to help shape that future rather than simply respond to it,” said Charles Musgrave, Dean of the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah. “Our partnership with XRDNA gives our faculty and students an excellent opportunity to collaborate with an industry partner with pioneering technology on complex systems-level challenges involving data, infrastructure, sensing, aerospace, defense, and digital engineering. Our goal is to create an environment where research, education, and real-world problem solving reinforce one another—and where promising ideas can move more quickly from the lab into practical use.”

Key areas of collaboration include:

• Defense and Space Systems: Advancing adaptive, coordinated mission networks
• Multimodal Sensor Systems: Transforming raw signals into real-time, actionable intelligence
• Materials Innovation: Creating closed-loop engineering systems for continuous optimization
• Digital Twins & Infrastructure: Building real-time, spatially aware models of physical systems
• Executable Research Environments: Enabling coordinated, secure, and continuously adaptive R&D ecosystems powered by Mission Fabric

Under the agreement, both parties retain ownership of their existing intellectual property while enabling structured pathways for commercialization of jointly developed innovations, including exclusive licensing opportunities within defined fields such as space systems and advanced sensing.

The partnership reinforces Utah’s growing role as a national leader in advanced technology and innovation, positioning the region at the forefront of next-generation R&D ecosystems.

Together, XRDNA and the University of Utah are building a new paradigm—where research is no longer static, but continuously coordinated, executable, and impactful.

More from HPCwire

• University of Utah Advances AI-Driven Health Research with New Computing, Data Infrastructure
• University of Utah, DOE’s National Laboratory of the Rockies Sign MOU on Energy, Critical Minerals
• University of Utah to Launch Statewide AI Supercomputer This Summer with $15M Support

About XRDNA

XRDNA is a spatial computing and executable systems company building the foundational technologies for real-time coordination across physical and digital environments. Through its core platform technologies — Elastic Vector Addressing (eVa), Spheres of Influence (SoI), and Mission Fabric — XRDNA transforms infrastructure into intelligent, secure, and executable systems capable of operating in dynamic, real-world environments. The company’s technologies are designed to support next-generation applications across aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, industrial operations, digital twins, and advanced research ecosystems.

About the University of Utah John and Marcia Price College of Engineering

The John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah is a nationally recognized leader in engineering research, innovation, and education. Located in Salt Lake City, the College advances breakthroughs across aerospace, biomedical engineering, materials science, computing, sensing systems, and energy technologies. As one of the original ARPANET nodes that helped lay the foundation for the modern internet, the University of Utah has a long history of pioneering transformative technologies and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration that drives real-world impact. For more information, visit https://www.price.utah.edu.

Source: XRDNA

The post XRDNA and University of Utah Partner on Executable Systems R&D Framework appeared first on HPCwire.

King Charles unveils government agenda for the next year as PM faces leadership threat from within Labour

Keir Starmer attempted to reassert his authority over his restive party on Wednesday, announcing his plans for the next parliamentary session even as speculation grew that he would be challenged for his job as soon as Thursday.

Starmer announced his second king’s speech as prime minister, promising a package of measures with bills to abolish NHS England, overhaul the provision of special educational needs teaching, limit trials by jury, introduce digital ID and end the leasehold system in England and Wales.

With Mexico under pressure from Trump to tackle drug trafficking groups, analysts say ‘it’s the most tense situation since the 1980s’

Relations between Mexico and the United States are being pushed to breaking point amid accusations by Washington that Mexican officials have been “in bed for years” with drug traffickers, and reports of CIA agents freely operating south of the border.

“There are many who are betting on the defeat and failure of the Mexican government,” said Claudia Sheinbaum tersely on Wednesday, when asked about the allegations at a news conference. ”We want a good relationship with the United States government. What are our limits? The defence of sovereignty and respect for the Mexican people and their dignity.”

Utah mom Kouri Richins was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on Wednesday, after a jury convicted her of murder and other charges in her husband's 2022 death.

A hacker group stole data from more than 9,000 schools using an exploit in Instructure's service. Now the House Homeland Security Committee is getting involved.

Medicare has already paused hospice and home healthcare agency signups as potential fraud is investigated

• US politics live – latest updates

JD Vance has threatened to “turn off” federal funding for government health insurance programs in states that refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on suspected fraud.

States which fail to “get serious” about fraud would lose Medicaid and Medicare funding, the US vice-president announced on Wednesday, sparking fresh accusations that Trump officials are using unfounded allegations to punish political rivals.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently made a secret visit to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with President Mohammed bin Zayed, sources told CBS News.

"Your doctor could be making decisions around treatment based on studies that never existed," one expert said.

In interview with Stateside with Kai and Carter, Abrams says Republicans have raised the stakes beyond party lines

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has slammed Republican-led states’ efforts to redraw their congressional maps to favor their party as “evil incarnate”.

In an interview with the Guardian’s new podcast, Stateside with Kai and Carter, Abrams argued that what she said amounted to intentional “cheating” to suppress racial minority voting power must be fought in the courts and on the ballot.

The US supreme court demolished the 1965 Voting Rights Act when they ruled in Louisiana v Callais in April that states can’t consider race in redistricting. Southern states from Tennessee to Alabama have rushed to erase majority Black districts, sparking chaos for the midterm elections. Kai Wright talks with Stacey Abrams, voting rights activist and former Georgia house minority leader, about the fallout from the decision, and why, even now, she thinks the way forward is still through engaging more voters to participate in democracy: “They have fractured communities and said we’re going to scatter these seeds. Our job is to grow.”

LAUREN BOYD
Editor-in-Chief

JESSICA BASSION
Executive Editor

To our readers,

If you had told the two freshman girls who showed up to an interest meeting for their student newspaper — because they were unassumingly nosy and loved “Gilmore Girls” — that they would one day become Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor, they would have shyly insisted you were mistaken. Three years later, here we are.

Cooped above The Den in the Perkins Student Center, our office sits behind a steel blue door, tucked away at the top of a quiet, dusty stairwell that can be hard to find the first time around. 

Luckily for us, it was in that stairwell that we bumped into each other for the first time; two girls from complete opposite ends of the country (Lauren from California and Jess from New Jersey), brought together by the winding search to find The Review’s office. The rest is history.

That early September meeting remains especially memorable to us for many reasons. It marks the day our friendship began to blossom, but more importantly, the day that our leadership, work ethic and confidence within the newsroom began to develop and would be forever changed.

That growth was deeply shaped by the senior editors and reporters whose endless curiosity and thoughtful criticism mentored us through every stage of conducting interviews, formatting articles and storytelling. Their long nights spent editing and early mornings distributing print copies may have gone unseen by many, but they made our work feel larger than life. 

The passing years brought several dreaded graduations, and we assumed our own roles as section and copy editors. In these positions, we gained invaluable lessons — from adhering to nuanced AP style rules and facing website crashes, to the importance of asking tough questions and upholding journalistic standards.

The Review has offered us, as it has countless student journalists before us, a way to orient ourselves on campus. Countless interviews have brought us closer with our community, protests have shown us where students are being failed and The Review has offered us the critical lens to represent these stories.

In the year ahead, we hope to continue a legacy of coverage that informs, engages and connects with students and faculty across disciplines, as well as community members in and outside of the university. 

Simultaneously, we are tasked with remaining attuned to the demands of a waning journalistic landscape. Print journalism continues to dwindle. Artificial intelligence has impacted storytelling. Resources are tight, and fewer students are seeking careers in the field.

Nevertheless, our work at The Review is inspired by the commitment our staff has made for decades: to provide fair, accurate coverage and give voices to those seldom heard.

With that mission in mind, we are eager to lead The Review through another academic year equipped with an unwavering and intelligent staff — our 144th since the first issue in 1882. 

From sitting next to each other at that very first interest meeting to seeing our names side by side as leaders of the newsroom, we could not be more thrilled and honored to step into these roles. 

On behalf of The Review staff, we thank you, our readers, for supporting our work. We hope you continue to engage with us and, as always, we welcome you to hold us accountable in return.

Keep the faith,

Lauren Boyd and Jessica Bassion

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. "We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. "We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)." "I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code," the software developer at a small web design firm told 404 Media. "It's making me dumber for sure," the fintech software developer added. "It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before." A software engineer at the FAANG said: "When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a mental model of the code I was working with. Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company's] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don’t need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It’s stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases.

This past month also saw which projects Haiku’s GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku’s Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku’s Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.

Nearly every router is affected by the FCC’s unprecedented ban. Until we learn more, you should wait on a new purchase if you can.

Kouri Richins was convicted for lacing her husband’s cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl

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A Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband and was later found guilty of killing him has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Kouri Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing her husband’s cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022.

Resolution fails by 49-50, with Lisa Murkowski and fellow GOP members Rand Paul and Susan Collins voting in favor

The Senate on Wednesday rejected the seventh attempt by Democrats to force an end to American involvement in the war on Iran, even as the ranks of Republicans opposed to Donald Trump’s strategy grew.

The war powers resolution proposed by Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, failed in a 49-50 vote. All Democrats with the exception of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania supported its advancement.

The T1 phone is shipping at last, according to an emailed confirmation from the CEO of Trump Mobile.

The iconic dog competition event will stream live on Netflix.

The GenAI boom has made hardware hot, both literally and figuratively. Unfortunately, the huge demand for infrastructure has completely disrupted the supply chain for chips, memory, and disk, making it nearly impossible to get the sort of hardware you need to run enterprise IT workloads–let alone HPC or AI jobs–without breaking the bank. So how can the average Joe navigate this brave yet expensive new world?

These are unusual times. The GenAI boom has led to a surge in construction of data centers around the country and the world. In the United States, there are approximately 3,000 data center projects under construction or planned, which will bolster the 4,000 that already exist. Hyperscalers and AI giants are behind many of these AI factories, which can span a million square feet of space and consume up to a gigawatt of power.

(Matthew-G-Eddy/Shutterstock)

Beyond the need for concrete, steel, and copper piping to build the data center itself (let alone the electricity to power them and the water to cool them), you need servers, memory, and storage to put inside of them. Problem is, the cloud giants and AI big wigs have practically snapped up all available supply.

The good news is the law of supply and demand has held. The bad news is that this law means that prices for processors, storage, and memory have soared.

Canceled Orders

Consider what’s happened with regular DDR memory. As the demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has soared, the three primary memory chip makers–SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron–have cut back on production of regular DDR memory. The result is that the cost of regular DDR memory has increased several hundred precent over the past six months.

This has caused a raft of problems for downstream tech users, including for RapidScale, a cloud provider owned by Cox Communications. RapidScale typically buys a number of servers every year for its growing cloud business, but the requisition process is anything but normal this year.

“A server fully populated with 2TB of memory in December was like $30,000,” said Duane Barnes, the president of RapidScale. “That same server today is $80,000.”

DDR-5 memory prices have increased by about 300% in the past eight months (Source: PCPartPicker.com)

The increases have led OEMs to make hard decisions about their businesses. Earlier this year, RapidScale placed a $1.2 million order for new servers with a major OEM provider. Instead of delivering the servers at the agreed-upon price, the computer maker welched on the agreement and tried to increase the cost by 300%, Barnes said.

“We’re certainly not the only customer they decided to not honor their orders with,” Barnes said in an interview. “If I sold something underwater to a client, I’d still honor that and make it up on the next order and the next customer, just like any normal business would do. They chose to take a different path, which is their decision, their business. But ultimately, I don’t think that’s a good way to handle your business.”

(HPCwire reached out to the server maker, whom we are not identifying at the moment, for comment for this story. But as of press time, we have not heard back. This story may be updated if the vendor chooses to respond and new data comes in.)

Shared Burden

Other vendors are taking a more open approach to dealing with the unprecedented situation. In an open letter posted April 23, Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO and Chairman of the storage vendor Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), apologized to customers for increasing prices by an average of 70% since the beginning of the year. But more importantly, he provided some details and rationale behind the price hike.

“A 70% increase might seem unconscionable until one understands the reality behind it,” Giancarlo wrote in the blog post. “Everpure’s input costs of many high-volume semiconductor components have surged between 300

Server makers are increasing prices (Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock)

% and 900% (4x to 10x) since mid-2025. In some cases, suppliers could not supply committed volumes because of surging demand, requiring us to find alternative sources (at higher prices) to meet delivery promised times.”

As Giancarlo noted, prices began to rise in the middle of the third quarter of 2025. Then the prices essentially doubled from December to January, and doubled or tripled again between February and March. Despite the rising costs through January, Everpure honored the prices it quoted customers with terms of 60 to 90 days.

The company also told its customers and channel partners about price hikes coming in the new fiscal year, which started February 1. Everpure has also moved to 30-day terms to minimize its exposure to continued hikes in component costs, which other vendors are also doing.

“We are keeping our price increases significantly below our actual supply chain cost increases,” Giancarlo wrote. “We will not profiteer from this crisis….We are choosing to share the burden alongside our customers.”

What This Means To Customers

The reality is that everything in the data center has gotten more expensive. Every customer’s situation is different, but they still have options.

One option is to source more computing capacity from the cloud instead of expanding on-prem. After all, the hyperscalers are the ones snapping up huge numbers of processors, memory chips, and NVMe drives, in preparation for an expected surge in demand for AI workloads.

As Brandon Whitelaw, the SVP and Head of Product at storage vendor Qumulo, noted in a recent BigDATAwire story, the big cloud companies have spent $700 billion in infrastructure this year, essentially cornering the market. There may be deals to be had with cloud providers, especially if OEMs are having trouble sourcing gear.

(GenAI/Shutterstock)

“Back in 2021, the top five hyperscalers spent about $100B, on par with the Big Seven Enterprise hardware vendors,” Whitelaw wrote in “The Cloud Already Ate Your Hardware Lunch.” “In 2025, the top five had jumped to $410B, and their year-over-year increase to $700B – that is double the entire Big Seven’s spend at $145B.”

Whitelaw recommends that customers take the time to implement a unified data fabric as one way to reduce storage costs. By eliminating data silos across a single fabric, total storage requirements can go down and efficiency goes up. Unified data fabrics also enable customers to more efficiently utilize hybrid cloud storage environments that span on-prem and cloud, allowing customers to shift storage according to price signals.

Barnes, the RapidScale president, advises customers to adopt FinOps practices to cut spending on cloud environments and increase utilization of existing investments. RapidScale provides FinOps services as part of its cloud offering, but any customer can adopt FinOps, for cloud or on-prem environments.

“I’ve got infrastructure. I think I need more, but do I really need more?” Barnes said. “We can come in and show you modern techniques to optimize that and then build a plan that’s more economically sound. in bite size chunks, to get you through the next few years of this chaos.”

Cloud computing has been dinged for being more expensive than on-prem for many types of workloads with steady and predictable demand, a category that includes some HPC and AI workloads. For a primer on the three main ways that FinOps can cut your bill, check out this BigDATAwire story from April 2025.

The final option is to simply wait out the storm and hope that it blows over in a year or two. Barnes said he has spoken to many CIOs and VPs who simply are punting on server upgrade projects for 2026. “They’re hoping the prices come down next year,” he said. “It’s sort of like the energy crisis. If I don’t need to take a vacation, I’m not going to drive my car to Florida for and pay six bucks a gallon for gas.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though the prices will come down any time soon. New chip fabrication plants are being built, but they won’t come online any time soon. For instance, Micron is building a new plant in Upstate New York, but it won’t start churning out DDR or HBM until 2028.

These are exciting times, to be sure. The AI gold rush will likely make a few companies who hit paydirt extraordinary wealthy, while making the tool providers merely rich. Unfortunately, the AI boom is also upsetting the supply chain, which impacts everybody who needs a computer. Customers who create a plan for navigating these disruptions are likely to come out of the boom better than those who don’t.

Related Items:

The Cloud Already Ate Your Hardware Lunch

WD Bullish on Spinning Disk Amid AI Boom

How the Memory Shortage Is Impacting AI and HPC Projects

The post Navigating Supply Disruptions Generated by Rising AI Waters appeared first on HPCwire.

Now they're gonna be golden live on stage.

Warsh will serve four-year term as chair, taking over amid rising inflation and pressure from Trump to lower rates

The US Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, one of the most powerful roles in the federal government that holds enormous sway over the economy.

The 54-45 Senate vote on Wednesday was split along party lines, with the exception of the Democratic senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, who joined the Republican majority. It was most divisive confirmation vote for the position in history.

President Trump said before he left that he and President Xi Jinping "have a lot of things to discuss."

Georgia lawmakers will return to the Capitol on June 17 for a special session focused on redistricting.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman were given 10-year sentences after entering the country on a motorcycling trip

The “terrified” family of a British couple jailed for 10 years in Iran on spying charges have said they have lost all contact with them.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both 53, were arrested in January 2025 while travelling through Iran during an around-the-world trip by motorcycle.

Brian Kemp’s move makes Georgia latest southern state to initiate map-making after dismantling of Voting Rights Act

The Republican governor of Georgia called a special session for next month to redraw electoral maps, the latest southern state to initiate new map-making after the US supreme court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Brian Kemp announced the special session, which will start on 17 June, on Wednesday. It will focus on “enacting, revising, repealing, or amending” district lines for the state legislature and congressional district, in light of the supreme court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais.

INDEPENDENCE, Mo., May 13, 2026 — Nebius has announced that it has broken ground on its flagship AI factory campus in Independence, Missouri – the company’s first gigawatt-scale digital infrastructure project in the US.

The ceremony brought together state and local leaders, economic development partners, community members and company representatives to mark the start of construction of the multi-building AI factory on approximately 400 acres in eastern Independence.

State and local leaders, development partners, and community members joined company representatives at the Nebius Independence, Missouri groundbreaking ceremony on May 12, 2026.

Nebius already operates in the Kansas City area and sees the Independence AI factory as a critical next step in its long-term growth in the US.

“Projects like this are built for the long term, and we are committed to developing this facility in a way that directly benefits Independence,” said Nebius Board Chairman, John Boynton. “We want to create lasting opportunities, act as a good partner with the community, and set a standard for developing AI and digital infrastructure responsibly.”

“Missouri continues to lead in innovation, infrastructure, and investment, and this facility in Independence is another example of that momentum in action,” said Governor Mike Kehoe. “This investment from Nebius strengthens Missouri’s position as a national leader in digital infrastructure, while creating quality jobs, supporting local schools and businesses, and generating long-term opportunity. We are proud to support investments that keep Missouri competitive and moving forward.”

Construction of the first phase of the AI factory is now underway. In both the construction and operation phases, Nebius has put in place intentional design measures to minimize impact at a local level, including by minimizing water use, containing noise and light, and protecting ratepayers.

Creating approximately 1,200 construction jobs – overwhelmingly drawn from local union building trades – and 130 permanent high-tech positions at full operation, Nebius’ Independence investment is also expected to generate $650 million in tax payments to local school districts and taxing jurisdictions over the next 20 years.

Nebius is committed to transparent operations and sustained community engagement. As part of this, the company has established a community benefits plan focused on education and local investment, and has already begun to put this into practice, including a recent donation to eliminate school meal debt at Independence and Ft. Osage School Districts and an initial agreement with Metropolitan Community College focused on AI literacy and workforce development.

More information about the Nebius AI factory in Independence, Missouri, can be found at nebius-independencemo.com.

About Nebius

Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents, and services worldwide.

Source: Nebius

The post Nebius Breaks Ground on Gigawatt-Scale AI Factory in Missouri appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft is adding a Windows Update feature called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery that can automatically roll back faulty drivers to a previously known-good version without waiting for hardware makers or users to fix the problem manually. PCWorld reports: The way faulty drivers work today is that the hardware partner is responsible for pushing an updated driver, or the end user is responsible for manually uninstalling the problematic driver. "This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period," says the blog post. With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft will be able to remotely trigger a rollback of the faulty driver to a previously "known-good" version of the driver via the Windows Update pipeline. Microsoft says that testing and verification of Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery will continue until August this year, aiming to deliver this feature to Windows PCs starting in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.

↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC

The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there’s no indication they won’t vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there’s no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.

Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there’s going to be many individual member states who simply won’t reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans.

Of course, we’ve got a long way to go, and I’m sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.

The streamer's upcoming NFL season coverage includes five total games.

On the night of the military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a loud boom woke the Nigerian man who lived in Unit 215. Tolulope Akinsulie stood up from his bed and saw heavily armed federal agents rushing into his apartment. He then felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Akinsulie screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his ankle, thighs, hip and wrist. 

Down the hall, agents took a Venezuelan mother and her 16-year-old son from their apartment at gunpoint to another unit. There, they saw agents hit a man with what looked like the butt of a  rifle and kick another who was lying on the floor. As he watched, her son began to hyperventilate.

“Here is another one,” agents said about a Mexican man who lived in Unit 502, before zip-tying his hands behind his back and marching him out of the building. Agents told the man he wasn’t welcome in the United States, took his city of Chicago identification card and ripped it up in front of him. 

While much has been documented about the Sept. 30 raid by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, new accounts from 17 men, women and children detained that night paint a violent and terrifying portrait of how the federal agents conducted the operation.

Their descriptions form the basis of administrative claims filed on their behalf Tuesday against DHS and several other federal agencies that took part in the midnight raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

The claims mark the tenants’ first step toward seeking accountability, their lawyers said, as well as millions of dollars in damages, for federal agents’ actions during the raid, a key moment in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago. The claims allege that agents didn’t have warrants before entering apartments.

“There was no reason to do me like that,” Akinsulie said in an interview with ProPublica. His body still bears the dark scars from the dog bites. The complaint, he said, is meant to send a message that officials are not above the law. “Everybody can get a check and balance,” he said. “People have to learn how to act right.”

The claims allege that federal agents caused physical injuries, emotional trauma, “brutal detention” and financial loss. Each of the claimants — 15 are immigrants, and two are U.S. citizens —  is seeking about $5 million, an amount the attorneys believe is comparable to similar court judgments in Chicago.

“There is no amount of damages that will compensate our clients for the trauma they experienced that night,” said Susana Sandoval Vargas, the Midwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national Latino civil rights organization that is representing some of the tenants. “It is about holding the federal government accountable for their unlawful actions.”

A DHS spokesperson said Wednesday that the “operation was performed in full compliance of the law” and that tenants are not owed compensation. “DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about Akinsulie’s injuries. But federal immigration agents have said they issued verbal warnings as they entered Akinsulie’s unit and believed he had been trying to hide and evade arrest, according to documents filed in an unrelated lawsuit. Akinsulie said he was in a deep sleep and did not hear any warnings or the dog barking.

Within DHS, the South Shore tenants’ claims also were submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In addition, they were sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, neither of which responded to questions from ProPublica.

An 18th claim also was filed Tuesday on behalf of a tenant who was detained outside the building a week before the raid and lost property.

The Federal Tort Claims Act provides one of the only avenues for people who believe they were harmed by federal employees acting unlawfully and allows for compensation for emotional distress, property damage, injury or death. If the agency does not respond or settle a claim within six months, or if it denies a claim, individuals can then file a lawsuit. 

DHS would not say how many claims have been filed since last year. But already there have been dozens across the country: A pregnant woman in California said she went into premature labor after being detained and shackled. A Marine Corps veteran said he was tackled by federal agents while protesting in Oregon. A Chicago alderperson said agents swore at her, shoved her and handcuffed her after she questioned their presence in a hospital emergency room. The DHS spokesperson said the three individuals were obstructing or interfering with law enforcement.

In interviews, a half dozen attorneys said they expect to see more claims in the coming months. “Hopefully this case and others will be a check against the most aggressive and reckless forms of (immigration) enforcement,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which worked on the case along with MALDEF, the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago and the MacArthur Justice Center.

During the South Shore raid, some 300 heavily armed agents stormed the dilapidated, five-story building; some descended from a Black Hawk helicopter. They hurled flash grenades, broke down apartment doors and zip-tied dozens of immigrants and U.S. citizens who lived in the building. The drama was captured by a television crew that accompanied agents.

The Trump administration repeatedly justified its actions by claiming it had intelligence that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building, and that there were guns, drugs and explosives inside. ProPublica journalists, who over the past several months have interviewed 16 of the 37 immigrants detained that night, previously reported that there was little evidence to back the government’s claim. To this day, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested.

The tort claims detail what families, including those with young children, allegedly experienced during the raid. A Venezuelan mother and father huddled together in their apartment with their four children, the youngest a 1-year-old U.S. citizen, who “screamed and cried in terror” while agents pointed guns at them. Agents marched them outside in their pajamas and separated the father. One of the boys, now 9, had a panic attack, according to the claim.

DHS officials previously insisted children were not zip-tied, but the account from the 16-year-old boy who hyperventilated at the sight of agents assaulting immigrants said he and his mom were zip-tied outside the building. DHS called that an “abject lie” and said no children were handcuffed or restrained. 

While the tenants were detained, the records allege, many of their possessions were stolen or lost: shoes, Playstations, smartphones, jewelry, mattresses, a backpack with $1,300 in cash and toys. Several reported losing their vehicles, too.

The raid upended tenants’ lives. Many of the immigrants, mostly Venezuelan, have already been deported. Many U.S. citizens who lived in the building, including some on public housing assistance, were forced to relocate late last year after a judge ordered the building shuttered for safety issues and code violations.

José Miguel Jiménez López, 42, the Mexican man who lived on the fifth floor, worked as a welder in Chicago before the raid disrupted his life. Jiménez said he wasn’t a gang member or involved in criminal activity. So even when agents pointed guns at him, zip-tied his hands and told him to go back to his country, he thought they would let him go. They didn’t.

Over the next four months, he was shuttled to detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana before being released at the Mexico border in February. He is now living in his childhood home in the state of Guanajuato. “I have friends and family who are still there, and they are afraid,” he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t like to see them go through what I had to go through.”

His claim details harsh conditions at the facilities, including insufficient food and water, constant air conditioning during winter and little time outside. Others described getting sick from the drinking water, a lack of adequate medical care and a constant worry that they would never see their loved ones again. The DHS spokesperson said the “safety and well-being of detainees are prioritized” and that detainees have access to medical care and nutritious meals.

In his claim, Jiménez alleged that “ICE officers treated him and other detainees as if they were sub-human and not entitled to basic dignity or respect.” He said he lost $3,000 worth of property, including a TV and a drill. 

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan woman and her 16-year-old son were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. They spent three weeks there until they were released into the U.S. on electronic monitoring. The woman now has trouble sleeping, while her son sees a psychiatrist to process what happened that night. 

Akinsulie, 42, said he is grateful to be alive. A devout Christian, he finds peace reading the Bible and in prayer. But while he was in detention, he had so many nightmares that he needed to see a psychiatrist. He dreamed about dogs barking behind him. Chasing him. Talking to him.

“The one that really baffled me was when the German shepherd was chasing me. Then I was running,” Akinsulie said. “The German shepherd was about to bite me. That really scared me because I don’t want no more bites.”

The nightmares stopped after he was released in March; the government had conceded that he and others had likely been arrested unlawfully. Akinsulie, who said he has lived in Chicago since 2007, has no criminal history, according to the arrest report from the night he was detained. 

He is back in Chicago now, staying with a friend and doing odd jobs. He finds it difficult to stand for a long time, and sometimes pain shoots from his hip to his right foot. Once an avid soccer player, he said he can’t kick the ball or run like he used to. He worries that the injuries might be permanent, but he can’t afford to see a doctor.

The post Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages appeared first on ProPublica.

Jordan Derrick charged in connection with deadly attack in the French Quarter on New Year’s Day 2025

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Federal authorities have filed charges against a Missouri man accused of publishing online tutorials on how to manufacture explosives that the terrorist who carried out the deadly attack in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter on New Year’s Day 2025 used as a blueprint to make his own improvised bombs.

R Matthew Price, a US attorney, announced Tuesday that 40-year-old Jordan Derrick, of the Missouri city of Sweet Springs, had been charged with one count each of engaging in the business of manufacturing explosive materials without a license, unlawful possession of an unregistered destructive device, and illicitly distributing information relating to manufacturing explosives.

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Elias Calocane says he thought violent messages sent by brother related to suicidal thoughts not harming others

The younger brother of Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in an attack in Nottingham, said he felt “powerless” over his sibling’s mental ill health and believed violent messages his brother had sent concerned suicidal thoughts.

Valdo Cacocane, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, stabbed to death Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65, on 13 June 2023, and seriously injured three others.

CBS News' Nikki Battiste gets to know Maggie Murdaugh through two of her longtime friends for "48 Hours."

The Senate rejected another attempt by Democrats to limit President Trump's ability to use military force against Iran, but one new Republican senator voted in favor of advancing the measure.

The Senate voted to confirm Kevin Warsh as chairman of the Federal Reserve, marking a victory for President Trump.

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President Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping comes as members of Congress are calling for a crackdown on China's ability to acquire U.S. farmland, citing national security concerns.

A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans oppose data centers, which require extensive amounts of electricity and water to operate, and negatively affect local communities.

The Trump administration is also warning states to crack down on Medicaid fraud or risk losing funding for their anti-fraud units.

A young woman dead in a boating crash, a mother and her son killed in a double homicide, and two other mysterious deaths – all with a connection to one family.

KEL MARQUEZ
Contributing Writer

Have you ever received the “I think you’re a really great person but…” text? Or the “I could see myself in a relationship with you, but I met someone else” paragraph? I have, and honestly, I’m so over it. 

This New Year’s Day, I made a resolution to be actively single all year long. Taking this new direction means no dating apps, flirting or accepting/giving phone numbers. The goal to be single all year long is simple, but I’m doing it for one major reason — to be committed to myself. 

For the past few years, I’ve been on dating apps, given my number to men I found intriguing and gone on a few dates. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it also drains my energy. Most of the time, those dates went nowhere because I was the one putting in the most effort. In the end, I would just be disappointed that nothing worked out. 

So I asked myself, why would I give my precious energy and time to people who want nothing to do with me?

It’s not just energy-consuming, but it’s also kind of embarrassing. I might just be influenced by the surge of swag gaps and the Vogue opinion article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” But the underlying reason behind these trends is something I resonate with deeply. 

It comes up when I’m talking to a guy I like and realize he will definitely forget me in a week. Or even when I mention a crush to a friend and think there are more interesting things to talk about. It’s the realization that in this era of dating, everything is temporary. 

The funny thing is, I actually love romance. It’s my favorite thing to read, watch and hear about. Love is what makes the world go round. It’s beautiful, but in this day and age, romance is dead. It’s no longer about the natural chemistry, yearning and human connection I read about. Today, we are overcome with prolonged talking stages, situationships and dating apps over real-life bonds. This has tainted my perception of love, which I now keep at a distance, at least for the time being. 

That’s not to say I’m giving up on the idea of love entirely. To get to know someone so honestly and truthfully is one of life’s most special gifts. I want to believe that romance will persevere. I want to believe that someday love will be waiting for me too. For now, though, I want to get to know myself better. If I pour out all of my vibrant energy onto others, I also deserve to feel it flowing within me.

If you’re tired of the failed talking stages or love interests who send mixed signals, maybe you need some time off, too. There is so much more to life than wondering when you’ll get that text back or what those mixed signals mean. 

Choosing yourself is an important skill to have, and trust me when I say, being single is fun. I love going on solo dates, getting myself a latte and spending time with friends and family. I’ve made the joke to my friends that I’m my own girlfriend now, and I’ve been loving it. 

In the words of the icon RuPaul, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

A new Linux local privilege escalation flaw called Fragnesia has been disclosed as a Dirty Frag-like vulnerability, allowing arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files through a separate ESP/XFRM logic bug. Phoronix reports: Proof of concept code for Fragnesia is already out there. There is a two-line patch for addressing the issue within the Linux kernel's skbuff.c code. That patch hasn't yet been mainlined or picked up by any mainline kernel releases but presumably will be in short order for addressing this local privilege escalation issue. More details can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health secretary’s move to force race sparks scramble on left of Labour for candidate to oppose him

Wes Streeting is preparing to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer on Thursday if the health secretary can secure the support of enough MPs to trigger a contest.

Streeting’s move to force a race has sparked a frantic scramble on the left of Labour to find a candidate to oppose him, with Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner both possible contenders.

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Health secretary’s lack of challenge had reassured Starmer and his allies – but then briefings for a speculative Thursday launch emerged

As the unofficial political truce of the king’s speech approached, with still no sign of a leadership challenge from Wes Streeting, some of his Labour colleagues assumed the health secretary’s chance to go for the top job might have passed for ever.

“There is a risk he becomes the David Miliband of this generation if he doesn’t do something,” one MP said, a reference to another longtime heir apparent who never made the final step.

St John the Divine, Kennington has built one of UK’s largest youth choral programmes in area marked by deprivation

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N’raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

“No,” she said, beaming. “Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully.”

Justices said decision was due to ‘improper external influences on the jury’ by a court clerk during the trial

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The South Carolina supreme court on Wednesday overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina attorney, due to “shocking jury interference” and ordered a new trial in the 2021 killing of his wife and son.

“Our justice system provides – indeed demands – that every person is entitled to a fair trial, which includes an impartial jury untainted by external forces bent on influencing the jury toward a biased verdict,” the justices wrote in a unanimous opinion.

Brand owner Mondelēz was accused of reducing weight of Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the packaging

Many chocolate lovers consider shrinkflation a serious crime – and they have been vindicated after a German court ruled that the makers of Milka cheated consumers by cutting the bar’s size, while keeping the wrapper the same.

The three-week case in a regional court was brought by Hamburg’s consumer protection office. It accused the chocolate brand’s US owner Mondelēz of deceiving shoppers by cutting the weight of Milka’s classic Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the distinctive purple packaging.

LEMONT, Ill., May 13, 2026 — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are developing a new way for robots to learn and adapt to many different hands-on laboratory tasks. The goal is to create robots that can work alongside scientists in real lab environments and adjust to changing conditions.

Argonne scientists are exploring using a series of interoperable robots to conduct biological research in an experimental lab. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

“Robots with fine motor skills already exist but using them safely and effectively in real laboratories is still very challenging,” said Nicola Ferrier, senior computer scientist. “Our approach starts by learning directly from expert scientists as they do their work.”

The RoSA: Robot Scientific Assistant for Accelerating Experimental Workflows project is part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a bold national initiative to double America’s research and development productivity within a decade. The key is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and world-leading supercomputers.

As a first step, researchers will outfit fellow scientists with sensors and observe them as they prepare for and perform lab procedures. The recorded data will then be used to train computer models that allow robots to mimic expert actions and learn how tasks are performed correctly.

Ferrier brings experience in using computer vision systems to guide robots and machines. Her collaborator, computational scientist Arvind Ramanathan, has worked on self-driving laboratories and AI systems that can make complex decisions.

“Our main goal is to strengthen the basic robotics and computing tools needed so that large-scale, automated robotic systems can carry out experiments faster and more reliably,” Ferrier said.

Ramanathan said the techniques developed as part of the RoSA project will complement other research efforts such as Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL). That multi-lab project will create a network of autonomous laboratories that can learn and adapt, to accelerate breakthroughs across biology, biotechnology and energy science.

“In OPAL, dexterous robotics – which are well coordinated and nimble – are being planned for executing biological experiments,” he said. “By integrating AI-driven decision-making with advanced robotics, we aim to create systems that can accelerate discovery across a wide range of scientific disciplines.”

RoSA will also organize common lab tasks by how difficult and precise they are and map them to the most suitable type of robot. Fixed station robots have a stationary base and perform tasks within a defined workspace, whereas humanoid robots are mobile systems designed to resemble and move like the human body. Hybrid robots combine aspects of both. The project team will test robot performance in a virtual lab environment.

“Within the next year we hope to show a fivefold improvement in how efficiently these tasks can be completed,” Ferrier said. “In the long term, we envision robot scientific assistants that can work with existing laboratory equipment, making complex experiments both safer and more efficient. RoSA is a key step toward that future.”

The work is funded by DOE’s Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne National Lab

The post Argonne Researchers to Develop Learning-Based Robots as Step Toward a Scientific Assistant appeared first on HPCwire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: LinkedIn planned to inform staff of layoffs on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a widening of technology sector cuts this year. The Microsoft-owned social network plans to cut about 5% of its headcount as it reorganizes teams and focuses personnel on areas where its business is growing [...]. LinkedIn employs more than 17,500 full-time workers globally, its website says. Reuters was unable to determine the teams affected. The cuts come as revenue at LinkedIn, which sells recruiting tools and subscriptions, rose 12% in the just-ended quarter from a year prior, in an acceleration of growth in 2026, according to Microsoft's securities filings. The layoff rationale was not for artificial intelligence to replace jobs at LinkedIn, one of the people told Reuters. The specter of AI-fueled disruption has nonetheless hung over software incumbents and workers generally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

May 13, 2026 — Using an infusion of state funding, the University of Utah is building an AI-assisted computing infrastructure expected to advance population-based medical and policy decisions.

Under a funding bill passed in the 2026 Legislature, state lawmakers and the governor have invested $18.6 million in a new technology system to maximize understanding of data stored in the Utah Population Database (UPDB) and the expertise of researchers at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and across campus, speeding health innovations and discoveries for generations to come. The Utah Health AI Vault (UHAIV) will be developed and housed at the university in a partnership between Huntsman Cancer Institute, the database, and the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC).

Credit: University of Utah

Another $15 million will support a new data center and broader AI ecosystem. Together, the state investment adds up to more than $33 million, positioning Utah to lead the nation in AI-enabled health innovation.

University leaders say the state’s commitment to advanced computing infrastructure will expand the university’s research capacity and establish a statewide AI foundation—supporting researchers, clinicians, educators and innovators across Utah. At the same time, the technology is expected to accelerate discovery, improve patient outcomes and drive economic growth.

“This is a powerful example of what becomes possible when a state chooses to invest boldly in the health and future of its people,” said Taylor Randall, president. “Utah’s leadership understands that world-class discovery, advanced computing, and responsible data stewardship are essential to improving the lives of patients, families, and communities across our state. We are deeply grateful for this partnership and the trust it represents, and we are committed to delivering innovation that serves the public good.”

The funding for UHAIV will update UPDB’s data architecture to make it compatible with innovations in data science and AI. UHAIV will be a university-wide initiative, jointly managed by Bradley Cairns, CEO of Huntsman Cancer Institute, and James Hotaling, chief innovation officer at University of Utah Health.

Together, the database and institute have enabled breathtaking discoveries over the past decades. For more than 20 years, Huntsman Cancer Institute has managed the UPDB as it powered landmark advances in cancer genetics, including the identification of inherited risk genes for breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA1 and BRCA2), melanoma (CDKN2A/p16), and colon cancer (APC)—discoveries that have reshaped cancer risk assessment, screening guidelines, and prevention worldwide.

UHAIV will develop a secure, modern platform that maximizes both resources, modernizing the UPDB to enable and develop advanced AI analytics within a secure environment, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy, data security, and ethical oversight. Huntsman Cancer Institute will play a key stewardship role in advancing the initiative, ensuring that the power of AI is applied thoughtfully and responsibly to accelerate discovery.

“Huntsman Cancer Institute is honored to help steward these initiatives,” Cairns said. “We take seriously both the opportunity and the responsibility that come with this investment, and we are committed to ensuring that it translates into meaningful advances for patients and families in Utah and beyond.”

U researchers will gain unprecedented capabilities to accelerate breakthroughs in prevention, early detection, personalized treatments and survivorship across numerous diseases—all while ensuring sensitive and private data remains protected.

“Infrastructure is the engine behind AI-enabled innovation,” said Manish Parashar, the university’s chief AI officer. “We’re grateful the state recognizes these investments as essential to keeping Utah at the forefront of AI. Once these resources are online, researchers and entrepreneurs will be able to move from concept to application at scale much faster.”

Peter Huntsman, chairman and CEO of Huntsman Cancer Foundation, worked closely with legislative leaders during the session to advocate for the initiative. Peter and Brynn Huntsman and the Huntsman Family Foundation also have contributed $10 million to the U to help launch the supercomputer project.

“We are grateful for the state’s leadership and partnership,” he said. “Together, we are building a future where discovery moves faster, care reaches farther, and innovation serves everyone.”

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• University of Utah to Launch Statewide AI Supercomputer This Summer with $15M Support

Source: University of Utah

The post University of Utah Advances AI-Driven Health Research with New Computing, Data Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Using the 1,000 most influential voices in AI that also happen to be on X, Digg wants to be your source of AI news.

May 13, 2026 — Fractile has raised $220 million to accelerate the path to getting its chips and systems into customers’ hands. The financing round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC, investing alongside existing backers.

Fractile was founded in 2022 on the bet that, eventually, the world’s most capable AI systems would be limited in their impact by the amount of time they take to produce useful outputs. The company bet on the logical conclusion: that the only way to truly unlock this latent value, to make speed viable at scale, was to radically re-invent the hardware used to run frontier AI models. Since then, Fractile has been building chips and systems designed to tackle this problem.

Raw AI capability has already reached the point where time from query to output is the key limit to frontier capabilities. As models have improved, so has their ability to be orchestrated over increasingly long output sequences. The toughest problems demand generating many tens of millions of tokens, and there are continual capability returns to generating longer outputs. At the same time, the unit economics of inference have become a brutal constraint. Inference is both the revenue engine of the AI industry and the rate-limiting factor on expanding it.

The positive correlation between performance and the amount of compute deployed at inference time has been a longstanding hallmark of frontier AI systems. DeepMind’s AlphaGo achieved superhuman performance through not just running a neural network once to pick one particular next move, but running a tree search over many possible futures, with each future explored by sequential, repeated inference of a neural network. The emergence of reasoning models in 2024 made clear that similar principles applied to LLMs. What is being seen now, though, with some of the most valuable applications of AI consuming many millions of tokens, is also a reflection of a fundamental property of hard work. Serious intellectual work involves many sequential steps, each dependent on the last.

For very hard work, these sequential steps can sum to an extraordinary body of intermediate output, yet lead to incredibly valuable outcomes when those outputs are synthesized. After years of work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Wiles realized that the approach he was working on that day looked like a dead end, but fit perfectly to resolve an approach he had explored three years earlier. The ability to operate over long context, exploring different directions in sequence – and the enormous stack of papers Wiles accumulated – is what frontier LLMs are starting to be pushed towards as they are applied to increasingly difficult problems.

Today’s LLMs are already producing up to 100 million tokens in pursuit of tackling these hard problems. At the ~40 tokens per second or so at which these models tend to run on existing chips, a single output of this length takes a month to complete. The technical and economic limits on inference speed, above all from memory bandwidth that has failed to scale on current architectures, are what is constraining progress. To compress that month into a day, output will need to be generated at ~1,200 tokens per second, while handling the complexity and capacity challenges of operating large models at very long contexts. This is exactly the problem Fractile has been building from the ground up to tackle.

However, what is most exciting about the hardware moonshot is not accelerating the workloads of today, but rather the entirely new workloads that it could enable. Compressing a month of work into a day, a weekend of lab computation into a coffee break, will make all that work happen radically faster, but it will also make far more ambitious AI use cases economically viable. Agentic coding is only the start of the story. The defining work of the 21st century will be marked by the engine of inference delivering immense and diffuse chains of intellectual inquiry, in drug discovery, in software engineering, in materials discovery, and in any field where humanity will benefit from sheer intellectual work to resolve complex problems. As with any technological revolution, those who drive this progress fastest, who push the frontier furthest, will capture the greatest share of the value. The workloads that push to the limits of the current frontier are already transformational. The ones that lie beyond that frontier, which this next phase of hardware aims to open up, will stretch imaginations and redefine the entire economy. Fractile is seeking to increase the clock speed of global progress, one chip at a time.

Making this possible begins with people. Since founding, the company has been working across the full stack, from foundational AI research to foundry process innovation to chip micro-architecture, to aggressively pursue the most promising solutions and develop systems that break the trade-off curve, reject the inference pareto frontier of cost-versus-latency, and chart a course to changing what can be done with the world’s best AI models.

Fractile’s journey has only just begun, and the most important work lies ahead. The company is hiring across the UK (London, Bristol), the US (San Francisco), and Taiwan (Taipei). Those looking for the opportunity to join what Fractile describes as a singularly ambitious, hard and consequential mission are encouraged to apply.

Source: Fractile

The post Fractile Raises $220M to Build the Next Generation of Inference Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.

Tiffany McElroy says inmates assisted in delivering her baby in May 2024 after jail staff left her to fend for herself

An Alabama woman has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that her civil rights and those of her infant daughter were violated after jail staff where she was incarcerated allegedly left her to labor alone for more than a day.

Tiffany McElroy, now 28, was booked into an Alabama jail in May 2024. Three days after arriving, she said she felt her water break weeks before she was expected to give birth.

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NEW YORK, May 13, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Monika Henzinger of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) as the 2026-2027 ACM Athena Lecturer. Henzinger is recognized for outstanding contributions to the fields of dynamic graph algorithms and web algorithms, and for dedicated mentoring and service to these communities.

Monika Henzinger

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Two Sigma.

Dynamic Graph Algorithms and Web Algorithms

Monika Henzinger’s research focuses on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for processing large, dynamic data. Her work spans fundamental areas of computer science, including graph algorithms, data structures, information retrieval, and web search technologies, and many of her contributions have made their way into standard textbooks. She developed the first linear-time algorithms for a variety of algorithmic problems such as computing shortest paths in planar graphs.

She has made significant contributions to dynamic algorithms, which maintain solutions efficiently as data changes, particularly in network and graph settings; establishing, for example, the first poly-logarithmic upper and lower bounds in the time per operation for the fundamental problem of graph connectivity.

A major theme of her research is handling massive, real-world datasets such as web graphs and social networks. She contributed to early developments in web search and link analysis, helping shape modern search engine technology. For her contributions, she was awarded the SIGIR Test of Time Award in 2017 and she is the co-inventor of over 80 patents in that field. More recently, her work has expanded to privacy-preserving data analysis, developing algorithms that ensure strong protection of individual information through differential privacy. Her research also addresses algorithmic challenges in distributed systems, network optimization, and approximation algorithms. Ultimately, her work bridges theory and practice, advancing fundamental algorithmic theory while applying it to large-scale, real-world problems.

Leadership Within the Field

In addition to her technical contributions, Monika Henzinger is a prominent leader in the research community. She has laid the foundations for several research fields such as data streams, web search algorithms, and the empirical evaluation of dynamic graph algorithms, co-initiated major conferences such as the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, and helped shape the trajectory of major technology companies. She serves in editorial capacities for leading journals and has chaired numerous conferences and award committees. Her mentorship is widely recognized; her research group members are considered worldwide leaders in dynamic and web algorithms.

Biographical Background

Monika Henzinger is a Professor and Vice-President of Technology Transfer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and was a Visiting Scientist at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley and at Stanford University. Monika has held prominent academic positions at institutions including Cornell University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In addition to her academic career, Henzinger has played a significant role in industry, notably as the first Director of Research at Google, where she contributed to the development of large-scale web search technologies, and as a member of Research Staff at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center.

She holds a PhD from Princeton University and an Honorary Doctorate from the Technical University of Dortmund. An ACM and EATCS Fellow, she is also a member of the Academia Europaea, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her honors include two ERC Advanced Grants, the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina, the Wittgenstein Award of the Austrian Science Fund, the European Young Investigator Award, and the NSF Career Award.

Henzinger will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 13, 2026, in San Francisco.

About the ACM Athena Lecturer Award

The ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Each year, the Athena Lecturer honors a preeminent woman computer scientist. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom; with her knowledge and sense of purpose, she epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the “Athena Lecturers.”

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Source: ACM

The post ACM Selects ISTA’s Monika Henzinger as 2026-2027 Athena Lecturer appeared first on HPCwire.

The US president’s late-night Truth Social vitriol riddled with erratic capitalization and spelling? That’s leadership

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Gas prices are soaring because of blockages in the strait of Hormuz as part of the unauthorized war in Iran. There’s a highly consequential meeting with the president of China on the books for this week. The FDA director just stepped down over a disagreement over fruit-flavored vapes. Southern states are redrawing maps at breakneck pace to gerrymander Black voters out of their electoral voices.

You know what that means: it’s time for some conspiracy-laden, high-speed Truth Social posting.

WILL MCCARTHY
Managing Sports Editor

Curveballs, clutch hits, diving catches and walk-off moments.

The 2026 Delaware softball season was another campaign for the bookkeepers to update records and accolades for legacy players in the program. 

A season that started out rocky for the Blue Hens only improved as they progressed into conference play. The team rallied around exciting young talent and strong veteran performances to turn the proverbial ship around, landing the Hens with a fourth-place finish in the regular season Conference USA (CUSA) standings. 

The program sealed the deal on May 1, with a 4-2 victory over the Western Kentucky University (WKU) Hilltoppers. This was the 12th straight win at home for Delaware, and marked the third straight season of at least 30 wins for the Blue Hens.

Celebrations rang throughout the 302 over the course of the season, with prominent out-of-conference victories over schools such as the University of Maryland Terrapins and Villanova University Wildcats, as well as big conference wins like the aforementioned Hilltoppers. 

In the process, Katie Scheivert, Sydney Shaffer and Kristen Luzon became the winningest senior class in program history as they won their 136th game together. The morale at the Delaware Diamond was high as the Blue and Gold prepared for the CUSA Softball Championships, hosted locally in Newark.

Earning a top seed in the conference, Delaware punched its ticket to the first round of the tournament, granting the opportunity to skip the single-elimination games of the bracket. The Blue Hens would avoid finding themselves in a win-or-go-home scenario to start off the tournament, and instead, in double elimination. 

After a contentious first match between the New Mexico State University Aggies and the Sam Houston State University Bearkats, Delaware found its first-round opponent in the Aggies. 

The Blue Hens outlasted the fifth-seeded Aggies in a home run derby, winning the game 11-7 off the sheer power of freshman Maddie Diamond’s two home runs and sophomore Bridget Chapman’s timely homer.

Diamond’s first home run set a new freshman home run record as she hit her 16th and 17th longballs of the season, putting punctuation on her stellar rookie season for the Blue Hens. 

After a downpour of scoring from the Blue and Gold, the Aggies tied the game with a grand slam by redshirt sophomore Madi Bachman, leaving the Blue Hens scrambling for answers in the bottom of the sixth inning.

Without hesitation, Delaware scored four consecutive runs and sent the game to the top of the seventh on the way to a major victory. The Blue Hens notched their first CUSA postseason win, doing so on their home turf. 

Delaware would move on in the CUSA Championship to take on first-seeded Jacksonville State University, falling to the Gamecocks 7-0 and being relegated to the consolation bracket of the tournament. The Blue Hens were next tasked with a familiar opponent, the WKU Hilltoppers. 

The Hilltoppers lingered in The First State after the conclusion of their weekend series against Delaware just a few days prior to the start of the tournament. The second-seeded Hilltoppers sought revenge against the Blue Hens as a clear rivalry brewed between the two teams. 

After an equally hard-fought game, WKU and Delaware were all knotted up heading to the bottom of the seventh inning, with one last chance for the Hilltoppers to walk it off on Delaware’s own field. 

WKU worked themselves into a bases-loaded situation, with two outs and junior Morgan Sharpe stepping up to the plate. In a flash, Sharpe made contact with a pitch from Delaware graduate student pitcher Claire Woods that bounced right to Delaware second baseman Katie Scheivert, who flipped it to Blue Hen Gianna Costaro perched at first base in an attempt to record the third out of the inning. 

By a matter of inches, Sharpe was called safe at first base, and sophomore Anna Mauck scored on a run from third base to home. WKU had won the softball game, advancing to the next round of the tournament, eliminating Delaware in the process.

Although Delaware’s season ended in a heartbreaking fashion, the team’s representation in the CUSA All-Conference awards is something to be proud of. The Blue Hens were recognized for eight postseason honors, the most of any CUSA team this postseason.

Shaffer, Diamond and freshman Allie Nankivell were named First Team All-CUSA selections, while Scheivert and sophomore Josie Crossman earned Second Team honors. Freshman Karli Challburg, Diamond and Nankivell were also selected to the CUSA All-Freshman Team, the league announced on May 5.

In her first season in Newark, Nankivell set a program record for runs scored in a season by a freshman, notching 39 trips around the basepads this year. The New Jersey native lived on base this year for Delaware as well, ending her season with a .400 AVG and stealing 19 bases for the Hens.

Delaware softball has cemented itself as a dominant program in CUSA with so much to be proud of in 2026. As we approach next season, the sky is the limit for the blossoming young talent that represent the Blue and Gold on the Delaware Diamond and in the “No Limits On Us” conference.

The German Sovereign Tech Fund has invested 1.2 million euros ($1.4 million USD) in KDE Plasma technologies to help strengthen the structural reliability and security of the desktop environment's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services. Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin shares an excerpt from the announcement: For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures: operating systems, desktop environments, document viewers, image and video editors, software development libraries, and much more. KDE's software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization. KDE will use Sovereign Tech Fund's investment to push its essential software products to the next level, providing every individual, business, and public administration with the opportunity to regain their privacy, security, and control over their digital sovereignty. Slashdot reader Elektroschock also shared a statement from Fiona Krakenburger, Technical Director at the Sovereign Tech Agency. "We have long invested in desktop technologies for a reason: they are the primary way people access and use digital services in everyday life," says Krakenburger. "The desktop holds personal data and mediates nearly every service we depend on, from booking the next medical appointment, to education, to the way we work. We are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology. Strengthening KDE's testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how we invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A city official in Miami Beach, Florida paid thousands of dollars to hire billboard trucks with text attacking specific members of an anti-Zionist Jewish group, according to a new filing in federal court.

David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

Related

StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing.

Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

After publication, Suarez sent The Intercept an email doubling down on his accusation. “You can use this response, only in its entirety,” Suarez wrote, “as a jew, I can spot a jew hater a mile away.”

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

Related

She Criticized the Mayor’s Support for Israel on Facebook. Then the Cops Showed Up at Her Door.

The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

Update: May 14, 2026
This story has been updated with a statement from city commissioner David Suarez.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

The Justice Department is probing suspicious trading timed to market swings, two sources say.

USA Today reports the T1 phone is shipping at last, citing an emailed confirmation from the CEO of Trump Mobile.

Tate Reeves cancels special legislative session but expects to redraw four congressional districts before 2027 elections

On Wednesday morning, Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, said that he was canceling a special legislative session that was scheduled to redraw the state’s supreme court districts next week. However, Reeves, a Republican, noted that he does expect the state to redraw its four congressional districts at some point in the near future.

Reeves, in an appearance on SuperTalk radio, a conservative talk radio network, also said that it would be difficult for the state to redraw the congressional districts in the Republicans’ favor in time for the upcoming midterm elections, slated for November. Doing so might also hurt Republicans in congressional races.

This marks the longest decline in overdose deaths in decades, according to preliminary government data.

• ‘My job is to create a culture,’ he says

• Captain may ask Tiger Woods for his input

Jim Furyk has admitted the United States need to make the Ryder Cup more of a priority as the 56-year-old plots a reversal of fortunes at Adare Manor in September 2027.

Speaking expansively for the first time since being handed the US captaincy for a second time, Furyk pointed towards an overhaul of approach to the biennial event. He also suggested he will be keen to involve Tiger Woods on his backroom team.

Alex Murdaugh was convicted of his killing his wife and his son at the family's home in 2021.

The South Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new trial, saying the 2023 trial was improperly influenced by a county clerk’s comments to jurors.

Apple Maps now keeps a running history of everywhere you go. Here's how to disable it, delete your history or limit how long it's stored.

Harvard faculty are voting on a proposal (PDF) to curb grade inflation by limiting solid A grades to 20% of students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Axios reports: Grade inflation is at a tipping point at Harvard. A move to make A grades harder to come by at one of the world's leading universities could influence grading debates at peer institutions. Solid A's account for nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate letter grades. That's up from roughly a quarter 20 years ago. More than 50 members of last year's class graduated with perfect GPAs. [...] Faculty are voting on three separate provisions. Each requires a simple majority to pass. A cap to limit solid-A grades to 20% of enrolled students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Changes to how internal honors are calculated, moving from traditional grade point average scoring to an average percentile rank. Allowing courses to use new "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" marks with a "satisfactory-plus" distinction. A pre-vote faculty poll showed around 60% of the 205 respondents favored the 20-plus-four formula over an alternative. Supporters of the cap argue it's intentionally modest as it places no restrictions on A-minuses. The four-grade buffer is designed to protect small seminars where a higher proportion of students may succeed. [...] If passed, changes would take effect in fall 2027, followed by a mandatory three-year review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No 10 confirms Streeting is still health secretary despite reports he could launch a leadership bid as early as tomorrow

• Streeting to resign and challenge Starmer, allies say

• Farage faces inquiry over £5m gift from crypto billionaire

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

An odd dispute of interpretation has emerged overnight between the Scottish and UK governments. Yesterday evening a Scottish government spokesperson announced that, during a call between first minister John Swinney and prime minister Kier Starmer, both parties agreed to meet face to face next month to discuss a referendum on independence.

It is particularly welcome that the prime minister agreed to meet next month to discuss a referendum on independence.

The PM committed to meeting to discussed shared issues including the cost of living.

As the PM told the first minister, the manifesto this government was elected on was unambiguous that ‘Labour does not support independence or another referendum’. Our position remains unchanged.

We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.

Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.

This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable.

Wes Streeting is expected to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer as soon as Thursday. News of the health secretary’s plans came during the king’s speech, derailing what was supposed to be another chance for the prime minister to reset the political agenda. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s head of national news, Archie Bland

Exclusive: Doctors say ‘highly concerning’ poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice

One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found that – of the 15% turning to chatbots – one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists.

With interest rates likely to stay higher for longer, it helps to know the interest-earning potential of a $100,000 CD now.

Beloved animated series will return for 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media reaches deal with Disney

Fans of Les Simpson have a message for anyone who doubted the future of the beloved and long-running Québécois version of the animated satirical show: Mange de la crotte.

Les Simpson will return for its 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media said it had reached an agreement with Disney for the rights to air and dub the show. The deal caps nearly a year of uncertainty surrounding the adaptation, which is beloved in Canada’s lone francophone province.

New rules would enable single-ticket bookings across multiple rail operators throughout Europe

Cross-border train journeys through several European countries are the stuff of many a holidaymaker’s dreams.

But the reality of trying to buy the tickets, navigating multiple websites without knowing who can help if a connection is missed, can prove less than relaxing. As one MEP puts it, it can often require “five tabs, three apps and a prayer”.

This blog is now closed, you can read more of our Ukraine war coverage here

Responding to the Guardian’s questions, the operator also confirmed that the vast majority of the 1,187 guests on board are British. There are also 514 crew members.

Ambassador Cruise Line also confirmed that a 92-year-old man died on board earlier this week, but he did not report any symptoms at the time and the cause of his death is yet to be established.

The Hormuz inflation shock is only just beginning Expert comment thilton.drupal 13 May 2026

A major inflation shock is likely thanks to high global energy prices.

As statistics authorities across the globe start to publish inflation data for the month of April, the scale of the Hormuz inflation shock is slowly becoming visible. The US announced its Consumer Price Index (CPI) had risen by 0.6 per cent in the last month, and 3.8 per cent over the last 12 months, its highest rise since May 2023. 

Elsewhere, annual inflation in the Philippines reached 7.2 per cent last month, from 4.1 percent in March. In Turkey, inflation accelerated to 32.4 per cent in April, from 30.9 percent a month earlier. 

There will be much more of this to come, and the reason is straightforward: the price of energy is a central variable in shaping overall inflation. And since the US-Israeli war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, energy prices have soared and show no signs of returning to pre-war levels. 

Energy is central to inflation  

Under almost any scenario, global energy prices will remain way higher than they were last year, when the price of Brent crude averaged a mere $69 per barrel, the lowest level since 2020. In contrast, the price of Brent crude these days is closer to $100 per barrel. 

This will be enough to keep inflation fears ignited, and central bankers will face very unpleasant challenges in the coming months. 

It is very difficult to find previous episodes of accelerating global inflation that don’t have rising energy prices at their heart. The most famous, of course, were the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which pushed inflation in the US, for example, towards 15 per cent in early 1980. In response, Paul Volcker’s US Federal Reserve raised its interest rate to 20 per cent to tame that beast. 

The global economy is considerably less energy-intensive than it was in the 1970s, and monetary policy is a lot more disciplined. 

Yet the role of energy prices in shaping inflation seems undiminished. 

Rising energy inflation – the change in energy prices – has played a critical role in the two notable broader inflation surges in the past decade: in 2016–2018, and following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021–2022 (see chart).

Equally, the moderation in global inflation that the world enjoyed between January 2023 and the Iran war in late February 2026 would have been inconceivable without a sustained collapse in global energy price inflation. During this period, there were only six months in which the inflation rate of global energy prices was above zero; the rest of the time, the change in energy price decreased. This energy price deflation paved the way for sharp declines in overall inflation measured by CPI. 

The role of demand

An important challenge to this admittedly simple view of things is that it confuses cause and effect: One might argue that it is really only demand conditions, shaped by monetary policy, rather than supply disruption, that determine the price of energy and therefore its effects on CPI. 

For example, there is an argument that the post-Covid inflation surge was only really made possible by excessively loose monetary and fiscal policies that many governments put in place to help soften the economic blow of the pandemic. Those loose policies, in turn, allowed global demand to outstrip supply, generating inflation in goods and services prices across the board – including the price of energy. 

Related work

The Strait of Hormuz energy crisis shows the EU’s carbon pricing is the right approach

That view of things may be right when it comes to explaining the specific post-COVID increase in inflation. But it doesn’t work quite as well in the other direction, when a general decline in global inflation began from late 2022. This decline was not accompanied by much of a decline in global demand growth, even though central banks almost everywhere had been tightening monetary policy in response to the inflation surge. 

Rather, the broad macroeconomic story of the past three years has been the incredible resilience of global demand – with global growth running at 3.3 per cent both in 2024 and 2025, well above its long-term average of around 2.7 per cent – despite the global monetary tightening. Instead, it is global energy inflation that has been the primary driver of inflation more broadly.

Second-round effects

Given this, the current surge in oil prices is likely to make central bankers worried. Of course, there’s not much they can do to address the direct effects of higher energy prices – rate hikes can’t make the oil price go down. 

However, they will need to be very concerned about ‘second-round effects’, or the way in which the initial energy price increases feed through into the broader processes that shape inflation. One of the world’s most respected central bankers, South Africa’s Lesetja Kganyago, made this clear in a recent speech. 

After drawing delighted crowds since first sighted in Orkney the young male has swum 400 miles across the North Sea

A peripatetic walrus who became a local celebrity as he toured the north-east coast of Scotland has now been spotted in Norway, bringing to an end his Celtic sojourn.

The young male was christened Magnus after he after first hauled his estimated 2.5-metre frame out of the sea on to Stronsay pier in Orkney on 16 April.

Richard Werstine, wanted in connection with killing of Cold as Life vocalist Rodney Barger, was arrested in Panama

A suspect accused of murdering his rock singer friend in 1993 has been apprehended in Central America after spending more than 30 years successfully evading authorities.

According to the US Marshals Service, Richard Werstine, who was wanted in connection with the killing of Cold as Life vocalist Rodney Barger, was arrested in Panama.

Xi and Trump won’t discuss China’s growing nuclear arsenal Expert comment jon.wallace 13 May 2026

But they can make important progress at their summit, by sharing their threat perceptions about the nuclear escalation risks brought by AI.

President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping will discuss some difficult topics at their summit this week – not least of which is the issue of nuclear weapons. China is reported to be growing and modernizing its nuclear arsenal on a scale unlike any other signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. At the same time, the US’s Golden Dome missile defence project, announced by President Trump in 2025, threatens to fuel a new arms race.

US negotiators want to discuss the increase in Chinese nuclear numbers. But China has already said that it will not do so. Any agreement on nuclear limits at this summit is therefore highly unlikely. Nor even is discussion of Chinese nuclear expansion plans. However, despite tensions between the two powers, there are areas where progress could be made.

One way to approach strategic topics could be for one or both countries to share their threat assessments of new military systems and technologies – and how investment in them informs their concerns about pathways to nuclear escalation. 

Either side could share their analysis of specific systems – particularly relating to artificial intelligence – and how they interpret their risk potential. The other country could then comment on or correct these assumptions. That could be an important first step towards beginning a strategic stability dialogue. 

A 2024 statement by President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden on keeping AI out of nuclear launch decisions was helpful, reducing concerns that major nuclear powers might consider automating those decisions. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated that agreement was possible among major powers on this topic. Trump and Xi could reaffirm this commitment – and perhaps go further.

That in turn could make an important contribution to the Non-Proliferation Treaty review currently underway in New York, building on reports of an emerging consensus at the conference.  

An AI hotline

The Trump administration is reportedly willing to talk about AI at the summit. That creates room to broaden discussion beyond the role of AI in nuclear launch decisions.

The US and China could discuss AI risks in escalation more generally, including how to handle AI errors: concerns are rising about the additional risks that AI-human interfacing might introduce into decision-making. 

These are new risks, and Washington and Beijing should discuss how to add crisis communication about an AI-caused emergency to their crisis communication protocols and exercise patterns. If the US and China were able to address this at the summit, it could lead to exploring an ‘AI hotline’ – as has already been suggested by the US summit team. 

Space

Over the last decade, space issues have, on and off, provided an area for dialogue between the US and China. Partly that is because dialogue on space contained fewer historic tensions, and in part because the domain was recognized as  ‘global commons’. 

But, as both states have invested more heavily in their space-based capabilities, and space-based enablers have become more central to modern warfare, dialogue on outer space has taken on a new strategic significance. 

The US is concerned about China’s space capabilities and whether it is planning to station weapons in space. China is concerned about Golden Dome. Discussing threats emerging from space-based systems, and maintaining space as a global common good, could once again provide an opportunity to tackle strategic questions without reference to nuclear stockpiles.

Problem areas

There are a number of thorny issues that could intensify tensions between the superpowers, hindering progress on nuclear issues. The US would like China to stop its material support for Iran, and to pressure Tehran to end the conflict on terms acceptable to the US. Washington might also want Beijing to help find a solution to the problem of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. However, China has not indicated any willingness to support the US in this.

Related work

Avoiding a new nuclear arms race

Another contentious issue is whether or not China has conducted low-yield nuclear tests. Earlier this year, at a session of the Conference on Disarmament at the UN in Geneva, the US accused China of conducting secret nuclear tests. 

China denies these accusations, and the CTBTO, which monitors compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, has not been able to substantiate the US allegations. If the US pushes too hard on this point, it could break the talks prematurely.

Finally, the US’s Asian allies will be watching the talks anxiously. Taiwanese leadership is nervous about potential concessions on US arms sales to Taiwan, or any changes in US language about Taiwanese independence. 

Strikes killed at least six people as Moscow and Kyiv trade long-range attacks after brief ceasefire

• Europe live – latest updates

Russia targeted Ukraine with more than 800 drones in a large-scale daytime assault that killed at least six people on Wednesday, hours after a previous deadly barrage.

The strikes came as Kyiv and Moscow traded long-range attacks after a brief ceasefire, and despite the latest suggestion from Donald Trump that the war could soon come to an end.

• Niners-Rams open in September at MCG

• London will stage three games in October

• Munich, Madrid, Mexico City and Rio also to host

The NFL revealed the matchups for all nine international games on Wednesday, with the Jacksonville Jaguars and San Francisco 49ers each playing two contests.

The league’s most ambitious global schedule to date spans seven countries and four continents, including its Australia debut (Week 1 in Melbourne) and its first game in France (Week 7 in Paris).

Just one garnishment has a major impact on your finances, and adding a second could lead to even bigger trouble.

Catherine, the Princess of Wales, is in Italy for her first foreign trip after undergoing cancer treatment.

Captain of French football team expressed concerns about far-right National Rally party gaining power

The French football captain, Kylian Mbappé, has angered Marine Le Pen’s far-right party after expressing concerns about it winning next year’s presidential election.

Mbappé, 27, who grew up in Paris’s northern suburbs in a family with Algerian and Cameroonian heritage, told Vanity Fair this week: “I know what it means and what consequences it can have for my country when people like them come to power.”

The guard helped the Atlanta Hawks to their best season for years but sees room for improvement

He is a shooting guard that doesn’t often shoot. A wing deployed less for lift than pressure. The style of Australia’s best basketballer, Dyson Daniels, is difficult to describe. “It’s kind of hard for me to describe it too,” he says. “It’s unique.”

He runs the point, and rebounds to make another. And, yes, he is perhaps the NBA’s best defender. “It’s different every game, put it that way.”

Researchers say rise not inevitable and it is important to unpick what is behind differences in obesity trends

A continuing rise in obesity around the world is not inevitable, research suggests, with rates in some countries levelling off or potentially in decline.

Researchers say focusing on what has been described as a global epidemic of obesity hides large variations in trends across different countries, sexes and age groups.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters. [...] The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network says criticism of Israel is routinely misrepresented as antisemitic – and that Palestinian voices are being excluded from debate

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Palestinian voices are being excluded from the debate on social cohesion, the peak body for Palestinians in Australia has said after it was refused leave to appear before the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (Apan) made detailed submissions on the issues of antisemitism – including how it is defined – as well as on racism and social cohesion, but was told it did not have a “direct and substantial” interest in the public hearings, which are under way in Sydney.

Case attracts widespread attention as example of China balancing enthusiastic adoption of AI with job security

A court in China has ruled in favour of a worker whose company replaced him with artificial intelligence (AI), awarding him more than £28,000 in compensation.

The worker, whose surname is Zhou, joined a tech company in the eastern city of Hangzhou in 2022 as a quality assurance supervisor overseeing large language models used in AI products.

Ronald dela Rosa, accused of crimes against humanity by international criminal court, has holed up in building to evade arrest

Gunshots have been fired in the Philippines senate as a senator who is wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) remained holed up in the building to evade arrest.

Ronald dela Rosa, a Philippine senator accused of crimes against humanity for his role in overseeing the former president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”, has spent two nights in the country’s senate in a standoff with the authorities.

Uline, owned by billionaire Republicans Richard and Liz Uihlein, halts construction of a new facility in Kenosha

Uline, a business and shipping supplies company owned by billionaire Trump supporters Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, is pausing the construction of a new distribution facility in Kenosha, Wisconsin, citing economic uncertainty.

The construction pause comes in a key battleground state, where Trump won in 2016 and 2024, but lost to Biden in 2020.

Exclusive: In letter seen by the Guardian, 30 members of Congress warn US president’s Cuba military operation would worsen ‘mass suffering’

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More than 30 members of Congress have urged Donald Trump’s top officials to end the use of the Guantánamo Bay naval base for immigrant detention and rule out any plans for military action on Cuba.

In the letter to the secretaries of defense, state and homeland security on Wednesday morning, reviewed by the Guardian, Democratic lawmakers led by Delia Ramirez, a representative from Illinois, linked a rise in migration from the island nation to the heightening US aggression on Cuba.

Not all of the Supreme Court’s significant actions come in the form of merits case decisions after full briefing and oral argument. In recent years, orders of the Court on emergency actions and other matters have grown in frequency and importance.

Currently, one case in front of the justices as part of its interim or emergency docket is the fate of mail-order access to mifepristone, a medication used as part of a regimen to end pregnancies. Two current emergency petitions, GenBioPro v. Louisiana and Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana, are under consideration this week on an expedited basis.

While merits cases at the Supreme Court take time to develop, the expedited mifepristone cases are typical of the current state of the emergency docket. Critics of the growing number of emergency applications to the Court refer to this set of cases as the Court’s “shadow docket,” a term coined by law professor William Baude in 2015 to describe what he called “a range of orders and summary decisions that defy its normal procedural regularity.” Not everyone agrees with that term and its definition, but the mifepristone cases will be front and center in the docket debate.

The GenBioPro v. Louisiana and Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana petitions come in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which sent the issue of abortion regulation back to the states. After Dobbs, the Biden administration allowed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expand access to mifepristone through online prescriptions without an in-person doctor visit. In October 2025, the state of Louisiana sued the FDA, claiming the medication had not been adequately tested and resulted in abortions considered as illegal in the state.

On May 1, 2026, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Louisiana v. FDA that agreed with Louisiana’s claims; however, three days later, the Supreme Court justice with responsibility for the Fifth Circuit, Samuel Alito, granted an administrative stay, which allowed continued mail access to mifepristone while the Court considered the matter. Two drugmakers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, claimed various harms from the Fifth Circuit ruling.

Merits cases versus Non-Merits matters

Many people are familiar with what are considered “merits” cases as considered by the Supreme Court. These cases come from several different paths to the Court and typically involve a disagreement, or split, between decisions by federal circuits and state supreme courts, alleged violations of the Constitution and its precedents, or in some cases, disagreements between states. Public arguments are heard at the Supreme Court after briefs are filed by the parties involved and friends of the court. And the Court hands down its decisions after internal deliberations, with opinions attached.

Non-merits matters are all other appeals and requests considered by the Court that are not merits cases. The most common of these are petitions for writs of certiorari, or requests made to the Court to hear appeals. Various estimates of these “cert” petitions range from 4,000 to 8,000 per year, with 80 or so accepted by the Court for arguments each term. The Court also handles procedural orders about how cases are filed and time extensions for arguments.

The other major part of the Court’s non-merits matters docket are emergency orders involving requests for injunctive relief and stays. For parties seeking injunctions, they may seek a preliminary injunction, which is issued early in the legal process to preserve the status quo as a case makes its way through the courts and develops a record. A stay is an action taken by a court to pause a government action. Parties asking for a stay pending appeal often want the Supreme Court to pause an injunction issued by the lower courts while the appeals case is litigated. These are seen as temporary relief actions, unlike permanent injunctions that remain in place until a court decides a case on the merits.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the interim docket consists of cases involving preliminary injunctions and stays pending appeal. If parties on the interim docket seek expedited consideration claiming imminent practical harm, the cases are considered “emergency matters” that have been labeled as the "emergency docket or, by some scholars and commentators, the “shadow docket.”

Cases on the Interim Docket

One of the recent controversies over the interim or emergency docket is the increase of cases using that pathway to the Supreme Court.

In the current term, 51 significant emergency appeals were submitted to the Court, according to a list compiled by SCOTUSblog. As of May 12, 2026, seven applications were pending, including two appeals seeking “to pause a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit preventing mifepristone from being prescribed by telemedicine and delivered by mail.” The remaining appeals are part of cases that were argued in front of the justices on the temporary protected status of immigrants, the use of presidential powers to remove executive officers, and the redistricting of congressional election maps.

On May 11, 2026, three interim docket cases involving Alabama’s redistricting maps were decided as moot by Justice Clarence Thomas. Among the other applications this term, per SCOTUSblog, the federal government prevailed in Trump v. Orr (about transgender and nonbinary identification language on passports) and Trump v. Boyle (about the firing of three Consumer Product Safety Commission members).

The frequent appearance of cases on the interim docket in the second Trump administration has been much discussed. In July 2025, Erwin Chemerisnky of UC Berkeley School of Law noted that the number of interim docket cases grew from 44 in the last year of the Biden administration to 113 during the first six months of the second Trump administration.

In his book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” Steve Vladeck of the Georgetown University Law Center argued that the use of the interim docket has led to decisions from the Court with a significant impact on major cases with the benefit of full briefings, public arguments, and full written opinions from the justices.

In an online discussion with Vladeck in 2024, Trevor N. McFadden, a federal district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, noted that the use of the term “shadow docket” was problematic. “Using the term shadow docket when we’re really talking about the Court’s emergency docket is both confusing — because it’s over-inclusive — and misleading, because it conjures images of something sinister or foreboding. In reality, most courts have a docket to handle matters that require expedited treatment,” McFadden said.

To be sure, the debate over the interim docket, and the appropriate names of actions taken under its jurisdiction, will not be going away soon. In March 2026, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh spoke at an event in Washington when the subject of the interim docket came up, including in the context of the mifepristone cases.

According to an account from the New York Times, Kavanaugh said emergency requests were “not a new phenomenon” and had been growing during the Biden administration. Kavanaugh cited an emergency request by the Biden administration to keep mifepristone access in place during the appeals process.

Jackson believed the Trump administration was using the docket to approve new policies, citing the mifepristone cases. “I just feel like this uptick in the court's willingness to get involved ... is a real unfortunate problem," Jackson told an audience, according to various reports. “It's not serving the court or this country well.”

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Looking to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage rates to know now.

State officials told vendors at the facility to prepare for a breakdown of the tented camp beginning next month

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An alliance of environmental groups and immigration advocates has welcomed what looks to be the imminent closure of Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigration jail in the remote Florida Everglades celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions.

State officials told vendors at the facility on Tuesday to prepare for a breakdown of the tented camp beginning next month, the New York Times reported, citing its ongoing cost.

ULM, Germany, May 13, 2026 — NVision, a leader in quantum technologies for healthcare, today announced a $55 million Series B financing round anchored by Abbott. The company also announced a major expansion from quantum sensing into quantum computing, advancing its efforts to build an end to end, quantum based approach to designing and validating therapies.

The company’s quantum-enhanced sensing platform, POLARIS, already uses quantum technology to boost the MRI signal of sugar-based imaging agents by orders of magnitude, enabling real-time measurement of metabolism on standard MRI systems. This allows researchers to assess treatment response within hours to days based on disease biology, rather than relying on traditional imaging that can take up to months to show changes in morphology.

Building on the quantum molecular approach behind POLARIS, NVision is now extending its platform into quantum computation. While developing its MRI signal enhancement technology, NVision discovered a new class of organic molecule-based qubits. With this expansion, NVision lays the foundation for a new quantum-driven approach to drug development. Quantum computing will enable the design of more effective drug candidates, including for previously inaccessible targets, while quantum-enhanced MRI with POLARIS will rapidly validate them in the real biological environment. Together, this will establish a unified “compute and validate” approach, combining quantum computing for design with quantum sensing for real-world validation.

POLARIS systems are already being installed at leading cancer centers worldwide and are expected to be deployed in approximately 20 centers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia by the end of the year. Sites include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Cambridge, and the Technical University of Munich. Importantly, POLARIS operates as a practical quantum device in real hospital environments and does not require specialized quantum expertise, demonstrating that quantum technologies can already deliver value today.

Drawing on the experience with POLARIS, NVision is extending the same molecular approach into quantum computing. The architecture is designed from first principles with scalability as a requirement. At its core are single photon emitting organic molecules forming an entirely new class of qubits, fundamentally different from legacy approaches.

The new qubits are now being integrated as a thin organic layer directly onto photonic chips, forming the basis of NVision’s quantum computing platform: Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC, pronounced “Pixie”). By combining this molecular layer with established photonic hardware, the approach enables a scalable path to building quantum computers using standard semiconductor manufacturing technologies.

“I see a future where quantum computers generate an explosion of drug hypotheses for diseases that are exceptionally difficult to treat today,” said Sella Brosh, CEO and Co-Founder of NVision. “As we expand our ambition into quantum computing, building on our remarkable new class of organic molecule-based qubits, that future comes closer. But without translational speed, we won’t fully realize those gains. POLARIS is built exactly to address this, enabling rapid in-vivo validation and closing the loop between design and reality.”

“NVision is fundamentally changing how we find, diagnose, and treat cancer by making the biology of disease visible in ways that weren’t possible before,” said Peter Barrett, General Partner, Playground Global. “That same molecular quantum capability now enables both the design and testing of new therapies – defining a new category in quantum health.”

To support this expansion, NVision also announced $55 million in new funding. The Series B includes a $17 million venture loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB). The round is anchored by Abbott, a global leader in diagnostics and medical devices, with participation from Playground Global, Matterwave/b2ventures, Entrée Capital, and others. The new funding brings NVision’s total capital raised to $120 million.

Abbott joins as the sole strategic investor in diagnostics, reflecting its interest in exploring how NVision’s quantum technologies can be applied across the diagnostic field. The investment provides Abbott with early access to emerging capabilities in quantum sensing and computing, supporting the evaluation of future applications in disease detection, monitoring, and clinical decision-making.

About NVision

NVision is a quantum technology company focused on healthcare, with deep expertise in engineering and controlling the quantum properties of organic molecules. This approach underpins both its POLARIS platform, which enables real-time measurement of metabolism on standard MRI systems, and its quantum computing platform, Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC, pronounced “Pixie”). Together, these capabilities are helping bridge the gap between understanding disease and delivering effective therapies. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ulm, Germany, NVision is backed by Playground Global, Entrée Capital, Matterwave/b2venture, Lauder Partners, Pathena Investments, The European Investment Bank and others. Learn more at nvision-quantum.com.

Source: NVision

The post NVision Raises $55M, Expands from Quantum MRI Sensing into Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

The Trump Organization says its former Australian construction partner is just distracting from "his own defaults and failures" as he bails on plans for a Trump Tower.

The country’s new leadership has pledged to reverse years of democratic backsliding, but they must act quickly

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Under blue skies on Saturday, crowds cheered as the EU flag was raised on the facade of the Hungarian parliament after a long absence. It was a powerful symbol on the day Péter Magyar was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister, with a declaration that Hungarians had given his party a mandate to launch “a new chapter” in the country’s history, and change the system.

The new government, seen as an experienced technocratic team, immediately signalled its new direction. “Hungary’s place is in Europe; naturally, firmly and without question,” foreign minister designate Anita Orbán said. Soon after, Hungary dropped its long-standing veto over sanctions against violent Israeli settlers – a sign it no longer sought to be outside the EU mainstream.

"Monster Wolf" is an animatronic scarecrow with flashing red eyes that howls and growls menacingly to scare away wild animals.

I can't believe I didn't discover this earlier.

With US inflation at a three-year high, US president insisted he’s not focused on economic hardship sparked by the conflict

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Donald Trump has said the growing financial pressure inflicted on Americans by the war on Iran is “not even a little bit” motivating him to make a peace deal with Tehran.

With US inflation at a three-year high, and fuel costs still climbing after a sharp rise in oil prices, the US president said on Tuesday that he is not focused on the economic hardship sparked by the conflict.

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Lineup to include pastor who called Democratic platform ‘demonic’, Christian author who said he would die in fight to overturn 2020 election and rabbi who has defended torture

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will this weekend headline a faith rally on the National Mall in Washington DC hosted by a private foundation operating in partnership with the White House, which includes some speakers that experts have characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.

Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled “The Virtue of Hate”; and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.

Organizers are concerned Fifa tournament will deepen housing crisis as short-term listings spawn and unhoused people are further displaced in sweeps

More than 10 million people are expected to visit the US for the World Cup this summer. However, where and how to accommodate these visitors has been a concern among residents and affordable housing advocates in host cities from Seattle to Atlanta.

Hotels remain under-booked in America’s 11 host cities, while short-term rental listings in some cities have increased by as much as 30% in recent weeks. To incentivize homeowners and landlords to become hosts during the World Cup, platforms such as Airbnb are offering a $750 sign-up bonus, with some rental listings already reaching $6,000 a night. Advocates worry that an increase in short-term listings will lead to a tighter rental market and higher rents for residents in host cities.

Alzheimer's Association CEO and president Joanne Pike shares some recommendations on which foods to eat, and which foods to limit, for better brain health. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)

Trump–Xi summit will be about managing US–China rivalry, not resolving it Expert comment LToremark 13 May 2026

The summit’s short agenda reveals a preference for continuing stability, which buys time. The question is how each side will use it.

When US President Trump and China’s President Xi meet in Beijing this week, the US list of concrete deliverables is short: keep rare earths flowing, create a board of trade mechanism for non-sensitive sectors, and secure Chinese purchase commitments. The gap between this short agenda and the long list of issues between two nations engaged in grinding, multidimensional competition reveals a shared preference for managing their rivalry rather than resolving it. But while Xi pursues this relationship management as strategy, Trump takes a more transactional and improvisational approach. With three more Trump-Xi meetings expected this year – at APEC in Shenzhen, the G20 in Miami and a Xi state visit – the question now is how each side will use this continued stalemate. 

Trump brings a commercial focus to Beijing and will be accompanied by a CEO delegation, reflecting a turn away from focusing on more structural issues. Among his aims are Chinese purchases of American products like soybeans, LNG and Boeing aircraft. While such purchases, even if fulfilled, are unlikely to compensate for the damage to US businesses from the 2025 trade war, the optics are helpful for a politically vulnerable administration. 

Xi also brings economic concerns – especially with further US tariffs pending – and will push on technology access. He has also signalled that Taiwan tops his agenda. China has long criticized US military support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers Chinese territory. The Trump administration approved an $11 billion arms package for Taiwan in December but has not yet followed through with delivery – even after Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan approved a special defence budget last week. On Monday, Trump indicated he would discuss the package with Xi, casting doubt on longstanding US policy regarding Taiwan. 

The brief agenda spans only a fraction of the US–China relationship. On AI, officials seek to establish a communication channel rather than address underlying competition. On China’s nuclear build-up, Beijing has shown little appetite to engage. Although communication beats silence, such underwhelming efforts sidestep structural dynamics. Other issues like the South China Sea, industrial overcapacity and currency issues are marginal or absent. While the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed Iran up the agenda, the focus will be on immediate resolution levers rather than underlying Chinese support for Iran, Russia and North Korea.

Washington’s narrow focus is itself revealing. It partly reflects the Trump administration’s transactional, short-term approach. More significantly, the 2025 trade war and Chinese rare earth export controls reoriented leverage and exposed vulnerabilities – even more acute given depleted US munitions stocks amid the Iran war. 

Going into the summit, both leaders face domestic constraints. Trump is navigating affordability politics, inflation, an unpopular war and setbacks to his trade agenda, with his approval rating at second-term lows. Agricultural communities, core to his support, have lost export markets and face rising fertilizer prices. For Trump, the pressure is on ahead of November’s midterm elections when his Republican party must defend Congressional majorities. He is also on the clock to resolve the Iran war. 

Xi, meanwhile, faces debt, deflation, demographic headwinds and softening global demand. China’s latest economic growth target is its lowest since 1991, even as pre-war stockpiles and diversified imports help buffer Iran shocks. But Beijing operates on a longer timeline; Xi answers to party elites and the focus is on stability.

An asymmetric stalemate

The US and China have taken very different approaches to managing their economic rivalry. As the two leaders seek continuing stability to buy time, how they use it is telling.

China has spent the past decade – especially since Trump’s first term – building its economic statecraft architecture, including export controls, the unreliable entity list, the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, and rare earth export licensing. China’s October 2025 rare earth export controls showed a willingness to use its dominance over rare earth supply chains as leverage. Although these measures were largely suspended by the so-called ‘Busan truce’, earlier April 2025 controls on permanent magnets and heavy rare earths remain in place. Beijing’s recent order directing companies not to comply with US sanctions against five refineries, accused of importing Iranian oil, also points to China’s growing assertiveness. 

Related work

Trump’s treatment of US allies has weakened his negotiating position with Xi