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Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where plane came down in south-western Iran

• ‘I’m regretting everything’: #MilitaryTok reactions to war stray from White House messaging

Iran has executed two men convicted of membership in a banned opposition group and carrying out disruptive actions aimed at overthrowing the Islamic republic, the judiciary said.

The executions on Saturday were the latest in a series targeting members of the banned People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), after four other convicted members of the group were executed earlier in the week.

All men were charged Friday with arson and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.

Meanwhile, a search-and-rescue mission for a downed fighter jet crew member is ongoing as the war in the Middle East rages on.

Frontenac, Kansas had everything it needed – except a public library. A mysterious donation changed that

Matthew Rodriguez, 18, was apprehended in Pennsylvania in connection to shooting that killed Kaori Patterson-Moore

A second suspect in the stray-bullet killing of a seven-month-old baby on a Brooklyn street was arrested on Friday, investigators said, two days after a shooting the New York police department (NYPD) commissioner called “a tragedy that truly shocks the conscience”.

Matthew Rodriguez, 18, was apprehended in Pennsylvania by NYPD detectives working with US marshals, according to authorities.

RILEY FRANCK
Staff Reporter

There is no official rulebook for college hookups. Many people ask themselves: Should I just assume I will never see this person again? Is there anything even going on in the first place? Why do I feel worse after doing this? 

Normalizing casual intimacy comes at a considerable cost, especially when these acts involve so much emotion, trust and physical vulnerability. People often walk away from these one-time encounters with “post-hookup distress,” particularly if it was more intense than expected. This emotional risk is higher than the reward of desire and pleasure.

Feeling somewhat emotionally attached to a guy you kissed at a party once is a candid event and we have to stop pretending it is not. College students are fed story after story about finding romance. It is only natural that they feel that a casual hookup could lead to something bigger.

 After all, college students are humans who have feelings. There are many elements involved within hookup culture, but two main questions surrounding it are: Why do college students participate in it and what actually happens in their brains to make them attached to a person after a romantic encounter?

Intimacy in any form has two essential components: biological/physical and emotional. These elements work together and influence one another.

Physical intimacy can result in feeling attached to someone, including a casual hookup. The physical aspect can range from holding hands, cuddling and kissing to other sexual activities. When people engage in physical intimacy, their bodies produce oxytocin, often called the “feel-good” or “love” hormone.

Oxytocin, like endorphins or serotonin, promotes positive feelings. Think of oxytocin as a chemical messenger in the brain that has the sole purpose of delivering the feelings of trust, recognition and romantic attachment to the bloodstream. It has both circulatory and neurological functions, but in this case, the neurological function is crucial. 

Oxytocin is one of the few hormones that operates through a positive feedback loop, meaning that once it is released, it triggers behaviors and physiological responses that cause the brain’s pituitary gland to release even more of it. 

This is due to dopamine, a neurotransmitter triggered by compulsive behaviors and addictive substances. This is why the rush of a new romance can feel so addictive. Dopamine is involved in the sensations that cause intense desire, which can lead to things like insomnia and euphoria. 

When hookups occur, they often involve alcohol, a substance that releases dopamine in the brain and lowers inhibitions and fear. It gives a sense of pleasure, but also makes the brain’s reward system more sensitive, so any form of physical touch feels more intense and rewarding than it normally would. 

That “liquid courage” is a temporary illusion, but it is good enough to make risky social choices in the moment, like asking a guy to dance or approaching a girl you like. When alcohol is combined with heightened sexual desire, the two produce a powerful surge of dopamine, making individuals more susceptible to impulsive decisions and emotional misreading.

As the alcohol suppresses the brain’s prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for judgment and emotional regulation — people struggle to interpret tone, intention and gestures accurately. This can make casual affection feel like a genuine emotional connection. 

To be frank, did that frat boy really like you, or was he just intoxicated enough to tell you about his family dynamics? Did he really like you, or was he just intoxicated enough to lecture you about how much of a feminist he is? The answer is most likely no and alcohol impairs the ability to have self-awareness. 

While under the influence, that person does not understand that being intoxicated in his room while hooking up is not the place to spew past traumas and tribulations. The other participant cannot understand that he is just spewing random nonsense and that “charisma” is the “liquid courage” talking, not him. 

The physical reaction that people’s bodies have to hookup culture is not the only reason why they may be addicted to or reliant on it. Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University and author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus,” argues that this is partially due to social validation.

I sat down with Bogle to better understand collegiate hookup culture. Before speaking with her, I conducted a small study with 16 freshmen selected anonymously, with an equal number of females and males. Participants listed anonymous names of everyone they hooked up with, resulting in 109 sexual partners — about seven per person.

In the study, 70% of participants reported having no prior relationship with the person they hooked up with. This finding did not appear to shock Bogle.

“I think it’s part of that whole kind of script of hooking up,” Bogle said. “The idea that you go to a party, or you go to an event, you know, alcohol is flowing and is kind of facilitating things, and people are pairing off from there.”

This classic hookup “script” is “very nonverbal,” according to Bogle. Unlike the traditional dating culture, where someone can ask someone out on a random Tuesday night, hooking up is often unplanned and spontaneous.

Within the hookup “script,” there is an element of social validation. Imagine being in a fraternity basement with dozens of other people. With the female-to-male ratio being female-dominated in these spaces, it can feel like a win to be noticed by a cute guy. 

This guy dances with you and your friends break away. Minutes later, you are kissing him in the corner of the basement with dozens of bystanders lurking nearby. It feels like a scene from a movie, a scripted performance seen countless times before. 

Just like in the movies, they walk you home and claim to want to see you again. But the next morning, you wake up and are just another hookup. Almost everyone’s least favorite part of the “script” is the questions. Is it a one-time thing? Are you talking to anyone else? 

This hookup could either ghost you or keep stringing you along. Each Snapchat notification feels like a rush, each beg to go to his frat feels like you are wanted, but in the end, you feel worse. 

While your body may physically enjoy the pleasure it is receiving, your emotions do not. These emotional highs and lows fuel our craving for that person. At the end of the day, women end up in a position of little power. 

The principle of least interest is where the inevitable emotional crash-out initiates. 

“Whoever has the least interest in the relationship continuing, or escalating, is the one with all the power, because they don’t care, and you’re the person that cares more, right?” Bogle said.

Her research showed that often, it is the female who cares most. 

When one person cares more about a connection than the other, the one who cares the least has less at stake. They have more control because they have less to lose by ending the relationship. Their breadcrumbing tactics feel less like a reward and more like an evident sign that the other party does not care. When a person is hurt or rejected, they often deflect and try “not to care.” 

“Some people think they’re going to beat that because they’re going to ‘not care either.’ They’re not going to not care the way a guy doesn’t care,” Bogle said. “And I think that women tend to lose at that game overall.”

To take your mind off your hookup, you get a new one, continuing the vicious cycle. It feels self-sabotaging, destructive and like a road you will always go down, ending up feeling more hurt each time. 

You are allowed to not like hookup culture. You are allowed to create physical and emotional boundaries for the sake of your mental health. You are also allowed to not entertain it at all. Biologically, physically and emotionally, we can not handle this culture –– and that is okay to acknowledge. 

“It’s important to remember that you might feel like you’re the odd man out who doesn’t like hooking up,” Bogle said. “There’s actually been a ton of research on a lot of people feeling that way. And even more men feel that way than you might think.” 

As voters head to polls, Washington support and alleged interference from Moscow raise questions about influence

The official announcement that JD Vance was to visit, days before Hungarians cast their ballots in a hotly contested election, was greeted by Budapest with no less than four exclamation marks and three emojis.

“!!Official!!” Viktor Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán, wrote on social media as he confirmed the news. The White House said Vance, along with his wife Usha, will land in Hungary on Tuesday, in what is widely seen as an attempt to bolster Orbán as he trails in the polls.

Alan Hayward James, who called himself ‘Al Capone’, admitted to rigging bids for IT contracts with Pentagon

A former US air force master sergeant who nicknamed himself “Al Capone” has pleaded guilty to defrauding the military branch out of $37m by inflating the cost of IT contracts – and giving some of the extra money to an individual he called “Godfather”.

Alan Hayward James, from Texas, ran a nine-year scam, beginning in April 2016, which also saw him funnel excess funds to himself, his family and his co-conspirators.

Washington, D.C., first responders said the building's structural integrity will be assessed once the bus is removed.

The former Little House on the Prairie star said husband was ‘last person in world who would hurt a child’

Melissa Gilbert has staunchly defended her husband and fellow actor Timothy Busfield in her first interview since New Mexico prosecutors charged him with child sexual abuse in early February.

In part of a conversation scheduled to be broadcast on Monday on Good Morning America but circulated in advance as a preview, Gilbert told ABC host George Stephanopoulos that she believed the Emmy winner whom she married in 2013 to be “the last person in the world who would hurt a child”.

The attacks came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Istanbul for talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Here are the highly rated series you should stream on HBO Max, plus new additions in April.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision. Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers. Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Storm expected to cause Easter weekend travel disruption, though warm weather could return next week

Storm Dave is expected to cause travel disruption this Easter weekend, with warnings for heavy snow and gale-force winds issued across northern parts of the UK, but a reprieve from the cold snap could be on the way, with temperatures forecast to reach the mid-20s next week.

The Met Office has issued a yellow severe weather warning in Scotland for heavy snow and blizzards causing some travel and power disruption. Up to 30 centimetres of snow could fall. An amber weather warning for wind has been issued for parts of northern England, Scotland and Wales on Saturday evening.

The government's legal bid to continue East Wing construction has the hallmarks of President Trump's social media posts.

One price covers a combination of wireless phone service and broadband internet.

Jesse Watters gave a litany of reasons why women shouldn’t lead before denying he agreed. But peddling these ideas normalizes them

Oh dear, it looks like Jesse Watters’ mother needs to give him a good talking to again. The Fox News host regularly spouts so much deliberately provocative nonsense that his mum, a liberal, has called into his show to ask him to use his voice “responsibly”. Instead of listening to her, however, he’s told his audience of millions that men shouldn’t eat soup in public because it’s effeminate, shared his creepy fantasies about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sex life, and urged America to bomb or “maybe gas” the United Nations headquarters. This week, as Donald Trump (a man) presides over a disastrous, immoral, and unpopular war, Watters has been busy informing the world that women just aren’t cut out to be president.

What prompted this latest rant? The usual pathological desire to be noticed, I presume. And also a recent MS NOW interview with Nancy Pelosi, in which the former speaker of the House, 86, said a female US president is inevitable, but likely won’t happen in her lifetime.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Beyond rising costs of gas and air travel, experts say this is likely just beginning of higher prices amid global volatility

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As consumers watch the price of gasoline and airline tickets rise, experts say that the war in Iran will continue to drive up prices across the economy.

“The good old days are gone,” said Christopher Tang, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who studies global supply chain management. “Right now we see the gasoline prices going up, but that is only part of the story. Everything will be more expensive.”

As Trump’s administration aims to bring ‘warrior culture’ back to the military, young service members express anxiety and snark online over potential deployment

If posts coming from the White House were to be believed, the US-Israel war on Iran looks something like scenes from Top Gun, Braveheart and Deadpool – or how a fifth-grade boy might imagine combat. The Trump administration has also presented Operation Epic Fury as a video game, borrowing gen Z parlance to describe the US armed forces as “locked in” on the conflict.

Such macho posturing squares with secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s desire to bring “warrior culture” back to the military. The former Fox News host has railed against DEI, “fat troops” and “beardos” (troops with beards), and envisioned a military full of “the right people” who fit his imposed standards of virility and masculinity.

There's a Spicy Saja McMuffin, Derpy McFlurry, Ramyeon McShaker fries and two new dipping sauces, one of which is much better than the other.

Bluey is now in residence at Disneyland.

Janice Randle was found dead in her bed in 1992, but police couldn't make an arrest in the case until new information emerged.

Crew members can now see the moon, which one described as ‘a beautiful sight’, from their spacecraft’s docking hatch

The Artemis II crew are now closer to the moon than the Earth, Nasa has said, as the four astronauts completed the third day of their flight to the moon.

“We can see the moon out of the docking hatch right now. It’s a beautiful sight,” said an unnamed member of the crew, which Nasa shared in a post on X on Saturday morning.

Philadelphia's Ministry of Awe is a multilevel art installation and immersive house of oddities that uses AI in subtle and fascinating ways. I took a visit, and I'm totally coming back.

Iranian state media said “many people” are searching for the missing crew member after an F-15 fighter jet and an A-10 attack plane were lost to hostile fire.

Along with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas, 79, made ground-breaking discoveries about one of humankind’s closest primate relatives.

Viral reviews of artisan cafes across the capital are sparking a debate over cost, culture – and who gets a slice of the city

The video that started it all was innocuous enough: a woman in her 20s posted on TikTok about how she spends a perfect weekend in north London. On her list were the bakeries Jolene and Gail’s, and the De Beauvoir Deli.

The reaction, however, was anything but. Many locals commented that they had never heard of the businesses she mentioned. One north Londoner, Moses Combe, 21, was equally incredulous. “If this is where all the north London girlies come in the morning, I’d be a bit surprised,” he said in a viral video.

Nurul Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee, was left alone in a Buffalo parking lot. His death has been ruled a homicide – what now?

On 19 February, the second day of Ramadan, Mohamad Faisal Nurul Amin and his family gathered to pray before sunrise in their apartment on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York. After nearly a year of waiting, they believed their family would be together again. Amin’s father, Nurul Shah Alam, 56, was coming home.

“For the first time since we arrived in America, I felt happy,” said Fatima Abdul Roshid, Shah Alam’s wife, speaking through an interpreter. “I thought my husband would be with our two sons and me for Ramadan.”

Researchers warn the high-pressure conditions could disrupt marine life and ecosystems if it continues

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For more than a century, shoreline stations operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have measured water temperatures along the California coast. This year, they are flashing a warning sign.

Over the last three months, several stations have repeatedly posted record-breaking daily high temperatures – with the La Jolla station registering temperatures a full 10F above historical average at one point last month.

President has affixed his name to institutions and edifices, and his visage now glowers from several federal buildings

The US has a history of naming things after its presidents.

Washington DC has the Ronald Reagan airport, while John F Kennedy international airport is New York’s main air transport thoroughfare. The Hoover Dam straddles Nevada and Arizona; Theodore Roosevelt is one of several former presidents to have a Washington DC building named after them; Franklin Delano Roosevelt has an island; Abraham Lincoln has the Lincoln Memorial; and George Washington has the nation’s capital and an entire state.

The crackdown on foreign-made routers labeled a "national security risk" affects most major router brands. If you plan on buying a router soon, read this first.

Last year's Razr Ultra was a strong foldable pick, but there are ways to make that $1,300 phone more enticing.

John Cantrell was enjoying his retirement until an unexpected condition forced him to choose between two kinds of heart surgery.

The US president seems to have turned his attention to Cuba in recent weeks, saying that it was 'next'. Officials from both countries have reportedly been in negotiations since February however the content of the discussions remains unclear. The Guardian spoke with professor emeritus of international relations Dr Philip Brenner about what the US might really want with the Island

The incident comes after a string of similar nighttime attacks across Europe that have heightened concerns over antisemitism.

As Israel expands its invasion of southern Lebanon, people are having to bury their dead in temporary graves

In Lebanon, the dead are usually given one last glimpse of their home town before they are laid to rest. Hoisted high above the heads of the living, their casket is slowly marched through the streets where they grew up.

It is the hands of their loved ones that guide them into their final resting place, already dug, and gently sprinkle dirt on their body.

The rightwing populist has been in power for 16 years but a new generation of voters are preparing to vote for his opponent, polls suggest

As he rushed to finish off his cigarette before heading to class, Ákos, 20, confessed that he has more at stake than most as Hungarians prepare to head to the polls in the coming days.

“If things remain the same, or get even worse, I can’t see a future here,” said the aspiring teacher. “There are many people who want to try living elsewhere, and that’s totally fine, but I’m not one of them. For so long I’ve dreamed of working and teaching here.”

Despite hostile rhetoric Trump let a Russian ship break his blockade – could it herald a Venezuela-style outcome?

When a sanctioned Russian oil tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, docked at Cuba’s Matanzas oil terminal on Tuesday, unloading 700,000 barrels of crude, it was not immediately clear why the ship had been allowed to pass through Donald Trump’s oil blockade.

In January, the US president had proclaimed on social media: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” yet last week he told reporters, “If a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with it” – and waved the Russian ship through.

The president’s son-in-law is acting as an envoy even as he looks to secure billions for his company from foreign governments

After Donald Trump returned to the White House, his son-in-law and former senior adviser Jared Kushner declined to take a job in the new administration and instead planned to focus on running his Miami-based private equity firm. Kushner said he would also forgo raising more money for his company while Trump was in office, to avoid any appearance of a conflict.

But since last summer, Kushner has re-emerged as a high-level peace envoy for Trump, helping broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; steering negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine; and, most recently, playing a central role in the aborted negotiations between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear program. Kushner still doesn’t hold an official government position – he’s a private citizen who has been negotiating some of the most important foreign policy agreements on behalf of the Trump administration, with a direct line to the president.

Strain found in 29 states and Puerto Rico carries spike mutations, but no data shows increased severity

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BA.3.2, an Omicron variant of Covid-19 with dozens of new spike mutations, has been detected in 29 US states and Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but experts say there is not yet evidence it is more severe than other recent variants.

“The right response to BA.3.2 is serious attention, not alarm,” says Dr Jake Scott, a Stanford professor and infectious disease expert who authored a systematic review of Covid vaccines for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Indigenous doulas are creating support networks for mothers who are at the highest risk of pregnancy-related death

Mary Sherbick found out she was pregnant at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Although she and her partner had planned it, the pandemic was anxiety-inducing and isolating. While scrolling on social media, she came across online talking circles for Alaska Native women, organized by Alaska Native Birthworkers Community (ANBC), who were pregnant or postpartum. Sherbick, who is Yupik, immediately signed up.

“A lot of us were also just concerned about the way that we would be treated, and some of our concerns of pain or our birth plans within a hospital setting,” Sherbick said. “I think a lot of the women that I talked to just were aware of the history of how Indigenous women, Indigenous people in general, have been treated, and the sterilization programs that have been done unknowingly to Indigenous people.”

Let's compare all the details so you can make the right choice for you.

Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state's new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place. Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year. The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state's growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle's owner, regardless of who is driving.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Videos broadcast by local television stations showed a large crowd of fans in the south stands amidst an explosion of fireworks.

Since the Trump regime launched its war on Iran, his administration has gotten a lot more biblical.

In the last few weeks, Trump and his circle have delivered a chorus of mandates — many sounding as if sent from the Almighty himself — from encouraging lawmakers to support legislation “for Jesus” to billing America’s 250th anniversary as a moment to rededicate the nation under a single, unified God.

Trump has surrounded himself with a constellation of evangelical advisers who not only support his policies but also frame them as divinely sanctioned. Their specific strand of evangelical theology interprets global conflict, especially in the Middle East, as a precursor to the end times. For Trump, this alignment may well be transactional, another way to energize and consolidate a critical voting bloc. But for many of the religious figures now orbiting him, the stakes are far more cosmic: The war is not simply geopolitical; it is eschatological.

And it’s already bleeding influence into America’s war machine. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has overseen a steady infusion of Christian symbolism and practice into military life — hosting prayer gatherings, elevating hard-line evangelical figures, and pushing a more overtly religious tone across the force.

Reporting shows his tenure has included efforts to reshape the chaplain corps and integrate his Christian worldview more directly into military culture. The aesthetic is not subtle: Hegseth has embraced Crusader iconography — he has tattoos of the Jerusalem cross and the phrase “Deus vult,” which means “God wills it” — while framing America’s conflicts in civilizational and religious terms. In a prayer given last week at the Pentagon, Hegseth asked God to aid in pouring down “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Even some on the right have begun to voice their unease. One conservative commentator, reacting to the growing influence, bluntly described Trump’s leading faith adviser Paula White-Cain as a “psychopathic doomsday cultist,” warning about the theological currents shaping the administration. 

As someone well-versed in Christianese — I was raised deep in the evangelical Bible Belt of Texas, and even met a young Paula White growing up — this dialect signals a real shift.

In evangelical media ecosystems, Iran is not just a strategic adversary but part of a prophetic story — one tied to interpretations of the Book of Revelation and the battle of Armageddon. Suffering, in this worldview, is not merely tragic; it is necessary to actuate the return of Christ.

And as White-Cain, now the head of the White House Faith Office, put it: “To say no to President Trump would be to say no to God.”

This tension — between political expediency and apocalyptic belief — is no longer theoretical. It is being operationalized.

Prophetic Gospels

Days after launching unilateral strikes on Iran, Trump convened nearly two dozen evangelical leaders for private counsel. The pastors stood around him, laying hands to pray for strength and protection for his latest military campaign. At the center of that circle is White-Cain, a longtime Trump ally who has served as his “spiritual adviser” since his first presidential run.

White-Cain’s rise is emblematic of the fusion now underway. Once a televangelist with deep ties to charismatic Christianity, she built a following through prosperity gospel preaching — a theology that links faith with material success — before being elevated as a key Trump confidant.

Early on, she rose to prominence through her connections to figures like Bishop T.D. Jakes and appearances on networks like BET, positioning her within both Black churches (which is where I met her) and evangelical media spaces alike. During his first term, Trump established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative and appointed White to lead the newly minted office.

But White-Cain is not just a political ally. She is part of a broader network of evangelical leaders who have long framed global conflict in explicitly prophetic terms. Figures in this sphere have publicly described Middle East wars as signs of the “last days,” argued that geopolitical upheaval fulfills biblical prophecy, and emphasized that spiritual warfare is inseparable from physical conflict.

White-Cain’s own writings and appearances wrap modern politics in stark, spiritually dispensationalist end-times framing. Dispensationalism, for the uninitiated, is a strain of evangelical Protestant theology that reads the Bible literally, divides history into distinct eras of God’s plan, separates Israel from the Church, and anticipates a coming rapture and a thousand-year kingdom on Earth.

In an April 2025 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, White-Cain opened by asking whether the world was ready to kick off Armageddon itself.

Related

Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home

“The Christian vision of the End of Days foretells of some profound transformation and redemption,” she said in the interview, as reported by the Times of Israel. “Based on the events that are unfolding today, do you feel that we are seeing these signs of that vision come to fruition?”

The stakes, by her telling, are nothing less than annihilation. This matters when those voices are whispering prayers into the decisions of a president directing military force.

She’s not alone. She’s brought others into Trump’s religious power network — including Alabama pastor Travis Johnson, who has been spotted around Trump’s religious events and moving in the same circles. 

He presents himself as a global traveler spreading Christian “love” and “peace.” On X, he also told his followers, “Islam is not just a religion, but a system of military conquest” — casting American Christianity as a necessary bulwark against it.

After Israeli missile strikes — which coincided with the start of Ramadan — decimated Iranian leadership, Johnson posted with a glib jab: “Bye, Felicia. Khamenei has left the building.”

Robert Jeffress, pastor of megachurch First Baptist Dallas and one of Trump’s most visible religious defenders, is also among those lending supernatural support to the president. Jeffress has spent years advancing a worldview that injects Christian nationalism with cultural and religious exclusion. He has described Islam as “a false religion” that is “inspired by Satan,” and once declared, “America’s collapse is inevitable and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

Others in Trump’s spiritual cadre push similar lines with parallel prophetic and apocalyptic bluster. California pastor Greg Laurie, another regular in Trump’s prayer closet, linked the assassination of Iran’s ayatollah to end times gospel in a video he posted on X.

“As far as I can see the next event on the prophetic calendar would be the rapture,” he told his audience. “Then of course the great tribulation period … culminating in the Battle of Armageddon.” 

Laurie, like many evangelicals, reads Iran as biblical Persia, which is named in the book of Ezekiel as an ally of Magog, a prophesied war machine that will one day converge on Israel in the final chapter of human history.

Related

Military Leaders See Iran War as “God’s Divine Plan” — a Chilling Turn for Trump’s Fascism

There are those in Trump’s religious sphere who haven’t given up hope — but only because they see themselves as locked in a holy war for the soul of a nation. Josh McPherson, a rising voice in Christian nationalist circles, has been blunt in his preaching for a theocratic military force, often teaching in camouflage and combat boots. He has advocated that “godly righteous men and women submitted to the Heavenly Father” should be running the most powerful military in the world.

In a recent podcast interview, McPherson frames American Christians as a critical line of defense against the spread of Islam, which he describes as “demonic” and a “scourge” while advocating for mass deportations. If action isn’t taken now, he predicts the apocalyptic vision where future generations of Christians will have to respond to an “Islamic Jihadist invasion, where the only way to push back is with bullets and guns.” 

Taken together, this is not a random assortment of fringe pastors. It is a coherent theological ecosystem, one that frames war as prophecy, opponents as demonic, and global collapse as necessary to bring about the return of Christ.

That convergence — of theology, rhetoric, and military power — is now drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have formally called for an investigation into Hegseth and the Defense Department, warning that “extreme religious rhetoric” may be seeping into the chain of command and shaping how the war on Iran is being prosecuted.

The danger is not just metaphysical. There is a long body of research showing that when political power fuses with religious certainty, war intensifies. Religious framing makes wars far more difficult to end, not easier. Conflicts become existential, not negotiable. Identity replaces strategy. Destiny replaces diplomacy. 

And for volunteer troops fighting in a pluralistic democracy, intention matters.

For a soldier, sailor, or Marine who pulls the trigger or launches the missile, it muddies the distinction between national defense and participation in what could amount to religious ethnic cleansing.

Where strategic decisions are guided not by how to end wars, but how to beget new prophetic ones.

Where the end result could mean dying not in service of your country, but instead as a preordained martyr. 

A soldier should not be asked to die for a religion he does not serve, to usher in an ending he does not want, or to fight for a vision of the world rooted in prophecy rather than policy. That is not national defense; that is ideological conscription. And when a state begins to wage war on those terms, it is no longer defending itself — it is surrendering its power to something far more dangerous than any enemy abroad.

The post Far-Right Religious Leaders Advising Trump See Iran as an End Times Holy War appeared first on The Intercept.

Apple doesn't regularly release a critical update for previous iOS versions but DarkSword appears to be a serious threat.

What I’m Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: The 4th U.S. President could teach the 47th a thing or two.

• Pam Bondi Out: When “you’re doing great!” means “pack your things.”

• The Backbone Shows Up Late: Or, poor NATO, with friends like these…

• Library: A 747 in the lobby, not a book in sight…Miami’s Newest “Library”

• What I’m Watching: Cover-Up

• Jukebox Playlist: Living For The City

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” James Madison

James Madison originally wrote that quote in Federalist 51, part of The Federalist Papers. I’m assuming the angels he was talking about were not strictly from the Christian point of view (where some are thought to be fallen), but maybe closer to the Muslim ideal of heavenly beings of light who are faithful to their Creator and the Creator’s tenets, who wouldn’t think of doing anything else. And yes, any being who falls short of those ‘angelic standards’ could probably use some reining in.

Including you and me.

You know how it is: if I accidentally swerve into someone else’s lane of traffic, I’ll right the wrong and quickly justify the action. I was tired. Someone swerved towards me. I had something in my eye. The other car was in my blind spot. But you just try to swerve into my lane…then there’s no excuse. You’re a lousy driver, period, and your license ought to be taken away.

In other words, we’re not terribly forgiving of one another’s shortcomings. And when we’re not, it’s good to know there’s an arbiter who will judge correctly, rationally, without prejudice.

In other words, government at its best.

The trouble is, we have to trust the arbiter. And the more a government (I won’t say which one) goes on recess when it should be working; or approves people to run huge and powerful sectors with no training, qualifications or even obvious intelligence; or goes belly up in the face of adversity (also known as “being primaried”); or refuses to legislate—to do its damn job!—we the people lose confidence in our elected and appointed officials, and it’s every man and woman for themselves.

Because, here’s another hard-to-believe fact: those same government officials are people too. They’re not a mind hive. They don’t automatically slip on the robe of righteousness the moment they get elected. Which means that they need to be governed as much as we the people do—I’d even say more, because they have more power and can therefore do more damage. A recent NY Times guest article by Mark Warner, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had this chilling line: “It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat [to our elections] now comes from inside our own government.”

Let that sink in for a moment. The very government who is supposed to be protecting us and our vote is trying to undermine this foundational tenet of how to make a government work. But why would people who made a vow to protect our Constitution do such a thing?

Because power changes people. It bends and tempts them. It whispers, “Hey, you’re different. You can handle it.” Which is usually the moment we (and they) stop handling it…and start getting our picture taken with a $50,000 Rolex on our wrist and cages of human beings as a backdrop. Or start talking about war as an “excursion” that’ll last a few weeks or maybe a month—oh, and have you seen sketches of my gargantuan ballroom? How about this terrific Arch of Triumph? (As they say, you can’t spell Triumph without Trump!)

Madison was right. Government exists because people will absolutely take advantage of a system if you let them. You give someone an inch, they’ll take a mile. You give them a mile, they’ll build a condo and start charging rent. And we the people exist not only to live our own lives and do our own thing but to make sure that government officials do what they’re supposed to do instead of taking advantage of our system.

And the sooner and the more thoroughly we do that, the quicker we’ll be able to believe in that system as the arbiter of justice once again.

Read more

Senior figures express concerns over medical union’s refusal of pay rise that is higher than offer to other NHS staff

Trade unions have privately expressed qualms about the forthcoming doctors’ strikes, expressing frustration at the conduct of the talks and the demands of the British Medical Association.

The BMA is pushing for a pay rise higher than the 3.5% offered to doctors by the government, with strikes planned for next week.

Initial reports suggested parts of arena’s wall had collapsed, but Alianza Lima says there were no structural failures

One person has been killed and dozens more injured at the Alejandro Villanueva Stadium in Lima, Peru, according to the football club Alianza Lima.

Hundreds of fans were attending a “flag-waving event” on Friday around the stadium, a day before a derby match between the home team Alianza Lima and local rivals Universitario de Deportes.

If the Eagles are to make a mark on their home World Cup in 2031, the hard-hitting Anthem RC lock could have a key role to play

Will Sherman may be the future of US rugby, but his roots are in the game’s American past. The 22-year-old standout second-row forward for Anthem Rugby Carolina in Major League Rugby is the son of Wade Sherman, a member of a champion Cal Berkeley team that included Mark Bingham, who on 11 September 2001 was one of the Flight 93 passengers who fought their hijackers and kept it from reaching Washington.

“There was a super old photo that my dad pulled up, and the first time I heard that story was from him,” Sherman said. “He was like, ‘That guy standing to my left is an American hero.’”

In the fifth week of the war, Trump continues contradicting himself on its objectives and how Americans are affected

When Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury alongside Israel on 28 February, his administration had settled on a set of stated, and broad, objectives: destroy Iran’s missiles, eliminate its navy, prevent a nuclear weapon.

Over a month later those objectives have multiplied, contracted and contradicted each other.

These are the best TVs I’ve reviewed for every budget, including top brands such as LG, Samsung and TCL.

Here’s how I make sure I don't lose sight of my goals -- and how you can, too.

Exclusive: research finds Jackdaw field would provide only about 2% of current demand, and Rosebank only 1%

Opening major new fields in the North Sea would make almost no difference to the UK’s reliance on gas imports, research has shown.

The Jackdaw field, one of the largest unexploited gasfields in the North Sea, would displace only 2% of the UK’s current imports of gas, which would leave the UK still almost entirely dependent on supplies from Norway and a few other sources.

The Trump administration takes pleasure in deploying dysphemism to describe the killing of Iranians

On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. A week later the US president told journalists on Air Force One: “You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.”

On 4 March, Pete Hegseth squirmed in pleasure as he described “death and destruction from the sky all day long”. Whatever happened to the subtle art of political euphemism?

A state visit intended to mark 250 years of U.S. independence could become a test of the British monarchy’s willingness to confront one of its most difficult controversies.

Private Chinese technology companies — some with ties to the military — are marketing detailed intelligence on movements of U.S. forces in Iran, even as Beijing seeks to keep its distance.

Lack of regulation for specialist classes leaves UK fitness enthusiasts at risk, say professional bodies

The boom in reformer pilates has created a “wild west” of studios where poor regulation has resulted in inexperienced teachers and a rise in injuries, professional standards bodies have warned.

Pilates is not formally or legally regulated, and as its popularity has surged, industry experts say, so too has the growth of packed reformer-based classes often led by instructors with limited training.

Riccione’s leftwing mayor, Daniela Angelini, says public purchase is victory for town and ‘act of love and vision’

An Italian council has bought a villa where Benito Mussolini spent his summer holidays, partly to avoid the property falling into the hands of “fascist nostalgics”.

Daniela Angelini, the leftwing mayor of Riccione, a town close to Rimini along Italy’s Adriatic coast, said the acquisition of Villa Mussolini through an auction was “an act of love and vision” and that bringing it back into public hands was a victory for the entire town.

Fears of Easter chaos over scaling up of new EU border system are eased, with no facial IDs for Eurotunnel and Eurostar passengers

Passengers crossing the Channel from the UK to France will not face new biometric checks in the coming weeks, despite an imminent deadline for the complete implementation of the EU’s entry-exit system (EES), ports say.

Airlines and airports across Europe have feared chaos over the Easter holidays.

An ultra-lightweight real-time operating system for resource-constrained IoT and embedded devices. Kernel footprint under 10 KB, 2 KB minimum RAM, preemptive priority-based scheduling.

↫ TinyOS GitHub page

Written in C, open source, and supports ARM and RISC-V.

Another major improvement in Redox: a brand new scheduler which improves performance under load considerably.

We have replaced the legacy Round Robin scheduler with a Deficit Weighted Round Robin scheduler. Due to this, we finally have a way of assigning different priorities to our Process contexts. When running under light load, you may not notice any difference, but under heavy load the new scheduler outperforms the old one (eg. ~150 FPS gain in the pixelcannon 3D Redox demo, and ~1.5x gain in operations/sec for CPU bound tasks and a similar improvement in responsiveness too (measured through schedrs)).

↫ Akshit Gaur

Work is far from over in this area, as they’re now moving on to “replacing the static queue logic with the dynamic lag-calculations of full EEVDF“.

You’d think if there was one corner of the open source world where you wouldn’t find drama it’d be open source office suites, but it turns out we could not have been more wrong. First, there’s The Document Foundation, stewards of LibreOffice, ejecting a ton of LibreOffice contributors.

In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years. It is interesting to see a formal meritocracy eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association. This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code).

↫ Micheal Meeks

The end result seems to be that Collabora is effectively forking LibreOffice, which feels like we’re back where we were 15 years ago when LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice. There seems to be a ton of drama and infighting here that I’m not particularly interested in, but it’s sad to see such drama and infighting result in needless complications for developers, end users, and distributors alike.

As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also forking drama in OnlyOffice land, the other open source office suite, licensed under the AGPL. This ope source office suite has been forked by Nextcloud and IONOS into Euro-Office, in pursuit of digital sovereignty in the EU. It’s also not an entirely unimportant detail that OnlyOffice is Russian, with most of its developers residing in Russia.

Anyway, the OnlyOffice team has not taken this in stride, claiming there’s a violation of the AGPL license going on here, specifically because OnlyOffice adds contradictory attribution terms to the AGPL. It’s a complicated story, but it does seem most experts in this area seem to disagree with OnlyOffice’s interpretation.

We’re in for another messy time.

The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a "free-return" path around the moon after a successful "translunar" injection burn. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit," NASA's Dr Lori Glaze told a news conference. The Guardian reports: The astronauts -- the Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and a Canadian, Jeremy Hansen -- spent their first day in space performing checks on the spacecraft, which had never carried humans before. Later they had time to speak to US TV networks. "I've got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this," Wiseman told ABC News from the cramped interior of the capsule. "Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realising the gravity of that." Orion will travel about 4,000 miles (6,400km) beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side. If all proceeds smoothly, the astronauts will set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before -- more than 250,000 miles. The mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the moon, with the aim of establishing a permanent base that will offer a platform for further exploration. After the final engine burn, NASA said Wiseman took two "spectacular" images of Earth. The first photo, called Hello, World, "shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole," reports the BBC. Another photo shows the view of Earth from inside the Orion spacecraft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.

↫ Axel Rietschin

It won’t take long into this series of articles before you start wondering how anyone manages to ship anything at Microsoft. If even half of this is accurate, this company should be placed under some sort of external oversight.

Two people in police custody after a fatal incident in Cudworth area on Friday evening

Two people have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man died after a collision in the Cudworth area of Barnsley.

Emergency services responded to reports of a collision between a Volkswagen Touareg and a pedestrian on Rose Tree Avenue about 4.55pm on Friday, South Yorkshire police said in a statement.

Man and woman released pending further enquiries after arrests at separate properties in state’s north-east on Saturday morning

Two people have been arrested as part of the investigation into how Porepunkah fugitive Dezi Freeman was able to survive on the run for seven months before he was shot dead on Monday.

A man and a woman were arrested at separate properties in north-east Victoria on Saturday morning around 7am, before being later released.

Reports on English policies seen in Wales as relating to whole of UK contribute to widespread confusion, researchers say

UK media is failing to report properly on devolved issues in Wales, leaving voters ill-informed about May’s Senedd elections, a report has found.

A Cardiff University study of more than 3,000 news items found repeated patterns in coverage across different broadcasters and platforms, including not signposting whether an issue was relevant to England or England and Wales only, widespread references to “the government” rather than “the UK government”, and the use of “you” and “your” in contexts that apply only to people living in England.

Use of unmanned ground vehicles has grown exponentially since 2024 turning the war into a technological contest

Victor Pavlov showed off Ukraine’s newest and most versatile weapon: a battery-powered land robot.

The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.

The brutalisation of global norms by figures like Pete Hegseth must be seen as an ethical issue. It’s a fight against chaos, and all major religions must play a role

That combative old hymn, Onward Christian Soldiers, is not much heard these days, though it was once a favourite with church congregations and school assemblies. Written in 1865 by Sabine Baring-Gould, an English clergyman and religious scholar, its belligerent refrain urges the faithful on to battle, victory and conquest: “Onward, Christian soldiers / Marching as to war / With the cross of Jesus / Going on before!” Its martial tone suited the Victorian zeitgeist but it made succeeding generations uneasy (though it was still sung in my primary school in the early 1960s). Nowadays, this sort of triumphalism gives religion a bad name.

Pete Hegseth, US defence secretary, and a leading Christian soldier, would certainly disagree. He probably hums it on his way to work. At a recent Christian worship service in the Pentagon – an irregular event, given the constitution’s dislike of anything smacking of state religion – Hegseth, referencing Iran, prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. Hegseth’s creed is killing. He describes Iranians as “religious fanatics”. And he should know. His intolerant brand of evangelical Christian nationalism is extreme even by US standards – yet has Donald Trump’s backing. Trump was a Presbyterian until 2020, when he abruptly declared he wasn’t. God knows what he is now.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

• Bruins to play for first championship in program history

• As it happened: UCLA 51-44 Texas

Lauren Betts hit the play button over and over, forcing herself to watch last year’s Final Four blowout loss to UConn 10 times during the offseason.

The two-time All-American made sure there wasn’t a repeat performance in this year’s Final Four, swooping in for the biggest play in a game that sends the Bruins into the NCAA national championship game for the first time.

• Bruins reach title game for first time in program history

• Gamecocks end Huskies’ winning streak at 54 games

• Auriemma, Staley have tense postgame exchange

South Carolina 8-13 UConn, 3:55 left, first quarter: And as I type that, Sarah Strong bails out her team with a 3-pointer as the shot clock nears zero. She scores again after another Okot miss, and the Huskies are already running away.

Tessa Johnson responds with a layup and then a jumper.

"Consumer PC parts aren't the only things being gobbled up by the 'AI' industry," writes PCWorld's Michael Crider. "A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for 'AI.'" The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming industry. Amid the ongoing hardware shortages, AI companies are basically gobbling up as much infrastructure as they can to repurpose it for AI workloads. From the report: The game in question is Stormgate, a crowdfunded revival of the real-time strategy genre that has languished in the last decade or so. The developer Frost Giant Studios told its players on Discord (spotted by PC Gamer) that it would be unable to continue multiplayer access past the end of this month. The "game server orchestration partner" was bought by an AI company -- the developer's words, not mine -- which means that the multiplayer aspects of the game will have a "planned outage." The devs say the game will be patched for offline play, presumably including its single-player campaign mode and co-op modes, but "online modes will not be available at that point." They're hoping to bring back online play in a later update, but that'll depend on "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." That sounds like old-fashioned player-hosted games with lobbies aren't in the cards, at least not yet. Frost Giant's server provider is Hathora, which was bought by a company called Fireworks AI last month. Fireworks describes its offerings as "open-source AI models at blazing speed, optimized for your use case, scaled globally with the Fireworks Inference Cloud." So, yeah, Hathora's infrastructure will likely be used for yet more generative "AI." And according to GamesBeat, it's planning to shut down the game service aspect of its company completely. That means Stormgate probably isn't going to be the last game affected. Hathora also provides online services for Splitgate 2, among others. I'm contacting Hathora for comment and will update this story if I receive a response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This blog is closed – our live coverage continues in a new blog here

Authorities in Abu Dhabi have reported two incidents of debris falling from intercepted aerial threats in the UAE capital, with one sparking a fire at a gas facility,

The official Abu Dhabi Media Office said authorities responded to an incident of falling debris at the Habshan gas facilities. “Operations have been suspended while authorities respond to a fire,” it said in a post on X, adding that no injuries were reported.

Datacentres ‘directly competing’ with possible residential builds near public transport, one council tells NSW inquiry, amid growing concerns

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Datacentre developments are crowding out opportunities for housing and job-rich industries across Sydney, a New South Wales inquiry has heard, with one local council reporting a rise in blackouts linked to the industry’s expansion.

Several Sydney councils, all facing an influx of datacentre developments, have raised concerns about the health, environmental and amenity impacts on their local communities in submissions to the state’s datacentre inquiry.

President Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to find a way to pay "each and every employee" of the agency.

The four-person Artemis II crew has left Earth's orbit and is headed toward the moon. Here's everything you need to know about the momentous mission.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 4.

Stiff winds ‘spreading the smoke’ as Springs fire bears down on Moreno Valley while smaller Crown fire also burning

A pair of wildfires broke out in southern California on Friday, marking the region’s first significant burns in a spring that has seen a major heatwave.

The fires started in windy conditions that have caused them to spread quickly. The National Weather Service issued a wind advisory for parts of southern California through midday Friday, warning of gusts up to 50mph.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump announces ‘fraud’ crackdown in Democratic states

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A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest out of the Middle East at our dedicated live blog.

This includes Donald Trump’s recent comments on Truth Social that “with a little more time” he could open strait of Hormuz. The president added that reopening the vital passageway would allow the US to “TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD.”

UConn, on a 54-game winning streak, entered the Final Four undefeated for the ninth time in school history.

• Gamecocks end Huskies’ winning streak at 54 games

• Auriemma: ‘I said what I had to say. It was nothing’

• Staley: ‘If I did something wrong to Geno, I had no idea’

UConn coach Geno Auriemma and South Carolina coach Dawn Staley had a heated exchange on the sideline after the Gamecocks beat the undefeated Huskies 62-48 in Friday night’s semi-final of the women’s NCAA Tournament.

South Carolina ended UConn’s winning streak at 54 games and secured a return trip to the national championship game.

Trump said Vance would focus on blue states and, without providing evidence, accused Democrat leaders of rampant ‘theft’ – key US politics stories from Friday 3 April at a glance

Donald Trump has given his vice-president, JD Vance, a new side gig: “fraud czar”.

The president this week announced a fresh crackdown on “fraud” in Democratic states and tapped Vance to lead the charge. Officials swiftly announced a string of arrests in California.

Russian advances slowing, thinktank’s data shows; 14 killed in Ukraine in massive drone and missile salvo. What we know on day 1,501

Russia’s army recorded almost no territorial gains on the frontline in Ukraine in March for the first time in two-and-a-half years, according to analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) conducted by Agence France-Presse. The Russian army has been slowing in its advances since late 2025 – because of Kyiv’s localised breakthroughs in the south-east of the country. Across the entire frontline, the Russian army seized only 23 sq km (8.9 sq miles) in March, losing territory in some areas, according to the analysis. This figure excludes infiltration operations conducted by Russian forces beyond the frontline, as well as advances claimed by the Russian side but neither confirmed nor denied by the ISW.

The Russian army made 319 sq km of gains in January and 123 sq km in February, which was then the smallest advance since April 2024. Its advance in March was the smallest since September 2023. The ISW attributed the slowdown to Ukrainian counteroffensives, but also to “Russia’s ban on using Starlink terminals in Ukraine” and “the Kremlin’s efforts to restrict access to Telegram”. The messaging app – very popular among Russians, including those fighting on the front – has been barely usable in recent months due to blocks imposed by the authorities. As in February, Russia lost ground on the southern section of the frontline, between the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Russian strikes killed 14 people in Ukraine on Friday, officials said, as Moscow launched the latest in an increasing number of daytime barrages. Moscow has been firing aerial broadsides at Ukraine throughout its more than four-year invasion, mostly at night, but in recent weeks has stepped up daytime attacks. The Russian military used more than 500 drones and dozens of missiles in its salvo on Friday, according to the Ukrainian air force.

Russia’s Baltic oil export hubs at Ust-Luga and Primorsk remain unable to handle shipments after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks, prompting the country’s refineries to find alternative routes for export, industry sources said on Friday. The attacks have damaged port infrastructure and continued through the last two weeks of March, with at least five strikes on Ust-Luga in the space of 10 days. Sources said the export restrictions, along with disruptions at large refineries, could lead to a decrease in oil production in Russia. Traders said refineries had been unable to deliver diesel fuel to Primorsk for export since 22 March, leaving refineries in European Russia and Siberia without their most viable export route. Traders said refineries were having to consider more expensive rail transport routes to other export terminals.

A Ukrainian drone and missile attack on southern Russia killed at least one person, injured four others and sparked a blaze aboard a foreign-flagged vessel, Russian officials said on Saturday.

Zelenskyy has called on lawmakers to pass key legislation next week to avert a funding crisis, help Ukraine fight the war against Russia, and enact key reforms required for EU accession. Due to lagging reforms and slow legislative progress in late 2025 and early this year, Ukraine missed deadlines to unlock billions from its key lenders, economists said. With the need for external financing standing at $52bn this year – equivalent to about a quarter of annual economic output – the budget situation is desperate. “I have a list of key draft laws that are critical for securing funding,” the Ukrainian president said in remarks released on Friday. They range from strengthening the court system to reforming energy sector procedures. “I believe that members of parliament from all parties must understand the importance of these bills for Ukraine’s budget,” said Zelenskyy, who has a majority in parliament but its relations with his government have soured.

New Hampshire is one of the few states in the nation that doesn't have a dedicated school for the deaf.

Budget proposal released on Friday outlines president’s desire to revive former federal prison in San Francisco Bay

Donald Trump is asking for $152m to restore Alcatraz, a former federal prison off the coast of San Francisco, according to a budget proposal released on Friday for the 2027 fiscal year.

Last May, Trump first called upon the Department of Justice, the FBI and Homeland Security to rebuild the prison. He heaped praise on Alcatraz’s reputation in a Truth Social post.

The Artemis II astronauts continued their long coast to the moon, capturing stunning photos along the way.

Pope Leo XIV carried a wooden cross for all of the 14 stations of the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum on his first Good Friday as pontiff, marking the first time in decades that a pope carried the cross to every station.

Misogynistic abuse of female staff is increasing, leaving teachers feeling ‘traumatised’ and ‘humiliated’

Teachers’ leaders have said a “masculinity crisis” is fermenting in schools across the UK, with misogynistic abuse of female staff on the increase, leaving victims “traumatised”, “demeaned” and “humiliated”.

Almost a quarter of female teachers who took part in a union survey said they have been the target of misogyny from a pupil over the past 12 months – the highest proportion in the last four years of surveys.

Ripple effects of oil and fertiliser shortage felt by farmers in India and Sri Lanka despite governments saying there is enough stock to go round

Gurvinder Singh never thought the war in Iran would touch his quiet corner of Punjab.

Yet looking out over his smallholding, where he alternates between wheat and rice crops in the state known as India’s breadbasket, the 52-year-old farmer can barely think of anything else. His anxiety over a conflict playing out thousands of miles away is crippling as he fears what will come of this season’s rice crop.

Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. "These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency," an internal Amazon communication memo reads. "We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration." Big Technology reports: With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon's Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three 'availability zones' or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are "hard down" and and "impaired but functioning," per the internal communication. "We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations," the internal post said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US president issues executive order as longest partial government shutdown in US history enters 49th day

Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday that declares all Department of Homeland Security employees will receive pay and benefits during the agency’s partial shutdown.

The “Liberating the Department of Homeland Security From the Democrat-Caused Shutdown” memo is similar to Trump’s executive order from last week which called for issuing pay to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents during the shutdown.

In the order, Trump directed the homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to the functions of DHS” to pay “each and every employee of DHS”.

• NBA scoring leader hurt in Thursday’s loss to Thunder

• LA have five games left before postseason begins

• Absence may force Dončić out of individual awards race

Luka Dončić will miss the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers’ regular season with a Grade 2 strain of his left hamstring, the team announced Friday.

Dončić is the NBA’s top scorer and the driving force behind the Lakers’ surge into the third spot in the Western Conference standings, but he injured his leg during Los Angeles’ blowout 139-96 loss to Oklahoma City on Thursday. An MRI exam revealed the severity of the strain.

Catholic Timothy Broglio says ‘hard to cast this war as something that would be sponsored by the Lord’

The leader of all Catholic chaplains in the United States’ armed forces has questioned how righteous the US military’s campaign in Iran is, saying that “under the just war theory – it is not”.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, told CBS News in an interview set for broadcast Sunday that while Iran “was a threat with nuclear arms”, waging war on the theocratic state constituted “compensating for a threat before the threat is actually realized”.

The AI giant recently said it would end its Sora image generator and put off a planned ChatGPT "adult mode" indefinitely.

US president makes baseless claims about fraud in blue states and says JD Vance will lead clampdown as ‘fraud czar’

Donald Trump announced a fresh crackdown on “fraud” in Democratic states and tapped JD Vance to lead the charge. Officials swiftly announced a string of arrests in California.

In a Truth Social post on Friday, the US president announced that his vice-president was now “in charge of ‘fraud’ in the United States”, claiming the problem is “massive and pervasive” and that Vance’s new role as “fraud czar” will be “a major factor in how great the future of our country will be”.

Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, boost local cloud capacity, train 1 million engineers and developers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the Japanese government. Reuters reports: The investment includes the training of 1 million engineers and developers by 2030, Microsoft said, which was unveiled during a visit to Tokyo by Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. In a statement, the company said the plan aligns with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's goal to boost growth through advanced, strategic technologies while safeguarding national security. Microsoft will work with domestic firms including SoftBank and Sakura Internet to expand Japan-based AI computing capacity, allowing Ecompanies and government agencies to keep sensitive data within the country while accessing Microsoft Azure services, it said. It will also deepen cooperation with Japanese authorities on sharing intelligence related to cyber threats and crime prevention.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The members of a tiny Methodist church in Virginia are excited — if a little confused — that Vance’s memoir of his path to Catholicism has put them in the spotlight.

The executive order is designed to increase the NCAA's control over college sports, and threatens to remove federal funding for colleges and universities that don't comply with NCAA rules.

An F-15 fighter jet and an A-10 attack plane were lost to hostile fire. Two search-and-rescue helicopters also were hit, injuring the crews, before safely returning to their base, officials said.

Pep Guardiola's team aims to step closer to a second cup triumph as they host Arne Slot's Reds.

Met police investigate incident, removing five officers from frontline duties after member of the public discovers items

Armed police officers protecting the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, allegedly left a bag containing guns and a Taser on the street which was discovered by a member of the public.

The Metropolitan police said on Friday it was investigating the incident and five officers had been removed from frontline duties while inquiries were being carried out.

Over 20 attorneys general challenge the executive order and say it’s an unconstitutional move to disenfranchise voters

More than 20 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit Friday challenging Donald Trump’s Tuesday executive order to restrict who can vote by mail.

In his order, Trump directed the US Postal Service to abstain from sending mail-in or absentee ballots to people who are not on a pre-ordained list of eligible citizens.

Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said mounting inflation risks "complicates the picture" on interest rates.

In a speech to what he called “the single largest gathering of American farmers that the White House has … ever had,” President Donald Trump distorted the facts on the estate tax, soybean exports and more.

• Trump falsely claimed that “we saved 2 million American farms from extinction by virtually ending the unfair estate tax.” That’s roughly the total number of farms in the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said only about 1% of farms would have paid any estate tax even if Congress had not permanently extended provisions that were set to expire. Experts say few, if any, farms were saved from extinction.

• He wrongly claimed that “American soybeans are now being shipped to China in record amounts.” U.S. exports aren’t on track for a record this year, and a trade deal the administration announced last year doesn’t show record amounts, either.

• The president said that beef prices were “starting to come down,” but price data show little to no indication of that.

• He said “the number of cattle was way down” due to an environmental restriction that he “got rid of.” But the White House pointed to the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution that never passed.

• Trump said that $12 billion in aid provided to farmers was paid from increased tariff revenue, but the money came from the Commodity Credit Corporation, which gets regular appropriations from Congress.

The president spoke to farmers gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on March 27.

Farms and the Estate Tax

Trump falsely claimed that “we saved 2 million American farms from extinction by virtually ending the unfair estate tax.” There aren’t even quite 2 million farms in the U.S., and tax experts say the number of small farms that got estate tax relief from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by Trump was vanishingly small.

Here’s what Trump said in his address to farmers:

Trump, March 27: Very importantly, we saved 2 million American farms from extinction by virtually ending the unfair estate tax. We’ve ended the estate tax, or as they call it, the death tax, and you can now keep your family farms in the family. … No, it was a big thing. I would see farmers and they pass away … and the children would get hit with this massive tax bill for the value of the farm. Sometimes the farm is very valuable, but the cash isn’t so readily available. And they go out to a bank and they’d borrow money and they’d borrow and borrow and borrow to pay the tax. They’d be working for 20 years to pay it off. If they had a bad season, they’d lose their farm. … And you’d have, actually, many, many suicides over it. They would actually commit suicide because they couldn’t stand the concept of losing their family farm.

Trump did not end the estate tax, which is a tax on inherited assets over a certain amount. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, doubled the assets threshold that would trigger an estate tax. That decreased, but did not entirely eliminate, the number of people subject to the estate tax. That provision was scheduled to expire at the end of 2025, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, permanently extended the more generous exemptions for the estate tax. For 2026, the thresholds triggering the estate tax are $15 million for individuals and $30 million for married couples.

But more importantly, only a small fraction of farms pays any estate tax.

To back up Trump’s claim, a White House official pointed us to an April 2025 article from the American Farm Bureau Federation, an advocate for farmers, that stated, “The estate tax, also called the ‘death’ tax, turns a time of mourning into a race against time to pay a government bill. Exactly nine months after the death of a family leader, some farm families owe the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) up to 40% of their farm’s value above an exemption limit. Without an act of Congress this year, the estate tax exemption will drop by 50% to $7.61 million on Jan. 1, 2026, putting the future of thousands of farm families at risk.”

The article noted that in 2024, the USDA “estimated that if the estate tax exemption reverts to its pre-TCJA level, nearly twice as many farms in every sales class would have to pay estate taxes.”

That’s true, but according to that USDA estimate, “the share of farm estates estimated to owe Federal estate tax would increase from 0.3 to 1.0 percent.”

“The story he [Trump] tells is dramatic but almost entirely untrue,” Howard Gleckman, a visiting fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us via email.

Although the Tax Policy Center has not modeled the estate tax impact on farms recently, Gleckman noted that “we estimated that a total of 3,960 decedents paid the estate tax in 2023. Those were total deaths, including all occupations. Since the vast majority of family farms are worth much less than $15m/$30m, the impact on farms is vanishingly low, and TPC concludes that zero small family farmers paid the tax.”

“It also is worth noting that any business owner subject to the estate tax has many tools to avoid the tax,” Gleckman said. “For example, they can create trusts or buy life insurance, which effectively pays the tax.”

In an article published in the Iowa Law Review in May 2025, Kathleen DeLaney Thomas, a professor at the University of North Carolina Law School, explored what she called the “myth” of “the threat of taxing family farms out of existence.”

“In the minds of voters, the family farmer is a sympathetic taxpayer who is cash poor but holds valuable property,” Thomas wrote. “Federal taxes that are based upon property values (like a wealth tax or an estate tax), rather than on cash income, appear to pose a risk that the family farm would have to be sold to fund such a tax. Yet, there is no empirical evidence that any family farm has ever been sold in the United States to fund federal taxes.”

As an aside, we weren’t able to find any examples of American farmers who committed suicide because of the prospect of losing their farm due to the estate tax, let alone “many,” as Trump claimed. There was a widely reported case of a man who committed suicide in 2025 due to worry about inheritance tax changes, but that was in the United Kingdom.

Soybeans to China

Trump falsely said that “American soybeans are now being shipped to China in record amounts,” touting a figure that he said he negotiated with China’s president. But U.S. exports are not on track this year to reach a record. A trade deal the White House announced in November also doesn’t show an agreement for record exports.

“Thanks to our trade deals, you’re now sending over $40 billion in American soybeans to China,” the president said. “I want to thank President Xi of China, because we had a deal at 20, and I said, ‘Could you do me a favor? It’s a big place, could you double it?’ … He said, ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ and you got 40 instead of 20.” Trump went on to make his claim about “record amounts” of soybeans now going to China.

Data from the USDA show that soybean exports to China, as of March 19, are about half the amount they were last year. “We’re not looking at record export sales, at least so far this year,” Chad E. Hart, a professor, extension economist and crop markets specialist at Iowa State University, told us.

Mindy L. Mallory, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, similarly said that “we are not even close to normal buying, let alone record buying.”

U.S. soybean exports to China totaled 11.2 million metric tons for the marketing year as of March 19, according to the USDA data. That’s about half the amount exported to China over the same period the year before, which was 21.8 million metric tons. (The marketing year is Sept. 1 to Aug. 31, covering the harvesting of the crop and what happens to it before the subsequent harvest, Hart explained. So, last year would be Sept. 1, 2024, to Aug. 31, 2025, and the current marketing year started Sept. 1, 2025.)

Typically, just over half of U.S. soybean exports go to China, Mallory told us. But exports dropped considerably in 2025, due to Trump’s policy of increasing tariffs on U.S. imports from China and China’s subsequent retaliatory policies for goods it gets from the U.S. For several months, China didn’t import any U.S. soybeans.

In early November, the White House announced that Trump and Xi had made a deal on trade. A Nov. 1 White House fact sheet said: “China will purchase at least 12 million metric tons (MMT) of U.S. soybeans during the last two months of 2025 and also purchase at least 25 MMT of U.S. soybeans in each of 2026, 2027, and 2028.”

Those amounts wouldn’t be records, either. Mallory said 25 million metric tons for a year would be “just below the average of the prior six years.”

In a Nov. 17 paper published on farmdoc daily, a website run by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, other Purdue agriculture economists wrote, “If China purchases at least 25 million tons of U.S. soybeans in each of 2026, 2027, and 2028, that volume would still be 14% lower than the five-year average of 29 million tons of soybean shipments to China from 2020 to 2024. The ten-year average was 27 million tons.” A chart in that paper shows that, over the previous 10 years, annual exports to China only dipped below 25 million metric tons in 2019 (22.6 MMT) and 2018 (8.2 MMT), during another trade disagreement in Trump’s first term.

It’s unclear if Trump is suggesting that he had secured a commitment from Xi for a larger amount of exports than the White House announced. The White House didn’t respond to our request for clarification of how much China had agreed to and when it would import $40 billion of soybeans, as Trump said. When we asked about the president’s claim, a White House official said: “China has agreed to increase its purchases of U.S. soybeans by millions of metric tons, in addition to increasing purchases of other commodities.”

For the marketing year, Hart said, exports to China are typically in the range of $16 billion to $20 billion, depending on prices. He said the president’s $40 billion figure must be a cumulative figure for multiple years, noting that the U.S. announcement concerned export amounts for several years.

Beef Prices

Trump said that the price of beef “is starting to come down.” But there’s little to no indication of that. He went on to falsely claim that “the number of cattle was way down” due to an environmental regulation concerning “gas permeating throughout the air,” adding that “we got rid of that one, too.” A White House official said he was referring to the Green New Deal, a nonbinding congressional resolution that didn’t pass.

We’ll start with beef prices. They have been high, due to several factors, which we’ll explain. The price of a pound of ground beef was an average $6.74 in February, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s down a mere penny from January, and it’s up $1.19 since January 2025. The price had gone up 52 cents from January 2024 to January 2025.

Uncooked beef steaks cost $12.74 per pound in February on average. That’s up 44 cents from January and up $1.83 from January 2025. Uncooked beef roasts were $8.93 per pound on average last month, down from a high of $9.29 in November. But the latest figure is still $1.21 more than the average price in January 2025.

Beef prices “are far from coming down,” Bob Chudy, a consultant for the beef industry, told us in an email. Chudy pointed to USDA figures for choice cutout, which he called “the best measure of wholesale beef prices.” Using a monthly average of weekly prices the USDA provides, Chudy said that choice cutout “jumped from an average of $3.69/lb in February to $3.94/lb in March.” That’s an increase of 25 cents. “And we are going into a period of seasonally stronger demand, with spring and summer grilling season around the corner.”

Chudy said that “beef supplies are historically low. There is nothing this administration can do to reduce beef prices for the balance of 2026 and extending into 2027 and likely 2028. Any short term deviations to the contrary are just that.”

As we’ve explained before, drought conditions in the U.S. over the past few years affected the feed for cattle and led to a slow reduction in the cattle herd, Bernt Nelson, an agricultural economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, told NBC News last summer. In a February Farm Bureau report drawing on USDA data, Nelson said the U.S. cattle inventory on Jan. 1 was 0.3% lower than in 2025, beginning the eighth year of contraction and “with little opportunity for meaningful expansion until at least 2028.”

“Tighter cattle supplies will contribute to higher prices and volatility for cattle and beef in 2026,” Nelson wrote.

Also, last year, the USDA suspended imports of live cattle from Mexico because of cases of New World screwworm, a parasite that kills host animals. Chudy called that “a huge factor” that “has choked off a valuable supply of animals raised in USA feedlots.”

And there are also demand issues. Altin Kalo, head economist with the Steiner Consulting Group, which focuses on the food industry, told us, “Beef demand has been exceptional in recent years and has been a big contributor to the rise in beef prices in recent years. Indexes that ag economists use to track the shift in demand over time show that in 2025 demand was up 8% vs. previous year and near 27% from pre-COVID levels.” Kalo cited several factors for the increase in demand, including income and employment, high quality of beef products and a shift to higher-protein diets, and consumers eating more meals in restaurants than in the past.

In November, Trump scrapped 50% tariffs he had placed on Brazilian imports, including beef.

Green New Deal

After mentioning prices, Trump made his claim about environmental concerns reducing the number of cattle.

Trump: Beef was, it was an amazing thing, I was told by [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke [Rollins]. I said, I don’t really believe it. They wanted to have less cattle in the country for environmental reasons. … These are sick people. No, they want less cattle for environmental reasons. It has something to do with gas permeating throughout the air. And we actually — and that’s what happened. And these, the number of cattle was way down. I said, what happened? They were mandated. They were restricted for that reason. These people are crazy. But anyway, we — we got rid of that one too. That was an easy one.

When we asked what environmental regulation Trump was referring to, a White House official told us: “President Trump is including the insane Green New Scam provision that sought to limit cow herds in order to reduce methane emissions,” linking to a 2019 New York Post article about the Green New Deal resolution, which was introduced by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that year.

That resolution, which was nonbinding, never passed. The number of cattle wasn’t “mandated” or “restricted” under the resolution, so there was nothing for Trump to get rid of, either.

The president has made a similar claim about the Green New Deal before, falsely saying in 2019 that it would “eliminate” all cows. Ocasio-Cortez did express concern about greenhouse gas emissions from cows, as have other environmentalists. (Methane emissions from agricultural livestock contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, as the Environmental Protection Agency says.) But as a nonbinding resolution, the Green New Deal was a broad vision for addressing climate change. If it had passed in Congress — which it didn’t then, nor when introduced in later years — lawmakers would have needed to propose separate legislation on steps to take to reach the resolution’s goals for emissions.

As we explained in 2019, the resolution doesn’t say anything about limiting cows. But two FAQ documents from the resolution’s supporters mentioned cows, garnering a lot of attention at the time. A fact sheet said: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” A blog post on Ocasio-Cortez’s website expressed a similar idea.

Farm Aid Not From Tariffs

Trump again claimed that $12 billion in aid provided to farmers was paid from increased tariff revenue, but the funding came from regular appropriations.

Trump said: “To further help farmers recovering from the Biden catastrophe, we use money taken from tariffs, the tariffs — we’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars from the tariffs, and as I said, we gave you $12 billion in farm relief. And that happened just recently because you were hurt by certain countries unfairly. And I said you were unfairly hurt and we gave you $12 billion and that — that made up for it.”

The $12 billion bailout for American farmers came soon after China slashed its purchase of American soybeans in 2025 following Trump’s imposition of additional tariffs on imports from China.

“The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 1.

But as we have written, the $12 billion was paid for by the Commodity Credit Corporation, a government-owned corporation that provides funding for agricultural programs and gets regular appropriations from Congress, according to a press release from the USDA.

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

The post Trump Fumbles the Facts with Farmers appeared first on FactCheck.org.

A Rome court ruled that several Netflix price hikes in Italy were unlawful because the company's contracts didn't adequately explain or justify future pricing changes. As a result, Netflix has been ordered to issue refunds that could total roughly 500 euros for some long-term subscribers. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it's unlawful for a "professional to unilaterally modify the clauses of the contract, or the characteristics of the product or service to be provided, without a justified reason indicated in the contract itself," according to a Google-provided translation. The court's April 1 ruling determined that Netflix's contracts were required to explain in advance why prices or other terms might change in the future. Because the price hikes were found to be imposed without providing customers with valid justifications, the court ruled that the new prices are invalid and ordered Netflix to refund affected subscribers. This comes despite Netflix reportedly providing a 30-day advance notice of the higher fees and allowing customers to cancel their subscriptions to avoid price hikes. The court gave Netflix 90 days to inform millions of current and former customers via email, mail, its website, and Italian newspapers of their right to refunds or else face a penalty of 700 euros per day, Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported today. Per Italian law, price increases that Netflix has issued or will issue beyond April 2025 are legal. At that time, Netflix adjusted its terms to state that contract terms could one day change due to technological, security, or regulatory needs, to clarify clauses, or to provide changes to the service, Il Sole 24 Ore reported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"That's us!" NASA says in a post showing one of the photos taken on the lunar journey.

April 3, 2026 — Yongtao Liu is an R&D staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS). In the Data NanoAnalytics Group, he is helping nanomaterials research move toward experiments that can run with far less handholding. His goal sounds simple but is tough in practice: What changes when an experiment can keep “thinking” after the scientist steps away? He is developing AI-driven “closed-loop” experiments that can plan measurements, read results as they come in and choose the next step, faster than a person could.

Yongtao Liu, an ORNL R&D staff member, uses AI-guided scanning probe microscopy to run experiments and analyze results with less hands-on work. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

For Liu, the point is not to take scientists out of the process. It is to remove the slow, repetitive work that keeps good questions waiting in line. His guiding principle is balance. Autonomy should speed up exploration, while expert oversight and clear, explainable reasoning keep results reliable. “Autonomy can help us explore faster,” he said, “but it must stay interpretable. We need to understand its choices and whether we should trust it.”

Liu came to ORNL in 2021 as a postdoctoral scientist and soon took on a leadership role. In 2024 he became project lead for physics-informed and data fusion approach for cross-facility autonomous experiments. The motivation for this work grew from the fact that materials development and scientific discovery rarely depend on a single experiment but instead rely on correlating multiple experiments that provide complementary insights. “This principle also applies to autonomous experimentation” he said.

Turning Nanoscience into a Closed-Loop, Self-Improving Experiment

Many nanoscience experiments follow a manual loop. A researcher sets a condition, measures a response, adjusts and measures again, often hundreds of times. In scanning probe microscopy, a family of microscopes that “feel” a surface with a tiny tip, that loop can become especially repetitive.

Liu’s approach replaces much of that repetition with software. Automation runs the instrument and collects data. A type of AI that finds patterns in data evaluates the results in real time and chooses the next best measurement. The goal is not only to generate more data, faster, but also to create an experiment that adapts as it learns.

“The AI can analyze the results in real time and automatically decide what you can do next,” Liu added. That speed matters, but so does sensitivity. Algorithms can notice small, consistent changes that are easy to miss when a person is staring at a flood of plots and images.

When ‘Novelty’ Might Mean Noise Rather Than New Science

One major thread in Liu’s work is “novelty discovery.” The idea is to teach an autonomous experiment to recognize when something looks truly unusual, not just statistically different. In the best case, novelty points to new physics. It can reveal behavior in materials that existing explanations do not cover.

A concrete example comes from Liu’s earlier work on halide perovskites. These materials are promising for devices like next-generation solar cells and light emitters. They are also known for complex, sometimes unstable behavior. In conductive atomic force microscopy, often called conductive AFM, his team used novelty detection to flag unusual current-voltage “hysteresis” behavior. Hysteresis means the electrical response depends on the path taken, not just the final setting. It is similar to how bending a paperclip one way changes how it behaves when it is bent back.

The algorithm noticed something specific. The opening of the hysteresis loop happened at different voltages depending on the local grain structure of the thin film. Grains are small crystalline regions, and their boundaries can change how electricity flows. Because this pattern was not well understood, the team applied representation learning, a type of analysis that helps reveal hidden structure in complex datasets. The result was a “partial knowledge map” that linked microstructure and electrical behavior. Some patterns fit existing ideas, while others still do not, and they now point to what should be studied next.

That experience shaped Liu’s view of autonomy. Speeding up measurement is only half the job. Autonomous labs also generate massive datasets, and scientists need better tools to interpret them without fooling themselves.

False novelty is a real risk. “The most common false novelty is measurement noise, or experimental artifacts,” Liu said. These are glitches caused by the instrument, the environment, or the sample, rather than true material behavior. AI can shine a spotlight on anomalies, but people still must decide whether the spotlight is on a discovery or a mirage.

From Materials Training to Machine-Guided Discovery

Liu earned his bachelor’s degree at Nankai University and completed his doctorate in materials science and engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. During graduate school, he ran into a problem that many materials researchers face. The material is complicated, and the number of possible experiments can be overwhelming.

A formative moment came while studying halide perovskite thin films. Researchers believed that many nanoscale features could affect how the films absorb light and conduct charge. Those features included grains, grain boundaries, crystal facets and internal “domain walls,” which are borders between regions with different internal structure. The trouble was scale. Manually checking each feature and all their combinations was practically impossible.

“I remember thinking that a better approach would be to explore these structures automatically,” he said, “rather than relying on human search.” That realization pushed him toward AI-driven autonomous microscopy aimed at finding new structures and behaviors that would otherwise be too slow to uncover.

Building Systems That Span Instruments, Disciplines and Time Scales

CNMS is a Department of Energy user facility, where visiting researchers from around the world rely on its tools. Because the same instruments support many different projects, CNMS especially values methods that “travel well” — software and workflows robust enough to work reliably across a wide range of experiments.

Liu’s work sits at the intersection of materials science, instrument engineering and AI. He argues that autonomy works only when those perspectives stay connected. Materials scientists understand what signals are physically plausible and what could be an artifact. Instrument engineers know how measurements can fail or drift. AI researchers build models that can learn from messy, real data without collapsing.

Liu said interdisciplinary teamwork works best when each group brings a complementary strength. Humans define the scientific questions and constraints. AI expands the team’s ability to search. In a closed-loop system, that partnership can scan a vast parameter space — testing countless experimental settings and material variations — so the system can continue exploring and refining its approach autonomously, long after the researcher has left the controls.

Linking instruments across facilities into one learning workflow
Liu also leads efforts to build cross-facility closed-loop experiments that connect different tools into one decision-making chain. Such a workflow might include synthesis tools, such as autonomous pulsed laser deposition, which grows thin films by blasting material off a target with laser pulses. It may also include combinatorial growth systems that produce many material variants in a single run. Those samples can then be studied using autonomous scanning probe microscopy.

The central challenge is timing. Microscopes can make decisions in seconds. Making a new sample can take hours or even days. “It’s like trying to run a loop while some parts respond instantly and others only update once per hour or per day,” Liu said. The engineering problem is to keep the fast tools efficient while still making smart use of the slow ones. He wants the whole system to keep learning, rather than waiting.

Tools for Autonomy That Scientists Can Trust

Two of Liu’s contributions focus on making autonomy practical and trustworthy in the real world. They are AEcroscopy and the Gated Active Learning Framework.

AEcroscopy is a software-hardware system that controls microscopes while standardizing data acquisition, data processing and experiment logging for automated and autonomous runs. In plain terms, it helps turn a long, repetitive measurement routine into a reliable script. Instead of a person changing a setting and taking the same measurement repeatedly, the system can step through conditions automatically, process the results, and record exactly what happened. This improves both speed and reproducibility, which is the ability to repeat an experiment and get consistent results.

The Gated Active Learning Framework addresses a different risk. AI can be fast enough to multiply a mistake. If the system assumes the data should look a certain way, it can misread results that do not fit. For example, the analysis may assume a signal has one clear peak. The real material might produce two peaks under certain conditions. If the AI is not built to notice the mismatch, it can “learn” the wrong lesson and reinforce its own error.

Liu’s gating idea acts like a safety filter. The model is trained only on data that match its assumptions. Strange or out-of-family cases are held back for separate review. In his opinion, this helps autonomy stay honest. “The computer model should do what it can,” he added, “instead of pretending it can do everything.”

What AI Should Never Do, and What It Makes Possible

Liu is direct about the limits. “AI should never hide its reasoning or replace critical scientific judgment,” he says. If a system cannot explain why it chose an experiment, and if humans cannot question and validate the choice, then the lab is moving fast without knowing where it is going.

At the same time, he sees a unique strength in AI. It can explore enormous experimental landscapes systematically and adaptively, learning which paths are promising while the experiment is still running. “It lets us search spaces that are too big for any one person, or even a whole team, to cover by hand,” he said.

His long-term vision is not AI that only predicts — he wants AI that helps scientists reason. In that future, the system proposes tests, spots patterns and challenges assumptions. People keep the work grounded in physical reality.

Training the Next Kind of Scientist

Liu also thinks about what autonomy means for early-career researchers. His advice starts with fundamentals. Build domain knowledge first and learn how the experiment works with your own hands.

“When new students or postdocs enter an AI-enabled lab, the most important mindset is domain-knowledge-driven critical thinking,” he said. Before relying on AI, they should learn to run the measurements themselves. That hands-on experience teaches a researcher to recognize when a surprising result is real, and when it is noise, drift, or a software assumption breaking in the wild.

Outside the Loop

Even in a career built around autonomous science, Liu’s daily work still depends on human choices. He chooses when to focus deeply on coding, when to step back and question a “novelty” and when to bring in collaborators to interpret a confusing result. The end goal may be greatly accelerated, self-driving experiments, but the destination is not science without people. It is science where people spend less time repeating steps and more time asking better questions.

Source: Scott Gibson, ORNL

The post ORNL Work Explores AI-Guided Experiments That Adapt in Real Time appeared first on HPCwire.

U.S. consumers are starting to feel the financial impact of the Iran war. Here's how the conflict is seeping into the economy.

• Strong is Huskies’ first winner since Paige Bueckers in 2021

• ‘Low-key superstar’ has led undefeated team to Final Four

Sarah Strong of UConn was named the Associated Press women’s basketball Player of the Year after leading the Huskies to an undefeated season, setting the stage for a run to the Final Four.

Strong became just the fifth player to win the award in her sophomore year, joining Oklahoma’s Courtney Paris (2007), UConn stars Maya Moore (2009) and Breanna Stewart (2014) and USC’s JuJu Watkins, who won it last year. The AP started giving out the award in 1995.

New Publication Fills Crucial Need for Rapid Publication of AI Research Results

NEW YORK, April 3, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has published the inaugural issue of ACM AI Letters (AILET). AILET aims to be the premier venue for rapid, impactful, and timely AI research. Bridging a crucial gap between traditional conferences and journals, AILET will feature short, peer-reviewed contributions that accelerate knowledge dissemination across academia and industry.

AI research output has grown exponentially, with publication volume increasing by approximately 80% in just three years. Billions of dollars in funding are driving thousands of new papers and submissions each year across an ever-expanding landscape of subfields. Yet the traditional journal and conference cycle, often requiring months from submission to publication, creates a significant lag between discovery and dissemination. This delay can impede the translation of ideas into practice and slow the collective progress of the field.

The style of the new publication is rigorous yet accessible, with a focus on articles that bring contemporary and fast-moving AI research to the fore.

AILET welcomes concise summaries of work in areas including reports on theoretical breakthroughs in AI, descriptions of significant algorithmic and scientific advances, as well as accounts of novel or deployed applications of AI in real-world settings. Applied settings might include areas such as healthcare, finance, robotics, and autonomous systems. Multidisciplinary work is especially welcome.

Complementing its coverage of the technical aspects of the discipline, ACM AI Letters will also include research about how these new technologies are shaping the world. In this vein, the editors are encouraging submissions on societal challenges such as the United Nations Sustainable Developmental Goals, AI ethics, policy, governance, and responsible AI.

With their broader goal of building a vibrant community around AILET, the editors are encouraging researchers to engage with each other by submitting opinions and briefs on public policy, the latest advances in the field, and comparative assessments.

In keeping with ACM’s ongoing commitment to open access publishing, AILET authors will not be charged publication fees for the first three years.

Articles in the inaugural issue of ACM AI Letters include:

• “Editorial: Launching ACM AI Letters—A New Forum for Rapid, Impactful AI Research,” by Nitesh V. Chawla, Barry O’Sullivan, and Richa Singh
•  “Proto-Interpretation: The Temporality of Large Language Model Inference,” by Mattias Rost
•  “Why Slop Matters,” by Cody Kommers, Eamon Duede, Julia Gordon, Ari Holtzman, Tess McNulty, Spencer Steward, Lindsay Thomas, Richard Jean So, and Hoyt Long
• “From Science to the Arts and Back: Computational Creativity Perspectives on the Automation of Science,” by Hannu Toivonen and Luc De Raedt
• “Generative AI Meets Future Cities: Towards an Era of Autonomous Urban Intelligence” by Dongjie Wang, Chang-Tien Lu, Xinyue Ye, Tan Yigitcanlar, and Yanjie Fu
• “Future-Proofing Deepfake Detection by Integrating Audio, Video, and Text,” by Pasquale Lisena, Kong Aik Lee, Yi Wang, Massimiliano Todisco, Chiara Galdi, Raphael Troncy, Nicholas Evans, Weiwei Lin, Lap-Pui Chau, and Man-Wai Mak
• “Strategic Generative AI for Machine Learning in Economic Environments,” by Omer Madmon and Moshe Tennenholtz

The Co-Editors-in-Chief of ACM AI Letters are Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame (USA); Barry O’Sullivan, University College Cork (Ireland); and Richa Singh, IIT Jodhpur (India). AILET is developed with an extensive editorial team which includes 52 Editorial Board Members, 27 Associate Editors, and a 16-member Advisory Board. Reflecting its mission of serving the global AI research community, AILET editorial team members hail from many countries including Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

About ACM’s Publications Program

ACM publishes more than 60 scholarly peer-reviewed journals in dozens of computing and information technology disciplines. ACM’s high-impact journals constitute a vast and comprehensive archive of computing innovation, covering emerging and established computing research for both practical and theoretical applications. ACM journal editors are thought leaders in their fields, and ACM’s emphasis on rapid publication ensures minimal delay in communicating exciting new ideas and discoveries.

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 AI Letters Journal Publishes First Issue appeared first on HPCwire.

• Son of NBA star Carlos Boozer led Blue Devils to 35 wins

• Other freshmen winners went No 1 or No 2 in NBA draft

Cameron Boozer was at the center of everything for Duke this season.

The 6ft 9in forward proved tough enough to score through physical play. Rangy enough to space the floor and shoot from outside. Deft enough as a passer to find teammates, whether against constant double teams coming for him as the top name on every scouting report or while running the entire offense from up top.

“You just want to affect winning in whatever way you can,” Boozer said.

The high-end NBA prospect did that all season for a team who won 35 games, reached No 1 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, claimed the top overall seed for March Madness and reached the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. Now he’s the AP’s men’s college basketball national player of the year, only the fifth freshman to earn the honor and the second in a row for a Duke program that keeps adding to the longest list of winners in the country. Sarah Strong of UConn was named the women’s player of the year.

Democrat Tammy Duckworth writes letter to TSA calling on agency to reinstate the shoes-off airport security policy

Nine months after US airports allowed passengers to pass through scanners without taking off their shoes, rescinding the stringent policy after almost two decades, a top senator claimed the “reckless” move could put passengers in danger.

The policy amounts to a “potentially catastrophic security deficiency”, according to Tammy Duckworth, Democrat for Illinois, and ranking member of the Senate commerce, science and transportation (CST) aviation subcommittee.

As memory constraints and energy costs are currently testing the limits of AI scaling, compression is becoming one of the industry’s most active areas of research. As we reported earlier this week, Google’s recent TurboQuant release targets the key-value cache, one of the most memory-intensive components of inference. Now, a new startup is aiming to compress the model itself.

PrismML, founded by Caltech researchers, has emerged from stealth this week with a $16.25 million seed round and an open source release of what it describes as a “1-bit” large language model family. The company says its approach can dramatically reduce model size and energy consumption while maintaining performance comparable to standard 16-bit models.

The benchmark scores of 1-bit Bonsai 8B compared to other models in the same parameter class (Credit: PrismML)

The Bonsai model family’s flagship model is Bonsai 8B, an 8-billion-parameter model trained on Google v4 TPUs. According to PrismML, the model achieves competitive performance on benchmark suites including MMLU Redux, MuSR, GSM8K, HumanEval+, IFEval, and BFClv3, but with a memory footprint of roughly 1GB, compared to about 16GB for a typical 16-bit equivalent. PrismML is also releasing 1-bit Bonsai 4B and 1.7B models, with 0.5GB and 0.24GB memory footprint, respectively.

PrismML says its models are fully binarized end to end, with all weights constrained to a single bit across embeddings, attention layers, and MLP blocks, with “no higher-precision escape hatches.” While quantization is widely used, pushing it to 1-bit across the entire network has historically degraded model quality, particularly for reasoning tasks. The company attributes its results to a new mathematical framework developed at Caltech, but has not yet detailed the training methods or stabilization techniques that would be required to make such extreme compression viable.

PrismML CEO Babak Hassibi, a computer scientist and mathematician at Caltech, described the approach as a new paradigm for AI that will adapt to diverse hardware environments. “We spent years developing the mathematical theory required to compress a neural network without losing its reasoning capabilities,” Hassibi said in a release. “We see 1-bit not as an endpoint, but as a starting point.”

PrismML founders from left: Sahin Lale, Babak Hassibi, Omead Pooladzandi, and Reza Sadri (Credit: PrismML)

The company claims its 1-bit models can deliver up to eight times faster processing and reduce energy consumption by as much as 75 to 80% on existing hardware. PrismML also predicts that future hardware optimized for 1-bit operations could further improve efficiency by replacing complex multiplications with simpler arithmetic.

Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, which participated in PrismML’s seed round, described the work as a “mathematical breakthrough” with the potential to reshape how AI systems are deployed.

“AI’s future will not be defined by who can build the largest datacenters. It will be defined by who can deliver the most intelligence per unit of energy and cost. PrismML represents that kind of breakthrough,” he said in a statement.

That perspective reflects the idea that AI will not remain confined to data centers but will instead be deployed across edge devices and local environments. PrismML says its models are designed to run on consumer and edge devices, potentially enabling more capable AI applications in smartphones, wearables, and robotics without relying on cloud infrastructure.

(Aila Images/Shutterstock)

PrismML’s claim that a fully 1-bit model can match the capabilities of higher-precision systems remains unproven outside the company’s own benchmark results. Extreme quantization techniques have historically struggled to preserve accuracy in complex reasoning tasks. Independent third-party benchmarks and real-world deployments will be critical in determining whether PrismML’s approach represents a true breakthrough or a more limited optimization.

In a blog post, PrismML describes what it calls “intelligence density,” a metric that attempts to capture how much capability a model delivers per unit of size. By that measure, the company says its 1-bit models redefine the tradeoff between model size and performance, maintaining competitive results at a fraction of the footprint. However, the metric depends on the company’s benchmark choices and definition of the metric itself, and has not yet been independently validated. Whether it proves to be a meaningful way to compare models or remains a company-specific metric will depend on how it holds up under further scrutiny.

For now, the release is another example of efficiency-driven AI design as the industry looks for alternatives to the escalating costs of scaling model size and infrastructure. While recent research like Google’s TurboQuant focuses on compressing specific components of inference, PrismML’s ambitious model compression could greatly expand where AI models can realistically run and how they are deployed.

The post PrismML Emerges From Stealth With 1-Bit LLM Family appeared first on HPCwire.

Veteran justice, 76, was treated for dehydration in March; a retirement would give Trump new chance to shape court

US supreme court justice Samuel Alito was reportedly taken to a hospital after becoming sick at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia in March, further fueling speculation that Donald Trump could have more chances to shape the land’s highest court through new appointments.

A CNN report said Alito was checked by medical staff and given fluids due to dehydration. He later returned to his home in Virginia that same night with his security detail. In the weeks since, Alito has resumed his duties, including participating in oral arguments.

I assume I don’t have to explain the difference between big-endian and little-endian systems to the average OSNews reader, and while most systems are either dual-endian or (most likely) little-endian, it’s still good practice to make sure your code works on both. If you don’t have a big-endian system, though, how do you do that?

When programming, it is still important to write code that runs correctly on systems with either byte order (see for example The byte order fallacy). But without access to a big-endian machine, how does one test it? QEMU provides a convenient solution. With its user mode emulation we can easily run a binary on an emulated big-endian system, and we can use GCC to cross-compile to that system.

↫ Hans Wennborg

If you want to make sure your code isn’t arbitrarily restricted to little-endian, running a few tests this way is worth it.

The search for the second crew member, a weapons system officer, is continuing, two U.S. officials said.

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its "beta" label after 17 years. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site, said the site will keep evolving with new improvements even though it's no longer technically in beta. "As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate that everything is finalized or perfectly working," the organizations says. "Exiting beta doesn't mean we'll stop continuing to improve AO3 -- our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day." Some of the features it's introduced over the years include a tag system, offline fanworks downloads, privacy settings that let creators restrict access to their work, and new modes for multi-chapter works. As it stands, the site says it has more than 10 million registered users and 17 million fanworks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 4, No. 1,750.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 4, No. 1,028.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 4, No. 558.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 4, No. 762.

Officials from 23 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit seeking to block President Trump's executive order that aims to restrict mail voting.

The Lyrids and Eta Aquariids are coming soon to a sky near you.

SEATTLE, April 3, 2026 — Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded its business collaboration with Siemens Energy, a global leader in energy technology. The deal establishes AWS as a strategic cloud provider for Siemens Energy, delivering cloud services solutions to advance its digital transformation and innovation efforts. As part of this collaboration, Amazon and Siemens Energy will also explore new ways to manage energy solutions and deliver energy infrastructure for Amazon data center development and scaling.

Credit: Shutterstock

Using AWS AI and machine learning services — including Amazon Bedrock for generative AI and agentic workflows, Amazon SageMaker for building and deploying ML models, and AWS IoT SiteWise as the foundation for industrial data collection and monitoring — Siemens Energy will enhance its capabilities in smart manufacturing and project delivery, supply chain and resource optimization, and autonomous plant operations. By leveraging AWS cloud infrastructure and AI solutions, Siemens Energy can scale its digital solutions more efficiently and securely.

“Siemens Energy’s understands the specific requirements of data center customers and has developed an extensive portfolio of technologies to address these needs,” said Frederik Doye, senior vice president of Siemens Energy in Europe. “Our strategic collaboration with AWS accelerates our efficiency and digital transformation while we deliver stable, reliable and more sustainable infrastructure that gets power to the right place at the right time.”

“This collaboration represents the future of energy technology—where cloud and AI are already transforming how energy companies operate and innovate,” said Joseph Santamaria, general manager, Energy and Utilities at AWS. “Together with Siemens Energy, we’re turning decades of operational expertise into intelligent systems that drive better performance, greater efficiency, and more sustainable energy solutions for customers worldwide.”

Under this agreement, Siemens Energy and Amazon will also explore expanded offerings across a broad scope of solutions to power data centers globally. Siemens Energy will continue to provide turnkey substation solutions to enable connectivity of Amazon’s data centers to the grid, while also exploring gigawatt-scale power generation, microgrids, sustainable backup power concepts, and other grid technologies to support growing data center demand and other critical Amazon infrastructure globally. The company will also leverage AWS to improve delivery management and ensure timely and high-quality infrastructure delivery. Together, Amazon and Siemens Energy will collaborate on systems to support data center power demand growth while incorporating grid and load stability considerations and leveraging grid and power technologies provided by Siemens Energy.

This agreement builds upon an already successful relationship between the two companies. AWS and Siemens Energy have collaborated on Siemens Energy’s IoT Connected Factory platform, which has transformed manufacturing operations by connecting assets from Siemens Energy’s global factories to AWS Cloud. The platform enables seamless integration between operational technology (OT) and IT, allowing for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance powered by AWS’s scalable compute and storage services — driving significant improvements in operational efficiency and manufacturing productivity.

About Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality.

Source: AWS

The post AWS and Siemens Energy Team Up to Advance Energy Sector Digital Transformation appeared first on HPCwire.

The annual sales extravaganza is reportedly being rescheduled. Here's the scoop on what we've learned so far.

@wheelwizard It really was. I completely detoured to get a good vantage point for it ^-^

Alan Hayward James, 51, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bribery, and conspiracy to rig bids.

Dayton Webber is accused of shooting Bradrick Michael Wells twice in the head during an argument

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A quadruple amputee professional cornhole player acted in self-defense when he shot and killed a passenger in his Tesla during a heated argument, his attorney has said.

Dayton Webber, 27, appeared in Charles county district court via videoconference for a bail review on Wednesday, where Judge Patrick Devine noted that he left Maryland after the 22 March shooting of 27-year-old Bradrick Michael Wells. Devine ordered Webber to remain jailed without bail.

Google Quantum AI recently announced it is expanding its quantum computing efforts to include neutral atom systems, moving beyond its longstanding focus on superconducting qubits.

In a blog post announcing the news, Founder and Lead Hartmut Neven struck a confident tone, pointing to steady progress toward commercially relevant quantum systems by the end of the decade and framing the addition of neutral atoms as a complementary path toward that goal. Neutral atom systems bring a different set of capabilities than superconducting qubits, including the potential for large qubit arrays and flexible connectivity, with tradeoffs in areas such as gate speed.

Google Quantum AI Founder & Lead Hartmut Neven

Neven outlined three focus areas for Google’s neutral atom program: quantum error correction, modeling and simulation, and experimental hardware development.

As part of the effort, Adam Kaufman will lead Google’s neutral atom program from Boulder, Colorado, expanding the company’s presence in a region with deep expertise in atomic, molecular and optical physics, anchored by organizations such as Elevate Quantum, NIST, JILA and the University of Colorado Boulder. He will continue as a JILA Fellow and CU Boulder faculty member.

“We are delighted that Google Quantum AI has engaged Adam Kaufman to lead this important work in Boulder,” said Massimo Ruzzene, CU Boulder senior vice chancellor for research & innovation and dean of the institutes. “This partnership strengthens Boulder’s nationally recognized quantum landscape, supported by major federal investments including the NSF Q‑SEnSE Institute, the National Quantum Nanofab and the U.S. EDA Quantum TechHub.”

The neutral atom effort follows Google’s October 2025 acquisition of Atlantic Quantum, which expanded its superconducting roadmap with fluxonium-based qubit designs aimed at improving coherence and reducing error rates. Having extended its superconducting roadmap, Google is now broadening its efforts to additional qubit modalities.

Google’s announcement comes as interest in neutral atom quantum computing has grown across the industry, with companies such as QuEra, Infleqtion, Pasqal, Atom Computing and Oratomic frequently in the spotlight. Recent work emerging from Caltech, which underpins Oratomic’s launch, has examined how neutral atom architectures could support quantum computation at cryptographically relevant scales, while noting that substantial engineering challenges remain.

Google is positioning its expansion into neutral atoms alongside continued investment in superconducting systems, framing the two approaches as complementary paths toward scalable quantum computing.

“The road ahead reflects these distinct starting points: an outstanding challenge for neutral atoms remains demonstrating deep circuits with many cycles, while the next task for the superconducting modality is to demonstrate computing architectures with tens of thousands of qubits,” Neven explained. “Investing in both approaches increases our ability to deliver on our mission, sooner. By advancing both, we cross-pollinate research and engineering breakthroughs, and can deliver access to versatile platforms tailored to different types of problems.”

More from HPCwire

• Caltech Team Finds Useful Quantum Computers Could Be Built with as Few as 10,000 Qubits
• Google Quantum AI Opens Willow Early Access Program for Research Proposals
• Google Claims Quantum Advantage with Willow Chip
• Google Quantum Lead Predicts Commercial Quantum Within 5 Years
• Google Quantum AI Brings Atlantic Quantum into Its Team

The post Google Expands Quantum Efforts to Include Neutral Atom Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Scary highlights include The Menu and Smile 2.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Today at a hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090 -- titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair -- out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote. The bill modifies Colorado's Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to "exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado's consumer right to repair laws." The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.) [...] During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products. [...] The Colorado Labor and Technology committee advanced the bill, but it still needs to go through votes on the Colorado Senate and House floors before going into effect. Those votes may take place as early as next week. Regardless of how the bill goes in the state, it's likely that manufacturers will continue their push to alter or undo repair legislation in other states across the country. "The 'information technology' and 'critical infrastructure' thing is as cynical as you can possibly be about it," says Nathan Proctor, the leader of Pirg's US right-to-repair campaign. "It sounds scary to lawmakers, but it just means the internet." The current wording of the bill "leaves it up to the manufacturers to determine which items they will need to provide repair tools and parts to owners and independent repairers and which ones they don't," says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. "This is a bad policy and would be a big step back for Coloradans' repair rights." iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing: "There's a general principle in cybersecurity that obscurity is not security," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing. "The money that's behind the scenes, that's what's driving the bill."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Officials say other remains missing in first downing of US fighter plane since start of war

• Middle East crisis – live updates

One US service member has been rescued after a US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter was shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic effort to locate its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the war began almost five weeks ago.

US officials familiar with the situation said one crew member was still missing late on Friday, after Iranian state media released images of a tail fin and other debris accompanied by an initial claim that an advanced US F-35 had been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran.

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[link] [comments]

California House members tour Otay Mesa center, which has faced allegations of poor conditions and sexual assaults

Two California lawmakers conducted an oversight visit on Thursday at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Otay Mesa detention center, an immigrant detention facility that has faced allegations of overcrowding, poor conditions and sexual assaults.

The visit had been previously scheduled. But Mike Levin, a Democratic congressman, told the Guardian he planned to conduct more unannounced visits following a federal court ruling that struck down the Trump administration’s policy of forcing members of Congress to announce oversight visits seven days in advance.

Pooh Shiesty among those accused of robbing and kidnapping three men after dispute involving record label

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Federal prosecutors on Thursday accused rapper Pooh Shiesty and eight others of robbing three men at gunpoint and kidnapping them in January in Texas after a contract dispute involving rap star Gucci Mane’s record label.

The US attorney’s office in Dallas declined to name the victims and an FBI affidavit attached to a criminal complaint only refers to them by their initials. One victim, RD, is described as the owner of 1017 Records – the label belonging to Gucci Mane, whose legal name is Radric Delantic Davis.

PARIS, April 3, 2026 — On the occasion of an official visit by Sébastien Martin, minister of state for Industry of France and Anne Le Hénanff, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs of France in its R&D center in France, Bull today unveiled a major recruitment plan to hire 500 employees in 2026.

Now an independent company under the shareholding of the French State, Bull is pursuing this strategic investment reflects as part of its strong growth trajectory, with a 16% revenue increase from 2024 to 2025 and its continued acceleration across the full spectrum of advanced computing and artificial intelligence (AI).

The targeted profiles will primarily include R&D specialists, data scientists and HPC-AI experts, as well as talents to strengthen Bull’s services, general functions and business teams in support of its continued growth. These recruitments will accelerate Bull’s innovation programs and strategic priorities – particularly in key components and in support of Bull’s flagship HPC‑AI-quantum initiatives – while further enhancing the company’s AI platforms and use‑case expertise.

As a tech player deeply committed to innovation, Bull invests 13% of its revenue in R&D, operates four research centres, and holds more than 1,600 patents, also providing a unique foundation to advance Data & AI platforms and use cases alongside its current community of 300 data scientists. With a more agile structure, a clear innovation roadmap and strong investment in talent, Bull is entering a new phase of acceleration, to drive the future of advanced computing and AI technologies.

Sébastien Martin, Minister for Industry of France, said: “This plan to hire 500 new employees demonstrates Bull’s ability to embark on a new phase of growth, driven by a renewed leadership team and a strong industrial vision dedicated to serving France. By investing in talent and innovation, the company is making a significant contribution to strengthening our digital sovereignty and global competitiveness.”

Anne Le Hénanff, Minister-Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs of France, said: “I welcome Bull’s revival and the announcement of 500 new hires in 2026, a significant share of which will be based at its Les Clayes-sous-Bois site. These recruitments respond to a major challenge: building in France the skills of the future that we need to safeguard our technological sovereignty. This is exactly the path we want to support, that of a France investing in its future.”

Emmanuel Le Roux, CEO of Bull, commented: “We are opening a new chapter for Bull, as an independent company, driven by strong ambitions. A key symbol of this new phase is our ability to attract new talent to complement our existing key expertise to support our growth and our technological leadership. We want to welcome professionals who seek technological excellence, digital sovereignty as well as sustainable and open innovation.”

More from HPCwire

• Atos Completes Sale of Bull Advanced Computing Unit to French State
• What the Return of Bull Means to European HPC

About Bull

Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.

Source: Bull

The post Bull Targets 500 New Roles in 2026 Across R&D, Data Science and HPC-AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was treated for dehydration after falling ill at an event in Philadelphia on March 20, the court's public information office said.

Customs and Border Patrol agents were helping rescue two boaters whose vessel capsized when they themselves were put in danger.

OSAKA, Japan and IRVINE, Calif., April 3, 2026 — A joint research team between the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology (QIQB) at The University of Osaka and Fixstars Corporation has demonstrated one of the world’s largest classical simulations of iterative quantum phase estimation (IQPE) circuits for quantum chemistry on up to 1,024 GPUs, surpassing the previous 40-qubit limit. The result expands the scale of molecular systems available for the development and validation of quantum algorithms for future fault-tolerant quantum computers, supporting progress toward industrial applications in drug discovery and materials development.

Large-scale classical simulation of IQPE quantum circuits demonstrated in this work. Larger qubit counts and more Hamiltonian terms result in deeper circuits and longer simulation times.

Overcoming unresolved challenges in drug discovery and developing new materials to address climate change will require advanced quantum chemical calculations beyond the reach of current technology. Against this backdrop, fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQC) are widely anticipated as a key enabling technology, making it increasingly important to develop and validate, ahead of their deployment, the quantum algorithms that will eventually run on such systems.

Quantum phase estimation (QPE) serves as a core subroutine in many quantum algorithms and, in quantum chemistry, is expected to enable analyses that are difficult for current classical computers. The research group, consisting of Professor Wataru Mizukami, Assistant Technical Staff Shoma Hiraoka, and Assistant Technical Staff Sho Nishida at QIQB, and Yusuke Teranishi of Fixstars Corporation, focused on Iterative QPE (IQPE), a QPE-based method that requires fewer qubits, and implemented it in the quantum circuit simulator for quantum chemistry, “chemqulacs-gpu.”

The group also developed and applied a new parallel computing technology to maximize the performance of large-scale GPU clusters. As a result, they exceeded the previous limit of 40 qubits for state-vector-based quantum circuit simulations for quantum chemistry reported in earlier studies and successfully carried out one of the world’s largest such simulations. The simulations achieved the following results:

• Largest problem size: calculation of a 42-spin-orbital system for an H₂O molecule (with qubit reduction technology applied)
• Largest circuit size: calculation of a 41-qubit circuit for an Fe₂S₂ molecule (pure circuit-scale benchmark)

To achieve this result, the team implemented IQPE in the quantum chemistry simulator “chemqulacs-gpu” and developed a parallel computing method optimized for large-scale GPU clusters. Using up to 1,024 NVIDIA H100 GPUs on AIST’s ABCI-Q system, the researchers overcame conventional computational bottlenecks and extended quantum circuit simulations of quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry beyond the previous 40-qubit limit.

This achievement expands the range of molecules that can be targeted in the development and validation of quantum algorithms and supports further progress toward more complex and realistic molecular simulations on future fault-tolerant quantum computers.

“Large-scale simulation of quantum circuits using 1,024 GPUs in unison is technically demanding, and within the limited 48-hour computation window we repeatedly encountered unexpected issues. I am delighted that the team, led by two young researchers, Yusuke Teranishi and Shoma Hiraoka, persevered throughout the effort, and that, with prompt support from the ABCI-Q operations staff, we were able to achieve one of the world’s largest results. I hope this accomplishment will help accelerate the development of quantum algorithms.”

Research Collaboration

This research was conducted as a collaborative study based on the research plan of Professor Mizukami at QIQB. QIQB led the research and development of methods for classically simulating IQPE quantum circuits on GPU clusters, and implemented the interface connecting the quantum chemistry layer to the simulation layer. Fixstars Corporation provided GPU performance profiling and optimization technologies, and was responsible for optimizing the simulation code and tuning its performance on ABCI-Q. This work resolved complex inter-GPU communication bottlenecks and enabled highly efficient circuit simulation.

Summary

A joint research team between the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology (QIQB) at The University of Osaka and Fixstars Corporation has demonstrated one of the world’s largest classical simulations of iterative quantum phase estimation (IQPE) quantum circuits for quantum chemistry on up to 1,024 GPUs, surpassing the previous 40-qubit limit. The result expands the scale of molecular systems available for the development and validation of quantum algorithms for future fault-tolerant quantum computers, supporting progress toward industrial applications in drug discovery and materials development.

Reference URLs

Professor Wataru Mizukami Researcher Profile: https://rd.iai.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/3df5398d10c44be6.html

About The University of Osaka

The University of Osaka was founded in 1931 as one of the seven imperial universities of Japan and is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive universities with a broad disciplinary spectrum. This strength is coupled with a singular drive for innovation that extends throughout the scientific process, from fundamental research to the creation of applied technology with positive economic impacts. Its commitment to innovation has been recognized in Japan and around the world. Now, The University of Osaka is leveraging its role as a Designated National University Corporation selected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to contribute to innovation for human welfare, sustainable development of society, and social transformation.

About Fixstars Corporation

Fixstars is a technology company dedicated to accelerating AI inference and training through advanced software optimization solutions. It supports innovation in healthcare, manufacturing, finance, mobility, and other industries.

Source: Fixstars

The post University of Osaka and Fixstars Advance IQPE Quantum Chemistry Simulation on 1,024 GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.

The new feature makes it easier to exchange media across the two mobile ecosystems.

Northern Irishman bristles at suggestions he has peaked as he returns to Augusta with the same intensity as always

It was an opening which depicted more than a decade of toil. “I’d like to start this press conference with a question,” said Rory McIlroy. “What are we all going to talk about next year?”

The wait was over. McIlroy had not only won the Masters, not only ended an 11-year wait for a fifth major, and not only become the sixth man in history to complete a grand slam. The ticking of all three boxes at once and in extraordinary circumstances was why the scenes at Augusta National in 2025 are unlikely to be matched as the 90th Masters staging approaches.

Some users are finding the change frustrating, but here's how to turn it off.

The Wall Street Journal shares the "wild behind-the-scenes story" of how the world's largest and most destructive botnet was uncovered and taken down, writes Slashdot reader sturgeon. "At times, the network known as Kimwolf included more than a million compromised home Android devices and digital photo frames -- enough DDoS firepower to disrupt internet traffic across the U.S. and beyond." From the report: Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case. A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn't know exactly who had built it -- or how. Brundage had been following the attacks, too -- and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge. As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn't want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he'd send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online. "It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious," said Brundage. At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat. Brundage didn't expect it to work, but he got the information. "It took me by surprise," he said. Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world's corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings -- including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago. Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

April 3, 2026 — In its MLPerf Inference 6.0 submission, AMD did not simply revisit familiar benchmarks with a faster GPU. It expanded into first-time workloads, crossed the 1-million-tokens-per-second threshold at multinode scale and showed that partners can reproduce the results across a broader ecosystem.

Credit: Shutterstock

That combination matters because AMD customers no longer evaluate inference platforms on one metric alone. They want competitive single-node performance, efficient scale-out, faster bring-up on new models, reproducible results across partner systems and confidence that the software stack can keep pace. MLPerf Inference 6.0 let AMD show all of that in one submission.

Just as important, AMD showed that these results are not isolated. A broad partner ecosystem submitted across four AMD Instinct GPU types that closely reproduced numbers submitted by AMD and the first three-GPU heterogeneous MLPerf submission demonstrated that AMD hardware and AMD ROCm software can orchestrate meaningful inference throughput even across systems in different geographies.

AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs: Designed for Inference from the Ground Up

AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs are built on AMD CDNA 4 architecture with a 3nm process, bring 185 billion transistors, add FP4 and FP6 support, and pair all of that with up to 288GB of HBM3E memory.

With up to 10 petaflops of FP4 and FP6 performance, support for models up to 520 billion parameters on a single GPU and an industry-standard UBB8 node available in both air-cooled and direct liquid-cooled configurations, AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs are built to deliver more than speed. They also are designed to deliver large-model capacity and deployment readiness in one platform.

Defining Moments from the AMD MLPerf Inference 6.0 Submission

MLPerf Inference 6.0 results from AMD go well beyond a single proof point, revealing meaningful progress across performance, model coverage, scale and reproducibility. Several breakthroughs stand out:

1. AMD Breaks the 1M Tokens/Sec Barrier in MLPerf Inference

One of the biggest milestones in this round is that for the first time, AMD surpassed 1 million tokens per second in the MLPerf Inference benchmark. AMD crossed that threshold on Llama 2 70B in both Server and Offline benchmarks, and on GPT-OSS-120B in Offline – all at multinode scale on AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs.

The industry increasingly evaluates inference at cluster scale, where aggregate throughput and time-to-serve determine whether infrastructure is ready for deployment. Surpassing 1 million tokens per second demonstrates production-class inference throughput.

2. AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs Deliver a Clear Generational Leap vs. Previous Gen

AMD also demonstrated a major generational uplift on Llama 2 70B Server. The AMD Instinct MI355X GPU delivered 100,282 tokens per second, displaying 3.1x more throughput than the previously submitted AMD Instinct MI325X GPU results.

That is a meaningful jump in six months, and it reflects the power of the full stack: AMD CDNA 4 architecture, high compute density, support for FP4 and FP6, large HBM3E capacity and AMD ROCm software optimizations tuned for modern large language model inference.

3. Llama 2 70B Shows Broad Single-Node Competitiveness

On Llama 2 70B, the most recognized large language model benchmark in MLPerf, the AMD Instinct MI355X Platform delivered highly competitive single-node results against both NVIDIA B200 and B300 GPUs. Against B200, the AMD Instinct MI355X platform tied in Offline, delivered 97% of Server performance and reached 119% of Interactive benchmark performance. Against B300 single-node, the AMD Instinct MI355X platform reached 93% in Server, 92% in Offline and 104% in Interactive.

Especially important is the breadth of the results. This is not a one-scenario story. AMD shows competitiveness across batch throughput in Offline, sustained throughput in Server and responsiveness in Interactive.

4. GPT-OSS-120B Demonstrates Fast First-Time Model Bring-Up

GPT-OSS-120B is among the most exciting parts of this Inference 6.0 submission because it was a workload run in MLPerf for the first time. First-time model enablement is difficult – the model must be brought up, optimized, validated for accuracy and pushed to competitive performance inside MLPerf timing.

Even with that complexity, the AMD Instinct MI355X platform delivered 111% of B200 Offline performance and 115% of NVIDIA B200 Server single-node performance. Against NVIDIA B300 single-node, the AMD Instinct MI355X platform reached a competitive 91% in Offline and 82% in Server.

5. Wan-2.2-t2v Extends AMD into All-New Text-to-Video Inference

MLPerf Inference 6.0 also let AMD expand beyond large language models (LLMs) into text-to-video generation with a first-time submission on Wan-2.2-t2v. This benchmark has two tests: Offline and Single Stream. For this submission AMD focused its effort on the Single Stream scenario and as a result the submission is in the Open category rather than Closed (which requires both Offline and Single Stream). However, AMD’s Single Stream run did satisfy the Closed submission rules and thus can be directly compared to scores in Closed division.

Even so, the result is impressive for a first-time AMD effort on a brand-new workload category: The AMD Instinct MI355X platform achieved 93% of NVIDIA B200 single-node performance and 87% of NVIDIA B300 single-node performance in Single Stream. After the deadline, additional tuning moved Single Stream to 108% of B200 and parity with B300, while unofficial Offline results reached 111% of B200 and 88% of B300. Post-deadline numbers were not part of the official MLPerf submission and were not verified by MLCommons, but they clearly show how quickly performance improved once AMD had more time to tune.

6. Multinode Inference Shows Efficient Scale-Out

Interest in multinode inference is rising as models get larger, deployments become more demanding and the industry lays the groundwork for rack-scale systems such as the AMD Helios solution. AMD’s MLPerf Inference 6.0 submission shows that the AMD Instinct MI355X is ready for that transition.

On Llama 2 70B, AMD scaled from one node to 11 nodes and stayed remarkably close to ideal linear scaling.

At 11 nodes and 87 AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, AMD delivered 1,042,110 tokens per second in Offline, 1,016,380 tokens per second in Server and 785,522 tokens per second in Interactive. Scale-out efficiency reached 93% in Offline, 93% in Server and 98% in Interactive. Offline scale-out is the more standard path, but Server and Interactive are harder because they must maintain latency requirements as the cluster grows, which makes these results especially compelling.

Multinode results continue on GPT-OSS-120B. These results become even more interesting since this was AMD’s first GPT-OSS multinode submission. The question was not whether the model could be enabled, but whether it could be scaled efficiently across a real cluster. At 12 nodes and 94 AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, AMD delivered 1,031,070 tokens per second in Offline and 900,054 tokens per second in Server. Just as important, AMD stayed close to ideal 12x scaling, with 92% efficiency in Offline and 93% in Server. That made GPT-OSS the second model on which AMD crossed the 1-million-tokens-per-second mark at multinode scale.

Ecosystem Scale and Reproducibility Across Partner Submissions

Another major highlight for AMD in the MLPerf Inference 6.0 submission is ecosystem momentum. This round resulted in a tie for most partners submitting on AMD Instinct hardware with nine: Cisco, Dell, Giga Computing, HPE, MangoBoost, MiTAC, Oracle, Supermicro and Red Hat.

Those submissions spanned four AMD Instinct GPU types: MI300X, MI325X, MI350X and MI355X. It shows that the ecosystem is not limited to one flagship configuration; it covers multiple generations and multiple deployment models across OEM, ODM and cloud-style platforms.

This reproducibility is especially powerful. On AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, partner results landed within 4% of submission made by AMD, and some landed within 1%, even on workloads run for the first time. That is a very strong signal that these numbers are not fragile lab artifacts; they are reproducible across real partner systems thanks to predictable AMD hardware and AMD ROCm software.

First 3-GPU Heterogeneous Submission Demonstrates Flexible Inference Across Geographies

One of the most forward-looking results is the first MLPerf heterogeneous submission built across three AMD Instinct GPU types: MI300X, MI325X and MI355X. Submitted by Dell and MangoBoost, the configuration reached 141,521 tokens per second on Llama 2 70B Server and 151,843 tokens per second on Llama 2 70B Offline.

An especially important detail is geography. The AMD Instinct MI355X platform was located in Dell’s lab in the United States, while the Instinct MI300X and MI325X platforms were in Korea. That makes this more than a mixed-generation inference story, it is also a proof point for orchestration across systems in different geographies.

Final Takeaway

The AMD MLPerf Inference 6.0 submission marks a major step forward for AMD and its generative AI story. Across all-new workloads, AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs delivered highly competitive single-node results, incredibly efficient multinode scale-out performance, first-time model bring-up on GPT-OSS-120B and Wan-2.2-t2v, and a milestone of delivering more than 1 million tokens per second at cluster scale.

At the center of all of this is AMD ROCm software, and a disciplined annual roadmap cadence. From the AMD Instinct MI300X GPU to the MI325X GPU to the MI350 Series featuring the AMD Instinct MI355X GPU, AMD is moving quickly, expanding model support, and building the software and systems foundation needed for future rack-scale AI deployments. With the AMD Helios rack-scale solution powered by the AMD Instinct MI400 Series and future AMD Instinct generations on the horizon, MLPerf Inference 6.0 reinforces a clear message: AMD is not just participating in the generative AI inference transition, it is helping define what production-ready GenAI infrastructure looks like.

More from HPCwire: MLCommons Releases New MLPerf Inference v6.0 Benchmark Results

Source: AMD

The post AMD MLPerf Submission Highlights MI355X Gains, Multinode Inference Performance appeared first on HPCwire.

Best known for voice-acting in Bob’s Burgers, Mirman was injured after his vehicle struck a toll plaza and ignited

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Bob’s Burgers voice actor Eugene Mirman says he is “extraordinarily thankful to the heroic people” that pulled him from the wreckage of his fiery car crash on Tuesday at a New Hampshire toll plaza – an accident that reportedly left him with serious injuries.

The 51-year-old comedian expressed his gratitude in an Instagram post late on Friday morning, which also described his being emotionally buoyed up by “the well wishes, love and kind messages from friends and strangers” in the wake of the wreck.

Finding the right mortgage lender can save you thousands of dollars while simplifying the homebuying process.

Bodycam footage of Tiger Woods’s arrest for DUI shows the golfer looking surprised when he was handcuffed by police officers at the scene of a vehicle crash last week and telling a deputy he had spoken to 'the president' on the phone after the incident. Woods told officers he was looking down at his phone and changing the radio station before the incident, in which his Land Rover clipped a truck and rolled on to its side. Woods pleaded not guilty to DUI and demanded a jury trial. In the bodycam footage he denies drinking any alcohol that day but admitted he had taken 'a few medications'. Woods took a breath test after the crash, which showed no signs he had drunk alcohol, but police said he refused a urine test. He was released on bail eight hours after his arrest. His case is due back in court on 5 May for a hearing

• Tiger Woods told police he talked to ‘the president’ after arrest, bodycam shows

• Tiger Woods released on bail hours after arrest at crash scene on suspicion of DUI

Ukraine’s Emergency Services posted images of rescue workers trying to save the animals — in one instance administering CPR to a dog — at the clinic in Chabany.

A federal judge on Friday rejected efforts by the Justice Department to revive two subpoenas it served to the Federal Reserve.

PM gets widespread backing after president’s mocking impersonation takes US-UK relationship to new low

Keir Starmer has been warned his relationship with Donald Trump may be beyond repair after the US president derided the prime minister for consulting his team about military decisions, in a mocking impersonation.

In a new low for UK-US relations, Trump appeared to imitate Starmer in a weak voice during an Easter lunch speech at the White House, and said the UK was “not our best” ally.

Aria Fani of University of Washington’s Middle East Center is latest critic of Israel to lose position at US university

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A University of Washington professor was removed as head of the school’s Middle East Center after reportedly using newsletters from the center to criticize the US and Israel’s war on Iran and describe Zionism as “cancerous”.

His case is one of at least three incidents in the past month in which higher education faculty members have faced suspension or dismissal after voicing opposition to US-Israeli actions in the Middle East.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is set to order a vast arsenal of chemical grenades, sprays, projectiles, and other weapons, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept. The purchase follows months of abuse of these very munitions on American streets.

CBP will spend up to $50 million on what it refers to as “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions,” a euphemism for weapons intended to merely hurt or disable a target rather than killing them. The agency is looking for a vendor who can supply vast quantities of 123 different types of munitions across 10 different categories, the contracting document says.

“The sheer quantity and the myriad different weapons is the most remarkable thing to me,” Rohini Haar, an emergency physician and researcher of less lethal ordnance told The Intercept. “When there’s so many different kinds, it makes you question, tactically, what’s the goal there?”

Federal agents’ indiscriminate use of “less-lethal” chemical weapons against the nonviolent demonstrators became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Contract documents show the Department of Homeland Security will continue to stockpile a massive arsenal of tear gases and projectile weapons. (Neither CBP nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Haar questioned whether the Department of Homeland Security will be able to suitably train federal agents to use such a wide variety of weapons.

“Each of them has a different sort of technical spec or specifications,” she explained. “Some of them are handheld grenades that you have to know to throw, but not hit people’s heads. Some of them are fired from a weapon, like a launcher, and so you have to be standing farther away than you would be with a grenade.”

Two Tear Gases

The shopping list includes a litany of different ways to hit people and objects with two common types of tear gas: chlorobenzalmalononitrile, or CS, a chemical weapon previously used by the U.S. in Vietnam but now banned for military use, and oleoresin capsicum, or OC, derived from chili peppers.

CBP agents already regularly use CS and OC-based weapons in the field, including against protesters. The procurement document shows that armed federal officers will continue to wield the threat of chemical agents against the public despite ample documentation of misuse.

Related

Federal Agents Used Toxic Chemical Smoke Grenades in Portland

Some of CBP’s desired weapons are designed to spread these chemical weapons indiscriminately. Included on the wish list are quart containers of liquid CS and OC meant to be spread through thermal “foggers,” dispersal devices meant to create mists with microscopic droplets of liquid. Defense Technology, a longtime chemical weapons vendor for CBP and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, says its Golden Eagle Pepper Fogger Generator can output 100,000 cubic feet of tear gas in 26 seconds.

Both chemicals are potent chemicals that can cause health effects far beyond debilitating pain.

“Greater exposure to chemical agents,” a 2023 study by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health found, “was significantly associated with higher odds of an adverse reproductive health outcomes.”

The outcomes included “uterine cramping, early menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness and delayed menstrual bleeding.”

The procurement list includes smoke grenades in four different colors and 12 different varieties of tear-gas grenades.

The weapons will be ordered in enormous volumes. CBP projects purchasing over 242,000 munitions from the “Hand Delivered Pyrotechnic Canisters” category and over 100,000 rounds of “impact munitions” fired from grenade launcher-style tubes.

The latter category includes foam-tipped “sponge cartridge” ammunition designed to either release a tear gas-style chemical upon hitting someone or merely harm them through sheer force of impact.

Maimed, Deafened, Blinded

Fired at close enough range, so-called less lethal rounds can easily kill or maim their target.

Anti-ICE demonstrator Kaden Rummler lost sight in his left eye after he was shot in the face by a federal officer in January. After the Los Angeles Police Department fired one such round directly into the face of another protester last summer, he was injured so seriously that he required surgery and had his jaw wired shut for six weeks.

“Distraction devices,” which emit loud sounds, bright lights, or other effects to stun targets, were also on CBP’s wish list, with plans to purchase 13,000 of them. The procurement document required the weapons be capable of emitting a sound of 175 decibels, louder than a gunshot or jet engine. The National Hearing Conservation Association warns of sound of 140 decibels can case permanent damage and “death of hearing tissue” begins at 180 decibels.

“In addition to injuries caused directly by the primary blast wave, such as ear-drum rupture or lung injury, secondary and tertiary injuries can also occur as a result of these explosive devices,” says a 2023 publication by Physicians for Human Rights that was co-authored by Haar.

CBP’s inclusion of rubber-ball grenades and scattershot projectiles alarmed Scott Reynhout, a researcher who also co-authored the PHR paper. When such grenades are thrown or launched at people, they release a burst of small rubber fragments akin to shrapnel in every direction and can be configured to simultaneously release tear gas.

“The procurement of the latter weapons is worrying as these have not seen widespread use yet by CBP/ICE in protests,” said Reynhout, referring to the scattershot projectiles, which he said were akin to “rubber buckshot.”

Such weapons were used by Chilean security forces against protesters six years ago, he said, resulting in more than 400 cases of partial or full-blindness, and are also employed extensively by Iranian police and paramilitaries in their crackdowns on demonstrations.

Weapons designed to pierce building materials were also included in the wish list.

CBP plans to purchase over 12,000 “ferret rounds,” projectiles filled with powdered or liquified chemicals that punch through barriers and spread tear gas on the other side.

Haar said, “If it can go through glass, particle board, and walls, it can go through a body.”

The post DHS Launches Massive “Less Lethal” Chemical Weapons Buying Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: When it comes to using AI, it seems some lawyers just can't help themselves. Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations. But as a cautionary tale, it doesn't seem to have had much effect. The numbers started taking off last year, and the rate is still increasing. He counts a total of more than 1,200 to date, of which about 800 are from U.S. courts. "I am surprised that people are still doing this when it's been in the news," says Carla Wale, associate dean of information & technology and director of the law library at the University of Washington School of Law. "Whatever the generative AI tool gives you -- as in, 'Look at these cases' -- you, under the rules of professional conduct, you have to read those cases. You have to read the cases to make sure what you are citing is accurate." "I think that lawyers who understand how to effectively and ethically use generative AI replace lawyers who don't," she says. "That's what I think the future is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rates on HELOCs and home equity loans are near multi-year lows, but the better pick depends on more than the rate.

• UConn men and women are both in the Final Four

• 20,000 customers of Jordan’s Furniture could be repaid

College basketball players aren’t the only ones poised to win big in this year’s March Madness.

A New England furniture chain is offering to reimburse customers for products bought earlier this year if both the UConn men’s and women’s basketball teams reach the championship games.

Crisis in the Middle East, a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv, a Saharan dust storm in Crete and the launch of Artemis II – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

Grandson of Reese’s cups inventor claims Hershey faked a pledge to switch back to original chocolate recipes

The grandson of HB Reese, the inventor of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, has accused the chocolate giant Hershey of faking a pledge to investors to switch back the recipes of its popular products – including KitKat – to the original milk and dark chocolate ones.

A confectionary-focused dust-up between Brad Reese and the $42bn Pennsylvania-based company began in February when Reese, 70, accused the company of “quietly replacing” the ingredients – or “architecture” – in his grandfather’s invention with cheaper “compound coatings” and “peanut-butter-style crèmes”.

Democrats rebuke White House’s ‘bleak and unacceptable’ view of priorities after 10% cuts proposed to other programs

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Defense spending would surge to its highest level in decades under a budget proposal put forward by the Trump administration on Friday, while other government programs would face cuts totaling 10%.

The document prepared by the White House office of management and budget (OMB) is a starting point for negotiations that will probably occupy Congress’s appropriators in the coming months, and is unlikely to be enacted in full.

Academics and youth workers say cuts to services and lack of public space help explain recent unrest in south London

It started with a flyer sent around on Snapchat. Teenagers were invited to gather at a south London basketball court to celebrate the start of the Easter holidays. They were told to bring their own weed and laughing gas because it was going to be a late one.

What followed in the hours after was chaos. Hundreds of young people came to the “link-up” last Saturday, and then gathered on Clapham High Street.

The president’s outbursts on allies and Nato were further confirmation that Europe cannot wait to bolster security – and Britain must play its part

“She had no more surprises for him; the unexpected in her behaviour was the only thing to expect,” Henry James wrote in his novel Daisy Miller. Leaders dealing with Donald Trump surely recognise the sentiment. James’s character was a young American out of her depth in Europe, falling victim to prejudices. Mr Trump is a real-world problem, and this time, Europe is battered by the prejudices and vengefulness of the American.

This week alone the US president has publicly mocked the British prime minister and armed forces (as weak), the French president (over his marriage), told allies to get their own oil – having set the Middle East on fire – and said leaving Nato was “beyond reconsideration”. Mr Trump’s wishful thinking has hit reality in Iran, where the war that he and Benjamin Netanyahu began will not be easily ended. His resulting frustration, concern about domestic political repercussions and desire to distract the public are matched by vindictiveness towards allies who rightly refused to join in.

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.

Bondi, reportedly ousted due to her botched handling of Epstein files, is still set to testify before Congress on 14 April

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As news emerged this week presaging Donald Trump’s dismissal of Pam Bondi, one of his motivations reportedly related to her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.

While the new acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, insisted he had “never” heard the president say “that anything that happened to her had anything to do with the Epstein files”, it’s clear the issue has dogged Bondi throughout her tumultuous tenure.

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Gold has fallen dramatically from its January peak. Here's what investors should consider before making a move.

Knowing today's mortgage rates can help new homebuyers and homeowners looking to lock in a good deal.

Eghosa Ogbebor, 14, was fatally shot on Thursday.

Our test results were a wake-up call to take our hearing health seriously. Here's why you should, too.

Hiring was much stronger than expected in March, with employers adding roughly three times the number of jobs economists predicted.

President Trump's new budget proposal asks Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending — a 42% increase — while cutting nondefense spending by $73 billion, or 10%.

The photo shows the entire planet, as well as the Northern and Southern lights.

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

Havana makes a Holy Week ‘humanitarian’ gesture as Russian tanker is allowed to reach oil-starved island

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Cuban authorities have begun to free prisoners after announcing they would pardon 2,010 inmates, the second release in less than a month as the country faces heightened US pressure.

More than 20 inmates emerged from La Lima penitentiary in east Havana on Friday, holding their release papers, crying and hugging relatives who had been waiting for them all morning.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, nearly half of planned U.S. data center projects are being delayed or canceled. "One major reason behind these setbacks is the availability of key electrical components -- such as transformers, switchgear, and batteries -- that are used both at data center sites and outside of them," reports Tom's Hardware. "Meanwhile, grid infrastructure is also stressed by electric vehicles and electrified heating systems." Tom's Hardware reports: Approximately 12 gigawatts (12 GW) of data center capacity is expected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, according to data by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. Yet only about one-third of that capacity is currently under active construction because of various constraints. Electrical infrastructure represents less than 10% of total data center cost, but it is as vital as compute hardware. A delay in any single element of the power chain can halt the entire project, which makes transformers, switchgear, and similar devices critical items despite their relatively small share of CapEx. Due to high demand, lead times for high-power transformers have expanded dramatically in the U.S.: delivery typically took 24 to 30 months before 2020, but waiting periods can stretch to as long as five years today, according to Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. For AI data centers, this is a catastrophe as their deployment cycles are under 18 months. To address shortages, companies are turning to global markets. As a result, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea became the biggest suppliers of high-power transformers for AI data centers to AI data centers. At the same time, imports of high-power transformers from China surged from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 units in 2025 through October, according to Wood Mackenzie data cited by Bloomberg. The volatility of exports from China does not end with transformers, as the PRC accounts for over 40% of U.S. battery imports, while its share in certain transformer and switchgear categories remains near 30%, according to Bloomberg.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Residents in at least 10 states are organizing campaigns to tax wealth in order to fund schools and other social services

Karen Sanchez likes to meet new people at trivia nights or concerts at her local brewery at the edge of Los Angeles county. Her opening line: “How do you feel about taxing the rich?”

Sanchez is volunteering to collect signatures to put a contentious “billionaire tax” on California’s November ballot, sponsored by her union, SEIU – United Healthcare Workers West. The proposal would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s 200-plus billionaires to cover lost federal funding for California hospitals and emergency services and to fund public education and food assistance programs. She says most people have been eager to sign on – and want to see more of it.

OLED and mini-LED are two of the best TV technologies. Which is better? Which should you get? Here are their pros and cons.

Iran shot down a U.S. Air Force F-15 fighter jet, U.S. officials said on Friday. At about the same time, a second U.S. plane, an A-10 Warthog, crashed near the Strait of Hormuz.

Both aircraft had two-person crews, U.S. officials told The Intercept, and in both cases, one crew member was rescued and one remains missing.

The downing of the U.S. plane undermined an assertion of strength President Donald Trump made in a nationally televised speech earlier this week.

“They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100 percent annihilated,” Trump said Wednesday. “We are unstoppable as a military force.”

A month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iranian leaders were “looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.” He continued: “Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.” 

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment on how Iran could down an advanced U.S. aircraft when the country supposedly no longer possesses anti-aircraft weaponry.

The loss of the F-15 is the first known instance of an American combat aircraft shot down in Iran since the war began in late February. It comes after Trump repeatedly threatened critical infrastructure in Iran and the U.S. struck the B1 bridge outside of Tehran, which killed eight people and wounded 95, according to Iranian news media.

Last week, at least 15 U.S. troops were wounded in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops.

The U.S. military has previously provided misleading and stale casualty statistics, in what a defense official who spoke with The Intercept called a “casualty cover-up.”

Related

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

At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran war, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, according to an Intercept analysis.

On Friday, Iranian state media published pictures and videos that they claimed show parts of the downed plane and one of the ejection seats.

Update: April 3, 2026, 12:45 p.m. ET
The article has been updated with additional information about the surviving crew member who was located.

Update: April 3, 2026, 2:58 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with news of a second U.S. military plane that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz.

The post Iran Shoots Down F-15 Fighter Jet After Trump Bragged They Had No Capability appeared first on The Intercept.

Ten years after the Brexit vote, Trump’s disdain and insults are fuelling the belief that the UK should renew ties with Europe

Going anywhere nice this summer?

No, me neither, judging by the warning from the Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, that a global shortage of jet fuel caused by the Iran war may soon lead to cancelled flights. Suddenly a week in Cornwall looks a safer bet, though even that will be a stretch for some families as the cost of long car journeys heads through the roof. When the representatives of more than 40 countries held talks in London earlier this week to discuss unblocking the strait of Hormuz, they convened virtually, not in person. This is no time to be seen boarding a private jet.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here

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.

The price of silver saw major swings in the first quarter of 2026. Here's everything investors need to know now.

The move, described by the communist government as a “humanitarian and sovereign gesture,” comes as the U.S. enforces a crippling oil blockade on the island.

April 3, 2026 — With its unparalleled infrastructure and extensive expertise, Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is at the forefront of harnessing the full potential of key technologies.

Graphic of the FZJ stand at HANNOVER MESSE 2026. The CUPITER AI demonstrator will be expanded at the stand to include three themed zones focusing on future computing, energy and Jülich’s research infrastructures. Image credit: Martin Sinken / GROSSE8 visuelle Kommunikation GmbH & Co.KG.

At HANNOVER MESSE 2026 from April 20 to 24, Forschungszentrum Jülich will showcase current projects, start-ups, and exhibits in the fields of artificial intelligence, high performance computing (HPC), research infrastructures, and sustainable energy systems.

Discover AI with CUPITER

The centerpiece of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s exhibition stand is the AI demonstrator CUPITER. This interactive exhibit brings to life key research topics at Forschungszentrum Jülich in the context of artificial intelligence. Many of these data- and computation-intensive applications are made possible by high-performance infrastructures such as JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, which is based at Forschungszentrum Jülich. CUPITER is complemented by three themed zones focusing on future computing, energy, and research infrastructures. Here, researchers will present current projects and opportunities for collaboration.

Experts on Stage

In addition to its stand, Forschungszentrum Jülich also features in the HANNOVER MESSE conference program. Chair of the Board of Directors Prof. Dr. Astrid Lambrecht is a speaker on the panel discussing the topic of “Quantum technologies for the sovereignty and competitiveness of the European industry”. The speakers from science, industry, and politics will take a look at how quantum technologies can be brought from research to application more quickly as well as the steps required to strengthen Europe’s technological competitiveness.

Where Innovation and Collaboration Convene

HANNOVER MESSE is the most important trade fair in the world and a key platform for future technologies. Forschungszentrum Jülich will use this occasion to strengthen its role as an experienced and reliable partner for business and industry, expanding collaborations and advancing the practical application or research results.

Visitors will find Forschungszentrum Jülich in Hall 11, Stand B22.

For an overview of FZJ projects and start-ups, general information about the exhibition, , and the FZJ stand, click here.

Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich

The post Jülich Takes AI, Energy, and Research Infrastructures to HANNOVER MESSE 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

Effort to curb grade inflation, by limiting top marks to 20% of students in a course, is opposed by most students

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Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a faculty committee proposal to cap the number of A grades per course in an effort to curb grade inflation.

The proposal, which was first reported earlier this year by the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, would cap A grades to 20% of students in a course, with an allowance for four additional As. It also would introduce a new internal “average percentile rank” system, which would rely on raw scores rather than grade point average (GPA) to determine honors and awards.

If debt collectors can sue but can't collect, you may have more leverage than you think. Here's how to tell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Perplexity's AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users' knowledge or consent. "This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up for a Perplexity account," the lawsuit alleged, while stressing that "enormous volumes of sensitive information from both subscribed and non-subscribed users" are shared. Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with "a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google." Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity's "Incognito Mode." That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a "sham." "'Incognito' mode does nothing to protect users from having their conversations shared with Meta and Google," the complaint said. "Even paid users who turned on the 'Incognito' feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them." "Perplexity's failure to inform its users that their personal information has been disclosed to Meta and Google or to take any steps to halt the continued disclosure of users' information is malicious, oppressive, and in reckless disregard" of users' rights, the lawsuit alleged. "Nothing on Perplexity's website warns users that their conversations with its AI Machine will be shared with Meta and Google," Doe alleged. "Much less does Perplexity warn subscribed users that its 'Incognito Mode' does not function to protect users' private conversations from disclosure to companies like Meta and Google."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Golfer has pled not guilty to DUI charges in Florida

• Footage shows Woods’s shock: ‘I’m being arrested?’

• Hydrocodone pills found in pocket following arrest

Bodycam footage of Tiger Woods’s arrest for DUI shows the golfer looking surprised when he was handcuffed by police officers at the scene of a vehicle crash last week and telling a deputy he had spoken to “the president” on the phone after the incident.

“I do believe your normal faculties are impaired, and you’re under an unknown substance, so at this time you’re under arrest for DUI,” Martin County Sheriff’s deputy Tatiana Levenar told Woods after officers conducted a series of field sobriety exercises on the 50-year-old.

Bruce Blakeman, a Long Island Republican running for governor, said his actions as Nassau County executive have "made" Nassau County the safest county in America. 

In a recent Instagram post, Blakeman wrote, "As Nassau County Executive, I hired 600 new law enforcement officers and made Nassau the safest county in America." His website says he "turned Nassau County into the #1 safest county in America." Blakeman has touted what he calls his "no-nonsense" approach to fighting crime in his  statewide campaign to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Blakeman, who defeated Democratic incumbent Laura Curran in 2021 and assumed office in 2022, bases his "safest county" claim on a U.S. News and World Report designation. The media outlet periodically publishes a list ranking counties on crime, injuries and public safety capacity. Nassau County, home to 1.4 million people, was named the safest county in 2022 and 2024, during his tenure. 

But it was also named the safest county under Curran in 2020 and 2021. 

We checked Blakeman’s claim that he hired 600 new "law enforcement officers." 

Blakeman’s spokesperson provided PolitiFact with a list of 638 new hires across seven job titles during Blakeman’s tenure in the police, corrections, probation, and fire departments. They include: 396 police officers, 178 correction officers, 16 deputy sheriffs, 24 fire marshals and marshal trainees, and 24 probation officers and trainees. 

We asked whether the new employees replaced retirees but did not receive a response.

The Nassau County comptroller keeps records of each filled position, through 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, the records show increases in total department employment in  police (111 positions), fire (40 positions), corrections (110 positions), and probation (34 positions), for a total of 295 new positions. But from 2022, Blakeman's first year, to 2025, there’s a loss of 396 positions in the police department and a loss of five positions in corrections.   

There is no evidence of 600 new "law enforcement officers." 

The number of jobs in some categories went up, but fell in others, according to the data, which does not include hires in 2026. The number of police officers decreased overall. There were 1,937 police officers in 2021. The number increased to 2,193 in 2022, but fell to 1,932 in 2025. The number of police detectives and sergeants increased by five and 15, respectively from 2021. But the number of police lieutenants and sergeant-detectives decreased by 19 and six, respectively. There were 34 more corrections officers and 26 more corrections corporals. There were also 11 more deputy sheriffs in 2025 than in 2021. 

To give this claim context, we looked at crime statistics in Nassau County. There are seven index crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. The rate of index crimes increased by 28% from 2021, just before Blakeman took office, to 2024, according to the most recent data available.

The rate of violent crimes went up by 18% since 2021, and the rate of property crimes increased by 29%. Since 2022, the murder rate has steadily increased, while the murder rate statewide has decreased. Still, Nassau’s murder rate in 2024 was one-third the rate of the entire state. The rate of all index crime in Nassau has fallen by 13% between 2022, Blakeman’s first year in office, and 2024, while the rate of all violent crime has remained flat. Historic fluctuations in the rate for all index crimes Nassau are similar to fluctuations statewide. However, statewide rates are higher, and since 2022, the statewide rate has fallen by just .6%, much less than Nassau's drop of 13%. 

Our ruling

If Blakeman had said he kept Nassau County the "safest county" in America, or that he hired 638 additional law enforcement officers, the ruling would be favorable toward him.

But that is not what he said as he presses his case on the campaign trail.

His office claims 638 new hires in public safety, but many appear to be filling positions of people who left or retired. 

And the county employs fewer police officers than when he took office, according to 2025 data.

Indeed, Nassau County earned the "safest county" designation under Blakeman’s watch. But Nassau County had that designation in the two years before he took office, so his predecessor had those bragging rights, too. 

His statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate this claim Mostly False. 

St. Bonaventure University students Conor Amendola and Ryan Lombardi contributed to this report. 

Your robot vacuum isn't broken; you may be hurting its performance. CNET spoke with experts to learn simple fixes for getting your bot back to peak cleaning condition.

Petrol has risen 19% and diesel 35%, while in England the north has had the sharpest increases

Fuel prices have risen faster in Northern Ireland than in any other UK region since the beginning of the Iran war.

Analysis of official data shows petrol has jumped by 19% in Northern Ireland since the end of February, and diesel is now 35% more expensive. The rises are among the largest in Europe.

The telco’s sweeping price changes and the closure of its cheaper ‘starter’ plan risk putting off many of its loyal customers

Telstra has long traded on its claim to have better – and far more expansive – mobile coverage than its rivals to justify a steep pricing premium that has accelerated in recent years.

But the telco’s latest changes, which include steep price hikes and the closure of its cheaper “starter” plan to new users, combined with a dramatic rejection of its coverage claims by the industry regulator, risk putting off many of its traditional customers, according to consumer advocates.

The interest-earning potential of a $25,000 2-year CD is sizable, but it's not the only savings account to consider.

Proposal, a win for RFK Jr’s Maha movement, is a ‘first step’ toward tackling plastic pollution, advocates say

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed on Thursday to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals on a list of contaminants in drinking water for the first time, a step that could lead to new limits on those substances for water utilities.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency was responding to Americans who have worried about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water. The gesture also aims to hand a win to health secretary Robert FKennedy Jr’s Maha movement, which for months has pressured Zeldin to further crack down on environmental contaminants.

NASUWT says full entitlement should be increased to 26 weeks and paternity pay also improved

Full maternity pay for teachers across the UK should be increased to 26 weeks to help stem the exodus of women in their 30s from classrooms, a union leader has said.

Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the NASUWT teachers’ union, said it was a “national scandal” that so many teachers who quit said inadequate maternity support was one of the reasons.

The 62-year-old was arrested for wearing a penis costume to an Alabama No Kings protest — then prosecutors doubled down.

Looking to buy a home or refinance your current one now? These are the mortgage interest rates you'll need to know.

Alan Turing Institute told by funder to offer better strategy and more value for money after board was reminded of legal duties by watchdog

The UK’s leading AI research institute has been told to make “significant” changes by its main source of taxpayer funding.

The Guardian revealed last week that the board of the Alan Turing Institute was reminded of its legal duties by the charity watchdog after a whistleblower complaint.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 3, 2026 — CavilinQ, a quantum hardware startup, has announced it has raised $8.8 million in seed funding to develop the interconnect hardware necessary to scale quantum computers beyond today’s single-processor limits. The round was led by QVT, with participation from Safar Partners, MFV Partners, Serendipity Capital, and Harper Court Ventures.

From left: Brandon Grinkemeyer, Co-Founder, CTO; and Shankar Menon, Co-Founder, CEO. Credit: CavilinQ.

The quantum industry has reached exciting milestones by performing verifiable calculations that challenge classical supercomputers. However, achieving broad, reliable real-world impact remains limited by the scaling challenge. To address this, CavilinQ is developing cavity-enhanced photonic links that enable individual quantum processors to operate together as modular, high-performance clusters.

“While we’ve seen impressive demonstrations of quantum utility on specialized tasks, solving real-world problems has been limited by the physical limits of current isolated processors,” said Shankar G. Menon, CEO of CavilinQ. “We are building the interconnects that unify isolated processors into one distributed processor, providing the infrastructure to make large-scale, fault-tolerant computing a reality.”

The company’s approach leverages high-fidelity light-matter interfaces, a field pioneered by its scientific co-founders Mikhail Lukin (Harvard University) and Hannes Bernien (University of Chicago / University of Innsbruck). While the technology is platform agnostic, CavilinQ will initially demonstrate integration with neutral atom quantum processors, a leading modality for large-scale quantum processing.

“With recent advances toward full-scale, fault-tolerant quantum processors, networking has become an increasingly important priority,” said Arthur Chu, Managing Partner at QVT. “We believe that CavilinQ’s technology will support multiple orders of magnitude increases in networking speed compared to other quantum networking technologies.”

The seed funding will support the establishment of a specialized laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the expansion of a team, and the demonstration of key technology milestones.

“Even classical computing as we know it is built on the premise that processors are more powerful connected than isolated,” said Brandon Grinkemeyer, CTO of CavilinQ. “Quantum computing will be no different, and every path to meaningful scale will require a modular architecture. We have the right team and the right technology to push quantum computing to utility scale.”

Visit the CavilinQ website for more information.

Source: CavilinQ

The post CavilinQ Secures $8.8M Seed Round to Develop Quantum Interconnects for Scalable Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

International law experts ‘seriously concerned’ about ‘strikes on schools, health centres and homes’ in contravention of Geneva conventions

Donald Trump, other senior US officials and their cheerleaders appear to be embracing attacks – and threats of attacks – on Iranian civilian infrastructure, which legal experts say appears to constitute serious war crimes under international law.

In a rambling national address on Wednesday, the US president warned that if Iran did not reach an unspecified deal with him, US forces would “hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants” and “bring [Iran] back to the stone ages – where they belong”.

Decisions on the White House ballroom, public media and journalists’ access to the Pentagon are heartening. But restoring our institutions is up to us

In another one of those strange and unprecedented moments of the Trump years, the president of the United States showed up at the supreme court the other day. No other presidents have done so, probably because they – to varying degrees – respected the separation of power among the three branches of US government.

But Trump has not shown himself to share in that basic principle.

Shop around, coast downhill, band together – drivers tell of how they’re dealing with the costliest gas in the US

Jack Nooney has pretty much made peace with the traffic since moving to Los Angeles five years ago, but recent soaring gas prices have certainly added another layer of insult to his daily commute. The musician and full-time grocery deli employee drives from his San Fernando Valley apartment to Santa Monica daily. While it’s just nine miles each way, with LA traffic that often equates to a whole gas-burning hour.

Nooney, who makes $20/hour, says it’s become glaringly clear that fuel costs will eat up more of his already tight budget. Angelenos are now paying on average nearly $5.90 a gallon – and some stations are charging a shocking $8 a gallon. The outsized prices are directly related to the Iran war, which has created the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, according to the International Energy Agency.

Research for TUC analyses link between job quality and economic inactivity, as UK youth unemployment rises

Young people in the UK are more likely to leave their job for health reasons and become economically inactive when they work in insecure, low-paid sectors, a study has found.

Research carried out for the Trades Union Congress by the consultancy Timewise charts a connection between the jobs young people are most likely to do – in hospitality, retail and care, for example – and the proportion of people leaving because of ill health.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 3, 2026 — COMPUTEX 2026 will take place from June 2 to June 5 at Taipei World Trade Center Hall 1 and Nangang Exhibition Center Halls 1 and 2. TAITRA, the co-organizer, is proud to announce that Cisco, a global leader in networking and computing, will join the COMPUTEX Keynote lineup for the first time. Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President, will deliver a keynote address on June 1, sharing how a full-stack approach can help organizations transform AI from a concept into a mission-critical reality.

Cisco Makes Its Debut at COMPUTEX Keynote: SVP Jeremy Foster to Unveil “A Full Stack Approach to AI”

In this keynote, Jeremy Foster will discuss “A Full Stack Approach to AI.” He will share insights on how Cisco is helping organizations move AI from proof-of-concept to mission-critical deployment, where the challenge shifts from accessing compute to effectively utilizing it. In an environment demanding greater performance, density, and efficiency, he will discuss how a secure, full-stack approach from the data center to the edge enables higher throughput, faster deployment, and more efficient resource utilization. Additionally, he will provide perspectives on building production-ready architectures that deliver predictable, measurable performance while reducing operational risk and complexity at scale.

Global Tech Leaders Gather at COMPUTEX 2026 – Registration Open in mid-April

In addition to Cisco’s debut appearance, global technology leaders including Qualcomm, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, and NXP will explore the future of AI.

Meanwhile, early-bird registration for the COMPUTEX Forum is now available. Those who purchase tickets by April 20 will gain access to all 29 forum sessions with a single pass and have the opportunity to enter an exclusive early-bird drawing to win an AI laptop.

COMPUTEX 2026, themed “AI Together,” is scheduled to take place from June 2 to June 5 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Halls 1 & 2 and Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC). This year’s event features a grand scale, expecting to host 1,500 exhibitors across 6,000 booths, focusing on three core pillars: AI & Computing, Robotics & Mobility, and Next-Gen Tech.

Cisco Keynote details:

• Date & Time: Monday, June 1, 2026 | 15:00 – 15:45 (TST)
• Venue: 7F, TaiNEX 2

For more exhibition information:

• COMPUTEX: www.computextaipei.com.tw/en/index.html
• InnoVEX: www.innovex.com.tw

More from HPCwire

• Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to Deliver Keynote at COMPUTEX 2026
• COMPUTEX 2026 Brings the Global AI Ecosystem to Taipei
• COMPUTEX Forum 2026 Opens for Registration
• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to Kick Off COMPUTEX 2026 with Opening Keynote

About COMPUTEX

COMPUTEX was founded in 1981. It has grown with the global ICT industry and become stronger over the last four decades. Bearing witness to historical moments in the development of and changes in the industry, COMPUTEX attracts more than 40,000 buyers to visit Taiwan every year. It is also the preferred platform chosen by top international companies for launching epoch-making products. Taiwan has a comprehensive global ICT industry chain. Gaining a foothold in Taiwan, COMPUTEX is jointly held by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, aiming to build a global tech ecosystem. COMPUTEX has become a global benchmark exhibition for AI and startups, connecting global pioneers and enabling new sparks of breakthrough technology.

Source: COMPUTEX

The post Cisco Joins COMPUTEX 2026 Keynote Lineup with Focus on Full-Stack AI appeared first on HPCwire.

The eye drops — sold under multiple brands — have been recalled over concerns about sterility, according to the FDA.

We ran the numbers to find which meal kit service offers the most value for your money compared to grocery store prices.

Employers added 178,000 new jobs in March and unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, ahead of economists’ predictions

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The US labor market picked up in March as employers showed signs of resilience amid the US-Israel war in Iran.

After an extraordinary contraction in February, employers added 178,000 jobs last month, ahead of economists’ expectations of about 70,000.

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem only two cabinet members to be fired despite string of scandals facing male officials. Plus, why New Yorkers are swapping gas for induction stoves

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Good morning.

Donald Trump has been accused of running a “misogynistic administration” after Pam Bondi became the second woman to be fired from a cabinet already dominated by men.

Who will replace Bondi? Trump said Todd Blanche, her deputy, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.

How badly has Iran been affected? At least 1,900 people have been killed and 20,000 injured in Iran since the start of the war, according to a rough estimate by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

As casualties mount, those who share a home state with the deceased in Iowa, Kentucky or Ohio question war’s legality

Upon the headstones at the Dayton National Cemetery in south-west Ohio are the names of the numerous wars fallen soldiers buried here have fought in: Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

At the center of this sprawling, manicured cemetery for veterans and service members, ground staff and three machines this week have cleared space for a new grave site. It will be the place where one of the first victims of a new US conflict – the 2026 war on Iran – will be laid to rest on Friday.

Enjoy all the best savings without having to put in any of the work.

Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane was lured to a Dallas studio for a meeting, then allegedly kidnapped and robbed by a group including rappers Pooh Shiesty and Big30.

A key senator is demanding the TSA reverse its decision to let travelers keep their shoes on while passing through airport screening, a controversial policy at the center of a classified security warning.

Nearly a year after her husband Harold Allen died, Marsha Allen's Indiana home was burglarized. The burglar alleged her daughter, Ashley Jones, was behind it all.

The Cuban government says it has pardoned and released 2,010 prisoners, a sweeping move that comes as the island nation grapples with pressure from the Trump administration.

Some Trump aides and supporters cloak the war on Iran in religious terms, but the Chicago-born pope said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

CNET reporters look back on how Apple shaped our childhood, and what it was like covering the tech giant.

You don't need a fancy fix to reduce reliance on your device. Your iPhone has built-in settings to find calm again.

Decision came after hearing in which Subramanyam Vedam, 64, said he didn’t kill Thomas Kinser when he was 19

A judge has cleared the way for the potential release of an Indian citizen who was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody last year after his Pennsylvania murder conviction was overturned following four decades in prison.

The decision came the day after the four-hour hearing in which Subramanyam Vedam insisted he did not fatally shoot Thomas Kinser in 1980 and was questioned by a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyer. Vedam participated in the hearing remotely from the Moshannon Valley processing center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania.

Re:Zero, One Piece and Classroom of the Elite? Better sign up for your subscriptions.

For this year’s Formula Student competition, the UK’s most prestigious university team are designing the fastest race car possible

At the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, more than 100 students are busy building the fastest, best designed race car possible for this year’s Formula Student competition.

Oxford Brookes Racing (OBR) is the UK’s most prestigious Formula Student team. They’ve won more design awards than any UK university, and frequently occupy the international race’s top spots.

Pentagon announces Randy George retiring from role as US army chief of staff, ‘effective immediately’

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Randy George, the US army’s top officer, is stepping down from his role after the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, reportedly requested that he retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that George, who had been serving as the army’s 41st chief of staff, was retiring.

“General Randy A George will be retiring from his position as the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army effective immediately. The Department of War is grateful for General George’s decades of service to our nation. We wish him well in his retirement,” the Pentagon chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement shared on social media.

U.S. immigration authorities followed "clues" shared by China's narcotics control commission to repatriate the fugitive, Beijing's public security ministry said.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Energy experts and lawmakers are scrambling to ensure reliability for Delaware’s electric grid, and some downstate Republicans have pointed to NRG Energy’s Indian River Power Plant as a site that could be part of the solution.

The Indian River Power Plant shut down the last coal-fired energy generators in Delaware a year ago, but the hulking industrial site near Millsboro has emerged at the center of a debate over whether it could factor into the state’s energy future.

As new, high-demand energy users like hyper-scale data centers seek to soak up more electricity while aging infrastructure raises concerns about future power grid reliability, energy experts and elected officials alike are brainstorming ways to meet future demand in a region of declining energy supply.

Inside Legislative Hall, lawmakers have debated the promise of offshore wind, solar farms and even modular nuclear reactors as potential energy generation solutions. 

But in recent months, Republicans have repeatedly pointed toward NRG Energy’s now-retired power plant as a potential solution to Delaware’s growing energy woes.

The Indian River plant was Delaware’s only generator of power used to meet everyday demand, known as baseload electricity, until it went offline in February 2025. Whether it could once again become a backbone of Delaware’s energy needs is a question of investment and best uses.

Why did Indian River close?

In regulatory filings, NRG blamed economics rather than politics or regulations for the need to close the Indian River power plant, noting that it had incurred financial losses for two consecutive years.

In June 2021, the company announced that it would close three different coal-fired power plants after revenue from the springtime energy auction dropped below $50 a megawatt per day, or a decline of more than 60% from the prior year.

That came at a time of great excess in energy supply when new natural gas-fired plants and renewable energy resources like solar and wind were pushing down costs for now comparatively small energy demands coming out of the COVID pandemic. This was also a time before the current rush to build hyper-scale data centers.

Coal is also a more expensive energy source, from the raw material to operation of the plant and disposal of the coal ash produced in its waste to implementation of scrubbers to reduce air pollution. By operating a coal-fired plant rather than building more efficient plants running on cheaper inputs, NRG was effectively cutting into its revenues – so it pulled the plug.

J. Scott Holladay, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tennessee who is familiar with the Indian River plant, said the demise of coal plants is simple economics. 

“On the fuel side, it’s hard to imagine coal competing in the current environment,” he said. “It’s not so much that [coal has] gone up in cost, but that the cost of everything else has gone down.”

The power plant included four generating units, each made up of large pieces of industrial equipment that once burned coal to generate electricity. 

Burning coal first created steam. That steam then powered turbines that would spin to generate electricity. It was a less efficient process than modern-day natural gas plants, which act like massive jet engines and no longer rely on steam as a middle man, or solar panels that convert solar energy into useful electrons.

The first two 80-megawatt coal-fired units at the plant went online in the late 1950s, followed by a third 165-megawatt unit in 1970 and a fourth 440-megawatt unit in 1980. 

The first three units shut down in the 2010s. The final, most-modern unit shut down in February 2025 after more than four decades in operation.

And while Holladay said it would be unlikely for NRG’s southern Delaware power plant to come back online using coal, he did not rule out the possibility of its resurrection entirely.

“The thing that could save Indian River, and maybe other older plants, is big increases in electricity demand, driven by AI load,” he said.

Would NRG bring it back online?

A spokesperson for NRG Energy declined to comment on future plans for Indian River, saying they currently are “undetermined.” 

But the spokesperson, Erik Linden, told Spotlight Delaware restarting the Indian River Power Plant in its original capacity — as a coal-fired operation — is not on the table. The company has no plans to restart any coal units at the facility, he said.

A small, 16-megawatt oil-burning plant remains active at the site as a “peakload” generator, which kicks on only in times of great energy demands. But even that unit is slated for decommissioning this June.

The power plant site spans nearly 1,200 acres, and it once had a total generation capacity of 780 megawatts. That wattage would have supplied just more than half the power demanded by the proposed, hyper-scale Delaware City data center.

Why is the site a talking point?

According to a recent report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which compiles data from different regional energy transmission authorities including the PJM Interconnection which serves Delaware, future projections show that energy demand will increase while supply decreases.

That is due, in part, to power plants — including the Indian River Power Plant — shutting down while high-energy users, like large-scale data centers, plan to come online.

Republican lawmakers in Dover have wondered if restarting operations at the facility could help close the gap.

State Sen. Bryant Richardson (R-Seaford) has publicly pointed to the site as “an ideal location” for a small nuclear modular reactor, while Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View) and Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown) “are actively working with stakeholders” to figure out the plant’s future. 

Pettyjohn told Spotlight Delaware that he and Hocker plan to meet with NRG officials during the General Assembly’s spring break with the goal of making Indian River a natural gas plant.

According to the National Pipeline Mapping System, the nearest natural gas transmission line is more than 2 miles away on U.S. Route 113. That means that extending service to the Indian River plant would likely cost $10 million or more, based on industry averages of recent projects.

Who would cover that cost and whether Delaware would incentivize it remain open questions about such a solution.

Then there’s the question of whether NRG would invest in new natural gas turbines at the Indian River plant, because they couldn’t just convert the old coal turbines. That investment would likely cost tens of millions of dollars per turbine, and those costs have been rising quickly in recent years as demand for the equipment has risen too.

But Holladay, who specializes in environmental and energy economics, said he is seeing “a lot of cases” of retiring coal plants converting to natural gas.

In Delaware, NRG has already proven that it can be successful.

More than a decade ago, it converted a unit at its Dover Energy Center from coal to combined-cycle natural gas, which captures both the combustion and heat from burning natural gas to spin two different turbines. The Dover plant was hailed as evidence of smart business as well as being environmentally friendly, as it removed significant sums of air pollutants that came from burning coal.

The Markell administration also incentivized that conversion project with a $500,000 grant from the state’s Energy Efficiency Investment Fund.

And while future plans for Indian River remain unclear, Holladay said the site could be ripe for conversion.

The Delmarva peninsula in particular, he said, is a “more isolated” part of the larger PJM electric grid. There are not many electric or natural gas interconnections on the peninsula, but since that access is integral to power plants, the existence of any such infrastructure at the NRG site would be its most valuable asset.

“It’s ruinously difficult to get access to the electricity grid,” he said.

He called the idea of using the Indian River site to house modular nuclear reactors, however, “far-fetched.”

“It’s really hard to justify building a nuclear plant in a floodplain with an unproven technology relative to the other options they have,” Holladay said.

What about offshore wind?

The Indian River site has been in the news more lately because of its proximity to a planned interconnection for the U.S. Wind offshore wind farm that has been hamstrung by lawsuits and opposition by the Trump administration.

The site’s decades-long run as a power plant is exactly what made it so attractive as a place for offshore wind farms to connect to the grid.

“That, to me, is the most valuable asset that Indian River has,” Holladay said.

In fact, NRG was among the first companies interested in offshore wind development along Delaware’s coast. In 2009, NRG Energy acquired Bluewater Wind, an offshore wind developer that sought to build a project that could have produced up to 200 megawatts of electricity. That project was ultimately abandoned.

A substation site on former power plant land along the Indian River has also been identified as the proposed point of interconnection for a different offshore wind project, the 121-turbine US Wind farm that is slated to be built about 10 miles off the Delmarva coast. That project has been embroiled in litigation and efforts from the Trump administration to halt all American offshore wind efforts.

Considering coastal risks

The Indian River Power Plant site is close to integral power grid infrastructure, but it also is directly in the path of rising tides, as Holladay noted.

According to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) flood planning tool, much of the Indian River Power Plant sits directly in a flood zone. Its highest points are no more than 30 feet above sea level. 

A recent study published by the nonprofit Climate Central and scientists at the University of California estimates some industrial sites pose additional hazards to nearby vulnerable communities as climate change continues to accelerate rising sea levels and exacerbate weather events like coastal storms. 

According to Climate Central’s data, the Indian River plant is expected to experience about four flood events annually by mid-century, making it one of the most at-risk industrial sites in the state.

Increased flood risks also mean toxic coal ash storage pits are likely to face future inundation as well. While such toxic waste disposal sites are typically capped and lined to prevent environmental impacts, adding salty water to the mix could test those barriers, Holladay said.

“Flooding concerns would be a big deal, potentially,” he said.

For years, environmentalists have warned that power plant waste landfilled along the river’s edges has already released hazardous chemicals and metals into the nearby waterways and groundwater.

DNREC said in an email, however, that landfills at the site are “in good standing” when it comes to permitting and maintenance.

In 2019, the Environmental Integrity Project released a study about contamination linked to coal-fired power plants across the country, citing problems with coal ash contaminant levels detected specifically at the Indian River site. According to the report, data indicated unsafe levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in area water sources.

The post Could the Indian River power plant be restarted?  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

I spent several weeks testing the re-released Teforia smart tea infuser to see if it's a modern kitchen must-have for tea drinkers.

Whatever flavor of sci-fi you're into, Netflix has you covered.

St Michael’s Mount and the people who live near it are still healing from the scars left by storm’s 100mph winds

Three months after Storm Goretti battered St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, the signs of the storm’s power are still evident in the scars left by uprooted trees, piles of logs and the shaking of heads from islanders who have lived there for decades and never seen the like.

“It really was something,” said Jack Beesley, a senior gardener. “We were shocked the morning after when we saw what had happened. We had been caring for these trees for years and to see so many of them down was very sad. We’ve worked hard to get the place ready for the Easter visitors but it will still be a month or more until we’re back straight.”

Country is torn between those who hope for end to Tehran’s influence and those loyal to Islamic republic

Of all the countries being pulled into the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is Iraq – a country that still bears the emotional and physical scars of the last time the Americans tried to reshape the region by force – where the conflict has exposed some of the deepest rifts.

The war is dividing those who see the attacks on Iran as a way to end Tehran’s longstanding influence over Iraqi politics from the self-declared loyalists of the Islamic republic, and cutting through state institutions, armed forces and Shia Islamist parties.

Some of these word and puizzle games are more casual, while others can be pretty difficult.

The following is the full transcript of the interview with Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services U.S.A. a portion of which will air on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on April 5, 2026. The interview was taped on April 2, 2026.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, told CBS' Ed O'Keefe that the war is likely not justified under the Just War Theory.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: CU Boulder researchers are reporting that they have discovered an appetite-suppressing compound in python blood that helps the snakes consume enormous meals and go months without eating yet remain metabolically healthy. The findings were published in the journal Natural Metabolism on March 19, 2026. Pythons can grow as big as a telephone pole, swallow an antelope whole, and go months or even years without eating -- all while maintaining a healthy heart and plenty of muscle mass. In the hours after they eat, research has shown, their heart expands 25% and their metabolism speeds up 4,000-fold to help them digest their meal. The team measured blood samples from ball pythons and Burmese pythons, fed once every 28 days, immediately after they ate a meal. In all, they found 208 metabolites that increased significantly after the pythons ate. One molecule, called para-tyramine-O-sulfate (pTOS) soared 1,000-fold. Further studies, done with Baylor University researchers, showed that when they gave high doses of pTOS to obese or lean mice, it acted on the hypothalamus, the appetite center of the brain, prompting weight loss without causing gastrointestinal problems, muscle loss or declines in energy. The study found that pTOS, which is produced by the snake's gut bacteria, is not present in mice naturally. It is present in human urine at low levels and does increase somewhat after a meal. But because most research is done in mice or rats, pTOS has been overlooked. "We've basically discovered an appetite suppressant that works in mice without some of the side-effects that GLP-1 drugs have," said senior author Leslie Leinwand, a distinguished professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology who has been studying pythons in her lab for two decades. Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy act on the hormone glucagon-like petide-1 (GLP-1).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bondi and Kristi Noem the only two cabinet members to be removed despite string of scandals involving male officials

Donald Trump has been accused of running a “misogynistic administration” after making Pam Bondi the second woman to be fired from a cabinet already dominated by men.

The US president dismissed the attorney general on Thursday amid mounting frustration with her performance, especially over the release of files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Biggest rises were in vegetable oil and sugar prices, which increased by 5% and 7% respectively

• Visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade

Food prices rose sharply in March as war in the Middle East drove up energy prices and freight costs around the world, a UN report says.

An index of food commodity prices by the UN’s food and agriculture organisation increased by 2.4% in March, its second consecutive monthly rise.

Starmer should just admit we’re being held to ransom by Trump – but instead he’s making the king go on a state visit

Donald Trump has suggested that the war with Iran will be over in two to three weeks. The rest of the world just shrugs. We’ll believe it when we see it. The US president has said so many contradictory things over the past few weeks, it’s hard to take anything that seriously.

Ethan Dietz died on Nov. 25 after being hit in the head during a basketball game in Texas three days earlier.

Min Aung Hlaing seized control five years ago and plunged Myanmar into conflict and economic chaos

Min Aung Hlaing, the military general who plunged Myanmar into conflict and economic chaos when he took power in the 2021 coup has been appointed president, months after widely condemned sham elections.

Min Aung Hlaing, who is wanted by the prosecutor of the international criminal court for crimes against humanity against the Rohingya Muslim minority, was voted president by lawmakers on Friday. Myanmar’s parliament is dominated by the pro-military party, which won a landslide in one-sided elections earlier this year.

Ibrahim Traoré, who took power in 2022 coup, tells state broadcaster ‘we must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us’

People in Burkina Faso should forget about democracy as it is “not for us”, the military president, Ibrahim Traoré, told the country’s state broadcaster.

Traoré took power in a coup in September 2022, toppling another junta that had taken power just nine months earlier. He has since stifled opposition and in January banned political parties outright.

Brady Ebert, a former member of the Grammy-winning US hardcore band, allegedly hit the father of Brendan Yates with his car

Brady Ebert, the former guitarist of the Grammy-winning US hardcore band Turnstile, has been charged with attempted second-degree murder after allegedly hitting the father of the band’s frontman, Brendan Yates, with his car.

On 29 March, police found William Yates outside his home with “trauma to his lower extremities”, with a broken bone protruding from his leg, according to the Baltimore Banner.

Footage shows US president saying UK ‘should be our best’ ally and accusing PM of prevarication over sending ships

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Footage has emerged of Donald Trump mocking Keir Starmer by claiming the prime minister said he would have to consult his team before deciding whether to send UK aircraft carriers to the Middle East.

In a new low for UK-US relations, Trump appeared to impersonate Starmer during an Easter lunch speech at the White House.

Hachette scraps the US release of Mia Ballard's Shy Girl after multiple allegations of AI-generated content.

As Trump suggests Middle East oil disruption is not his problem, experts say talk of US ‘energy independence’ is a smokescreen – with consumers paying the price

A month has passed since the US and Israel’s war on Iran all but closed the strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies typically flow. Prices have surged, amid fears of sustained disruption to global supplies.

Donald Trump argues this is not his country’s problem. “Go get your own oil!” the president urged countries, including the UK, earlier this week. The US has “plenty”, he added. The US is “totally independent” of the Middle East, the president claimed in a prime-time address on Wednesday. “We don’t need their oil.”

It's a dazzling and heavy-duty (emphasis on "heavy") showcase of laptop technology for deep-pocketed gamers.

Experts don't expect military action soon. But actual regime change is complicated.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen’s absence from recent city meetings, which some council members say they were not notified about, has resulted in questions about whether he should be removed from office. His absence also comes as city council faces its latest in a string of recent hurdles.

Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen’s absence from city meetings over the past month, amid controversy over a homeless shelter in the city and the ousting of the city manager, has raised eyebrows in the capital city. 

Both residents and city council members expressed concerns that Christiansen’s prolonged absence violated the city charter — justifying his removal from office. But Christiansen rebuffed the claims of his wrongdoing, and a Spotlight Delaware review of city code revealed stipulations in the policy that could support the mayor’s claims.

Christiansen last attended a city council meeting on Jan. 12. He was not present for the three subsequent meetings on Feb. 25, March 9 and March 23. 

This three-meeting absence is what critics say is cause for Christiansen’s removal. According to the city charter, the mayor forfeits his office if he “fails to attend three consecutive regular meetings of the council without being excused by the council.” 

But Christiansen said his absences were, in fact, excused. He contracted the flu in late February, he said, which turned into other illnesses and forced him to spend more than a week in the hospital. 

Christiansen said he disclosed this information to City Council President Fred Neil, excusing his three absences. He declined to provide more details, but Neil confirmed he had been in communication with the mayor about reasons for missing recent meetings.

Still, Christiansen said, he continued performing his duties from the hospital, like maintaining regular communication with Police Chief Thomas Johnson, so there was no need for him to temporarily give the mayorship to someone else.

During Christiansen’s absence, Neil took over some public duties for him, like presenting a tribute to the family of the late former City Council member William Hare, and welcoming a group of foreign students to the state capital, Neil said. 

While some city council members have raised alarms that they were not informed about the circumstances of the mayor’s absence, Christiansen and Neil said they handled the situation in line with city rules.

Neil wrote in an email to Spotlight Delaware, on which Gov. Matt Meyer was copied, that he communicated with Christiansen’s assistant that he would be available “should an emergency occur,” while the mayor was in the hospital. 

A mayor’s scolding 

Christiansen has used the attention surrounding his illness as a chance to comment on what he described as city council’s “drama and lack of professionalism” in recent months. 

He has taken issue with both members of the public coming to meetings to comment on “speculations and untruths,” and some of the shouting and finger-pointing he has heard among council members. 

“I’m from the old school,” Christiansen said. “I got elected to council in 1983. Never have I seen the public’s business put aside and handled so willy nilly.”

Christiansen plans to sit in the audience, instead of on the dais with other city leaders, at the next city council meeting on April 13 — his first in roughly two months. 

The mayor does not vote on matters that come before city council, but he is able to veto ordinances after they are passed — a power Christiansen said he “won’t hesitate to use” going forward. 

Months of turbulence

Since last fall, Dover city council has faced a slew of controversies.

Beginning with resident and police officer concerns about Police Chief Thomas Johnson’s leadership, city leaders then faced months of internal divisions and community pushback over a proposed anti-panhandling ordinance. More recently, one of the city’s few homeless shelters has been the subject of council scrutiny after nearby residents raised concerns about neighborhood blight.

Christiansen missed the meetings in which council members voted to reject the panhandling ordinance, opted to deny funding for the People’s Church of Dover, and placed City Manager Dave Hugg on administrative leave following concerns about his performance.

When asked by Spotlight Delaware about having missed these discussions, Christiansen said he had been keeping up with the meetings remotely, but he declined to comment on both the homeless shelter and Hugg’s ousting. 

Residents have expressed their concern about Christiansen’s unannounced absence during the March 25 city council meeting, in emails with council members, and in op-eds published in the Daily State News. 

“Why hasn’t the Mayor been here a couple of times?” Dover resident Bill Faust asked at the March 25 council meeting. “You usually say, ‘This person is sick, this person is on military leave.’ Radio silence.” 

Some city council members said they share similar concerns about Christiansen’s absence, and the communication surrounding it. 

“I would hope in the future there is better communication between the council and the mayor and vice versa,” Councilman Brian Lewis told Spotlight Delaware. 

Council members David Anderson and Julia Pillsbury said they agreed communication about the mayor’s illness was poor, but they do see truth in Christiansen’s argument about establishing better decorum.

Anderson said he believes the city’s open forum section of its council meetings, which has come under fire in the past for being cut short and not being livestreamed, sometimes turns into a “theatrical performance,” instead of residents civilly communicating their concerns.

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post Dover mayor’s prolonged absence draws concern, questions appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

If the idea was to shed some of the liabilities of the Epstein scandal by firing Bondi, the move seems likely to backfire

It was only a matter of time. The writing has been on the wall for months for Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, who was unceremoniously fired on Thursday after 14 months leading the justice department. Trump was rumored to be unhappy with Bondi; frustrated at the slowness and failures of some of her prosecutions of his political enemies, angry that she could not make the Epstein scandal go away, and disappointed by her rather wooden performances on TV.

For a while, it looked like Bondi would be the first cabinet secretary that Trump fired in his second administration – something he has been much more reluctant to do since returning to office in early 2025. But in October, when she was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, Bondi made sure to issue vicious insults to her Democratic interrogators in front of the news cameras; she made a similar performance in February at a House judiciary committee hearing, where she lobbed ad hominem attacks on Democrats, including calling Representative Jamie Raskin “a washed-up loser lawyer.” These performances evidently endeared Bondi to Donald Trump enough that he decided to keep her around for a while; Kristi Noem, his onetime secretary of homeland security, became the first cabinet member to be fired in his second term. But the Epstein story persisted, and so did Trump’s dissatisfaction with his own mounting unpopularity ahead of the November midterms. He is not capable of blaming himself, and so he looked around for someone else to punish for his own failures. Pam Bondi was there.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Richard Blumenthal says company acts like it has ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ as records show it upping fees to cut losses

• Ticketmaster quietly raised other fees after US crackdown on hidden charges

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

Senators slammed Ticketmaster for raising ticket fees following a regulatory crackdown on hidden charges as revealed in a report by the Guardian last week.

The Federal Trade Commission last May began requiring Ticketmaster to disclose concert ticket fees upfront – a practice known as all-in pricing. The company eliminated the order processing fee it charged at the the end of a transaction to comply with the rule.

After more than a month into the U.S.–Israel conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump addressed the nation directly for the first time on Wednesday about why he dragged the country into an unprovoked illegal war. During his wide-ranging speech, Trump made numerous false claims, including repeatedly emphasizing the nuclear threat Iran posed.

The reasons the Trump administration have given for partnering with Israel in this war have been varying and at times include religious undertones, especially from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth regularly infuses Christian right rhetoric in how he speaks about the war on Iran and the military more broadly.

During a recent religious service at the Pentagon, Hegseth prayed for God to give U.S. troops “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

“Hegseth belongs to a denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. … [He] believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation,” explains investigative journalist Sarah Posner, who covers the religious right, on The Intercept Briefing. “For Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.”

This week on the podcast, Posner speaks to host Jessica Washington about how various factions of the Christian right are shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policies. 

“I don’t think the mainstream media has ever taken the Christian right seriously enough. They have consistently viewed Trump’s relationship with white evangelicals as ranging from harmless to purely transactional. When in fact, I think that they’re very deeply ideologically embedded with one another,” she says.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript 

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Jessie.

JW: Before we jump into the news of the week, we have some news too. The Intercept Briefing has been nominated for a Webby Award for best news and politics podcast; help us win by voting for us, please.

AL: Yes, definitely vote for us if you like what we’ve been doing with this podcast. We’ve been working really hard to make it better for you, so show us some love.

JW: You’ll make our day. We will add a link to vote in our show notes.

Now onto the news. 

On Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump addressed the nation directly for the first time about why he dragged the U.S. into an unprovoked, illegal war with Iran. 

During his rambly 20ish-minute speech, he made numerous false claims, including repeatedly emphasizing the nuclear threat Iran posed. Trump’s own intelligence agency reported last year that “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

Akela, what did you make of Donald Trump’s speech?

AL: He sounded less energetic than he typically does. The overall tone was, again, as you said, rambling, non-committal, and saying obviously extreme things with this very apathetic tone, which I found interesting. There’s a lot of rumors that he’s not in the best of health, so that was running through my mind through this.

But stepping back a little bit, thinking about what was the purpose of this speech, it was obviously an attempt to agenda set and shape the tone on this war — saying that we’re winning the war, that Iran is decimated, both of which we know are not true, but part of the administration’s attempt to control the narrative on this issue and also combat criticism that the president who has campaigned and thrust himself forward as anti-interventionist is doing exactly the opposite.

JW: The war clearly has been getting to Donald Trump. You can see it in his energy, as you just mentioned. We can also see gas prices are rising. Obviously, the Strait of Hormuz being closed as a result of this war is something that is having catastrophic financial impacts. We also have midterms going on.

Related

Sunrise Movement Pushes Anti-War Candidates, Endorsing Melat Kiros in Denver

This is definitely having a broader political impact. Last week, I did a story on Melat Kiros, who is being endorsed by the Sunrise Movement as a part of their broader anti-war campaign. We’re definitely seeing candidates latch onto this idea that you can’t take AIPAC and defense money and be meaningfully anti-war.

Akela, how are you seeing it play out in the midterms and in politics more broadly?

AL: This is becoming a huge midterm issue. There’s a wave of insurgent candidates who have been vocal against the war on Iran and challenged both Democratic leadership and incumbents on their stances, including support from the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, which has backed Trump’s war on Iran, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

We’ve also reported on the effort by progressive groups to get Democrats to exploit what is a growing rift among Republicans, both on Iran and on Israel. We reported that the pro-Palestine group Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project has been urging Democrats on this issue. They’re also planning to spend $2 million on ads this cycle, hitting Republicans in toss-up districts on Israel, but using that as part of a broader strategy to hit Republicans on rifts on foreign policy, which is obviously the bulk of that being on criticism on Iran right now. 

This group, IMEU Policy Project, is one of the groups that met with the Democratic National Committee over concerns about how Gaza could hurt Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. This was part of that big story from Axios on Democrats having this secret autopsy on Gaza. Progressive groups are really looking at how to take advantage of this issue in the midterms and take over what they see as a vacuum where Democrats are refusing to do that and leaving opportunities on the table.

That sort of investment on ads from this group is one of the biggest investments from pro-Palestine groups on ad spending this cycle in a cycle where we’ve seen unprecedented levels of outside spending in midterm races where these issues are playing a big role with voters.

JW: You’re right. We’re really seeing this play out in so many different races, this cycle. And Akela, I believe you had a story out this week that also touches on that.

AL: We reported exclusively that Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed State Assembly Member Claire Valdez on Thursday in New York’s 7th District Democratic Primary, which is of interest to our audience because it is really one of the biggest contests where progressives and socialists and various factions of the left in New York City are battling over who will determine the future of the left under [Mayor] Zohran Mamdani.

Related

Bernie Sanders Backs Claire Valdez in NYC House Race Dividing Left and Progressives

So this race has pit progressive groups against each other. Outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez has endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who has backing from progressive groups like the New York Working Families Party, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and several city council members.

Then on the Sanders side, where he just jumped in the ring on the side of the socialist faction of the left, which is backing Valdez, including Mamdani, Democratic Socialists of America, and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.

This race is not heavily focused on Iran, but Claire Valdez and Reynoso have both been very vocally opposed to the Iran war. We know Bernie Sanders has long been vocal against this war as well. It’s just another example of how this is becoming a new litmus test — again, for mostly progressives, but they’re also using it to put pressure on the broader party.

JW: It’s clear from your story and other reporting from The Intercept over the last month that the war on Iran is really creating political pressure for Republicans and Democrats.

Obviously, we’re mostly talking about a lot of those divisions on the left. But on the right, there are also these real religious pressures that we haven’t spoken about as much. But on the podcast today, I spoke to Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who covers the religious right about how the Christian right’s apocalyptic views of end times are shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policies.

Sarah is a contributing writer at Talking Points Memo, host of the podcast Reign of Error, and author of the book “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.”

This is our conversation. 

Sarah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me.

JW: There’s so much I want to talk to you about, so let’s dive in. The U.S.–Israel war on Iran has been going on for more than a month now, and its end appears illusive.

Last week, during a religious service at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a prayer a chaplain gave to the team who raided Venezuela and kidnapped the former President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Let’s hear a clip.

Pete Hegseth: Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield. Protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.

JW: So Hegseth regularly infuses Christian rhetoric in how he speaks about the war on Iran and the military more broadly. And here, he prays for overwhelming violence and no mercy.

Can you talk about the religious messaging that Hegseth has invoked throughout this war and in other military missions the Trump administration has taken?

SP: Hegseth belongs to a denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. It is a denomination that adheres to the tenets of a Christian movement called “Christian Reconstructionism.” They believe that the Bible — and in particular, what they consider to be biblical law — governs every aspect of life: your personal life, your life at work, your life as a public figure, your life in civilian life, your life in military life, all of it. It’s a very aggressive Christian supremacist ideology in which Hegseth believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation.

So for Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.

He expects — I think, through his public statements and these monthly prayer gatherings that he has at the Pentagon auditorium — to have the military follow not just Christianity, but his particular brand of Christianity.

JW: What you just said is really interesting to me. Obviously, muscular Christianity, war-mongering Christianity isn’t new; we can go back to the Crusades. But is there something new, though, in what Hegseth and his ilk are talking about?

SP: It’s not new in terms of the religious right. This idea of Christians taking dominion, not only of America, but the world, has been a driving force of the Christian right’s view of foreign policy and their role in politics domestically. But I think what’s new about Hegseth is how unabashed he is about declaring this in public spaces and enforcing it, or attempting to enforce it in the military.

Another big difference is that we are more accustomed to hearing the popularized Christian Zionist message of “We need to go to war with Iran because they’re an enemy of Israel, and it’s our biblical obligation to defend Israel, and potentially, this is one piece of a series of events that will trigger the end times and the return of Jesus.”

Related

Military Leaders See Iran War as “God’s Divine Plan” — a Chilling Turn for Trump’s Fascism

Hegseth comes from a slightly different religious tradition where they don’t adhere to that rapture, tribulation, Armageddon narrative. Instead, they believe that they are on a divine mission to establish God’s kingdom on Earth, and then Jesus will come back.

So for him, it’s a much more muscular, aggressive, imperialist kind of messaging. So when you hear him talk about the military action in Venezuela or potentially Greenland and now in Iran, it’s much more focused on that, as opposed to something that centers Israel and centers the Armageddon narrative as the reasons why we might be doing this.

JW: I want to dive deeper into that side of things, the kind of Christian Zionist side. You’ve written about John Hagee, a televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel, who thanked Trump for entering the war while he was standing behind a sign that read “God’s Coming … Operation Epic Fury.”

Who is Hagee, and how does he view the war, and how widely held is that view among the Christian right?

SP: So I think Hagee’s view is more widely held than Hegseth’s view. So Hagee is an 85-year-old megachurch pastor and televangelist from San Antonio, Texas. He’s extremely influential in the evangelical world, and he has been extremely influential in Republican politics.

In 2006, he founded the organization Christians United for Israel, which is the political side of his religious arguments about why Christians should “support Israel.” For many years, he’s argued that Christians have a biblical obligation to support Israel, and by that he means support an Israeli right-wing government, support settlers, and occupation, support the war on Gaza, et cetera.

All of this is very tied up in his view of a Bible prophecy about the sequence of events that will happen prior to Jesus’s return. Now, he would argue that he’s not trying to hasten that return, that all of that will happen on God’s timing, but he’s been arguing that the United States should go to war with Iran for at least 20 years.

The political side of the argument is Iran is acquiring a nuclear weapon. He has argued that whether it was true or not. Then, on the religious side, he argues that a war with Iran will trigger a series of events that will lead to the second coming of Jesus. So he has played both sides of this very successfully.

So he makes the religious plea from his pulpit, and sometimes the political plea from his pulpit too. But then through CUFI — through Christians United for Israel — he makes these political arguments as to why it’s the U.S. obligation to defend Israel from aggression from Iran, or go to war with Israel to preempt aggression from Iran.

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But he has built this organization in 20 years to encompass many, many evangelicals who are predominantly Republican voters across the country. He had the ear of the Bush White House, and he had the ear of the first Trump White House. He delivered the benediction when they had a ceremony, when Trump moved the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

He has boasted of his strong connection to Trump, and that Trump understands the importance of centrality of Israel, not only to American foreign policy, but to this religious narrative in which Hagee argues that when Jesus comes back, he will rule the world for 1,000 years from a throne on the Temple Mount.

JW: I came across Hagee for the first time covering Daystar, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. For those who don’t know, it’s essentially an evangelical Christian broadcasting network that hosts a bunch of different televangelists. They’ve got various scandals over the years that we won’t get into, but the important thing to know about them is they’re very much a part of the kind of constant drumbeat of pro-Israel, of this is a sign of the end times, and very much pushing U.S. foreign policy in a direction that is pro-Israel and fueling war in the Middle East. I guess, at least that’s what they’re pushing.

But my question is, how influential are these people, really? How much is this kind of prophesizing around the end times actually pushing U.S. foreign policy?

SP: Evangelicals and particularly charismatic evangelicals like Hagee, people who believe in these prophetic statements, believe that they can receive direct prophecies from God. People who believe that in our midst are modern-day prophets and apostles who are receiving revelations from God that they need to then carry out in their personal or public life. This is a very significant part of the Republican base, and in particular, a very significant part of the Trump base.

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In contrast to other Trump supporters and other religious Trump supporters, they’re far more devoted to Trump. They are probably the most loyal to Trump, in part because they believe that he has been very loyal to them, and because they believe that he’s anointed by God to save America and the world.

Those two things are actually very tied together because of the way that both his presidencies have been very influencer, celebrity-driven. Being close to Trump for a burgeoning charismatic influencer is very important, because if you get a little boost from Trump, then more people will watch your YouTube, and more people will follow you on X, or whatever your social media platform is.

Those things are very tied together. It’s not just a one-way street. But Trump is very intermingled with that world. His top religious adviser and director of the White House Faith Office, Paula White, she comes from that world of televangelism and prosperity, gospel preaching, and signs and wonders and miracles — that charismatic Christian world.

So in many ways they are the most influential religious block on Trump, and that obviously is causing a little bit of consternation in the MAGA base currently.

JW: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One question I have, and this is a little bit of an aside, but is there a penalty for these people to continuously predict the end times?

That seems to be a large part of what we’re talking about with wars in the Middle East. Does anyone pay a price for that?

SP: Almost never. Typically, in this world, once somebody is considered a prophet and they make a prophecy, sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. I think that’s why somebody like Hagee is so careful to say this is all God’s timing. A lot of them are careful to say things like, is this a sign of the end times? Might we be experiencing the end times? They phrase it in the form of a question instead of saying, “This is the thing that is definitely going to trigger the end times.”

I think from a marketing standpoint, consistently raising it as a question, it generates a little bit more anticipation and excitement. They’ve been doing this for decades, not just with regard to what’s going on in Iran, but just other things that might be a sign of the end times. So nobody really pays a price because their followers are invested in this world where anticipating and getting ready for, and thinking about and wondering when the end times will happen is just very much embedded in their culture.

JW: I’ve been wondering about the end times and these predictions. My mom is a former Catholic, so I was raised a little bit Catholic, a little bit Unitarian. So there was not all this lore.  

SP: Yes, this is definitely very much an evangelical thing and not a Catholic thing, and that is part of the reason why there is friction in the MAGA base over not just the Iran war, but Trump’s closeness with Netanyahu.

JW: You can see this growing division on the right more broadly among some of the loudest MAGA voices, questioning Israel’s influence in American politics. That criticism has been increasing as the Trump administration pursues its illegal war on Iran.

Recently you wrote about Candace Owens and Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned in opposition to the war.

Sarah, what do you make of the growing number of critical MAGA voices, and how they’re framing their opposition. What do you make of Owens in particular and her messaging? What’s the end game?

SP: Candace Owens is a raging antisemite. Every discussion of Owens needs to acknowledge that. So when she talks about being anti-Israel or being anti-Zionist, her criticisms are not just legitimate criticisms of the Israeli governments and the Israeli military’s actions. All of her criticisms are imbued with antisemitic conspiracy theories and rank antisemitism, Holocaust denial, that sort of thing. Just so that we’re on the table with that.

JW: Good disclaimer.

SP: But I think that she and some of her colleagues and allies in the far-right Catholic MAGA world are trying to do a sort of horseshoe thing, where they want leftists who are anti-Zionist or anti-Israel, to give them a pat on the back for being the right-wingers who have come out against Israel’s actions and Israel’s policies, and the American relationship with Israel. Owens and her allies are making this not just about Israel, but also about Catholics and evangelicals.

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For most mainstream Catholics, even conservative ones — ones who you might think of as being George W. Bush Republicans, they’re anti-same-sex marriage, anti-abortion, that sort of thing — but the Israel stuff just isn’t that important to them. She is trying to make it important to far-right Catholics. So she’s trying to make it important by starting a little intra-MAGA war between Catholics and evangelicals over this issue.

She and her allies have tried to make the argument that it’s a violation of their religious freedom to have to submit to or agree with these kinds of policies that Christian Zionists promote because that is not part of their Catholic faith. 

Now, it’s true that the whole end-times scenario that someone like John Hagee promotes is not part of the Catholic faith, but Owens always doubles down on the antisemitism on top of that. So it’s a complicated world.

The other thing about trying to determine how big is this MAGA rift, really. One thing that’s important to understand is that white evangelicals make up a huge part of a very important part of Trump’s base, and they’re very homogenous in this way. Eighty percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and a huge segment of them are Christian Zionists.

Catholics are more split 60-40, 50-50 on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. And Catholic converts like Candace Owens, who are extremely far right, make up a very small segment of Catholics as a whole, even a small segment of Republican Catholics.

So I think when we’re trying to assess her influence, in a way we’re comparing apples and oranges because we’re trying to compare someone who has had a podcast and a huge following on Twitter for a few years with a movement that has spent decades making this end times theory, or this end times narrative, a core part of what their followers believe.

[Break]

JW: So now I want to talk about another kind of Christian right influencer: the Heritage Foundation, obviously the people behind Project 2025, but their new report is receiving less attention. It’s called “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation For The Next 250 Years.”

This report outlines a vision that “restores” what they call the “natural family,” defined as marriage between a man and a woman, and how that mission is fundamental to saving America’s future. Can you talk about how we’re seeing that vision show up in policymaking and in bills like the SAVE [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act?

SP: In terms of policymaking, I think that they’re trying to [push] a lot of small bore things through, say, the Department of Health and Human Services or the FDA. They want to try to ban mifepristone so that abortion will be inaccessible to people. They want to do things to promote adoption by Christian families instead of non-Christian families or instead of same-sex couples.

Every anti-LGBTQ policy is a furtherance of this “natural family” policy in that Heritage Foundation document. They want to, through anti-abortion measures, enforce motherhood for women and also create an image of the “natural family marriage between a man and a woman.”

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It’s an explicit anti-LGBTQ agenda, and they’ve been extremely, explicitly anti-trans. From their perspective, trans people threaten their whole idea of a binary sex — men and women, and that’s it. It explains a lot about why they’re going so hard after trans people’s rights.

With regard to the SAVE Act, I’m not sure what they’re doing there. Because the SAVE Act would punish women who took their husband’s names because then you wouldn’t be able to register to vote unless you got your birth certificate, which then your birth name wouldn’t match your current name. So it creates a whole host of problems. That to me is an odd thing for them to be pushing right now, but it’s also in line with a segment of the religious right, including Pete Hegseth’s pastor that believes that women shouldn’t even vote. But I feel like they’re stepping all over themselves with what they’re proposing in the SAVE Act.

JW: Yeah, and I wanted to get into that. The report doesn’t explicitly mention transgender people. They just say gender ideology throughout their entire Save the Family report. But it’s essentially just ragging on transgender people, queer people. A lot of ragging on feminists, birth control.

There’s obviously discussion of how to have more families, more kids.  But it almost seems more focused on enemies than it does on actually promoting kids and families. Should we understand it as a document that actually is trying to push for more kids and families, or is this about mandating a specific type of Christian lifestyle?

SP: The latter. In order to do that, they have to marginalize other people. So in their view, if trans people exist, then there is no binary between men and women in which these gender roles are very clearly defined and delineated.

JW: To you, it’s much more about, OK, how do we make people live the lives that we want them to live? And how do we find enemies who we can terrorize to make that happen?

SP: Well, think about it this way, that what they are proposing runs counter to the way American culture has been for the last 50 or 60, 70 years and runs counter to — not Dobbs, obviously, that’s an exception — but it runs counter to things that have become more accepted, like marriage equality and I wouldn’t include trans rights in that category because it hasn’t been accepted. I think that is what is driving them to create enemies, in order to make this “traditional family” seem more appealing to people or seem under threat by something.

If the traditional family is the ideal — where there’s a man and a woman and kids, and the woman stays home and doesn’t go to work and all of that — then all of these other people, women who don’t get married, single moms, trans people, same-sex couples, they’re a threat to that. They see it as a threat. They would consider a threat to their religious freedom because they think that their religion demands these kinds of family relationships. And so it’s a very radical document. I think that there are people within the administration who take it very seriously.

JW: We haven’t discussed race yet, and I think that’s always the kind of underlying thing in the corner when you’re talking about Christian nationalism, specifically white Christian nationalism. In this document they only mention Black people so much as to say, not enough Black people are getting married, that’s a problem, and then leave that to the side. They don’t mention race generally, but how do you view race in this vision?

SP: Overall, the Trump regime has attempted to completely eviscerate civil rights for Black people. I mean completely. Dismantling the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, dismantling the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. So I think within the context of this pro-natalist argument, it’s a paternalistic view. “It would be better for Black people if they also adhere to this traditional family structure.” I feel the 1980s are hovering over us right here, and that was when a lot of this pro-family, pro-natalist stuff of the modern religious right was hatched.

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But I think that it is a clear broadside just against any kind of culture that they consider to be non-compliant with their idea of the traditional family whether that’s women who have chosen not to get married, moms who’ve chosen not to get married. When you see how they’ve tried to marginalize, say, trans people from public life, this gives you a lot of insight into how they view, let’s say, non-complying people with their view of what America should be.

JW: While we’re talking about the Save the Family and the religious right’s views on marriage and family and race, in that regard, I also wanted to ask you about their views on immigration and race. How do you perceive the Christian right when it comes to this issue?

SP: White evangelicals are among Trump’s staunchest supporters when it comes to immigration. When you look at the polling data about their views of his position on immigration, in general, and in particular, the ICE crackdowns in Minneapolis and other cities, white evangelicals are among his staunchest supporters. And this is very much tied into their view of what a Christian nation is, and their acceptance of the argument, their embrace of the argument that undocumented people are necessarily criminals because just the act of having come here “illegally” is a crime. That is very much tied into their perception that America was founded as a Christian nation. Somehow that was taken away from us by many things that happened over the course of the 20th century, including immigration, including the Civil Rights Act, including women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, all of that. So when they talk about restoring the Christian nation, what they’re really talking about is restoring a white Christian nation.

JW: I want to get into the deeper, the broader impact of these groups. Your podcast Reign of Error illustrates how the Christian right isn’t a fringe movement, but how its various figures, groups, and sects are in the halls of power shaping policies and remaking America from local offices to the White House. 

Can you talk about the infrastructure the Christian right has been able to build over the years to wield that level of influence and policymaking?

SP: I think a lot of people think of the religious right as being a lot of megachurch pastors at the pulpit telling people how to vote and that it’s just people getting instructions every November and going to the polls and hitting the lever for the Republican candidate.

It’s much thicker and deeper than that because they have built mechanisms for creating and enforcing this political ideology, not only in their churches, but through television shows, conferences, books, and with the advent of social media, of course, YouTube, X, TikTok, all of the social media that they have at their disposal, and so you have that element of it. You have political organizations that work with religious leaders to recruit religious people, and even pastors to run for office and to organize voters to go to the polls on Election Day.

You have organizations that were created to counter institutions that liberals and the left had built. So to counter the ACLU, they founded the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has litigated most of the cases, producing some of the Supreme Court’s worst precedents in recent years, including the Dobbs decision. ADF was behind challenging the ban on conversion therapy in Colorado that the Supreme Court ruled on recently. 

So you have all of these things together. You have the Heritage Foundation, which was created back in the 1970s to counter the Brookings Institution — which is not really like a leftist organization by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s how they perceived it. So you have these different layers of convincing people and keeping them engaged in the political project and the political process. 

Then you also have on the legal front, not just these legal organizations, but Christian law schools that are educating the next generation of Christian lawyers who will go out and litigate these cases, maybe become judges. So they have built an infrastructure, a multi-layered infrastructure that is intended to be intergenerational, that’s intended to last for decades. That’s not intended only to run from election cycle to election cycle.

They spent 50 years to overturn Roe vs. Wade. They didn’t give up. They chipped away for many decades. When you think about that, they worked at the state level to chip away at it. They worked the legal process to chip away at Roe at the state level. They chipped away at abortion rights. 

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At the same time, when I talk about the multi-layered, they had institutions and organizations that helped train judges to rule from these right-wing perspectives, that would advocate for judges that were nominated to the bench by George W. Bush or Donald Trump to become District Court judges, appellate judges, Supreme Court justices. That’s what I’m talking about when I say it’s a multi-layered infrastructure because you have all of these things working together. There’s never a sense of victory like, “Oh, we got that done, yay us, and now we’re gonna take a break.” No, they did not even stop for a minute after they overturned Roe vs. Wade. Now they’re on to trying to ban mifepristone.

It’s important for people to understand that they never see any victory as their final achievement. It’s just one piece in a long road that they’re very dedicated to trotting.

JW: Given this relentlessness that you’re describing and the level of influence that we’re talking about here, especially even within the Trump administration, do you think that mainstream media is taking the Christian rights seriously enough?

SP: I don’t think the mainstream media has ever taken the Christian right seriously enough. They have consistently viewed Trump’s relationship with white evangelicals as ranging from harmless to purely transactional. When in fact, I think that they’re very deeply ideologically embedded with one another.

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It’s partially a function of a little bit of nervousness about even touching religion, that they don’t want to be seen as being critical of somebody’s religious beliefs or religious practices. But I think it has taken a long time for the media to wake up to how extreme they are and how successful they’ve been at capturing, not just the Republican Party but Trump in particular.

JW: That was really informative and pretty alarming, but we’re going to leave it there. Thanks, Sarah, for joining me on the Intercept Briefing. 

SP: Thank you, Jessica.

JW: To keep up with how the Christian right is shaping policy in the U.S. today, follow Sarah’s work at Talking Points Memo and her podcast Reign of Error, which I highly, highly recommend.

Before we go, we’d love it if you helped The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast. So please vote for us. We’ll add a link to vote in our show notes. Thanks so much! 

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home appeared first on The Intercept.

Created in Italy and made with elderflower liqueur, the cocktail is sweeter than Aperol spritz and lower in alcohol

Pub gardens and bar terraces have been awash with a sea of orange in recent years as Italy’s love of Aperol spritz spread to the UK. But this year the cocktail’s cousin, a Hugo spritz, will be the drink of the summer, according to supermarkets and bars.

It is already being served across the country, including at Sea Containers on the banks of the Thames and Mayfair’s swanky Claridge’s hotel in London, 20 Stories bar in Manchester and the Bridge Tavern in Newcastle. Wetherspoons has the cocktail on its menu nationwide.

40ml St‑Germain elderflower liqueur.

60ml prosecco.

60ml sparkling water.

8-10 mint leaves.

Lime wedge for garnish.

Mint sprig for garnish.

Fill your glass with ice cubes.

Add in the mint leaves.

Pour sparkling wine and sparkling water over ice.

Add St‑Germain elderflower liqueur.

Gently stir.

Garnish with a mint sprig and lime wedge.

This next-generation network technology won't just make our phones faster; it'll unlock new capabilities in robots, turning them into all-sensing, always-learning fleets.

Bosses write to home secretary and London mayor listing series of incidents staff have faced in past week

Marks & Spencer has called on the government and London’s mayor to crack down on retail crime, saying it has become “more brazen, more organised and more aggressive”, after reporting an increase in shoplifting and violence at its stores.

The M&S chief executive, Stuart Machin, has written to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and its retail director, Thinus Keeve, has written to the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, saying greater resources are needed for police to tackle the crime effectively and target repeat offenders and crime hotspots.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 3 No. 557.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 3 #1027

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 3, No. 761.

South-east Italy also affected by heavy rain, and snow at higher altitudes, while deadly flooding hits Afghanistan

Parts of the Mediterranean have been lashed by Storm Erminio this week. Heavy rain, thunderstorms and occasional bursts of hail affected much of Greece throughout Wednesday and Thursday, with the most severe conditions across south-eastern parts of the mainland and several islands in the southern Aegean Sea, including Crete, with streets flooded and vehicles stranded.

Some of the heaviest rain fell on Wednesday across Attica, a region encompassing Athens, with one weather station near the city’s international airport recording 132mm (5.2 in) in 24 hours. The most intense downpours were overnight, when the coastal town of Nea Makri was particularly badly affected; an unofficial weather station recorded about 50mm falling within just two hours. One person died in the town; a man found beneath a car was believed to have been swept away as he escaped his flooding basement home.

From a subtle Princess Peach lip jelly to a Yoshi egg that’s been traumatising children, the cosmetic chain’s latest tie-in is out of this world

When The Super Mario Bros Movie came out in 2023, it came with a rather unlikely tie-in: a range of skincare and bathing products from cosmetics chain Lush. The store, known for its devotion to natural ingredients and support for social justice causes, didn’t seem like the obvious partner for a major video game franchise. Because of this, I thought I should try them out, assuming that my dalliance with beauty journalism would be short-lived.

I was wrong. The collection was so successful, Lush later released a Minecraft range, which I also reviewed, and now there’s a Super Mario Galaxy range to tie in with the new movie. Somehow, I have become the Guardian’s Lush correspondent and it seems I am now trapped in a sweet-smelling cycle of video game-branded toiletries. There are definitely worse fates, so I’m just going with it.

A new book explores how technology and a host of maverick innovators have given rise to an exceptional crop of baseball players

In a 1940 publicity stunt, the Cleveland Indians’ flamethrowing pitcher, Bob Feller, tested which was faster: One of his own blazing deliveries, or a motorcycle. Feller’s pitching won, hands down. But today, Feller’s once-remarkable speed has become commonplace, even bettered, as major leaguers routinely pass triple figures on the radar gun. The secret to this arms race? The advances in pitching analytics,often authored by people without any previous baseball pedigree.

That’s part of the narrative of Unhittable, a new book by one such individual – Rob Friedman, more commonly known to his online followers as PitchingNinja. The book’s subtitle says it all: How Technology, Mavericks and Innovators Engineered Baseball’s New Era of Pitching Dominance.

Mauricio Pochettino faces several tough decisions to name a squad for the 2026 World Cup hosts

A full 24 matches into the Mauricio Pochettino era, we have arrived at the moment of truth. The US men’s national team’s 2026 World Cup roster will be named on 26 May, and the team’s two recent friendlies (a 5-2 loss to Belgium and a 2-0 loss to Portgual) have given Pochettino plenty to think about as he makes his selection.

We here at the Guardian have made our picks as well – based a little on our own preference, but still within the realm of what Pochettino may do. Separately, the three of us made our 26-man rosters. Any player who we agreed on got the “on the squad” designation. Anyone we differed on is listed as “up for debate”, with other notable exclusions listed as “out of the picture”.

Just under three years ago, the Food and Drug Administration deemed 19 peptide drugs too unsafe to be dispensed by compounding pharmacies, which mix components of approved drugs to create bespoke medication for people who have trouble taking commonly available products.

Now, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency is poised to reverse itself. That’s despite few clinical studies supporting the effectiveness or safety of these peptides, which are amino acid chains meant to help regulate functions in the body and have become popular among fitness and longevity enthusiasts.

In February, Kennedy said the FDA acted illegally in 2023 when it categorized 19 peptides as too unsafe for compounders, whose final products aren’t tested or approved by the FDA. Kennedy, who described himself as a “big fan” of peptides, has used the therapies himself.

“It was illegal because they’re not supposed to do that unless there’s a safety signal,” Kennedy said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, referring to adverse events related to medications. “And they didn’t have a safety signal. They’re not allowed to look at efficacy. They’re not allowed to say, ‘Well, we don’t believe these are efficacious,’ or whatever. They can only look at safety.”

But three former FDA officials closely familiar with how the agency created the criteria to assess the peptides in the first place say Kennedy has mischaracterized their work. The agency’s 2023 decision to ban certain peptides was supported by numerous documented safety concerns, they said. FDA regulations also require the agency to assess both safety and effectiveness before approving a substance for compounding.

“It would be a disruption of the societal pact we have had since 1962 that drugs will be studied to see if they work before they are marketed in the U.S.,” said Janet Woodcock, a former FDA acting commissioner.

If Kennedy justifies reversal of the previous work by suggesting there were no safety concerns, it would give a false imprimatur of safety to more than a dozen unapproved, untested drugs, the officials said.

There’s been little new science on the 19 peptides since the FDA’s 2023 decision to categorize them as unsafe. But demand for the drugs has exploded as influencers have flooded social media with promises of sculpted physiques, glowing skin, luscious hair, rapidly healing injuries, youthful energy and blazing sex lives.

The demand has given rise to a burgeoning gray market, where wellness spas, multilevel marketers and telehealth websites ply the public with vials of “research grade” peptides labeled “not for human use.”

“More people want to use them,” said Lauren Colenso-Semple, a muscle physiology researcher and science communication specialist who follows scientific studies of peptides as part of her work. “That’s what’s changed.”

FDA-approved peptide drugs such as insulin and oxytocin have been available for decades. Newer ones such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, broadly known as GLP-1s, have exploded in popularity for weight loss and have shown promise for treating other conditions, such as addictions and neurodegenerative and liver diseases. The popularity of these drugs has led the public to become more comfortable with injectables and has helped drive attention to other gray-market peptides.

Last year, at a Las Vegas conference promising radical life extension, two women became critically ill after being injected with peptides the FDA had categorized as unsafe. Although Nevada regulators investigated and fined the health practitioners involved in administering the peptides, investigators weren’t able to determine the exact cause of the reaction. The doctor who ran the booth where the women became ill said he didn’t believe that the peptides caused their reactions but apologized for the incident and said he would review his practices.

The Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, one of the largest industry associations lobbying for the FDA to change its stance on peptides, acknowledges it knows little about the safety of individual peptides being sold to the public. (Its CEO says it is an advocacy organization, not a scientific one.) But the group argues the public would be safer if peptides were handled by regulated compounding pharmacies instead of the gray market. The FDA should forgo the usual human clinical trials in order to bring about this shift, a spokesperson for the alliance said.

“Where we don’t have research, clinical trials, what we’ve got a ton of, is, shall we say, testimonials, patient affidavits, attesting to the wonders of the drug,” said Scott Brunner, the alliance’s chief executive officer. “And RFK Jr. is one of those testifiers.”

On the Rogan podcast, Kennedy wasn’t clear on exactly how the FDA would let compounders start dispensing peptides, describing it only as “some kind of action” to make “about 14” peptides “more accessible.” Nor has he specified which peptides he wants to make available. (Neither the FDA nor HHS responded to ProPublica’s requests for more information.) But several regulatory shortcuts exist and, ultimately, Kennedy could simply declare the ingredients are legal.

“He has all of the authority,” said Woodcock, likening such a declaration to former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ unilateral 2011 reversal of the FDA’s decision to lift age restrictions on the emergency contraception Plan B. (A judge ultimately found Sebelius’ move to be arbitrary and capricious and nullified it.)

“The secretary can do anything they want.”

The Bulks List

The FDA’s road to regulating compounding pharmacies — and by extension the peptides they seek to dispense — has been long and tedious. Much of the regulatory fight has focused on which ingredients compounders should be allowed to use.

Under a 1997 law, the first passed by Congress to regulate the industry, compounders can only use ingredients that are a component of an approved drug, have what’s known as a USP monograph (essentially a third-party certified recipe for a drug used mainly by manufacturers of generics), or are listed as approved substances by the FDA.

This FDA list, known as “the bulks list,” is at the center of the ongoing peptide debate.

Litigation and pressure from the industry and lawmakers delayed for decades the creation of the bulks list, leaving compounders in limbo on scores of substances, not just peptides.

“Everything was a fight. It was a huge fight,” said one former FDA official who has spent more than 30 years working on compounding policies. The former official asked not to be named to avoid a public debate with the industry.

The need for the list took on new urgency in 2012, when more than 60 people died from fungal meningitis infections contracted from a drug produced at a compounding facility and dispensed to hundreds of people. Congress passed another law further regulating large compounders that sell medications to doctors’ offices and hospitals rather than individual patients. The new law also prompted the agency to move more quickly on establishing the bulks list.

The FDA asked the industry to nominate substances for inclusion on the list. It did so, nominating thousands of ingredients, including, for example, purified water and asparagus.

“They put in everything,” the official said. “Literally thousands of nominations with absolutely no justification for why it needed to be there.”

Each substance would have to be reviewed individually before it could be added to the bulks list. The agency would have to solicit public comment and an advisory committee of health and pharmacy experts would have to review the FDA’s research.

Reviewing them “was a massive effort. The agency proceeded glacially, but really we were speeding as fast as we could,” the official said.

In 2017, under pressure to move more quickly, the FDA came up with an interim solution. It substantially narrowed the list of nominated ingredients, quickly reviewed each remaining substance and placed them into three categories. The first was substances with enough of a safety track record that the agency felt comfortable letting compounders use them while the final list was assembled. The second category included substances considered too risky for compounding. And the third included those without enough supporting information for the FDA to make an informed decision and therefore wouldn’t be used for compounding.

This categorization didn’t constitute a formal regulation; rather the agency was using its discretion not to go after compounders who used ingredients it deemed safe — those from the first category.

In 2023, the FDA placed 19 peptides in Category 2, which already included a handful of substances the agency considered to be dangerous.

This is what Kennedy has called “the war on peptides.”

In explaining its decisions, the FDA pointed to well-established research in peptide drug development that injectable peptides carry the risk of causing immune reactions. Such reactions can range from responses with “no clinical manifestations” to irritating rashes to life-threatening conditions such as anaphylactic shock, which constricts breathing and impairs motor function.

Peptides occur naturally in the body but break down quickly after serving their purpose. Peptide drugs, on the other hand, are manufactured to last longer in the body to create a therapeutic response, such as controlling appetite or promoting the growth of new blood vessels, bone density or muscle.

“Now that it’s been tweaked to make it something else, the immune system can recognize it as foreign and there’s the potential issue of having an unwanted immune response,” Colenso-Semple said.

The manufacturing process can also introduce impurities — like bacteria or heavy metals — into peptide drugs. They also are sensitive to environmental conditions and can change chemical composition if stored at the wrong temperatures or shaken too vigorously, increasing the risk of an immune response or decreasing their effectiveness. And when a substance is injected, as opposed to taken orally, it bypasses most of the body’s natural defenses.

The risk of an immune response is common to peptide drugs in general. But individual peptides also present specific potential risks.

The FDA reviewed data to assess these risks and found limited human studies on a few peptide therapies; most have only been studied in animals or in clinical populations like HIV patients. What human data the FDA did find for individual peptides indicated the potential for harm. Subjects in studies of six individual peptides — growth hormone releasing peptide-2, ibutamoren mesylate, ipamorelin, CJC-1295, AOD-9604 and melanotan II — experienced adverse events, including death. (It wasn’t proven whether the deaths were caused by the peptides or by something else.) Ultimately, the FDA decided not enough data existed to allay the known safety concerns.

“Of course any adverse event can be a flag,” said another former FDA official who worked in the compounding division when the peptides were categorized as unsafe. The former official asked not to be named because they work in public health and don’t want to antagonize the current administration. “Also, if there is no clinical data for a substance, and an awareness that the substance has the propensity for harm, that could make it an appropriate placement on the Category 2 list.”

Are They Safe?

Putting the peptides on the unsafe list didn’t change much for compounders. Because those peptides aren’t components of an approved drug and don’t carry a USP monograph, compounders weren’t allowed to dispense them anyway.

“All that did was put an exclamation point on it,” Brunner said. In the months after the FDA’s announcement, his organization repeatedly warned its members not to dispense peptides.

But the listing prompted at least two peptide companies to sue the FDA, arguing it was dragging its feet on creating the bulks list of allowed compounding substances. To date, only six substances have made it through the process to be put on the list, none of which are peptides and none of which are injectables. As the lawsuit wound its way through federal court, the FDA agreed to accelerate the review of four peptides named in the lawsuit: CJC-1295, AOD-9604, thymosin-alpha and ipamorelin acetate. It also decided to move forward on two other peptides not listed in the complaint: kisspeptin and ibutamoren mesylate. Online marketing claims these peptides help with, among other things, weight loss, muscle-building, anti-aging, insomnia, tissue repair and sexual dysfunction. Marketers also claim thymosin-alpha, one of the more studied peptides, can help with immune function, Lyme disease and COVID-19.

In the final months of the Biden administration, the FDA convened the expert advisory committee and presented its research on the six peptides. In reports up to 158 pages long, the agency detailed the science behind the immune response risk in synthetic peptides, listed documented adverse events associated with the drugs and summarized the limited research on human subjects. In each case, the FDA recommended against putting the peptide on the bulks list for compounders.

“I can’t imagine anybody looking at this data and being comfortable” making these available to the public, Colenso-Semple said.

The peptide industry was given just 10 minutes before the committee to present arguments that the six peptides were safe. Speakers offered anecdotal evidence from their own and others’ practices. Even though peptides can’t legally be used by compounders, many were dispensing the drugs because the FDA has been lax in enforcing its regulations.

“Many of the peptides that have been placed on Category 2 have been used successfully by thousands of our practitioners treating hundreds of thousands of patients who utilize these compounds to energize cellular function and give the body what it needs to help address sickness and disease, including obesity, diabetes and addiction,” said Dan DeNeui, CEO of one of the peptide companies that sued the FDA.

His wife, Terri DeNeui, a nurse practitioner and founder of their company Evexias Health Solutions, presented information from a survey of 508 patients treated with various peptides that said 19% reported uncomfortable side effects and less than 1% experienced an adverse event.

They also contended peptides would be more safely dispensed by regulated compounders than on the gray market — the argument now being made by the Alliance for Compounding Pharmacies. The active ingredients in the drugs would be manufactured at an FDA-registered facility subject to inspection, and compounders are overseen by state boards of pharmacies to ensure sterile conditions.

That’s “a heck of a lot better than what many consumers are doing,” getting advice in chat rooms and “ordering some substance that purports to be a peptide and may or may not be,” Brunner told ProPublica.

While that argument addresses quality-control concerns associated with the gray market, it doesn’t confront the fundamental question of whether peptides are safe.

“They’re totally unapproved drugs,” said one of the former FDA officials. “Would you let a pharmaceutical company do this? No. No way.”

In the end, the advisory committee sided with the FDA and endorsed its initial decision that the six peptides were too risky to be dispensed to the public.

What Happens Now?

Unhappy with the advisory committee’s decision, the compounding industry has amplified its argument that the FDA review process for the bulks list is broken. The advisory committee had few working compounders on it and didn’t give those who opposed the decision on peptides enough time to present its arguments, industry advocates say.

With a new administration, whose health secretary has used peptides himself and is trying to advance alternative health practices, they see an opportunity. They hope the FDA will appoint more members with compounding experience to the committee and ease enforcement on peptides while it continues the established regulatory process.

“Given the scale of demand — demand that is going to be met, if not by a state licensed compounding pharmacy, then by the black and gray markets — we believe the lens that the FDA is using related to these peptides, at least some of the peptides, is the wrong lens,” Brunner said. “They’re wanting research, clinical trials. They’re wanting a certain amount of certitude that, frankly, is appropriate for most drugs, but not for this moment.”

Regulatory shortcuts exist that would allow the FDA to skip the more laborious approval process. The FDA could simply remove the peptides from Category 2, those it considers unsafe. It could place them in Category 1, allowing them to be used in compounding. Or it could announce it’s changing its enforcement strategy and not going after compounders who work with these substances.

None of that would be safe for the public, Woodcock contends. Congress intended for the FDA to “refer to a substantive body of evidence about the safety and effectiveness” of ingredients put on the bulks list, she said.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a route for unapproved drugs to get into the market,” she said. “Not even Congress was thinking that.”

The post RFK Jr. May Reverse a Peptide Ban He Calls “Illegal.” Former FDA Officials Say He Mischaracterized Their Work. appeared first on ProPublica.

The president says Iran’s remaining leaders are more reasonable. But assassinations have left in place an emboldened government driving a hard bargain, officials say.

People leaving Iran for Turkey tell of impact of bombs and internet blackouts, while others are travelling the other way to be closer to relatives in peril

He could not help but splutter out a laugh at the question. Amir, whose name has been changed for his safety, had just crossed the Kapıköy border point in eastern Turkey, a mountain pass between snow-topped peaks that is one of the few gateways to the west from Iran.

Until a few weeks ago, this was a busy place, popular among Iranian daytrippers coming across to Turkey to do some shopping in the lively city of Van, a further two hours drive west, or to spend a couple of nights out in its discreet Iranian-only nightclubs and bars serving alcohol.

Renewables made up nearly half of global installed electricity capacity by the end of 2025, "accounting for 85.6% of global capacity expansion," reports the Register, citing the International Renewable Energy Agency's (IRENA) 2026 Renewable Capacity Statistics report. "Per IRENA's data, that aforementioned 85.6 percent share of new power capacity additions was actually a decrease from 2024, when renewables were about 92 percent of global capacity additions. Yes, the share of total installed power capacity in 2025 rose again, but non-renewable capacity additions also rebounded sharply last year." From the report: Solar, in turn, was the dominant renewable technology, accounting for nearly three-quarters of last year's renewable capacity additions. Those additions totaled 692 GW in 2025, lifting installed renewable capacity by a record 15.5 percent year over year, IRENA noted. By the end of last year, renewables accounted for 49.4 percent of global installed electricity capacity, while variable renewable sources such as solar and wind represented roughly 35 percent of total capacity. For reference, it was only in 2023 that renewable energy sources crossed the threshold of generating 30 percent of the world's electricity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The engine firing provided a slingshot-like boost to the Orion capsule, speeding it to 24,500 mph, the velocity needed to break free of Earth's gravitational clasp for a trek to the moon.

Plan for three nuns who escaped from care home last year to go to Rome thought to be positive sign of Vatican’s decision

Three nuns who escaped from a care home to return to their convent in a castle close to Salzburg where they had spent most of their lives are a step closer to being able to stay there, sources close to them say.

Sisters Bernadette, Regina and Rita, who are in their early to late eighties, broke into their convent home in Elsbethen last September with the help of former pupils of the Catholic school at which they had taught and other supporters. Their case became a cause célèbre, attracting attention from around the world.

From farms in New Zealand to factories in Delhi, the effects of the oil crisis triggered by the Iran war are rippling across Asia

An Israeli assault is pushing the fragile country to the brink.

A deal Tehran could take.

Tania Warner is fitted with ankle monitor and released along with seven-year-old daughter Ayla Luca after being deemed not a flight risk

A Canadian woman and her seven-year-old daughter, who were held for nearly three weeks in a notorious detention center by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), were released on Thursday evening after posting a bond of $9,500.

Tania Warner and her daughter Ayla Luca, originally from British Columbia, are both Canadian citizens. Warner moved to the US in 2021 when she married Edward Warner, a US citizen. “Very happy to have my family home … it’s been a whirlwind day,” said Edward Warner.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Responding to public health concerns about microplastics and pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water, the Trump administration for the first time has placed them on a draft list of contaminants maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA announced the move Thursday, touting it as a "historic step" for the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement, which often raises concerns about toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in our food and environment. Also Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $144 million initiative, called STOMP, to develop tools to measure and monitor microplastics in drinking water and in a later stage, to remove them. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires the EPA to publish an updated version of its Contaminant Candidate List every five years. This is the sixth iteration of the list. Microplastics and pharmaceuticals appear in the draft of the upcoming list, alongside per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and dozens of other chemicals and microbes. Their inclusion on the list gives local regulators a tool to evaluate risks in their water supply, the EPA says, and it can set the stage for more research and regulatory action -- but doesn't actually guarantee that will happen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, California leaders accused oil companies of price gouging at the pump, but a state investigation found no evidence of that. Instead, a CBS News California investigation found what's really driving the highest gas prices in the U.S.

President Trump warned the U.S. "hasn't even started destroying what's left in Iran," and previewed that strikes on bridges and power plants could be next.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 3.

This blog is now closed. You can read about the latest major development in the conflict here.

Trump has claimed that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of gaining a nuclear weapon.

Earlier on Wednesday the president said he did not care about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium (HEU), arguing it was deep underground and could be monitored by satellite.

From the very beginning my campaign for president in 2015, I said I would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This regime has been chanting death to America, death to Israel.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general

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During its brief pro forma session today, the US House took no action on the funding bill to end the historic DHS shutdown, after Senate-passed legislation was sent to the lower chamber earlier today.

The House’s next procedural meeting will be on Monday, meaning the lapse in funding for several subagencies will continue until at least next week. However, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson may even wait until lawmakers return from a two-week recess to ensure the measure, that his party rejected last week, can pass.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he will allow service members to carry personal weapons onto military installations.

US attorney general Pam Bondi failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies – key US politics stories from Thursday 2 April at a glance

Spring cleaning has begun at the White House.

Donald Trump on Thursday fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Drone-maker backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr tries to win contracts with Gulf countries protected by US

A drone-maker backed by Donald Trump’s two oldest sons is trying to sell to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the US military led by their father.

The sales drive by Florida-based Powerus – which announced a deal last month to bring aboard Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr – positions the company to potentially benefit from a war that their father began.

ENSCHEDE, Netherlands, April 2, 2026 — QuiX Quantum, a leading provider of photonic quantum computing hardware, today announced it has demonstrated “below threshold” error mitigation for the first time on a photonic quantum computer, suppressing physical qubit errors to the level compatible with scalable, fault‑tolerant quantum computing.

The achievement marks the first time a European company has demonstrated a production-ready method of error reduction, demonstrating the scalability of the QuiX quantum computing platform based on photonics. The project was conducted on the QuiX BiaTM Cloud Quantum Computing Service in collaboration with NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of Twente, and Freie Universität Berlin.

Quantum information is fragile, and without error correction, a computation of any user-relevant size will be impossible. For this reason, the ability to control errors in the quantum state is seen as a crucial milestone for any of the competing computing platforms. Increasingly, experts consider the ability to deal with such errors as the crucial differentiator between different technological approaches.

For such a protocol to be meaningful, it must meet two conditions: it must remove more errors than it introduces, and it must not impede the operation of the rest of the computer. QuiX is the first party in photonics to demonstrate a protocol that meets both requirements simultaneously. The findings are described in a paper available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05947 which is currently undergoing peer review.

“Below-threshold, physical error mitigation has never been implemented in a photonic quantum computer. This achievement marks a significant milestone and places QuiX Quantum at the forefront of progress toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing,” said Stefan Hengesbach, CEO of QuiX Quantum. “We believe the most resource-efficient strategy is to reduce errors early rather than correct them at great expense — and by demonstrating net positive error mitigation on real hardware, we’ve taken a foundational step that showcases European leadership in accelerating quantum technologies toward powerful, large-scale systems.”

“This paper represents an important jump forward towards large-scale photonic quantum computing,” said David DiVincenzo, director of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at the Peter Grünberg Institute at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. “By using a multimode optical Fourier transform, the authors have established experimentally an elegant photon distillation scheme that would significantly slash required resource costs in the future photonic quantum processor. This work takes a big step forward on one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in creating indistinguishable photons, giving a hint of a scalable path towards quantum fault tolerance.”

Photonic quantum computers use photons – particles of light – as their information carriers. The photons move around on an optical chip and entangle with each other because of their quantum particle statistics. However, the sources producing these particles are imperfect, and any path information inherent in the particles will destroy the entanglement, resulting in distinguishability errors.

Photon distillation is a hardware level, coherent technique for error reduction that improves the quality of single photons before computation. Using quantum interference among multiple imperfect photons, the method creates a cleaner, more indistinguishable photon without heavy qubit redundancy or classical post-processing.

Using a programmable 20‑mode photonic processor, the team demonstrated a photon distillation gate that makes photons measurably more alike, reducing photon indistinguishability error by a factor of 2.2. And despite additional noise introduced by the gate, the device still delivered a 1.2X net reduction in total error, demonstrating net‑gain mitigation.

The research also shows that combining photon distillation with quantum error correction may significantly reduce system level resource demands. Modeling with current photon source performance and photonic architectures, the approach could reduce the number of photon sources required per logical qubit by up to a factor of four, lowering system complexity and cost.

“For any quantum computer modality to scale, you have to prove you can remove more error than you add while the computer is still able to run, and that’s what we’ve shown here,” said Jelmar Renema, Chief Scientist at QuiX. “Our photon distillation gate is compatible with running real computations and delivers net gain error mitigation once all gate noise is included. That’s why this is a major achievement for photonics and quantum computing in general.”

The project was partially funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Defense’s Purple NECtar Quantum Challenges initiative.

About QuiX Quantum

‍QuiX Quantum is a leading provider of photonic quantum computing hardware driving innovation across Europe in the development of its Universal Quantum Computer. The first system, already sold and contracted for delivery, underscores the impact of QuiX Quantum’s market-leading hardware and renowned quality. Following its expansion across Europe and UK, QuiX Quantum pushes the boundaries of quantum technology and industry, strengthening Europe’s international competitiveness, leveraging a wide network of partners while serving a growing global customer base.

Source: QuiX Quantum

The post QuiX Quantum Demonstrates Below-Threshold Error Mitigation in Photonic Quantum Computing for First Time appeared first on HPCwire.

A doctor on trial on allegations he attempted to murder his wife on a hiking trail in Hawaii last year took the stand in his own defense.

A former FBI agent who was prosecuted for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and later hired by the Trump-era Justice Department has left his government post, he announced Thursday.

‘Ukraine has expertise concerning sea waterways, and the defence and reopening of maritime traffic,’ says president. What we know on day 1,500

Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered on Thursday to provide Ukraine’s expertise in dealing with freedom of navigation in the Black Sea to those countries considering how to keep the strait of Hormuz open amid the conflict in the Middle East. The Ukraine president, speaking in his nightly video address, said the foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, had taken part in a virtual meeting devoted to reopening the strait of Hormuz, attended by about 40 countries. “Ukraine has relevant expertise concerning sea waterways, and the defence and reopening of maritime traffic,” he said. “If [our] partners are ready to act, we will consider how we can strengthen them, how we can apply our expertise, knowledge and technological potential.”

Russia’s army recorded no territorial gains on the frontline in Ukraine in March, for the first time in two and half years, AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) showed. The Russian army’s advances have been slowing since late 2025 due to Kyiv’s localised breakthroughs in the south-east, and losing ground in March and February on the southern section of the frontline, between the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, the analysis showed. Across the entire frontline, Ukrainian forces managed to recapture 9 sq km in March.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, gave “field guidance” at the Memorial Museum of Combat Feats at the Overseas Military Operations, which is under construction , state media KCNA said. The museum in Pyongyang will be a place to commemorate the fallen soldiers sent to support the Russian army in the war in Ukraine. The construction of the museum is almost complete and Kim said the opening ceremony would be held in mid-April, marking the first anniversary of the deployment of the North Korean soldiers.

Six Ukrainian children will be returned from Russia to their families in Ukraine, the White House said on Thursday, citing efforts by Melania Trump to expedite their return. A seventh Ukrainian child will also be returned to their family later this month, the first lady’s office said in a statement. Ukraine says almost 20,000 children have been illegally sent to Russia and Belarus, where they are sometimes subject to military training and forced to fight against their own country’s troops.

Russian strikes across Ukraine on Thursday killed at least two people and wounded dozens, officials said, as Moscow stepped up its attacks amid stalled peace talks. In the south-eastern Kherson region, Russia attacked “with artillery, mortars and UAVs”, the regional prosecutor’s office said on social media. A 42-year-old man was killed when a drone hit a civilian car, and 16 others – including a teenage boy and three police officers – were wounded in air attacks and artillery shelling, it added. In the Chernihiv region, north of the capital Kyiv, Russia attacked with a ballistic missile, the head of Chernihiv’s military administration, Dmytro Bryzhynsky, said on Telegram.

Russian forces maintained a daylong barrage of drone strikes on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, on Thursday, injuring at least two people, local officials said. Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, posted reports on Telegram throughout the day and well into the evening, noting strikes in four city districts. One city official said there had been at least 20 drone strikes. He said some had triggered fires and two people had been injured in an evening attack, including an eight-year-old girl.

Russian forces carried out 129 attacks on Ukrainian gas and heating facilities during the recent 151-day heating season, the state oil and gas firm Naftogaz said on Thursday. “The Russians hit pipelines, gas production, underground storage facilities, heating systems – everything that Ukrainians depend on for heat and gas,” it said in a statement.

Health minister Mark Butler says federal government is ‘not negotiating’ when it comes to removing price protections on common medications

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Australia will not cave in to pressure from pharmaceutical giants and the Trump administration by removing consumer price protections on common medications, the health minister, Mark Butler says.

Donald Trump imposed a new 100% tariff on branded pharmaceuticals imported into the US overnight, Australian time, trying to force manufacturers to agree to drug-pricing deals or commit to making their products domestically.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 3, No. 1,749.

One of the sources said Hegseth wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and Hegseth's vision for the Army.

A federal judge in New York has tossed out actor Blake Lively's sexual harassment claims against actor Justin Baldoni over their roles in the movie "It Ends With Us," but left intact a claim for retaliation.

YouTube is rolling out Stations, music video-themed FAST channels curated by the artists and creators you love.

The new surcharge will be added to fees paid by third-party sellers in the US and Canada.

The balance of power in Lebanon may be shifting. In a few days, I will again be involved in discussions with a Middle Eastern client on regional developments. Without disclosing anything sensitive, it is possible to outline the core analytical framework that underpins my advisory work in this case. Clients rarely pay for history lectures. They pay for interpretation, and ultimately for actionable guidance derived from that interpretation. The purpose of this piece is therefore not to provide a comprehensive history of Lebanon, but to explain the structural realities that shape what is, and is not, possible in the current

The post Lebanon: Beirut and the Polycentric Reality appeared first on Lima Charlie World.

United did not say why it was raising its prices, but the move follows JetBlue also hiking its checked bag fees earlier this week, citing "rising operating costs."

schwit1 shares a report from the Kathmandu Post: In Nepal, helicopter rescue on high altitude is, by any measure, a genuine lifesaving operation. At high altitude, where oxygen thins and weather changes without warning, the ability to airlift a stricken trekker to Kathmandu within hours has saved countless lives. But threaded through that legitimate system, exploiting its urgency, its opacity, and its distance from oversight, is one of the most sophisticated insurance fraud networks in the world. Nepal's fake rescue scam is not new. The Kathmandu Post first exposed it in 2018. Months later, the government convened a fact-finding committee, produced a 700-page report, and announced reforms. In February 2019, The Kathmandu Post published a long investigative report. Last year, Nepal Police's Central Investigation Bureau reopened the file, and what they found is that the fraud did not stop -- instead it was growing. The mechanics of the fake rescue racket are straightforward: stage a medical emergency, call in a helicopter, check a tourist into a hospital, and file an insurance claim that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. But the sophistication lies in how each link in the chain is compensated, and how difficult it is for a foreign insurer -- operating from Australia and the United Kingdom -- to verify events that occurred at 3,000 metres in a remote Himalayan valley. The CIB investigation identifies two primary methods for manufacturing an "emergency." The first involves tourists who simply don't want to walk back. After completing a demanding trek -- an Everest Base Camp trek, for instance, can take up to two weeks on foot -- guides offer an alternative: pretend to be sick, and a helicopter will come. The guide handles the rest. The second method is more troubling. At altitudes above 3,000 meters, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen saturation can drop, hands and feet tingle, headaches develop. In most cases, rest, hydration or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But guides and hotel staff, according to the CIB investigation, have been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment. They tell them they are at risk of dying, that only immediate evacuation will save them. In some cases, investigators found that Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets, used to prevent altitude sickness, were administered alongside excessive water intake to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call. In at least one case cited in the investigation, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically unwell. Once a "rescue" is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger's insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors' knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment. In one case, an office assistant at Shreedhi Hospital admitted that he had provided his own X-ray report taken about a year ago at a different hospital, to be used as a case for treatment of foreign trekkers to claim insurance. The commission structure that holds the network together was described in detail during police interrogations. Hospitals pay 20 to 25 percent of the insurance payment to trekking companies and a further 20 to 25 percent to helicopter rescue operators in exchange for patient referrals. Trekking guides and their companies benefit from inflated invoices. In some cases, tourists themselves are offered cash incentives to participate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A county board near Nashville voted to dismiss Luanne James, who said she stands by her decision, in the latest clash in a national debate over access to books.

Ryan Bridge is co-founder of Raise the Colours, which has been criticised for anti-immigrant rhetoric

The leader of a flag campaign group has been arrested on suspicion of causing religiously and racially aggravated harassment.

Ryan Bridge is the co-founder of Raise the Colours, which has put up hundreds of union and Saint George flags across England and attracted criticism for spreading anti-immigrant rhetoric. He was arrested on Tuesday and released on police bail the following day.

Commentary: If there's one company capable of making genuinely stylish wearable tech, it's British indie darling Nothing.

Attorneys for Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born US green card holder, say he was targeted for criticizing Israel

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The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque was detained by federal immigration agents, drawing accusations from local officials and religious leaders that the arrest was motivated by his statements against Israel.

Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody by nearly a dozen US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Monday in Milwaukee after he left his home, according to the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.

Britain’s Keir Starmer hosts a meeting of world leaders for talks on the waterway amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration to join the Iran war.

OpenAI is acquiring tech news podcast TBPN, a fast-growing daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence, even though the acquisition is widely viewed as part of a broader effort to influence public discourse around AI. CNBC reports: In the announcement, OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo wrote that their mission of bringing artificial general intelligence comes with a responsibility to have a space for "constructive conversation about the changes AI creates." Altman has appeared on TBPN multiple times and is a frequent presence across media and podcasts, even hitting NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in December. The announcement says TBPN will maintain editorial independence and continue to choose its own guests. "TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions." OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal but said TBPN will be housed within its strategy organization. "While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right," wrote Hays in a statement. "Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SINGAPORE, April 2, 2026 — From 2025 until the end of 2029, Microsoft is on track to spend $5.5 billion to power Singapore’s AI future, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith announced yesterday, alongside the expansion of Microsoft Elevate programs to provide AI tools and skills to tertiary students, teachers and nonprofits with responsible AI to uplift all communities in the AI era.

Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft is announcing a $5.5 billion USD investment in cloud and AI infrastructure and ongoing operations in Singapore during the five years from 2025 through 2029. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to enabling individuals and economies through technology, talent and trust, every tertiary education student in Singapore also now has free access to Microsoft 365 Premium with Copilot and the company’s suite of productivity tools, while all educators will be provided free AI training through Microsoft Elevate for Educators, and Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers will upskill nonprofit leaders. Together, these programs strengthen the education, workforce, and social impact systems for communities so more people can learn, work, and thrive in the AI economy.

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith was in Singapore to make these announcements and deliver a keynote at today’s Asia Tech x Inspire event, alongside IMDA Chairman Russell Tham, Senior Minister of State at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Dr. Janil Puthucheary, local leaders from public and private sectors along with students from across Singapore’s universities and vocational institutions.

“Our ongoing investment in cloud and AI infrastructure reflects Microsoft’s long-term confidence in Singapore as a global digital leader,” said Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft. “Together, we’re focused on helping people and organizations use AI by strengthening skills, increasing cybersecurity and resilience, and advancing trusted governance so technology delivers real benefits for Singaporeans.”

These announcements to expand AI skilling and workforce readiness nationwide to put people at the centre of the AI opportunity are aligned to Singapore’s rapid adoption of AI, reinforcing its ranking at #2 globally in the recent AI Diffusion Report from the Microsoft Research AI Economy Institute.

Dr. Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment in Singapore, said: “Baseline AI skills are increasingly becoming as fundamental as digital literacy. By equipping students with a hands on experience using AI tools, and supporting our educators to adopt them confidently, we are strengthening the foundations for Singapore’s future workforce, and training them to use AI with confidence, discernment and trust.”

Powering Singapore’s AI Future

As part of its commitment to spend $5.5 billion in Singapore over five years to power the nation’s ambitions and AI future, Microsoft will invest in cloud and AI infrastructure and ongoing operations in Singapore. Microsoft will continue strengthening AI skills across sectors and communities, while increasing cybersecurity, resilience and trusted governance.

Empowering Every Tertiary Student with Free, Trusted AI Tools

Microsoft 365 Premium with Copilot will be free for 12 months to every tertiary student in Singapore. The more than 200,000 students enrolled in university and vocational training institutions will have access to Microsoft 365 productivity tools with Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, built right in – including in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Tertiary students can sign up to access this free offer (valid tertiary email address required) from this Microsoft site.

Access to useful, trusted, secure AI built right into the flow of work will give students an edge as they further their education, and ultimately improve their employability in the evolving job market. This expansion follows the announcement of the offer for students in the United States at the White House’s AI Education Task Force meeting in recent months.

New Microsoft Elevate Programs for Educators and Nonprofit Leaders

As AI adoption accelerates, readiness remains uneven. Many institutions and communities lack the skills, guidance, or capacity to adopt AI responsibly and effectively. Microsoft Elevate helps address these gaps by bringing together trusted technology, free credentials, professional communities, and system level capacity building, delivered through partnerships that support long term, inclusive impact.

To build AI confidence in classrooms, Microsoft has expanded Microsoft Elevate for Educators to Singapore, a new program helping educators build confidence in using AI responsibly in the classroom – from primary and secondary schools to Institutes of Higher Learning. Aligned with Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0, the initiative supports AI literacy and trusted, inclusive adoption through foundational training, virtual workshops and a global educator community.

To strengthen nonprofit leadership with responsible AI, Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers has been introduced in Singapore to support nonprofit and social impact leaders driving real world AI adoption in service of their communities. Designed to meet organizations where they are, the program builds practical skills with free AI readiness credentials while strengthening internal capacity for responsible and effective use.

These targeted efforts build on Microsoft’s long-term commitment to upskilling the people of Singapore, including through initiatives delivered in partnership with Singapore Government agencies and organizations that have reached hundreds of thousands of workers across every sector.

Latest Advice for Students, Job-Seekers, Employees and Leaders

New Economic Graph data from LinkedIn – a Microsoft company – shows that demand for AI literacy skills has grown in Singapore over 70% year-on-year. The latest insights released by LinkedIn today in the new book Open to Work; How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, with a foreword contributed by Microsoft’s Brad Smith, show AI fluency has become a baseline expectation across organisations, regardless of role or function. The regions that pull ahead will ensure widespread access, widespread adoption, and widespread ability to innovate – including by prioritizing lifelong learning and public-private partnerships, as Singapore does.

“The significant commitment Microsoft is making to Singapore reinforces its pivotal role as an AI innovation hub in Asia. We’re all-in on Singapore’s AI future, and access and skills will be fundamental to fully realizing this nation’s ambitions. By embedding AI literacy into everyday learning and in how every sector from enterprise to nonprofits operate, we’re building on the National AI Strategy 2.0 to drive inclusive, trusted AI adoption for genuine impact,” said Wee Luen Chia, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Source: Microsoft

The post Microsoft Plans $5.5B Investment in Singapore Cloud and AI Infrastructure Through 2029 appeared first on HPCwire.

According to Jonathan the tortoise's vet, there was also a crypto donation request from the same account that falsely announced the tortoise's death.

From attempts to prosecute president’s foes to claims of a cover-up, attorney general endured tumultuous tenure

• Analysis: Bondi firing a reminder that even ultra-loyalists get dumped by Trump

• Democrats cheer Trump’s firing of Pam Bondi and attack Epstein files ‘cover-up’

Donald Trump fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, on Thursday, removing the nation’s chief law enforcement officer after months of mounting frustration over her handling of the Epstein files and her faltering attempts to prosecute the president’s political enemies.

“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Thursday. He said she would be replaced by her deputy, Todd Blanche, on an interim basis.

Judge Lewis Liman dismissed 10 of Lively’s 13 claims against Baldoni, including claim of sexual harassment

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A federal judge has thrown out the majority of Blake Lively’s claims against Justin Baldoni.

In a court ruling on Thursday, Judge Lewis Liman dismissed 10 of the 13 claims in Lively’s lawsuit against her co-star and director of the domestic violence film It Ends With Us.

Interest rates for a typical home loan jumped Thursday to 6.46%, the highest level since September 2025. House-hunters aren't pleased.

New tax will hit branded drugs and active ingredients while exempting generics for at least one year

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Donald Trump is threatening 100% tariffs on pharmaceutical companies that have not struck deals to lower US drug prices.

The new tariff will only apply to branded drugs and their active ingredients. Generic drugs, which make up more than 90% of medicines sold in the US, will be exempted from tariffs for at least one year. Orphan, veterinary and other specialty drugs are exempt if they are from trade deal countries or meet urgent public health needs.

Stocks rebound after sliding in early-day trade, with investors buoyed by reports that Iran and Oman could monitor ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

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A month after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech on April 1, saying the military operation was “getting very close” to completing its mission. Trump repeated some false and questionable claims we’ve written about before.

• Trump said the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear facility sites in Iran last June. Experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and Iran’s uranium enrichment program was set back, but the sites and the country’s nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed.

• The president said that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of “a nuclear bomb.” Arms control experts have said that there’s a lack of evidence that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program before the U.S./Israeli military operation and that a nuclear weapon wasn’t “imminent.”

• Trump claimed that before the U.S. attacked, Iran “would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland,” but arms control experts have disputed Trump’s claim.

• Trump criticized an Obama-era agreement that he said “would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran” if Trump hadn’t ended it in his first term. That’s Trump’s opinion. One arms control group estimated the withdrawal from the agreement sped up the time it would take for Iran to produce weapons-grade uranium.

• The president falsely suggested that the U.S. became the “No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet” because of his leadership. The U.S. became the top producer of both natural gas and petroleum, which includes crude oil, even before Trump’s first term as president.

• He falsely claimed to have turned a “dead and crippled” economy into the “strongest in history.” Many economists measure the health of an economy by the rate of growth in real gross domestic product, which was lower in the U.S. in 2025 than it was the year before Trump started his second term.

Last June’s Airstrikes

The president said the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear facility sites in Iran last June in a U.S. airstrike operation called Midnight Hammer. Experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and Iran’s uranium enrichment program was set back, but the sites and the country’s nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed.

In a March 18 congressional hearing, however, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard backed up Trump’s claim, saying that it was the assessment of the Intelligence Community that last year’s airstrikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Trump has repeatedly used the description “totally obliterated” in describing the success of the operation, starting the night of the attack in a televised address. As we’ve written, a five-page, preliminary, classified report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said the bombing sealed off entrances of two facilities and set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months, CNN and the New York Times reported last June.

On June 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement saying it would take “years” to rebuild key facilities. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes,” he said. “This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us in March that “it is clear that it would take Iran years to fully rebuild its enrichment plants” that were “severely damaged” in June. But the operation didn’t “remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled, and that the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] reported this week is buried [at] Iran’s nuclear complex near Isfahan,” one of the three sites hit in last year’s airstrikes.

To be weapons-grade, the uranium would need to be enriched to 90%.

Iran’s Nuclear Capability

The president went on to say that Iran “sought to rebuild their nuclear program at a totally different location, making clear they had no intention of abandoning their pursuit of nuclear weapons.” He said the country was “right at the doorstep” of “a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon, a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.”

The phrase “right at the doorstep” is vague, but arms control experts have said that there’s a lack of evidence that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program before the U.S./Israeli military operation and that a nuclear weapon wasn’t “imminent.”

As we reported last month, Kimball told us that “[w]hile Iran’s nuclear program remains a medium- to long-term proliferation risk, there was and is no imminent Iranian nuclear threat; Iran is not close to ‘weaponizing’ its nuclear material so as to justify breaking off negotiations and launching the U.S.-Israeli attack.”

Eliana Johns, a senior research associate with the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, told us that “if Iran enriches uranium to weapons-grade, they will need to weaponize the material and develop a nuclear device with other sensitive components. It’s relatively easy to put various payloads on a missile; however, while Iran certainly has ballistic missiles that could theoretically be used for this purpose, there are still challenges with designing a nuclear device that can be mated with the intended missile, will detonate when desired, survive reentry, and arrive accurately at its target.”

In her prepared remarks for the March 18 congressional hearing, Gabbard said: “As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement. We continue to monitor for any early indicators on what position the current or any new leadership in Iran will take with regard to authorizing a nuclear weapons program.”

Asked by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff whether it was “the assessment of the Intelligence Community that there was an ‘imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime,'” as the White House had said, Gabbard said, “The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” Under repeated questioning on the issue, Gabbard said that the president was “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat.”

Iranian Missile Range

Trump claimed that before the U.S. attacked, Iran was “rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe and virtually any other place on earth.” But arms control experts have disputed Trump’s claim about missiles “soon” reaching the U.S.

As we wrote when Trump made a similar comment in his State of the Union Address on Feb. 24, while “soon” is a subjective term, experts say the threat of Iran developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland of the United States was not particularly imminent. One expert put the time frame at several years, while others have said it would take Iran a decade or more to develop a functioning ICBM.

“Iran’s missile arsenal remains one of the pillars of its security strategy,” Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us in an email. “However, there is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future. Recent estimates determined that not only does Iran have no intercontinental ballistic missile capability, but the country appears to have maintained its self-imposed missile range limit of 2,000 km.”

Pushing back against the president’s claim, some Democrats have pointed to a Defense Intelligence Agency report released last May that stated, “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” The report, which assessed missile threats that might be faced by a Trump-proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, projected Iran could have 60 ICBMs by 2035.

“So basically, the U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Iran would need 10 years to build ICBMs capable of hitting the United States militarily if they chose to do so,” Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank advocating restraint in U.S. foreign policy, told us. “And it did not necessarily say that there was evidence that Iran had chosen to do so.”

However, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on global security at Middlebury College, warned that many were misreading the context of the DIA report.

“The question wasn’t ‘When will Iran have an ICBM’, it was ‘What will the threat environment look like in 2035 when Golden Dome is to be fully operational,’” Lewis wrote on X.

A March 2 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Lewis “said that even if Tehran wanted to pursue building the weapons, it would likely take two to three years at least to build a single missile based on the history of how other nations developed similar missiles.”

“US officials have been saying since the late 1990s that Iran is a little over a decade away from developing an ICBM and is pursuing that capability,” Johns, of the Federation of American Scientists, told us. “However, building an ICBM capable of accurately striking the US mainland would require overcoming substantial technical hurdles with propulsion, guidance, and reentry, among other things. And there is little evidence to indicate that Iran has this capacity or intends to pursue it.”

Obama Nuclear Deal

The president again criticized a multilateral nuclear agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration that was intended to restrict Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Trump, who withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in his first term, said the nuclear deal “would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them.”

As we’ve written before, we can’t say what would have happened if the agreement had remained in place, and Trump noted that this was his “opinion.” But the deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and also signed by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany, put restrictions on uranium enrichment by Iran for 15 years and required inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities. In exchange for Iran abiding by the deal, the other countries agreed to lift sanctions on Iran.

The agreement took effect in 2016, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from it in 2018.

The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that Trump withdrawing from the agreement led to Iran accelerating its nuclear program. As of November 2024, the center estimated that the “breakout time,” or the time Iran would need, if it chose to do so, to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb, was two to three months before the nuclear agreement and was 12-plus months during the agreement. After the U.S. withdrew, the breakout time was a couple of weeks.

However, as we’ve explained, after producing the highly enriched uranium, it would take much longer for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump also said that “Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash … in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty but it didn’t work.” As we explained in a 2016 article, the $1.7 billion payment, made in 2016, settled a claim that Iran had filed against the U.S. in an international tribunal in The Hague. It concerned a decades-old dispute over Iran paying the U.S. $400 million for military equipment, and the U.S. refusing to provide it after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

The $1.7 billion included the original $400 million and “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest,” according to a statement by John Kerry, the secretary of state at the time.

Oil and Gas

Trump falsely suggested that the U.S. became the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas because of him.

“Under my leadership, we are No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet, without even discussing the millions of barrels that we’re getting from Venezuela,” Trump said. “Because of the Trump administration’s policies, we produce more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. Think of that. Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and that number will soon be substantially higher than that.”

As we’ve written, the U.S. has been the world’s No. 1 producer of petroleum, which includes both crude oil and refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, since 2013, and it has produced the most crude oil, including lease condensate, since 2018, as was long predicted. The International Energy Agency said in a 2012 energy outlook report that the U.S. was projected to become “the largest global oil producer” by “around 2020” due to advances in shale extraction technology.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been the leader in natural gas production even longer — since 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. overtook Russia to become the top producer of natural gas, and it has produced more of it than Russia and Saudi Arabia, combined, in all but one year since 2014.

Saudi Arabia and Russia had produced the most petroleum and crude oil until the U.S. surpassed them years ago. The U.S. has produced more petroleum than Saudi Arabia and Russia together since 2024, but it does not produce more crude oil than those two countries combined.

The Economy

Trump repeated his false claims about turning around a country that was “dead and crippled” economically.

“We built the strongest economy in history,” he said. “We’re going through it right now, the strongest in history. In one year, we’ve taken a dead and crippled country, I hate to say that, but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration, and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation, record-setting investments coming into the United States over $18 trillion and the highest stock market ever, with 53 all-time record highs in just one year.”

Trump didn’t create the “strongest” economy in his first or second term as president. Economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth in real (meaning inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product. In his first year back in office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.1% in 2025, which was down from the annual rate of 2.8% in 2024 under his predecessor.

In addition, as of February, the unemployment rate in the U.S. had increased to 4.4% — up from 4% when Trump took office in January 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There is also still inflation, even though the annualized rate, based on the Consumer Price Index, did decline from 3% in January 2025 to 2.4% as of February. Overall prices may have increased further since then. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is predicting that the annual inflation rate in March was back up to 3%, largely because of the impact that the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is having on energy prices.

And Trump continues to inflate the total amount of investments he has secured from foreign companies and countries. The White House’s own website puts the figure at $10.5 trillion — not $18 trillion. But as we’ve written, even that number cannot be substantiated because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not materialize, as well as some investments that may not be due to Trump.

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

The post FactChecking Trump’s Prime-Time Address on Iran appeared first on FactCheck.org.

April 2, 2026 — As advanced discovery tools flood U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories with data, scientists are facing a critical challenge: Humans can’t keep up with the sheer volume and speed of information being generated.

Tao Zhou of the CNM explains the capabilities of the 26-ID beamline, jointly operated by CNM and the APS. Image credit: Mark Lopez/Argonne National Laboratory.

Modern X‑ray, microscopy and neutron facilities produce vast streams of high‑value imagery, yet tools to interpret this data at scale have not kept pace. Researchers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to rapidly turn these massive datasets into usable insight.

As part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a historic national effort to transform American science and innovation through the power of AI, DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory is contributing to several important projects that will strengthen U.S. technological leadership and global competitiveness.

One of those projects is the Synergistic Neutron and Photon Science – Intelligence (SYNAPS-I) AI platform, which will integrate data from neutron, X-ray and microscopy experiments across national labs into a single model. This model will analyze information across scales and accelerate understanding of complex systems in real time.

The SYNAPS-I project is led by Alexander Hexemer, senior scientist at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The project also includes members from these DOE national laboratories: Brookhaven National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The rapid data analysis platform is built to accelerate breakthroughs in microelectronics, medicine, advanced manufacturing and energy security. The goal is to advance DOE laboratories with next‑generation, AI‑driven research capabilities.

“SYNAPS‑I is envisioned not just as a tool for analysis and automation, but as a cognitive partner for scientists — capable of generating hypotheses, detecting subtle correlations and helping turn DOE facilities into truly intelligent, self‑driving laboratories,” said Mathew Cherukara, an Argonne computational scientist, group leader and leader of the Argonne SYNAPS-I team.

SYNAPS‑I Enables Real‑Time AI Imaging at Beamline Scale

The SYNAPS-I project aims to develop an AI‑driven imaging engine capable of turning vast scientific data streams into rapid insight. One challenge is scale: SYNAPS‑I seeks to train a multimodal, billion‑parameter foundation model on data from more than 100 beamlines across seven DOE facilities, far surpassing today’s archive of 50 billion images. ​“Multimodal” means the model can process different types of data, such as text and images, and ​“billion-parameter” refers to the billions of internal variables the system adjusts as it learns.

Beamlines are experiment stations built to deliver and shape X‑ray beams for scientific measurements.

To build and test the platform, the team started with ptychography, an X-ray technique that gathers overlapping diffraction patterns — the distinctive ways X-rays scatter after interacting with a material — and uses computation to reconstruct sharp, high‑resolution images.

“The use of ptychography is expanding rapidly, driven by major light source advances such as Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) Upgrade and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Upgrade at Berkeley Lab,” said Alec Sandy, associate director of Argonne’s X-ray Science division. ​“Converting raw ptychography data into human and AI‑interpretable results in real time maximizes DOE’s investment in these facilities and makes the measurements immediately relevant for technology development.”

Researchers chose ptychography because it ​“feels almost magical,” said Tao Zhou, a scientist at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and a member of the SYNAPS-I team. ​“Scientists have pushed traditional X‑ray optics to their physical limits. Ptychography sidesteps those limits by using physics and computational reconstruction to achieve detail finer than the beam itself can reveal.”

This level of resolution has been achieved before, but not this rapidly.

SYNAPS-I accelerates the entire workflow, delivering high‑resolution ptychographic images fast enough to keep pace with experiments and surpass the limits of conventional optics. The platform uses the advanced computing resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at LBNL. The APS, CNM, ALCF, ALS and NERSC are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

At Argonne’s APS, the world’s brightest synchrotron X-ray source, a coherent beam scans nanoscale samples such as microelectronics and other manufacturing‑relevant materials. SYNAPS‑I captures the resulting diffraction patterns and reconstructs them into high‑resolution images in real time.

“SYNAPS-I is a rapid‑analysis method that delivers insights at the pace data is generated, compressing hours or days of analysis into seconds,” said Aileen Luo, an Argonne assistant computational scientist and lead developer of the SYNAPS-I model for ptychography.

Behind that speed is an AI platform engineered to think like the imaging tools themselves.

“By building the physics of coherent imaging directly into the model, we’re giving AI the same knowledge a scientist would use,” said Emon Dey, a postdoctoral researcher in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science division and member of the SYNAPS-I team. ​“That built‑in understanding makes it far more accurate and efficient when handling the massive data volumes produced at DOE facilities.”

The platform works across domains, speeding progress in microelectronics, biomedical research, advanced manufacturing and energy security. SYNAPS-I cuts imaging analysis from years to days and enables real‑time, AI‑driven materials design for next‑generation U.S. manufacturing.

The platform could deliver substantial economic gains by using real-time AI to cut research delays, eliminate costly bottlenecks and speed innovation, boosting U.S. competitiveness and driving growth across multiple industries.

Testing Reveals Order-of-Magnitude Gains

Argonne recently successfully tested the new rapid‑analysis data method, running the full SYNAPS‑I workflow on microelectronics and quantum samples at a shared APS/CNM beamline.

The platform captured data and displayed the imaging results instantly for real‑time viewing at the beamline. Simultaneously, the saved data was moved to the ALCF, where high performance computing resources were used to refine the models.

“The test opened the door to real-time identification of defects in materials, for example, to guide manufacturing processes and enable autonomous discovery campaigns to discover new technologically impactful materials,” said Sandy. Autonomous discovery campaigns are largely self-driving research efforts in which AI systems help design experiments, analyze results and determine the next steps, accelerating the search for promising new materials.

The results of the test at the 26-ID beamline of the APS (operated by CNM) showed ptychography capabilities that were 10 times higher in resolution and contrast and 100 times faster than similar experiments without using AI workflows. SYNAPS-I enabled the analysis of 1.3 terabytes of data on one graphical processing unit (GPU) in real time, whereas a similar experiment without AI would take 2,500 GPU hours to process.

SYNAPS‑I: The Road Ahead

As the APS expands its coherent imaging capabilities, the team plans to deploy SYNAPS‑I across the facility and other DOE light‑source and neutron facilities.

The capabilities under development could support 10 APS beamlines and many more across the DOE complex, Sandy said.

The team also aims to extend SYNAPS‑I beyond ptychography, expand it with new partners, test it in real experimental settings and refine it continually as it scales.

To do that, the Argonne team is drawing on the unparalleled strengths of the DOE user facilities, including the APS.

“We’re fortunate to have one of the brightest, most advanced synchrotron facilities in the world at the APS, and that’s a big part of what makes this project possible,” Luo said.

Along with Cherukara, Sandy, Zhou, Dey and Luo, the Argonne SYNAPS-I team includes Ming Du, Peco Myint, Jeffrey Klug, Antonino Miceli, Xiangyu Yin, Sinisa Veseli, Tekin Bicer, Varuni Sastry, Yijiang Li and Kibaek Kim.

SYNAPS-I is a public-private partnership uniting Argonne with LBNL, Brookhaven, ORNL, SLAC, university researchers and AI leaders with key industry innovators.

Work performed at the CNM and APS was supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Source: Beth Burmahl, Argonne National Laboratory

The post DOE Labs Develop SYNAPS-I AI Platform for Real-Time Beamline Data Analysis appeared first on HPCwire.

I tested dozens of headphones and headsets to find the most comfortable models with strong call quality and solid PC compatibility for video meetings. Here are my top picks.

The mother of the last remaining Afghan detained at Guantánamo Bay is pleading with the Trump administration to free her son, who has been held in detention for nearly two decades without ever being charged with a crime.

In a letter shared exclusively with The Intercept, Safora Yousufzai calls on President Donald Trump to release her son, 60-year-old Mohammad Rahim, citing his poor health and “advanced age” and arguing that “his prolonged detention has significantly affected both his physical and psychological well-being.”

Yousufzai points out that Afghanistan’s government released 64-year-old linguistics researcher Dennis Walter Coyle last month, after he spent over a year in captivity. His family had urged the Taliban to “look upon him with leniency” in a letter, which Afghanistan’s foreign ministry cited in their announcement of his release.

The Trump administration claimed credit for negotiating Coyle’s return — and proclaimed its commitment to “ending unjust detentions overseas.”

Now, Yousufzai is hoping to hold the administration to that promise.

“In light of recent humanitarian actions undertaken in comparable circumstances — such as the release and repatriation of detainee Dennis Coyle to his family, I respectfully express my hope that similar consideration may be extended in my son’s case,” wrote Yousufzai. “Such actions reflect not only legal discretion but also a broader commitment to human dignity and humanitarian values.” 

U.S. forces detained Rahim in Pakistan in 2007 and transferred him to the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2008. The U.S. government accused the Afghan national of being an interpreter and courier for Osama Bin Laden in Al Qaeda, but he was never charged or tried for any crimes.

The Biden administration reportedly offered to release Rahim in exchange for a prisoner swap including Mahmood Habibi, a U.S. citizen who was reportedly arrested in Afghanistan in 2022, after the U.S. killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. That deal never went through, and the Taliban has reportedly continued to request Rahim’s release. The Taliban publicly denies holding Habibi, who is still in custody, saying that they are unaware of his whereabouts. 

The White House and State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Related

After Torturing Him, U.S. Breaks Guarantees of Safety to Former Guantánamo Detainee

The CIA tortured Rahim while he was in its custody, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture. Rahim was subjected to “extensive use of the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation techniques,” the 2014 Senate report reads. According to their records, he was subjected to facial slaps, diet manipulation, and eight sleep deprivation sessions. During one of the sessions, he was kept awake for six straight days. Not sleeping for even three days can have lasting and profound negative impacts on cognitive health.

While he was being intentionally deprived of sleep, he was “usually shackled in a standing position, wearing a diaper and a pair of shorts,” the report adds. While in custody in 2007, he was provided a diet that “was almost entirely limited to water and liquid Ensure meals.” 

Administration officials have not spoken publicly about whether they would consider releasing Rahim. However, according to the New York Times, a senior U.S. official said that Rahim would not be a part of future deals with the Taliban. 

“At a minimum,” his mother wrote to Trump, “universally recognized human rights principles and norms call for a careful reassessment of his situation, with due consideration given to his age, health, and length of detention.” 

In her letter, Yousufzai also pleaded with the Trump administration to think of Rahim’s daughter, who she said has “been deprived for years of the care, affection, and guidance of her father.” 

Yousufzai, who is elderly herself, wrote that she hopes the Trump administration will allow her to see her son at least one last time before her death.

“As I approach the later stages of my life, the opportunity to see my son again remains my most earnest and final hope,” she wrote. “I respectfully urge your administration to take a thoughtful and humane step toward resolving his case, consistent with the values of justice, mercy, and respect for human dignity.” 

The post Mother of the Last Afghan in Guantánamo Bay Begs Trump to Free Her Son appeared first on The Intercept.

Rodney Ward returned debris instead of pets’ ashes and stored animals’ bodies in hearse or threw them out on road

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A Baltimore county man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of defrauding pet owners through his fake crematorium business, returning rocks and sand to grieving victims instead of ashes.

On Tuesday, 56-year-old Rodney Ward was also ordered to pay $12,510 in restitution to victims. He had pleaded guilty to one count of felony theft and five counts of malicious destruction of property over $1,000, according to the Baltimore county state’s attorney’s office.

Attorney general was key part of effort to go after enemies but even she could not satisfy whims of mercurial president

Pam Bondi’s swift dismissal on Thursday underscores a reality that has met Trump loyalists from Jeff Sessions to Kristi Noem – no amount of loyalty is enough to save oneself from being dumped by Donald Trump.

Since the president assumed office last year, there have been few people more important to his effort to remake government than Bondi, his longtime friend.

A wealthy labor lawyer shoots his high-profile wife from the backseat of their SUV -- he says it was an accident -- prosecutors say otherwise

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% "fuel and logistics" surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company's Fulfillment by Amazon service -- which is used by many of the independent sellers who list their products on Amazon's retail sites -- in the US and Canada. Items shipped by Amazon on behalf of merchants who sell on their own sites or at other retailers will carry the surcharge beginning May 2. "Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry," Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, said on Thursday. "We have absorbed these increases so far, but similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated we implement temporary surcharges to partially recover these costs." Vanicek notes that the fee will apply to the sum Amazon charges to ship an item, not the product's sale price. Last month, USPS announced that it would impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Houston, we have a potty problem. A team effort restored the Orion spacecraft's bathroom, to astronauts' relief.

April 2, 2026 — Designing metamaterials consisting of engineered lattices whose geometry gives them unusual strength, flexibility, or energy absorption typically requires long cycles of trial‑and‑error simulation. The challenge becomes even harder when the structure combines multiple materials and must handle real-world behavior such as large deformations, plasticity, and contact, where many different designs can produce similar mechanical responses, deemed unsolvable by classical computational design methods.

For a given target input stress-strain curve, the AI “thinks in reverse.” A video diffusion model de-noises from random noise into a plausible sequence of evolving internal mechanical fields, then a structure-identifier converts those fields into a manufacturable multi-material lattice — bypassing classical inverse computational design methods that are intractable.

Researchers from MechSE and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have now introduced a generative AI workflow that is trained on NCSA’s DeltaAI high-performance computing system to reverse the process. Instead of starting with a design and predicting what it does, the method starts with the desired stress-strain curve and generates candidate multi‑material architectures that can deliver it.

The approach adapts video diffusion models, which are best known for producing images and videos for animated clips on social media. Through the process of noising and de-noising, the diffusion model learns how mechanical solution fields evolve during loading for a given stress-strain response, and an additional “structure identifier neural network” converts those fields into manufacturable multi‑material layouts.

This novel research was recently published in the Journal of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. It builds on research by Professor Dennis Kochmann’s group at ETH Zurich, which focused on a single-component material.

The ability to quickly propose many candidate structures with tailored nonlinear behavior opens doors to impact‑energy absorption for automotive and aerospace applications, soft‑robotics actuators that undergo large deformations, and bio-inspired materials that mimic tissue-like mechanics for implants, prostheses, and tissue engineering — all areas where customizable, nonlinear responses are crucial. MechSE Professor Iwona Jasiuk’s group is already moving toward the fabrication and testing of AI‑designed samples.

Jaewan Park led the project, co-advised by Jasiuk and Seid Koric, MechSE Research Professor and Senior Technical Associate Director at NCSA.

Other members of the team include former MechSE PhD students Diab Abuiedda, Junyan (Jimmy) He, and Shashank Kushwaha, as well as Qibang Liu, a research scientist at NCSA.

About Delta and DeltaAI

NCSA’s Delta and DeltaAI are part of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem through the U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS program. Delta (OAC 2005572) is a powerful computing and data-analysis resource combining next-generation processor architectures and NVIDIA graphics processors with forward-looking user interfaces and file systems. The Delta project partners with the Science Gateways Community Institute to empower broad communities of researchers to easily access Delta and with the University of Illinois Division of Disability Resources & Educational Services and the School of Information Sciences to explore and reduce barriers to access. DeltaAI (OAC 2320345) maximizes the output of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research. Tripling NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expanding the capacity available within ACCESS, DeltaAI enables researchers to address the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI/ML and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data. Additional funding for DeltaAI comes from the State of Illinois.

Source: Grainger College of Engineering Mechanical Science & Engineering, University of Illinois

The post NCSA, MechSE Develop GenAI Workflow for Metamaterial Design on DeltaAI appeared first on HPCwire.

Rumors have been circulating about Apple's next iPhone for quite some time. Here's what we know about the iPhone 18 so far.

Foundayo is the first oral GLP-1 weight loss pill that doesn't require fasting.

It's the second straight year that black won't be available on Apple's flagship phone.

• Three-time champion ‘out for extended period’

• ‘It is the most special week. I will be watching’

Phil Mickelson has announced he will not compete at next week’s Masters due to an ongoing “family health matter”.

The six-time major winner, who won the Masters in 2004, 2006 and 2010, missed the first four LIV Golf events of the year and said he will remain “out for an extended period of time”.

The commission, which is chaired by a White House staffer, voted 9 to 1 to approve the design, which includes a ballroom with seating for 1,000 guests.

Body camera video has been released of Tiger Woods' arrest, after a car crash in Florida. He has been charged with driving under the influence.

President Trump has ousted Pam Bondi as attorney general, saying she will be taking a job in the private sector.

IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement. IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World. That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data shows 209 cases recorded as assisted dying referred to CPS by police between 1 April 2009 and 31 March this year

Thirteen cases of suspected assisted dying are being considered by prosecutors in England and Wales, according to the latest data.

Encouraging or assisting the suicide or attempted suicide of another person is against the law in England and Wales, under the Suicide Act 1961.

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

Bondi earned president’s ire over handling release of Epstein files and failing to prosecute his political enemies

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Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

Headlining set for Netflix Is a Joke festival marks first outing with major streamer since misconduct allegations in 2017

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Netflix is welcoming Louis CK back into its fold.

The comedian, long subject to questions regarding rehabilitation and so-called “cancel culture”, will headline a show at the Hollywood Bowl next month as part of the streamer’s Netflix Is a Joke festival – his first major outing with a streamer since allegations of sexual misconduct at the height of the #MeToo movement. Later this summer, Netflix will also premiere CK’s new special, Ridiculous, which he directed and executive-produced.

By constitutional design, the press is antagonistic to the government. As the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in his opinion defending the publication of the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago, “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Such a free and unrestrained press requires a cohort of committed legal advocates. Whether to counter the federal government’s repeated insistence on ignoring freedom of information laws, or the Trump administration’s overt hostility and retaliation against news organizations that confront and debunk its unconstitutional narratives, a robust network of attorneys is needed to protect the press’s constitutional function.

That’s why President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional executive order aiming to punish preeminent United States law firms over their pro bono clients represents an unacceptable attack on the legal profession and poses a threat to an independent press. And that is why 42 media organizations and press freedom advocates, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief Thursday urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to affirm four District Court decisions. All four lower courts found the Trump administration’s executive order that imposed sanctions on law firms for representing President Donald Trump’s political opponents unconstitutional.

The amicus brief, authored by Andrew Sellars and Kendra Albert of Albert Sellars LLP, argues that the press plays an essential role as both a proxy for the public and a check on government power. This role requires an oppositional relationship with government interests. The president’s executive orders targeting lawyers with clients opposed to his agenda severely restricts press organizations’ access to legal counsel, particularly for outlets relying on pro bono or reduced-fee representation.

“An independent media requires First Amendment champions to guarantee citizens access to the information necessary to hold our government accountable,” said David Bralow, PFDF’s legal director. “This is why The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, legal advocates, and other partner organizations nationwide filed an amicus brief to prevent the administration’s unconstitutional efforts to intimidate lawyers fulfilling their professional oaths.”

The coalition includes news organizations, press associations, advocacy groups, media law firms, and individual attorneys with over five centuries of collective experience in First Amendment and press freedom issues.

“We are honored to represent this august group of news outlets, advocacy organizations and First Amendment attorneys at the D.C. Circuit. The public needs the press, and the press needs independent counsel, who cannot be subject to sanction because the president dislikes their clients,” said Kendra Albert, partner at Albert Sellars LLP.

“The Press Freedom Defense Fund exists for moments like this one. Alongside 42 coalition partners, we are drawing a clear line: a free press is not a privilege this or any administration may revoke,” said Annie Chabel, The Intercept’s CEO. “It is a constitutional right — and so is the independent counsel required to defend it.”

The post The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund Leads Cohort Fighting Trump’s Unconstitutional Media Attacks appeared first on The Intercept.

The Environmental Protection Agency also added microplastics to its contaminant candidate list for the first time.

A $10,000 6-month CD combines profitability and flexibility. Here's how much interest savers can earn by acting now.

Hakeem Jeffries predicts Pete Hegseth could be next as party alarmed by damage done by ‘terrible’ attorney general

• Trump fires Pam Bondi, a loyalist and ally, as attorney general

• US politics live – latest updates

With quips, memes and jabs, Democrats cheered Donald Trump’s firing of attorney general Pam Bondi on Thursday, while the president’s Republican allies praised her relatively brief tenure overseeing the justice department.

Trump announced Bondi’s departure on Truth Social, saying: “We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.” Her deputy, Todd Blanche, will take over as acting attorney general.

‘Partnership’ on drug pricing also gives patients in Britain greater access to potentially life-extending treatments

British drug exports to the US will escape tariffs imposed by Donald Trump as part of a controversial UK-US medicines deal that critics fear will mean less money for the NHS.

The deal will also give patients in Britain greater access to potentially life-extending drugs because the rules have been relaxed to allow the NHS to pay more for particular treatments.

Picking the right processor for a particular workload will always be important. But when it comes to AI–and more specifically, AI inference–the selection of any individual chip is less important than how the whole system is architected. Today’s acquisition of GigaIO’s data center business by d-Matrix, as well as Nvidia’s $2 billion investment in Marvell earlier this week, show this to be true.

d-Matrix originally made a name for itself by developing a novel digital in-memory compute (DMIC) technology that it delivers as a chiplet that plugs directly into the PCI bus. Its latest in-memory compute offering, dubbed Corsair, incorporates three-dimensional digital in-memory compute (3DMIC) that fuses the processor directly into SRAM modules connected to PCIe Gen5. Corsair was developed specifically for AI inference utilizing large language models, and delivers 150 TB/s of memory bandwidth, which helps AI models connect with data and deliver better results quicker.

The Santa Clara, California company, which raised $275 million in a Series C round last November and has raised a total of $450 million since it launched in 2022, announced its first acquisition today. d-Matrix is buying the data center business of Carlsbad, California-based GigaIO, which develops a composable infrastructure, dubbed FabreX, that connects GPUs, FPGAs, and other XPUs using PCI and CXL standards. GigaIO uses FabreX with its SuperNODE platform, which connects up to 32 XPUs to a single node.

d-Matrix’s Corsair processor incorporates in-memory compute in a 3D-stacked chiplet form-factor

The acquisition shows that d-Matrix understands that AI inference requires more than just a fast chip. “Inference is bigger than any one chip,” said Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-Matrix. “It’s now a systems problem.”

Succeeding with AI in the future will mean breaking workloads up into smaller tasks that run across a variety of different processor types, including CPUs, GPUs, and inference accelerators, Sheth said.

“That means data must move efficiently across chips, nodes, racks, and entire data centers in real time,” he said. “This acquisition accelerates our ability to deliver infrastructure built for this new reality, where low latency, efficiency, and scale all matter at once.”

GigaIO plans to continue as an independent entity focused on edge computing. The company recently announced the Gryf, which it positions as a “portable supercomputer” that can fit in the overhead bin of a jetliner.

Nvidia is also moving beyond chips. Big Green became the world’s most valuable company as a result of its powerful GPUs, which have been in high demand since soon after OpenAI sparked the current AI boom by releasing ChatGPT in late 2022. Its roadmap calls for ever-more powerful GPUs, with today’s Blackwell giving way to Rubin in 2026, to be followed by the Feynman GPU in 2028.

NVLink Fusion connects other vendors’ AI accelerators to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform

But even Nvidia recognizes that one GPU does not good AI make. Its recent GPU Technology Conference was full of news about other types of chips, including its new Vera CPU and the Groq language processing unit (LPU), the IP for which it paid $20 billion to acquire in December. CEO Jensen Huang was adamant that successful AI requires all seven of its chips, which it now refers to as its Vera Rubin platform.

“Most people forget that Nvidia’s business is much, much more diversified than a chip company,” Huang said during a Q&A with the press at GPC in March. “And the reason for that is because we’re full stack and we can help people build AI factories anywhere.”

Nvidia doubled-down on that move this week when it announced that that it’s investing $2 billion into Marvell, the $8 billion custom chipmaker based in Santa Clara. Marvell develops a variety of custom silicon, including ASICs for AI accelerators, switches, storage controllers, gaming consoles, and silicon photonic devices. It worked with AWS to develop its Trainium XPUs for AI model training. It has also worked with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The $2 billion investment from Nvidia is geared toward improving Marvell’s integration with NVLink Fusion, which is Nvidia’s plans to build an open ecosystem around its proprietary scale-up NVLink interconnect. According to Nvidia, Marvell will provide custom XPUs and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking components. Nvidia, meanwhile, will provide the reset of the stack, including Vera CPU, ConnectX NICs, BlueField DPUs, and the NVLink interconnect and Spectrum-X switches, as well as “AI compute” (i.e. GPUs).

“Our expanded partnership with Nvidia reflects the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optical interconnect and accelerated infrastructure in scaling AI,” said Matt Murphy, chairman and CEO of Marvell. “By connecting Marvell’s leadership in high-performance analog, optical DSP, silicon photonics and custom silicon to Nvidia’s expanding AI ecosystem through NVLink Fusion, we are enabling customers to build scalable, efficient AI infrastructure.”

In December, Marvell spent $3.25 billion to acquire Celestial AI, which was developing a scale-up optical interconnect. Celestial AI was building Photonic Fabric, a scale-up optical interconnect that could deliver up to 16 terabits per second of bandwidth. Marvell was expected to incorporate the Celestial AI interconnect with its support for UALink. But now that it’s working with Nvidia and its NVLink Fusion interconnect architecture, it will be interesting to see how that UALink evolves.

Whether it’s UALink, NVLink Fusion, or Ultra Ethernet that becomes the vehicle for breaking down the memory wall, it’s clear that pushing the limits in AI inference these days requires a whole-of-system approach that goes beyond the capabilities of any individual chip.

Related Items:

Nvidia’s Shift from GPUs and AI ‘Inference King’ Economics

Agentic AI Is Driving Workloads and Infra On-Prem and to the Edge

d-Matrix Takes On AI ‘Memory Wall’ with 3D Stacked In-Memory Compute

Editor’s note: d-Matrix has raised $450 million, not $429 million. HPCwire regrets the error.

The post Forget About Chips. It’s the System That Matters For AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Eight people reported killed in attack on newly completed suspension bridge after strike splits structure in half

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump claimed responsibility for destroying Iran’s largest bridge, a day after he threatened to bomb the country “back to the stone ages” if a deal to end the five-week-long war he started was not reached.

The US president shared footage of part of the newly built 136 metre-high $400m B1 suspension bridge between Tehran and Karaj collapsing dramatically on to the causeway below amid a rising plume of black smoke.

Owe money for taxes but expecting a refund? Here's what could happen and how you can protect what's yours.

In need of extra financial support now? Here's what the monthly payments will look like for a $30,000 personal loan.

A Radio-Canada reporter noticed his maple syrup tasted odd; testing revealed it was adulterated with cane sugar

An investigation by Canada’s national broadcaster has found that a major Quebec producer has been diluting its maple syrup with cane sugar and selling the fraudulent product to grocery chains.

In a sting operation that involved false identities and covert recordings, journalists from Radio-Canada’s Enquête programme found that a low-cost syrup sold in major grocery store chains was heavily diluted.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options. The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 4GB models are seeing new $25 price increases, the 8GB models seeing $50 price increases, and the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is seeing a $150 price increase. The Raspberry Pi Compute Modules are also seeing increases from $11.25 to $100 USD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Government must ‘come down very hard’ on online trade in knives and weapons, says policing and crime minister Sarah Jones

Children are setting up online businesses selling knives in the same way they trade clothes, the policing and crime minister has said.

Sarah Jones heard how children as young as 12 were buying and selling the weapons on the internet and social media, at the opening of the new National Knife Crime Centre in Bloomsbury, central London, on Thursday.

Most of Google's cloud storage plans come with extra access to AI tools like video generation.

Blessing from NCPC comes just days after judge ruled work on project cannot proceed without congressional approval

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Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project received the approval of Washington’s planning authorities on Thursday, two days after a judge ruled work cannot proceed without Congress’s approval.

The National Capital Planning Commission, which ​is chaired by one of Trump’s former lawyers, gave the green light to the “East Wing Modernization Project” on Thursday, describing the ballroom as just the latest stage over two centuries of continuous changes.

The opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel said that because it believes the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, President Trump does not need to comply with it.

Yvette Cooper hosts virtual summit of more than 40 countries to consider coordinated action in face of closure of vital shipping lane

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

More than 40 countries gathered to discuss “every possible diplomatic, economic and coordinated measure” to pressurise Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, the UK foreign secretary has said.

After chairing a virtual summit on Thursday, Yvette Cooper said coordinated action was needed as Iran’s “reckless strikes” on international shipping and efforts to “hijack the global economy” were hitting nations from across the globe “who played no part in this conflict”.

The US president couldn’t give a single coherent reason for why this aggressive war of choice must still be prosecuted

Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory speech on Iran on Wednesday night was as puzzling as it was divorced from reality. I had hoped he would declare victory and end the war. Some feared he might provide cover for a ground invasion. Instead, he told us in essence to be patient, that he is almost done, but he was utterly unclear about what more there is to accomplish.

If there was ever a purpose to the war, it was to curtail Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump harped on that goal repeatedly in his speech, noting that he had long vowed that he “would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon”. But he didn’t mention that Iran has long agreed to eschew a nuclear weapon. If that is the only goal, this entire war has been pointless.

Company refocuses on bringing datacenter-class computing directly to the edge with Gryf.

CARLSBAD, Calif., April 2, 2026 — GigaIO today announced the sale of its SuperNODE platform and patented PCIe Gen 5-based AI fabric FabreX to low-latency AI inferencing pioneer d-Matrix. The sale is the logical culmination of the companies’ strategic partnership to deliver inference solutions for AI at scale.

In April 2025, the two companies announced the integration of d-Matrix’s Corsair inference platform into GigaIO’s SuperNODE architecture to create a solution that supports dozens of Corsair accelerators in a single node. This collaboration became the industry’s most scalable AI inference platform, with an integration that enabled end users to deploy ultra-low-latency batched inference workloads at a new scale.

With the sale, d-Matrix has also acquired key rack-scale engineering talent from GigaIO, providing additional resources to rapidly deploy complete solutions for high-performance inference to data centers.

“We have worked closely with d-Matrix for more than a year to create rack-scale systems with industry-leading, high-performance inferencing,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “We are excited to see our world-class FabreX technology extend to full system capability and believe that d-Matrix, in combining its inference engines with our fabric, is the ideal company to challenge the existing hegemony.”

Moving forward, GigaIO will focus on bringing datacenter-class computing directly to the edge. Powered by FabreX and designed with SourceCode, GigaIO’s Gryf is unique in its ability to scale to the performance of a field supercomputer within such a small, portable form factor, providing real-time intelligence and analytics that were previously impossible without massive infrastructure.

“The edge market has a huge upside, with increased need to deploy new, modern, meaningful compute closer to the users, and that’s what GigaIO is going to be focused on,” said Benjamin. “As AI becomes an increasingly integrated part of daily business and life, the ability to execute sophisticated workloads closer to data inputs and outputs becomes ever more essential. We are excited to rethink the long-standing paradigm of stripped-down capabilities at the edge and instead deliver a new approach with mobile datacenter-class hardware that can execute increasingly complex use cases wherever they are needed.”

Gryf has enabling users to dynamically deploy applications anywhere, at any time. Organizations can process critical data on site without the latency issues from data transfers, accessing computing power in a ruggedized, field-ready design that can be deployed virtually anywhere. GigaIO has cited strong interest in Gryf from defense and intelligence, sports and media organizations, and the energy sector.

More from HPCwire

• GigaIO Secures $21M to Scale AI Inferencing Infrastructure Solutions
• GigaIO Partners with d-Matrix to Deliver Ultra-Efficient Scale-Up AI Inference Platform

About GigaIO

GigaIO redefines scalable AI infrastructure, seamlessly bridging from edge to core with a dynamic, open platform built for every accelerator. Its flagship product, Gryf, is the world’s first suitcase-sized AI supercomputer that brings datacenter-class computing power directly to the edge.

About d-Matrix

d-Matrix is pioneering accelerated computing for AI inference, breaking through the limits of latency, cost and energy. Its Corsair compute accelerators, JetStream IO accelerators, and Aviator software deliver fast, sustainable AI inference at data center scale. Learn more at www.d-matrix.ai.

Source: GigaIO

The post GigaIO Sells SuperNODE and FabreX AI Fabric to d-Matrix appeared first on HPCwire.

SAN DIEGO, April 2, 2026 — Cohu, Inc., a global supplier of equipment and services optimizing semiconductor manufacturing yield and productivity, today announced that two customers have placed follow-on orders totaling $30 million for the Eclipse platform configured with active thermal control for testing of next generation high-performance computing (HPC) processors.

The orders, which are expected to be delivered over the next couple of quarters, expand Cohu’s presence in the fast-growing HPC market and reflect rising demand for scalable, high performance test solutions as processor complexity, power density and thermal constraints continue to increase. Together, these production-level engagements underscore the increasing importance of scalable, thermally precise test architectures as HPC devices push the limits of performance.

Within these follow-on orders, one customer is subscribing to Cohu’s PAICe Prescriptive software analytics – worth a potential of $330 thousand in annual subscription fees – to help drive higher overall equipment efficiency (OEE) in production at its outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) partner. PAICe Prescriptive continuously analyzes equipment signals and behavior patterns to predict issues before they impact production and provides guided repair recommendations to reduce troubleshooting time, improve productivity and lower mean time to repair (MTTR).

“These follow-on orders reinforce the strong customer momentum we are seeing for Eclipse, including continued demand projected in the second half of this year. Additionally, other customers are qualifying the Eclipse for their processor test needs over the next couple of quarters,” said Luis Müller, Cohu President and CEO. “We are fast expanding in the high-performance computing market and estimate delivering results toward the higher end of our $60 million to $85 million guidance for this segment in 2026.”

About Cohu

Cohu, Inc. (NASDAQ: COHU) was founded in 1947 and is a global technology leader supplying test, automation, inspection & metrology products, software analytics solutions and services to the semiconductor industry. Additional information can be found at www.cohu.com.

Source: Cohu

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London mayor says more arrests will be made after young people stormed into shops as part of social media trend

Sadiq Khan has warned against any repeat of “utterly unacceptable” scenes of disorder in Clapham earlier this week, saying culprits who assault and intimidate shop workers will face the full force of the law.

The mayor of London said more arrests would be made in the coming days, and urged anyone considering more violence over the Easter weekend to think again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license. Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses. The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around. The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google. Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. NSF ACCESS simulations using TACC’s Stampede3 system shed light on hemolysis risks in blood pump conditions

April 2, 2026 — For patients with heart failure, blood pumps can be lifesaving. But the very forces that sustain circulation can also harm it damaging red blood cells through hemolysis and compromising the body’s oxygen supply.

Credit: ztigmafx/Shutterstock

Now, supercomputer simulations are revealing how red blood cells deform under stress, offering new insights that could lead to safer, more effective blood pump designs.

“Supercomputing infrastructure is critical to advancing healthcare and scientific knowledge,” said Keefe Manning, Ph.D., who holds joint positions in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, and the Department of Surgery, Penn State College of Medicine.

“We’re able to create more complex environments and parameterization now because of supercomputers. Their value in science cannot be understated. As we apply concepts such as a digital twin and as we improve the infrastructure, we can modify the physiological models in a way that we never could before and accelerate our understanding.”

Manning is the corresponding author of a study on computational modeling of red blood cells, published January 2026 in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. In it, he and colleagues lay the foundation for understanding hemolysis, the red blood cell destruction associated with blood pumps, referred to as mechanical circulatory support devices (MCSDs).

Workflow and imaging platform for in vitro red blood cell deformation experiments. Credit: DOI: 10.1007/s10439-026-04000-4

The science team was awarded supercomputing allocations on the Stampede3 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) by the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which provides support for thousands of scientists across the nation.

The Red Blood Computational Model

Manning and colleagues’ model advances beyond earlier methods that used simplified stress calculations and lacked mechanistic predictability for complex flow conditions.

Instead, they adapted the governing droplet deformation evolution equation to scale to the complex, multidimensional flow environment characteristic of MCSDs in a continuum approach that uses the open source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM.

The authors calibrated the model’s constitutive parameters to reproduce human red blood cell data with reasonable mean absolute error.

Data and Post-Processing

On the data side, the scientists collected blood samples from a dozen people. They ran the blood through microfluidic channels, capturing images that were post-processed to reveal the extraordinary shape-changing of red blood cells. While many people are familiar with their ubiquitous biconcave disc shape, red blood cells can also be squished flat like a folded parachute or stretched out like a torpedo as they squeeze through tiny capillaries.

“The novelty of our study lies in the volume of experimental data that we collected internally to calibrate the droplet model,” Manning added.

Accelerating Science Through Supercomputing

This research marks a step forward in understanding the biophysics of red blood cell behavior in very thin layers, behavior at the flow fields that has been hard to reproduce in simulations.

“A simple laptop computer won’t be able to do the computation, “Manning said. “ACCESS resources have been critical for Hannah Palahnuk, my PhD student, to get this work done. Having OpenFOAM supported within ACCESS is important for our research in helping improve healthcare of our nation’s population and create future technology that will be less harmful to red blood cells.”

“I utilized the ticketing system when I needed help, and the staff were responsive and helpful,” said study co-author and principal investigator Hannah Palahnuk, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Penn State University.

“TACC’s Stampede3 supercomputer provided a much higher core-hour allocation, allowing high-fidelity, high-resolution simulations in reasonable amounts of time. This was extremely helpful as the resources are free and they are driving forward important research in the biomedical engineering field,” she added.

Bringing Simulations Closer to Reality

Moving forward, the research will model more realistic physiological conditions for red blood cell concentrations and translate these advances into direct hemolysis measurements.

“Once validated at scale across real-world fluid environments, this work could deepen our understanding of hemolysis in blood pumps, and help save lives in the process,” Manning concluded.

About the Research

The study, “Modeling Red Blood Cell Deformation at Supraphysiological Strain Rates Using a Droplet Framework,” was published January 2026 in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. The study authors are Hannah P. Palahnuk, Nicolas A. Tobin, and Keefe B. Manning of The Pennsylvania State University. Funding was provided by the Walker Assistantship program at the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory and grant U54 TR002014-05A1 from the National Institutes of Health, with computational support from ACCESS allocation MDE 24001.

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post TACC: How Supercomputing Reveals Early Red Blood Cell Damage appeared first on HPCwire.

April 2 is International Fact-Checking Day, purposefully set the day after April Fools’ Day (when mistruths are encouraged). The day was launched in 2016 by the International Fact-Checking Network, which calls it “a global celebration of truth and accuracy.”

This year’s International Fact-Checking Day theme is: “We Stand for Facts.”

We’ve been doing that for more than 20 years. FactCheck.org has been holding politicians accountable for the claims they make — and providing the facts to our readers — since our launch in 2003.

To commemorate this day, we gathered various mentions of our work over the years by politicians of both parties. Social Media Manager Josh Diehl searched the Congressional Record and dug up clips from C-Span to produce it. We include, of course, then-Vice President Dick Cheney, during a 2004 vice presidential debate, mistakenly calling us “FactCheck.com” (instead of FactCheck.org), a mention that nonetheless essentially put us on the map. Since then, lawmakers have periodically cited our work on the House or Senate floor.

FactCheck.org is a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, along with more than 180 fact-checking organizations around the world. Signatories adhere to a code of journalistic ethics and principles rooted in nonpartisan and transparent work. FactCheck.org Director Lori Robertson is a member of the IFCN advisory board.

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

The post Happy International Fact-Checking Day appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Federal agency, which normally supports state and local public health labs, has been hobbled by staff departures

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The US federal agency responsible for monitoring diseases has temporarily halted certain diagnostic testing, including those for rabies, human herpesvirus and several other infectious illnesses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a list on Monday showing that more than two dozen types of testing are now unavailable.

Daniel Kebede tells his members that detail in new policies ‘just does not deliver’ and schools are ‘running on empty’

The leader of the UK’s biggest education union has torn into the government’s record on schools, accusing Labour of letting down the nation’s children and failing to deliver on its promises for education.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), was unsparing in his criticism of the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson’s policies in a speech to delegates at the NEU’s annual conference in Brighton on Thursday.

A great effort will be needed to undo the damage once the US president has gone. But with the constitution unable to bring him to order now, that is what we must do

The US is extraordinary. One day it goes to the far side of the moon and revives the space age. On the same day, its president is looking to the far side of the Earth and says he will take Iran “back to the stone ages”. It may be a giant leap for mankind, but in what direction?

There can be no point other than prestige in sending humans to the moon, which is why more than 50 years have passed since they last went there. Robots can perform all we need in space. Returning the Iranians to the stone age is a different matter. The last time the US made the same boast was against Vietnam in a typical threat (much misquoted) by Gen Curtis LeMay. Vietnam crushed the US in the ensuing war.

Simon Jenkins 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.

Selling silver? Here's how the timing, your strategy and your buyer choice can impact your final payout.

Tina Peters, an election denier, was found guilty in 2024 of allowing unauthorized access to county’s voting equipment

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A Colorado appeals court on Thursday ordered the resentencing of a former state election official who was found guilty of allowing unauthorized access to her county’s voting equipment, the latest development in a closely watched case that has attracted considerable attention from Donald Trump and other election deniers.

Tina Peters, a former clerk in Mesa county in western Colorado, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2024 after a jury found her guilty on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the secretary of state. Peters was the county clerk in 2020 and later allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s Dominion voting machines. Sensitive information from the machines later wound up on the internet.

Speaking in South Korea, the French president defended the transatlantic alliance and called for return to peace

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Emmanuel Macron has sharply criticised Donald Trump’s inconsistent and often contradictory pronouncements on the Iran war and Nato, saying if “you want to be serious” it was better not to come out with something different every day.

“There is too much talk … and it’s all over the place,” the French president said on Thursday during a state visit to South Korea. “We all need stability, calm, a return to peace – this isn’t a show!”

Former government adviser Polly Billington urges bigger steps to shield people in UK from effects of Iran war

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Keir Starmer should convene a global energy summit of the same order as Gordon Brown’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and put Britain on a “war footing” to reduce its exposure to fossil fuels, a Labour MP and former government adviser has said.

Polly Billington, who was an aide in Brown’s government, warned that economic pain was “hurtling down the tracks” and a bigger response was needed to protect the British people from the consequences of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

• Wizards apologize over half-time April Fools’ prank

• Promotion that appeared to trick fan draws backlash

• Team issues statement saying stunt was pre-planned

The Washington Wizards apologized on Thursday after an April Fools’ Day in-game promotion during their loss to the Philadelphia 76ers prompted criticism on social media.

During Wednesday night’s game at Capital One Arena, a fan was brought on to the court for a blindfolded half-court shot promoted as being worth $10,000. The shot missed, but arena staff and performers reacted as if it had gone in and briefly presented the fan with a ceremonial check as part of what later was revealed to be a scripted skit.

The autopsy results for Nurul Amin Shah Alam sparked fresh calls to investigate the circumstances surrounding the visually impaired refugee’s death, which provoked outrage in Buffalo.

Former UK foreign secretary among 3,000 signatories of open letter to Isaac Herzog after spate of killings

The former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind is among leading members of the Jewish diaspora urging the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to intervene to stop “attacks by Jewish extremists” on Palestinians in the West Bank.

An open letter to Herzog facilitated by the London Initiative – a liberal Zionist network of 360 people, including eminent Jewish, Israeli and Israeli Palestinian figures – has attracted more than 3,000 signatories, including diplomats, philanthropists, rabbis and academics from Australia, Canada, across Europe, South Africa the UK and US. It follows a spate of killings and arson attacks by settlers on Palestinian civilians in March.

BERKELEY, Calif., April 2, 2026 — Rigetti Computing, Inc. has announced that it has sold a 9-qubit Novera QPU to the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The Novera QPU, which was shipped in March, will be at the core of USask’s first quantum computing system. The system will be managed by USask’s Centre for Quantum Topology and its Applications (quanTA), an interdisciplinary institute devoted to advancing quantum science and quantum technology development.

“By providing hands-on access to real quantum computing hardware, academic institutions like USask are enabling students and researchers to pursue groundbreaking advances in quantum science and technology. We are delighted that USask has selected a Rigetti Novera QPU for their quanTA Centre and congratulate them on this exciting new phase of quantum technology exploration and innovation,” said Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti CEO.

“At quanTA, our goal is to make Western Canada a competitive force in quantum science and quantum technology development. The establishment of a quantum computing testbed is fundamental to providing the USask community with the resources needed to embark on innovative research in areas including quantum materials, quantum algorithms, and quantum computing architecture. With the Novera QPU at the core of our first quantum computing system, we are excited to embark on this next era of discovery,” said Dr. Steven Rayan, quanTA Executive Director and USask Mathematics and Statistics Professor.

“This remarkable milestone is a monumental achievement that positions USask as a key player in quantum research on the world stage. As we step into the future, USask is continuing to establish itself as a cutting-edge institution and a hub for national and international quantum-focused research that will propel work in agriculture, health sciences, defense technologies and more across the Prairies,” said Vince Bruni-Bossio, USask President and Vice-Chancellor.

The fully assembled quantum computing system combines hardware from companies who are all members of the Novera QPU Partner Program — an ecosystem of quantum computing hardware, software, and service providers whose technologies are compatible with the Novera QPU. The Novera QPU will be installed in a Zero Point Cryogenics dilution refrigerator, Qblox control systems will be installed for operating the qubits, and QuantrolOx software will be integrated for automated qubit bring-up, characterization, and tuning.

While the Novera QPU can be integrated with our partners’ technology, customers can also purchase full-scale quantum computing systems based on Rigetti’s modular Cepheus architecture ranging from 36 to 108 qubits. These systems include a sourced dilution refrigerator, Rigetti’s control systems, and QCS Outpost, a comprehensive software operating environment for administering, monitoring, integrating, and using a Rigetti quantum computer. Rigetti can manage the entire delivery and installation process to ensure a fully operational quantum computing system.

Rigetti QPUs are manufactured in Rigetti’s Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility.

About Rigetti

Rigetti is a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing. Rigetti quantum computers are based on superconducting qubits, which are widely believed to be the leading qubit modality given their maturity, clear path to scaling, and fast gate speeds. Current Rigetti quantum computing systems achieve gate speeds of 50-70ns, which is about 1,000 times faster than other modalities such as ion traps and neutral atoms.

Rigetti sells on-premises 9-qubit to 108-qubit quantum computing systems, supporting national laboratories and quantum computing centers. Rigetti’s Cepheus 36-qubit to 108-qubit systems are based on the Company’s proprietary chiplet-based technology and include the Company’s control electronics. Rigetti’s 9-qubit Novera QPU supports a broader R&D community with a high-performance, on-premises QPU designed to plug into a customer’s existing cryogenic and control systems.

The Company operates quantum computers over the cloud through its Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform, enabling global enterprise, government, and research clients to pursue R&D. The Company’s proprietary quantum-classical infrastructure provides high-performance integration with public and private clouds for practical quantum computing.

Rigetti developed the industry’s first multi-chip quantum processor for scalable quantum computing systems. Leveraging this proprietary technology, Rigetti deployed the industry’s largest multi-chip quantum computer in 2025 with Cepheus-1-36Q, based on four 9-qubit chiplets tiled together. The Company designs and manufactures its chips in-house at Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility. Learn more at https://www.rigetti.com.

Source: Rigetti

The post Rigetti Announces Novera QPU Sale to the University of Saskatchewan appeared first on HPCwire.

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times. One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prosecutors have charged a man allegedly connected to two deaths tied to the "Texas Killing Fields," a site where dozens of bodies have been found since the 1970s.