Hazmat crews deployed to the Pentagon on Thursday and a shelter-in-place was in effect for what authorities described as a "hazardous materials incident."

Trump says the U.S. will hit Iran "very hard" within hours, and seize key oil infrastructure "in the not too distant future."

Vance Boelter pleaded guilty to the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses on Thursday as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors.

Intelligence tool now set to expire today after Republicans fail to secure two-thirds majority needed to pass

• US House blocks extension of powerful surveillance law

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

The US supreme court has published its opinions, but none of the cases we’ve been watching for were part of the decisions today.

In comments reported by NBC News, House speaker Mike Johnson has said it is “stunning” to him that “House Democrat leadership has put out a statement saying that they’re willing to allow the number one national security tool to go dark over some political disagreement over a very short-term temporary appointment”.

President says US will take vital fuel hub ‘in not too distant future’ and will ‘assume total control of their oil and gas markets’

• US strikes Iran for second day, as ceasefire appears close to collapse

Three Indian seafarers were killed in a US attack on an oil tanker earlier this week, India’s shipping minister, ‌Sarbananda Sonowal, said.

“It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello. Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified,” he wrote in a post on X.

The Middle East is being pulled deeper into crisis & the consequences reach far beyond the region.”

US president warns of further military action as both sides accuse each other of breaching temporary ceasefire

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump has said the US will take control of Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure and launch further strikes on Iran on Thursday night, just hours after the countries exchanged fire for the second consecutive day despite a nominal ceasefire being in place.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the US would hit Iran “VERY HARD, TONIGHT”, claiming that most of Iran’s offensive capacity had been destroyed. He also said the US would seize Kharg, an island in the Gulf that handles about 90% of Iran’s oil exports and hosts vast storage facilities.

Former xAI engineer Devin Kim alleges he was illegally fired for trying to implement safety mechanisms for the chatbot

A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI who now heads a thinktank focused on AI safety filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired from the SpaceX subsidiary for raising concerns about the risks artificial intelligence poses to humanity.

Devin Kim claims in the lawsuit filed in California state court on Tuesday that his efforts to place guardrails on the development of the chatbot Grok made him a target for company leadership.

Tories, SNP, Reform and Lib Dems all turn fire on PM with as Labour figures also call for greater defence spending

Ryan Henderson, assistant chief constable for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, is about to hold a press conference about last night’s rioting.

Andy Burnham is facing criticism after saying that he thinks the Waspi women should be entitled to “some” compensation.

I’ll stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness.

One government figure decried Burnham’s intervention as “pathetic”, adding: “He can’t say no to anyone.”

An ally of Sir Keir Starmer likened Burnham’s economic agenda to that of hard-left former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and argued that the mayor’s intervention would harm his chances of manoeuvring the prime minister out of Downing Street.

Andy Burnham’s continued support for Waspi women is both welcome and hugely refreshing. While some politicians have broken their promises, it takes real courage to speak out and say what millions of people across the country and hundreds of MPs from all parties already know - that 1950s-born women deserve justice.

Andy has always recognised the unfair way in which state pension equalisation was introduced.

As mayor of Greater Manchester, he supported Waspi women in the city-region with early access to concessionary travel, providing some recompense to them within affordability limits.

Exclusive: PSNI repeatedly warned by monitoring group for eight months after a so-called hitlist of addresses began circulating in far-right networks

A monitoring group repeatedly warned the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) over the past eight months that anti-immigration activists were circulating the addresses of properties that were targeted in this week’s Belfast riots.

The Accountability Project Northern Ireland, a volunteer group formed last summer to monitor anti-immigration activity online, sent dozens of reports to police between November 2025 and June 2026.

⚽️ Infantino tells fans to ‘chill’ in response to Fifa’s critics
⚽️ Match centre | Player guide | Bracketology | Mail Rob

BTL chat is thus far dominated by Gianni Infantino’s ritual pre-tournament torching of his own dignity. SonOfThe Desert offers this:

“Infantino is just absolutely wretched, isn’t he? An absolute nothing of a man, sucking up to tyrants because he thinks it makes him look strong.

”But you know what’s really annoying me? All those heads of national associations who could have unified around a candidate - anyone - to oppose Infantino and try and rescue Fifa from humiliation. Couldn’t be bothered though, could they? Might’ve had to do some actual work that way.

New York has honored two footballing greats by temporarily renaming streets after Thierry Henry and Pelé ahead of the World Cup kickoff …

Crowds gathered at West 50th Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Manhattan to mark the unveiling of “Thierry Henry Way” by city officials, according to FOX Sports.

Do you owe money to debt collectors but use an online bank? Here's what to know before the problems escalate.

The Justice Department announced it has charged three people in Ohio for conspiring to smuggle unaccompanied minors across the U.S. border.

Analysts say IPO that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire has a ‘major disconnect’ on price

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to launch the biggest stock market float in history amid warnings that it may be overvalued.

The space exploration, satellite broadband and AI company will join the US stock market on Friday at a valuation of $1.78tn, after offering at least $75bn of shares to investors through an initial public offering .

Regulator approval means patients who meet criteria such as having obesity will be able to purchase pills with private prescription

Patients will soon be able to buy the Wegovy weight-loss pill, the medicines regulator announced today.

It is the first GLP-1 receptor agonist tablet for weight-loss to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), making the UK the third country to authorise the pills, behind the US and the United Arab Emirates.

Suspect, 19, still at large after officer dies in hospital having been shot while searching an apartment

A Toronto police officer has been shot dead as police raided an apartment allegedly linked to the March attack on the US consulate, the city’s police chief said.

Toronto’s police chief, Myron Demkiw, said 43-year-old constable Marc Pinizzotto was shot while conducting an early morning search warrant in the north-west of the city and later died at a hospital.

Fatima Jabbe-Bio kept tenancy despite living for much of year in the presidential lodge in Freetown

A social housing flat rented by Sierra Leone’s first lady has been seized by a London council.

Southwark council confirmed it had repossessed the two-bedroom home in Walworth previously occupied by Fatima Jabbe-Bio, whose tenancy was reported by The Times last year.

Officials found three passengers in the cabin and their suspect hiding in the lavatory, Bali immigration authorities said.

The House on Thursday defeated a last-ditch effort to extend a key spy authority until early July.

Measure failed in 198-218 vote after Democrats said they would block renewal of Fisa over naming of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

The US House of Representatives on Thursday failed to pass a short-term extension of a powerful surveillance law amid controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s decision to install an inexperienced loyalist as the country’s top intelligence official.

The measure failed in a 198-218 vote, after Democrats announced they would block the move to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) in protest of Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte, a major Republican donor, as acting director of national intelligence.

Australia, the US and Paraguay will have their work cut out to match the Crescent Stars’ young midfield but a shaky defence is a genuine concern

Turkey coach Vincenzo Montella has been building one of the nation’s strongest teams in living memory. A youth-driven squad with two genuine stars – Arda Guler and Kenan Yildiz – several players were not even born when the Crescent Stars last qualified for a World Cup and finished third in 2002.

In past tournaments, Turkey were often labelled as “dark horses” – which turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. This time, Montella has constructed a squad that sits among those on the rung below heavyweights Spain, France and Argentina.

The Interior Department is planning an aggressive work schedule to complete President Trump's arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: China was likely behind an online influence operation to sway U.S. perceptions of artificial intelligence technology and reshape the debate in Washington around the infrastructure needed to support it, according to research from OpenAI published Wednesday. OpenAI said it caught the influence campaign because China-backed operatives were using ChatGPT to create content for the social media campaign. [...] OpenAI's researchers identified two clusters of ChatGPT users "likely originating from China" who used the AI chatbot to generate social media content "in support of apparent covert influence operations" promoting certain narratives about AI. This includes claims that data center build-outs are raising electricity costs for the average American family and that President Donald Trump has weaponized tariffs to keep the U.S. ahead in the global tech race. These accounts have since been banned, the report said. One cluster of users asked ChatGPT to generate images and comments pushing these narratives. These comments were then posted on social media by "batches of accounts" posing as Americans, [said Ben Nimmo, principal investigator of intelligence and investigations at OpenAI]. Another cluster identified by researchers used AI to generate social media content criticizing the Trump administration's tariffs as an attempt to "dominate technological competition." Prompts used for this campaign were submitted in Simplified Chinese and asked that AI-generated content not include Chinese President Xi Jinping and focus solely on Trump -- a possible tell that China was behind the operation, according to the report. Nimmo said that the influence campaign amplified existing public backlash in the U.S. against the creation of new AI data centers, which has resulted in dozens of proposed moratoriums at the local, state and national level. "Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement," Nimmo said. "They're important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China, and the narratives they're testing and seeking to amplify, but not for the impact."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite his managerial veneer and quiet approach, the outgoing defence secretary is a highly political operator

• UK politics live – latest updates

If there was one thing Downing Street could rely on with John Healey, it was avoiding unnecessary drama. Whether in parliament or on the morning broadcast round, his sober suits and general demeanour of a benign but firm headteacher spelled reassurance.

But then, just before 12.10pm on Wednesday, the drama arrived. In a letter posted to social media, Healey resigned as defence secretary, a job he had held – whether in government or its shadow equivalent – from the moment Keir Starmer became Labour leader.

A wave of US strikes represents the gravest test yet of the fragile truce. Here’s what happened, what officials are saying and whether the deal can survive

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US has launched strikes across southern Iran for a second consecutive day. Although there have been several breaches since a ceasefire was agreed between the two sides in April, the attacks this week – launched after the downing of a US helicopter over the strait of Hormuz – represent the most serious and extensive breakdown of the truce to date.

The US president, Donald Trump, has raised the prospect of further attacks, while his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has told reporters if strikes “have to happen [Friday] night, they will be strong and they will be clear”.

A surge in the Producer Price Index signals that businesses are paying more for goods and services, which could push up consumer costs.

If there's one name on the bill, could two paychecks really be at risk? Here's what creditors can actually do.

With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple’s desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all Intel Macs. It’s important to note that Apple will provide three more years of security updates for the final Intel release of macOS, so Intel users won’t be dropped like a brick immediately.

Still, the Intel Mac Pro was still being sold all the way up until mid-2023, and I’d be royally pissed off if my expensive 2023 Intel Mac went out of support a mere six years after purchase. They weren’t cheap machines, and while you can argue everybody knew the writing was on the wall for the Intel Mac Pro in 2023, it still feels way too short of a supported lifespan for such an expensive, high-end piece of equipment. It didn’t sell many units, I’m sure, but still.

In addition, MacOS 27 will be the last release to include the Rosetta 2 translation layer that allows Intel binaries to run on ARM macOS. I have no idea how many important applications are still Intel-only, but I have a feeling that number is going to be relatively small, and will become even smaller as the first macOS release without Rosetta 2 support near release. On top op of that, I’m sure enterprising users will find a way to transplant Rosetta 2 onto unsupported macOS release, and if all else fails, there’s always virtual machines.

PARIS, June 11, 2026 — Alice & Bob, a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing, today unveiled the Helium Quantum System, marking the company’s expansion from developing cat-qubit chips to delivering a complete quantum computing system for on-premise deployment.

The Helium Quantum System has been engineered to encode Alice & Bob’s first logical qubit with as few as 18 cat-qubits. From the processor architecture to the cabling, control electronics and software stack, the entire system is optimized for quantum error correction. Designed as an upgradeable platform, the quantum system will also support the next 48 cat-qubit chip on Alice & Bob’s roadmap – expected to feature multiple logical qubits.

Alice & Bob is inviting research partners to conduct experiments on the Helium Quantum System and collaborate with the company on advancing fault tolerant quantum computing research. The system enables researchers to integrate quantum and classical computing resources within a single computing infrastructure, such as those found at high-performance computing (HPC) centers.

By providing direct access to cat-qubit architecture, Alice & Bob offers a platform for research into quantum error correction, logical qubits and the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

“Alice & Bob has focused on fault tolerance from the outset. Our cat-qubit architecture is designed to dramatically reduce the error-correction overhead – one of the industry’s largest technical and economic barriers. We believe the defining race in quantum computing is building better qubits that can reach fault tolerance with the fewest resources. The Helium Quantum System is an important milestone on that journey, giving researchers direct access to the architecture underpinning our roadmap to universal, fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO and co-founder of Alice & Bob.

The Helium Quantum System is designed with operational efficiency in mind, requiring approximately 40 kW of power to run, helping lower the cost of deploying advanced quantum systems, one of the key bottlenecks in quantum computing today.

As part of launch, Alice & Bob is releasing Starboard a custom monitoring interface that gives administrators visibility over the 18-cat qubit system. Through a single dashboard, administrators can visualize system behavior, monitor individual qubit performance, schedule workloads, and track live hardware metrics. Starboard features highly automated software designed by Alice & Bob. Starboard brings together the tools needed to monitor, run, and optimize the Helium quantum system.

The Helium Quantum System features compatibility with the most common HPC schedulers (including Slurm) through the open-source QRMI library, and other third-party solutions. Users can connect to the Helium Quantum System with Alice & Bob’s dedicated Felis software framework, providing custom instructions tailored to the Helium chip while maintaining compatibility with major quantum programming frameworks.

About Alice & Bob

Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches.

Source: Alice & Bob

The post Alice & Bob Introduces Helium Platform for Quantum Error Correction and Logical Qubit Research appeared first on HPCwire.

Employees at artificial intelligence companies are coming into gargantuan sums of money amid boom in IPOs

Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area’s already expensive market are skyrocketing as employees at leading artificial intelligence companies come into gargantuan sums of money thanks to a boom in initial public offerings.

With San Francisco’s OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as SpaceX, which operates a major facility in the Los Angeles area, eyeing debuts on the stock market, the hot housing market may not abate soon. If their initial public offering (IPO) is well-received, the companies’ multibillion-dollar valuations are poised to produce massive wealth for employees and executives holding shares, which experts say could trigger an uptick in demand for the Bay Area’s limited housing stock.

Kharg Island is a heavily fortified, strategically vital island off Iran's north coast that President Trump says the U.S. may seize control of militarily.

Meteorologists forecast it will rival – or exceed – record El Niño from 1997 and further heat globe

El Niño, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced on Thursday.

Experts said the El Niño, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will probably turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival – or exceed – a record El Niño that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heatwaves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.

President Donald Trump threatened to take Iran’s most critical oil terminal “in the not too distant future,” after fresh attacks on U.S. bases in the region.

Vance Boelter is facing both federal and state charges related to the fatal shootings of state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband, Mark, and in an attack on state Sen. John A. Hoffman (D) and his wife, Yvette, that left them critically injured.

Iran and the new Persian Gulf equilibrium Expert comment jon.wallace 11 June 2026

The Axis of Resistance failed to deter Israel and the US. Whatever deal ends the war, Tehran will seek to rebuild its deterrence around the threat it poses to the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf states.

The fragile ceasefire between Iran and the United States, in place for two months, has been punctuated by several episodes of violence. That includes the latest exchange of strikes following the shooting down of a US helicopter, and President Donald Trump’s threats on 11 June to seize Iran’s Kharg Island. However, both Washington and Tehran have generally expressed a reluctance to return to open warfare. And according to media reports the US has signaled to Iran, through Qatar, that recent attacks were not meant as a resumption of all-out war.

At the same time, negotiations to prolong the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz have failed to make progress. A deal on the Strait will eventually emerge, but whatever the details, dynamics in the Persian Gulf have changed – and will not return to the pre-28 February 2026 status quo.

A new deterrence strategy

Since the ceasefire in early April, Iran and the US have floated in a volatile state of no war and no peace. The two sides are far from reaching an agreement that would set bilateral relations on a more stable and predictable footing, let alone resolve the deep divergences that have divided them for 47 years. Each perceives that it has the upper hand, and expects the other to make compromises. In this fragile context, limited escalations are virtually guaranteed to happen again. But the events of early June reinforce the view that Iran and the US will continue to try to avoid uncontrolled escalation.

The World Today

Related work

How Iran’s ‘forward defence’ became a strategic boomerang

However the war ends, a new equilibrium is steadily emerging in the Persian Gulf based on an equation that features both new and pre-existing but modified variables.

First, the Axis of Resistance – the network of non-state armed groups supported by Iran – has failed. Israel has not been able, as much as it has tried since October 2023, to decisively defeat Hamas and Hezbollah. But the two Iran-backed groups have undoubtedly been weakened. More importantly, they could not deliver what was one of the original rationales behind Iran’s support for the Axis: deterrence.

When Tehran developed its forward defence strategy, one of its goals was to signal to the US and Israel that an attack on Iran would be met with a costly retaliation from Axis members. In this sense, the Axis did not fulfil its mandate: the threat of reprisals failed to deter multiple American and Israeli attacks on the Iranian homeland.

As a result, Iran’s focus is shifting to the Gulf. Analysts, in and out of government, have long known that in the event of a war that threatened its survival, the Islamic Republic would likely try to close the Strait of Hormuz. Countless wargames and simulations demonstrated exactly that. What was known in theory has now been demonstrated in practice, and there will be no turning back.

This profoundly and sustainably transforms the geopolitics of the Gulf region. There is little doubt that the Strait of Hormuz will eventually re-open to maritime traffic. It will probably not be a sudden re-opening. Instead, it will be gradual, for both security reasons and because it will take time for supply chains to re-organize themselves.

But the Islamic Republic will not forget the tremendous leverage it gained by closing it. Neither will it agree to permanently forego the option of resorting to this tactic again. Rather, it will integrate it into its strategy. And it will not hesitate to consider closing the Strait again if it perceives it to be necessary. The war, in other words, has broken a psychological barrier that will not be rebuilt.

Iran will, as such, restock and reconstitute its damaged military infrastructure with Hormuz in mind. Rebuilding its missile and drone production facilities, heavily damaged by American and Israeli strikes, will be its top priority, as will be the consolidation and diversification of its global supply networks. 

This will take precedence, for example, over rebuilding its shattered nuclear infrastructure and conventional navy. This will ensure that the threat of the closure of the Strait remains a black cloud permanently hanging over maritime shipping in the Gulf and, therefore, the global economy.

The Houthis

The fear of that scenario will be compounded by the possibility that the Houthis, the  group that controls the northwestern quadrant of Yemen, could join the fray and close the Bab al-Mandab at the southern tip of the Red Sea – another crucial maritime chokepoint. This week, the Houthis explicitly threatened to close the route to Israeli shipping.

The Houthis are not Iranian puppets and do not merely execute orders from Tehran. That said, they caused severe disruption to Red Sea shipping throughout 2023-25, motivated, they said, by solidarity with Palestinians. In a hypothetical future conflict in which the Islamic Republic is seriously threatened, it is conceivable that they would renew their attacks. In combination with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the impact on the global economy would be significant.

The other feature of the new equilibrium is the threat of Iranian attacks on the Gulf Arab states. As with Hormuz, analysts have long understood that if pushed into a corner, the Islamic Republic would likely target the six petro-monarchies that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. 

And, as in the case of Hormuz, the war has created a precedent that provides Iran with important leverage moving forward. For GCC states, whose brand is partly premised on their reputation as havens of stability, this is another permanent threat that will further damage their security and prosperity.

Service disruptions inhibited many Google users' AI work on Wednesday. Here's what Google said happened.

The new space telescope will work in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope to uncover more secrets of the universe.

BOLOGNA, Italy, June 11, 2026 — The Italian Research Centre on High Performance Computing, Big Data, and Quantum Computing (ICSC) today inaugurated the IQM Radiance 54 quantum computer at CINECA, one of Europe’s leading supercomputing centers, enabling advanced applications in optimization, simulation, and machine learning.

The moment Italy’s second IQM quantum computer went live at CINECA in Bologna.

The installation, located at the CINECA headquarters in the DAMA Tecnopolo in Bologna, represents not just technological progress but a strategic Italian asset providing concrete tools for the scientific community and businesses to foster innovation, accelerate research, and transform knowledge into high-impact applications.

IQM Radiance, named NOX, is being integrated into Leonardo, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to support hybrid high-performance computing and quantum workflows. The objective is to provide researchers with a production-ready environment for experimentation with integrated classical–quantum computing paradigms.

“This installation is what Production Quantum means to us. Quantum computers you own, operate, and build value on. Real infrastructure inside real environments, doing real work,” said Sylwia de Weydenthal, Chief Commercial Officer of IQM Quantum Computers. “The delivery of IQM Radiance to CINECA is a milestone for Italy and for European quantum computing. It reinforces our role as a strategic partner in delivering Europe’s HPC–quantum infrastructure on the ground.”

The system is the first on-premises superconducting quantum computer at CINECA and the second IQM quantum computer in Italy, further strengthening the country’s position in quantum computing.

This deployment contributes directly to IQM’s ambition to drive the global adoption of hybrid computing systems and enable customers to build quantum capability.

IQM has on-premises systems operating at four of the world’s top ten supercomputing centers and has sold 23 quantum computers globally, more than any other manufacturer.

“In line with the European strategy, we have invested in building a modern and competitive national infrastructure, capable of providing universities and research institutions with advanced computing tools essential for tackling major scientific, technological, and economic challenges. However, this milestone does not mark the end of our commitment. Several measures have already been launched to ensure continuity of PNRR results and activities, further strengthening the infrastructure and more effectively supporting the transfer of advanced applications and solutions to industry and public administration,” said Anna Maria Bernini, Italian Minister of University and Research.

“This significantly strengthens digital sovereignty and supports national competitiveness. Especially in today’s geopolitical and energy instability, this resource is crucial to avoid falling further behind in the global race for data control and to build a viable and sustainable Italian and European alternative to U.S. technological offerings,” said Antonio Zoccoli, President of the ICSC and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN).

“With the addition of SOL and LISA, we are delivering an integrated ecosystem built around Leonardo, designed to support a broad spectrum of workloads—from advanced AI applications to traditional HPC and emerging quantum computing. This milestone is the result of a strong national commitment by Italy—through the Ministry of University and Research, CINECA and ICSC—together with EuroHPC, aligning investments and capabilities to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty and enable a new generation of cutting-edge assets for research and innovation,” said Francesco Ubertini, Vice-President of the ICSC and President of CINECA.

More from HPCwire: EuroHPC Inaugurates SOL Quantum Computer and LISA AI Partition in Italy

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Quantum Computers is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum computers and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, national laboratories, and enterprises worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland with major operations in Munich, it has over 400 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM has previously announced its ongoing business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: RAAQ), which will result in IQM becoming a public company in mid-2026.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM’s NOX Quantum Computer Integrated with Leonardo Supercomputer appeared first on HPCwire.

The Edge's lightweight design feels great in the hand, and it looks a bit like the bigger and better phone Motorola's selling overseas.

Spatially reframed photos. Panoramas that become whole environments. Maps with more realistic detail. Something's happening around the edges, and I think I know what it is.

The US is celebrating its 250th anniversary – and Trump is turning 80. As their big birthdays loom, what state is the president, and his country, in?

This wearable wants to give you more control over your daily UV ray exposure.

We tested the most popular at-home red light therapy devices. These were our favorites.

Check out some old classics and great new releases on Netflix now.

June 11, 2026 — The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) today inaugurated SOL, the 6th EuroHPC quantum computer and LISA, the Leonardo Improved Supercomputing Architecture partition, in Bologna, Italy.

The two systems, co-funded by Italy’s Ministry of University and Research through ICSC, the Italian Research Centre on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing Computing and the European Union though EuroHPC JU, were unveiled at the DAMA Technopole in Emilia-Romagna, Italy during a ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by CINECA and ICSC.

The two systems were unveiled at the DAMA Technopole during a ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by CINECA and ICSC.

The event was attended by Anna Maria Bernini, the Italian Minister of University and Research, Roberto Viola, Director-General of the Directorate-General Communication Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT) at the European Commission and Daniel Opalka, Head of Unit, Research and Innovation at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

These two new systems connected to Leonardo, one of the world-class EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers, represent significant milestones that further strengthen Europe’s supercomputing, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing infrastructure, and mark an important step in building a world-class, sovereign supercomputing ecosystem in Europe.

Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director stated: “Today’s inauguration shows how Europe continues to turn ambition into capability. With SOL, the new EuroHPC quantum computer and LISA, the AI-upgrade to the world-class Leonardo supercomputer, we are further strengthening our sovereign supercomputing ecosystem and giving European users new tools to innovate across AI, HPC and quantum technologies. This milestone expands opportunities for research, industry and the public sector, while reinforcing Europe’s technological leadership in strategic supercomputing domains.”

Francesco Ubertini, President of CINECA added: “With the addition of SOL and LISA, we are delivering an integrated ecosystem built around Leonardo, designed to support a broad spectrum of workloads—from advanced AI applications to traditional HPC and emerging quantum computing. This milestone is the result of a strong national commitment by Italy—through the Ministry of University and Research, CINECA and ICSC—together with EuroHPC, aligning investments and capabilities to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty and enable a new generation of cutting-edge assets for research and innovation.”

Antonio Zoccoli, ICSC President said: “The inauguration of LISA and the SOL quantum computer is a major step forward for Italy and Europe in advanced computing. Thanks to the strategic vision and strong commitment of the Ministry of University and Research, led by Minister Anna Maria Bernini, and in synergy with the European strategy, we are delivering a cutting-edge hybrid infrastructure integrating HPC and quantum technologies. This ecosystem will be able to strengthen technological sovereignty and the competitiveness of Italian and European research and industrial sectors. With the integration of the Pasqal quantum system into Leonardo, Italy is also positioning itself at the forefront of global innovation, providing powerful tools for scientific excellence and sustainable growth.”

SOL, the Quantum Acceleration for Leonardo Supercomputer

Hosted and operated by CINECA in Bologna and supplied by Pasqal, the new quantum computer is based on neutral atoms, and named SOL, reflecting both Italy’s cultural heritage and the laser-based technology at the core of the system. Inspired by the Roman Sun god and the precision associated with Sol Invictus and Apollo, it highlights the central role of light and accuracy for this system.

The system’s first-generation processor will provide at least 140 qubits operating in analogue mode. The planned upgrade in 2027, which will transition the system towards a hybrid analogue/digital paradigm, will create additional value for European end-users.

Utilizing arrays of optically trapped atoms and programmable laser interactions, SOL will enable the exploration of quantum many-body physics, optimization problems, and machine learning applications.

Integrated into Leonardo, SOL will also enhance hybrid quantum-classical HPC workflows and make next-generation computing resources available to a wide range of European users, spanning from the scientific community to industry and the public sector.

The system is currently undergoing calibration and is expected to provide compute resources to European end-users by autumn.

LISA, Upscaling IT4LIA AI Factory Capabilities

The LISA upgrade incorporates an AI-optimized partition into Leonardo, hosted and operated by CINECA in Bologna and will allow for more AI applications to be processed. It will better support the development of Large Language Models and multi-modal generative AI, as well as considerably extend the overall AI capacity of system.

LISA is the first EuroHPC computing partition designed from the ground up specifically for AI workloads. It is specifically engineered to address the demanding computational, memory, and networking requirements of next-generation AI models. The upgrade, provided by Bull, integrates a compute partition featuring 166 advanced 8-way GPU servers (1,328 GPUs in total) fully interconnected and significantly boosting the supercomputer’s performance for AI-intensive tasks.

The LISA upgrade will complement the operations of IT4LIA, the EuroHPC AI Factory currently centered around Leonardo, strengthening Europe’s capacity for AI research, innovation, and industrial applications. Under the IT4LIA initiative, a new AI optimized supercomputing system is currently being deployed, following the recent contract signing with E4 Computer Engineering and Dell Technologies, the selected vendors. This new system will be co-funded by Italy’s Ministry of University and Research (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca – MUR) and the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN),

The LISA upgrade is expected to become available to users during the summer of 2026.

Background

The procurement contract for SOL was signed in March 2025 with Pasqal, following a call for tender launched in August 2024. SOL is co-funded with a total acquisition cost of EUR 13 million. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the costs, while the other 50% will be funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through ICSC, the Italian Research Centre on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, established in the framework of Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR/RRF funds). The EuroQCS-Italy consortium is led by CINECA and includes the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES) and the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) in Germany.

To date, the EuroHPC JU has procured six quantum computers, located across Europe. The five first systems have already been inaugurated since last year:

• PIAST-Q in Poznań, Poland in June 2025,
• VLQ in Ostrava, Czechia in October 2025,
• Euro-Q-Exa in Munich, Germany in February 2026,
• Lucy near Paris, France in April 2026.
• EuroQCS-Spain in Barcelona, Spain in May 2026.

The EuroHPC JU signed the procurement contract for LISA with Bull in May 2025, following a call for tender launched in September 2024. The deployment of LISA was conceived as the upgrade of the Leonardo supercomputer and as a core building block of the IT4LIA AI Factory.

The deployment of LISA represents an investment of EUR 50 million, covering both the acquisition and installation of the infrastructure as well as the resources required for its operation and support. This investment is co-founded by the EuroHPC JU together with Italy through Italy’s Ministry of University and Research (MUR) and ICSC.

More from HPCwire: IQM’s NOX Quantum Computer Integrated with Leonardo Supercomputer

Source: EuroHPC JU

The post EuroHPC Inaugurates SOL Quantum Computer and LISA AI Partition in Italy appeared first on HPCwire.

Ted Lasso will deliver a message of hope before the USA’s first game, in an America that is not a fit or desirable host right now

Shortly before 6pm local time on Friday night at the Los Angeles Stadium, the actor who plays Ted Lasso – the fictional manager of a fake team in a falsely heartwarming version of football – will tell hundreds of millions of TV viewers tuning in to watch the start of the American leg of the Fifa World Cup that football unites the world.

In an interesting twist, the actor Jason Sudeikis will do this at a time when the World Cup host is simultaneously bombing the second-ranked country in Group G, having recently murdered its head of state. The message of unity is one likely to be heard by the US president, Donald Trump, who has initiated six military conflicts in his second term, and whose brutally divisive immigration policies have now led to the barring of Omar Artan, the reigning African referee of the year.

Forensic tests helped identify a man whose remains were found inside a sleeping bag in Washington state in 2000.

European Central Bank increases main deposit rate to 2.25%, with two further rises expected by next spring

• Business live – latest updates

The European Central Bank has raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 in response to higher inflation caused by the war in Iran.

The ECB raised its main deposit rate from 2% to 2.25% in a move that financial markets expect to be the first of three rises by next spring.

• 20-year-old finished in blistering time of 12.75sec

• First world record at NCAA championships since 1976

American Ja’Kobe Tharp broke the 110m hurdles world record with a blistering time of 12.75sec at the NCAA outdoor track and field championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, on Wednesday.

Tharp’s effort in the heats of the 110m hurdles improved upon the previous world record mark of 12.80sec, set by Olympic champion and fellow American Aries Merritt in Brussels in 2012.

The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the same year the U.S. birth rate started to slide. The issues could be linked, a new analysis finds.

The U.S. men's national soccer team, which last appeared at the 2022 World Cup, will face Paraguay to kick off its 2026 World Cup.

Samsung gave plenty of notice on the Messages shutdown. Here's how to use the time you have left to migrate without losing anything.

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Vertigo Games
This clever update captures the 1990s magic of the original… including some of the technical issues

The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.

We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.

With some matches being held in nearby Miami, a Cuban response to US military action could mar the tournament

As Cuba crumbles under a nearly five-month-long US oil blockade, many on the island hope that the World Cup might save the island from US attack – or at least offer a respite until the competition ends on 19 July.

“The beginning of the World Cup will make it more difficult for the United States to carry out a military action in Cuba,” said Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU. “Cuba is very close to the US, and can hit many targets inside the US, especially in south Florida, with drones or other weapons.”

Some local internet providers score higher than the big national names we hear often, but there's one winner that's an all-around favorite.

• Mboko forced out with knee injury after heavy fall

• Williams’ focus now shifts to Berlin wildcard spot

Serena Williams’s first tournament since coming out of retirement has ended prematurely after her partner Victoria Mboko was forced to withdraw from the Queen’s Club tournament after injuring her knee when slipping on the grass in her singles match on Wednesday.

Williams made a sensational return to competition at 44 after a four-year absence on Tuesday alongside Mboko as the pair defeated the third seeds Nicole Melichar Martinez and Erin Routliffe 7-6(2), 6-2. The pair were scheduled to face Leylah Fernandez and Laura Siegemund on Thursday afternoon.

PC Jess Turnbull was responding to separate crash when she was hit by Mercedes

A 19-year-old police officer has died after being struck by a car while responding to another crash.

PC Jess Turnbull, a Northumbria police officer since September last year, was described by her chief constable, Vanessa Jardine, as “dedicated and committed” with so much to look forward to.

GoPro cameras have enabled the adventurous to record images of their experiences for nearly 25 years. But the company is under extreme pressure from intensifying competition, rising costs and more.

The diplomat was found dead at the Sakura Residence & Hotel, according to attorneys familiar with the case.

Minister accuses Starmer of being ‘unable to commit the resources to defend the country at this time of rising threats’

• UK politics live – latest updates

The defence secretary, John Healey, has resigned over the government’s defence spending plans.

The long-awaited defence investment plan (DIP) was expected to be published imminently, but in a letter to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, Healey said it fell “well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time”.

Twenty people were killed and 120 injured in the attack at the Erawan Shrine, a popular tourist destination

A Thai court has handed out death sentences to two Uyghur men from the north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang for a 2015 bombing in the centre of Bangkok that killed 20 people.

The explosion occurred at the Erawan Shrine in the centre of Bangkok, an area popular with foreign tourists. As well as the 20 people killed, another 120 were injured. Five of the dead were from mainland China and two from Hong Kong.

Broadcaster reveals its revenues from expanded tournament are running about 30% higher than Euro 2024

The World Cup will be the most lucrative sports event ITV has ever aired, the broadcaster has said, with bosses calling the tournament a “six-week summer Super Bowl moment” for TV advertising.

The channel is airing 51 of the 104 matches across the men’s tournament, co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, which is the biggest yet after an expansion from 32 to 48 teams.

New York’s 29-point comeback in Game 4 was the largest in NBA finals history. For a team forged by disappointment, it felt strangely inevitable

What does a team of destiny look like? You know it when you see it. The evidence has been mounting for weeks – months, even – that this year, despite decades of precedent to the contrary, that team is the New York Knicks.

On Wednesday night, the proof overflowed in the hallowed halls of the Mecca. One of the most improbable comebacks in NBA history – and the largest ever in an NBA finals game – saw New York erase a 29-point deficit to beat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 4, leaving Taylor Swift and members of Haim leaping for joy courtside and the 58-year-old building shaking like a bounce house.

Lawyers ask prosecutors to upgrade charges from manslaughter in light of text messages discussing fire risk

Lawyers for victims of the deadly New Year’s Eve fire in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana have formally asked prosecutors to upgrade the charges against the bar’s owners after text messages emerged discussing the danger.

Forty-one people were killed and 115 injured in the blaze at Le Constellation bar, which investigators believe started in the basement when sparklers attached to champagne bottles were held too close to sound-insulating foam on the ceiling.

Meal kits can simplify week night dinners, just ensure you have these tools to get you started.

To put it plainly, nitrogen hypoxia kills by starving someone of the oxygen needed to sustain life

The eighth amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is among the most noble and valuable constitutional protections. It is the only provision of the constitution that recognizes the dignity and humanity of everyone, even those who commit the vilest crimes.

But in the last several years, this great legal and moral achievement has taken a beating at the hands of conservative judges and justices. They have done much to empty it of its meaning by tethering it to the views of the people who wrote it more than two centuries ago.

Many have watched recently released UFO videos, but most still think the government knows more than it is saying.

What impact will the latest inflation surge have on gold prices? Here's what some experts are predicting now.

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: "For years we've had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints... now we know." From the report: Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed. "We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. "It's a test. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode," in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead -- everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing... Everything it sees will be killed." With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included "a couple of soldiers, one truck," says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guardian review finds group tied to Cleta Mitchell and Heather Honey funded misleading ads in swing states

As the 2024 election approached, advertisements began popping up in key swing states suggesting local officials had discretion not to certify elections.

The advertisements, reported at the time by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch, were misleading. Certification is not optional, and officials are required to certify the vote once the proper process for any election challenges are complete and an official challenge is complete. The warnings, nonetheless, arrived at a moment when Donald Trump and allies seemed to be gearing up to contest the election results if he lost.

Iran says US attacks make ceasefire ‘practically meaningless’. Plus, Trump says ‘I love the inflation’ when asked about jump to 4.2%

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

Good morning.

Has the ceasefire collapsed yet?

What is the status of negotiations? Talks to turn the ceasefire into a durable peace deal have stalled for weeks, with periodic flare-ups as both sides continued to launch limited strikes and trade blame for violating the truce.

What do the two sides want? Iran seeks the lifting of international sanctions, the unfreezing of billions of dollars in assets, and control over the strait of Hormuz. Trump has said any future peace deal must prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which Tehran denies it is seeking to do.

This is a developing story. Follow our live coverage here.

What did Gates say? “I support the release of all the Epstein files and sincerely hope that, through your efforts and those of others advocating on their behalf, the survivors of Epstein’s crimes can get the justice that they deserve.”

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira faces fraud charges after allegedly persuading family to take her into their home

A 38-year-old woman has been arrested in Brazil accused of pretending to be a 12-year-old girl to deceive a couple who took her into their home for more than a year.

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira was charged in the southern state of Santa Catarina with fraud and false identity offences.

Nor is the dreamy promise that this tech will unlock boundless potential and productivity

Everything we hear about artificial intelligence is conflicting, and hearing about it feels inescapable. AI is terrible. AI is wonderful. It will break the world. It will transform the future. It’s essential to embrace it. It’s a moral imperative to abstain from using it.

Already, AI is projected to generate nearly unfathomable amounts of revenue. In the last quarter of 2025, it represented nearly 60% of the growth in the US economy. Already, pundits and economists wring their hands about what calamity will befall us if and when the AI bubble bursts.

Five Mexican police officers were killed and five others wounded on the eve of the World Cup opener in Mexico City, authorities said.

London, the east of England and the West Midlands have highest number of cases, as UKHSA urges families to get children vaccinated

Two children in England have died from measles, health officials say, as data shows more than 100 new reported cases in the last fortnight.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Thursday that two children had died this year, one from “acute measles” and the other from the “late effects of measles”.

The Knicks set the record for the biggest NBA Finals comeback Wednesday night as they rallied from 29 points down to beat the Spurs 107-106.

The ‘fraud’ he sees is in the very concept of democracy, in the idea that people who don’t agree with or fawn over him might have a say, too

By now, it is an event as regular and predictable as the tides: a Democrat wins an election, and Donald Trump says that that election was rigged. There does not need to be any evidence for this; indeed, there never is. Trump will say it anyway.

He rallies the rightwing media ecosystem to spread the lie; he convinces his followers to believe it. That this, by now, a repetitive spectacle, devoid of suspense, does not mean that it is not dangerous.

There’s a downside to too much convenience: it harms our bodies

There is a seductive fantasy being floated by AI executives that all the efficiency their products will bring us will lead to humans finally returning to their essential, best selves. Picture it: when this day arrives, we’ll spring from our chairs, push aside our keyboards and, supposedly, do all things we’ve been meaning to do: hike, cook and finally take a pilates class.

It’s true – AI has already taken some workday drudgery, such as reading and writing contracts, presentations and quarterly reports, off some people’s plates. Within a few years, we’re told, a team of invisible digital assistants will take over mundane domestic chores too: making medical appointments, renewing our car insurance and planning. The vision is enticing: finally, the moment when we can stop switching-switching-switching between screens and devices, put our health first and flourish. Unfortunately, if the history of innovation teaches us anything, it’s that labor-saving technology has rarely, if ever, triggered healthier habits.

Drive-throughs and microwaves did not lead to more time spent walking in nature. When escalators replaced stairs, email took over from walking over to talk to a colleague, and wandering through the video store was swapped out for streaming from the couch, few of us considered how these tiny conveniences would chip away at our physical health, year after more efficient year. A task that took almost no effort used to be described with the saying: “You hardly need to lift a finger.” Now, we literally lift a finger and – tap – the chore is done.

Most fathers would shield their children from death. Mine, a psychologist, did the opposite

My dad and I kept a running list of ways we didn’t want to die. Being buried alive was always No 1. Whenever we learned about unusual deaths – accidents involving farm machinery, medieval torture, mobsters encasing victims’ feet in cement before throwing them in the ocean – we added them to our shared catalogue.

Most fathers would shield their children from such morbid fascinations. Mine, a psychologist, did the opposite. He saw death as life’s most honest teacher and ensured I wouldn’t meet it as a stranger.

Amanda Sloat is professor of practice in international relations at IE University in Madrid, Spain

Former intelligence officers sound alarm over ‘devastating’ impact of president’s bid to overhaul US security agency

For generations they have borne the mantle of strength and authority inherited from J Edgar Hoover’s Depression-era G-men, a label supposedly affixed after the arrest of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933.

Now hardened veterans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are projecting a different face as they seek to fight back against what many say is the systematic undermining of the bureau’s values under a drive by Donald Trump to turn it into an instrument of retribution.

These alternate search engines are free and could help you break up with Google.

Games are likely to be tied at the end of regulation at the 2026 World Cup, especially in the late stages of the tournament with a highly competitive field.

The battle over “60 Minutes” can teach us a lot about how someone like CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss can wreak havoc on our media ecosystem. What has gotten a lot less attention, however, is the way the fight shows us how ill-equipped our media institutions already were when it comes to covering the Trump administration and MAGA-era politics.

The strife at the famous magazine television news program reached a fever pitch last week, when, during a staff meeting, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley unloaded on Nick Bilton, Weiss’s pick to run the show. Pelley was fired and took to the media to defend himself.

In a long interview with the New York Times over the weekend, Pelley talked about how Weiss had injected herself into the show’s editorial process.

The most revealing part of the discussion centered on Pelley’s own “60 Minutes” coverage of President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement officers into Minneapolis, the uprising against the invasion, and the subsequent crackdown that led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.

Weiss’s role in the story was clearly toxic, but Pelley’s description of his own editorial process before Weiss got involved should also raise eyebrows.

“I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively,” Pelley said. “I thought we’d done a really good job with this.”

Pelley said they found evidence of protesters chest-bumping officers and hitting them with snowballs. The Minnesotans screamed at federal agents, Pelley said, and Pretti himself could be seen in one picture kicking out a police car taillight.

Striving for “Balance”

It’s a striking passage because it shows a revered journalist searching for a balanced narrative where there simply wasn’t one. If, after scouring hours and hours video to find evidence of “aggressive” protesters, all you can find is a chest bump and a thrown snowball, perhaps that’s a sign that your narrative that both sides were aggressive isn’t all that accurate.

Related

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

The truth is that the Minneapolis protesters were remarkably restrained in the face of egregious state violence and brutality. Yes, they were angry, loud, persistent, and rude. Demonstrators yelled insults at officers, blew whistles, and recorded with their cellphones. Yet that is all First Amendment-protected activity, no matter how many times Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem try to call it “terrorism.”

There’s a reason why the criminal charges against protesters have rarely held up in court: There was never any merit to them. Over and over, when it came time to present actual evidence, the government backed down, was reprimanded by a judge, or was rejected by a grand jury.

Likewise, Pretti’s confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement days before he was killed has nothing to do with whether immigration officers were justified in killing him. Videos of the killing show that Pretti did nothing to justify being confronted, beaten, and shot 10 times.

Pelley’s remarks, by themselves, offer a lesson in the pitfalls of striving for “balance” under an administration that lies by default, lies when it doesn’t need to, and lies as a demonstration of its power.

Enter Weiss

Weiss, her billionaire Paramount bosses David and Larry Ellison, and the other tech billionaires who fund her publication the Free Press are all of the belief that the legacy media is overwhelmingly left of center.

They’re correct in a very broad sense. Generally, journalists who work for legacy outlets have personal politics that skew liberal, but it’s more complicated than that. Legacy media journalists also tend to be institutionalists and deferential to authority. That can make them defensive of power and often skeptical of those who challenge it.

As Pelley’s Minneapolis story shows, these journalists also want to be seen as fair, which can drive them to seek balance even when there is no credible “other side.” Contrary to Weiss and the MAGA world’s claims that legacy media is hopelessly blinkered, the more urgent problem right now is that even the most revered journalistic institutions aren’t equipped to sort through the firehose of lies and propaganda pouring out of Trump’s far-right movement.

Related

Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do

Weiss’s role at both the Free Press and now at CBS News has been to make that task even more even more difficult. Her editorial feedback for Pelley, for instance, only served to muddy the waters.

“About four hours after our deadline,” Pelley told the New York Times, “Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include — can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing: Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

Weiss’s editorial advice to Pelley wasn’t about clearer or fairer or more contextual journalism. She was asking for propaganda.

If Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, reasonably feared for his life, he was legally justified in killing Good. And if Good was driving toward him, that bolsters his claim to have reasonably feared for his life.

The problem is that there’s no evidence that she was. In fact, CBS News did its own analysis of the video footage, which clearly demonstrated that Good’s wheels were pointed away from Ross — as did several other outlets. As television producer Tim Carvell pointed out, however, CBS’s analysis never aired on the network; it was relegated to YouTube.

Weiss’s alleged directive also glosses over how Ross and his fellow agents also created the very volatility they claimed justified his use of lethal force. And it ignores how the agents violated multiple Department of Homeland Security policies during the encounter — for example, by putting themselves in front of Good’s car, and by rushing toward her door.

At the time of Good’s death, the administration and its supporters had also been pushing a much more destructive and conspiratorial narrative: that a cabal of far-left donors had been training protesters and ICE watchers to weaponize their cars against immigration officers. Not only was there zero evidence for this, it provided cover for what the agents themselves were doing. Video and witness accounts repeatedly showed agents ramming and boxing people in with their vehicles, then falsely claiming they were the victims who had been rammed. Slandering Good just reinforced the narrative.

If Weiss had really wanted to provide relevant context for Good’s death, there were plenty of places to look. Perhaps Good feared for her safety because immigration officers surging into liberal cities were pulling people out of their cars and beating them. Or maybe it was relevant that Border Patrol officers have a long history of improperly placing themselves in front of moving vehicles, then using that as justification to fire at those vehicles.

Weiss didn’t demand any of that. For her, balance and nuance meant telling Pelley to make his story more palatable to MAGA.

Crisis of Disinformation

We now live in an era in which one of the two major parties has given itself over to wild conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and the whims and biases of a disturbed billionaire.

Related

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

The mere fact that Trump leads that party means the airwaves are already polluted with nonsense like whether windmills cause cancer, whether immigrants are eating neighborhood pets, and whether developing countries are “emptying their insane asylums” into the U.S.

The fact that half the Congress, about 40 percent of the public, and the entire executive branch now subscribe to anti-vaccine bullshit, election denialism, and “great replacement theory” doesn’t make any of those claims legitimate. So long as a good portion of the country is in the throes of MAGA, however, there will be ongoing pressure to platform even the looniest claims out of a sense of fairness and representation. Weiss isn’t the cause of all of this, but she is an accelerant.

Pelley told the New York Times that he refused to make Weiss’s changes, and that his piece aired without them. That may be encouraging, except that not everyone has the institutional stature of Scott Pelley to insulate themselves from reprisals — not even Scott Pelley, it turns out.

Related

Kash Patel Is Using MAGA’s Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press

The request itself, however, testifies to a disinformation crisis that’s only going to get worse, particularly as Weiss starts replacing departed staff with her own people and Trump keeps leaning on media outlets.

Another way it could get worse is if media honchos like those who own CBS keep gaining clout. Weiss’s own bosses, for example, have now set their sights on CNN — with Weiss reportedly expected to lead editorial at both news operations.

The post Scott Pelley Shows How Legacy Media Got It Wrong — Before Bari Weiss Made It Worse appeared first on The Intercept.

Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy

Even as Donald Trump boosts coal over clean energy, solar power is hitting new milestones in the US and remains the leading source of new power.

Data released on Wednesday by the global energy thinktank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (Seia) and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy. In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.

Why Should Delaware care?
The practice of handing taxpayer money to private business has grown more controversial in Delaware in recent years. Last year, outsider Gov. Matt Meyer said he would shift how the state handles the practice. A recent state grant to a student loan startup follows the shift.

Delaware recently awarded nearly $800,000 to a student loan company through a grant that one economic development official noted was “a little bit unusual,” because of the company’s startup status. 

Founded last year by a former Sallie Mae executive, Delaware-based Gradbridge currently employs 12 people, according to company officials. They expect to have 49 employees in the coming years at a new headquarters at Newark’s Iron Hill Corporate Center.

The company markets student loans with high-interest rates to college students who had been denied by traditional lenders. Its fixed-rate loans range from about 18% to 23% interest, depending on qualifying factors. By comparison, student lending giant Sallie Mae offers undergrad fixed-rate loans ranging from under 3% to just over 17%.

Gradbridge also joins an existing ecosystem of online lenders based in Delaware that offer nontraditional loans. 

While still in its infancy, the company raised $20 million last fall from the private equity firm Acorn Investment Partners. At the time, company officials said the cash infusion would support GradBridge’s launch of a “first-of-its-kind private student loan product exclusively designed for students who have exhausted federal and private options.”

Last week, Delaware’s Council on Development Finance committed additional dollars to the new venture. 

The state council’s board — made up of members from government and private businesses — approved GradBridge’s request for a $780,000 grant tied to defined employment goals, and a $7,500 capital expenditure grant.

The terms of the grant contracts were negotiated by the public-private economic development organization Delaware Prosperity Partnership – a separate entity from the Council on Development Finance that receives dollars from the state but is not subject to open records rules.

Noah Olson, director of innovation at the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, noted the award is a “little bit unusual,” because it veers away from the state’s past practice of granting money to more established companies. 

But he said the Delaware Prosperity Partnership wants to “see more of these types of companies,” which he described as a venture-backed startup. 

“We think that it’s an exciting milestone for us to be supporting growth-stage companies,” Olson said.

Olson also emphasized that the grant is performance-based, meaning Gradbridge needs to hire and retain the promised workers before any dollars are disbursed. 

Last year, Gov. Matt Meyer announced plans to focus the state’s economic development efforts on small businesses growth and on workforce development programs instead of dedicating huge sums of taxpayer money to large projects by established companies.

“In my administration, you’re going to see the use of this cash assistance de-emphasized,” Meyer said during the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner last year.

The governor’s office declined to answer questions asking whether the Gradbridge grants are in line with the governor’s new vision for economic development, and about the company’s practice of marketing high-interest loans to college students.  

Meyer’s spokesman instead referred questions to the Delaware Division of Small Business. 

When asked whether the state has awarded money to startups in the past, Division of Small Business spokeswoman Andrea Wojcik said in an email that the majority of applications to the Council on Development Finance are from existing companies. 

But she said the state does not track grant awards by existing companies versus startups and there is nothing to prohibit a startup from applying.

In a press release announcing Gradbridge’s award, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership said the grant is a “strategic fit” for the governor’s innovation economy agenda. Meyer also was quoted in the press release.

“Delaware is proving once again that it is the best place for high-growth companies to launch, scale and succeed,” Meyer said.

Gradbridge focuses on unserved

Gradbridge markets its loans to college juniors, seniors, and graduate students — a model that CEO Jen O’Donald said allows her company to “pick up really where the other lenders leave off.”

In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, O’Donald said the inspiration for her to launch the company partly came from threats made last year by the federal government to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. 

If carried out, it would be a “massive disruption to the student loan industry, to schools, and to students themselves,” she said. 

She said her company lends to upperclassmen and graduate students because they might only need one or two loans to “cross the finish line” to graduation. She also said Gradbridge requires a cosigner for its undergraduate loans.

After originating loans, Gradbridge then sells them as assets to other companies. 

The startup’s technology centers on what O’Donald calls its custom credit score machine learning model, which it developed in partnership with the consumer credit reporting company, Experian Analytics.

To determine credit worthiness, the model considers FICO scores, past loan delinquencies, and bankruptcy, among other factors, O’Donald said. 

Growing Delaware’s existing fintech industry

Gradbridge joins an already rich online lending and fintech industry in Delaware. 

Wilmington is home to fintech student loan company College Ave, fintech lender Best Egg, and digital credit card company FairSquare.

Student lender Sallie Mae is headquartered in Newark. And the San Francisco-based online lending giant, SoFi, has locations in Greenville and Claymont. 

Other financial institutions headquartered or located in Delaware include BlackRock, Bank of America, Capital One, and JPMorganChase – all of which are increasingly expanding into the fintech field. 

Additionally, the University of Delaware houses a Fintech Innovation Hub on its STAR campus.

The post Delaware awards ‘unusual’ grant to student loan company after state’s economic development shift appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Laurel, a small town in western Sussex County, retains a disproportionately high violent crime rate compared to its small population. After the shooting of a local high schooler, a community group formed to make a change. More than three years later, with more donations and support, the group is still working to build a safer town.

Groups working to combat gun violence in the small, western Sussex County town of Laurel gathered last week with local leaders to unveil new beautification projects they hope will build community pride and push their work forward.

Organizers from Operation West Laurel gathered inside the Laurel Police Department headquarters on June 5. The group commemorated National Gun Violence Awareness Day by debuting the portraits of two Laurel high schoolers who were fatally shot in 2023 along with new community gardens.

The portraits memorialize Corey Mumford and Kylee Robinson – two 18-year-olds who were killed in the same year. Mumford’s death inspired Laurel High School teacher Amy Handy to start Operation West Laurel, an organization using prayer, trash pick up and after-school programs to combat violence. 

Mumford and Robinson’s portraits will be displayed at Laurel High School, along with a memorial bench.

Following the portrait reveal, Handy cut the ribbon for two new community gardens: a flower bed outside city police headquarters and a nearby vegetable garden across the street from Mount Zion Church. 

The portraits and community gardens represent Operation West Laurel’s ongoing community beautification work, one its many initiatives undertaken to mitigate violence in the town.

Those initiatives were bolstered last summer when it received a separate $93,000 grant from Healthy Communities Delaware. That grant was given in conjunction with Wilmington-based nonprofit End Community Violence Now, which has partnered with Operation West Laurel to extend its gun violence prevention work into southern Delaware.

The group also received a $50,000 grant from the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control to fund community beautification projects.

Rising from the classroom

Along with community beautification, Operation West Laurel hosts youth programming in the hopes of deterring teens in the community from turning toward violence.

Two days out of the week, Handy and her team hold after-school sessions for high-risk high school boys called Project RISE.

Handy defines “at-risk,” as kids who struggle with grades and attendance. Through working with the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the group has further identified students who are at-risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of gun violence.     

Last summer’s group included boys who were there when Mumford and Robinson were killed. 

At these after-school sessions, students are met with music and offered a snack. They then participate in “restorative circles,” and rate their days on a scale of 1-10. Afterward, they review their grades and do schoolwork. 

One of the students in the program, Woodley Dormevil, just graduated. Dormevil has known Handy since he was in seventh grade. Since leaving RISE, he has transitioned to helping out with some of the group’s community projects, like trash pick-ups. 

Dormevil said more people have come out to help Operation West Laurel since he started. He hopes Handy’s after-school program continues to grow and get more kids involved in the community.

This year, Operation West Laurel started offering workforce training once a week, including resume building and interview skills to the students at the after-school program. 

Handy said that she has seen a decline in community violence since starting her work. The Laurel Police Department did not respond to requests for the town’s most recent shooting data. 

According to news reports, there have been at least three shootings in Laurel in the last 12 months, none of which have resulted in a death. One incident in April involved a 16-year-old who fired a 3D-printed “ghost gun.”

Beyond the data, though, Handy said at-risk students have gained self-confidence and support from the after-school program. 

“They feel like people are listening to them,” Handy said. 

Pivoting toward in-state support

Since partnering with Operation West Laurel, the executive director of End Community Violence Now said the Sussex County town has gained more attention from philanthropic partners, the news, and elected officials. House Minority Leader Rep. Tim Dukes (R-Laurel) and Sen. Bryant Richardson (R-Seaford) both spoke at the gun violence press conference last week. 

“It’s really showed that it’s a bipartisan issue,” said Lauren Footman, the executive director.

Footman is using this traction to urge lawmakers to fund Gov. Matt Meyer’s proposed Office of Gun Violence and Community Safety. First introduced last May as an executive order, House Bill 369 would codify and secure funding for the office. The bill has passed the House and is currently awaiting consideration by the Senate. 

Due to the changing landscape of federal funding, Footman said that she is thinking strategically about how to leverage state support for gun violence prevention.

In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in existing violence prevention grants, an initiative launched by the Biden administration. 

Then in September, the administration changed the grant’s requirements, preventing community-based organizations like End Community Violence Now from receiving funding.

“We are exhausting all options of working with the federal delegation,” Footman said.  

Growing together 

The joint grant that Operation West Laurel and End Community Violence Now received last summer has helped the groups to work toward curbing crime through environmental design, mainly through community gardens and clean-up initiatives.

“I think it is really starting to show in the community – things are starting to look better,” Dormevil said.

Footman said the gardens serve many purposes. In addition to feeding families in need, they also serve as an opportunity to engage at-risk youth who tend to the gardens. 

She described the gardens as an “intergenerational opportunity,” bringing young and old residents together to co-create something for the community.  

Footman said she also is thinking about gun violence prevention on the infrastructural level, including improving street lighting. 

As for work on the streets, Operation West Laurel continues to do its prayer walks – one of the first group events Handy started shortly following Mumford’s death – every Thursday. 

Sabrina Isler, an Operation West Laurel volunteer, said the following has grown. More kids and families expect to see the team and join in on the walks. 

“We can’t control what people do, but at least they know someone is watching,” Isler said.

The post Laurel groups rally against gun violence, vow to continue community work appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
The Dover City Council’s decision to fire City Manager Dave Hugg earlier this spring has had costly and messy implications for the city government, including an age-based discrimination complaint and now a lawsuit alleging open meeting law violations. 

Former Dover City Manager Dave Hugg filed a lawsuit this week in Delaware’s Court of Chancery against the city of Dover, alleging officials violated open meeting laws in the process of firing him.

The lawsuit marks the latest development in the months-long turmoil over the city’s decision to oust its top administrative official. 

Hugg claims in the lawsuit that the public hearing during which the Dover City Council voted to fire him from his position was not conducted in compliance with Delaware’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

According to Hugg’s complaint, the city violated FOIA by improperly labeling what would take place during the April 13 meeting where he was fired – the public notice did not explicitly say a vote to fire Hugg would be taken during the meeting. The complaint also alleges that holding the hearing at the end of an already long city council meeting prevented members of the public from attending.  

Hugg’s lawsuit represents another step in what is becoming a costly and litigious battle between the fired city manager and Delaware’s capital city. Hugg also filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) age-based employment discrimination complaint against the city last month, which will turn into a separate legal conflict once the investigation wraps up and he receives a “right to sue” letter. 

Dover is simultaneously dealing with a number of other controversies and financial roadblocks, including a $7 million budget shortfall, unrest between the Dover Police Department and city leaders, and an ongoing debate about a potentially unconstitutional panhandling ordinance. 

Hugg and the law firm representing him in the case, Offit Kurman, did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment on Wednesday. 

Dover City Attorney Dan Griffith confirmed the city is aware of the lawsuit, but said the city has not yet been served any court documents. 

The city has also not yet determined whether Griffith or an outside attorney will represent them, a spokesperson for the city told Spotlight Delaware. Keri Morris-Johnston, an attorney with the firm Marshall Dennehey, is representing the city against Hugg’s EEOC claim. 

The arguments

The thrust of Hugg’s case against the city focuses on the public hearing directly before he was fired. His attorneys say that meeting intentionally “lacked transparency” and “deprived the public” of the opportunity to defend Hugg’s performance as city manager. 

The saga began earlier this spring, when Hugg was quietly placed on administrative leave by city council. Hugg said that leave placement came after he was told by city leaders that he could either retire, resign, or be fired.

The Dover city charter requires a city manager to be given a public hearing and a “written statement of the reasons alleged for their removal” before the city council can take a final vote on removing them. 

And this, Hugg’s lawyers argue, is where the open meeting law issues arise. 

Hugg’s public hearing was listed on the April 13 council meeting agenda as “City Managers’ Request for Hearing Pursuant to City of Dover Charter, Article III, Sec. 33.” 

His lawyers say the city misrepresented the nature of the hearing in the pre-meeting notice, suggesting the agenda item was city council merely considering Hugg’s request for a public hearing, rather than actually conducting the hearing and voting on his employment status that same night. 

In addition, the lawyers argue the city’s decision to situate the hearing as the meeting’s 20th agenda item – so it did not begin until roughly two hours after the council meeting started – was another effort by the city to defy open meeting laws. 

“Because the Council was substantially delayed in beginning the termination hearing, at least one individual could not stay for several hours and was forced to leave before the hearing commenced,” the complaint says.

Hugg’s attorneys also say he submitted a FOIA request for a number of documents cited by the city council in its written statement of reasons for his removal, and the city denied the FOIA request. This prevented Hugg from being able to review the relevant records to prepare for the hearing, his lawyers argue. 

The lawsuit also makes mention of Hugg’s separate claim of age-based discrimination, which is currently playing out through an ongoing EEOC complaint and investigation. 

The lawsuit alleges the city council wanted to remove Hugg so that they could “replace him” with assistant city manager Sharon Duca, who is “over twenty years younger” than him. 

Duca was appointed the acting city manager in early March when Hugg was first placed on administrative leave. Then, at the June 8 city council meeting, she was named the full-time city manager. 

Griffith, the city attorney, and the city spokesperson declined to comment on the arguments laid out by Hugg’s team. 

Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen told Spotlight Delaware he is concerned about the lawsuit’s implications on the city’s financial situation and “the credibility of the city.” 

Other FOIA violations

While it remains to be seen how the court proceedings will unfold, there have been other questions raised in recent months about the city of Dover’s compliance with open meeting laws. 

Since last fall, city officials have been criticized for cutting the public comment section of city council meetings short and not including those public comments in the virtual livestream of the meeting, nor in the meeting recording posted online afterward.  

Then, in December, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings ruled the city had violated FOIA by denying a Spotlight Delaware public records request.

The city had used an overly broad interpretation of what documents are exempted from FOIA due to ongoing or potential litigation, the Attorney General’s office wrote in its December ruling. Hugg’s attorneys wrote in the Chancery Court complaint that the city also denied Hugg’s FOIA request based on the same public records exemption – pending or potential litigation. 

Most recently, the Department of Justice ruled in favor of a citizen’s complaint that the city government did not follow FOIA rules by “failing to properly notice its rescheduled meeting.” 

This has forced the city council to reconsider its controversial panhandling ordinance, which the Attorney General’s office said was not properly advertised as being on the agenda for a final vote at the Feb. 25 council meeting. 

Once the city is formally served Hugg’s recent Chancery Court complaint, it will have 20 days to respond, according to Chancery Court rules. 

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 Fired Dover city manager sues city, claims open meeting law violations appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

With matches being played in 11 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada​, fans are getting three World Cup opening ceremonies.

Looking for hands-free cleaning? We trialled the most powerful robot vacuums – some of which even mop your floors – to find the best

• The best vacuum cleaners, tested

Robot vacuum cleaners take the drudge work out of cleaning your floors and carpets. No more tiresome weekly stints of vacuuming, and no more last-minute panic when you have visitors on the way. Instead, your compact robot chum regularly trundles out from its dock, sucking up dust, hair and debris to leave your floors looking spick and span.

Over the past few years, robot vacuums have become much more affordable, with basic units starting at about £150. They’re also doing more than they used to: mopping hard floors and charging in sophisticated cleaning stations that empty their dust collectors and clean their mop pads for you.

Best robot vacuum cleaner overall:
Eufy X10 Pro Omni

Best budget robot vacuum for small homes:
Roborock Q7 L5+

A federal lawmaker is pushing for a provision that would bar the Federal Bureau of Prisons from offering taxpayer-funded VIP perks to pardoned drug lords and child traffickers. 

Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, introduced the measure last month as an amendment to a House appropriations bill, telling her colleagues that there “should never be preferential treatment for narco leaders.”

The move comes in response to ProPublica reporting on the special treatment extended to one high-profile pardon recipient — former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was released from a federal penitentiary late last year. Less than 18 months earlier, Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing drug traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. while he was in office.

But after President Donald Trump pardoned him in December, the Central American strongman — who has long maintained his innocence — got what Torres and others have described as the “red carpet” treatment. On the day of his release, ProPublica found, Hernández had in place what’s known as an immigration detainer, a formal request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet instead of holding him, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get the detainer removed so he could walk free. Then, instead of giving him a bus ticket or airfare to get home on his own, prison officials paid a four-man tactical team overtime to drive him six hours from a West Virginia high-security facility to the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, New York, according to records and three people familiar with the situation. 

Read More

Amid Mass ICE Arrests, Trump Pardon Recipient Juan Orlando Hernández Given Special Treatment

Torres sought to stop that sort of treatment with a narrowly tailored amendment barring the bureau and several other agencies from using taxpayer dollars to give convicted drug traffickers and child traffickers — even those who have been pardoned or received a sentence commutation — special accommodations or transportation, as well as from lifting “any detainers not provided to other inmates.” 

Last month, the amendment hit an early stumbling block when the House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines against including it in its proposed 2027 spending bill. 

“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to give convicted criminals special accommodations, lifted legal holds, or government-funded transportation,” Torres said in a press release afterward. “We should be enforcing the law, not handing out favors. I’m shocked that my Republican colleagues didn’t agree with that common sense idea.” 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the proposal is dead. Last week in a statement to ProPublica, Torres — a Guatemalan immigrant who last year criticized the decision to pardon Hernández — said she planned to raise the issue before the Rules Committee, which can decide whether previously rejected amendments still get a vote on the House floor.

“I am not giving up,” she said, adding: “The American people deserve a government that enforces the law fairly and holds powerful criminals accountable, regardless of who pardons them.”

A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson declined to comment on the measure out of respect for members of Congress. Previously, a spokesperson said that the bureau does not discuss conditions of confinement or security procedures and that employee standards of conduct prohibit staff from giving any prisoners preferential treatment. ICE had previously referred questions to the White House, which this week did not respond to a request for comment.

Long before his arrest and controversial release, Hernández had been a polarizing figure, plagued by allegations of corruption in his country. Still, he was seen as a key U.S. ally under the Obama and first Trump administrations, in part because of his apparent interest in tackling drug trafficking and migration issues.

But in 2018, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrested his younger brother, former Honduran congressman Tony Hernández, for weapons and drug trafficking charges. The following year, a jury found Tony Hernández guilty in a Manhattan federal trial.

And weeks after the elder Hernández left office in 2022, he was arrested in Honduras and extradited to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and weapons charges. Prosecutors said Juan Orlando Hernández funded his political career with money he got from “violent drug-trafficking organizations” in exchange for allowing them to “move mountains of cocaine” out of the country. At one point, they said during trial, he bragged that he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

After a federal jury voted to convict him in early 2024, Hernández was sent to a notorious high-security penitentiary in West Virginia to serve his time. Last year, he appealed to Trump’s sympathies, penning a four-page letter framing his case as a “political persecution” by the Biden administration. 

In November — two days before the Honduran presidential election that swept Hernández’s right-wing National Party back into power — Trump announced his intent to pardon his former Central American counterpart. Experts said the timing sent an obvious message on the eve of a tight race; as one former high-ranking U.S. diplomat previously told ProPublica, the pardon was a show of support that served as a “clear green light for the National Party to manipulate the vote.”

(The narrow victory for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who had been trailing in multiple polls, came amid reports of voter intimidation and fraud allegations. After the election, Asfura promised to “work tirelessly for Honduras.”)

On Dec. 1, Trump formally granted Hernández the full pardon, and by the end of the day he was on his way to the swank, five-star hotel in New York City, ProPublica reported. Days later, Renato Stabile, Hernández’s court-appointed lawyer, filed a motion to vacate the judgment and dismiss the indictment in light of the presidential pardon. When prosecutors didn’t file a response opposing it, a federal court agreed to Stabile’s request.

Previously, Stabile told ProPublica his client’s treatment during the release process was appropriate, as Hernández could have been arrested or killed had he been deported to his home country. He also declined to comment on where Hernández stayed but said the government did not pay the bill. Hernández had declined to comment through his attorney.

At the time, Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker and former union leader, said that BOP staff were “disgusted” after the agency “rolled out the red carpet” for Hernández. 

Last month, when the amendment came up for debate in front of the 63-member House Appropriations Committee, Torres held up a printed copy of ProPublica’s investigation as she told her colleagues about the special treatment Hernández received and about how the prisons agency had used “our hard-earned taxpayer dollars” to pay for his transport to New York. 

“These actions can never be allowed to happen ever again,” she said.

Two other lawmakers spoke in support of the measure. One, Rep. Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, opposed it, calling the amendment “performative and unnecessary.” He did not explain his reasoning to the committee, and his office did not respond to an emailed request for comment. 

Ultimately, 31 Republicans opposed the amendment and 27 Democrats supported it. None of the Republican members who voted against the amendment responded to requests for comment from ProPublica.

Though Torres plans to raise the issue again this summer in front of the Rules Committee, the 9-4 Republican majority there makes it unlikely the measure will garner enough support to move forward right now.

But if the House fails to agree on spending bills before the end of this Congress, the November elections could change the balance of power and give the Democrats more say in what amendments make it to the floor next year.

The post Lawmaker Pushes for Ban on Special Treatment for Convicted Drug Traffickers After ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

Spending on religious construction rose 17 percent last year as congregations grapple with the changing role of faith institutions.

The Dreame X50 Ultra vacuums, mops and navigates every corner and right now you can get one for less than $900.

• Fox explains late play that changed Game 4

• Anunoby block sparks historic Knicks comeback

• Barkley blasts Spurs guard’s costly decision

• Game 4 report: Knicks storm back to stun Spurs

For nearly 47 minutes, the San Antonio Spurs looked poised to leave Madison Square Garden with the NBA finals level at two games apiece.

They’d led by 81-52 in the third quarter, brought a frenzied Madison Square Garden crowd to heel and put themselves on the verge of reclaiming home-court advantage after having dropped the first two games at home. Even after the Knicks mounted a furious second-half fightback and wiped out the entirety of San Antonio’s 29-point cushion, the Spurs still appeared to have one final lifeline.

The U.S. and Iran exchanged fire again on Thursday after President Trump pledged Tehran would "pay the price" for not accepting a deal.

fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Tests reveal that when people are ambling about, they have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction. "If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift counterclockwise," said Dr Inaki Echeverria Huarte at University of Navarra in Spain. As with many critical discoveries in science, the revelation owes a debt to serendipity. During the pandemic, the researchers ran experiments to see how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance. On reviewing the video, they noticed that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction. The surprise set in motion an entire research project. The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which individual pedestrians or small crowds roamed around enclosed spaces. Time and again, the researchers observed the tendency to walk in an anticlockwise direction. Suspecting that cultural norms might play a role, the team joined forces with Dr Claudio Feliciani at the University of Tokyo. He found the same results in Japan. The finding held when the researchers accounted for people being right-handed, right-footed and right-eye dominant, and was seen in both male and female walkers. The only difference they spotted was a more pronounced bias in children. "Each of us carries a small personal bias to turn slightly to one side, and when many people share a space, those tiny biases add up into a net counterclockwise rotation," said Echeverria Huarte. Researchers think the tendency may be tied to biomechanics: people are not perfectly symmetrical, and the way the brain processes sensory information and coordinates muscles may gently tip walkers toward one side. Right-side dominance may also play a role, especially in running, where anticlockwise movement puts more internal force on the right side of the body and may feel more natural to right-leg-dominant athletes. "We have tested several ideas and the bias stubbornly keeps showing up, so the exact mechanism is still an open question," said Echeverria Huarte. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Budget airline describes inquiry as ‘bogus’ as watchdog says it is only large carrier flying from UK to impose charge

• Business live – latest updates

Europe’s biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair, is facing an investigation over the mandatory fee it charges a parent to sit with their child.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the Irish carrier’s terms and conditions require at least one parent to sit with their children, including those with disabilities, and bills them about £8 a flight to do so.

Singer and actor has denied all charges after more than 20 women made allegations against him dating back to 1990s

The French singer Patrick Bruel has been charged with rape and sexual assault in one of the biggest #MeToo cases in the French music industry.

The 67-year-old, a major figure in French pop culture, was placed under formal investigation over four cases that included alleged rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Explosions reported across Iran after Donald Trump vowed to ‘hit them hard again’, with Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan targeted by Tehran

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US launched a new round of airstrikes on Iran into Thursday morning after Donald Trump warned Tehran would “pay the price” for stalled negotiations, prompting Iran to respond with strikes targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

The new US assault across a range of Iranian cities came as efforts to negotiate an end to the war again appeared stuck, with Iran insisting it would maintain its chokehold on the strait of Hormuz. The American attack appeared more intense and wider than the day before, but Iran released no information about what was hit.

The first-ever Creator Cup will put YouTube creators, athletes and celebrities on the pitch for a special exhibition match in New York ahead of the World Cup final.

Sharon and Jack Osbourne defend their plan to create a "digital imprint" that would let fans talk with rock's Prince of Darkness.

Under US rules, even a distant strike can suspend a game – and some will take place in Florida, the thunderstorm state

Hot weather will be a major concern at the World Cup, but lightning may also prove a particular problem. Under US safety regulations, a strike within 10 miles (16km) of a stadium triggers a 30-minute suspension of the game, during which players must leave the pitch.

The size of the safety zone was dictated by research on the distance that lightning can strike from a storm even with no clouds overhead. This is more than a theoretical risk. During a game in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998, an entire team was killed by a single bolt of lightning. There have been many other deadly incidents.

Former Labor foreign affairs minister says belief US would defend Australia in event of an existential attack is a ‘ludicrous delusion’

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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

Aukus will prove to be one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions ever made by an Australian government and is only being permitted by Donald Trump in order to destroy Chinese nuclear threats to the US mainland, former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans has said.

In evidence to an independent public inquiry into the $368bn nuclear agreement with the US and UK on Thursday, Evans, a cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, warned the transfer and construction of submarines to Australia from the early 2030s was effectively only an extension of the American military fleet.

This blog has now closed – our coverage of this crisis in the Middle East continues here

If the US genuinely wants a deal it will have to engage with Iranian demands on sanctions relief, says Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence.

Today’s exchange of strikes shows how easily both Iran and the US can slide towards another round of escalation, says Citrinowicz, who is now a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

If Washington is unwilling to accept that reality, it should recognize the likely alternative: continued confrontations with Iran that could eventually spiral beyond anyone’s control and lead to military conflict under less favorable conditions.

Even a limited military campaign designed to weaken Iran would not fundamentally alter Tehran’s negotiating position. It has not happened in the past, and there is little reason to believe it would happen now. Iran emerges from the latest exchange of blows convinced that it can absorb pressure and respond to attacks.”

Legal and moral responsibility of all countries in the region (especially those located along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf) to prevent the US military and Israel from using their territory or facilities to plan, organise, execute, or support hostile actions against Iran.

How China’s currency manipulation is warping the world economy.

Why the AI build-out was doomed from the start.

California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom spearheaded a redistricting initiative that was intended to make up to five more districts more friendly to Democrats. Voters may have different ideas.

A veteran North Korea analyst says Xi Jinping's visit to North Korea was about keeping tabs on an emboldened Kim Jong Un who wants "to confront the U.S."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Solar generated more U.S. electricity than coal for the first month on record in May 2026, according to new analysis from global energy think tank Ember. Solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity during the month, while coal dropped to 12.2%. That's a dramatic shift in the U.S. power mix. Just five years ago, coal generated 19.7% of U.S. electricity in May, while solar accounted for only 5.4%. U.S. solar generation hit a record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May 2026, up 17% from May 2025 and higher than the previous record set last July. Ember says another record could be broken again this summer. Solar output usually peaks in June or July, but its share of the electricity mix is often highest in spring, when strong sunshine lines up with milder temperatures before summer cooling demand ramps up. May was also the first time solar became the third-largest individual source of electricity in the U.S., behind only natural gas and nuclear. (If solar is included with all other renewables, then they're the second-largest source of electricity as an overall category of electricity.) Meanwhile, coal keeps sliding (and will continue to slide). Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Output rose slightly in May to 43.4 TWh, but it was still 11% lower than May 2025 levels. Even with that small rebound, coal couldn't keep pace with solar's rapid growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police have used water cannons on protesters in Northern Ireland after violence erupted for a second night over a stabbing in Belfast.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 11.

Man accused of sedating and filming abuse of partner had contact with Pelicot, who was jailed for drugging wife and inviting men to rape her

A bodyguard from Lyon is to go on trial for allegedly sedating and raping his partner after he was in contact online with Dominique Pelicot, who was convicted of drugging and raping his own wife, Gisèle Pelicot.

Pelicot, one of the worst sex offenders in modern French history, is serving 20 years in prison after he was found guilty of drugging his then wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her in their home in the south of France over almost a decade. He and 50 other men were found guilty after the biggest rape trial in French history in 2024.

This live blog is now closed.

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.

As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.

Jake Lang, a far-right influencer who was charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, was arrested in Dallas on a state charge of making terroristic threats.

Two days of strikes followed downing of US Apache helicopter over the strait of Hormuz, which Trump has blamed on Iran – key US politics stories from Wednesday 10 June at a glance

The US has launched new strikes against targets in Iran for the second consecutive day, following through on Donald Trump’s promise to “hit them hard again” as a two-month-old ceasefire appears close to collapse.

US Central Command announced in a statement that forces began “launching additional self-defence strikes today at 5:15 p.m. ET [10.15pm UK time on Wednesday] against multiple targets in Iran at the Commander in Chief’s direction”.

Pick out a frightening feature to watch this week.

Defense says no evidence occasional Uber driver Jonathan Rinderknecht ignited deadly blaze on New Year’s Day 2025

The trial of 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht, the man accused of starting last year’s deadly Palisades fire, kicked off on Wednesday with opening arguments. Prosecutors cast him as a vengeful arsonist who sought to hide his role from authorities, while his defense attorneys argued that the fire was caused by fireworks.

On New Year’s Day in 2025, firefighters extinguished a small blaze in the Pacific Palisades, a coastal Los Angeles enclave. But the flames continued to smolder underground, before reigniting as they were picked up by strong winds. The Palisades fire, the most destructive wildfires in city history, tore through roughly 23,000 acres, incinerating thousands of buildings and killing 12 people.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 626 for Thursday, June 11.

According to a recent survey, 71% of U.S. public school teachers said they work at least one second job.

Commentary: My favorite anti-tech tech product has barely changed since the 2000s -- thank goodness.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 11, No. 1,818.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 11, No. 1,096.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 11, No. 830.

The U.S. military launched an additional round of strikes on targets within Iran early Thursday morning local time, hours after President Trump vowed to hit Iran "hard."

A judge denied a request to block the DOJ's "anti-weaponization fund," noting Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had already vowed not to move forward. But the judge warned: "Don't play possum with this court."

• Knicks host Spurs with 2-1 lead in best-of-seven series

• Chuck D: Spurs can’t Knicks’ desperation in NBA finals

• How New York Knicks finals fever reached Rikers Island

• Reach out to Beau on Bluesky or by email

Trivia quiz …

How many teams have faced a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals and gone on to win?

This blog is now closed. Read our main report here: Police use water cannon against rioters in Northern Ireland

Hadi Alodid refused legal representation and made no reply to charges which were put put to him through an Arabic interpreter as he appeared in court charged with attempted murder following the Belfast knife attack, the Press Association reports.

The 30-year-old, with an address at Duncairn Avenue in Belfast, appeared before the city’s magistrates’ court on Wednesday morning.

He is charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie on Monday, with threatening to kill an NHS radiographer on the same day and with the possession of a knife.

Force disperses crowd of 300 people who burned truck and reportedly planned to target hotel hosting migrants

Police have used water cannon against rioters in Northern Ireland during a second night of anti-immigration protests.

It dispersed a crowd of about 300 people who burned a truck and threw bricks and petrol bombs close to the Sandyknowes roundabout near Newtownabbey, eight miles north of Belfast.

Hundreds of free World Cup tickets will be given to working families with kids, first responders and military families in the New York City area.

The wrongful arrest is just one of over a dozen in recent years linked to facial recognition technology.

For now, new users still have the option to just buy the hardware upfront.

Amid FIFA World Cup ticket troubles, the short-term rental company is offering fans free tickets with select bookings priced, on average, at $385 a night.

U.S. Central Command said it went after “multiple targets” after the president said Tehran would “pay the price” for not making a deal.

Apple recently announced its next crack at integrating “AI” into its operating systems, this time opting to simply whitelabel Google’s Gemini “AI” tools instead of developing its own LLM technology. Called “Siri AI”, Apple also stated it’s not coming to the EU, and the company stated that’s because the EU’s basic consumer protection legislation would give other “AI” tools “unprecedented access” to user data on users’ devices. The company made a big stink about this in the press.

As anyone with basic pattern recognition skills already knew, this was a blatant, baldfaced lie. What really happened is that Apple asked the EU for an 18-month long exemption from the EU’s consumer protection and privacy legislation during which it would not have to comply with any legal privacy and interoperability requirements – just so it could roll out Siri “AI” before anyone else could offer a competing product for Apple users.

Obviously, the EU wasn’t going to grant such an exemption.

“The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU.

“Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU ​privacy and security standards,” Regnier said.

“Instead ​of trying to find ⁠a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA – and this for at least 18 months. ​That’s not an option,” Regnier said.

↫ Inti Landauro and Foo Yun Chee at Reuters

So what’s really going on here is that Apple wants to offer a set of whitelabeled Google Gemini tools on iOS and macOS in the EU, but because Apple is classified as a gatekeeper, it is legally obligated to offer interoperability options for competing “AI” tools. These options in turn need to adhere to the EU’s strict privacy regulations, so that competing “AI” tools can offer the same level of privacy that Apple’s own whitelabeled Google Gemini tools claim to offer.

Apple didn’t want to offer these privacy-respecting interoperability options as required by law, so instead of following the law in the countries it wants to operate in, Apple asked to be placed above the law for at least 18 months, basically giving Siri “AI” a massive head-start over possible competitors so that it could entrench itself in the userbase. The EU saw right through Apple’s nonsense, and now called them out on their bullshit. Perhaps Apple has gotten so used to openly bribing Trump that they forgot other parts of the world don’t work that way.

Whenever Apple and its PR attack dogs say anything about the EU, you can be assured they are lying. They have proven time and time again to basically never speak a single word of truth when it comes to its dealings in the EU. It’s almost pathological at this point, and what makes it doubly interesting is that Apple will not launch Siri “AI” in China either, for the very same regulatory reasons – yet all China got was a single footnote in a press release.

I wonder why.

Eufy's FamiLock line is now larger, with more affordable models that limit AI processing to help protect your privacy. Here's how that works.

State supreme court ruling aids nationwide redistricting effort aimed at helping party retain slim House majority

The Florida supreme court on Wednesday allowed new US House districts drawn by Republicans to be used in the midterm elections, marking another victory for the GOP in a nationwide redistricting effort aimed at helping the party retain its slim House majority.

Attorneys for voters who sued had argued that the new congressional districts violate a state constitutional prohibition on partisan gerrymandering, and that the court should order the state to continue using the same districts as in the previous election. The supreme court, in a 6-1 decision, denied their request for a temporary injunction without ruling on the merits of the case. The judges said they lacked jurisdiction to intervene while the lawsuit gradually plays out in the lower courts.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was the only passenger to survive the incident in June 2025, which killed 260 people

The only survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed 260 people in June 2025 has called for “honesty, transparency and answers” a year on from the disaster, and spoken about his “significant psychological scars” and financial hardship.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British national, has previously described his fate as a “miracle” after being the only person to survive the incident, in which a Boeing 787 Dreamliner struck a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport.

New name, Bristol Dockyards, and museum revamp aimed at becoming more rooted in community, says chief executive

One of the UK’s maritime landmarks is being renamed as part of a drive to make it “cooler” and more inclusive.

For a decade, the dockland site in Bristol that houses the ocean liner SS Great Britain, which was designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, has been promoted as Brunel’s SS Great Britain.

A researcher using the name Nightmare Eclipse has released a new Microsoft Defender zero-day exploit called "RoguePlanet," which reportedly works on fully patched Windows 10 and 11 systems and can spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges through a Defender race condition. The release came just hours after Microsoft fixed two previously disclosed flaws during its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop -- its largest Patch Tuesday release ever. BleepingComputer reports: The researcher shared a proof-of-concept exploit on Tuesday afternoon in a self-hosted Git repository after saying that GitHub and GitLab repositories hosting their exploits had previously been removed by Microsoft. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others," Nightmare Eclipse wrote in the repository. [...] Cybersecurity firm ThreatLocker told BleepingComputer that they successfully reproduced the flaw in their testing and confirmed the exploit worked against fully patched Windows 11 systems with KB5094126 installed, and shared a video demonstrating it. "Our initial analysis confirms that the RoguePlanet exploit is viable and performs as described. Organizations using application allowlisting can prevent the exploit from executing, providing an effective layer of protection against this attack," Danny Jenkins, CEO of ThreatLocker, told BleepingComputer. According to Nightmare Eclipse, RoguePlanet was originally developed as a remote code execution vulnerability that exploited Microsoft Defender's handling of files hosted on remote SMB shares. "In initial development, it was confirmed that this vulnerability was a remote code execution," the researcher explained in a blog post. "It required an attacker to coerce a victim to open a .vhd(x) in a remote SMB server, succesful exploitation resulted in defender overwriting its own files and obviously the end outcome was an RCE." The researcher says another attack scenario could lead to remote code execution simply by coercing a victim into opening an SMB share if symlink evaluation settings were enabled. However, the researcher claims Microsoft silently hardened Defender in mid-May by patching "mpengine!SysIO*" API, which blocked junction attacks. "Rewriting RoguePlanet to make it functional again drained my soul and I couldn't complete the other scenarios and for now it remains unclear if RoguePlanet is limited to LPE or there is some sort of way to turn it into an RCE," the researcher wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With its detachable display, the Insta360 Luna Ultra is exciting for YouTubers. Here's how it compares to the Osmo Pocket 4.

For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

You shouldn’t be using Chrome anyway.

Two months after the rousing success of the Artemis II mission, NASA introduced four new astronauts -- all men.

Thanks to the success of its GPUs in powering the first stage of the AI boom, Nvidia became not only the world’s most successful chip company, but the world’s most valuable company. But as we enter phase two of the AI boom, we’re seeing a new class of chip based on static random access memory (SRAM) come to the forefront. That’s good news for Nvidia, which bought its own SRAM chipmaker, as well as upstarts like d-Matrix, Cerebras, and an SRAM cloud company called Gimlet Labs.

While GPUs excel at chewing through massive gobs of data, keeping the previously computed AI model values in memory is the main bottleneck with AI inference workloads today. The so-called GPU memory wall is the primary barrier, as it imposes a hard limit on the number of previously computed keys and values an AI inference system can cache in memory for quick recall during an AI session. A smaller KV cache translates into a substandard experience for users, either through limited context windows, longer response times, or fewer number of concurrent users.

d-Matrix builds in-memory compute in a chiplet form-factor

The brute force answer to the KV cache problems is to cram as much fast memory into the system as physically (or fiscally) possible. While the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in Nvidia and AMD GPUs offers relatively big caches for GPUs to stash data as they processes data, HBM resides off the chip, which limits the total memory bandwidth. The fastest memory available is SRAM, which resides directly on the chip and offers memory bandwidths on the order of 100 TB per second to 150 TBps, compared to the 1.2 TBps (HBM3) to 2 TBps (HBM4) per stack.

SRAM is superfast but it’s relatively expensive, which has traditionally limited its use to the chip registers and internal L1, L2, and L3 caches. Dynamic RAM (DRAM), by contrast, is slower but less expensive than SRAM, and traditionally has been the choice for use as main working memory.

But as AI pushes the limits of computing, that has started to change, and chipmakers are starting to build designs that feature SRAM as main memory. Groq is one of those chipmakers. Acquired by Nvidia in December for $20 billion, Groq built its Language Processing Unit (LPU) by building vector and matrix computing units directly onto the chips containing loads of SRAM. Nvidia quickly turned its acquisition around, and launched its Groq 3 LPX racks at GTC in March.

But Groq LPUs aren’t the only SRAM game in town. d-Matrix also based its chip architecture on a digital in-memory compute (DCIM) architecture that utilizes large amounts of SRAM. The Santa Clara, California company recently has been developing its Corsair accelerator, which incorporates 256 MB of SRAM in a 3D-stacked chiplet form factor. Each Corsair card delivers 150 TBps of memory bandwidth directly from a PCIe Gen 5 card.

Cerebras WSE-3 features 44GB of on-chip SRAM

Yesterday, d-Matrix announced that Corsair is in full production, with product shipping in volume to priority customers. Each Corsair accelerator offers up to 2,400 teraflops of 8 bit dense compute within a 600 watt TDP, and can be installed in standard air-cooled server racks. It’s being manufactured by d-Matrix partners TSMC and Alchip Technologies on TSMC’s N6 process node.

“We built Corsair specifically for this moment, the Age of AI Inference,” stated Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-Matrix. “The applications that matter most today–agentic AI, interactive coding, real-time voice agents–live or die on latency. Corsair takes off from where the GPU leaves off, and this summer our customers will be able to experience the turbocharge d-Matrix brings at full rack scale.”

Another chipmaker building around SRAM is Cerebras Systems. Where the d-Matrix Corsair takes a svelte, chiplet-based approach that can scale from very small to big, Cerebras is swinging for the fences with its massive chip, the Wafer Scale Engine.

The WSE-3, which Cerebras announced in March 2024, is a monster of a chip, containing 4 trillion transistors and packing 44GB of on-chip SRAM along with nearly 1 million AI compute cores onto a silicon wafer the size of a dinner plate. With up to 1 PB of external memory, it can train the biggest AI models in the world, spanning 24 trillion parameters or more.

Cerebras Systems went public three weeks ago. Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CBRS, Cerebras raised $5.55 billion with its shares price at $185 per, making it the biggest IPO of the year (so far). The company is currently valued at $56 billion, which makes it the poster child for the emerging SRAM chip market.

Source: Gimlet Labs

An SRAM company to keep an eye on is Gimlet Labs, an applied AI research startup out of Stanford University. The company is developing what it calls a “multi-silicon inference cloud” that eliminates hardware considerations for AI customers by building an abstraction layer in between the workload and the hardware.

Zain Asgar, the Stanford adjunct professor who co-founded Gimlet and is its CEO, is a fan of traditional GPUs as well as newer SRAM accelerators.

“Our software orchestration slices and maps inference workloads to the optimal hardware, and that experience has given us a practical view of where each architecture sits,” Asgar wrote in a March blog titled “The emerging role of SRAM-centric chips in AI inference.” “With top labs increasingly investing in inference speed and throughput, SRAM-centric accelerators are positioned to capture a meaningful share of the market,”

Gimlet, which recently raised $80 million in a Series A round, is running SRAM-based accelerators in its cloud, alongside traditional chips like Nvidia GPUs. The prefill and decode stages of AI inference put dramatically different demands on processors and memory stacks, and fitting each workload to the appropriate hardware is a constant challenge.

The auto-regressive nature of the decode stage maps very well to high memory intensity and doesn’t benefit from compute density, which favors the near-compute memory architectures, such as SRAM, Asgar wrote.

“This has created a perfect storm for near-compute memory chips (like today’s SRAM-centric architectures), which provide superior performance for decode,” he wrote. “As an industry, we are entering an exciting new era of chip design, with the unique demands of today’s inference workloads pulling architectures in many different directions at once. We look forward to seeing (and using) the new chips that emerge under these constraints.”

Feature image at top shows Groq 3 LPU. 

The post Why SRAM Chips Are Pulling Ahead in the New AI World appeared first on HPCwire.

Less than two weeks ago, in a scathing rebuke, a federal judge ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release a Louisiana grandfather who’d suffered a heart attack while in ICE custody.

The man, Akram Mahmoud Omar, 77, lived in the U.S. for 50 years until ICE abruptly seized him during a routine check-in last October and soon sent him to “Camp 57,” the ICE detention camp within the notorious Angola, Louisiana, state prison.

The stress of the poor conditions there contributed to Omar’s heart attack, according to the habeas petition he filed in April. On May 29, a federal judge found ICE had violated Omar’s constitutional rights and ordered his immediate release. 

Then on Monday, just 10 days after his release, ICE seized Omar again and tried to whisk the still-recovering man onto a deportation flight the next morning, according to his lawyer Ken Mayeaux. 

Following an emergency motion from Mayeaux, the same judge again ordered ICE to release Omar and cautioned the agency not to make another deportation attempt.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) shall IMMEDIATELY RELEASE Omar from ICE custody,” said the Monday order from Judge Brian Jackson in Louisiana’s Middle District. “ICE shall not RE-DETAIN or REMOVE Omar from the United States during the pendency of Omar’s Emergency Motion to Enforce the Court’s May 29 Order.”

In the May order, the judge found that ICE had violated Omar’s constitutional rights by unlawfully detaining him and denying him the chance to prepare for an orderly departure.

ICE directly defied that order by seizing him without warning for immediate deportation, the emergency motion alleges, blocking him from arranging his affairs or even saying goodbye.

“Petitioner’s re-detention and planned removal are in direct contempt of this Court’s prior order,” reads the June 8 emergency motion. The government “lied to Mr. Omar, telling him and his family that he did not need to report to ICE/ERO” — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division — “until December, but now, Respondent is racing to remove petitioner within hours.”

In a statement to The Lens and The Intercept, ICE spokesperson Angelina Vicknair said, “ICE complies with all court orders, and any allegation that a judge’s orders were not followed are categorically false.”

Federal courts are now constantly dealing with flagrant violations of judicial orders by ICE, said Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.

Related

“Warehousing Human Beings”

“This level of cruelty and disrespect for federal courts is the rule, not the exception,” said Pranzatelli, who is familiar with the case. “The Court looked at the entire record before it and issued a well-reasoned decision, which specifically mandated certain protections for this very elderly, very sick man, and ICE ignored it.”

ICE’s actions in Omar’s case are also in line with the way that the government is using extreme measures to target Palestinians, Pranzatelli said. Omar was born in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel; in 1975, he moved to the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident.

“If In Fact He Survives the Flight”

After his release last month, Omar attended his regular ICE check-in on the first Wednesday in June; his next check-in would be in December, he was told. But last Friday, he received a letter telling him to report to an ICE office on Monday morning, June 8.

After Omar received the letter, Mayeaux emailed the ICE office in Bossier City, Louisiana, where Omar lives, warning immigration officials that “any attempted removal of Mr. Omar in June would be in direct contempt of the Court Order,” according to a copy of the email included with the motion. “I am instructing my client not to report as requested.”

Related

ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa.

Instead, on Monday, ICE came to Omar’s home and arrested him again. Omar’s wife immediately called Mayeaux. Only hours later did ICE tell Omar’s family he was being taken nearly two hours away, to an ICE staging area for deportation flights, and would be put on a plane the next morning to Israel.

By early afternoon, Mayeux had filed the emergency motion. 

His client’s health, Mayeux wrote in the emergency motion, was his main concern. Omar is still recovering from his April heart attack and open-heart surgery. His wife told the arresting ICE officer that she was planning to take Omar to a cardiologist later that day, and that he could not move well. 

According to the filing, a doctor was prepared to testify that the roughly 14-hour flight without medical clearance raised serious concerns about Omar’s health, “if in fact he survives the flight.” 

“Heartless and Cruel”

Omar had been in the U.S. for half a century when ICE picked him up in Mississippi during a routine check-in last fall. There was no readily apparent cause: ICE had long known about two minor, nonviolent convictions, one in 2005 and one in 2022, but Omar had lived in the U.S. for years under ICE supervision and had complied with required immigration check-ins. 

“Incredibly, despite these undisputed facts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) considers Omar to be both a ‘flight risk’ and a ‘priority for removal,” said the May release order from Jackson, a federal judge in Baton Rouge. “Omar has been held in ICE detention since October 28, 2025 — 7 full months — with no end in sight.” 

Jackson ruled that ICE had to abide by its own regulations: If ICE were to deport him, the agency needed to give him advance notice, a reason, an opportunity for an orderly departure, and an informal interview to respond to ICE’s deportation efforts.

ICE did not serve Omar’s counsel with notice until he was already back in ICE custody. 

“The Notice also makes a mockery of the Court’s Order,” says Mayeaux’s June 8 emergency motion. “It was only after he was taken back into custody — in contravention of the Court’s Order — that he was informed of the existence of the travel document and of his imminent removal.” 

But even at that point, the motion alleged, ICE didn’t give Omar the chance to speak directly with counsel.

The court had also directed ICE to facilitate communication with Omar’s doctors and family “to ensure the most efficient and effective continuation of his required medical treatment upon his release.”

Related

Deportation, Inc.

ICE appears to have violated most of Jackson’s orders when its agents re-detained Omar. Even when ICE SUVs showed up at his door to bring him to the Bossier City field office, the agents continued to say that it was only a routine check-in. Not until less than 24 hours before the flight was scheduled to depart were family members told he was being deported.

Again, an order from Jackson mandated Omar’s immediate release. ICE agents returned him to his home around 7 p.m. Monday evening — leaving his family relieved, but shaken.

“They’re all completely traumatized,” Mayeaux said of his client’s family.

While ICE’s letter last week had made him suspicious, he said, “I couldn’t believe they would be so heartless and cruel as to do this to a 77-year-old man who’s ill. I just didn’t.”

The post ICE Defied Direct Order From Federal Judge and Re-Detained Elderly Palestinian appeared first on The Intercept.

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has finalized a deal with Albanian officials to allow construction on Sazan Island in the Adriatic Sea. The $1.6bn project is expected to build luxury tourism real estate on the pristine island and surrounding waters and wetlands. Spurned by the potential environmental impact of the plan and the possibility of corrupt dealings, demonstrators have taken to the streets of Albania's capital city demanding an end to the project. Cate Brown, the Guardian's political enterprise reporter, examines what the Kushner real estate deal on Sazan Island can teach us on how Donald Trump’s son-in-law pursues real estate ventures and examines why Albania isn't alone in its fight

• Protests in Albania grow over Jared Kushner-backed luxury resort

• Sold to the Trump family: one of the last undeveloped islands in the Mediterranean

Environmental groups say exchange between US government and SpaceX would worsen ecological risks

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

Environmental groups on Wednesday sued in an attempt to stop the Trump administration from giving SpaceX more than 700 acres (280 hectares) of wildlife refuge in Texas, claiming it would worsen ecological risks to a Gulf coast region already transformed by billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket operations.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service this month approved moving forward with the deal with SpaceX, which would surrender 683 acres (276 hectares) the company owns in exchange for federal land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley national wildlife refuge. The 103,000-acre (41,700-hectare) refuge spans four counties along the Texas border and is home to animal habitats and historical landmarks.

Visa is integrating its payment network with ChatGPT so AI agents can shop and complete purchases on users' behalf. "It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user's behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa," reports the Associated Press. "The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants." From the report: OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco Wednesday, Forestell gave an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they're looking for a pair of wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the customer. Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay. [...] Visa says the feature will have guardrails like spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

National Science-at-Scale Collaborative will connect industry, the Department of Energy and national laboratories to accelerate manufacturing innovation

June 10, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has launched a new effort to help American companies develop and scale new products and manufacturing technologies more quickly.

Pilot-scale manufacturing equipment at Argonne’s Materials Engineering Research Facility. Image credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

Called the ​“National Science-at-Scale Collaborative,” the effort is supported by DOE’s Office of Critical Materials and Energy Innovation (CMEI). The collaborative brings together industry, government and the national laboratories to address complex challenges in critical materials and chemical manufacturing in the United States.

Argonne will work with industry partners on projects designed to move promising technologies from research to commercial production faster. Researchers will use advanced computer modeling, artificial intelligence, rapid synthesis tools and pilot-scale manufacturing systems at Argonne’s Materials Engineering Research Facility to help companies test and scale new production processes.

“American manufacturing has an opportunity to lead the next generation of innovation in critical materials and chemical processing,” said Paul Kearns, director of Argonne. ​“The National Science-at-Scale Collaborative will help connect discovery, engineering and deployment in ways that strengthen U.S. competitiveness and advance our economic security.”

The announcement followed an industry roundtable chaired by CMEI. Leaders from the chemical and critical materials sectors met to discuss manufacturing challenges and opportunities for collaboration.

“To compete globally, the U.S. must bring new technologies into domestic production more quickly,” said Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson. ​“This collaborative will help connect DOE, the national laboratories and private industry to speed up that process.”

The collaborative supports CMEI’s broader mission to strengthen America’s critical minerals supply chains and accelerate next-generation energy technologies.

Industry roundtable participants list:

• DOE: Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Office.
• National Laboratory System: Argonne National Laboratory.
• Manufacturers: Aclara, Albemarle, ATALCO, BASF North America, Chemours, Dow, Entegris, Exxon Mobil, Orbia and Standard Lithium.

About Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Source: ANL

The post Argonne and DOE Launch New Partnership to Speed Up US Manufacturing Innovation appeared first on HPCwire.

In a 6-1 ruling, the court determined the First District Court of Appeal should consider the merits of the case before it weighs in on the matter.

Microsoft co-founder appears in closed-door session as part of lawmakers’ investigation into convicted sex offender

Bill Gates testified in front of the House committee on oversight and reform on Wednesday, and told lawmakers in his opening remarks that he “never witnessed nor had any indication” that Jeffrey Epstein was “engaged in ongoing criminal conduct”.

“I am here to answer your questions about my interactions with Jeffrey Epstein and to help contribute to the committee’s important work,” Gates said in his opening statement, seen by the Guardian. “I support the release of all the Epstein files and sincerely hope that, through your efforts and those of others advocating on their behalf, the survivors of Epstein’s crimes can get the justice that they deserve.”

The hit summer reality show is off on Wednesdays.

The Fifa president’s monologue before the 2022 World Cup attained legendary status for all the wrong reasons. He was in familiar form four years on

Gianni Infantino’s speech on the eve of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar is the stuff of legend. You know the one – the rambling, hour-long monologue where he told us all how he felt. He felt gay that day. He also felt disabled, Qatari, Arab, African and like a migrant worker. In doing so, the Fifa president engraved himself permanently into meme culture, and his remarks remain a popular source of online amusement to this day.

On Wednesday, amid a gaggle of reporters and photographers, Infantino once again took to the stage. He sat in a tent in the shadow of the Estadio Azteca – it has been renamed Estadio Ciudad de México for the World Cup – a place many see as the western hemisphere’s cathedral of football. On Thursday, Mexico will host South Africa in the opening match of the 2026 World Cup.

• Quarterback has two years added to his deal

• Contract will last until Mahomes is 38

The Kansas City Chiefs and their starting quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, have agreed to a restructured contract that adds two years to his deal and pushes his total compensation past a half-billion dollars, according to sources.

Mahomes signed a 10-year, $450m contract in 2020 that set a benchmark not only for the quarterback position but for any NFL player. The latest extension ties the two-time MVP to the Chiefs through the 2033 season, when Mahomes will be 38, and it comes in at $504.75m, with incentives and escalators that could push the value beyond $520m.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, often touts bipartisanship and moderation. The word "bipartisan" appears 2,635 times on her official website. But her Democratic rival, Graham Platner, said she is a rubber stamp for the Republican president.

"If you are an independent voice, why do you vote with Donald Trump 95% of the time?" Platner said, addressing Collins during his June 9 Senate primary victory speech. 

That number matches a respected analysis of senators’ votes in 2025, although Collins sided with Trump at a slightly lower rate during his first term. However, a percentage in isolation disregards that Collins has opposed Trump on some key issues.

Collins largely aligned with Trump’s position in 2025

Collins' 2025 votes supported Trump’s position 94.6% of the time. Among Republicans, only Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska supported Trump less frequently than Collins. Republican senators supported Trump at record levels; most Republicans voted 100% with Trump. 

The percentage comes from CQ Roll Call, a nonpartisan source that has examined congressional votes and presidential support since 1953.

Members’ scores reflect how often they vote in agreement with the president’s position. The analyzed votes are a fraction of all votes that Congress takes.

During Trump's first term, Collins sided with Trump about 90% of the time.

Not all votes are equal  

Congressional experts said the percentage doesn’t tell the full story about a lawmaker’s record.

Mark D. Brewer, a University of Maine political science professor, said the CQ metrics are legitimate measures and useful to voters, but they have two drawbacks. 

"First, they do not register if a member fails to vote on a bill (obviously not a problem for Collins)," Brewer wrote in an email to PolitiFact, a nod to the senator reaching her historic 10,000th vote without missing a roll call vote. "Second, and more important, they treat all measures that the president has taken a position on the same. Obviously some bills matter more to a president than do others, but that is not accounted for here."

Collins has taken some high-profile votes against Trump. In 2026, she sided with Democrats to block a nearly $1.8 billion weaponization fund for Trump allies. In April, she voted in support of a resolution directing the removal of U.S. armed forces from hostilities against Iran.

In 2025, Collins was one of three Republican senators who voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Collins said she supported extending tax relief for families and small businesses, but primarily opposed the legislation because of "the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid, affecting low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes."

Weeks later, Trump said on Truth Social: "Republicans, when in doubt, vote the exact opposite of Senator Susan Collins. Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong."

She opposed Trump during his first term on some major votes. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Collins voted to convict Trump on an impeachment charge. She said his actions interfered with the peaceful transition of power and were an abuse of power.

As Senate Appropriations Committee chair, Collins has the power to shape federal spending. During Trump’s current term, Collins opposed $1 billion in White House ballroom funding and objected to the administration's proposed cuts for biomedical research.

Bipartisan analysis is another way to measure her record

Another useful metric is the Bipartisan Index Rankings, a partnership of the Lugar Center and Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. The index measures the frequency with which a lawmaker co-sponsors bills offered by the other party and how often they attract or recruit co-sponsors from the other party for their own bills. The more often lawmakers collaborate with members of the other party on bills, the higher their score.

Over the last 13 years, Collins has ranked first on the index among Republicans.

These analyses don’t capture other ways senators can influence outcomes on measures that never reach a vote.

In 2025, the White House withdrew its nomination of Dave Weldon as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hours before his Senate hearing. In a statement to The New York Times, Weldon, a former Florida congressman, blamed Collins and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.

Collins said she "had some reservations, but I certainly had not reached a final judgment." 

Our ruling

Platner said Collins votes with Trump "95% of the time."

That was a reference to CQ’s analysis of her votes in 2025. During Trump’s first term, she sided with Trump on about 90% of votes.

Focusing on this percentage alone omits that Collins has opposed Trump on some key measures. 

We rate this statement Mostly True.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks in the 2026 midterms

Shasta county passes measure requiring elections to be held in person on one day and limiting absentee ballots

Northern California’s Shasta county, best known for its radical conservative politics and thriving election-skeptic movement, appears on track for another clash with the state over a newly approved ballot measure that would transform local elections.

In last Tuesday’s election, the majority of voters in the rural county backed Measure B, which requires elections to be held in person on a single day and limits who can cast an absentee ballot – effectively putting an end to vote by mail – while also requiring photo ID and a hand count.

CNET experts have tested dozens of standing desks and have landed on these as the best choices of 2026.

Trial of former New York City comptroller is ‘another example of the Trump administration’s suppression of political dissent’, lawyer argues

The trial against senior New York City Democrat Brad Lander, stemming from his arrest during an attempt to inspect rooms holding detained immigrants, involved six hours of litigating elevator logistics in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday.

Lander, the former city comptroller now vying for Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman’s congressional district, which encompasses lower Manhattan and north-west Brooklyn, was taken into custody on 18 September last year at 26 Federal Plaza.

These desks are the best ones CNET experts have tested.

EMILY BRADY
Opinion Columnist

I love reality television. Maybe that’s a hot take for some people. I know there are many people out there who are against it, calling it “trashy” reality and denying that it’s even real at all. Although that could very well be true, it doesn’t take away from how entertaining it is. I think it’s especially nice when we, as an audience, get to have a say. We almost feel like we’re a part of the show.

Take “Dancing with the Stars,” for example. Just as much as the judges have their say, we get to be judges too! “Dancing with the Stars” is a reality competition show where celebrities are paired with professional dancers to perform routines and compete for judges’ scores and audience votes. Every week, we get the chance to text the name of the person we are voting for to the number 21523, and you can do it up to 10 times. The fans basically get to decide who wins the entire thing.

The same goes for “Love Island,” where we get to vote in real time, with new episodes almost every single day. It’s a show where single contestants live together in a villa, form romantic couples and compete in challenges to win a cash prize. I’ve been a huge fan since the United States version started in 2019. 

Then I discovered the UK version, which is amazing as well. It’s not only about them finding love — how likable they are to the audience plays a big part, too, and America’s votes usually make the drama 10 times better. Did you see that time America voted for Iris to go on the date with Jeremiah when he was coupled up with Huda? That was crazy. America really did its big one, and that made for some great television. 

Some shows where we don’t get a say, like “The Bachelor,” are pre-filmed. “The Bachelor” is a show where one man dates multiple women at the same time, and chooses one at the end who he’s supposed to propose to. But we still get to tune in weekly, all at the same time. 

There’s something kind of cool about knowing that while you’re watching, thousands of other people around the world are reacting to the same moments, too. I have been a fan of “The Bachelor” franchise for a while, but I remember specifically when Joey’s season blew up. Everyone got together with their friends each week to tune in for the new episode. That made for a huge bonding experience with my friends freshman year.

The fascinating part about these shows is that they’re filled with real people who live real lives. As parasocial as it may sound, you really start to feel like you know the people on these shows. You start rooting for your favorites, and you feel for them almost like they’re your personal friends.

I think that’s what makes these shows so addictive. It’s easy to find them on social media and continue to follow their lives if you want to. It’s important not to get overly invested, though, because that could end up being unhealthy. You can get emotionally attached and forget that you don’t actually know these people. 

Sometimes the drama is just so good that fiction can’t even replicate it. Another favorite of mine — and a fan favorite — is “Dance Moms.” It’s a show that follows young dancers and their mothers as they train and compete under the very strict dance teacher, Abby Lee Miller. The moms are just so hilarious. 

Even though that show ended a few years back, it never gets old and continues to bring in new fans. The reruns are the best, and it’s so easy to find some of the best clips on YouTube. “Dance Moms Best Moments” are great. It features clips of the show’s funniest and most out-of-pocket moments. 

Some shows have such interesting concepts that it’s impossible not to tune in. “Love Is Blind” is an interesting show where singles form relationships and even get engaged without seeing what their partner looks like. The fact that they get engaged to someone they’ve never seen before? Crazy. I’m obsessed.

Even if reality TV is not your cup of tea, there’s no denying that it’s one of the most entertaining forms of television. Give the first episode of “Love Island USA” season six a chance and get back to me — I swear you’ll be hooked!

Emily Brady is an opinion columnist at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at emilyhb@udel.edu. 

Valve is discontinuing physical Steam Gift Cards and says it will stop restocking them as retailers sell through remaining inventory. In a blog post, the company blamed persistent gift card scams as the reason, though Steam Digital Gift Cards will remain available and existing physical cards can still be redeemed. PC Guide reports: Valve says it has "responded to gift card scams over the years" -- but this doesn't stop scammers from adapting. The Steam creator has actively worked with retailers and law enforcement, among other precautions, to counteract scams, but says the issue can never be fully resolved. Steam Digital Gift Cards will continue to operate as normal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Cooper Lutkenhaus, 17, wins 800m by 0.01sec

• Gout Gout sixth; Tebogo says: ‘He has a long way to go’

There are few venues more deeply embedded into track and field’s soul than the Bislett Stadion. An extraordinary 70 world records have been set here. Plenty of reputations have been made. Plenty more left frayed, too.

And so it proved again as the brilliant 17-year-old American Cooper Lutkenhaus added to his staggering résumé by taking down the Olympic 800m champion, Emmanuel ­Wanyonyi, with a race for the ages in Oslo. But another, the Australian star Gout Gout, learned what it is like in the big leagues.

After a months-long carriage dispute was resolved, missing channels like Telemundo will be restored.

Federal prosecutors unsealed indictment against activists trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment on Wednesday against eight pro-Palestinian activists who are accused of conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials while trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel.

The indictment also describes vandalism against some companies that operate in Michigan and against the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

Bill Gates told members of Congress on Wednesday that Jeffrey Epstein put his philanthropic work at risk, and that meeting him represented "a grave error in judgment."

President Trump said the U.S. has taken out "millions" of barrels of Iranian oil in the dead of night, and said inflation will come down when the war ends.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. "We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time. Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes. The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period. The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta. The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say. [...] Comments that violated Meta's policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta's rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

June 10, 2026 — At Computex, Supermicro announced a new class of servers designed to meet the rapidly growing compute demands of the Agentic AI era. Powered by Arm’s recently introduced AGI CPU, these systems deliver industry-leading compute density and power efficiency for next-generation AI inference and agentic workloads.

Credit: Shutterstock

AI infrastructure is entering its inference era

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI infrastructure conversations have largely centered around GPUs. Datacenter expansion over the past several years has been driven by the race to deploy more accelerated compute for large-scale model training. However, the AI landscape is evolving quickly. Unlike first-generation AI deployments that focused primarily on model training, agentic AI workloads are persistent, distributed, and inference-driven. They require systems capable of handling orchestration, retrieval, reasoning, and real-time decision making at scale.

This shift is driving a new wave of infrastructure requirements where efficient CPU compute plays a foundational role in maximizing overall AI system performance. As workloads shift from training to inference — and increasingly toward autonomous, multi-step agentic AI systems — CPUs are becoming a critical component of modern AI infrastructure.

Agentic AI introduces a fundamentally different compute profile. Unlike traditional chatbot-style interactions, agentic systems continuously orchestrate reasoning, memory access, retrieval, planning, and communication across multiple services and models. These workflows generate massive demand for highly efficient general-purpose compute, memory bandwidth, and I/O scalability alongside GPU acceleration.

To address this shift, Arm introduced the AGI CPU in March 2026. Built with up to 136 Arm Neoverse V3 cores, 12 DDR5 memory channels at up to 8800 MT/s, and PCIe Gen6 connectivity within a 300W power envelope, the AGI CPU is designed to deliver exceptional compute density and energy efficiency for AI-first data centers. Arm AGI CPU with leading performance per core combined with high core density, high memory bandwidth per core and industry leading power efficiency enables up to 2x higher performance per rack to comparable x86-based solutions, according to Arm estimates.

Purpose-built infrastructure for next-generation AI workloads

Supermicro’s new server and rack-scale portfolio brings the AGI CPU capabilities to market across cloud, enterprise, and edge deployments.

For hyperscale and neocloud AI infrastructure, Supermicro unveiled the liquid-cooled Open Rack Wide (ORW) platform, the ARS-142TP-QNR-LCC. A fully populated ORW rack can support up to 336 AGI CPUs, enabling massive compute density for cloud-scale agentic AI and inference workloads.

For customers adopting Open Rack V3 (ORV3) environments, Supermicro also introduced the liquid-cooled 2U4N ORV3 ARS-242TP-QNR-LCC server, enabling up to 168 AGI CPUs per rack while maintaining deployment flexibility for modern datacenters. Both the ORW and ORV3 systems are targeted for sampling in Q1 2027, with production availability in Q2 2027.

Supermicro is also extending AGI CPU support into air-cooled environments. For edge deployments with constrained power and space requirements, the single-socket ARS-212HE-FNR short depth server provides an optimized platform for distributed AI inference and edge computing applications. The system is targeted to sample in Q4 2026 and reach production in Q1 2027.

For general-purpose compute workloads, the dual-socket 2U ARS-222H-NR server supports up to 8 NVMe drives and additional accelerator expansion in a standard 19-inch form factor. These servers are ideally suited for a wide variety of datacenter workloads such as web & application serving, databases & Analytics, virtualization & cloud infrastructure, and media & content processing applications.

Meanwhile, the 5U ARS-522GP-NR platform targets high-performance AI inference deployments with support for up to eight accelerator cards alongside dual AGI CPUs and high-density NVMe storage. These platforms are targeted to sample during Q3 ’26 and released to production in Q1 ’27.

Together, these platforms highlight an important industry transition: the future of AI infrastructure will not be defined by GPU performance alone. As agentic AI scales across enterprises and cloud providers, balanced architectures that combine high-performance CPUs, accelerators, memory bandwidth, and efficient system design will become essential.

At the same time, power efficiency and datacenter scalability are becoming increasingly critical. As enterprises look to deploy AI broadly across cloud, enterprise, and edge environments, infrastructure must deliver higher compute density without unsustainable increases in power and cooling requirements. This is where platforms built around the AGI CPU can provide a significant advantage by enabling scalable AI compute with improved performance-per-watt.

With this portfolio based on the AGI CPU, Supermicro is helping customers build AI infrastructure optimized for the realities of agentic computing — from hyperscale inference clusters to enterprise and edge deployments. As the industry moves toward AI systems that can autonomously reason, collaborate, and act, the combination of efficient CPU compute and accelerated AI infrastructure will form the backbone of the next generation of datacenters.

Source: Dilip Ramachandran, Arm

The post Supermicro and Arm Advance Compute for the Agentic AI Era appeared first on HPCwire.

For years, centrist Democrats like Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia dismissed claims that a key National Security Agency surveillance program could be abused to spy on Americans.

Then President Donald Trump tapped Bill Pulte — an unqualified housing official accused of misusing sensitive databases to pursue the president’s political vendettas — to oversee the nation’s spy agencies. That got the centrist Democrats’ attention.

Warner, who serves as ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, voted with every Senate Democrat except for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman last week against advancing the renewal of the NSA program authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

In the face of pushback from Democrats and some Republicans, Trump declined to back down on his choice. Instead, he said Tuesday that he was moving up the effective date of Pulte’s appointment to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to June 19.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a longtime critic of Section 702, said that there’s unprecedented support for reforming the law.

“I have been doing this a while,” Wyden, who is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “I am the longest serving member of SSCI in history, and I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.”

That doesn’t, however, mean that reform efforts hinge on Pulte’s political fate. Though the announcement narrowed the odds that the spying program will be renewed before it expires Friday, the fracas over Pulte has revealed a deep divide among Democrats that could keep the issue alive.

Centrists such as Warner would still vote to renew Section 702 if Pulte is sacked. Other Democrats, like Wyden, say that Pulte’s selection only exacerbated long-standing issues such as the lack of a warrant requirement for searching through the NSA’s data.

“Firing Pulte doesn’t fix the problem,” Wyden told reporters on Tuesday. “There have to be reforms.”

Section 702 has been the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes squabble since Congress passed a short-term, 45-day extension of the program in April.

Related

Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law

The law allows the FBI and other agencies, including ODNI, to pore through Americans’ communications collected abroad without a warrant. Ostensibly, there are safeguards in place to prevent those agencies from targeting specific Americans — but courts have repeatedly found widespread violations of those rules.

For years, civil liberties advocates have sought to create a warrant requirement that would require the FBI and other agencies to go to a judge to read through Americans’ communications.

That idea has proven a nonstarter for defenders of Section 702 such as Warner, who argue that it would create insurmountable logistical obstacles for agents hoping to prevent terror attacks. Warner has long allied with Republicans to push back on the warrant proposal.

Compromise Flop

Since April, a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties supporters in Congress has managed to block a long-term reauthorization of Section 702. In recent weeks, Warner helped craft what was billed as a compromise proposal intended to win over enough of the critics to allow the passage of a long-term renewal of the law.

Then, Trump said on June 3 that he would appoint Pulte to serve as temporary director of national intelligence, to replace departing chief Tulsi Gabbard.

The announcement immediately soured centrist Democrats’ plans to help secure passage of a FISA extension. Pulte, whose net worth is at least $190 million, is a private equity firm founder who became a minor internet celebrity for giving away money on Twitter. Then Trump appointed him last year to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In those roles, Pulte helped launch housing fraud probes of Trump nemeses including Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. He is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office for allegedly misusing confidential government databases for information on the president’s foes.

“There were already sensitive negotiations that were ongoing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday. “And then Donald Trump chose to elevate this partisan political hack, Bill Pulte, into this position of great sensitivity, effectively tossing a hand grenade in the midst of these negotiations as we approach the deadline to potentially renew surveillance authority.”

The compromise deal floated by Warner and others had never impressed privacy advocates. They said the changes it made to the law mostly layered on more layers of internal oversight, which would not stop a determined Trump flunky from abusing the NSA’s spying powers.

Even calling it a “deal” was misleading, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit working on law and policy.

“The members who drafted this legislation, basically Trump allies plus Sen. Warner — all longtime opponents of 702 reform who are in complete alignment with each other on the fundamental points of debate — they were the members who drafted the legislation,” she said on a conference call Tuesday. “Members who support reform were shut out.”

Push and Pulte

While Warner and other Democratic supporters of the program voted against putting its renewal on the Senate agenda last week, that boiled down to a repudiation of Pulte instead of a sudden change of heart on the program.

“Pulte is the major stumbling block for people like myself and Mark Warner, who are generally supportive because of the importance of the program,” Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “But we can’t in good conscience hand the keys to the country’s most significant car to a teenager.”

In the Republican caucus, a faction of members with libertarian tendencies support adding a warrant requirement. Some longtime supporters of the program, on the other hand, have dismissed the significance of Pulte’s appointment.

“He’s an interim guy, he’ll be there for weeks to a couple months, so I don’t understand why it’s a big issue anyway,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who serves on the Intelligence Committee.

Privacy advocates are largely aghast at the appointment of Pulte, but they hope the expiration of Section 702 will create space for reform. They were heartened on Tuesday when Jeffries gave some of his strongest statements yet in support of overhauling the law.

Related

Democrats Might Save Mike Johnson’s Push to Give Trump Domestic Spying Power

“Donald Trump needs to withdraw his decision to elevate Bill Pulte,” Jeffries said on PBS. “That’s a starting point, not an ending point. And then we can see if we can responsibly get to a place where there are enough reforms built into the law to provide guardrails and protect the American people.”

Reformers have a smorgasbord of reform proposals. Wyden wants to create a warrant requirement not only for searches of NSA data, but also one for searches of sensitive information available on the open market, such as location tracking from commercial data brokers.

Wyden said he senses a rare opportunity, pointing to support from Republicans such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and said, “Both of us have bipartisan bills with almost all of the provisions we’re talking about.”

The post Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

Any official reprimand will come from regulator Ofcom, but not for at least two months

• UK politics live – latest updates

Elon Musk’s X will face no action to remove a mass of posts inciting violence in Northern Ireland for at least two months, despite widespread condemnation of the platform and its billionaire owner.

Concern over the role social media played in spreading disturbing images and fuelling anger continued to grow on Wednesday as police and community leaders urged calm.

Misty Roberts, 44, who faced up to 17 years in prison, convicted of two felonies including statutory rape

Misty Roberts, a former mayor in Louisiana, has been sentenced to 90 days for raping a 16-year-old boy.

On Tuesday, 44-year-old Roberts was sentenced following her conviction earlier this year of two felonies including carnal knowledge of a juvenile – or statutory rape – and indecent behavior with a juvenile.

The vice president said President Trump "has been very clear about what is in our best interest" as the relationship with Israel is tested over the Iran war.

June 10, 2026 — Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) hosted an innovative workshop series to make high performance computing (HPC) education more accessible for practitioners with disabilities and the broader research community.

NCSA’s Delta

Led by Omar Khan, a graduate research assistant at NCSA, and JooYoung Seo, an assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NCSA faculty affiliate, the workshop emerged from a recognized gap in accessible educational resources for HPC systems. While prior efforts have explored how learners conceptualize HPC environments, there has been limited work examining how to make HPC education accessible.

Khan and Seo sought to learn how disabled researchers work with HPC systems and expand access to research computing through education and support.

“As researchers with disabilities ourselves who regularly use HPC resources, we wanted to understand how other practitioners leverage these resources – if at all – and what we can offer in education and support to ensure open access,” Khan said. “These are systems that hold tremendous power in expediting large-scale task completion across multi-disciplinary domains, and therefore, multi-disciplinary researchers. To that end, we felt that such resources should not be limited to those with certain abilities or ability levels.”

The workshops emphasize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to working with HPC systems. Khan and Seo included different teaching practices in the workshops, including reading terminal commands character by character to reflect the actual interaction flow of screen-reader users with HPC systems, and emphasizing multimodal interaction with the terminal and text editor to prompt ideas for a personalized user experience.

“It’s a curriculum built by, with, and for practitioners with disabilities and beyond, demonstrating that learning HPC concepts, like any other computing concept, can and should be taught in a multitude of ways to support learners with different abilities,” Khan said.

Sponsored by the NCSA Delta project – a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded resource charged with making computing more accessible – the workshop series was also created to raise broader awareness of the different educational opportunities for HPC systems. A variety of perspectives can strengthen collaboration and boost innovation, especially within NCSA’s multidisciplinary initiatives, because researchers can bring unique approaches to the work.

By understanding how researchers and practitioners with different abilities interact with HPC systems, the broader HPC community can develop more sophisticated and open strategies for improving accessibility across the field.

“Each of us brings our own unique backgrounds to any project we work on, and recognizing this variety of perspectives is critical to the most impactful collaboration,” Khan said.

The workshop series received a positive response from its audience and will have a significant impact on the future of accessible research computing.

“We’ve received a positive reception to our workshop series with both disabled and non-disabled learners being excited to have accessible learning materials and to learn how each group can communicate their understanding more effectively with the other,” Khan said. “We are especially thankful for our participants’ feedback as we look to improve this workshop series for future offerings.”

The workshop recordings are available to the public. Watch here.

Source: Andrew Helregel, NCSA

The post NCSA’s Delta Brings Accessibility to HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

On a related note, what about a raycasting first-person shooter written in… COBOL?

Can you think of a better programming language than COBOL to implement an FPS from scratch? I know I can’t, so buckle up and enjoy what can only be described as an out-of-body experience for COBOL enthusiasts as I set out to make a Wolfenstein3D-like raycasting based FPS game (and potentially go a bit further than that, hopefully it’s not a DOOMed attempt).

↫ icitry on YouTube

I don’t link to YouTube videos very often, but there’s always the exception that proves the rule. The COBOL code’s available on GitHub.

What a mad man.

Splashy initial public offerings often skyrocket early on, only to return to earth with a thud, Wall Street analysts say.

Easily split bills and create digital passes from physical cards with the latest Wallet updates.

Reform UK leader has been unusually quiet in recent weeks – at great cost to the party during a crucial byelection

Fake images of Nigel Farage have been ubiquitous online lately – but the real politician has proved far more elusive since it was revealed seven weeks ago that he took a £5m personal gift from a crypto billionaire.

And while an AI-generated depiction of the Reform UK leader was falsely shown getting violent on BBC’s Question Time, Farage has been largely avoiding the TV studios where he might face questions over the cash.

Chemical tank overheated in May and forced evacuation of 50,000 nearby residents due to danger of explosion

The FBI is searching a southern California aerospace facility where an overheated chemical tank forced 50,000 residents to evacuate last month, after federal authorities served a search warrant there on Wednesday.

Signed by a federal judge last week, the warrant approved the seizure of records related to the “storage, use or disposal” of methyl methacrylate, the chemical stored inside the tank that authorities feared could explode.

My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.

↫ Marko Stanic

It looks amazing already, and it isn’t even done. Stanic goes into great detail explaining how he created the various assets for the game, and it’s a joy to read through his creative process and problem-solving routines. The game’s called Catlantean 3D, and is expected to ship somewhere early 2027.

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

Microsoft has detailed that Windows 11 is going to switch away from dedicated printer drivers to its Windows Ready Print system. This should make it a lot easier and less cumbersome to get printers running on Windows 11.

At the core of Windows Ready Print is a transition away from legacy, third party drive-based workflows toward modern, standards-based printing with IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) using the Windows inbox IPP printer driver. 

Starting in July 2026, new printer installations will default to Windows Ready Print where supported, enabling a simpler and more reliable setup experience. This change reduces the need for traditional driver management and lays the foundation for a more scalable and predictable print experience.

↫ elliesekine at the Windows Tech Community

Printers still play a huge role in our lives – whether we like it or not – and their terrible user experience is basically a meme a this point. Making at least one aspect of printing easier, less cumbersome, and more streamlined is incredibly welcome, and I’m glad Microsoft is taking the Windows printing ecosystem along for the ride on this one.

My own personal experience with printing on Linux and now on Windows 11 (as promised, I’ve been using nothing but Windows 11 since 26 May!) has been mostly effortless already. Our cheap networked printer/scanner/combo thing from HP “just works” on both Linux and Windows 11, since Windows downloads HP’s drivers and application automatically when detecting the printer on the network. Still, not having to use HP’s driver would be a nice bonus.

Coincidentally, I also managed to get the printer component of our HP combo thing working on… HP-UX 11i v1. Despite being more than two decades newer, our HP printer works perfectly with a printer definition file included in HP-UX, giving me full printing from CDE and the rest of HP-UX. It’s entirely useless and cost me an evening of my life, but seeing the test page and other documents from HP-UX come out of our printer, over the network, put a big smile on my face.

Pinterest is tying Amazon storefronts to its app, making it easier for creators to earn from product recommendations.

NASA's Jared Isaacman says the crew was selected solely based on their experience, expertise and availability for flight assignment.

Inflation just rose to its highest level since 2023. Here are three CD account moves savers should make in response.

President Trump has offered timelines of days and weeks for the Iran war, but a solution remains elusive.

The men’s head coach discusses his ‘American dream’ at the World Cup and tempering the host nation’s ‘arrogant’ expectations

This American dream begins in small-town Murphy, Santa Fe. That’s Santa Fe, Argentina, at a little club where the old folk played bochas, a kind of boules, and they had one of the few colour television sets. It was 1978, Mauricio Pochettino was six years old and he can see it perfectly, still feel the meaning of it all.

“I lived in a prefab with my grandmother and my older brother because my parents were off working the land, then at the weekend we would go to the club,” he says. “There were three courts and I remember standing there, hanging on to my dad’s pocket, watching the World Cup. The ticker-tape at River [Plate], that image engraved. Passarella, Ardiles, Luque, Bertoni, Kempes, Fillol, Tarantini … my heroes.”

The researchers saw many strange animals — many believed to be new to science — living off the whale carcasses.

BYD plans to install 3,000 ultra-fast "Flash Chargers" across Europe by the end of 2027, with the first stations already appearing in Germany and the UK. The Verge reports: At an estimated cost of 580,000 euros (about $670,000) per charger according to the Financial Times, that would mean a total spend of roughly $2 billion to install the network. The 1,500kW charging stations are significantly more powerful than Tesla's 500kW V4 Superchargers, though Tesla already has 20,000 chargers installed in Europe. BYD, which has been steadily overtaking Tesla in global sales, says its chargers shouldn't add undue strain to the energy grid, as they'll charge cars from batteries which can be topped up overnight. Any car with a standard CCS charge port can use the Flash Chargers, though only BYD cars equipped with the company's new Blade Battery can hit the top speeds. Right now there's only one of those in Europe, the 115,000 euros ($133,000) Denza Z9 GT -- it charges to 70 percent in five minutes on the new chargers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever wanted to attend a Pokémon Go event? Here's what the whole crazy, colorful, collector experience is like.

Logitech has launched an $80 ultracompact folding mouse. Its design is great, but its ergonomics leave a little to be desired. Still, it's a rather nifty travel mouse.

ICE has extended training for new officers and mandated additional instruction for those onboarded under a shortened process that has now been scrapped.

As completion of 144-year basilica nears, questions swirl over resemblance of church to architect’s original plans

It has been a long wait but 144 years after work began, Pope Leo XIV has blessed the recently completed central tower of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church in the presence of members of the Spanish royal family, the prime minister and hundreds of bishops.

With the completion of the Jesus Christ tower, the tallest of 18 in the temple, the basilica has reached its full height of 172.5 metres. It is now not only the world’s tallest church but Barcelona’s tallest building. It was consecrated in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.

Prime minister is ‘hellbent’ on fighting any contest, even if his future may be out of his hands, sources say

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer’s closest aides are “war-gaming” how to win a leadership contest ahead of Andy Burnham’s much-anticipated return to Westminster if he wins the Makerfield byelection, the Guardian understands.

Downing Street sources said the prime minister had taken the last fortnight to think seriously about his future but was now “hellbent” on fighting any contest. His team is working through various scenarios, including sacking ministers who publicly support Burnham.

Lawmakers warn appointment of presidential loyalist will scuttle bipartisan agreement to renew Fisa surveillance law

Donald Trump stood firm on his decision to install the controversial loyalist Bill Pulte as the country’s top intelligence official, demanding Congress pass a short-term extension of a surveillance law set to expire amid intense criticism of the appointment.

Pulte has been asked “to execute the immediate and needed downsizing” of the office of the director of national intelligence, the US president declared on Wednesday, after lining him up to serve as acting director on a temporary basis.

Don't miss out on big discounts and record low prices on tech, smart home gear, kitchen gadgets and more with this week's best deals.

NHS bosses urge all hospitals in England to use ‘digital triage’ process to combat overcrowding in emergency services

Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service’s usual winter crisis.

Eighteen hospitals in England are already using “digital triage assessment” to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away or be dealt with in another way. If patients do need urgent care they are treated at once in the usual way. But if they have more minor ailments and can wait, they are told to come back later that day or the next day, or are referred to a community-based service, such as a GP or pharmacy.

• Richards back in full training before first match

• Center-back feared worst after Palace ankle injury

• US face Paraguay in high-pressure Group D start

If it was up to Chris Richards, he’d be in the lineup when the United States opens Group D action against Paraguay.

The center-back is among the most important players on the squad, the clear lead defender among a deep corps of options. When he exited Crystal Palace’s second-to-last Premier League fixture with an ankle injury, anxiety spiked that Mauricio Pochettino’s side would enter the tournament without their bedrock. Richards was as tense as anybody, admitting his ankle was so swollen after the hit that he braced for the worst – again.

Awards for prose, children’s writing and poetry, for writers of colour in UK and Ireland, come with £1,000

Diana Evans has won this year’s Jhalak prose prize for I Want to Talk to You, a nonfiction collection on subjects ranging from Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison to lockdowns and the British monarchy.

The book, described as a “pleasure and an invigoration” by the Guardian’s reviewer Alex Clark, was announced as the 10th winner at a reception on Wednesday evening.

• Kirsty Coventry: IOC will have taskforce for any issues

• Referee Omar Artan refused entry by US officials

The International Olympic Committee insists it is “confident” that the LA Games in 2028 will not face the same immigration issues that have marred the buildup to the World Cup – including Africa’s top referee, Omar Artan, from Somalia being refused entry by US officials.

Despite Fifa’s close relationship with the Trump administration, it was also unable to stop Iran being moved from a training camp in Arizona to Mexico and some of its officials being denied entry visas.

DRESDEN, Germany and DELFT, Netherlands, June 10, 2026 — GlobalFoundries (GF) and Qualinx today announced the successful completion of the first fully European-based, end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing flow at GlobalFoundries’ Dresden fab on its FDX technology. The milestone demonstrates that security-critical chips for aerospace, defense and critical infrastructure can be designed, manufactured and delivered entirely within Europe.

In this partnership, Qualinx served as the launch customer with a sophisticated GNSS SoC design for secure Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) applications. The QLX3xx design targets sovereign GNSS-based PNT solutions for aerospace, defense and critical infrastructures—such as resilient timing and synchronization networks and highly integrated, ultra-low-power GNSS receivers at the connected edge.

GF and Qualinx Set a Benchmark for GF’s European Sovereign Manufacturing co-funded by the European Chips Act, GF’s Dresden fab is establishing its European sovereign manufacturing flow, consolidating every step of the production process — from design intake and mask services to wafer manufacturing — within the European Union. No sensitive design data or physical materials leave Europe, meeting the strict regulatory and security requirements of European governments, defense agencies, system integrators and critical infrastructure operators.

“We are demonstrating that Europe can rely on a secure, end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing flow that meets the highest requirements of aerospace and defense,” said Dr. Manfred Horstmann, Senior Vice President and General Manager at GlobalFoundries. “Our partnership with Qualinx marks the first operational milestone: it shows that complex, security-relevant ASIC designs for aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure can already be industrialized today using a fully European, trusted manufacturing path.”

“This first secure product demonstrates that a fully European manufacturing path – from mask services to wafer production – is already a reality today,” said Tom Trill, CEO of Qualinx. “Together with GlobalFoundries, we’ve optimized our Digital RF technology on GF’s FDX with a secure end-to-end flow, culminating in the launch of our ultra-low-power reconfigurable GNSS SoC and Analog Front End. This milestone underscores our ability to deliver trusted, energy-efficient solutions while maintaining full control over IP, data and the supply chain within Europe.”

Roadmap: Scaling European Sovereign Manufacturing

The tape‑out realized with Qualinx represents the first operational milestone on the path toward a fully automated trusted European flow, which GF aims to establish in Dresden by the end of 2026. Starting in 2027, aerospace and defense, as well as critical infrastructure customers, will be able to use this automated flow as part of regular foundry engagements, including the integration of European IP partners, mask houses and OSAT service providers to ensure a consistent, European-anchored value chain.

Already today, a number of European system and module manufacturers from aerospace and defense, as well as operators of critical infrastructure, are in discussions with GF to map upcoming product generations onto GF’s sovereign manufacturing flow. The successful start with Qualinx serves as a strong proof point and reduces both technical and regulatory risks for subsequent programs.

To further strengthen its European sovereign manufacturing flow, GF is also working with leading European connectivity and cloud providers to secure data flows across the entire semiconductor value chain. In a joint project with Deutsche Telekom, GF is assessing how production-related data from design and tape-out through manufacturing, test and quality can be processed, transported and stored entirely within Europe on European networks, cloud infrastructures and data centers. The resulting practices in secure data routing, encryption and access management for highly sensitive A&D and critical infrastructure workloads will feed directly into the scaling of GF’s European sovereign manufacturing model.

About GlobalFoundries

GlobalFoundries (GF) is a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, enabling AI at scale from the cloud to the physical world. Through deep partnerships with customers, GF delivers differentiated, power-efficient and high-performance solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, data centers, smart mobile devices, the Internet of Things and other high-growth markets. With global manufacturing operations across the U.S., Europe and Asia, GF is a trusted and holistic technology partner for customers around the world. GF’s talented, global team remains focused every day on security, longevity and sustainability. For more information, visit www.gf.com.

About Qualinx

Qualinx is a European deep-tech semiconductor company redefining ultra-low-power connectivity for the connected edge. Its proprietary Digital Radio Frequency technology implements traditional analog receive-chain functions in digital hardware building blocks, powering GNSS, PNT and PVT chipsets and modules that deliver secure, scalable and reconfigurable tracking solutions for wearables, consumer electronics, automotive, fleet, pet, and asset tracking applications.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, Qualinx delivers next-generation Digital RF semiconductors designed for real-world deployment and long device lifecycles. Follow Qualinx on LinkedIn or learn more at https://www.qualinx.io.

Source: GlobalFoundries

The post GlobalFoundries and Qualinx Demonstrate 1st European Sovereign Manufacturing Flow forSecurity‑Critical Semiconductors appeared first on HPCwire.

Robert Dillon was arrested at home in Florida despite living 300 miles away from where a crime was committed

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

A Florida man is suing several law enforcement agencies for his arrest and prosecution for allegedly luring a child after he was wrongly identified using faulty AI facial recognition software.

According to the Jacksonville Beach police department, an algorithm returned a 93% probability that Robert Dillon was the man caught on security cameras at a McDonald’s in the town attempting to persuade an unaccompanied girl, aged younger than 12, to leave with him.

Social Security disability benefits can provide crucial income support, but eligibility is notoriously strict.

The Asahi Linux team is warning Apple Silicon users not to upgrade to the macOS 27 beta because Apple's changes to the boot picker and Startup Disk app make Asahi partitions invisible, preventing Linux from booting. The Register reports: The team added: "If you insist on trying out macOS 27 as soon as possible, please ensure you install a secondary copy of macOS 26 first, or install macOS 27 itself on a secondary volume." They've also updated the installer to prevent installs from running on macOS 27 for now. For anyone who ignored all of the above, "we will not support users who have installed the macOS 27 beta without ensuring at least one stable version of macOS is installed." Considering macOS 27 is in beta, the issue may be accidental rather than an attempt by Apple to block Linux on its hardware. The Asahi team said it has filed bug report. The good news for anyone who pulled the trigger on installing the macOS 27 beta is that although the partition might not be visible, it hasn't gone anywhere. The Asahi team wrote: "If you have already upgraded to the beta and noticed that your Asahi partition has disappeared, do not stress. Your Asahi partition is still there, and you have not lost any data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Mboko forced to retire in singles match at Queen’s

• Duo are due to play next on Thursday evening

The future of Victoria Mboko’s doubles partnership with Serena Williams was plunged into doubt after the Canadian was forced to retire in her opening singles match at the HSBC Championships in London.

Williams, 44, made her comeback to tennis on Tuesday, securing a win alongside Mboko in their first doubles match. The duo beat Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe, and are scheduled to face Leylah Fernandez and Laura Siegemund on Thursday evening at Queen’s Club.

NEMA, ASHRAE and PNNL Join Forces To Establish an Authoritative Framework To Equip Data Center Project Developers and Facility Managers With Resources Needed To Advance Safe, Reliable, and Resilient Data Centers

ARLINGTON, Va., June 10, 2026 — The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), ASHRAE, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) today released their trilateral AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework, a comprehensive set of technical standards and industry best practices that will aid data center project developers and facility managers in the design, installation, and maintenance of critical energy infrastructure – including electrical, heating, and cooling equipment and integrated systems.

“Data centers are foundational to America’s growth, competitiveness, and national security objectives, providing essential capabilities to advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and critical infrastructure,” said NEMA President and CEO Debra Phillips. “As data centers grow in number, complexity, and scale, it’s imperative that they operate safely, reliably, and as efficiently as possible. The AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework that NEMA has developed with ASHRAE and PNNL is a new way of connecting standards, guidance, and deployment into one operating guide designed specifically for the data center environment.”

The AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework marks the culmination of years of close coordination between NEMA and ASHRAE – two leading standards development organizations – and PNNL, a federal authority in energy systems research. The joint Framework sets the standard for efficiency, resilience, and performance in data center design, construction, and operation, covering all aspects of energy sourcing, energy use, and water use in data center facilities.

At a time when the market is coalescing around the value of ‘speed to power’ and increasingly pursuing innovative pathways to project energization, the AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework connects standards, guidance, and deployment into one actionable operating framework– eliminating uncertainty at each stage of the development process.

The Framework outlines best practices and applicable standards for planning and siting, integrated design principles, energy and thermal efficiency, grid-interactive design, resilient design, commissioning and performance validation, operations and maintenance, and retrofit and modernization strategies for data center development professionals. The Framework features more than a dozen NEMA technical standards and guidance documents, including resources for energy storage systems, microgrids, fire and life safety equipment, insulating material, transformers, switchgear, uninterrupted power supply systems, wire and cable, electricity metering, and alternating current grounding and bonding systems.

“ASHRAE’s technical leadership in building systems and data center guidance is central to this effort at a pivotal moment for our industry,” said 2025-26 ASHRAE President Bill McQuade, P.E., CDP, Fellow ASHRAE, LEED AP. “As AI continues to drive rapid changes in load density, system design and operational expectations, this Framework brings together the collective expertise of ASHRAE, PNNL and NEMA to deliver practical, integrated solutions. It translates complex technical challenges into clear, actionable strategies that help operators enhance performance, control costs and make more effective use of energy, while strengthening reliability at both the facility and grid level.”

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

About NEMA

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) represents over 300 electrical equipment manufacturers that make safe, reliable, and efficient products and technologies that power, connect, and light our world. Together, our members contribute a full 1% of U.S. GDP and directly provide over 590,000 American jobs, adding more than $375 billion to the U.S. economy. Learn more at makeitelectric.org.

Source: NEMA

The post NEMA, ASHRAE and PNNL Release AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework appeared first on HPCwire.

Before the conflict began, inflation was at 2.4%, but the closure of the strait of Hormuz has affected energy prices

Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.

Speaking from the White House on Wednesday, the US president said that he was not concerned about inflation because of recent developments in the conflict.

Republican who chairs House panel says he based decision on testimony from Epstein’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff

Representative James Comer, the Republican who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, announced that he would be asking Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein’s former attorney, to appear before the panel as part of its investigation into the late sex offender.

“I am going to ask Alan Dershowitz to come in, we will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in,” Comer said on Wednesday morning, adding that the decision was based on the testimony of Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, who testified before the committee on Tuesday, as well as “a meeting that I had afterwards with several of the Epstein survivors”.

Rows over US visas and excessive ticket prices have overshadowed flawed tournament preparations. But fans will still hope for a gripping spectacle

One hundred and four matches involving 48 competing nations, to be played in 16 venues across a continent and four time zones: the sheer scale of the men’s World Cup in Canada, the United States and Mexico, which begins on Thursday and ends on 19 July, makes it easily the biggest and longest football tournament ever staged.

Whether it will ultimately be judged the greatest in sporting terms will depend on the 1,248 players competing in gruelling conditions, ranging from the heat of Houston to the high altitude of Guadalajara. But after a lead-up marred by hubristic hype, visa rows and the eye-watering cost of buying tickets for games, for many people it will be a relief when Mexico finally kick off against South Africa in the Estadio Azteca on Thursday evening.

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.

A growing number of Europeans see the U.S. as a rival or an adversary, especially in Denmark, France, Spain and Switzerland, according to the poll.

WWDC was all about Siri AI, but it certainly looks like a piece in the smart glasses puzzle. Vision Pro's new features are another big sign.

The U.S. Embassy said Americans traveling to Mexico for the World Cup should look at advisories for the region they will be visiting.

CAMBRIDGE, England, June 10, 2026 — Nu Quantum, a leader in distributed quantum computing, today announced new research showing that multi-node quantum networks can be designed to tolerate the complete failure of individual QPUs.

The simulations show that on a distributed system with quantum information encoded across the entire network rather than on a single-QPU, catastrophic node failure can become a correctable error. Information encoded across the wider network can still be recovered, so long as the failed node holds only a small fraction of the total error correction code. It also shows that when a replacement node is brought online, logical information can be transferred to it and operations can continue.

This work provides techniques for multi-QPU systems to support arbitrary length computations, compared to monolithic platforms which lack these mechanisms to reduce the risk of unrecoverable loss of logical information.

“This research offers additional evidence that distributed quantum computing represents a viable approach to achieving fault-tolerant computing at scale. Increasing the size of the quantum code by adding more QPUs to the network simultaneously improves the systems resilience to qubit errors and improves critical system availability,” said Dr. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Founder and CEO of Nu Quantum. “While this tolerance is not unconditional, our team’s work indicates that node failures can be suppressed with only a negligible impact on logical error rates. Adding QPUs on a network therefore offers a promising method to achieve even lower logical error rates. Classical Cloud and HPC computing services have for decades exploited elastic modularity to deliver robust, highly available services; this work proves that Quantum can get the same benefits.”

The findings also indicate that fault tolerance improves as the proportion of total qubits held on any single node declines, meaning that resilience is enhanced by using more or smaller QPUs.

The identified distributed quantum error correction techniques are up to 6x more efficient than previously identified ways of mitigating node failure.

A Major Step Towards Unlocking the Full Potential of Quantum Computing

There is consensus across industry that to access valuable industrial applications, quantum computers need to be significantly larger than today. However, building a monolithic machine with 1 million or more physical qubits poses its own set of complex science and engineering challenges.

Sir Peter Knight, Chair of the UK National Quantum Technology Programme Strategic Advisory Board and Professor at Imperial College, said of the research: “Quantum networking is at the heart of the UK quantum strategy. Nu Quantum has now demonstrated an important advance in linking together quantum processors to deliver resilience against sub-component failure, a major step towards fault tolerant distributed quantum computing.”

Distributed quantum computing provides a parallel path to reaching the 1 million qubit target. By enabling quantum computing with QPUs of any scale, networked quantum-computers can derisk the path to valuable applications. At the same time, it enables large codes to be spread over multiple nodes, which improves error correction and reduces the risk of losing logical information.

The research examined two types of error correcting codes, toric and hyperbolic Floquet, to assess their ability to protect logical information when individual nodes fail. Both codes maintained effective error suppression, suggesting that at low node failure rates, a distributed toric code would outperform a monolithic implementation.

The techniques in the paper are modality agnostic and can be applied to multiple modalities, including trapped ion, superconducting and neutral atom systems. Node failure rates and performance numbers in the paper would vary for each hardware platform.

The paper is available for review here.

About Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum is the category creator and leader in distributed quantum computing. The company’s approach represents a shorter path to useful quantum computing by implementing a modular layer for interconnecting multiple QPUs into a single, more powerful distributed quantum computer. This ‘Entanglement Fabric’ approach to interoperable networking of quantum computers presents a faster and more scalable method to deliver useful fault-tolerant quantum computing for industrial users. Founded in 2018, the company has raised over $70 million from investors and now has more than 80 team members located primarily in Cambridge and Los Angeles. For additional information, visit nu-quantum.com.

Source: Nu Quantum

The post Nu Quantum Research Suggests Distributed Quantum Systems Can Survive QPU Failures appeared first on HPCwire.

Outcome of polls in four states offers mixed signals about direction of two major parties before November’s midterms

• Graham Platner wins Maine Democratic Senate primary – video

Progressives rallied around Graham Platner after his primary victory in Maine on Tuesday while Donald Trump again exerted his grip on the Republican party by helping to defeat a politician who had pushed for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Primary elections were held in four states – Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina – before November’s midterms to decide control of both houses of Congress. The results offered mixed signals about the direction of the two parties.

Scientific breakthroughs are often associated with new algorithms, novel approaches, or more powerful computing systems. But according to speakers at a TPC26 panel discussion, one of the most important and often overlooked drivers of progress in this space may be something less technical: collaboration.

During a Scientific Advancement Through TPC Collaboration session,  researchers from several leading scientific institutions discussed how partnerships and collaboration across organizations and countries is critical to advancing AI for science. Some of it is already happening but more is needed. 

The session was moderated by Intersect360 Research CEO Addison Snell. The panel included computational biologist Nicholas Chia of Argonne National Laboratory, computer scientist Christine Sweeney of Los Alamos National Laboratory, RIKEN researcher Eliott Jacopin, and Rio Yokota, a professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo and leader of a research team at RIKEN. 

The discussion ranged from international research programs and shared scientific infrastructure to hackathons, workforce development, and industry engagement. While the panelists represented different disciplines and institutions, they shared a common view that future scientific advances will increasingly depend on communities that can combine expertise, data, and computing resources across organizational and geographic boundaries.

A core theme through the discussion was that many of today’s scientific challenges are simply too large and complex for any single organization to tackle alone. That’s one of the primary reasons why collaboration is so vital for the success of AI for science. Researchers are increasingly relying on expertise, data, and computing resources that span institutions, disciplines, and national borders.

(DC Studio/Shutterstock)

Yokota shared that most of his own work already depends on international partnerships. He cited collaborations involving researchers in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Those relationships have supported projects ranging from molecular dynamics research to the development of scientific AI models. He suggested that global research networks will become even more important as datasets grow and computing requirements increase.

“We’ve been discussing about how to collaborate in building these open foundation models,” said Yokota. “But we can’t do this alone. Having your own data at one site is not as good as being able to train on everyone’s data. And this doesn’t necessarily mean we need to share all our data. There are many different ways to train across sites without moving the data.”

Chia echoed the importance of international partnerships. This is especially true in scientific fields that naturally extend beyond national boundaries. 

Drawing on his work in computational biology, he shared that overcoming research challenges requires cooperation among institutions around the world. “You can’t track infectious disease around the world without world partners,” he said.

Collaboration, however, is about more than sharing expertise and data. The panelists also discussed the role it plays in validating scientific results. 

The conversation later shifted from collaboration itself to a related challenge: trust. While AI systems and simulations can generate powerful insights, researchers still need ways to verify that those results hold up in the real world.

For all the discussion around AI models and computing power, panelists noted that science ultimately comes back to evidence.

A model may suggest an answer, but researchers still need experiments and observations to determine whether that answer holds up in the real world. However, validation often requires specialized tools and equipment that may only be available in certain facilities. 

Accessing the facilities needed to perform those tests often requires partnerships that extend beyond a single lab or research organization.

According to Sweeney, collaboration helps researchers quantify uncertainty and validate results. It ultimately helps build confidence in the systems they develop. And to that, they need access that can be enabled through collaboration. 

“It’s very good at making simulations,” explained Sweeney.  “And those data sets are a basis for our models. And we do want to validate and collaborate with others that have the right facilities, like in Europe or Japan or wherever,” she said.

Several speakers pointed to TPC26 hackathons as one of the consortium’s most effective collaboration mechanisms. 

Jacopin described how the events bring together researchers from different institutions and countries, often leading to relationships and projects that continue long after the event itself. “The hackathon for me was phenomenal because the people that were there all coming from TPC (community),” he said.

The discussion also touched on workforce development. Panelists noted that TPC hackathons give students and early-career researchers exposure to new tools and research methods. They also provides an opportunity to expand professional networks. 

Those connections can lead to new collaborations and broaden the scope of future research efforts. Beyond producing technical results, the hackathons also help cultivate the talent needed to support future scientific advances.

The panel suggested that collaboration is not simply a benefit of AI for science but a requirement. As scientific questions become more complex, the ability to share expertise and resources may prove just as important as advances in computing technology.

The post TPC26 Panel Highlights the Growing Importance of Collaboration in AI for Science appeared first on HPCwire.

Outbreak driven by falling vaccination and misinformation as federal public health cuts hamper state response

The US has recorded more than 2,000 confirmed measles cases so far this year – near the total of 2,228 recorded in all of 2025, and on track to become the worst year for measles in decades as states struggle with the loss of federal funding for public health.

The virus continues to spread in unvaccinated and under-vaccinated communities, including among babies too young to be vaccinated, and it reveals the depths of the twin crises of misinformation and public health in the US.

Vertiv Rack Extreme supports heavier, deeper IT equipment with expanded load ratings, flexible configurations and integrated cable management

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 10, 2026 — Vertiv, a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, has announced the Vertiv Rack Extreme, a next-generation rack designed for the increasing demands of high-performance computing and AI applications. This future-ready rack platform supports deep and heavy IT equipment required for next-generation deployments.

Credit: Vertiv

Driven by increasing compute density, data center operators must accommodate IT equipment while supporting airflow, cable organization and installation flexibility. The Vertiv Rack Extreme is designed to help meet these evolving demands with higher load ratings, deeper configurations, integrated cable management and compatibility with power and thermal management systems used in data center environments.

“As computing requirements continue to intensify, customers need rack infrastructure designed not just for higher density, but for flexibility, strength, and ease of integration within complex data center environments,” said Ramesh Menon, vice president of IT systems solutions at Vertiv. “The Vertiv Rack Extreme is engineered to address these requirements by providing a robust platform that supports IT deployments while simplifying installation and long-term scalability.”

The Vertiv Rack Extreme has multiple size and configuration options, allowing organizations to align infrastructure with specific application requirements. Designed for rapid deployment, the cabinet ships fully assembled and integrates seamlessly with a broad ecosystem of compatible accessories, including overhead cable management and airflow optimization solutions, supporting simplified expansion as infrastructure demands grow.

With static and dynamic load ratings of up to 4,500 lbs. (2,045 kg), the Vertiv Rack Extreme supports higher‑density deployments than traditional racks, which typically have lower load limits when rolled than when stationary. By maintaining the same load capacity in both conditions, it delivers up to 2x higher dynamic capacity and up to 1.3x higher static capacity compared to conventional designs and enables operational flexibility through full-rated mobility. Its fully welded construction, integrated airflow and cable management—including a high open‑area mesh door and flexible rail systems—and standard features such as vertical cable bars and corner rPDU mounting bars streamline installation and ongoing management. Engineered shipping solutions, including shock‑absorbing pallets and multiuse ramps, help protect equipment and enable smoother on‑site deployment.

The platform is also designed for seamless integration with Vertiv’s broader portfolio, supporting a wide range of rack-mounted solutions including Vertiv uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, Vertiv rack PDUs, Vertiv thermal management solutions such as Vertiv CoolLoop RDHx rear door heat exchanger (rDHX) solutions and Vertiv CoolChip CDU coolant distribution units with liquid-to-chip manifolds, and Vertiv Avocent KVM and serial console solutions—enabling a fully integrated, end-to-end infrastructure.

For more information about the Vertiv Rack Extreme or Vertiv’s full portfolio of rack, power, and thermal management solutions, visit Vertiv.com.

About Vertiv

Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv does business in more than 130 countries.

Source: Vertiv

The post Vertiv Unveils High-Capacity Rack Platform for AI and High-Density IT Deployments appeared first on HPCwire.

A cycle of threat, detente and deadlock repeats itself wearisomely as the president’s war in Iran drags on

• US politics live – latest updates

As the story of the US-Iran war is written direct to social media, Donald Trump may be the genre’s premier unreliable narrator.

Since the war began, Trump has again and again threatened Iran with fearsome consequences if Tehran doesn’t come to the table and sign a peace deal that the US president said was imminent weeks ago. And he has also repeatedly claimed that an Iran deal is “close” – without any result. (A CNN tally put the number of times he’s claimed it at 38.)

A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google's argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users. The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements." Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates." The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work. The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them." The court also noted that the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, the AI overview is just an extra feature. At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify if the AI summary was correct. It also said that these users knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted." The court rejected this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Package allocates $38bn to ICE, $26bn to Customs and Border Protection and $5bn more to the DHS

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

Donald Trump signed a nearly $70bn immigration enforcement package into law on Wednesday after the House narrowly passed the legislation, ensuring funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol activities through the rest of Trump’s presidency.

The Secure America Act passed in a 214-212 vote that was largely along party lines, with Kevin Kiley, an independent who aligns with the Republicans, joining all Democrats in voting no. The Senate approved the measure last week, which allocates $38bn to ICE, $26bn to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $5bn more to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through September 2029.

The primary victories set up a race that could be key to Democrats' hopes of winning control of the Senate.

The recall affects certain Honda Pilot, Ridgeline, Passport, and Acura MDX vehicles sold in 23 states and the District of Columbia.

US defense secretary continues ramp-up of pressure against country including sanctions and devastating oil blockade

Pete Hegseth has warned Cuba against acquiring weapons that could threaten the United States, during a visit to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay.

Washington has ramped up pressure against Cuba with sanctions and a devastating oil blockade, and Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled that the Cuban government could be the next after Venezuela to fall to US pressure.

Director of Chatham House UK in the World Programme gives evidence at Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee News release jon.wallace 10 June 2026

Olivia O’Sullivan gave evidence on the purpose and focus of the Integrated Security Fund, at a time of changing priorities for UK security.

Olivia O’Sullivan, Director of Chatham House’s UK in the World Programme, gave evidence to the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on 9 June, discussing the Integrated Security Fund, which aims to tackle high-priority threats to UK security.  

During her evidence, Olivia discussed the UK’s changed strategic security outlook in the light of the massive contraction in global aid spending, and the difficult trade-offs facing the UK government.

During her evidence she examined how the UK should plan to address immediate threats and long-term, complex risks; how the UK should balance defence priorities with conflict prevention and managing new and unanticipated threats; and how the government should prevent conflict-affected states becoming neglected in the new international aid landscape.

Addressing the focus of the Integrated Security Fund, Olivia said:

‘Looking forward we do have a good opportunity here for a fund that sits in the centre to respond to the way that security is changing, to make long-term plans and long-term investment. The question I would have for government is [how can we ensure] that in the wider FCDO restructure… that doesn’t get lost.’

Watch the session in full.
 

Critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan population falls after heavy rain and landslides, fuelled by climate crisis, in North Sumatra

Extreme rainfall and landslides fuelled by the climate crisis killed 7% of the remaining population of the world’s rarest great ape, a study has found, prompting fears for the species’ survival.

The research suggests 58 out of the remaining 800 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) were killed after more than 1,000mm (39in) of rain fell over four days in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province in November 2025. This equates to 11% of the local population and 7% of the entire species.

In a 3-0 ruling, the Michigan Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned a conviction against a man in connection with the 2020 plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

A federal judge banned Alabama from executing an inmate by nitrogen hypoxia, calling the method unconstitutionally cruel.

The Consumer Price Index rose last month at a 4.2% annual rate amid a spike in U.S. energy prices.

Attackers torched neighborhoods across Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested and accused of stabbing a man.

Seattle has enacted a one-year moratorium on new datacenters, making it the largest U.S. city to do so as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the ban. The Guardian reports: Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills. According to Seattle mayor Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a "good use of urban land," and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits. "There are times when public pressure forces elected officials to do something they don't want to do, but in other cases, public pressure just supports and helps to spur on elected officials to do things that they already want to do," said Wilson. "I think this was one of those latter cases." [...] An amendment to the moratorium that passed unanimously last week allows existing datacenters in Seattle to apply for expansions requiring up to 20 megawatts of additional power during the year-long pause. Activists are concerned that the provision may lead to a spike in datacenters' demand for power while the moratorium is in place, and may undermine the premise of the pause. Lawmakers justified the amendment as a way to differentiate between the datacenters that already exist in Seattle and serve a civic purpose, like those powering health facilities and emergency-call systems, from large-scale centers designed to serve the AI sector.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: Parental controls, perimenopause and last-day-of-school photos. Apple seems to have followed us into our 40s, and now I'm worried about both of us.

Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and progressive activist, has won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Maine. Platner won 72% of the vote, defeating the state governor, Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot. Platner received scrutiny during the campaign for old incendiary Reddit posts, a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, sexually explicit messages sent to other women early in his marriage and accusations from a former girlfriend, denied by Platner, that he was physically intimidating. Platner will face the senator Susan Collins, a Republican running for a sixth six-year term, in November. The race is seen as a must-win for Democrats to take control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

• Graham Platner shrugs off scandals to win Maine Democratic Senate primary

• Democrats rally round Platner in Maine as Trump reaffirms grip on GOP after primaries

President Trump said he's asking Congress to approve a short-term extension of a key spy authority to "provide time for the selection and confirmation of a permanent" director of national intelligence.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer said he wants Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to appear before lawmakers in July.

Sean Strickland claims he was not cleared to attend the UFC event because he ‘made fun of Israel and Epstein’

The only current American men’s UFC champion says he has been barred from Sunday’s fight card on the south lawn of the White House because he dared to criticize Donald Trump, Israel and Jeffrey Epstein.

On Tuesday night, middleweight champion Sean Strickland wrote on X that he had been informed by the Ultimate Fighting Championship that he had not been cleared to attend the event by the White House.

Restaurant chain took chainsaw to ancient oak tree in Enfield without permission

The UK restaurant chain Toby Carvery has settled a legal dispute over taking a chainsaw to an ancient oak tree without permission, by agreeing to pay to restore a lost orchard.

The unauthorised partial felling of the 500-year-old oak next to a Toby Carvery car park in Whitewebbs Park, Enfield, north London, in April last year, prompted widespread public outrage and questions in parliament.

Australia, Turkey and Paraguay must be vigilant of a defender-heavy squad ready to bring Mauricio Pochettino’s vision to life on the home stage

The opening salvo kicked off pitchside at Wembley – not between the Australian and USA World Cup teams, but between players turned pundits Mark Schwarzer and Mike Grella. The former Socceroos goalkeeper, with 109 caps on his CV, was on-hand for the EFL Championship promotion final and stationed alongside Grella, who had a fine career in MLS and the EFL but never cracked the USMNT. It’s unlikely Schwarzer arrived with an axe to grind but he took umbrage with Grella’s post-draw reaction that playing Australia was “a lay-up” for the co-hosts.

“Host nations are always difficult to play against at any World Cup,” Schwarzer said. “We always knew the USA was going to be a tough, tough opponent. What we like to do is let our performances do the talking.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ComputerWeekly: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative, said: "We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cyber security. June's record-shattering drop ... is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale. The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018. It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist." And with the addition of hundreds of CVEs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and other third-party flaws taking the total to almost 600, Chris Goettl, vice president of security product management at Ivanti, said talk of a 'Patch Apocalypse' was no longer unwarranted. "We are in the Patch Apocalypse. The Patch Apocalypse is now," said Goettl. "This is not intended to be a scare tactic. It is meant to outline the challenge that many organizations were anticipating, but the new generation of LLMs [Large Language Models] has accelerated significantly in the first half of 2026." "There are going to be more CVEs resolved by vendors at a faster and more continuous pace than we have ever seen previously. Unfortunately, this will also include more zero-day and n-day exploits than previously seen as well. The window from release from a vendor to exploitation had already shortened to five days as of 2023 threat intelligence data." Goettl said that many suppliers have acknowledged the need to use AI tools in their security research to identify and resolve flaws, with Oracle, Google Chrome and Mozilla all upping the cadence of their updates. Whether or not Microsoft follows suit remains to be seen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released the finalized Fusion Science and Technology (FS&T) Roadmap, a national strategy to accelerate the development and commercialization of fusion energy on the most rapid, responsible timeline in history. Building on earlier roadmap efforts, the finalized roadmap brings together fusion science, technology, infrastructure, workforce development, and commercialization priorities into a single national strategy to support fusion pilot plants and commercial fusion power in the mid-2030s.

Fusion is the process that powers the sun and stars. For decades, scientists and engineers have worked to bring that same process to Earth as a source of abundant, reliable energy. The finalized roadmap outlines how DOE, industry, universities, and national laboratories will work together to accelerate the path toward commercial fusion energy in the United States.

This effort advances President Trump’s energy dominance agenda and reinforces the Administration’s commitment to expanding reliable American energy production, strengthening domestic supply chains, and maintaining U.S. leadership in critical technologies. By accelerating progress toward commercial fusion power, DOE is helping secure a future of abundant and reliable energy.

“Fusion energy has entered a new era defined by extraordinary scientific progress and public-private momentum,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Darío Gil. “With this roadmap, we now have the clarity, coordination, and sustained commitment needed to turn the promise of fusion into a reality for the American people.”

Developed with input from more than 800 scientists and engineers across the public and private sectors, the finalized FS&T Roadmap reflects contributions from more than 15 private companies, over 10 National Laboratories, and more than 70 universities. The roadmap identifies the critical science and technology gaps that must be closed to realize fusion pilot plants and strengthen U.S. leadership in the global fusion industry.

The FS&T Roadmap establishes a unified strategy for the U.S. fusion enterprise built around three primary drivers:

• Build critical infrastructure to close fusion materials and technology gaps.
• Innovate through advanced research, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.
• Grow the U.S. fusion ecosystem through public-private partnerships, supply chain development, workforce growth, and commercialization pathways.

The roadmap aligns with DOE’s Genesis Mission and will be implemented through the DOE’s newly established Office of Fusion, leveraging artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and public-private collaboration to accelerate fusion research, engineering, and commercialization. With more than $10 billion in private investment already advancing fusion technologies and demonstration projects, DOE is coordinating a national effort to close the remaining technical gaps needed to commercialize fusion energy. Through the Build-Innovate-Grow strategy, DOE and its partners are strengthening domestic supply chains, advancing fusion science, and positioning the United States to lead the global race to commercialize fusion energy.

The activities outlined in the Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap are focused on prioritizing strategic directions for DOE to further collaborate with the U.S. fusion industry. DOE’s ability to support the roadmap’s milestones and timelines is contingent on future public-private partnerships and future Congressional appropriations. This roadmap is not committing DOE to specific funding levels.

A full copy of the Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap can be found here.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Releases Finalized National Fusion Strategy Aligned with Genesis Mission appeared first on HPCwire.

Your Social Security check isn't fully shielded from old federal student loans. Here's how much is at risk.

People have absorbed violence and terror into their lives. Somehow, they keep going – quietly rescuing, evacuating, replacing, mending, adapting … and sometimes saving tiny animals

It was a glorious balmy night, and I was walking home from dinner. I’d just eaten fried red mullet from the Black Sea on a pavement terrace, listening to the cries of the last swifts as darkness crept over the city. A couple of blocks from where I was staying, there was a curious sight: a couple and their dog were standing over a hedgehog, which was standing seemingly irresolute in the road. I wasn’t sure the couple were doing the right thing by shining their phone torches at the poor creature, but their intentions were clear enough: they were trying to protect it and chivvy it out of the way of the traffic. As a car bore down, I flung myself into the street, like a latter-day Roberta from The Railway Children, and waved my arms to get the driver to stop. At the same time, the couple’s dog gave an encouraging bark to the tiny animal, which scuttled across to the opposite pavement, and into the safety of a yard.

Everything always feels heightened in Kyiv, and I was apt to overthink into this moment many metaphors of escape, protection and destruction. Hedgehogs, by the way, are a surprisingly common sight in Kyiv. So too are the “hedgehogs” made from metal beams welded together in a three-dimensional star-shape, a highly effective obstruction for tanks. (The other favoured tank obstructors are known as “dragon’s teeth”, because of their resemblance to monstrous molars rising from the ground.)

It’s just a ruling from a lower court, but it sets the stage for how European courts are going to deal with the question of who is liable for whatever slop “AI” generates.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

↫ Matthias Bastian at The Decoder

Google tried to argue it doesn’t carry any responsibility or liability for whatever slop its “AI” generate, but the German court does not agree. According to the court, “AI” overviews are not the same as regular search results, because they rewrite findings and just make shit up, thereby making claims that are nowhere to be found in any search results (or in reality in general). Furthermore, the court states that Google develops the “AI”, it runs it, it offers it to users, and Google alone controls its output, and as such, Google is liable for whatever their “AI” produces.

Google also tried to argue that users know not to trust anything an “AI” produces, which is hilarious considering how hard Google is pushing these tools, but the courts state that the ability of users to do further research does not absolve Google of liability. In addition, the court made it very clear that free speech protections absolutely do not apply, because the “AI” expressions are coming from an algorithm, not a person, and are above all an expression of Google’s business activities”.

In other words, if an “AI” tool generates false accusations and misleading statements, the creator of said “AI” is liable. With this ruling in hand, countless other people have a stronger case to make whenever Google or any other company tries to absolve itself from liability from slop just because a pachinko machine generated it.

Excellent news, and the only fair outcome.

Thanks. The smoothing in the package and the firmware do different things, if you change both at once I imagine the difference is quite markable, I’ve gotten similar feedback from others. I never experienced it, for me it was a lot of gradual testing and tweaking (and dealing with issues on the firmware side of changes). But still happy about how my board rides right now (and planning on ironing out the remaining kinks).

Wasn’t aware 6.06 won’t pair with 7.0 Tool anymore, don’t think there’s a real reason for it. I’ll do a 7.0 release at some point. Haven’t tested riding 7.0 yet, but looking into more IMU comms improvements now, some things still missing for some controllers (Little FOCer 3.1 is probably as good as it gets already though) and I’ll be testing those on 7.0.

In an age of spiritual isolation, witches are forming covens that defy the oppressive natures of man and church

On the floor of a sun-drenched room in a 200-year-old Irish estate, a group of 15 witches gather to commune with the spirits. Everyone has someone they want to talk to – dead ancestors, forest fairies, the witches who came before them – and the room has the same expectant charge as the first day of school. Some of the witches wear long black capes and bandannas. Some wear Columbia fleeces, spaghetti-strap tank tops and Adidas sneakers.

Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, guides the women as they make divination maps, sheets of paper covered with “yeses” and “nos” that work like Ouija boards: the witches ask their questions and the spirits guide the crystal pendulums in their hands towards the answer. One of the women, Tara Monte, screeches as her pendulum begins circling uncontrollably. “Isabella, do I stop this? Someone really wants to talk to me.” Later, she will confess she believes it was her archangel Michael letting her know yes, her parents were proud of her. Yes, they still loved her.

When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented CEO. Then Eagle lost its CEO, Dennis Barnhart, in a crashed Ferrari on the day of its IPO, June 8, 1983. In this blog post, we’ll explore the reasons Eagle Computer fell, because there was more to it than just the tragic story involving its CEO.

↫ Dave Farquhar

Just one of the many early PC companies that died off, even if Eagle died off before many of the other big players. It must’ve been such a vibrant and fascinating time to be into PCs and computers in general at that time, with so many companies and players to choose from.

Shame about the 308 GTS.

US inflation hits a three-year high in May

European stock markets are taking a more decisive turn downwards now – the UK’s FTSE 100 has fallen 0.5%. The German Dax is down 0.6% and the French Cac 40 is down 0.3%.

The Europe Stoxx 600 is down 0.4%.

Footage appears to contradict Israeli military’s account of killing of seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in West Bank

Footage has emerged that appears to contradict the Israeli military’s account of the shooting that killed seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in his mother’s arms, showing the family’s car slowing near a military post before soldiers opened fire.

On Friday, the killing of the infant by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank caused outrage, after soldiers opened fire on the family’s vehicle despite it having complied with an order to stop. Sam was killed and his mother, Daniyah Abu Haikal, and father, Fahed Abu Haikal, were both injured.

Left stranded in freezing temperatures near Everest's "death zone," the climber said he survived for days with almost no food or water.

The best part? The sustainable single-serve coffee system is only $100 during the preorder sale.

The president’s immunity from continuing audits made fewer headlines than the ‘anti-weaponization fund’, but it’s no less egregious

Last week, Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general, told Congress that he was abandoning plans to establish a $1.8bn fund to compensate Donald Trump’s political allies. The administration’s attempt to use taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government – possibly including those convicted of violence during the January 6 Capitol riot that Trump incited – was too much for Senate Republicans.

But Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer before joining his administration, made another announcement that got far less attention than scrapping Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund”: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be barred from continuing audits into the president, his family and their “affiliates”. In other words, Trump secured something most Americans can only dream of: immunity from IRS audits of his past tax returns.

If you own a cellular-enabled iPad model, you can get affordable unlimited wireless data for 24 hours.

Retailer plans to shut unprofitable stores as falling US airport traffic due to Middle East conflict hits trading

Business live – latest updates

WH Smith has issued a profit warning after shopper numbers at its stores in US airports fell as a result of the war in the Middle East, prompting the company to raise fresh capital from investors.

The retailer, which operates 1,200 outlets globally in airports, railway stations and hospitals, raised £102m through a share sale on Wednesday to strengthen its balance sheet, pay down debt, invest in technology and shut down unprofitable stores after “a downturn in trading conditions”.

Israeli restaurateur Yehezkel Schweiger tells CBS News why he's willing to brave daily Hezbollah attacks to bring customers a bit of joy.

Oscar winner Mikey Madison and Jeremy Strong to star in film focused on fallout from whistleblower Frances Haugen

The first trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Social Network has landed.

The Social Reckoning has been described as a film that isn’t a “straight sequel” but one that will still revisit Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Star, 59, of 2000 blockbuster X-Men seeks to raise awareness of condition as he undergoes chemotherapy

The actor and former professional wrestler Tyler Mane has revealed he has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and is undergoing chemotherapy.

Mane, 59, a star of the 2000 superhero blockbuster X-Men, posted the news to Facebook in an attempt to raise awareness of a condition he said was rarely talked about.

Research suggests households that include a GLP-1 user collectively spent £780m less on grocery bills

• Business live – latest updates

Weight-loss drugs are saving users’ households more than £400 a year on grocery bills, according to a survey, which found use of GLP-1s has nearly tripled in the past two years to 1.9 million adults.

More than 6.3% of households in Great Britain now include at least one GLP-1 user, according to the research by Worldpanel by Numerator. This marks a sharp rise from 4.1% of households in 2025 and 2.3% in 2024.

BOLOGNA, Italy, June 10, 2026 — NextSilicon, a leader in next-generation computing solutions for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced plans to productize its Arbel RISC-V core into a 64-core and a 128-core, enterprise-grade processor suited to deliver ultra-speed performance for agentic tools, expected to be available in early 2028. Following an October preview, the company is now sharing expanded technical detail and a roadmap shaped by early customer and partner feedback. This announcement coincides with NextSilicon’s presentation at the RISC-V Summit.

NextSilicon announced plans to productize its Arbel RISC-V core into a 64-core and a 128-core, enterprise-grade processor suited to deliver ultra-speed performance for agentic tools, expected to be available in early 2028.

NextSilicon designed Arbel from the ground up for the performance demands of AI infrastructure and HPC. The move from test chip to production roadmap follows customer and partner silicon evaluations, including HPC program leads, AI infrastructure architects, and data center operators. Their input has validated Arbel’s key performance attributes and is shaping the requirements and architecture decisions for the 64-core production processor.

Introducing Arbel: Silicon-Proven, Customer-Validated

Arbel exists because NextSilicon needed a core that could keep up with the rest of the system. The company originally designed it as the control processor inside its Maverick-2 accelerator platform, where it handles the serial logic and data movement that the dataflow engine cannot parallelize. That production deployment became the proving ground: the core had to perform under real workload conditions, not just pass a benchmark suite.

NextSilicon fabricated a standalone Arbel test chip on TSMC’s 5nm process to validate the architecture outside the accelerator context as a full evaluation system. The results confirmed what the Maverick-2 deployment had already demonstrated. A 10-wide instruction-issue pipeline and 480-entry reorder buffer deliver up to 16 scalar instructions per cycle at retirement. Four 128-bit vector units handle data-parallel workloads, including AI inference. Clock speeds reach 2.5 GHz. Standard coherent CHI interconnect and full Linux OS support make the core a practical candidate for server and HPC system evaluation.

Customer and partner evaluations of the test chip silicon validated those performance characteristics and shaped the requirements for the production processor. That feedback drove the decision to productize Arbel as a standalone 64-core server chip, detailed in the next section.

Taking Arbel from Test Chip to Production

The production processor scales the Arbel architecture to 64/128 performance cores, targets a 3.4 GHz operating frequency, and moves to a more advanced process node to meet the power efficiency and density requirements of production data center and HPC deployments. The core architecture retains the defining characteristics of the test chip, including the TAGE branch predictor designed for competitive prediction accuracy against the leading x86 and ARM server implementations.

The chip targets two complementary deployment roles. As a standalone enterprise server processor, it offers organizations a high-performance RISC-V alternative designed to reduce ISA licensing constraints and long-term dependence on third-party vendor roadmaps. As a host processor for NextSilicon’s Maverick accelerator platform, it handles system orchestration and data movement for heterogeneous AI and HPC deployments. Both roles are supported by full RVA23 compliance and standard Linux distribution support.

“Agentic AI changes the game. The future isn’t just more accelerators – it’s smarter, more powerful CPUs with fewer, stronger cores. The response from our early customers and partners has been clear: the architecture performs, and they want to see it at production scale,” said Elad Raz, CEO and co-founder of NextSilicon. “We built Arbel because Agentic AI changes what a CPU needs to do. As AI agents call more tools, trigger more code, orchestrate more services, and move through more complex workflows, the CPU can no longer be an afterthought. It needs to run fast, respond quickly, and keep the entire system moving.”

With Arbel, NextSilicon started from the workload requirements, not from the constraints of an inherited architecture. The result is a CPU designed for the next generation of AI and HPC systems, built on an open ISA that gives customers control.

“RISC-V is the most compelling architecture for the future of AI, data center, and HPC workloads,” said Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International. “We are excited to see the innovation and success of the Maverick-2 accelerator and Arbel test chip, and look forward to future developments, including RVA23 compliance.”

The RISC-V Data Center Opportunity

RISC-V has crossed the threshold from an academic architecture to a viable enterprise platform. As ecosystem standards have matured, software vendors increasingly have stable, consistent targets to build and certify against – similar to the foundation that drove broad adoption of x86 and ARM in data centers. Major Linux distributions, compiler toolchains, and systems software now support RISC-V natively, with ecosystem support from Canonical, Red Hat, and NVIDIA. The data center and HPC segment of the RISC-V market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 33.1% from 2025 to 2034 to over $200B.

The gap that remains is at the top of the performance envelope. HPC and AI workloads are hybrid. They require massive parallelism for compute-intensive segments, combined with serial control logic that determines the throughput ceiling of the entire system. Agentic AI coding platforms represent a fast-growing example of this architectural mismatch. Unlike training workloads that scale across thousands of GPU cores, agentic coding tasks run autonomous reasoning loops that are fundamentally serial: parsing code context, evaluating alternatives, generating and validating output.

These workflows demand strong single-thread performance from a compact core alongside integrated acceleration for inference, not the wide, general-purpose server cores designed for cloud multitenant scheduling. As agentic workloads scale from developer tools to enterprise infrastructure, the gap between what cloud CPUs were designed for and what these workloads actually need will widen. That serial path requires a CPU designed for maximum single-thread execution speed, not a general-purpose core managing system overhead. No existing RISC-V processor was built with that specific requirement as the primary design constraint. Arbel was.

Availability and Customer Engagement

The Arbel production processor is expected in Q1 2028. NextSilicon is engaging qualified customers now for early access discussions and continued roadmap collaboration. Organizations evaluating RISC-V infrastructure for HPC or AI applications can contact NextSilicon to discuss workload requirements and options.

NextSilicon will present a detailed technical overview of the Arbel architecture and production roadmap at the RISC-V Summit on June 10, 2026. Additional technical documentation is available at www.nextsilicon.com.

About NextSilicon

NextSilicon builds computing infrastructure for algorithmically complex workloads. The company’s Maverick-2 accelerator uses a runtime reconfigurable dataflow architecture to deliver up to 10x performance over leading GPUs at less than half the power, with no requirement to rewrite existing applications. Maverick-2 is in production at customer sites across HPC, AI, and national security computing environments. NextSilicon is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, with offices in Minneapolis, MN, in the United States.

Source: NextSilicon

The post NextSilicon to Productize Arbel RISC-V Core into 64-Core Enterprise Processor for AI and HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

Nancy Lacore, ousted by Pete Hegseth last year, heads to a run-off in race for Nancy Mace’s seat

• US politics live – latest updates

A three-star navy rear-admiral fired by Pete Hegseth last year in the defense secretary’s purge of senior US military officials advanced to a Democratic run-off in a closely-watched congressional race in South Carolina.

Nancy Lacore, who served 35 years in the navy, was chief of the navy reserve when she was ousted by Hegseth in August.

Can't decide between a laptop and a tablet? You don't have to. Check out my top picks for the best two-in-one convertibles.

The Prelim Attention Score system enhances vision-language model safety and trustworthiness

June 10, 2026 — Vision-language models are AI systems that combine image analysis with large-language models. These widely used AI systems have a persistent problem: hallucinations, or outputs that describe objects that are inconsistent with, or absent from, the input image.

The Prelim Attention Score tool helps detect whether a model’s output is grounded in the image or driven too strongly by its own generated text.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have developed the Prelim Attention Score (PAS), a tool that helps detect whether a model’s output is grounded in the image or driven too strongly by its own generated text.

“The PAS is a real-time, plug-and-play metric that acts as an internal monitor for the AI,” said Manish Bhattarai, a Los Alamos computer scientist. “The system works with major existing vision-language models and requires minimal additional computational overhead, making it an efficient way to detect potential hallucinations. PAS achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in catching hallucinations, offering developers a practical path toward safer and more trustworthy multimodal AI systems.”

Most commonly used vision-language models are autoregressive, meaning they generate each new token, or word, based partly on the words they have already produced. The PAS system monitors a vision-language model’s prediction of each token, allowing PAS to identify where the model is drawing its information from and where hallucinations are likely to occur. PAS presents a score that alerts users to the possible presence of hallucinations in the output.

A Useful Screen for Practical Applications

Many autoregressive vision-language models are built on transformer architectures, a class of deep-learning neural networks that use attention patterns to weigh information as they generate an output. The Los Alamos research team examined how these models attend to the image, the text prompt and the model’s own preliminary generated words.

When integrated into a vision-language model workflow, PAS can run alongside the model as it handles a request. For object mentions in the model’s response to an image and text input, PAS computes an attention-based score that indicates how strongly the model relied on its own previously generated words. The closer the PAS score is to zero, the less likely it is that the model has produced a hallucination.

“By understanding the way a vision-language model pays attention to preliminary information, PAS can help identify the exact instance where a model begins to over-rely on its own words,” said Xuan Nhat Hoang, Los Alamos intern. “Our tool reads signals the AI is already producing, representing a low-overhead way to help ensure that information is reliable and useful.”

PAS could be employed in scenarios where images, documents, diagrams and text are analyzed by vision-language AI models. For instance, it could eventually support reliability checks in settings such as medical imaging, scientific document analysis, engineering diagrams, remote sensing and other mission-relevant visual workflows where unsupported visual claims could affect downstream decisions.

The Los Alamos team is presenting PAS at the prestigious Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 conference, sponsored by the IEEE and Computer Vision Foundation, in Denver this month.

Funding: This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Los Alamos.

Source: LANL

The post Los Alamos Method Helps Expose Hallucinations in Vision-Language AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Kenya’s G7 role must address the economic pressures fuelling domestic criticism of President Ruto Expert comment LToremark 10 June 2026

Kenya has felt the pressures of costly debt, risk-averse Western investment and China’s industrial dominance. The G7 summit on global economic imbalances is a chance to speak up.

Kenya’s participation at the G7 summit in France on 16-17 June sees it walk a familiar tightrope between international opportunity and domestic political risk. Though Kenya has attended three G7 summits since 2017, its presence this year has been spotlighted by South Africa’s reported exclusion following US pressure.

President William Ruto will see the invite as tacit endorsement of his efforts to present Kenya as a reliable broker between global powers. The G7 summit also follows Kenya’s co-hosting of the Africa–France summit on 11–12 May in Nairobi, framed as the first edition in a non-Francophone country by design – although critics took a more sceptical view. 

But Ruto’s international ambitions rest on shaky domestic foundations.

Related work

Does President Ruto have the means to appease Kenya’s protestors?

Major anti-government demonstrations in June 2024, which led Ruto to dissolve his cabinet, followed a prolonged inflation crisis and proposed new taxes – but also came just weeks after a state visit to the US which drew criticism for its cost. Recent protests – over a US-backed Ebola quarantine facility on Kenyan soil, and a transport shutdown over rising fuel prices – show how external conditions continue to affect domestic politics. 

A purely symbolic Kenyan presence at the G7 would do little to alleviate these pressures. The summit’s headline focus on global economic imbalances, however, is a chance for Kenya to speak out on structural conditions that have constrained its domestic choices. 

Global economic imbalances and Kenyan debt

The main theme of this year’s G7 refers to large and persistent disparities in the current account balances – the sum of a country’s trade in goods and services – of major economies. The world’s two largest economic powers feature on opposite sides of this equation: a US current account deficit of 0.9 per cent of global GDP last year contrasting with China’s surplus worth 0.8 per cent.

This G7 focus is particularly timely for Kenya. As a lower middle-income country with a market-facing economy and persistent trade deficits, its experience shows how global imbalances can deepen existing vulnerabilities.

Kenya’s defining weakness in recent years has been its public debt burden, with servicing costs consuming over a third of revenues. As the largest bilateral lender to Kenya, China has attracted much of the blame. But this is not the full story. There has also been a parallel rise in Kenyan borrowing from international commercial markets.

The decade following the 2008 global financial crisis saw Kenya issue its first Eurobonds alongside a rapid surge in Chinese lending to Africa, as global interest rates remained low despite US deficits. In the post-COVID-19 era, however, the US deficit has contributed to higher global interest rates, leading to rising Kenyan borrowing costs and refinancing challenges.

Billions of US dollars in Chinese lending agreed in 2014-15 for a major Kenyan railway project – converted to renminbi in 2025 – were set at floating commercial interest rates that subsequently surged after 2021. In parallel, Kenya’s struggles to secure liquidity for a $2 billion Eurobond repayment due in June 2024 brought a rapid slide in the Kenyan shilling, worsening the fiscal crisis that precipitated major youth-led protests.

Kenyan leaders must shoulder the primary blame for the rapid accumulation of unproductive debt. But indirect exposure to global conditions has made the solutions more painful.

Kenya’s trade imbalances

Alongside its debt stock, China is also Kenya’s largest trade partner and runs a widening trade surplus: 2024 figures show Chinese exports to Kenya were $4.3 billion, against $196 million in imports. 

Closing this gap will be difficult for several reasons. One is that deals presented by China as addressing the disparity may ultimately keep it intact. In May, China finalized an interim agreement extending zero-tariff access to 53 African countries. Kenyan agricultural exports are an obvious beneficiary of tariff removal – as the continent’s mineral and energy exports were already tariff-free – but Kenya’s middle-income status meant it had first negotiated a reciprocal agreement to open its market to Chinese imports. A rumoured 10-year timeline for this also compares unfavourably to existing 25-year deals with the EU and UK. 

Related work

Kenya’s conversion of Chinese debt to renminbi reflects economic pragmatism more than strained US ties

However, more consequential drivers of this trade gap are the structural conditions underpinning China’s global surplus – including weak domestic consumption, industrial subsidies and an undervalued renminbi – which erode the relative competitiveness of Kenyan industry. The US remains a more significant market for Kenyan exports, totalling $662 million in 2024, but its tariffs have introduced significant uncertainty.

The example of a French road project epitomizes how such imbalances constrain Kenya’s economic decisions. In 2019, Kenya signed a $1.5 billion deal with a French consortium to build an upgraded toll highway between central Kenya and Nairobi. Kenya cancelled the contract in 2024 amid rising costs and reports that the French partners declined to take on the risk of potential shortfalls in toll revenues. The contract was instead awarded to Chinese contractors who promised to accept this risk and deliver at a lower price, with labour and materials sourced from China.

This underscores the difficult decisions facing Kenya. On the one hand, Western countries claim that their financing models create fewer dependencies than China, yet a risk-averse private sector was unable or unwilling to deliver at a time of acute vulnerability for Kenya. On the other hand, Chinese firms, with the muscle of state backing, can reduce project cost and fiscal risk – but imported materials and labour add to an already glaring trade deficit.

Kenya’s G7 opportunity 

Kenya’s G7 participation is a chance to ensure that summit debates on global imbalances do not neglect a shared responsibility to emerging economies. 

An attainable first step following on from the Africa–France summit is to secure expanded G7 commitment to a first-loss guarantee mechanism to help derisk investment. Another more challenging objective will be to ensure that stricter EU trade measures do not disincentivize Chinese investments in African export industries. Kenya must also leverage its Ebola quarantine commitment to extract US concessions, including progress on a trade agreement first proposed in President Trump’s first term.

Hundreds of thousands gather to remember Carlos ‘Indio’ Solari, who inspired cross-generational devotion, especially among working class

The line stretched for more than 7km (four miles). Mourners sang rock songs, waved banners, and carried speakers blasting music while smoke rose from makeshift barbecues and vendors sold T-shirts bearing the image of a bald man with sunglasses.

As evening fell, a drizzle set in, but the queue remained. At the end of the line in Avellaneda, outer Buenos Aires, stood a chapel containing the body of a rock star.

A Guardian analysis reveals how most of 39 countries facing US entry restrictions are most vulnerable environmentally

• ‘Every day it’s more barriers’: how the US is shutting out climate refugees

Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.

As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.

As the US shuts its doors to most refugees, there’s little hope of a new system to help those forced from home by climate impacts

• Trump targets migrants from countries hit most by climate shocks

Millions of people around the world are having their lives upended by floods, storms and heatwaves worsened by the climate crisis. Those forced to flee their home countries, however, are finding that the door to the US is more firmly shut than ever.

Neither US nor international law recognizes environmental hazards, such as climate-related displacement, as a valid cause to claim asylum or gain entry through other migration pathways, despite the mounting toll of disasters caused by an overheating planet.

The last words spoken by Angela Prichard, 55, an Iowa wife and mother who called 911 to report she was in danger, was the first clue investigators had to identify her killer.

A surveillance camera captured the sound of dogs barking, helping authorities determine when Angela Prichard's estranged husband arrived at the location to wait for her.

Thai woman is in custody in connection with investigation after man was reportedly found dead at a hotel in Yangon

A US diplomat has been found dead in Myanmar’s largest city, and members of the diplomatic community in Yangon say a Thai woman has been detained by police in connection with the investigation.

US officials in Thailand and the US embassy in Myanmar referred questions on the case to the state department, which confirmed the “death of a US government employee” assigned to the embassy in Yangon, but gave no other details.

From horror galore to Chinese action games, the key trends, trailers and surprises from Summer Game Fest’s many, many hours of streams and broadcasts

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Did you spend hours of your weekend watching a relentless series of video game adverts? No? I don’t blame you – Summer Game Fest, the collection of livestreams that has arisen in place of the giant annual E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, is extremely overwhelming. There are the bigger, longer shows: the PlayStation and Xbox streams, the main SGF show hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James, Future’s duet of the Future Games Show and the PC Gaming Show. Each show is two hours long. Then there are all the indie showcases: cosy games, women-led games, Black voices in gaming, Day of the Devs. Between them, they show off hundreds of games that might pique your interest.

I picked out exactly 34 highlights here: the biggest news, the most interesting-looking smaller games. But from the barrage of trailers I was also able to discern some trends. Here’s what we can learn.

Police are treating the case as a possible homicide and have a Thai woman in custody, sources told The Associated Press.

Despite calls for calm, masked anti-immigration protesters in Belfast set a bus, vehicles and some homes on fire in what one politician called "a race-based pogrom."

"This is similar to a doctor that is licensed to practice family medicine but is doing brain surgery in their office," police said.

The flames from the cross burning in the middle of Grant Park were visible to anyone driving or walking down Columbus Drive.

Pamela Evette and Alan Wilson are heading to a runoff on June 23 in South Carolina's Republican primary for governor.

Democrats are aiming to unseat Nevada GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo in one of the country's most tightly contested gubernatorial contests this year.

This month, the administration is seeking to denaturalize 17 people, part of an effort unprecedented in modern US history

I still remember my citizenship ceremony from 2011. There was a festive spirit among the dozens of us who were about to become the newest Americans, a kind of joy offset only by the anxiety of having to turn in our green cards first. For years, I jealously guarded that little card, which was not only not green but also something I was repeatedly told by authorities to carry with me at all times. They had to pry it from my fingers that day.

At my ceremony, which I wrote about at the time, a representative from the New York City commission on human rights explained to her captive American audience what civil rights protections we had, and the judge who swore us in as citizens encouraged us to exercise our vote, serve on juries, run for office and speak out for our rights. We were each given a pocket constitution. The whole thing was a celebration of democratic values. I entered downtown Brooklyn that day as a resident alien. I left as a newly minted American citizen, equal in the eyes of the law to every other American citizen.

Vice-president says he expects war to end in a week or few months with ‘a deal that is good for US economically’. Plus, get ready for start of Fifa men’s World Cup

Good morning.

US forces have launched strikes against Iran in response to the downing of an Apache helicopter near the strait of Hormuz a day earlier, and Iran has retaliated by hitting American airbases in the Middle East. The exchange of fire came as the US vice-president, JD Vance, was vague on the possible timeframe for ending the Iran war, saying it could conclude in a week or a few months.

What did Vance actually say? “Right now, I feel that we are in a position to get a deal that is good for the United States economically and that really does deal with the Iranian nuclear program. Not just now, not just while Donald Trump is president, but for the long term, to where my kids can say when they’re adults: ‘Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon.’”

Who is Steve Hilton? Since arriving in the US 14 years ago, he has had stints as an entrepreneur, a policy analyst and a Fox News host after years of working in the background of Conservative party politics in Britain.

Who has been supporting him? Hilton has assembled a broad coalition spanning working-class voters, Latino small-business owners, religious conservatives and Silicon Valley tech tycoons. He has managed to turn his British accent into an asset, priding himself on being a legal immigrant as opposed to the undocumented kind derided by the Republican establishment.

• Wilson sparks winner as US beat Brazil 1-0

• Marta slams referee for being ‘main character’

• Riot police surround match officials

United States manager Emma Hayes said she had “an experience I will never forget” after her side’s bad-tempered 1-0 win over Brazil in Fortaleza saw the home team handed eight red cards.

Brazil head coach Arthur Elias and three members of his staff were dismissed towards the end of the second half before police in riot gear surrounded the match officials on the pitch at full-time after further flashpoints.

Karmelo Anthony was found guilty earlier Tuesday after a trial that examined the confrontation leading to Austin Metcalf's death at a Frisco track meet.

Brexit 10 years on: Michel Barnier and the future of UK–EU relations 22 June 2026 — 10:00 TO 11:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 10 June 2026 Chatham House and Online

Join a fascinating discussion with the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator to assess a decade of change and the future of EU-UK relations.

A decade after the Brexit vote, UK–EU relations are entering a new phase marked by friendly yet cautious engagement. Ongoing disputes over trade, regulation and mobility continue to test progress. These pressures frame efforts to rebuild cooperation while domestic politics and wider European shifts influence the direction of the relationship.

Join us as Michel Barnier, former Prime Minister of France, discusses the challenges framing efforts to reset cooperation between London and Brussels. From a potentially pivotal 2027 presidential election in France, to wider issues facing Europe and the UK, Mr Barnier will outline potential solutions to overcome these challenges.

This event discusses:

• What priorities shape the UK–EU relationship after Brexit, and where do key tensions remain?
• How do domestic politics in the UK, France and the EU affect cooperation?
• How could political change in France next year influence European policy?
• What outcomes are realistic in the near term?

System not fit for purpose due to poor infrastructure and planning, with minority groups particularly at risk, MPs say

The UK’s stem cell transplant system is potentially putting the lives of blood cancer patients at risk as a result of inadequate infrastructure and a lack of long-term planning, a parliamentary report has found.

A hematopoietic stem cell transplant, often referred to as a bone marrow transplant, is a medical procedure in which stem cells from a healthy donor are transplanted into a patient.

As Hollywood searches for its next iteration of the superspy, the actor explains how he earned pop culture’s most sought-after role – and how he’s taking 007 back to basics

• They expect you to die! The history of Bond in video games, from the good to the bad

Is any acting gig more contested than James Bond? Each week seems to bring a din of audition speculation so loud that it must be exhausting for the Elordis, Cavills and Dickinsons who are at the centre of it all. But when one of them does finally bag the role, perhaps they should seek the counsel of the actor who has quietly played the part for the last five years: Patrick Gibson. He’s the star of 007 First Light, the video game that has sold 2.7m copies since it was released two weeks ago.

As a computerised Bond, Gibson is the first video game actor to lend both his voice and likeness to the role. With endorsement from both Amazon MGM and previous brand guardians Eon there’s a case to be made that he is the seventh official Bond (and the second Irish one). Not that he knew this when submitting a self-tape to Danish developers IO Interactive. “There was talk of martinis in the audition sides that gave me an inkling,” says Gibson. “Although at that point I didn’t believe there was any way it could be that.”

Interactive takes on MI6’s globetrotting spy have been around almost as long as the films, but that doesn’t mean all of them were a success. Here’s 007’s chequered past of hits, flops and oddities

• ‘The enormity of the idea helped me’: how Patrick Gibson became gaming’s new James Bond

Bond finally arrived in an official video game capacity in 1984, courtesy of Parker Brothers. The game grouped several 007 adventures (Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only) together. Yet despite including elements from each movie, it was essentially the same game throughout: an unsatisfying and tricky mashup of the arcade games Moon Patrol and Scramble, with the player controlling Bond’s amphibious Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me. Obscure pub trivia fact: due to the dispute between Bond producers Eon and screenwriter Kevin McClory, the Diamonds Are Forever segment replaced Blofeld with a villain named Seraffino.

This year’s events will be a mélange of Trumpian egotism, Maga populism and Christian nationalism

Musicians who dropped out of the Great American State Fair said they were tricked.

“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” wrote the rapper Young MC on Facebook of the first major celebration of the US’s 250th birthday. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is nonpartisan, SPIN magazine describes it as ‘Trump-backed.’” The country singer Martina McBride said that the organizers’ description of the event as nonpartisan “turned out to be misleading”.

Commonwealth Fusion has published five peer-reviewed papers laying out the physics case for ARC, its planned 400 MW fusion power plant, which would follow the company's smaller SPARC tokamak now under construction. The papers suggest ARC could produce more energy than it consumes using high-temperature superconducting magnets, molten-salt heat extraction, and 15-minute fusion pulses. Ars Technica reports: ARC will be a tokamak that hosts fusion between hydrogen's two heavier isotopes, deuterium and tritium. This reaction results in a helium nucleus and releases a neutron and radiation. The helium transfers heat to the plasma, maintaining the conditions needed for fusion, but it is otherwise a waste product, referred to as "ash" in the fusion context. The neutron and radiation, however, are put to use. Part of that use is simply imparting energy into a blanket of molten salt that surrounds the fusion chamber. That energy, in the form of heat, will be used to drive a turbine that produces the electricity. The molten salt includes lithium ions; when one lithium isotope absorbs a neutron, it decays into more helium, plus tritium that can be used as fuel for the reactor. There are isotopes present that will also release additional neutrons, allowing this process to generate sufficient fuel. Overall, the present design of ARC is expected to produce about 1.13 GW of fusion power, with 500 MW of that extracted as electricity. Some of that (100 MW) will be needed to power the plant's operations, leaving 400 MW to be sent to the grid. The rest of the energy is either kept in the tokamak to maintain the fusion reactions or lost due to inefficiencies in the heat and energy transfer of the system. There's a lot of uncertainty about these numbers; the 1.13 GW is just the center of a range of potential values running from 900 MW to 1.3 GW, so the 400 MW output may need to be adjusted up or down accordingly. Some of that 400 MW comes during periods where fusion is not occurring. The nuclear reactions will occur within 15-minute-long periods that will be interspersed with one minute resets. The resets are meant to be kept short enough that nothing has much of a chance to cool down before it gets heated up again -- thermal inertia will let it continue generating power. That will be one of the key differentiators with SPARC, which doesn't have the heat extraction needed to maintain stable fusion for these long time periods, and so can't maintain the near constant temperatures needed for reliable power generation. It's inevitable that parts of the device will be exposed to radiation and perhaps fusion plasma. The inner walls of the reactor will be shielded by tungsten, which will limit erosion by the conditions. Meanwhile, the vacuum vessel is designed to be replaced every one to two years. The papers note that this flexibility will allow them to make some design changes even after ARC is built. To enable this, the whole tokamak is meant to split in half for maintenance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: Siri AI is the headline feature of WWDC26, but there are more new capabilities I need to check out.

Multiple attackers killed at least 12 people and wounded nine others in a late-night mass shooting near South Africa's biggest city, Johannesburg, police say.

Hadi Alodid, 30, further charged with possessing a knife in a public place and making threats to kill on same day

A man has appeared in court accused of the attempted murder of a man in Belfast on Monday night.

Hadi Alodid, 30, of Duncairn Avenue, Belfast, was charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie. He was further charged with possessing a knife in a public place, Kinnaird Avenue, on the same day.

Jermiah Copeland had admitted killing Angelina Resendiz, attacking another sailor and illegally recording another

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

A member of the US navy has been ordered to spend 44 years in federal prison after admitting that he fatally strangled a fellow sailor in his barracks room, violently squeezed the neck of a second woman onboard an aircraft carrier and illegally made secret video recordings of a third, including while they were being intimate.

Meanwhile, the family of the petty officer whom Jermiah Copeland acknowledged murdering, Angelina Resendiz, has called for reforms within the armed forces meant to better protect women serving in the military.

The Monaco striker’s impact on the US attack will vary depending on how the team builds up, and where that buildup happens

• Free newsletter | Daily podcast | Download our app

Some strikers are gregarious personalities who ensure attention even when they struggle. Folarin Balogun prefers to speak softly and maintain a healthy goalscoring record. The 24-year-old has still been making himself known to his country of birth – he was born in New York but raised in London – after committing to the US over England and Nigeria. This past season, he finished fourth in Ligue 1 scoring with 13 goals, priming him for an emergent World Cup on home soil.

Balogun’s recruitment was closely monitored by US fans, desperate for a dependable goalscorer.

We’re thinking about the crisis facing pollinators all wrong. And we’ve come to a crucial moment

Last winter, commercial beekeepers lost more than 60% of their colonies – their worst losses on record. We tend to blame bee losses on separate, singular threats: pests, pesticides, habitat loss or extreme weather. But we’ve been thinking about bee losses wrong.

The real culprit is our industrial food system.

Don't forget to check out all these iOS 26 features before Apple releases the next iOS software later this year.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In the wake of rising energy costs and concerns about future electricity demands from new high-demand users like data centers, elected officials are considering a slew of solutions. That has included a task force considering nuclear energy, but their recommendations will likely arrive too late to make legislative changes.

In April, New Jersey lifted a 50-year moratorium on new nuclear power projects.

In Virginia, an energy company is already 3D printing parts for the state’s nuclear plants.

And details about restarting Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant could be announced as soon as this month.

But in Delaware, decisions about the state’s stance on nuclear power — specifically the emerging technology of small modular reactors — will likely be delayed until well after this year’s General Assembly adjourns on June 30.

That’s because the Delaware Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force, which has been convening regularly since last fall to study the issue, pushed back its deadline to produce a report until nearly a month after the legislative session ends. 

The group, created by the legislature, was supposed to present its findings by the beginning of 2026, but task force members decided to delay the deadline almost immediately after they first convened.

“Right now, Delaware is years behind the other states,” said Martin Willis, a member of the Boilermakers Local 13 union, and task force appointee. “If we wait until 2027, we’ll be light years behind. We have to do something.”

The July 31 deadline means lawmakers are unlikely to consider new rules or regulations for the small nuclear reactor industry until next year — after the November elections that could impact lawmakers currently sitting on the task force. Additionally, task force member Rep. Jeff Hilovsky (R-Long Neck) will retire at the end of this year. 

Despite the late deadline, the task force could potentially vote on its recommendations as early as Monday. Even so, it would leave only seven legislative days left in the 2026 General Assembly to draft, hear and pass legislation to advance those priorities this year.

Led by Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown), the task force has been exploring the potential for small modular nuclear reactors in Delaware. While some see such reactors as part of a long-term solution, the industry is currently largely unproven. 

The U.S. military reported in April that it is developing small modular reactors and related technologies that could come online as early as next year. But there are no such reactors actively providing power to anyone anywhere in the world, according to Allison Macfarlane, the former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

During a meeting last month of the task force, Macfarlane told members that only large reactors operate throughout the world because the immense costs inherent in nuclear technology can only be overcome through economies of scale.  

“It’s basic economics and I don’t think we’re going to be escaping that any time soon,” Macfarlane said

Nuclear gets a bipartisan nudge

Unlike coal and renewables, nuclear energy has traditionally been a less politically polarizing source of power. 

Advancing nuclear technologies played a key role in the Biden administration’s plan for a transition toward a cleaner electric grid. Meanwhile, removing “undue burdens” on certain energy resources, including nuclear, was among President Donald Trump’s first executive orders.

Meyer, too, proclaimed in his State of the State earlier this year that “safe, modern nuclear energy” is needed in Delaware. In April, he noted during a radio program that Delaware is in an energy crisis. He said that is due to the state not generating much of its own power. The state typically imports 30% to 55% of its electricity from its regional grid.

“I’ve been very clear that we need to invest to make sure that we have wind generation, solar generation, nuclear generation, combined-gas generation,” Meyer told WHYY/DPM listeners in late April. “That is state policy.”

While Delaware’s nuclear energy task force began as a Republican idea, it was embraced by Hansen, a Democrat known for spearheading progressive environmental policies. 

Lawmakers created the task force last year through a resolution that passed the House of Representatives through a voice vote, and the Senate through a vote of 19 to 2. 

Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown), who does not sit on the task force, told Spotlight Delaware that he didn’t expect the resolution to pass. But with an energy supply crunch, he said all options need to be considered. 

While modular nuclear reactors show promise, Pettyjohn also noted the challenges. He said the  technology is not ready to be deployed so it would not solve the state’s immediate electricity needs. 

He also pointed to historical events, such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, that leave lingering concerns for any residents living nearby a reactor.

Not an immediate answer

Pettyjohn’s comments came after Delaware elected officials repeatedly stated over the previous year that every energy option needs to be considered. 

Lawmakers collectively turned their attention to the state’s energy industry after power bills shot up in the winter of 2025. Additionally, some have expressed concerns about grid reliability with power-hungry data centers sprouting across the region. 

Still, Pettyjohn said unproven nuclear power technology likely “isn’t going to be the silver bullet” to address the region’s rising energy costs.

Economists and energy experts have for years set nuclear as one of the most expensive energy resources when start-up costs are included, typically running over $100 per megawatt hour. Modern nuclear projects have come in billions over budget and years overdue. Others have been abandoned altogether.

“If you need electricity in the next five years, nuclear is just not going to be able to answer that,” Macfarlane told the task force in early May. “You will not get what you need in that time period, probably not even in 10 years.”

Nuclear power in recent years has accounted for about 19% of the U.S. energy mix. But none of those electrons are being generated by small modular reactors, Macfarlane said.

Willis, who has been critical of the task force’s sense of urgency, wanted to see legislation passed this year to take advantage of federal funding opportunities that are already flowing to energy projects elsewhere. 

“Everything we know now we knew six months ago,” Willis said. “In the meantime, New Jersey just leapfrogged right over us and passed legislation.”

The post State task force delay likely shelves nuclear legislation until next year appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Booming population growth, high rent prices and a lack of housing diversity have been prominent issues in Sussex County in recent years. The county government has now made changes to increase the region’s affordable housing supply, but whether the new measures will have the intended effects remains to be seen. 

Following more than a year of discussion over booming growth in Sussex County and how to diversify the housing supply, the county council passed two measures on Tuesday aimed at encouraging more affordable housing. 

The ordinances, which will allow higher rents and more density within the county’s historically underutilized affordable housing program, passed the five-member council unanimously. 

The two reforms represent one of the few times in recent years that Sussex County has instituted regulatory changes focused on addressing the region’s population boom and housing crunch. 

The measures were taken from recommendations proposed by the Sussex County Land Use Reform Working Group, but are less expansive than what the group originally proposed last fall.  

Council members gave limited insight during the meeting into their reasons for casting votes in favor of the reforms. 

Councilwoman Jane Gruenebaum did, however, express concern that the ordinances do not require an assessment of “the adequacy” of roads, schools, emergency medical services and other infrastructure when developers are applying to build new housing. 

Gruenebaum said she is “disappointed” both the land use reform group and the current ordinances did not address the need for infrastructure studies. 

Concerns over road capacities and the current county infrastructure’s ability to handle new developments were a major point of contention surrounding the controversial Atlantic Fields and Belle Mead project proposals last fall. 

Despite her hesitations, Gruenebaum voted in favor of the reforms. 

The changes also come on the heels of attempts by the state legislature in recent months to address affordable housing shortages across the state by forcing municipalities to increase housing density. 

Councilman John Rieley said during Tuesday’s meeting that he is pleased the county is taking action, so the state cannot “override all of our authority and take it up to Dover.” 

County staff made clear they view the reforms as just the first step in solving the region’s housing crisis. The policies, they said, will need to be reviewed and assessed over the next year to ensure they are serving their intended purposes. 

“This is going to be a living ordinance,” County Attorney Vince Robertson said. 

What will the reforms do?

The first of the two adopted reforms allow for higher rents within the Sussex County Rental Program, enacted in 2008 to incentivize developers to incorporate affordable rental units in their projects, in hopes of encouraging more participation from housing developers.

Currently, in order for a project to qualify for the rental program, 25% of its housing units must have a maximum rent of $810 for a one-bedroom, $970 for a two-bedroom and $1,120 for a three-bedroom. 

These rents are meant to be affordable for households earning half the county’s median income, or about $40,749 a year. 

Under the new regulation, housing developments will need to keep the 25% affordable housing threshold, but will now have a range that the rent caps can fall within. 

The rents will need to be between $970 and $1,295 for a one-bedroom apartment, between $1,165 and $1,550 for a two-bedroom and between $1,345 and $1,790 for a three-bedroom. 

The reform is an effort to make building affordable homes more appealing to developers, County Administrator Todd Lawson said at the public hearing for the ordinances on May 19, since only two projects have used the rental program since its creation in 2008. 

The change is not as far-reaching as first proposed by the land use working group, which would have raised the rent caps to be affordable for households making 80% of area median income and lowered the required threshold of affordable units to 15%.

Developers still say they believe the amended regulations will incentivize more participation in the program. 

The second measure passed on Tuesday amends certain aspects of the county code to allow for more dense housing developments. 

The ordinance aims to address the need for the county to move away from large-tract, single-family home developments toward more mixed-use, multi-family housing. That debate has been at the forefront of the land use working group’s discussions since it first convened last spring. 

Councilman Steve McCarron said at Tuesday’s meeting he believes the new regulations are something all council members will have to vow to “keep our eye on,” evaluating how they function over the next year. 

“If we didn’t get it exactly right, we turn right back around and make sure we get it right eventually,” McCarron said. “But we do have to start from somewhere.” 

Olivia Marble contributed to this report.

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 Sussex County Council approves affordable housing reforms appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

EV maker aims to overtake Toyota, as it plans to spend £1.8bn to build five-minute flash chargers in Europe

• Business live – latest updates

The Chinese car company BYD has said it aims to be the world’s biggest automaker within the next five years.

Targeting Toyota’s long-held top spot, BYD’s founder and chair, Wang Chuanfu said he was confident it could overtake global rivals through rapid advances in battery technology and fast charging, as well as growing production overseas, including Europe.

The rise of AI factories marks a fundamental shift in how we think about and utilize intelligence. We are witnessing the transition from traditional AI models and isolated tools to AI being used as a scalable production system with the power to automate business operations in real time. The number of organizations considered “AI mature” increased from 1% in 2024 to 37% in 2025.[i]^,[ii]

Traditional AI strategies center on R&D, training custom models, and running proof-of-concept pilots. AI factories go beyond fundamental capabilities—focusing on inference predictions, driving agentic AI workflows, and scaling efficiently to accommodate vast datasets and diverse workloads. These environments are purpose-built to enable enterprises to industrialize AI. From data pipelines and model training to inference and real-time insights, AI factories are engineered to handle massive workloads while maintaining seamless performance and operational efficiency. They incorporate sovereign AI capabilities to ensure data control, compliance, and security, as well as exascale computing power to drive breakthroughs in fields like science, healthcare, and national security.

Sovereign AI is critical for organizations that need AI environments aligned with their own security, compliance, and privacy standards. For many users, sovereign AI depends on trusted infrastructure with control over who can access AI systems, where workloads run, and how models are governed. AI factories are the physical engines that enable sovereign AI. However, building and securing the right infrastructure can be costly and difficult to manage. Defining clear policy frameworks and securing AI expertise can pose major roadblocks along the journey.

Deploy trusted AI faster

HPE supports sovereign AI with infrastructure designed to help organizations move from pilot to production with stronger security, compliance, governance, and control over AI operations. Leveraging an extensive portfolio of edge-to-cloud solutions, HPE makes it simpler to build an AI factory that connects, protects, analyzes, and acts on data wherever it resides—empowering organizations to turn questions into discovery, insights into action, and imagination into reality. Whether deploying turnkey solutions or designing custom infrastructures, HPE equips businesses with the tools to scale AI projects and fuel AI-powered enterprises.

HPE AI Factory sovereign is designed for environments that need jurisdictional control, options for on-prem and air-gapped deployment, centralized visibility, and architecture built to support sovereignty requirements. Co-engineered with NVIDIA, HPE AI Factory sovereign builds upon the at-scale AI Factory story by adding capabilities designed to protect AI-based computing:

• Broad control plane for observability and policy management
• Framework to ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate controls (including structures like HIPPA, EU AI, FEDramp, FIPS and NIST)
• Consulting Services to integrate sovereign security control into frameworks
• On-prem data control to store data locally
• Air-gapped solutions for isolating infrastructure
• Government-Ready NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA AI Factoryfor Government reference design

Image provided by HPE

Solutions from HPE and NVIDIA transform high performance AI into a computing platform that remains within an organization’s total control and jurisdiction—including the infrastructure itself, data, and models to the outcomes they deliver.

Large enterprises and service providers are implementing HPE AI Factories in multiple industries:

• Government policy, technology, and defense
• Scientific research and modeling
• Heavily regulated industries, such as healthcare and financial services
• Telecommunications infrastructure and tenancy
• Retail supply chain management, purchasing, and inventory management

Experience HPE AI Factory sovereign

HPE invites you to confidently grow your sovereign AI initiatives to power innovation and unlock economic growth. Join us at ISC High Performance 2026 returning to Hamburg, Germany from June 22^nd–26^th. Visit HPE at booth C10 and NVIDIA at booth E30 to talk with our experts, experience demos, and much more.

The HPE AI Factory sovereign kiosk will showcase videos of sovereign AI in action as well as an interactive slide show for you to explore. Ready for next steps? Schedule a meeting with HPE and NVIDIA specialists to discuss how turnkey speed and sovereign data control can transform your work.

Key takeaways:

• Run large-scale AI with confidence: Every aspect of creating a production-grade AI Factory is handled by HPE and offers you complete control.
• Secure sensitive and confidential data: Your data never migrates externally, and access is governed by your organization’s policies.
• Ensure compliance: Your AI Factory is architected with a comprehensive compliance framework, backed by HPE’s proven cybersecurity and compliance readiness.

Let HPE and NVIDIA help you harness sovereign AI to thrive in today’s data-driven world.

[i] “Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential,” McKinsey 2025 mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/superagency-in-the-workplace-empowering-people-to-unlock-ais-full-potential-at-work
[ii] “The art of AI maturity,” Accenture 2026 accenture.com/us-en/insights/artificial-intelligence/ai-maturity-and-transformation

The post Building AI Factories for the Future of Sovereign AI appeared first on HPCwire.

NIne months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.

As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.

A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.

Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.  

Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull as the Americans watched from above.

According to officials, Bradley explained in briefings that because the September 2 attack was the initial strike of the campaign and was conducted by the secret plane, the survivors would have had no idea they were attacked by the aircraft. They probably believed the explosion was caused by a catastrophic engine malfunction, Bradley said in the briefing.

The two men were shipwrecked, helpless, or clearly in distress, six people who saw video of the attack said. Bradley watched as the injured men clung to what remained of the boat. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on CNN after viewing video of the attack.

Three sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Senate and House Armed Services committees confirmed that the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for roughly 45 minutes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources.

Related

U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly

Bradley again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance on whether he could legally attack the shipwrecked men. Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including that lawmaker who viewed the video, said that the survivors waved their arms and, logically, must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All believed the men were signaling for help, rescue, or surrender. “Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” said one of the sources, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising one’s hands is a universal sign of surrender for members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked — are considered hors de combat, the French term for those no longer in the fight, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit on this point. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

Bradley found a workaround. While he declined to comment to The Intercept, a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.” About 45 minutes after the men had been thrown into the water, a second missile screamed down on Bradley’s order, killing them. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that those killed by U.S. forces were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and members of a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But from the very beginning, questions swirled among members of Congress and their staffers about the identities of those killed in the attack — and why there were so many of them.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing. 

One of the government officials at the briefing explained that questions arose about the few boats targeted by the U.S. with greater-than-expected numbers of people on board; the September 2 strike was singled out due to the especially large number of passengers.

Out of more than 60 strikes since, only four involved boats with six or more people aboard, almost all of them in the initial wave of attacks. In October 2025, there were two strikes on boats with six crew members and one with eight people on board. Since then, just one other vessel has had as many as six crew.

Sources and methods of identification were a major topic of the fall briefing, where it became increasingly clear that JSOC did not positively identify everyone on the boats, said the official. “Questioning then led to trying to understand who these people could be,” that official said.

The second source at the briefing said they were astonished by Bennett’s candor that victims of human trafficking might have been among those killed. “I was surprised. But only by the admission,” said that official.

Military officials with knowledge of the strikes also discussed the likelihood that some of those on board were being trafficked, were part of a more generalized smuggling operation, or had simply hitched a ride on the vessel, said another government official who was not at that briefing.

Related

Trump Administration Conjures Up New “Terrorist” Designation to Justify Killing Civilians

In later classified briefings, the Pentagon’s story of who was aboard the vessel changed — but only marginally, said two government officials. Just one person aboard the go-fast boat on September 2 was a member of a so-called “designated terrorist organization,” while 10 were “DTO affiliates,” according to the officials who received those later briefings. Both said that they were under the impression that little more than a conversation with a DTO member might confer affiliate status but said that the military’s explanations were vague.  

For weeks, The Intercept has sought to speak to Bennett, the deputy director for Special Operations on the Joint Staff, about the strikes and his briefings. “RADM Bennett is unavailable for an interview,” Maj. Annabel Monroe, a spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Intercept. “As a matter of policy, the Joint Staff does not confirm specific operational details or comment on ongoing or potential future military actions.”

Asked specifically for comment from Bennett and the Joint Staff about the trafficking remark and about how many victims of U.S. boat strikes may have been passengers of any sort, such as trafficking victims, smuggled persons, or paid passengers, Monroe replied: “Nothing further to add.” 

Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, said the command was unaware of any allegations of victims of trafficking being killed on September 2 or in subsequent strikes.

“Targeting decisions are based on comprehensive assessments and reviewed through established processes,” a spokesperson for U.S. Southern Command told The Intercept. “Every narco-terrorist killed … was an affiliated member of a Designated Terrorist Organization actively transporting illicit material along known trafficking routes in international waters.”

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group including representatives of the CIA, the State Department, White House counsel, Department of Justice, and the Department of War — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels with whom the Trump administration claims they are in a “non-international armed conflict.” Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attack. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

Six current and former government officials briefed on the boat strikes or with experience in counter-narcotics smuggling efforts said that while the vessel struck on September 2 might have had cocaine on board, the sole intent of its voyage was not drug trafficking.

“No one would smuggle cocaine with 11 people on board their drug-running boat,” said one of the current officials, noting that it was a waste of space, fuel, and created security risks. “It just is not done. Full stop.”

That official, who talked with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said that the vessel’s profile more closely matched that of a ship smuggling various types of cargo, including people. 

Retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin, said the number of passengers was an obvious red flag. “I’m disappointed in the quality of planning for this operation,” he told The Intercept. “There appears to have been a lack of knowledge and expertise in what cocaine smuggling operations look like.”

The vessel that would become the target of the first Trump administration boat strike reportedly left San Juan de Unare in Venezuela on the night of September 1. The 11 men aboard all hailed from that town or nearby Güiria, coastal communities on the Paria peninsula in Venezuela’s Sucre state. It’s an impoverished region where 90 percent of the population is food insecure; the nongovernmental organization Transparencia Venezuela identified the area as the country’s prime center of, and transit hub for, human trafficking.

Reporting by Venezuela’s El Nacional identified Güiria and San Juan de Unare as having gone from fishing and tourist centers to “corridors of organized crime,” as the economic crisis in the country “drove many fishermen to replace fishing with smuggling gasoline, migrants, and eventually, drugs.” Some boats are known to carry mixed cargos of drugs, weapons, and people.

A 2020 report on human trafficking in the Caribbean found that Venezuela was “the greatest supplier of trafficking victims to Trinidad and Tobago” — and that 43 percent of those trafficked from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago travel from Sucre. It cited a Venezuelan government official who drew specific attention to Güiria due to its proximity to Trinidad and Tobago, stating it was “frequently used clandestinely for human trafficking.” A 2025 U.S. State Department report also highlighted the “long-standing allegation that national guard and coast guard members active in coastal states, such as Sucre and Falcon, facilitated the transport of trafficking victims to Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago.”

A recent investigation by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets noted immigrant transport, people smuggling, and human trafficking is integral to the desperately poor population of Güiria and “as ordinary a job as teaching school — only far better paid.” The journalists wrote:

In this Venezuelan town, people do not call the illicit transportation of drugs and other goods … to neighboring Caribbean islands or Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula “drug trafficking” or “smuggling.” They call them vueltas—literally “runs” or “jobs”—borrowing the slang Colombian traffickers use for narcotics shipments, contract killings, or debt collections.

For many people in Güiria, those vueltas are the only path to a decent life.

According to a 2025 analysis by InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized criminal activity in the Americas, gangs from Sucre are involved in “cocaine trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, arms trafficking, and the contraband of animals and minerals.” Roughly 30 percent of trafficking victims who pass through the region wound up in sexual exploitation networks, Transparencia Venezuela found.

While trafficking victims are often assumed to be women and girls forced into sexual slavery — and many are — men and boys represent nearly half of the total number of human trafficking victims worldwide. And males are frequently mentioned in reports on Venezuela. A 2019 State Department investigation of human trafficking, for example, noted Venezuelan men were “increasingly vulnerable to forced labor in destination countries, including islands of the Dutch Caribbean.” A 2023 State Department report noted “an increase in male Venezuelan labor trafficking victims” in Trinidad and Tobago. It also details “migrant smuggling, which serves as traffickers’ primary method of transportation of victims from Venezuela.”

Between 2019 and 2022, 69 percent of Venezuelan immigrants in South America interviewed by the Mixed Migration Center reported having hired smuggling services to leave their country.

In 2023, the Curaçao Public Prosecutor’s Office also put out a warning about child trafficking, particularly from Venezuela: “Trafficked children range in age from 4 to 15 years old and are often transported in boats that also carry drugs and firearms on board.”

Related

“Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner”

An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those slain in boat strikes examined the life of one of the men killed in the September 2 attack: Luis “Che” Martínez. The AP found that Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss, made his living smuggling both drugs and people across borders, according to several people who knew him. He had been incarcerated in late 2020 on human trafficking charges after a boat he had operated capsized, killing almost 25 people — including two of his sons and several other relatives, according to local reporting at the time. He was eventually released from custody and returned to smuggling people and narcotics, acquaintances told the news outlet.

In the aftermath of Trump’s first boat strike, the size of the death toll immediately surprised those knowledgeable about illicit trade in the region. “With 11 people on board, there could have been a human smuggling element as well,” InSight Crime observed just after the September 2 attack, noting that such go-fast boats generally have a crew of two or three people. “You do not need 11 people on board a single vessel to smuggle drugs, even for a very big consignment.”

“I would have expected much more attention to what smuggling operations look like and how to distinguish serious bulk cocaine smuggling boats from inter-island smugglers that might be primarily carrying passengers,” said Baumgartner, the retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

When questioned just a day after the initial strike, at a press conference in Mexico City, Rubio explained the reasons for the attack by first mentioning human trafficking. “The President of the United States has determined that narcoterrorist organizations pose a threat to the national security of the United States,” he explained. “They are traffickers of people, they are traffickers of deadly drugs,” he said.

Facing outrage over the extrajudicial killings, Bradley has attempted to quiet questions about who the U.S. has targeted.

In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bradley confirmed significant involvement in the boat strikes by the National Security Agency. He has also reportedly told lawmakers that U.S. intelligence officials had verified the identities of the 11 people on the boat on September 2 and validated them as legitimate targets. But Special Operations Command would not confirm what Bradley told lawmakers about the identities of the 11 people killed. And numerous government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that claims that intelligence “confirms who these people are” — as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson asserted in December — is a rhetorical sleight of hand, if not an outright lie.

JSOC did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.

Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”

“Srikes [sic] are deliberate, lawful, and precise — aimed squarely at narco-terrorists and their enablers, not civilians,” a Southern Command spokesperson told The Intercept by email. “SOUTHCOM has full confidence in the operational and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

SOUTHCOM routinely claims, in fact, that “intelligence” confirms that targeted vessels are “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” But last week, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revealed that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria” involved in the boat strikes.

Behind closed doors, in fact, Pentagon officials don’t even pretend that they need to know who they are attacking. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Most of the government officials, including lawmakers briefed on the attacks, who spoke with The Intercept said that they believed the vessels targeted in the campaign are involved in illicit trafficking and are not simply fishing boats. But without stopping and searching boats, many said it was impossible to know for certain who and what is aboard a particular vessel.

In late April, Bradley told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the boat strikes are built upon the targeting procedures of the post-9/11 drone wars. “It is based off of the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,” he said, referring to strikes targeting people. Over that span, the U.S. has consistently killed civilians the world over — from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Somalia and Libya to Yemen — due to intelligence failures and targeting errors.

“There has never been a ‘perfecting’ of persona targeting. Just because the U.S. military — and other U.S. forces — conducted many strikes against known targets under the moniker of counterterrorism does not mean that they became significantly better at it over time,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser to the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Over those same two decades being lauded as a time of learning lessons for the U.S. military, human rights groups documented repeated civilian deaths tied to flawed intelligence or assumptions or bias.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept, for instance, revealed a raft of errors leading up to a drone strike in Somalia that killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Special Operations forces who conducted the strike were confused, despite months of “target development,” and argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. They mistook a woman and child for an adult male and never even knew how many people they killed.

“When Adm. Bradley references ‘the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,’ he’s actually invoking an architecture that human rights groups criticized regularly for overconfidence in the intelligence, confirmation bias and assumptions, and institutional incentives to interpret ambiguity as threat confirmation,” Yager said.

Related

The U.S. Still Owes Money to Family of 10 Afghans It Killed in “Horrible Mistake”

Five experts, including current and former government officials, say that it’s impossible that the U.S. has not killed innocent people in its boat strike campaign given the long-standing limitations of U.S. targeting procedures, such as an overreliance on signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio admitted that the U.S. has erroneously identified boats as possible targets, only to pull back. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” he said. “There are multiple times that I’ve been aware of … because it doesn’t meet the criteria or because there’s doubt.”

“Secret planes and SIGINT aren’t the answer. Confirmation bias continues to be a problem,” one government official briefed on the boat strikes told The Intercept. That official said it was far more likely that U.S. forces had misidentified or outright failed to notice a person aboard one of the boats that have been struck than that they knew the names and affiliations of everyone they had killed.

Government statistics confirm the limitations of intelligence, profiling, and the ability of U.S. personnel to identify supposed drug traffickers from afar. Between September 1, 2024, and October 7, 2025, the Coast Guard interdicted 212 boats headed toward the U.S. that it suspected of drug-trafficking. Forty-one of them, or about 20 percent, had no illicit contraband on board, according to official statistics. As for ships just off the coast of Venezuela, the amount wrongly suspected of carrying drugs was a shade higher: 21 percent.

When asked about the statistics showing 1 in 5 vessels had no drugs aboard, Yager told The Intercept that “positive identification of both targets and civilians has been a known problem in the U.S. military kill chain.”

“In the case of the boat strikes, that’s a high rate of mistaken identity,” she said. “My guess is that the U.S. military has no idea who these people actually are before moving to kill them.”

The post Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.

A child reported among those killed when Taliban forces fired on crowds in Herat, who were protesting over arrests of women accused of violating hijab dress code

A Taliban crackdown on women’s dress code in Afghanistan has escalated into a rare mass street protest in the western province of Herat, with at least two people, including one boy, killed by security forces.

Officials made a wave of arrests in recent days targeting women and young girls accused of “improper hijab”. Residents say many families had received no information about the whereabouts or condition of those detained.

Renewed outrage at White House’s use manga and anime imagery after US president is depicted as ninja Naruto

Japanese anime and manga fans are urging Donald Trump to stop using their favourite characters in his social media posts.

About 20,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org entitled Protect Japanese Manga, protesting against the official White House X account posting videos featuring unauthorised use of imagery from the popular Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto series. Angry fans have also been posting on social media.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 10 No. 625.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 10, No. 829.

Billboards are being painted over and former allies seem eager to forget the man they once glorified

For years, his bewhiskered face stared down from propaganda billboards glorifying the supposedly revolutionary rule of a dictator who styled himself as “the protector of the people”.

The spin-doctored adoration was such that factories churned out plastic action figures exalting Nicolás Maduro as an “indestructible” and “iron-fisted” caped crusader nicknamed “Super Moustache”.

What about using voice notes, or calling someone totally unannounced? Experts give their verdict on how to use your phone without causing offence

It is not news that many of us are addicted to our phones and nor is it a revelation that inconsiderate public behaviour now appears to be the norm, but when the two collide it can cause anger. Last week, at the end of a performance of the drama Inter Alia in London’s West End, the actor Rosamund Pike took to the stage after the curtain call to announce that she had seen someone texting during the performance. “I just wanted to say for anyone going to the theatre, it’s a huge thing that we’re trying to give you. I am trying to tell you a story, and I’m feeling you, and I hope you’re feeling me too … Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are, but we do see these, we do feel them.”

What is the correct etiquette when using your phone? Myka Meier, author of Modern Etiquette Made Easy, says: “It is always thinking about other people before yourself when you’re on the phone.” This also means being aware of how disabled people might use, and rely on, their phones. As an academic with hearing loss pointed out to the BBC after Pike’s comments, bans on phones in theatres, or public shaming, could exclude disabled people in audiences, such as those who use hearing aid apps and need to adjust the settings.

As a lifelong Knicks fan, the Public Enemy frontman knows how much New York craves an end to its 53-year NBA title drought

I didn’t see the Knicks win their second championship in 1973 because I had to go to bed.

That night, the Knicks beat the LA Lakers, but clinching game was on the west coast and it was a school night. I couldn’t watch it. I was 13 and in seventh grade. Back then things were different. Today, 13-year-olds stay up to 5am. But I had to go to bed.

Chuck D was talking to Jacob Uitti.

In city after city, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has been met by protests and rallies from members of the local community opposed to the White House’s deportation policies. Federal agents from the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have repeatedly attempted to break up and drive back these crowds through the use of airborne irritants like tear gas and pepper spray, which can cause an array of immediate reactions — from eye pain to shortness of breath to nausea and vomiting — intended to temporarily disable their targets.

DHS has defended its use of these weapons on crowds and said that it “does NOT target children,” but after reviewing news accounts, lawsuits and officer-worn body camera footage, as well as verifying incidents by interviewing more than 40 victims or witnesses, ProPublica recently identified more than six dozen instances in which children had been harmed by tear gas and pepper spray.

Here are five things you should know about how these airborne weapons have been used during Trump’s immigration crackdown and how their use has particularly harmed children.

Dozens of children have been harmed by tear gas deployed by immigration agents.

So-called less lethal weapons like tear gas and pepper spray were developed to inflict severe pain and debilitate adult combatants and rioters, but ProPublica identified 79 children across the country since 2025 who have been harmed by these chemicals after they were deployed by federal immigration officers. Our tally is nearly four times the number cited in a recent congressional report, yet it is likely still a vast undercount.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended its agents’ use of the chemicals and claimed the blame lies with “agitators” in the crowds and parents who put their children in harm’s way. Many children harmed by tear gas and pepper spray were in their cars, at home or walking to school when they came into contact with the airborne weapons.

Tear gas and pepper spray are especially toxic to children.

There is no one such thing as “tear gas.” It’s a catch-all term for various chemical irritants that exist as a fine powder and trigger nerve endings to feel as if they’re on fire. The chemicals sear your lungs and throat, inflaming your airways until it feels like you’re breathing through a straw, while snot and tears stream down your face. They can cause vomiting, rashes and coughs that last for weeks. Pepper spray is made from compounds found in hot peppers and causes similar effects.

Because children breathe more rapidly and can pull in more contaminated air than adults relative to their body weight, these weapons are particularly dangerous to the young. Children are also more vulnerable because they have narrower airways and they are closer to the ground, where tear gas tends to pool after being deployed. The Trump administration’s use of tear gas has been so extraordinary that no one yet knows what long-term harm may result from children who’ve come into contact with these chemicals — some of them multiple times.

Courts have found that agents’ use of tear gas is excessive, but their power is limited.

In November 2025, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that ICE and CBP officers had deployed these chemicals “without justification, often without warning” against people who didn’t pose a physical threat. This constituted an illegal use of excessive force, said the judge, ordering the agencies to stop. But her injunction covered only the areas mentioned in the complaint. Agents were unfettered to continue using the weapons elsewhere.

After federal agents in Portland, Oregon, responded to a Jan. 31 rally by firing various less-lethals into the crowd — including Triple Chaser grenades that each separated into three tear gas canisters; dozens of pepper ball projectiles filled with chemical munitions; and “rubber ball grenades” that released stinging pellets, bright lights, and loud sounds — a judge there issued a temporary restraining order that forbade federal agents from using chemical munitions unless targeted at someone who posed “an imminent threat of physical harm.”

However, appellate courts have subsequently vacated the Illinois judge’s ruling and multiple rulings from judges in Portland seeking to enjoin the use of these weapons.

Once deployed, these weapons are difficult to contain.

Though the Trump administration has defended agents’ training and said ICE officers are taught to use “the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations,” not only can tear gas canisters launched into a crowd bounce and roll unpredictably, but the toxic chemicals can travel through the air, sometimes for blocks. In Minneapolis, ProPublica found that tear gas had traveled at least a quarter mile before seeping into a McDonald’s.

Derrick Nash and his family live a block and a half east of an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Even from that distance, they felt the effects inside their homes when officers tear-gassed protesters. Each time the tear gas seeped in, the kids — ages 6 to 17 — coughed, and their throats often burned. The eldest, a high school senior with asthma, would hide out in his second-floor bedroom. One evening, his face turned red as he coughed uncontrollably and sucked on his inhaler without relief.

“He was wigging out, saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Nash recalled. The family considered calling an ambulance, but the street was closed.

No national standard for use of tear gas exists.

Law enforcement policies governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray differ widely by location, and no federal standard exists. The DHS policy on force says officers must use tactics that “minimize the risk of unintended injury” and should be guided by “respect for human life.” The CBP’s policy says officers “should not use” pepper spray or “less-lethal” chemical munitions against “small children.” ICE’s policy says “the presence of other officers, subjects, or bystanders” are a factor in determining whether an officers’ use of force is reasonable.

Read More

Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences.

At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign.

U.S. Lawmakers Demand Reforms to Immigration Officers’ Use of Tear Gas and Pepper Spray

Compare that with tear gas policies in two cities that have experienced Trump’s immigration crackdown firsthand. In Portland, police officers who consider using tear gas must take into account their proximity to homes. Meanwhile, Minneapolis forbids officers from using chemical munitions for crowd control unless authorized by the police chief — even when officers fear they will be physically harmed.

Requiring all law enforcement agencies to adopt uniform policies and training methods would go a long way, experts told ProPublica. At the same time, they acknowledge that this would likely require Congress to pass a bill mandating that federal law enforcement entities adopt stricter practices and incentivize local police departments to do the same.

Bills that seek to strengthen use-of-force training on such a wide scale and legislation that targets DHS and its use of these weapons have thus far failed to even make it to a vote in Congress. Following ProPublica’s investigation, U.S. lawmakers have begun demanding reforms to immigration officers’ use of these weapons.

The post What You Need to Know About How Tear Gas Harms Kids appeared first on ProPublica.

NASA has named Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas as the crew for Artemis III, which has been reworked from a moon-landing mission into a roughly two-week Earth-orbit test of lunar landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. NBC News reports: Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas are expected to launch into Earth orbit next year, with the goal of testing two commercially developed lunar landers that are slated to carry astronauts to the surface of the moon during the Artemis IV mission in 2028. Bresnik will be the mission's commander, with Parmitano, an Italian astronaut with the European Space Agency, serving as the pilot. Douglas and Rubio will be mission specialists, and Bob Hines will train with the crew as a backup member. "This test flight will enable us to prove we can carry out highly choreographed operations with our partners across hardware interfaces, software propulsion systems and life support elements with crew in the high-stakes space environment," Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, said during NASA's announcement on Tuesday. Bresnik has been to the International Space Station twice, most recently as commander of an expedition in 2017. A retired U.S. Marine colonel, he was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2004. Bresnik has helped oversee development and testing of spacecraft for the Artemis program as an assistant to the chief of the Astronaut Office, which manages astronaut training and operations. Parmitano has also done two stints on the ISS and served as commander of an expedition in 2019. He has completed a total of six spacewalks and also performed the first live DJ set in orbit. Before becoming an astronaut, Parmitano was a test pilot for the Italian air force. For Rubio, a physician with 28 years of service in the Army, Artemis III will be his second trip to space. From 2022 to 2023, he spent 371 days on the space station, breaking the record for longest-duration spaceflight by an American, according to NASA. Douglas is the only crew member making his spaceflight debut. An engineer who previously worked on space exploration and robotics at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, he became a NASA astronaut in 2022. Douglas was the backup crew member for the Artemis II mission around the moon earlier this year. He told NBC News in an interview after Tuesday's announcement that the role had at times been a challenge. "It was hard to figure out how do you balance getting ready to go, not go, all that stuff," he said. "But to go now is just fantastic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Peiqing Ni targeted by account portraying her as promiscuous drug addict after posting about Tiananmen Square

A high-profile Chinese activist in the UK who was inundated with deepfake posts on X portraying her as a sexually promiscuous drug addict was told that the abuse did not breach the rules of Elon Musk’s platform.

Apple Peiqing Ni, the 27-year-old founder of the UK-based China Dissent Network, had been advised by UK police to complain to the US-headquartered platform after she was targeted by what she believes is a pro-regime bot.

The two helicopter pilots were uninjured. After the retaliatory strikes were announced, President Trump said, "I believe the response should be very strong, very powerful."

US president blames Tehran for loss of Apache gunship, whose crew were rescued by a drone near strait of Hormuz

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US has launched strikes against Iran after Donald Trump blamed Tehran for downing a US army helicopter near the strait of Hormuz, imperilling a shaky ceasefire that was announced by the two countries in April.

The attacks triggered a wave of retaliatory strikes from Iran on Wednesday morning, with Tehran saying it had targeted Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

MP Melanie Ward calls on Charity Commission to look into 32 organisations she says have given at least £28m

Thirty-two charities in England and Wales have donated at least £28m to Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law, an MP has said.

Labour’s Melanie Ward said that if gift aid were claimed against the donations in the usual way, it would mean taxpayers had subsidised illegal settlements to the tune of £5.6m, a situation she described as deplorable. The foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced on Tuesday that the Charity Commission has been tasked with investigating UK charities’ links to settlements.

Amazon and Sony among firms that may have sourced coltan, used in phones, from supply chains controlled by the M23 rebels, says Global Witness

Leading global brands including Amazon, Ericsson and Sony are “likely” to have sourced minerals linked to a militia accused of widespread sexual violence, summary executions and torture, a new investigation claims.

The companies allegedly, but unknowingly, acquired coltan smuggled from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that are occupied by the M23 militia, which has committed myriad atrocities in eastern DRC.

The Ukraine and Iran wars are very different, but a common authoritarian delusion unites the men who started them

A strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of roubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 10.

Exclusive: poll across 15 countries finds ‘deep mistrust’, with majority doubting US would come to their aid in an attack

European confidence in an American “security guarantee” has hit a historic low, a survey suggests, with only one in 10 people across 15 countries seeing the US as an ally and majorities in all doubting it would come to their aid if they were attacked.

The survey, published on Wednesday by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank before critical G7 and Nato summits in France and Turkey over the coming weeks, revealed “deep European distrust in the US”, the authors said.

Russia’s loss is NATO’s gain.

Europe lost the plot on online speech.

America must build—and use—leverage against Beijing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones -- a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase -- which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country's telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity. The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with. In a synopsis of the proposed changes, the FCC writes, "Specifically, we seek comment on requiring originating providers to, at a minimum, obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate telephone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to its services." The goal of collecting this data, the FCC writes, is to deter some scammers from getting onto a telecom network in the first place, and so "enforcers will be better able to identify the scammers when they do." The FCC compares the changes to the sort of data collected by banks to prevent money laundering. One section stresses that the newly collected data would help "law enforcement to more easily identify callers that use the network to perpetuate crimes by ensuring that voice providers have accurate and complete customer information." It goes on to ask if the data would help identify people buying and selling illicit goods; the investigation of "fraud, espionage, or influence operations that undermine national security", and "address abuse in text messaging networks." "Criminals continue to leverage the anonymity provided by phone calls and texts to defraud Americans and exploit communications networks to further other crimes," one section reads. "For decades, civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked. We never thought that would happen here," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told 404 Media in an email. "But make no mistake: with this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people's ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low-income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Progressive Randy Villegas' win is an embarrassing defeat for establishment Democrats amid an intraparty feud about the party's future.

• Staal scores twice as Carolina level Cup final

• Hurricanes beat Vegas 5-3 in Game 4 thriller

• Series shifts to Carolina tied at two games apiece

Jordan Staal scored his second goal of the game while stretched out on his stomach at 6:32 of the third period to put the Carolina Hurricanes ahead for good in their 5-3 victory on Tuesday night over the Vegas Golden Knights and even the Stanley Cup final after four games.

Game 5 is Thursday night at Carolina, which will potentially have two games on home ice to win their first Cup in two decades. The Golden Knights are searching for their second in four years.

Lieutenant governor and attorney general advance but result signals decisive defeat for controversial Nancy Mace

Donald Trump-backed Pamela Evette, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, and Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general, have advanced to a runoff in a competitive race to represent the Republican party in South Carolina’s gubernatorial election.

The winner of the Republican primary is favored to win the closely watched general election, given South Carolina’s conservative tilt, although Democrats are hoping to ride a wave of progressive enthusiasm to make political gains across the ticket.

The killing of Austin Metcalf, 17, captured national attention and exposed racial and ethnic tensions in the north Dallas suburbs.

Sen. Lindsey Graham has held the seat since 2003, and Democrats have an uphill battle in any attempt to unseat him.

Maine Democrat Graham Platner clinched the nomination to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

Thanks. Sounds like the battery path is basically a dead end on a 7314/Hydrus 5200.

If you were in my position and wanted:

1. More range

2. Better hill climbing

3. To eventually go VESC

what would you do next?

Would you spend money on a tire, motor, or other upgrades first, or would you skip all that and just go all-in on a Pint X V Kit?

I’m trying to avoid spending money twice. If you had $300–$800 to put toward this board, where would you spend it and why?

Platner, whose campaign was hit by series of negative headlines, to face Susan Collins in key midterm contest

Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and progressive activist, has scaled a mountain of personal controversies to win the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Maine.

Platner won 72% of the vote, defeating the state governor, Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and third-placed David Costello, based on early results reported by Reuters.

The latest VisionOS updates give Apple's headset a few things that future glasses could also add. There are other interesting additions, too.

If you can't afford to have your teeth professionally whitened, these are some affordable options to try at home.

A longtime fixture of the Democratic establishment in California and a Republican former Fox News host will head to a runoff in the race to be the state’s next governor in November.

Steve Hilton, a conservative former political aide and commentator, finished second Tuesday, a week after the state’s nonpartisan primary day. He will compete with Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden. The pair edged out Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who ran on a progressive platform.

The ascension of Hilton, a conservative power player endorsed by President Donald Trump, suggests dissatisfaction with the slate of Democratic candidates on offer in the open primary and an inability for Steyer, who has never held elected office, to break through with a campaign vowing to help redistribute the wealth.

It also offers Becerra an easier path to election, with California voters expected to skew heavily Democratic in November.

Becerra, who ran a relatively quiet campaign focused on his credentials, previously served as California attorney general under Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. He came under fire for his work in that office, as The Intercept reported last month. In 2018, Becerra’s office pushed for the state Supreme Court to artificially inflate the IQ of an intellectually disabled Black man in order to execute him, and he fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid pandemic, despite a moratorium Newsom imposed. Becerra has also been criticized for his alleged mishandling of migrant children who were in his office’s care while serving as HHS secretary. 

Related

“Me Too” Comes Back to Congress

His primary campaign managed to overcome those criticisms, racking up high-profile endorsements from figures including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., as well as several notable labor unions. Becerra’s campaign was also boosted by the rapid and scandalous departure of former front-runner Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape. Swalwell denied the allegations but swiftly resigned from Congress and ended his gubernatorial campaign, clearing a path in the centrist lane that Becerra quickly filled. 

Hilton, meanwhile, spent months neck and neck in the polls with Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who used his immense wealth to fund his campaign yet ran on what was widely considered the most progressive platform in the race, earning the head-turning endorsement of Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. 

While he’s a relative unknown in the United States, Hilton has a reputation in the United Kingdom for helping to orchestrate the rise of former British Prime Minister David Cameron. If he manages to defeat Becerra in November, Hilton will be California’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger, the architect of the state’s open primary system.

The post In California, a Former Biden Official Will Face Fox News Personality for Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

The ex-reality TV star, who lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire, cast himself as the antidote to the city’s woes

Spencer Pratt, an ex-reality TV star, cast himself as the antidote to Los Angeles’s woes as he campaigned to be the city’s next mayor.

He curried favor with swaths of disillusioned voters who related to his diatribes against city leadership. His fervent social media posts, including re-shares of AI-generated campaign ads showing LA in an apocalyptic light, garnered national attention.

Home city of Amazon and Microsoft passes moratorium as backlash against energy-guzzling AI infrastructure grows

Seattle has passed a year-long moratorium on the construction of new datacenters. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the temporary ban on Tuesday.

A major tech hub whose metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country.

After extensive hands-on testing, these are the watches that stood out for their design, features, accuracy, battery life and overall value.

Portable Bluetooth speakers keep getting better with each passing year. As CNET's mobile audio expert, I've tested hundreds of wireless speakers. Here are my current top picks for every budget.

Former UK political operative endorsed by Trump will face off against Democrat Xavier Becerra in November election

Republican Steve Hilton, the former UK political operative turned Fox News personality, has advanced to the November general election in the race to become California’s next governor, facing off against Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman, state attorney general and US health secretary.

Hilton’s success, a remarkable achievement for a recent immigrant, came after he was endorsed by Donald Trump.

The startup touted a production-ready breakthrough in solid-state battery tech, but the claims collapsed under scrutiny.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 10, No. 1,817.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 10, No. 1,095.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and adviser to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, will advance to November's general election in the race to become California's next governor, CBS News projects.

Bill Pulte will begin serving as acting director of national intelligence in a week-and-a-half, President Trump said, effectively standing by his decision to name the housing regulator and Trump loyalist.

Polls open in Maine, North Dakota, Nevada, and South Carolina; voters appear to stand by Democratic challenger Graham Platner despite string of controversies

• Maine voters weigh Platner scandals: ‘It’s not my job to judge’

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

The Associated Press projects that Republican Steve Hilton, the former UK political operative turned Fox News personality, has advanced to the November general election in the race to become California’s next governor, in a match-up against Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman, state attorney general and US health secretary.

Hilton’s success, a remarkable achievement for a recent immigrant, came after he was endorsed by Donald Trump.

Emily C Marks finds method proposed to kill Jeffery Lee violates ban on cruel and unusual punishment

A federal judge on Tuesday permanently blocked Alabama from executing a man with nitrogen gas after declaring the method violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Alabama became the first state in the nation to use the execution method in January 2024, but has faced repeated legal challenges to its use.

Emily C Marks, a US district judge, permanently enjoined the state from executing Jeffery Lee by nitrogen gas. Lee was scheduled to be executed Thursday at an Alabama prison.

Crowds gather at sites across Belfast after Sudanese man charged with attempted murder

• Full report: Man seriously injured in Belfast stabbing Starmer describes as ‘sickening’

Badenoch said, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it was right that people wanted to ensure this did not happen again.

It led to the Macpherson report, she said.

[It] wanted to put right what went wrong with policing in the 1990s.

However, in attempting to do so, it also enshrined a principle which I believe is wrong that a racist incident is racist if it is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person.

Equality law, properly designed, should protect us all in the same way. It should be a shield, not a sword.

It should protect people from discrimination. It should protect people from being treated differently because of their race, sex, religion, sexuality, disability or age.

A sunscreen ingredient that's been available in Europe, Japan and South Korea for years has finally been approved by the FDA for sale in the U.S.

It's the seventh time this session that a discharge petition has secured the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote on legislation.

President backs Pulte for acting DNI chief despite backlash that puts reauthorization of key surveillance law at risk

Donald Trump met with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, at the White House on Tuesday as pressure mounts on the president to nominate a permanent director of national intelligence, the step some Republicans now believe is the only way to save a controversial and powerful surveillance law before it expires by the end of the week.

At stake is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a post-9/11 authority that allows US intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreign targets overseas without a court warrant. While the program is intended to target non-Americans abroad, it can also sweep up communications involving Americans. This powerful and contentious spy tool is set to expire at midnight on Thursday.

Justice secretary’s plans likely to increase black people’s suspicion of court system, committee suggests

David Lammy’s planned changes to the criminal courts in England and Wales could have a “far-reaching” impact on race relations, a cross-party committee of MPs has concluded.

The deputy prime minister’s plan to remove the right to elect for a crown court trial “has the potential to increase mistrust in the criminal justice system among the black community”, the justice select committee said, because black defendants are more likely to elect for trial.

Inmates in England and Wales live among vermin while gangs control entire wings, monitors warn, with failures ‘at risk of becoming normalised’

• Staff at immigration detention centre wore England flags, report finds

The independent monitoring board’s annual report of conditions across the prison estate of England and Wales is stark and unflinching.

Men and women are held for long periods in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, often living alongside vermin.

Chair of prisons and detention watchdog concerned about intimidating effect as wide-ranging and damning review published

• Grim reality of prison conditions laid bare in damning report

Staff at an immigration detention centre wore England flags pinned to their uniforms while guarding migrants, a report from the prisons and detention watchdog has revealed.

Their use by staff at one of the Home Office’s short-term holding facilities to detain migrants is revealed in the Independent Monitoring Boards’ national annual report, published on Wednesday, which is based on 127 annual reports about different prisons, young offender institutions and immigration detention centres.

Targeted vaccination and improved testing planned as part of drive to eradicate disease by 2038

Cattle will be vaccinated against tuberculosis from 2030 as a “gamechanging” part of a new strategy to drive eradication of the disease in England by 2038. In parallel, the last badger culls are expected to end by 2029, with vaccination of badgers expanded.

More than 20,000 infected cattle are slaughtered each year, costing taxpayers £100m and inflicting a heavy toll on affected farmers’ livelihoods and mental health. Mass culling of badgers began in 2013 and has killed about 250,000 animals, at a cost of about £60m.

The Pentagon has added Alibaba, BYD, Baidu, Unitree, and other Chinese companies to its list of firms it says support China's military, barring them from U.S. defense contracts. The companies and China's embassy deny the allegations. The Associated Press reports: Created in 2021 by a congressional mandate, the list (PDF) seeks to identify Chinese companies that the Pentagon considers to have links to the Chinese military -- not only those directly controlled by the Chinese military and security forces but also those contributing to the country's defense industrial base. When updating the list last year, the Pentagon said the Chinese military sought to acquire advanced technologies and expertise developed by Chinese companies, universities and research programs that "appear to be civilian entities." The Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement. [...] The Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vice-president says deal could ‘absolutely’ come before midterms, as US strikes Iran after downing of helicopter

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US-Israel war on Iran could conclude in a week or a few months, Vice-president JD Vance said in an interview, hours before US forces launched retaliatory strikes against Iran, in response to the downing of the Apache helicopter near the strait of Hormuz a day earlier.

In a new interview with CBS, taped early Tuesday and set to air later this week, Vance claimed the US was “very close to achieving” a peace deal with Iran, adding that it could “absolutely” come before the midterm elections.

The highly rated book adaptation premieres on MGM Plus soon.

AI company restricted access to Fable 5, its most powerful Mythos model, for months over cybersecurity concerns

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, made a new version of its technology available to the general public on Tuesday while restricting its use in sensitive areas.

Dubbed Fable 5, the model is the first to be made widely available from the company’s new Mythos class – its most advanced lineup of AI technology, unveiled in April but restricted to a small set of partner institutions for months over cybersecurity concerns.

The House passed Republicans' $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies for the rest of the Trump administration.

Reproducibility is absolutely critical in science, but it’s a troublesome characteristic when it comes to AI. Frontier models developed by Big AI may deliver superior accuracy and reasoning capabilities, but they do so largely as black boxes with little regard for reproducibility. If AI is going to turbo-charge scientific productivity, it must do so without compromising reproducibility. The question, then, becomes how to achieve it.

This was the topic of a presentation at the TPC26 conference last week by Noah Smith, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and senior director of NLP research at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Smith discussed why it’s important for scientists to have AI tools that meet their needs when it comes to reproducibility, and how model flows can help to deliver them.

Image courtesy Noah Smith, Ai2

“Scientists need to be able to inspect and control their tools. A big part of science is your tools–the engineering, the systems that are going to help you answer questions,” Smith said. “At the Allen Institute for AI and with our collaborators at the University of Washington and other universities, we’ve taken the position that the way to get to this fine-grained control and inspectability is through what we call model flows.”

What exactly is a “model flow”? Smith went on:

“We use this term ‘model flow’ to refer to a kind of full openness,” he continued. “Everything that you need to reproduce the work from the very beginning: all of the data, the model weights…and intermediate checkpoints. We describe the entire recipe. I’ll give you all the code that you need to reproduce any stage so that you can go back and change anything. All of our evaluations are careful and open, and we richly document and analyze the capabilities of the models.”

Clearly, many frontier models fail to check even some of these boxes. Claude, Gemini, and GPT from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are all extremely capable models that deliver stellar results on many general purpose topics, but they are closed source and don’t offer the full model flows that is critical for reproducibility. Scientists receiving funding from government institutions, including the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, can use these proprietary frontier models, although they must meet strict privacy and security guarantees.

Noah Smith, Ai2 director of NLP research and computer science professor at University of Washington

There are other challenges with using frontier models from Big AI. For starters, they’re optimized for consumer and enterprise usage, not necessarily for science (although some Big AI providers, like Google, are offering science packages). They also tend to be quite expensive to use at scale, which is why much of the discussion of AI for science and engineering, at least in the public sphere, tends to take place around fully open models.

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), which received $152 million in funding last August from the NSF and Nvidia, is developing the Olmo 3 family of fully open models, intended primarily for use by scientists and engineers. Olmo 3, available in 7B and 32B sizes, delivers the full model flows that scientists need, and but at a fraction of the data budget of something like Qwen 3, according to Smith.

One of the Olmo 3 models is Molmo, a vision-language model designed to generate textual descriptions from visual input, and MolmoPoint, which adds support for pointing commands. Vision-language models are important for bridging the gap between AI models and agents and robots that are going to act in the real world, Smith said. Molmo2, which was recently released, adds support for video.

There is also DR Tulu, a reinforcement learning (RL) model designed to power deep research agents. The DR Tulu stack gives scientists the ability to create agents that search and browse literature, evaluate relevance, integrate evidence, write answers with attribution, and evaluate precision and recall. It uses RL to create rubrics that evolve based on what the agent discovers. DR Tulu-8B performs comparatively to GPT-5 Search, OpenAI DR, and Claude Sonnet, but at a cost that is 100X to 1,000X less.

Image courtesy Noah Smith, Ai2

Olmo Hybrid, meanwhile, melds the precise recall of transformers with the superior state tracking of linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to create a hybrid model that excels at both. Olmo Hybrid delivers superior performance in math, coding, and other categories compared to Olmo 3-7B, as well as offering better scaling, according to Smith.

While the AI models from Ai2 can deliver comparable performance to proprietary frontier models, they do so with full reproducibility as a result of their open model flows. They’re also more adaptable than frontier models, which Smith cited as another factor in their favor. If scientists value reproducibility, adaptability, and the ability to control their own AI models, then fully open models should be where they are putting their chips, he said.

“I think reproducing commercial AI is too small a goal for those of us working in the open space,” Smith said. “I think building infrastructure for science needs to enable scientific communities to do things that the market is just never going to prioritize: Inspect the internals of the system, adapt it to local scientific requirements, study every aspect of its development so we can make improvements, [and] control the costs and specialize for long-tail domains.”

The post Why Model Flows Are the Key for Reproducibility in AI for Science appeared first on HPCwire.

The European Commission has ordered Meta to temporarily restore free WhatsApp Business API access for rival AI chatbots while it investigates whether Meta's ban on third-party assistants abuses its dominant position. Meta says it will appeal, calling the move "regulatory overreach" that would let major AI companies use a paid WhatsApp product for free. The BBC reports: The EU said it began its investigation, in December 2025, after Meta banned third-party general-purpose AI assistants from the WhatsApp for Business API. It said that appeared to be an abuse of Meta's dominant position in European markets. So, as an interim measure as its investigation continues, it has given Meta five working days to re-instate access for third-party general-purpose AI assistants to the WhatsApp for Business API under the same terms and conditions that were in place previously. "In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted," said Teresa Ribera, the Commission's executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition. "This is why these interim measures will remain in place for the duration of the investigation." She added the decision "preserved choice for citizens across Europe on the AI assistants they want to use with WhatsApp, without that decision being made for them." The Commission said if Meta failed to comply with its interim decision it could be fined up to 10% up of its total turnover. "The European Commission has decided that OpenAI and some of the largest companies in the world can use the paid-for WhatsApp Business product for free," it said in a statement. "This is regulatory overreach subsidized by the many European companies that pay. We will appeal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This live blog is now closed. For the latest, read our full report:

• House Republicans approve $70bn bill for Trump’s immigration crackdown

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

Vice-president JD Vance has added a chicken coop to his residence at the US Naval Observatory, the Daily Wire reports, along with a dozen baby chicks whose new henhouse is designed to look like the Victorian home where the second family lives.

The coop was built without taxpayer money, a person familiar with the project told the Associated Press. The residence hosted a family event over the weekend where local 4-H students taught other kids about the newly installed coup, the person said.

Secure America Act passes largely along party lines in 214-212 vote, ending months-long standoff with Democrats

House Republicans on Tuesday approved a $70bn bill funding through the duration of his term the agencies leading Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, ending a months-long standoff with Democrats that at one point forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to shutter.

The Secure America Act passed in a 214-212 vote that was largely along party lines, with Kevin Kiley, an independent who aligns with the Republicans, joining all Democrats in voting no. The Senate approved the measure last week, which allocates $38bn to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), $26bn to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $5bn more to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through September 2029. The legislation now awaits Trump’s signature.

A year ago, AWS’s Thierry Pellegrino estimated that quantum computing was still four to five years away from broad commercial relevance. Speaking at TPC26 last week, however, he suggested the timeline may be accelerating.

“I think 2027 is going to see a lot of advancements,” Pellegrino said, arguing that some quantum computing modalities are making progress toward the logical qubit counts needed to tackle meaningful scientific problems.

The prospect of quantum computing becoming useful sooner than expected formed a central theme of Pellegrino’s keynote, which examined how advances in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and high performance computing are reshaping scientific discovery.

Pellegrino also argued that researchers increasingly need access to both cloud and on-premises computing resources, depending on the scale, urgency and nature of their workloads. The result, he said, is a more flexible computing environment in which advanced computing capabilities are no longer limited to organizations that can build and operate dedicated supercomputers.

“There used to be a time that a lot of us remember where building a supercomputer would take years,” Pellegrino said. Today, he added, researchers can access supercomputing resources “with the click of a button,” enabling a level of flexibility and scale that was previously available only to a handful of large national laboratories.

Thierry Pellegrino, Global Head of Advanced Computing at AWS, speaking at TPC26 in Baltimore.

Against that backdrop, Pellegrino outlined four areas where he believes quantum computing is most likely to deliver practical value first: physics and chemistry, cryptography, materials science, and optimization.

In physics and chemistry, quantum computers could help researchers simulate molecules and other quantum systems that are difficult to model accurately using conventional computers. Materials science represents a related opportunity, with researchers exploring how quantum systems might be used to engineer novel materials with properties that are difficult to predict using classical methods.

Cryptography remains one of the most widely discussed quantum applications. Pellegrino acknowledged that advances in quantum computing could eventually threaten some existing encryption methods, but argued that concerns about an imminent cryptographic apocalypse are often overstated.

“Even if we get to the point that a quantum computer can break that code, it will cost so much money that you will need to really know what data you want to get to,” he said. “So it’s not the end of the world.”

His fourth category encompasses optimization problems and related applications. While these remain largely prospective, Pellegrino said routing, resource allocation and machine learning continue to be promising areas for future quantum computing applications.

Despite the growing excitement around quantum computing, Pellegrino stressed that the technology is unlikely to replace classical high performance computing. Instead, he described a future in which the two become increasingly interdependent. Quantum hardware development already relies heavily on HPC resources for chip design, simulation and algorithm development, while future scientific workflows may combine classical supercomputers, AI models and quantum processors to tackle problems that would be difficult for any one technology to solve alone.

“Quantum researchers and scientists need HPC,” he said. “I believe also HPC needs quantum for the future of technology innovation.”

(Source: AWS)

As an example of the growing relationship between HPC and quantum computing, Pellegrino pointed to research by teams from the University of Southern California, Harvard University and AWS focused on quantum error correction.

The researchers developed a digital twin of a quantum device that could be used to evaluate error-correction strategies more effectively than conventional approaches that rely on simulating a device and injecting artificial noise. According to Pellegrino, the technique enabled analysis of a 97-physical-qubit system in 75 minutes using a single server with 96 virtual CPUs.

Without this approach, he said, the calculations would have required computational resources that were effectively out of reach.

While much of the discussion at TPC26 focused on AI-accelerated workflows, Pellegrino stressed that advances in scientific discovery will also depend on closer integration between classical HPC and quantum computing.

“Integrated quantum classical computing, that’s my plea,” he said. “Do not forget about quantum.”

The post TPC26: AWS’s Pellegrino Says 2027 Could Mark a Quantum Turning Point appeared first on HPCwire.

A new analysis warns a proposed FEMA overhaul by a Trump-appointed panel would limit access to disaster aid for survivors, shifting the burden to state and local agencies amid hurricane season.

Anthropic is releasing Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class AI model for enterprise customers and paid subscribers. The company says broader access is possible thanks to new safeguards that block high-risk requests in areas like cybersecurity and biology. "For us, it's really around what we call 'race to the top,' being able to provide this technology in a valuable fashion, and at the same time providing the right safety guardrails so that it can do asymmetrically more benefits than harm," Dianne Penn, Anthropic's head of product management for research, told CNBC in an interview. CNBC reports: [W]ith the launch of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic is honoring its stated "eventual goal" to deploy Mythos-class models at scale. It's also capitalizing on growing momentum and investor interest in its technology ahead of a potentially massive IPO, which is expected to take place as soon as this year. Anthropic said Claude Fable 5 shows "exceptional performance" across software engineering and knowledge work tasks. On some benchmarks, it scored more than 10% higher than Claude Opus 4.8, another model the company announced late last month, according to a blog post. Claude Fable 5 represents a "significant jump" in capability, which is why Anthropic had to implement additional guardrails to prevent misuse, Penn said. If a user asks a high-risk question, like how to make ricin, a toxin, for instance, the model will block its response and fall back to Claude Opus 4.8 to deliver a safe answer. "What we wanted to do was to be very intentional about building new types of classifiers and new types of safety guardrails in place for this launch," Penn said. Anthropic also released an updated Mythos model called Claude Mythos 5. "It's the same underlying model as Claude Fable 5, but with the safeguards lifted in some areas," reports CNBC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump walked out of a sit-down interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” That happened after he made, or repeated, a number of false and unsupported claims — some of which Welker pushed back on.

• Trump seized on the slow vote-counting procedures in California to claim, without evidence, that its recent primary election was “rigged.”

• The president falsely claimed that he “didn’t guarantee” that he’d keep the U.S. out of “new wars” in his second term. There are several examples of him making such a promise in 2024.

• He claimed that Iran was “very close to having a nuclear weapon” under a multilateral agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration and wrongly said the country “got all of this uranium during Obama.” Arms control experts say Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

• The president also said that if he didn’t launch airstrikes against Iran in June 2025, the country would “right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.” That assessment is at odds with reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which said in March 2025 that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

• He provided no support for his claim that Jan. 6 rioters were “ushered into” the Capitol by “FBI agents.” A 2024 watchdog report said that FBI agents arrived to assist law enforcement after rioters had already broken into the Capitol.

• Trump repeated other claims we’ve written about before regarding gasoline prices, the economy under his presidencies and construction of factories.

The interview was recorded on June 5 and aired two days later.

No Evidence of ‘Rigged’ California Elections

Trump walked out of the interview after Welker repeatedly asked him to provide evidence for his claims that the California elections were “rigged.”

The “evidence” Trump cited, however — that California had not finished counting votes several days after a June 2 primary election — is not evidence at all.

It does take California longer than other states to count ballots, but that’s because the vast majority of votes are cast via mail-in ballots, which counties send to all active registered voters. Mail-in ballots are accepted so long as they are “postmarked on or before election day” and received “no later than seven days after election day,” according to state law. That alone causes some delay.

“California has the largest number of registered voters in the nation—more than 23 million registered voters,” according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s website. “Ensuring that all valid votes cast by eligible voters are accurately processed and counted takes time.”

California is also one of 32 states that require signature verification for mail-in ballots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But California also allows voters to “cure” their ballot if a problem arises in signature-matching.

“If a signature is missing or does not compare to the signature on file, state law requires county elections officials to reach out to voters to verify their signature to ensure that their ballot can be counted,” the California secretary of state website states. “By law, and for most elections, voters are allowed to verify their signature up to eight days before the county certifies their results. These processes ensure that all valid votes cast by eligible voters can be counted.”

On election night, California shares “semi-official” tallies of the votes cast in-person at the polls on Election Day, the early votes cast in person, and mail-in ballots received and processed prior to Election Day. But in close elections, that’s often not enough for election prognosticators to “call” a race for the winners.

The top two vote-getters in the primary for both governor and Los Angeles mayor — regardless of party — square off in the general election. As of the morning of June 9, the Associated Press had projected Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra would advance to the general election, but it is yet to be determined whether he will face Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Tom Steyer. In the Los Angeles mayoral election, the Associated Press projected a day after the election that incumbent Karen Bass will be on the November general election ballot. But it wasn’t until June 8 that the AP projected Nithya Raman, a city councilwoman, would grab the second spot over reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

In his “Meet the Press” interview, Trump revived his false and unproven claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “dirty.”

Welker noted that “you’ve never presented evidence” that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“It’s happening right now in California,” Trump said. “Right now, it’s, look at what’s happening in California.”

“Where’s the evidence to that?” Welker asked, adding that “the Republicans are doing well in California.”

“In California, it’s, no they’re not,” Trump said. “They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election. Let me tell you, it’s four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with the —”

Welker pushed back, saying, “That’s how they count the votes in California.”

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said.

“Do you have evidence to support that?” Welker said.

“All I have to do is look,” Trump responded.

“But that’s not evidence,” Welker said.

“And I listen. And I listen to people,” Trump said.

“But sir, that’s not evidence,” Welker said.

“We’re like a third world country,” Trump said. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

The unfounded claim about California was not new for Trump, who posted on Truth Social on June 4, two days after California’s election, “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”

The following day, Bilal “Bill” Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, posted on X that his office “has multiple election fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles. “We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent,” Essayli wrote.

No further details about the investigations were provided.

Essayli also lambasted the state’s “[u]niversal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements,” which he said “creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence.”

He added that the U.S. attorney’s office would be working with the Department of Justice’s civil rights division “to conduct a comprehensive audit of California’s voter rolls.”

A post from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office on June 4 warned, “There is a lot of misinformation floating around about California’s election — including from the President.” The post linked to a CNN explanation of why it takes California so long to count ballots.

“And yes, for the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” the governor’s press office post concluded.

‘No New Wars’

During an exchange about the Iran conflict, Trump repeatedly denied — wrongly — that he ever promised there would be “no new wars” in a second Trump term.

“One of your consistent campaign promises was no new wars, going all the way back to 2015,” Welker said, before asking the president, “Did you break that promise to the American people?” In response, Trump said, “No,” then he added: “I had to stop a country, very powerful, very dangerous country, from having a nuclear weapon because they’d use it.”

When Welker continued to press the issue, asking Trump “what changed” to make him go back on his promise to keep the U.S. out of “new wars,” he said, “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Later in the interview, Trump again said that he had made no such guarantee. “When you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything,” he said. “I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”

Several times during his 2024 campaign, Trump was specific about wanting to “end” or keep the U.S. out of “endless” foreign wars. For example, during a Wisconsin campaign rally in September 2024, he said: “I will expel the warmongers from our national security state and carry out a much-needed cleanup of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America first. … So, we’re going to end these endless wars, endless wars. They never stop. You ever see these wars? They’re going for 14 years, 20 years.”

However, to Welker’s point, there also were many times when Trump said that there would be no U.S.-involved wars at all in a second Trump administration.

When accepting the GOP nomination for president in July 2024, Trump said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”

The following month, at an August 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, he told the audience, ”Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.” A few days earlier, during a campaign speech in North Carolina, Trump said that “we will end the era of inflation, mayhem and misery” under the Biden administration by having “no more wars” and “no more disruptions.”

Then, while giving his election victory speech in November 2024, Trump said that his political opponents were wrong to say that he would be the one to start a war. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” he said.

But it was the U.S. and Israel that launched the airstrikes that began the fighting with Iran.

Iran Nuclear Capabilities

The president made several disputed and unsupported claims about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the actions he and former President Barack Obama took.

Trump claimed that Iran was “very close to having a nuclear weapon twice.” The first time, he said, was under a 2015 deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — and Germany. In 2018, in Trump’s first term and two years after the JCPOA went into effect, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the deal.

In the “Meet the Press” interview, Trump said the JCPOA was a “horrible deal. It was a path to them getting a nuclear weapon. They were very close to having a nuclear weapon. I terminated the deal.”

The deal put restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium and required international inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities for 15 years. While there were critics of the agreement who said it didn’t go far enough, experts we interviewed disputed Trump’s claim that it was a “path” to Iran “getting a nuclear weapon.” In fact, they said, Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

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 that the 2015 nuclear deal “established an array of limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and uranium stockpiling” and a rigorous monitoring and verification program. After the Trump administration’s withdrawal, “Iran began to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities, including by deploying large numbers of advanced centrifuges and stockpiling” highly enriched uranium.

Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency for 28 years, told us: “Iran simply would not have been able to enrich to the point of possessing over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium had the JCPOA remained in place.” That’s a reference to the amount of 60% enriched uranium Iran had before June 2025 airstrikes on the country’s nuclear program sites.

In July 2019, about a year after Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Obama-era deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had exceeded the deal’s limits on Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and Iran’s foreign minister said the country would begin to enrich uranium beyond the low level needed for civilian nuclear power.

In the NBC News interview, Trump wrongly claimed that Iran “got all of this uranium during Obama.” When Welker said that Iran “escalated their development after the deal was ripped up,” Trump said that “they didn’t escalate anything.” That’s contrary to what arms control experts have said.

As we’ve explained before, to be weapons-grade, the 60% enriched uranium would need to be enriched to 90%.

The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA shortened the so-called “breakout time,” or the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb – if the country chose to do so. As of November 2024, the center estimated that the breakout time went from two to three months before the JCPOA to 12-plus months during the deal. After the U.S. withdrew from the agreement, the breakout time was reduced to just a couple of weeks.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in a couple of weeks. Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that once Iran had weapons-grade uranium, it “would then need to manufacture the rest of the weapon. This process would likely take much longer, perhaps months to a year.”  

Again, if Iran chose to do so. That brings us to another disputed claim by Trump. He said that Iran was close to having and potentially using a nuclear weapon before the June 2025 U.S. airstrikes. “If I didn’t go in there with the B2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already,” Trump said.

The president’s view is at odds with the assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community — which is made up of 18 government intelligence agencies and departments — and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

In late March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” In a March 25 congressional hearing, then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated that finding in her opening statement. Gabbard also said, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

Similarly, a May 31, 2025, report from the IAEA said it “has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme” to develop nuclear weapons in Iran, but the group had concerns about “repeated statements by former high-level officials in Iran related to Iran having all capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons.”

The agency said, “[T]he fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern, which has drawn international attention given the potential proliferation implications.”

The Iranian nuclear program sites targeted by last June’s U.S. airstrikes were damaged, but not “obliterated,” as Trump put it, according to experts, who told us the bombings likely increased the so-called breakout time. The operation didn’t “remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled,” Kimball said.

Trump has said he wants Iran to turn over its stockpile of enriched uranium as part of a peace deal to end the current U.S. military operation in the country.

Finally, Trump said that Obama sent a plane to Iran loaded with “$1.7 billion in cash, “adding that the administration “emptied out the banks” in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., for this payment. As we’ve explained before, 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 the equipment 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.

The $400 million came from a foreign military sales trust fund, and the $1.3 billion in interest came from Treasury’s judgment fund, which pays lawsuit settlements or judgments against the government. That’s according to a December 2016 Congressional Research Service report and September 2016 congressional testimony by the Treasury Department’s assistant general counsel for enforcement and intelligence.

The Treasury counsel, Paul Ahern, said the money was sent to European banks, which changed it to foreign currency to be remitted to Iran. He acknowledged that cash was involved because U.S. and international sanctions on Iran “had effectively cut off Iran from the international financial system.”

Jan. 6 Claims

Trump also claimed without evidence that some of the people who were arrested for entering the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, had been “ushered into the building” by “FBI agents.”

After Welker asked Trump if people who attacked police officers that day should be compensated via a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that the Justice Department announced and then halted due to bipartisan backlash, Trump said, “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” He then argued that some of the roughly 1,400 people who were charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds had been victims of government weaponization.

When Welker told Trump that “172 people did plead guilty to assaulting police officers,” he said: “They pled guilty because they were frightened. They went down. They were ushered into a building. Many of them were arrested without even going into the building.” Earlier, he said that there were “FBI agents ushering them into the building.”

But as Welker said, there is no evidence that FBI agents did that.

A December 2024 report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General said that “several hundred” FBI special agents and employees were deployed after the Capitol already had been breached by rioters who broke through windows and doors. The report also said that there were no undercover FBI employees at the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

In addition, there were 26 FBI informants, or confidential human sources, in Washington, D.C., that day “in connection with the events planned” for Jan. 6, the report said. However, those individuals are not agents or employees.

During the riot, 17 of the 26 informants entered the Capitol or a “restricted area” outside of the building. But the report said that none was authorized to do so or “to encourage others to commit illegal acts.” Only three informants were tasked with informing the FBI about suspects attending Jan. 6 events; other informants who went to the Capitol did so by choice.

As for Trump’s claim that “many” people “were arrested without” entering the Capitol, that ignores some of the serious offenses — such as assault — committed by people who were outside of the building. As an example, NBC News published photos of David Dempsey assaulting officers with a pole and pepper-spray just outside of a tunnel leading inside the Capitol. He later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting or impeding officers with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Dempsey was one of the many rioters who pleaded guilty to using weapons to assault officers, who — according to police statements and media reports — suffered cuts, bruises, sprains, concussions, bone fractures and other injuries.

When Trump took office in January 2025, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of every person charged with committing an illegal act during the Capitol riot. His executive order also directed the attorney general to seek dismissal with prejudice of all pending indictments against individuals for conduct related to Jan. 6 events.

More Repeats

There were more claims in the interview that we’ve fact-checked before:

Gasoline prices. Trump said that gasoline prices would “drop like a rock” once the war in Iran was over, saying they were “going to go lower than they were before.” Energy experts told us that prices will start to drop when the war ends, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to its pre-conflict level. The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.15 per gallon as of the week ending June 8, according to the Energy Information Administration, up about 41% from the week ending Feb. 23, five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes.

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

Economy. He has said it over and over again — “I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever.” This time, the president added: “And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.” By the measure favored by economists — growth of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product — the U.S. economy wasn’t the greatest ever during Trump’s first term.

Annual real GDP growth peaked in that term at 3% in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, real economic growth has exceeded Trump’s peak year 17 times. 

As for this term “blowing … away” the first? Not so far. Real GDP growth was just 2.1% in 2025. The annual rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 1.6%, according to the BEA’s second estimate released in late May.

Factory construction. Trump mentioned that “we’re building more factories.” But that’s not what the Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data show — data that the White House cited earlier this year when Trump made claims about this issue.

The monthly figures show a nearly 20% decline in manufacturing construction spending, from January 2025, when Trump was sworn in, to April, the most recent data available. On a quarterly basis, construction spending went down 18%, from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of this year. And on a yearly basis, the drop was 6.6% from 2024 to 2025.

See our February story for more on what factors have affected this spending under the prior administration and under Trump.

Although there has been a slight uptick in manufacturing jobs this year of 23,000 jobs, overall manufacturing employment has declined during Trump’s second term by 68,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That comes after a drop of 202,000 jobs in Biden’s last year in office.

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 Contentious ‘Meet the Press’ Interview appeared first on FactCheck.org.

From August 2025 to March 2026, an immigrant detention facility at Fort Bliss Army base suffered a host of serious incidents, including two deaths that were investigated by the Government Accountability Office.

A new logo means new merch! I’m launching brand new merch today, all featuring the brand new OSNews logo. We’ve got the classic T-shirt with the new OSNews logo, in sandy white and terrain grey. They’re made from sustainably-grown and processed cotton, come in a variety of sizes, and ship worldwide.

The crowdpleaser is also making its triumphant return: the OSNews coffee mug, now also with the new logo and a green-on-white two-tone design. It holds coffee and tea, of course, but feel free to use it for whatever you want. Grow a plant in it!

A newcomer is the OSNews Mousepad – a basic, no-nonsense, no-frills mousepad that does exactly what it’s supposed to do, in a classic square(ish) formfactor. It makes for a great companion to any (retro) setup, but feels particularly at home with BeOS and OS/2.

One merch item remains from our previous collection: the ever-popular Gemini shirt and longsleeve, with a retro ASCII-art OSNews logo in bright green on deep black. It’s like staring at a real classic CRT. On your chest. Don’t sit too close.

As always, every price is set so that for every item sold, roughly €8 goes to OSNews. I will add the proceeds to our fundraiser tracker, so this is yet another way to support us, together with Ko-Fi donations, SEPA direct bank transfers¹, and Patreon.

1. Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS ↩︎

If you want to test out Fable 5 without paying extra, you need to try it before the end of the month.

Kingdom Hearts 4, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake and Xenoblade Genesis stole the show.

Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund will be unable to pay full benefits in 2033, which could lead to higher health care costs for Americans over 65.

The trial of Karmelo Anthony centered on whether he acted in self-defense when he fatally stabbed Austin Metcalf at a Frisco ISD track meet in 2025.

In an interview airing on "CBS Sunday Morning," Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. will reach a deal with Iran before November's midterm elections.

NASA's Artemis III astronauts plan to carry out rendezvous and docking procedures with commercial moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

The two crew members were rescued by a sea drone in the first such operation ever carried out by the U.S. military, officials told CBS News.