News Reel

• Mendoza is a lock at No 1. What will happen next?

• Staff predictions: stars, needs and lower-round gems

• Mail david.lengel@theguardian.com with your thoughts

Fernando Mendoza

The QB widely expected to be selected no1 overall by the Las Vegas Raiders, will be the first presumptive top pick to not attend the draft in person since Trevor Lawrence was selected by Jacksonville. Mendoza wants to be at home to share the moment with his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, his father, and other close family and friends. But don’t worry, ESPN TV in the US will have at least one camera inside the Mendoza home to document the moment.

The soldier allegedly bet on Nicolás Maduro's removal as president of Venezuela before news of the raid was reported, sources told CBS News.

Zamil Limon and Nahida Bristy, both 27, were last seen in the Tampa area on April 16, the University of South Florida Police Department said​. Loved ones say their disappearances are out of character and they're concerned.

Mark Greenblatt, who was the inspector general for the US Interior Department before Donald Trump fired him in January, called it ‘critically important the audit is thorough and independent’

• DoJ inspector general to audit department’s compliance with Epstein Files Transparency Act

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You’ve likely seen that the Senate adopted the plan for the budget blueprint for ICE and border patrol after an all-night “vote-a-rama”.

This is, in fact, not a congressional dance break.

US president says meeting between Israel’s and Lebanon’s ambassadors to the United States went ‘very well’

The Pentagon abruptly announced that the secretary of the US navy, John Phelan, would be leaving his job yesterday. No reason was given for the unexpected departure of the navy’s top civilian official, who had addressed a large crowd of sailors and industry professionals at the navy’s annual conference in Washington just a day before the announcement.

People familiar with the dynamics at the Pentagon told the Guardian Phelan was fired. Phelan had an increasingly rocky relationship with the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and other senior staff.

"If you haven't booked for this summer, get busy," Atmosphere Research Group Airline industry analyst Henry Harteveldt told CBS News.

Attorneys for a DOJ program that accredits nonprofits to help provide legal help to immigrants were transferred last month, creating setbacks for a number of legal aid groups.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the ambassador-level negotiations, but it remains unclear whether the administration will push for a permanent resolution.

Apple has fixed a bug that could cause parts of Signal notifications to remain stored on iPhones even after messages disappeared and the app was deleted. "Affected users concerned about push notifications can update their devices to stop what Apple characterized as 'notifications marked for deletion' that 'could be unexpectedly retained on the device,'" reports Ars Technica. "According to Apple, the push notifications should never have been stored, but a 'logging issue' failed to redact data." From the report: Vulnerable users hoping to evade law enforcement surveillance often use encrypted apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. That's why users felt blindsided when 404 Media reported that Apple was unexpectedly storing push notifications displaying parts of encrypted messages for up to a month. This occurred even after the message was set to disappear and the app itself was deleted from the device. 404 Media flagged the issue after speaking to multiple people who attended a hearing where the FBI testified that it "was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database." The shocking revelation came in a case that 404 Media noted was "the first time authorities charged people for alleged 'Antifa' activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization." "We're grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue," Signal's post said. "It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication." In their post, Signal confirmed that after users update their devices, "no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These are the agencies detaining people across the US – mostly, but not all, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security

When the Trump administration ordered a surge of armed federal immigration enforcement personnel on to the streets of Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security declared it the largest operation in its history and the liberal midwestern city became Donald Trump’s latest chosen hotspot.

Such escalations mark the US president’s agenda of mass arrests and deportations from the US interior. The highest-profile efforts involve officers from multiple agencies rushing to prominent Democratic-led US cities, against local leaders’ wishes. But coast to coast, federal officers have been raiding homes, businesses, commercial parking lots – even schools, hospitals and courthouses. The efforts have delighted the president’s hardcore Make America Great Again voter base, but are also tearing families apart and spreading fear and even death on the streets and in detention.

The Russian leader has not yet committed to attend the annual gathering of world leaders, which is scheduled for December at the president’s Doral golf resort.

Baton Rouge police chief says attack unfolded after argument inside food court at Mall of Louisiana

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At least one person has been killed and five people were injured and transported to the hospital Thursday when two groups exchanged gunfire inside the food court at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, according to police.

Several of the people involved ran off as a large police presence responded.

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders have approved Paramount Skydance's takeover bid, moving the massive Hollywood merger a step closer to completion. It's not a done deal quite yet, though, as it still faces regulatory scrutiny and fierce opposition from critics who warn it will further concentrate media power. The Associated Press reports: Per a preliminary vote count Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery said the overwhelming majority of its stakeholders voted in support of selling the entire business to Skydance-owned Paramount for $31 a share. Including debt, the deal is valued at nearly $111 billion based on Warner's current outstanding shares. That means Warner-owned HBO Max, cult-favorite titles like "Harry Potter" and even CNN could soon find themselves under the same roof with Paramount's CBS, "Top Gun" and the Paramount+ streaming service. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a statement that stockholder approval marks "another key milestone toward completing this historic transaction." Paramount added that it looks forward to closing in the coming months, and "realizing the creation of a next-generation media and entertainment company." [...] Meanwhile, Warner shareholders rejected a separate measure Thursday outlining post-merger payments for company executives.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump's renovation kick has now reached the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Following a second round of peace talks, President Trump announced that the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire had been extended by three weeks.

Florida Republican Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, an Army combat veteran, attacked his leading opponent in the state’s gubernatorial race over not supporting military pay raises. 

The Collins campaign distributed a 13-page document titled "Congressman Byron Donalds’ Liabilities." Donalds holds a double-digit lead against his primary opponents.

"Byron Donalds voted with (U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-.N.Y.) and the radical Socialist Squad against three pay raises for military service members, including the largest pay raise for the military in 22 years," the document said, referencing Donalds’ votes against the National Defense Authorization Act in 2022, 2023 and 2025.

The Collins campaign lobbed this and many other attacks about Donalds’ criminal history and past associates after an April 20 event in St. Petersburg. 

Collins’ campaign referred PolitiFact to the document Collins distributed. But framing Donalds’ votes as being solely against military pay is misleading.

The National Defense Authorization Act is a sweeping annual package that authorizes billions in funding and policy for the U.S. Defense Department, with several non-military provisions tacked on. Donalds voted against the legislation in the three years Collins references, but he also supported it in two other years. Each bill included military pay raises.

Donalds’ campaign told PolitiFact his mixed voting record reflects his disagreement with other provisions in the bills, not because he opposed raising military pay.

When a reporter asked Donalds about Collins’ attack, he referenced the bills he voted against during President Joe Biden’s administration, saying they included policies that were "actually hurting our military men and women." 

"In 2022, yeah I voted against the NDAA," Donalds said April 20, "because the Biden Administration had a radical policy in there that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were pushing through Congress. Of course I voted against it, and so did all conservatives in Congress."

The bill had provisions that some Republicans in Congress didn’t like, but many conservatives in both chambers ended up voting for it.

What is the National Defense Authorization Act?

The National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress has passed every year since 1961, authorizes about $800 billion in defense spending in recent years. It serves as the primary vehicle for setting military salaries, housing allowances and health benefits. It also approves funding for a wide swath of military operations, including research, training, construction and equipment procurement. 

The legislation frequently includes non-military provisions with which Democrats and Republicans disagree, prompting members of both parties to routinely vote against it. 

"It would be disingenuous to pull out one topic — like the pay raise — and say a vote against the annual defense authorization bill is a vote against the raise," said Elaine McCusker, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute who focuses on defense strategy and budget, noting that the legislation is "thousands of pages." 

How did Donalds vote on the defense package?

Donalds voted for the National Defense Authorization Act twice — in 2021 and 2024 — and against it three times in 2022, 2023 and 2025, the last one under President Donald Trump. Each bill included raises for servicemembers and became law. 

Donalds and 34 other House Republicans voted against the NDAA in 2022. His campaign characterized it as a "Biden agenda bill" with "no amendments and Ukraine funding" that "included (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs, climate initiatives and no spending offsets." 

In 2023, the NDAA provided a 5.2% military pay increase, the largest for military members in over 20 years. At the time, Donalds said he voted against the legislation because it included the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a law passed after 9/11 that has been used to surveil American citizens. 

"There should be no clean reauthorizations of FISA in the National Defense Authorization Act," Donalds told the late Charlie Kirk on Dec. 11, 2023, a few days before the vote. "That should be removed immediately. I completely disagree with House leadership on that. That should not occur." Donalds’ campaign also pointed to anti-DEI provisions the Senate removed from the bill, and climate change-related requirements for the Pentagon.

The House passed the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026 on Dec. 10, 2025, with a 312-112 vote. The bill authorized $900 billion in Pentagon programs, which included a 3.8% pay raise for service members. Donalds voted against it. (Other Florida Republicans also opposed it, Reps. Greg Steube and Anna Paulina Luna.)

The bill required the Pentagon to release additional information on U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and expanded support for Ukraine. Donalds’ and other Republicans’ resistance to the bill involved the Ukraine aid and missing provisions banning the government from issuing central bank digital currency.

Donalds hasn’t said why he supported the NDAA bills in 2021 and 2024. However, some House Republicans praised the 2021 legislation as a "clean" defense bill from which Democratic provisions on "red flag" gun laws and initiatives to eliminate extremism in the military had been stripped out. The 2024 bill banned certain types of medical or surgical gender reassignment procedures for children of service members on military health plans. 

Our ruling

Collins said Donalds voted "against three pay raises for military service members, including the largest pay raise for the military in 22 years." 

This is cherry-picked.

Donalds voted against the National Defense Authorization Act three times, and for it twice. But the legislation is multi-faceted. While it includes increasing military pay, it also authorizes billions in funding for military operations, and typically tacks on several unrelated provisions. 

Donalds said his votes reflect his disagreement with other provisions in the bills, not military pay. 

The statement contains an element of truth about Donalds’ vote record but gives the wrong impression that he opposed military pay raises.

We rate it Mostly False.

The path of the USS George H.W. Bush to the Middle East has been closely watched as President Trump demands progress in peace negotiations with Tehran.

The company adds a feature that will reveal what topics teens delve into with AI on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

If you have the right Samsung hub, you can now get Ikea's low-cost devices without needing any expensive add-ons.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 24, No. 578.

Police said the shooting appeared to have happened after two groups of people got into an argument in the mall's food court.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 24, No. 782.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 24, No. 1,048.

• Coach to attend counseling in wake of recent events

• NFL previously said it will not investigate matter

The New England Patriots have given their backing to Mike Vrabel as new photos of their head coach and NFL reporter Dianna Russini emerged on Thursday.

Russini resigned from her post at the Athletic last week after the New York Post published photos of her and Vrabel embracing and holding hands at an Arizona resort. The pair are married to different people and have said their relationship is platonic. On Wednesday, Vrabel said he will miss day three of the NFL draft on Saturday to undergo counseling in the fallout from the controversy. He made an appearance before Thursday’s draft where he said “my priorities are my family and this football team. In that order. ... My family needs me this weekend, and that’s where I’ll be.”

President Donald Trump has regularly said that drug-price discounts on his watch are greater than 100%, which isn’t mathematically possible. Now his health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is trying to back up his faulty math.

During an April 22 Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., questioned Kennedy about discounts available on the federally run TrumpRx website. She expressed doubt about Trump’s past statements about price reductions up to 600%.

Kennedy said, "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There’s two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."

In an Oval Office event the following day, Kennedy brought up the exchange with Warren and reiterated his statement.

"If the drug was $100 and it raised the price to $600 that would be a 600% rise," Kennedy said. "If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings. And the President used that mathematical device to illustrate the magnitude of the theft that has been happening against our country and our people."

But well-established mathematical principles have only one way to calculate percentage change, and neither Trump nor Kennedy did it correctly.

In Kennedy’s example to Warren during the Senate Finance Committee hearing, if a drug was reduced from $600 to $10, that would represent a 98.3% decrease, not a 600% decrease. Specifically, to calculate that percentage decrease, you would subtract $10 from $600 and divide the answer ($590)  by the original price, $600. In Kennedy’s case, $590 divided by $600 equals .983, or 98.3%.

"It’s mathematically impossible" for the reduction to be higher than 100% and for the consumer to still have to pay something, said Maryclare Griffin, associate professor in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s mathematics and statistics department.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

Trump has made similar claims before — citing decreases as high as 1,000% — but price cuts this large are not mathematically possible.

In August, when The Associated Press fact-checked an earlier instance of Trump making a similar statement, the White House did not explain or justify the underlying math. At the time, White House spokesman Kush Desai said, "It’s an objective fact that Americans are paying exponentially more for the same exact drugs as people in other developed countries pay, and it’s an objective fact that no other Administration has done more to rectify this unfair burden for the American people."

A 100% reduction would mean that a consumer pays nothing for a medication.

A 200% reduction would mean the pharmaceutical company pays the consumer the full price of the medicine. 

A 400% reduction would mean the company pays the consumer three times the price of the medicine. 

A 500% cut would bring the consumer four times the price, and a 600% cut would give the consumer five times the price to accept the medicine. Any of these decreases are unrealistic.

"There’s no other way to calculate percentage change, and Trump's way is not a valid way," said Brooke Nichols, a mathematical modeler and health economist at Boston University’s School of Public Health. "The maximum amount a price can decrease is by 100%. It's possible to increase a price by 600%, but it doesn't work the other way around."

Our ruling

Kennedy said, "There's two ways of calculating percentage" decreases. "If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."

That’s not how percentage decreases work. For anything higher than a 100% decrease in price, the seller would be paying the customer to possess the drug.

In Kennedy’s example to Warren, a $590 reduction in the price of a $600 drug would represent a 98.3% decrease, not a 600% decrease.

We rate the statement Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Staff Writer Grace Abels contributed to this report.

Summary

Under President Donald Trump’s second term:

• Job growth slowed, with a total of 369,000 jobs created as of March. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%.

• Inflation worsened a bit, and gasoline prices increased after U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. 

• Average weekly earnings of private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.0%.

• The economy grew 2.1% in 2025.

• Consumer sentiment has now hit a record low.

• The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased about 92%, and refugee admissions dropped by the same percentage.

• The percentage of the population lacking health insurance held steady in the first six months of 2025.

• The trade deficit dropped 14% for the most recent 12 months.

• The number of murders nationwide has continued to decline, a trend that began in 2022.

• The stock market fell dramatically after the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, then rebounded and reached new heights.

• Oil production went up 2.7%, and oil imports declined almost 6.6%. Carbon emissions increased slightly.

• About 3 million fewer people are receiving federal food assistance.

• The federal debt held by the public rose about 8.6%.

Analysis

This is the first update in our “Numbers” series for Trump’s second term. Expect additional updates to be published every three months for the remainder of his presidency, as we did for his predecessors, starting with President Barack Obama in 2012.

These are just some of the many economic and social statistics that indicate how the U.S. is faring. We will include a few other data categories, such as household income and the poverty rate, later this year when the newest government figures are available.

We only present the numbers, which, depending on the reader’s perspective, may seem positive, negative or neither. How much credit or blame the president should receive for the statistics is also in the eye of the beholder.

Jobs and Unemployment

Job growth slowed markedly, and unemployment crept up during Trump’s second term. Manufacturing jobs continued to decline despite new tariffs on imports. Job opportunities declined.

Employment — Employment continued growing during Trump’s first 14 months in office, but far more slowly than it had in the previous 14 months.

The most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show an increase of only 369,000 in total nonfarm employment between January 2025 and March 2026. The total went up four times faster before, rising by 1,565,000 during the final 14 months of President Joe Biden’s administration, even after the BLS revised Biden’s figures downward in February as a result of its annual “benchmarking” study.

Much of the sluggishness under Trump is due to the president’s deliberate slashing of the federal workforce. Federal government employment has fallen by 352,000, or 11.7%, since he took office.

Looking only at the private sector — excluding federal, state and local government workers — 609,000 jobs were added during Trump’s term so far. But that’s still far less than the 1,044,000 added in the preceding 14 months.

Last August, after the BLS reported only 73,000 jobs had been gained in July, Trump called the figures “rigged” and “phony” and fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. But the numbers have only grown worse since then. The gain for July has been revised downward to 64,000, and the BLS reports that the economy actually lost jobs in August, October, December and February.

Manufacturing Jobs — A year ago, Trump predicted a flood of new factory jobs as he announced sweeping new tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025.

“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” he said. But so far that hasn’t happened. The economy has continued to lose manufacturing jobs.

During Trump’s first 14 months, the loss was 82,000, following a loss of 186,000 in the preceding 14 months.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate declined a bit in Trump’s second term, dropping from 62.6% in January 2025 to 61.9% as of March.

The rate is the portion of the population over age 16 that is working or seeking work. It generally has been in a long decline as the population ages and people retire.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has gone up slightly since Trump took office. It was 4.0% in January 2025, and most recently was 4.3% in March.

But that is still well below the historical norm. The median rate for all months since 1948 is 5.5%.

Job Openings — The number of job openings declined by 549,000 under Trump, to 6.9 million as of the last day of February. It’s a drop of 7.4%.

Meanwhile, the number of people officially listed as unemployed and seeking work rose by 374,000, to 7.2 million as of March. When Trump took office there were more openings than job-seekers. Now it’s the opposite.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Trump campaigned on a promise to reduce inflation, but since he took office it has worsened a bit.

In the 12 months before Trump took office, the Consumer Price Index, the most commonly cited measure of inflation, rose 3.0%. And in the most recent BLS report, the 12-month increase was 3.3%.

Over Trump’s first 14 months in office, the CPI went up 3.6%, pushed up most recently by the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, which have sent up gasoline prices in particular.

Fuel prices — always volatile — had been a bright spot for Trump before. As of our previous “Trump’s Numbers” report in January, the national average price for regular gasoline at the pump had declined to $2.78 a gallon, down from $3.11 the week he was sworn in for his second term. But as of the week ending April 20, it was up to $4.04, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s an increase of 29.9% since Trump’s inauguration.

Inflation is still higher than the Federal Reserve would like, and it’s going in the wrong direction as measured by the Fed’s preferred metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The central bank’s target is a 2% annual increase in the PCE. When Trump took office, the 12-month increase in the PCE was 2.5%. But the most recent report put the 12-month increase at 2.8% in February. And that does not reflect the effects of the war on Iran, which began the last day of February. (PCE figures take longer to collect than the CPI, but the Fed prefers the measure because it is more comprehensive and adjusts more quickly to consumers’ buying habits.)

Wages — Wage increases accelerated under Trump, even adjusted for worsening inflation.

The average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.0% during Trump’s first 14 months. They were rising when he took office, but had only gone up 0.4% in the preceding 14 months.

Those figures include professionals, executives and supervisory employees, whose pay is normally higher. But rank-and-file wage earners are seeing gains just as rapid as those of their bosses. For private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees, real average earnings also rose 1.2% under Trump through March, after a 0.8% rise in the preceding 14-month period.

Economic Growth

The U.S. economy resembled a roller coaster last year – with weak first and fourth quarters but strong second and third quarters. 

The end result: a respectable, but underachieving 2.1% growth for the year.  

“Despite a solid 2.1% expansion for the full year, 2025 will likely be remembered as the year that ‘could have been,’” EY-Parthenon Chief Economist Gregory Daco said in an April 9 analysis. “A rare confluence of supply shocks — tariffs, tighter immigration and elevated policy uncertainty — constrained activity, leaving growth below what strong organic productivity gains and rapid AI adoption would have otherwise supported.”

The nation’s real gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first quarter and expanded by only 0.5% in the fourth quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In between, the economy grew at the robust annual rates of 3.8% in the second quarter and 4.4% in the third quarter.  

For the full year, the U.S. finished with the weakest GDP since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked the economy. (See the chart below.)

As for this year, economic experts project that the U.S. economy will continue to grow – but they warn that projections carry what S&P Global called “a high degree of unpredictability” because of the Middle East conflict. 

In an economic outlook released March 25, S&P Global Ratings projected 2.2% real GDP growth for the U.S. this year, assuming that the war will result in only a “temporary, supply-driven oil shock that recovers inside the year.” 

Similarly, Michael Wolf, a senior manager and global economist at Deloitte Touche, wrote in late March that Deloitte economists project U.S. growth at 2.2% – while noting that “conditions remain highly fluid.”

Daco, who is also the president of the National Association for Business Economics, said in a press release that an NABE survey of economic forecasters conducted from March 5 to March 13 found that most of those surveyed expect “recent geopolitical developments to reduce 2026 GDP growth.” 

As of April 21, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 1.2% for the first quarter. The BEA first quarter estimate will be released on April 30.

Consumer Sentiment

When Trump took office, consumers surveyed by the University of Michigan expressed concern that his plan to increase tariffs would increase prices, and that turned out to be true. Consumers now have an added inflationary concern: the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that started on Feb. 28. Over a nearly two-month period, the war has driven up the cost of oil, gasoline, and other goods and services.  

Consumer sentiment, which already has been stubbornly low under Trump, has now hit a record low. 

The university’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 47.6 – the lowest since at least 1978, according to the university’s online database. 

“Consumer sentiment sank about 11% this month, extending a decline that began with the start of the Iran conflict,” Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in a press release issued this month. “Demographic groups across age, income, and political party all posted setbacks in sentiment, as did every component of the index, reflecting the widespread nature of this month’s fall.”

April’s preliminary number, which could change when it is finalized on April 24, is 24.1 points lower than it was in January 2025, when Trump took the oath of office for a second time. 

In its most recent Consumer Confidence Survey, the Conference Board — a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies — reported that consumer confidence “improved modestly” in March for the second straight month. “Nonetheless, the Index has been on a general downward trend since 2021,” Dana M. Peterson, the board’s chief economist, said in a March 31 press release. 

The Conference Board’s April report is scheduled to be released April 28. 

Home Prices & Homeownership 

Homeownership — Homeowner rates have remained largely unchanged under Trump.

The most recent homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — identical to the rate during Biden’s last quarter in office. 

Last year’s fourth quarter rate was up slightly from the previous quarter, but the difference was not statistically meaningful, according to a February press release from the bureau.

The homeownership rate remained largely unchanged last year even though the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times and mortgage rates declined. 

Days before Trump took office, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 7.04% for the week ending Jan. 16, 2025, according to Freddie Mac. As of the week ending April 16, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.30%.

In a Dec. 12 article, Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones said homeownership rates continue to be affected by “[p]ersistent affordability challenges and a shortage of reasonably priced homes.”

Home Prices – Home prices have remained fairly stable under Trump.

The national median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $412,400, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was only 3.6% higher than it was in January 2025, when Biden left office and the median price was $398,100. 

Year-over-year, the median sales price in March was only 1.25% higher – a record high for March, despite a decline in home sales for the month, NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a press release. Existing single-family home sales were down 3.5% from February and 0.3% year-over-year, the NAR data show.

“March home sales remained sluggish and below last year’s pace,” Yun said. “Lower consumer confidence and softer job growth continue to hold back buyers.”

“Because inventory remains limited,” he added, “the median home price rose to a new record high for the month of March.”

Existing home sales and prices for April are scheduled for release on May 11.

Immigration

Illegal immigration continues to be historically low since Trump took office for his second term.

While it’s impossible to know how many people successfully cross illegally into the U.S., for the purposes of our Numbers stories going back to Obama, we have calculated the change in border apprehensions as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings. Over the last 12 months under Trump, there were 85,218 immigrants apprehended attempting to illegally cross the southern border. That’s down nearly 92% from the last 12 months under Biden.

Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said that one of the biggest drivers of the dramatic drop in illegal immigration was a new policy, which Trump invoked on his first day in office, that “effectively … people were no longer able to apply for asylum” at the border. That was one of the major drivers of immigration during the Biden administration, with hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border and “sort of waiting to be intercepted and asking for asylum.”

“So now, without access to that kind of protection, that certainly impacted the number of people who are trying to cross the border,” Putzel-Kavanaugh told us.

In addition, Trump abolished the so-called “catch and release” policy, such that people apprehended at the border are processed for expedited removal or placed in detention, rather than some, such as those seeking asylum, being released into the U.S. pending an immigration hearing.

That is what Trump was apparently referring to in a speech at a Turning Point USA event on April 17, when he said he had taken an “open border and created the most secure border in U.S. history, one of the most secure borders anywhere in the world with zero illegal aliens coming into our country in the past 11 months. Zero.”

But, Putzel-Kavanaugh said, because “people are just immediately processed for removal,” it’s also possible things are returning to the “standard migration pattern” where people are seeking to evade detection.

One other major factor in the decrease in illegal immigration to the U.S. has been the Trump administration’s focus on interior enforcement and deportations, which, Putzel-Kavanaugh told us, “likely has somewhat of a chilling factor for people who maybe were thinking about coming to the US.”

According to publicly available Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, the average daily population of those detained by ICE during the first three months of 2026 is up nearly 300% compared with the last three months under Biden. The Trump administration is also arresting a greater percentage of people who have neither criminal convictions nor pending criminal charges. In the last three months of the Biden administration, 65% of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions and 29% had pending criminal charges. Just 6% had neither. By contrast, in the first three months of 2026, 30% of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions and 31% had pending charges. The percentage of those detained by ICE with neither criminal convictions nor pending charges was 39%.

Refugees 

In Trump’s second term, refugee admissions have all but stopped – except for South Africa’s white minority Afrikaners. 

As we wrote last year, Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office that called for an indefinite suspension of all refugee admissions until the program “aligns with the interests of the United States.” 

But Trump issued an order on Feb. 7, 2025, making an exception for Afrikaners. When asked about the exception, the president told reporters there was “a genocide that’s taking place” against white farmers in the country – which, as we wrote, distorts the facts.  

Since February 2025, the U.S. admitted only 5,005 refugees in Trump’s first full 14 months in office – including 4,838 refugees from South Africa, according to the State Department’s monthly refugee admissions reports.  

That’s an average of 357.5 per month, or 92.5% fewer than the monthly average of 4,741 per month under Biden.

For fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1, 2025, Trump capped refugee admissions at just 7,500. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the Trump administration has resettled 4,499 refugees and all but three came from South Africa. 

Health Insurance

Data on how health insurance coverage has changed under Trump’s second term is slowly being released. In late January, the National Health Interview Survey published a preliminary report on the first six months of 2025 that found no change in the percentage of the population lacking health insurance, compared with the full-year report for 2024.

For January to June 2025, 8.2% of the U.S. population was uninsured, the same figure as the prior year. In raw numbers, 27.5 million people lacked insurance in the first half of 2025, a figure that “was not significantly different” from the 27.2 million who lacked insurance in 2024, the report said. The NHIS measures the uninsured at the time people are interviewed.

The NHIS, a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used to release quarterly preliminary reports, but as of last year, it said it would switch to biannual reports only. A full-year report for 2025 is scheduled to be published in June.

Annual reports from the Census Bureau, typically released in September, measure those who were uninsured for the entire calendar year. The report for 2024, the latest available, similarly put the uninsured rate at 8%.

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to increase the number of people who lack health insurance, but the impact will occur over several years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the uninsured would increase by 10 million people over 10 years, with most of the increase due to the law’s changes to Medicaid. For 2026, the rise was estimated at 1.3 million people. (See the link to estimated changes in people without health insurance.)

Trade

The latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services may be headed for a decrease in 2026 after rising in 2025.

During the most recent 12 months ending in February, the U.S. imported about $775.6 billion more in goods and services than it exported. That trade gap was down 14.15% from the annual trade deficit of $903.5 billion in 2024.

The trade deficit rose to almost $911.7 billion in 2025, which was influenced by larger than usual monthly deficits in January, February and March of last year. As we have written, those three monthly deficits — all above $100 billion — were the result of U.S. importers stocking up on goods to get ahead of a number of tariffs on imported products that Trump had said he planned to implement.

Trump claimed that his tariffs would help reduce, or even eliminate, the trade deficit, which had increased by 34.1% under Biden.

Crime

Violent crime has declined. The latest data comes from several groups that monitor crime statistics. The FBI’s annual nationwide report for 2025 won’t be released until the fall.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, documents an 11% drop in the number of violent crimes from 2024 to 2025, based on data from 445 law enforcement agencies across the country covering nearly a third of the U.S. population. Murders declined 17.9%, and robberies were down 19.2%. The number of property crimes decreased 12.2%. The number of violent and property crimes continued to go down in January and February, compared with those months last year.

AH Datalytics’ charts on the longer-term trend show an increase in the number of murders starting in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a decline in the numbers since 2022.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization representing police executives in large cities, similarly found a 19.3% decrease in the number of homicides and a 19.8% drop in the number of robberies in 2025, compared with 2024. That’s based on data from 67 law enforcement agencies.

The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, found similar percentage decreases among 35 U.S. cities from 2024 to 2025. Its year-end report, released in January, said that when the FBI publishes nationwide data later this year, “there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.” The existing historic low is a rate of 4.4 per 100,000 population in 2014.

“The overall reduction in crime, especially homicide, is welcome news,” Ernesto Lopez, lead author of the report and a CCJ senior research specialist, said in a press release. “While the big story here is that homicide saw the largest one-year increase [in 2020] and the largest one-year decrease in a short period of time, we should not forget that homicides had been steadily dropping since the late 2000s. It is possible that these rates reflect a longer-term downward trend punctuated by periods of elevated homicides.”

CCJ also published comments from several criminal justice experts on what might be driving the recent decline in homicides. “Researchers and practitioners have pointed to a range of possible contributors, including changes in criminal justice policy and practice, shifts in routine activities and social behavior, economic conditions, technology use, and local violence prevention efforts,” the group said.

Corporate Profits

Corporate profits have set records every year since 2015. The streak continued last year under Trump, but at a slower rate. 

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that after-tax corporate profits hit a record $3.51 trillion in 2025, but that was just 0.6% higher than the previous year. (See the chart below.)

Under Biden, the annual average growth in profits was 31% in 2021, 3.8% in 2022, 7.8% in 2023 and 7.9% in 2024, according to BEA data. 

The estimate of first quarter profits for this year will be released May 28.

Stock Market

It’s been a turbulent ride for the stock market since we wrote the first “Trump’s Numbers” piece of this term on Jan. 20. Stock prices fell dramatically after the U.S. and Israel began airstrikes on Iran starting in late February, and Iran retaliated by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, an important waterway for international trade. But with subsequent peace talks amid a fragile ceasefire, the stock market has rebounded and again reached new heights, just as it had under Biden.

The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, closed at roughly 19% higher on April 22 than it was three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, was up 13.8% over that same period.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq composite index, comprising more than 3,000 companies, many in the technology sector, surged by almost 25.6% between Jan. 17, 2025, and April 22.

The gains under Trump have come after substantial increases during the Biden administration, when the S&P rose 57.8%, the Dow Jones went up 40.6%, and the Nasdaq increased by almost half.

Oil Production and Imports

Crude oil production in the U.S. averaged roughly 13.6 million barrels per day during Trump’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in January), according to Energy Information Administration data published in late March. That was 2.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2024.

The 13.6 million barrels produced each day in 2025 set a new U.S. record, exceeding the previous high of more than 13.2 million barrels produced daily in 2024. The EIA said that even with “less rig activity and fewer wells” in 2025, “efficiency improvements that we saw in 2024 continued through 2025 and resulted in a slight increase in crude oil production.”

However, in its Short-Term Energy Outlook for April, the EIA reported that it expects production to dip slightly in 2026 — to 13.5 million barrels per day — before increasing again in 2027.

Meanwhile, crude oil imports are down under Trump — dropping to about 6.15 million barrels imported on average each day in his first full year in office of his second term. In that time, imports fell almost 6.6% from the daily average in 2024. But the U.S. is expected to remain a net importer of crude oil in 2026, according to the EIA.

Carbon Emissions

The latest EIA data still show a slight increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption under Trump.

In his first 11 months (ending in December), there were more than 4.4 billion metric tons of emissions from the use of coal, natural gas and petroleum-based products. That was 2% more than the over 4.3 billion metric tons that were emitted from consuming those energy sources over the same stretch in 2024.

However, as of April, the EIA’s outlook was that energy-related CO2 emissions would fall in 2026, by about 2.4%, to roughly 4.8 billion metric tons — down from just over 4.9 billion in 2025. The 2026 total, if the EIA estimate holds, would be almost exactly the same as the amount of CO2 emitted in 2024. The agency said the expected drop this year is “due primarily to expected declines in coal consumption” at electricity-generating power plants.

Food Stamps

Early data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the number of people accessing benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, has declined under Trump.

As of December, the most recent month for which preliminary USDA figures are available, about 39.5 million people were participating in SNAP. The number has dropped further since our last update in January and is down by more than 3.3 million, or about 7.7%, since Trump took office in January 2025.

The decline in SNAP participants was expected because of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which changed eligibility requirements for nutrition assistance and is estimated to reduce federal spending on the program. For example, the law extends work requirements to include “able-bodied adults without dependents” aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt.

The CBO estimated in August that provisions in the law “will reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.”

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has risen. It increased by more than $505 billion to over $31.3 trillion, as of April 21. The public debt is up about 8.6% under Trump. It increased by one-third on Biden’s watch.

Deficits — The debt continues to increase mostly due to large annual budget deficits. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficit so far for fiscal year 2026 is lower than it was at this point in fiscal 2025, when the annual deficit was almost $1.8 trillion.

Through the first half of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was about $1.2 trillion, or “$139 billion less than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year,” the CBO reported in its latest Monthly Budget Review. But as of February, the CBO projected that the deficit for FY 2026 would rise to nearly $1.9 trillion for the year.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — There hasn’t been a vacancy on the Supreme Court during Trump’s second term. At this point in his presidency, Biden had won confirmation for one justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, which occurred on April 7, 2022. 

Court of Appeals — As of April 22, six of Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals had been approved. At the same point in his term, Biden had won confirmation for 15.

District Court — Trump also has had 31 nominees confirmed to be District Court judges, while 43 were confirmed by this time in Biden’s tenure.

By this point, two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also were confirmed under Biden. None have been confirmed so far under Trump, and there are no such positions currently available.

As of April 22, there were no vacancies for Court of Appeals judges, 33 for District Court judges with nine nominees pending, and one vacancy for the international trade court with a single nominee pending.

Sources

We provide links to the sources for these statistics throughout the article.

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

The post Trump’s Numbers, April 2026 Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

OpenAI released its new GPT-5.5 model today, which the company calls its "smartest and most intuitive to use model yet, and the next step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer." The Verge reports: OpenAI just released GPT-5.4 last month, but says that the new GPT-5.5 "excels" at tasks like writing and debugging code, doing research online, making spreadsheets and documents, and doing that work across different tools. "Instead of carefully managing every step, you can give GPT-5.5 a messy, multi-part task and trust it to plan, use tools, check its work, navigate through ambiguity, and keep going," according to OpenAI. The company also notes that GPT-5.5 will have its "strongest set of safeguards to date" and can use "significantly fewer" tokens to complete tasks in Codex. GPT-5.5 is rolling out on Thursday for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise ChatGPT tiers and Codex, with GPT-5.5 Pro coming to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration started accepting applications in December for foreigners willing to pay $1 million for the right to live in the U.S.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announces the launch of a criminal investigation into OpenAI in connection with the 2025 Florida State University shooting.

Let’s say you woke up this morning with a super sweet business plan: 

• Step 1: Start with your absolutely scrumptious recipe for key lime pie.
• Step 2: Find a way to churn them out by the dozens.
• Step 3: Ride a wave of grateful fans to fame, glory … and profit.

That was how Jessica and Lee Williamson envisioned their future. The Milton couple knew they had the perfect pie and were sure it would inspire fandom everywhere. But it wasn’t until they turned to the Delaware Division of Small Business that they found the missing ingredient for next-level success.

The state is supporting dozens of Delaware entrepreneurs through a reinvigorated grant program called EDGE 2.0, which is providing crucial infusions of cash and coaching to lift small startups toward success. 

In the case of Coastal Key Lime Pie, which received an earlier grant from the program, that meant a $50,000 jolt to their budget, and a fresh path toward their dreams. A new crust-making machine and a refrigerated van let them supersize their footprint. Close support from the division’s small business experts kept them on track toward growth.

Today, Jessica and Lee are well on their way to regional acclaim, and even dream of delivering creamy goodness up and down the coast.

“It would have taken so much longer to grow without the EDGE grant,” Jessica Williamson said. “It propelled our business in a way that’s unimaginable.”

Short for “Encouraging Development, Growth and Expansion,” the EDGE program stands as the flagship funding initiative of the state’s Small Business Division. In its seven years, more than 100 startups have been helped, many in the high-tech sector that Delaware is working to grow.

“The best investment the state can make is in the people already doing the work,” said Christopher “CJ” Bell, Director of the Delaware Division of Small Business. “When we give a good business the resources to get even better, the whole state benefits from their success.”

The program is designed to give early stage businesses an extra boost through funding and planning assistance during their first five years, a time when many small businesses are at more risk of failure. To qualify, businesses must be less than seven years old, have 15 or fewer full-time employees, and have less than $700,000 in assets.

But most importantly, they must be ready to compete and driven to win. Once grant proposals are done, the division begins several rounds of evaluations based on set criteria, and selects  the most promising ideas from the pool of hopefuls. Twice each year, those finalists gather for a showdown called a “pitch competition,” where judges pepper presenters with questions and decide the winners. 

The stakes are high: Each competition offers $400,000 in total grant money for entrepreneurs like the Williamsons. For businesses in the resource-heavy STEM and high-tech sector, $750,000 is available. Judges can pick as many winners as they want; the pot of money is then divided based on needs.

“We have raised the total grant money by 50-60% this year, giving the program much more potential for having a maximum impact,” said Joe Zilcosky, one of the division’s regional business managers who coach and encourage applicants. “It’s also now easier to apply, and all finalists and awardees will get in-kind services and support to help them grow.”

Grant money can be used for purchasing equipment, improving building infrastructure, obtaining rental space, or contracting for website design or a marketing campaign to help acquire more customers.

Since the program’s launch in 2019, the division has awarded $9.1 million to 127 small businesses. More than half (53%) of the 127 awardees have been either woman, minority, or veteran-owned small businesses. Another 16% fall into more than one of those categories.

The first step in the grant process is as easy as going to the EDGE 2.0 homepage. State specialists are ready to guide hopefuls through the technicalities of grant requirements; Project plans are honed and roadblocks are avoided, all with one-on-one guidance. 

Ultimately, to get the grant, businesses must show how much they deserve it – and how committed they are to succeed. Winners also must be ready to put some of their own cash on the line: The program’s 3:1 match formula means they must pony up $1 for every $3 the state gives.

In many ways, the “prize” is just part of the package. Long after the pitches have been made, participants can access services like memberships to networking organizations, along with expedited pathways to the division’s other funding programs.

“Our services don’t begin with EDGE, and they don’t end with EDGE,” Zilcosky said. “After the competition’s over, we still want to help you, and we have many tools in the toolbox.”

Applicants are also encouraged to try again if they swing and miss on their first “pitch” – that’s what Jessica and Lee Williamson did, fine-tuning their plan after their first attempt, then prevailing on their next try. And, win or lose, everyone gains invaluable business advice. “So even if you don’t win the money, hopefully you still win,” said Zilcosky, who says about 95% of grant recipients are still in business.

Ultimately, the program serves to foster and encourage Delaware’s most innovative ideas, creating pathways to the future. One EDGE winner that’s leaning hard into that future is Sindri Materials Corp., which was created with the idea of producing a new carbon material – just one atom thick – that can enhance the speed and effectiveness of pharmaceutical research. 

With the grant money in hand, Sindri has been able to fine-tune production of its graphene material and is now approaching the point of bringing it to the market – and starting to earn revenue.

Today, they feel far more comfortable about their 5-year trajectory and are even beginning to look beyond.

“Sindri Materials is a great example of our focus on supporting cutting-edge ideas that could revolutionize an industry, and exponentially grow jobs in Delaware,” Zilcosky said.

Along with crucial capital, the state’s grant also gave Sindri’s team a welcome boost of confidence, and a feeling they had an ally who cared. “Anytime I needed to jump on a call with him, Joe was right there,” said Sindri CEO Christopher DiMarco. “It was clear to us that companies like ours matter to the state. Innovation matters to this state.”

Now, he and fellow co-founders Brian Checchio and David DiMarco ponder a new challenge: Finding a bigger lab space to accommodate their grant-driven growth. But the team feels tested and tougher today, especially after surviving the scrutiny of the EDGE judges.

“The judges were tough. They asked me so many great questions,” said Chris DiMarco, who fretted he had muffed his big pitch due to technical glitches. “I told Joe, I thought I blew it. Then, two weeks later, when he told me we had won, I was jumping up and down. I didn’t believe it.”

That feeling of sweet joy seems likely to spread, especially as Williamsons’ pies begin filling shops far and wide. Their creations are now available at more than 30 area shops and restaurants throughout Delaware and Eastern Maryland. The momentum is so powerful, and their passion is so deep, that Coastal’s journey seems bound to reach far beyond Delmarva.

“It really is an adventure, not knowing what the future is, but sensing we have something that can create that future,” Lee Williamson said. “At first, everyone thought we were crazy. Now, our three boys are like, ‘Now we have a job!’ ”

The post Small businesses find sweet success with EDGE grants appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Former federal prosecutors think the indictment struggles to articulate the elements of the alleged crimes in the case, a problem that could lead to its full or partial dismissal.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 24, No. 1,770.

National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report further says crash prevention system didn’t generate alert

A firefighter whose truck collided with an Air Canada jet last month on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing both pilots, heard an air traffic controller warn “stop, stop, stop” but didn’t know who it was for, federal investigators said Thursday.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report on the 22 March collision that a crash prevention system for air traffic controllers didn’t generate an audio or visual alert, and lights on the runway that act as a stop light for crossing traffic were on until about three seconds before the collision.

To host hundreds of thousands of football fans, Pittsburgh moved schools online and is warning of traffic mayhem. Will the NFL’s spotlight be worth it?

Meta is reportedly cutting about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 8,000 jobs, while closing thousands of open roles it had intended to fill. "We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making," said Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer. The company had almost 79,000 employees at the start of the year. Quartz reports: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poured resources into building out AI capabilities, directing spending toward model development, chatbot products, and the engineering talent to support them. Meta set its 2026 capital expenditure guidance at $115 billion to $135 billion, almost double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. Employees have been encouraged to use AI agents internally for tasks such as writing code. The early disclosure, Gale explained, was prompted by the fact that information about the cuts had already made its way into press reports before the company was ready to announce. "I know this is unwelcome news and confirming this puts everyone in an uneasy state, but we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances," she wrote. According to the memo, severance for affected workers in the United States will cover 18 months of COBRA health insurance premiums, along with a base pay component of 16 weeks that increases by two weeks for each year of service. Departing employees will have access to job placement assistance and, where applicable, help navigating immigration status. Packages outside the U.S. will vary by country. Meta cut between 10% and 15% of its Reality Labs workforce in January, shut down several VR game studios, and shed about 700 positions across at least five divisions in March.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Micro RGB TV evo range supports over a billion colors and is available in sizes over 75 inches.

Meta plans to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce as the technology giant steps up its spending on artificial intelligence.

Force says it is ‘confident there was no offence’ and condemns ‘shameful’ behaviour by protesters

The investigation into reports of a rape outside a church in Epsom that led to widespread public disorder will close as police are “confident there was no offence”.

Surrey police received a report on Saturday 11 April that a woman had been raped near a church in the early hours of the morning after leaving Labyrinth nightclub in Epsom.

• Four seats are put on sale for $2,299,998.85 each

• Fifa doesn’t set offerings, but some go above $100,000

• Governing body takes 15% from both buyer and seller

Fifa’s resale site has four tickets on sale for the World Cup final for just under $2.3m each.

The $2,299,998.85 seats for the 19 July match at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, are located behind a goal in the lower deck of the arena.

interest earnings on a $15,000 money market account can still be significant. Here's what savers need to know now.

The app brings lots of live channels and on-demand to the VR world.

I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case.

Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety. This release brings native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm, making Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ideal platform for AI development and production workloads. 

↫ Canonical press release

It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like “AI” aren’t it. On top of all the “AI” nonsense, this new version comes with all the latest versions of the various open source components that make up a Linux distribution, as well as a slew of Rust-based replacements for core CLI tools, like sudo-rs, uutils coreutils, and more.

All the derivative release of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others, will also be updated over the coming days. If you’re already running any of these, updating won’t be a surprise to you.

Tensions around US negotiations may reflect mistake of assassinating more pragmatic and experienced figures

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has claimed that the infighting between moderates and hardliners in Iran’s leadership is so intense that Iranians have “no idea who their leader is”, but many experts questioned his analysis, saying, given the mass assassinations of senior commanders, the country had shown remarkable institutional cohesion.

Trump’s allegations of “CRAZY” splits in the Iranian leadership – the second outing for this argument in three days – is remarkable since he has previously said either he has little knowledge of the new Iranian leadership or that there has already been regime change.

Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and Drake are among the top artists.

The 32 Degrees Heated Socks can pose a burn risk due to the combination of heat, friction, moisture and pressure created during athletic activities.

Justice department has already identified 384 foreign-born people whose US citizenship it wants to revoke

The Trump administration is reportedly pushing the justice department to pursue hundreds of denaturalization cases, in which Americans born outside of the US are stripped of their citizenship.

The justice department has already identified 384 foreign-born US citizens, whose citizenship it wants to revoke and will begin the process in the coming weeks, according to the New York Times.

Gold prices are still sitting near record highs, but there are smart ways to invest with $100 or less today.

Thought a $40,000 a home equity loan was affordable in 2025? Here's how much cheaper the monthly payments are now.

Hope Not Hate campaign identifies election hopefuls calling for a ‘white Britain’ and complaining of ‘kowtowing to the black community’

A Reform UK candidate who called for a “white Britain” and said Keir Starmer should be shot is among a number of contenders fuelling doubts about the party’s claim to have tightened up its vetting.

The past comments of Linda McFarlane and other political hopefuls have been unearthed ahead of the 7 May elections, including one who complained about “constant kowtowing to the black community” and others who endorsed the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The French government agency that handles the issuing and management of citizens' identity documents, including national IDs, passports, and immigration documents, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a data breach. In an announcement, the Agence Nationale des Titres Securises (ANTS) said the data stolen in the breach could include full names, dates and places of birth, mailing and email addresses, and phone numbers on an undisclosed number of citizens. ANTS said the investigation to determine how the breach happened and its impact is ongoing, and people whose data was affected are being notified. ANTS, which said it detected the attack on April 15, did not specify how many people were affected by the breach. But some reporting suggests millions may have had some of their personal information stolen. According to Bleeping Computer, a hacker has advertised the stolen data on a hacking forum, claiming to have a database with 19 million records. The hacker's forum post referenced the same kind of stolen information as mentioned in ANTS' announcement and was published before ANTS publicly disclosed the breach on April 20.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mandated release of files was marred by missed deadlines, leaked victims’ information and excessive redactions

• US politics live – latest updates

The US Department of Justice’s office of the inspector general (OIG) announced on Thursday that it is launching an audit of the justice department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

In a news release, the deputy inspector general William M Blier, who the statement said is performing the duties of the inspector general, said the “preliminary objective” of the internal inquiry “is to evaluate the [justice department’s] processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records in its possession as required by the act”.

Smarting from the humiliation of a report published at The Atlantic about his time in office, FBI Director Kash Patel did what conservatives have done over and over in the age of Trump: He sued for defamation. 

The Atlantic’s story detailed allegations about Patel’s mismanagement of the office and FBI staffers’ concerns that his behavior has become borderline dangerous. According to the magazine’s reporting, staffers have observed that the director frequently drinks to the point of intoxication and has been unreachable behind closed doors multiple times, at one point necessitating agents breaking down a door. In his lawsuit, Patel said that the allegations are demonstrably false. 

Patel’s case — which names the publication and the writer as defendants and demands $250 million in damages — doesn’t appear very strong; it’s unlikely he’ll win in court. But a legal victory isn’t necessarily the goal. Such lawsuits apply financial pressure and ensure newsrooms think twice before publishing critical articles in the future.

Related

Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Sues The Intercept Over Russian Mercenary Report

For all the modern right-wing movement’s bleating about its commitment to free speech, in practice they’re anything but, with a demonstrated penchant for using the legal system as a cudgel against people who say things they don’t like. Known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP, they are a tool of the powerful — and have multiple levels of use.

Most immediately, SLAPP allows plaintiffs the potential to muzzle their critics, who will be less likely to launch attacks against someone who has already proven litigious. This applies not only to the defendant, whether it’s an individual or an institution, but also to others like them who will think twice rather than risk a protracted (and expensive) legal battle.

Typically, the more deep-pocketed someone, or their backers, are, the more they can bleed out defendants by dragging on court cases for as long as possible, racking up legal bills that will have to be paid. Most publishers and newsrooms have lawyers on retainer or in-house, but their legal insurance deductibles are still high, potentially running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. 

Even if these anti-free speech crusaders don’t win a judgment, they have a good chance of draining their opponents’ bank accounts — and breaking their spirits. 

Federal action is is sorely needed to make sure the use of SLAPP doesn’t spiral further out of control. Many states, including New York and Minnesota, have anti-SLAPP laws on the books, but their application in federal courts remains unsettled. Patel filed his suit in D.C. federal court, where the appellate court says the anti-SLAAP statute does not apply. 

Universal application of these laws is needed so the powerful can’t turn to federal courts for meritless filings, and some lawmakers, like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have introduced legislation to that end. So far, however, those bills have not made it to law. 

Patel is far from the only conservative figure to deploy the courts as a weapon against his critics, and this isn’t even his first shot at it; he has an ongoing 2019 lawsuit against Politico, for that outlet’s reporting on his time with the National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term, and another defamation action, against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi for comments on MS NOW, was dismissed on Tuesday.

Related

The Real Danger of ABC News Settling Its Lawsuit With Donald Trump

Trump’s manipulation of the legal system to punish detractors predates his time in politics, but it’s gone into overdrive since his first term. The president has filed multiple defamation suits against members of the media and their organizations, including $475 million against CNN in 2022 (which was dismissed in 2023); the Pulitzer Prize Board for an award he objected to in 2022 (ongoing); journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster in 2023 (dismissed); ABC News in 2024 (settled for $15 million); CBS parent Paramount in 2024 (settled for $16 million); the Wall Street Journal in 2025 (dismissed), the New York Times in 2025 for $15 billion (ongoing), the BBC in 2025 for $10 billion (ongoing); and others. To be clear, this is not an exhaustive list. 

Trump and Patel are two of the better known conservative figures attacking free speech via the courts, but it’s a mainstay tactic in MAGA world. Laura Loomer, an Islamophobic off-and-on ally of Trump, sued late-night personality Bill Maher over comments he made about her relationship with the president (the case was thrown out on Wednesday evening). In 2013, Trump sued Maher for breach of contract after the HBO pundit promised $5 million to charity if the then-real estate magnate could prove his mother was not an orangutan. (Trump withdrew the case.) 

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire with close ties to the White House, used his X social media platform to file a suit against Media Matters for America over its reporting on ad content running alongside antisemitic posts on the site. And David Sacks, another tech billionaire who worked as Trump’s crypto and AI czar, threatened the New York Times over its reporting on his conflicts of interest in a public legal letter last December. 

Closer to home, I’m currently being sued, along with my publisher, Hachette, for more than $1 million by conservative pundit Matt Taibbi over my book, “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” which delves into his ideological shift to the right. And the editor of this piece you’re reading now, Katherine Krueger, was sued for $100 million alongside her former employer Splinter by 2016 Trump spokesperson Jason Miller for a story about a court filing that alleged he drugged a woman with an abortion pill. Miller refuted the allegation, but that case was thrown out on summary judgment because it accurately reported what was in the court filing; mine is ongoing.

In some circumstances, as Trump found after he was elected to a second term in 2024, SLAPP lawsuits can succeed, irrespective of the strength or weakness of the claim. ABC News and Paramount settled with Trump in what are widely regarded as payoffs to a powerful figure who can control their corporate future. Corporations have made the calculation: Better to get on his good side than risk four years of retribution, and, after all, what’s a few million dollars compared to the benefits of having the world’s most powerful person looking kindly on you?

But for the right wing, SLAPP suits also serve to make an ideological point. Whether or not Patel expects to win a $250 million judgment, a central claim in his lawsuit is that his word is enough to shut down speech. 

Because he told The Atlantic the claims in their article weren’t true, they shouldn’t have published it, the complaint argues: “Defendants published the Article with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false.” The objections of a powerful man should be enough to avoid bad press, this line of reasoning goes; publishing anything to the contrary is wrong. 

That’s the animating principle behind the right-wing’s relationship with the media. If they disagree with it or find it embarrassing, you shouldn’t publish it; if you disobey, you must be punished. 

It wasn’t until Trump — and decades of ideological capture of the courts — that there was the potential to regularly use the legal system as a weapon against critics. Until there are First Amendment protections against SLAPP, we can expect the powerful to continue dragging their detractors to court. 

The post Kash Patel Is Using MAGA’s Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press appeared first on The Intercept.

Elon Musk admits owners with outdated self-driving hardware who purchased the option will require a major retrofit effort.

Police allegedly found images on iCloud account of singer accused of killing 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez

A Los Angeles prosecutor said that the singer D4vd, who was charged this week in the killing of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, was in possession of a “significant amount of child pornography”.

Police allegedly found the images on the iCloud account of the 21-year-old singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke.

Ireland and Spain will also not broadcast Eurovision after decision to boycott live event over Israel’s participation

National broadcasters in Ireland, Spain and Slovenia will not air the Eurovision song contest this year, after they decided to boycott the event over Israel’s participation.

Having announced it would not submit a national entry, the Slovenian broadcaster RTV confirmed on Thursday it would implement a broadcasting blackout of the world’s largest live music event and instead show a series of films about Palestine.

Seven-day-old Poppy Hope Lomas died after complications during home birth encouraged by midwives at Barnet hospital

A mother who lost her baby a week after an “unsafe” home birth that went against medical advice was failed by the NHS, an inquest has found.

Poppy Hope Lomas was seven days old when she died at University College hospital in London on 26 October 2022 after complications during a home birth that, according to her mother, was encouraged by midwives at Barnet hospital.

A group of seven tourists, including three children, became trapped on a cliff when the tide came in during a morning walk on an Australian beach.

Exclusive: Officials warn department will also lose access to database of 26,000 verified incidents due to cuts

The Foreign Office unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza and more recently Lebanon has been closed because of cuts within the department, the Guardian can reveal.

The decision to shut the international humanitarian law cell follows a review by Olly Robbins, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office dismissed last week by the prime minister over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Native integration of Q-CTRL’s Fire Opal software with IonQ’s hardware will accelerate real-world applications without specialized quantum expertise

LOS ANGELES, April 23, 2026 — Q-CTRL and IonQ today announced the native integration of Q-CTRL’s Fire Opal software into IonQ’s quantum processors to maximize their quantum performance.

Quantum optimization is a compelling candidate for near-term quantum acceleration across problems in logistics, finance, energy, and more. For the typical customer, even an expert in quantum computing, extracting high-quality solutions from real hardware is highly challenging; many parameters and techniques must be manually tuned or adjusted by the user, mandating a depth and breadth of specialized skills few end users possess.

Q-CTRL and IonQ are reducing the barriers to achieving true commercial value from the most advanced quantum processors, natively integrating Fire Opal’s Optimization Solver directly into IonQ Quantum Cloud as a single, fully configured, easy-to-use function. Now any end user can focus on their optimization problem, allowing Fire Opal to automatically handle all aspects of execution on real hardware to achieve the most valuable results.

IonQ Quantum Cloud users can access Fire Opal’s Optimization Solver directly on IonQ’s Forte and Forte-Enterprise devices, the company’s highest-performing, commercially available quantum computers.

“At Q-CTRL, we’re focused on providing the infrastructure software that makes it possible for end users to achieve true positive ROI from the most advanced quantum computers available,” said Alex Shih, VP of Product at Q-CTRL. “The capability to solve world-changing problems is right there inside of these extraordinary machines. We’re thrilled to partner with IonQ in empowering customers with the quantum-control infrastructure software that brings this power within reach.”

The value of the Fire Opal optimization solver coupled to IonQ Forte is captured in a telecommunications industry case study, delivering the correct solution to reduce network interference out of 68 billion possibilities.

In addition to this native optimization solver on the IonQ Quantum Cloud, Fire Opal’s performance-management capabilities for integrating error suppression into an arbitrary quantum circuit remain available for IonQ hardware via Amazon Braket. These expanded access points now enable users to achieve meaningful industrial outcomes and reliable results without specialized expertise in quantum hardware.

Q-CTRL has an unrivaled track record of creating modular, enterprise-grade infrastructure software, integrated across a range of quantum computing architectures, from trapped ions and semiconductor spins to superconducting qubits. Algorithm performance can be boosted by up to 1,000x, making Fire Opal an extraordinarily powerful and versatile tool for enterprise end users seeking reliable performance enhancement across their varied applications.

“In our experience, IonQ has been a leading hardware platform, and we are excited by what the native integration of Fire Opal error suppression and optimization can unlock,” said Dr. David Benoit, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Physics and Astrochemistry at the University of Hull. “We expect the Fire Opal optimization solver will significantly streamline our workflow by abstracting away from the specific quantum circuits and unlocking latent hardware performance, allowing us to focus fully on solving the core problem rather than managing the complexities of implementation.”

To use Fire Opal on IonQ Quantum Cloud, visit Q-CTRL’s website to request access: https://q-ctrl.com/fire-opal/ionq

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.

About Q-CTRL

Q-CTRL is a global leader in quantum infrastructure software that makes quantum technology useful. Q-CTRL delivers field-deployable capabilities for navigation in GPS-denied environments based on software-ruggedized quantum sensors, with collaborators including Lockheed Martin and Airbus. Their efforts in leveraging software to solve the most challenging problems in making quantum technologies useful carry over to quantum computing, where Q-CTRL partners with industry pioneers like IBM, Rigetti, and AWS to enhance quantum computer performance through AI-driven control solutions. The company’s breakthroughs have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and recognized by TIME Magazine as transforming both commercial and defense operations. Founded
in 2017 by Professor Michael J. Biercuk, Q-CTRL operates globally from offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Huntsville, Berlin, and Oxford.

Source: Q-CTRL

The post IonQ and Q-CTRL Partner to Unlock Quantum Optimization with Fire Opal on Forte Quantum Processors appeared first on HPCwire.

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Battle of the blockades may still have more time to run as the US and Iran try to assert control over the strait of Hormuz

Donald Trump’s decision to extend the naval blockade of Iran indefinitely may do nothing to reduce world oil prices – but it could amount to a recognition that further US military escalation in breach of the nominal ceasefire comes with greater risk against a regime disinclined to surrender.

In theory, Trump’s military options are increasing. A third US carrier strike group, the George HW Bush, is due to arrive in the Middle East within days after rounding South Africa. A second taskforce of 2,500 US marines is sailing from the Pacific and is due to arrive by the end of April.

The deal comes with the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion.

Proposal at heart of offer made during a 30-country two-day meeting jointly organised by France

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Britain is prepared to deploy a squadron of RAF Typhoons based in Qatar to patrol over the strait of Hormuz as part of a multinational mission to keep open the strategic waterway once the Iran war comes to an end.

The UK military also offered to deploy mine-hunting drones and specialist divers to help clear the strait mined by Iran – but no decision has been made on whether HMS Dragon or another warship would also be deployed.

Taskforce report examines how effects of slavery and Jim Crow in Fulton county continue to harm Black residents

A Georgia taskforce has released a landmark report that details the lasting impact of slavery and its afterlives in Fulton county.

The report, spanning more than 600 pages, is based on original research by the Fulton county reparations taskforce and a review of primary source documents. It is the first – of its kind in the nation, according to county leaders and researchers. Rather than examining the impact of slavery and racism at the federal or state level, the harm report investigated the role of the county government.

Audible, Uber Eats and more can now connect to Anthropic's AI chatbot.

New Google Cloud Managed Lustre capabilities with DDN EXAScaler improves AI training, inference, and high-performance computing, delivering scale, performance, and economics

LAS VEGAS, April 23, 2026 — DDN has shared new innovations involving Google Cloud Managed Lustre, unveiled at Google Cloud Next 2026. Built on DDN’s proven Lustre expertise, EXAScaler, and delivered in collaboration with Google Cloud, these advancements redefine what’s possible for AI training, inference, and high-performance computing (HPC) in the cloud.

With performance scaling to 10 terabytes per second, Google Cloud Managed Lustre delivers improved throughput, elasticity, and cost efficiency—enabling enterprises to run the world’s most demanding AI and HPC workloads. The launch underscores DDN’s vision to power the full AI lifecycle—from training and fine-tuning to inference and large-scale simulation—through a unified, high-performance data platform.

“This is not just a product milestone—it’s a market-shaping moment,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO at DDN. “We are delivering one of the fastest-growing, highest-performance managed Lustre services in the industry, purpose-built for the realities of modern AI at scale. This announcement reinforces DDN’s leadership in AI data platforms and our shared commitment to helping customers innovate faster, at lower cost, and with greater confidence.”

Built for the Next Generation of AI

Google Cloud Managed Lustre provides a POSIX-compliant, parallel file system that delivers high throughput and low latency. Customers across industries—including AI, financial services, robotics, autonomous systems, and advanced research—are rapidly adopting the platform to power:

• Large-scale LLM training, fine-tuning, and checkpointing
• High-throughput AI inference, RAG, and KV-cache acceleration
• Financial modeling, life sciences and HPC workloads
• Machine vision, multimodal AI, and physical simulations

A key innovation unveiled at Google Cloud Next is the use of Managed Lustre as a shared KV-cache for AI inference, dramatically improving performance and economics. By leveraging Lustre’s ultra-low latency and high aggregate throughput, customers can avoid redundant computation and scale inference across clusters with virtually unlimited shared cache capacity.

In benchmark testing, this approach delivered:

• improved total inference throughput by 75%
• reduced the mean time to first token by greater than 40% compared to using KV Cache in host memory alone

The result is faster, more responsive AI applications—and significantly lower cost of inference at scale.

A Collaboration Driving Cloud-Scale Performance

For the offering, DDN combines long-standing Lustre expertise and extreme-scale data systems with Google Cloud’s elastic infrastructure, innovations in compute and Hyperdisk, global reach, and access to cutting-edge accelerators, including TPUs.

“Managed Lustre enables us to scale AI model training for AFEELA Intelligent Drive by 3x compared to other Google Cloud solutions,” said Motoi Kataoka, Senior Manager, AI & Data Analytics Platform, Sony Honda Mobility Inc.

New capabilities announced at Google Cloud Next also include a single, dynamic hot and cold tier, designed to deliver high performance for hot data with dramatically improved economics—eliminating the complexity, performance cliffs, and SKU sprawl common in competing tiered storage solutions.

Setting the Pace for the Industry

With rapid customer adoption, explosive capacity growth, and performance milestones, the combination of DDN and Google Cloud Managed Lustre is setting a new benchmark for AI and HPC in the cloud.

“This is what happens when deep infrastructure expertise meets cloud-scale innovation,” said Kirill Tropin, Group Product Manager at Google Cloud. “Our partnership with DDN enables customers to run their most demanding AI workloads with the performance, scale, and simplicity they need—today and into the future.”

About DDN

DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across hundreds of thousands of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns. Discover more at ddn.com.

Source: DDN

The post DDN Expands Google Cloud Managed Lustre for AI and HPC Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

A direct conversion from pounds to dollars would make the new two-panel folding phone seriously pricey in the US. However, that's not the whole picture.

Thinking about taking a DIY approach to bankruptcy? Make sure you understand the risks before you file.

Ursula von der Leyen hails ‘good news’ after Hungary’s lifting of vetoes allows leaders to sign off on agreements

EU leaders have welcomed the end of diplomatic deadlock over a long-awaited €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, after the bloc completed the agreement along with a 20th sanctions package against Russia.

After weeks of delay, the EU signed off on the loan on Thursday, in time for a summit in Cyprus that began in the evening and will include talks over a dinner with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

OpenAI says its latest model is meant to help run your computer.

In a recent town hall meeting reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple CEO Tim Cook named the troubled 2012 launch of Apple Maps as his "first really big mistake" in the role. "The product wasn't ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more of local kind of stuff," Cook told staff. MacRumors reports: Reflecting on the debacle, Cook said it was "valuable," noting that he expressed regret to users at the time and suggested they use competing navigation apps instead. "We apologized for it, and we said, 'Go use these other apps. They're better than ours.' And that was some humble pie," Cook said. "But it was the right thing for our users. And so it's an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made." Cook added: "Now we've got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted again early Thursday, marking its 45th episode since December 2024.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 23, 2026 — Oklo Inc., an advanced nuclear technology company, today announced an agreement with NVIDIA and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to advance critical nuclear infrastructure, AI-enabled research, and nuclear fuel R&D at Los Alamos.

The agreement brings together advanced nuclear reactors, AI models, and national laboratory expertise to support critical nuclear infrastructure for the federal government’s Genesis Mission.

The collaboration is intended to combine advanced nuclear power, AI, digital twins, modeling, and simulation to support critical infrastructure development and accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy. By aligning Oklo’s advanced sodium-fast-reactor platform, NVIDIA AI infrastructure, and LANL’s world-leading expertise in materials science and nuclear fuels, the parties aim to lay the groundwork for a new class of mission-critical, high-assurance energy.

“This agreement brings together reactor deployment, high-performance compute, and world-class fuel and materials science expertise” said Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte. “We believe this will advance our plutonium-bearing fuel work on Oklo’s Pluto reactor, which was selected under DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program, and help bring resilient power in support of the Genesis Mission.”

Initial focus areas include:

• Physics- and chemistry-based AI models, including trained inference models to support fuel validation and R&D for plutonium-bearing fuels
• Materials science and fabrication R&D for plutonium-bearing fuels
• Power generation, grid reliability, redundancy and stabilization studies in support of nuclear-powered AI factories at LANL

Projects under the agreement include integrated full-stack solutions to support nuclear powered AI factories; AI development, including physics and chemistry trained AI models to support nuclear fuel R&D; grid stabilization, reliability, and redundancy studies; materials science efforts focused on plutonium-bearing fuel; and proof of concept work related to the development of a nuclear powered AI factory.

About Oklo Inc.

Oklo Inc. (NYSE: OKLO) is developing fast fission power plants to deliver clean, reliable, affordable energy at global scale; establishing a domestic supply chain for critical isotopes; and advancing nuclear fuel recycling to convert used nuclear fuel into clean energy. Oklo was the first to receive a site use permit from the U.S. Department of Energy for a commercial advanced fission plant, was awarded fuel from Idaho National Laboratory, and submitted the first custom combined license application for an advanced reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Oklo is also developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Laboratories.

Source: Oklo Inc.

The post Oklo, NVIDIA, and LANL Advance Nuclear Fuel R&D and AI Modeling for Los Alamos Projects appeared first on HPCwire.

More than 200,000 have signed petitions urging the government to break contracts amid concerns about the company’s ‘supervillain’ manifesto

More than 200,000 people have called on ministers to break contracts with Palantir in an apparent groundswell of public concern about the US tech company’s role in the NHS, police, military and councils.

Two petitions have attracted 229,000 signatures, one calling for the government to end all public contracts with the company, the software of which is used by Donald Trump’s ICE immigration enforcement programme and the Israeli military, and another urging the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to cancel its £330m patient data contract with the NHS.

Prosecutors say 43 people indicted on charges including murder, kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking

More than two dozen members and associates of the Mexican mafia were arrested during an early morning crackdown in southern California, federal authorities said on Thursday.

The FBI and other federal and local agencies executed search and arrest warrants at locations mostly in Orange county, south of Los Angeles, according to the US attorney’s office.

Forecasting service raises alarm over data from Paris airport used to settle Polymarket wagers on temperature

French police are investigating alleged tampering with national weather forecasting service equipment after a series of unusual temperature readings coincided with suspicious winning bets made on Polymarket.

Data from a Météo-France weather station at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport was used to settle bets between online gamblers on what the temperature would be in Paris for March and the first weeks of April.

The Justice Department's internal watchdog said it will audit the department's compliance with the law that required the release of the Epstein files.

Managing Editor, CBS News

Technology minister tells Commons ‘de-identified’ information from UK Biobank advertised for sale on Alibaba

The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.

The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.

Tech can scale cyber-attacks and defences alike, raising questions about private power, public risk and the future of a shared internet

Anthropic announced its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, this month but said it would not be released publicly, because it turns computers into crime scenes. The company claimed that it could find previously unknown “zero-day” flaws, exploit them and, in principle, link these weaknesses in order to take over major operating systems and web browsers. Mythos did so autonomously, writing code and obtaining privileges. The implications are significant. It’s like a burglar being able to target any building, get inside, unlock every door and empty every safe.

The Silicon Valley company has so far named 40 organisations as partners under Project Glasswing to help mount a defence – asking them to “patch” vulnerabilities before hackers get a chance to exploit them. All are American, sitting at the heart of the US-led digital system. Anthropic shared Mythos with only Britain outside the US, allowing the AI Security Institute to test frontier models. After seeing it up close, British ministers warned: AI is about to make cyber-attacks much easier and faster, and most businesses are not ready. Banks in Europe are likely to test it next.

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.

US president says Tehran hobbled by infighting as Pentagon reportedly briefs mine clearance may take six months

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has again said that the US has “total control over the strait of Hormuz”, adding that Iran’s leadership was so hobbled by infighting that it was unclear who was in charge.

But the US president’s claim seemed questionable in the face of the seizure of two container ships by Iranian commandos and a US report warning it could take six months to clear the strait of mines.

Senior Vice President, Booking, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures

Man from North Carolina arrested at Florida hotel with a handgun and about 200 rounds of ammo, authorities say

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Authorities say a man suspected of planning a mass shooting at a large New Orleans festival was arrested at a Florida hotel with a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

The event was not named, but the New Orleans jazz and heritage festival, commonly known as JazzFest, runs from Thursday through 3 May. The gathering celebrates Louisiana’s music, food and culture, and attracted about 460,000 people last year, organizers said.

Eurail, which sells passes, says data being ‘offered for sale on dark web’ after December breach affecting 300,000 people

Holidaymakers across Europe are facing the stress and expense of getting new passports after their personal data was posted on the dark web after a hack of the Interrail company Eurail.

Personal data, including passport numbers, names, phone numbers, email and home addresses and dates of birth of more than 300,000 European travellers was accessed in December. But this week Eurail revealed to customers that “data copied during the security incident has been offered for sale on the dark web and a sample dataset has been published on Telegram”.

Vietnam-born Cao stood twice for federal office in Virginia and has called for upgrading of fleet to face new threats

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The acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, who steps into the role after the sudden departure of John Phelan, is a veteran naval officer and former refugee who earned a position with the Trump administration with campaigns for political office in Virginia marked by religious intolerance.

When Cao was first appointed, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, set him to modernizing base infrastructure and quality-of-life issues for sailors and marines, and to raise recruiting standards. Cao has also been a point person in the administration on permitting vaccine refusal and eliminating “DEI” policies in the military.

Here's how to watch Timothée Chalamet's Oscar-nominated performance.

Guest column: For centuries, humans looked to seers and astrologers to determine fate. Today, we look to algorithms, and the loss of agency is the same.

Microsoft plans to offer voluntary buyouts for the first time. According to CNBC, "about 7% of U.S. employees are eligible," with the program being "available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher." Further details will be provided on May 7. From the report: Last year Microsoft removed some costs through multiple rounds of layoffs. As of June 2025, the company had 228,000 employees. "Our hope is that this program gives those eligible the choice to take that next step on their own terms, with generous company support," Amy Coleman, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief people officer, wrote in a memo viewed by CNBC. Additionally, Microsoft is adjusting the way it doles out stock to employees for annual rewards. The company will no longer make managers tie stock directly to cash bonuses. This way, "managers have more flexibility to meaningfully recognize high performance," Coleman wrote. The company is also simplifying the review process for managers, so they can choose from five pay options for employees instead of nine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enrolling in a debt relief program can impact the debt collection process, and not always in the way you'd expect.

John Phelan firing caused by poor relationship with Pete Hegseth and slow movement on shipbuilding, sources say

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The Trump administration fired its top naval official on Wednesday in a move unrelated to the ongoing naval blockade of Iran’s strait of Hormuz, but instead over over an internal dispute about shipbuilding.

The Pentagon confirmed that John Phelan, who ran a private investment fund in Florida and was a Donald Trump donor, had been ousted as the navy secretary. His departure – the first of any service secretary in the Trump administration – came in the same week that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized two container ships in the strait of Hormuz, claiming maritime violations and transferring them to Iranian shores.

Lebanese PM calls attack that killed Amal Khalil a ‘war crime’, with rescuers attempting to free her also targeted

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel’s killing of a prominent Lebanese journalist in a double-tap strike has been greeted with international outrage as Lebanon’s prime minister described the attack as a “war crime”.

Amal Khalil, 43, who worked for al-Akhbar newspaper, was buried on Thursday. She was killed in what colleagues described as a sustained attack by Israeli forces, with rescuers attempting to dig her out of the rubble of a building also targeted and prevented from providing life-saving assistance.

Jim Taiclet spoke in earnings call as company expands contracts with the US government amid the Iran war

Lockheed Martin’s CEO has called the Trump administration a “golden opportunity” for the company as it expands its contracting work for the federal government amid the conflict in the Middle East.

In an earnings call on Thursday covering the first quarter of 2026, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors that the company is well positioned “based on more available resources for us”.

A working research prototype designed to connect quantum systems from different vendors, in all major encoding modalities, at room temperature, over standard telecom fiber

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 23, 2026 — Cisco today announced the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch, a critical milestone in quantum networking that addresses one of the most fundamental barriers to building a quantum network. As a working research prototype, it is the latest proof point in Cisco’s accelerating full-stack quantum networking program, built on years of foundational research, real-world demonstrations, and a growing ecosystem of strategic collaborations.

Quantum computers encode information in different ways, and until now, no switch could accept and translate between all major encoding modalities without destroying the quantum information in the process. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is designed to address this challenge for the first time, routing quantum information while preserving it at room temperature, on existing telecom fiber, with a Cisco-patented conversion engine that translates between encoding modalities at input and output.

“Reaching this milestone is a pivotal moment for our quantum program and a testament to the transformative potential of quantum networking,” said Vijoy Pandey, SVP/GM of Outshift, Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation Group. “We’ve long recognized that connecting quantum systems is the key to achieving true scalability, and now we’ve taken a critical step toward making that vision a reality. While this is a significant achievement, it’s just the beginning. The road ahead is long, yet the impact of what we are building—and what is still to come—will be nothing short of profound.”

Cisco Is Building the Network Layer for the Quantum Era

Today’s quantum computers are powerful but limited, operating at hundreds of qubits when real-world applications in healthcare, financial services, and aerospace will need millions to achieve unheard of speeds and technological breakthroughs. Cisco believes networking and connectivity are central to bridging that gap. The quantum future will not be built by any one company or any one technology. It will be built by connecting them all.

Imagine connecting billions of people and tens of billions of devices with direct cables. It would be unmanageable. The internet became possible because classical switches could connect all of those endpoints through a shared, scalable network. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch does the same thing for quantum. When two quantum computers need to share information, it accepts the signal in whatever modality it arrives, translates it into a common language for routing, and delivers it in the format the receiving system needs, without losing any quantum information along the way.

This is made possible by a Cisco-patented conversion engine at the heart of the quantum switch. The output modality can match the input or be an entirely different one, enabling the quantum switch to connect and translate between quantum systems that were never designed to talk to each other, a critical capability for building quantum networks that work across different vendors and technologies.

The quantum switch is designed to support all major quantum encoding modalities used to carry information:

• Polarization (the orientation of light waves)
• Time-Bin (the timing of light pulses)
• Frequency-Bin (the color or frequency of light)
• Path (the physical or spatial path)

To date, the quantum switch has been experimentally validated with polarization encoding. Support for time-bin and frequency-bin is built into the design and represents the next step in Cisco’s ongoing validation process.

Proof-of-Concept Experiments and Results

The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch was tested by Cisco researchers using Cisco’s own entanglement source and single-photon detectors. In these experiments, the switch demonstrated that quantum information can be routed and converted across systems quickly, accurately, and efficiently, without destroying it in the process.

Key findings include:

• Quantum information preserved through conversion: Less than 4% degradation in quantum state fidelity and entanglement, maintaining the coherence that quantum networks require to function.
• Switching at the speed quantum networks demand: Sub nano-second electro-optic switching, reconfiguring connections in as little as 1 nanosecond
• Energy efficient: Consumes less than 1 milliwatt of power

Powering the Quantum Network of the Future

Quantum networking is in a nascent state. There is no established infrastructure connecting quantum systems, and most can only communicate with other systems that encode information the same way they do.

The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is an entirely new approach:

• Unique in its nature: Current switch technology is limited to one encoding type. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is designed to support all major modalities, with a built-in conversion capability that is Cisco-patented and available in no other product on the market today.
• Room-temperature operation: Unlike many quantum hardware components that require cryogenic cooling, Cisco’s Universal Quantum Switch operates at room temperature. This eliminates the need for specialized cooling infrastructure, reducing both deployment complexity and cost.
• Works with existing infrastructure: It operates at standard telecom frequencies over the same fiber that carries internet traffic today, requiring no specialized equipment.
• Connects systems that could not previously communicate: Organizations are no longer locked into a single vendor ecosystem. It enables quantum devices from different manufacturers to interoperate, protecting existing investments and enabling best-of-breed quantum environments.
• Designed for the full stack: The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is built as part of Cisco’s evolving end-to-end architecture for a distributed quantum network, spanning hardware, software, and application layers.

Cisco’s Vision for What Comes Next

For more than four decades, Cisco has built infrastructure that connects the world. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is the latest milestone in that journey, reflecting Cisco’s conviction that the road to practical quantum computing will be built via a distributed network of interconnected quantum devices in a matter of years, not decades.

The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch is one part of a broader quantum networking portfolio that includes Cisco’s quantum network entanglement chip, which generates the entangled photons that quantum networks rely on to transmit information, and Cisco’s industry-first network-aware Quantum Compiler, which orchestrates how quantum algorithms are distributed and executed across multiple quantum processors. All three were developed from the ground up at Cisco’s dedicated quantum labs in Santa Monica. Together, along with applications like Quantum Sync and Quantum Alert, these innovations contribute to Cisco’s vision for a full quantum network stack, from the hardware that generates and routes quantum information, to the software that manages it, to the applications that put it to work. Cisco is also advancing this vision through strategic collaborations with IBM, Qunnect, Atom Computing and more.

More from HPCwire

• Atom Computing Partners with Cisco to Advance Scalable, Networked, and Distributed Quantum Computing
• Qunnect and Cisco Demonstrate Metro-Scale, High-Speed Quantum Entanglement Swapping Over Commercial Fiber
• IBM and Cisco Detail Effort to Connect Future Fault-Tolerant Quantum Systems
• Cisco Launches Quantum Lab and Debuts Entanglement Chip for Scalable Networking

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity, and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all.

Source: Cisco

The post Cisco Introduces Universal Quantum Switch, Advancing the Path to a Quantum Network appeared first on HPCwire.

Inquiry began in March after report on security arrangements involving FBI director’s girlfriend, NYT says

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The FBI began investigating a New York Times reporter after the newspaper published a story raising concerns about the security arrangements surrounding the girlfriend of Kash Patel, the FBI director, the Times has reported.

According to reporting from the Times on Wednesday, the inquiry into Elizabeth Williamson, the reporter, began in March following an article she reported alleging that Patel used FBI resources to provide protection and transportation for his girlfriend, the country singer Alexis Wilkins.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York is suing Coinbase and Gemini, two of the newest players in the prediction market industry, arguing that the companies' unregulated and unlicensed platforms are illegal gambling operations. Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state court in Manhattan, seeks to bar the companies' platforms from operating in the state unless and until they obtain licenses from the state Gaming Commission. "Gambling by another name is still gambling, and it is not exempt from regulation under our state laws and Constitution," James said in a statement. "Gemini and Coinbase's so-called prediction markets are just illegal gambling operations, exposing young people to addictive platforms that lack the necessary guardrails." Both companies began as cryptocurrency trading platforms before branching into the prediction space, which has been dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket. [...] New York's lawsuit alleges that the Coinbase and Gemini are seeking "to avoid the legal and financial consequences" of the state's close regulation of gambling "by offering what is quintessentially wagering under the guise of offering 'event contracts' on a 'prediction market.'" By operating without licenses, the lawsuit says, Coinbase's and Gemini's prediction market businesses aren't paying the same taxes as licensed casinos and mobile sportsbooks, which are taxed by the state at a rate of approximately 51% of gross revenues. In addition, the lawsuit says, Coinbase and Gemini allow users as young as 18, while state law prohibits wagering by anyone under 21.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The order places FDA-approved products containing marijuana and state-regulated medical marijuana products at a lower drug classification.

Pope Leo XIV shed his previous image as he denounced war in the Middle East and responded assertively to criticism by President Donald Trump.

Italian officials expressed no interest in a substitution that would give Italy’s national team a charitable berth after failing to qualify for the tournament.

Picking the right headphones for the right situation is key. For everyday use, exercising and lengthy listening time, three is the perfect number for a headphones collection. Here are my picks.

Bill clears 50–48 vote to boost ICE and CBP funding as Democrats oppose measure and shutdown continues

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Senate Republicans on Thursday approved a plan to fund Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants for the remainder of his term and pave the way for an end to the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The budget resolution adopted along a near party line vote in the early-morning hours sets the stage for Congress to craft legislation allocating as much as $140bn to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), two agencies at the forefront of Trump’s mass deportation agenda that have been without funding since mid-February, when the DHS shutdown began.

Want to skip investing and deposit $20,000 into a top savings account instead? Here's how much you'd earn if you do.

President Trump intends to nominate David Cummins to lead the Transportation Security Administration, according to a person familiar with the decision.

A combination of heat, dry air and strong winds are fueling "extreme" wildfire risks for millions across the middle of the country.

Firm went bust in February amid fallout from the scandal over Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein

Little says in March she had a meeting when she asked to see the Foreign Office’s documentation about the decision to grant Mandelson vetting. She said she was asking because this was documentation covered by the humble address. She said was told that “that information would not be forthcoming”.

In the middle of March, I have a meeting with Sir Olly and a senior member of his team, and this is after the point that I’ve been told that this summary document exists.

I specifically ask to see this document and any decision-making audit trail around those judgments at the time. It was made clear to me that that information would not be forthcoming.

I took the very unusual judgment that I should directly request the information from UK Security Vetting.

And I did that because I go back to my responsibilities, to discharge the humble address, which is a responsibility that is unique to me and I take very seriously.

Commentary: One big product frontier still looms for Apple. Will smart glasses have their AirPods moment at last?

New lawsuit accuses JetBlue of using consumers' browser activity and other personal data to set airfares.

After Keir Starmer’s statement to the Commons and gripping evidence from the sacked top civil servant Olly Robbins, Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey talk about how the story of Peter Mandelson’s vetting for his job as UK ambassador to the US, which was first broken by the Guardian last Thursday, has unfolded this week

A journalists' union said rescuers were prevented from accessing the destroyed building where reporter Amal Khalil was left trapped beneath rubble.

Move comes after Hungary and Slovakia dropped opposition following reopening of the Druzhba oil pipeline

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Kyiv will seek to receive the first tranche of the €90bn European Union loan by the end of May, or early June.

“This is strengthening of our army,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp chat, reported by Reuters.

Wildfires burning across the south-eastern US intensified on Wednesday in parts of south-east Georgia, where 50 homes were destroyed, and across north-east Florida, forcing evacuations and school closures in some communities.

The Georgia forestry commission issued its first mandatory burn ban in the state’s history, effective across 91 counties in the lower half of the state, because of worsening drought conditions and rising wildfire activity.

Some of the biggest blazes are reported to be along Georgia’s coast and around Jacksonville, Florida. They have been exacerbated by a long drought, low humidity and strong winds in the area

• Wildfires burning across Georgia and Florida destroy homes and force evacuations

Adam Hall, of Tyne and Wear, will serve at least 23 years in prison, with victims describing lasting trauma

A “callous, calculating sexual predator” who raped and deliberately infected young, vulnerable men with HIV has been jailed for life and told he must serve at least 23 years.

Adam Hall, 43, of Washington, Tyne and Wear, is the second man in the UK ever to be found guilty of intentionally setting out to spread the virus.

VC-led round will be used to scale platform and team, building on a foundation of hardware-agnostic quantum software leadership

BOSTON, April 23, 2026 — Zapata Quantum, a pioneer in quantum computing application and algorithm development, today announced the completion of an oversubscribed $15 million financing led by Triatomic Capital, a leading technology venture capital firm, with participation from other strategic investors. The capital raise marks the final milestone of a successful year-long restructuring effort and positions Zapata to accelerate its role in advancing the application layer of quantum computing.

“We’ve completed our restructuring and emerged stronger than ever,” said Sumit Kapur, Chief Executive Officer of Zapata Quantum. “This financing is a strong vote of confidence from long-term, fundamentals-oriented investors and positions us to scale at a critical moment as quantum computing transitions from technical progress to transformational real-world value creation.”

“Zapata stands out for its commitment to technical rigor, deep portfolio of foundational IP, and proven experience helping enterprises advance in their quantum journey,” said Jeff Huber, General Partner of Triatomic Capital. “We’re proud to support Zapata’s growth as it continues to demonstrate leadership in translating quantum advantage into quantum utility.”

Leadership in Quantum Value Creation

Since emerging from Harvard’s Quantum Computing Lab in 2017, Zapata has led foundational work advancing real-world quantum applications across Fortune 500 enterprises and the public sector, spanning high-value domains including cryptography, pharmaceuticals, finance, materials discovery, and defense.

A recent example of Zapata’s work highlighting quantum-enabled drug discovery was selected as one of Nature Biotechnology’s top 10 scientific papers of 2025, and featured as the journal’s December 2025 cover. The study, co-authored with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, University of Toronto, and Insilico Medicine, focused on targeting the KRAS mutation in cancer therapy—serving as a proof point of Zapata’s capabilities and quantum computing’s massive potential to generate viable drug candidates in the biotech domain.

Scaling at a Critical Moment for Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is entering a phase of increasing enterprise relevance, with rapid hardware progress fueling growing sophistication in algorithms and implementations. At the same time, a gap remains between technical advancement and the ability to develop validated, high-value applications for enterprise problems. Zapata is focused on closing this gap by providing enterprises with the intelligence and tooling required to move from experimentation to production-ready solutions.

The strategic investment by Triatomic and others underscores Zapata’s mission to solve the quantum application bottleneck and represents a key next step in the company’s progress in the public market.

Funding will be used to scale Zapata’s platform and team across science, engineering, product, and commercial functions. As an AI-native company, Zapata is structured to deploy this capital efficiently—leveraging AI-driven development and strategic partnerships, including its collaboration with the University of Maryland on formal validation of quantum algorithms, to extend capabilities, accelerate development, and maximize runway.

“We are already firing on all cylinders: scientifically, technically, and commercially,” said Kapur. “This capital is jet fuel. It allows us to scale across every dimension. I couldn’t be more grateful or excited for the journey ahead as we continue toward our true north as the foundational hardware-agnostic quantum software platform.”

About Zapata Quantum

Zapata Quantum (OTC: ZPTA) is a leading hardware-agnostic, pure-play quantum software company focused on accelerating quantum application development. With a portfolio of more than 60 granted and pending patents developed over seven years, Zapata supports applications across cryptography, pharmaceuticals, finance, materials discovery, defense, and more. The Company is the only organization to have participated across all technical areas of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking program and has worked with Fortune 500 enterprises and government agencies to translate quantum advances into real-world impact. Learn more at zapataquantum.com.

Source: Zapata Quantum

The post Zapata Quantum Secures $15M Financing Following Year-Long Restructuring appeared first on HPCwire.

Commentary: If you want a new iPhone, get Apple's iPhone 17. The iPhone 18 is still too far away, and we don't know enough about it to justify the wait.

YouGov survey shows cross-party consensus – but that many fear abortion access could be reduced

New polling has found that whatever their party political leanings, an overwhelming majority of people support the right to access an abortion – although young people, in particular, fear reproductive rights may be reduced.

The YouGov polling, commissioned by MSI Reproductive Choices to mark its 50th anniversary, found nine in 10 people support the right to access an abortion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the EV maker plans to use Intel's next-generation 14A manufacturing process to make chips at its Terafab project, an advanced AI chip complex Musk has envisioned in Austin. The contract would mark Intel's first major customer for the technology, a breakthrough for the chipmaker which has struggled to stand up its contract manufacturing business essential for taking on top rival TSMC. Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan has said that the company would exit the chip manufacturing business altogether if it failed to secure an external customer. Intel has previously said it was in discussions with large customers about 14A, but has not yet disclosed a major external customer. It declined to comment on Musk's remarks. [...] "Given that by the time Terafab scales up, 14A will be probably fairly mature or ready for prime time," Musk said. "14A seems like the right move, and we have a great relationship with Intel," he said. Ben Bajarin, head of technology consultancy Creative Strategies, said that Intel's 14A technology could "turn out to be a bigger deal for Intel than folks thought." "It's important to have multiple partners as early design partners to help clean the pipe and work through needed learnings at the leading edge. They will definitely have scale, so a great first non-Intel customer," Bajarin said. Seaport Research Partners analyst Jay Goldberg said Musk's vote of confidence in Intel's technology outweighed the unknowns about the Terafab project. "Having a customer is more important than the timing," he said. Goldberg said that Musk's lofty estimates of how many chips its robots could one day require may or may not materialize, but even making chips for Tesla's existing businesses would be a significant win for Intel. "It's not equivalent to Apple or Nvidia" in terms of chip volumes, Goldberg said. "But it's a real customer. It can be real volumes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 50% of voters at first AGM under new leadership oppose plans to scrap climate reporting

BP’s board has suffered a triple climate rebellion in its first shareholder meeting since appointing new leadership to steer the embattled oil company.

More than 50% of shareholders voting at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) came out against its plans to scrap its existing climate reporting, and its resolution to replace in-person annual shareholder meetings – a lightning rod for climate protest in recent years – with online-only events.

Removal site in Dunkirk will hold people of 10 nationalities trying to reach UK in small boats under new £660m deal with French

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The UK will pay for 200 French officers to detain and deport people seeking asylum from some of the world’s most oppressive and war-ravaged regimes under a new UK-France deal to try to reduce Channel crossings.

In what is being billed as the first time the French government has agreed to target those heading to the UK in small boats, a removal site in Dunkirk will be used to hold people from 10 countries: Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam and Yemen. The Home Office said they were the top 10 nationalities who crossed the Channel by small boat last year.

New Classiq Quantum Agent capability turns natural-language intent into production-ready quantum applications, powered by the first generation of expert-level quantum AI agents

BOSTON, April 23, 2026 — Classiq today announced a significant acceleration for quantum software development: a new AI agentic layer that enables users to move from natural-language intent to structured, executable quantum applications, powered by a first-generation, expert-level quantum agent.

Unlike traditional code assistants, the Classiq Quantum Agent operates on top of its model-based quantum software platform, allowing it to generate, refine and optimize quantum programs within a validated, scalable development environment. This approach now enables AI to not only suggest code, but to function as a trained development partner. It is now capable of guiding and implementing complex quantum workflows across enterprise domains such as pharmaceuticals, finance, aerospace, automotive and quantum error correction.

“AI in quantum computing has so far been limited to helping write code,” said Nir Minerbi, CEO and co-founder of Classiq. “Classiq created the foundational modeling and abstraction layer for quantum software. It’s the only stack designed to be natively understood by large language models, allowing AI to develop expert-grade quantum applications that are not just theoretical, but fully compilable and ready to run on real hardware.”

From Prompts to Production-Ready Portable Quantum Applications

Classiq’s new capability enables users to describe high-level goals, algorithms or domain-specific problems in natural language, and generate structured quantum programs that can be analyzed, optimized and executed.

Crucially, this is not free-form code generation because the AI-generated outputs are built on top of Classiq’s model-based architecture, ensuring that programs remain:

• Structured and maintainable
• Fully validated and compilable
• Optimized for real hardware constraints
• Hardware-agnostic and forward-compatible with evolving quantum systems

By combining natural-language interaction with its synthesis and optimization engine, Classiq enables a shift from experimental coding to repeatable, enterprise-grade quantum development.

An Emerging AI Category: Expert Quantum Agents

The agentic workflow is designed to operate across the full lifecycle of quantum application development, including:

• Translating domain problems into quantum models
• Designing scalable algorithms across abstraction layers
• Optimizing circuits under real-world constraints
• Iterating within structured development workflows

Because it operates on top of Classiq’s validated modeling layer and curated algorithm libraries, the agents can reason about quantum systems at a higher level than traditional LLM-based tools. The result is a system that combines the flexibility of AI with the rigor required for serious quantum software development.

Accelerating Quantum Projects to Practical Long-Term Quantum Assets

Classiq’s approach reflects a broader shift in how enterprises engage with quantum computing. As the quantum ecosystem continues to move toward larger-scale systems, software abstraction, automation, developer productivity and implementation quality are becoming critical.

Rather than producing one-off experiments or disposable code, organizations can now build persistent, evolving capabilities, where knowledge is captured, validated and continuously improved over time.

“Enterprises don’t want to ‘play with quantum,’” added Minerbi. “They want to build something that lasts. By combining AI with a validated modeling foundation, we’re enabling teams to create quantum applications and knowledge assets that remain relevant as the technology evolves.”

AI-native development workflows are the next step in that evolution, enabling more teams to participate in quantum development while maintaining the depth and rigor required for real-world applications.

By introducing expert-level AI into the quantum development process, Classiq is expanding what is possible, and democratizing who can build it.

About Classiq

Classiq is the leading quantum computing software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness quantum computing. Classiq’s platform transforms high-level functional models into optimized, hardware-ready quantum circuits automatically. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner, without deep hardware expertise.

Source: Classiq

The post Classiq Certifies Expert-Level Quantum AI Agents for Real-World Applications appeared first on HPCwire.

The merger will still require governmental approval and could be delayed by a lawsuit seeking to block it

Shareholders of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) voted “overwhelmingly” to approve the company’s $110bn merger with Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, on Thursday.

But shareholders voted against generous proposed compensation packages for WBD executives, including a $550m payout to the outgoing chief executive, David Zaslav.

British foreign secretary told to impose new measures as ruble-pegged cryptocurrency A7A5 is supported in country

More than 20 MPs and peers have called on the foreign secretary to take action against institutions and individuals in Kyrgyzstan allegedly facilitating large-scale Russian sanctions evasion.

They urged the UK to levy personal sanctions against three top Kyrgyz officials for their alleged role in facilitating Russian sanctions evasion more broadly, and more specifically for allowing Kyrgyzstan to host infrastructure supporting the cryptocurrency A7A5.

Tehran has shown that its grip over the strait of Hormuz is its most potent deterrent – arguably more consequential than its now defunct nuclear programme

• Fawaz Gerges is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics

Donald Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran will be remembered as a grave strategic miscalculation – one that has reshaped the region in unintended and destabilising ways. With the ceasefire now extended indefinitely, we can see more clearly how the war has undermined the US’s standing in the world and failed to achieve its core objectives: it has neither brought about regime change in Tehran, nor forced Iran to submit to American demands. Far from it.

By inflicting economic pain far beyond the region and slowing the global economy, Iran has demonstrated that its grip over the strait of Hormuz constitutes its most potent deterrent – arguably more consequential than its now defunct nuclear programme. Control of the strait will be Tehran’s most powerful source of leverage in the years ahead.

A deeply divided federal appeals court has ruled that public schools in Texas are allowed to display Ten Commandments posters or framed copies in public school classrooms, setting up a potential landmark case in the Supreme Court’s next term.

On Tuesday, the full United State Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a 9-8 decision in Nathan v. Alamo, held that a state law, S.B. 10, requiring the 10 Commandments classroom display does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause or Free Exercise Clause. These clauses read as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Link: Read the Decision

The Fifth Circuit majority considered a Supreme Court precedent set in Stone v. Graham (1980), where a divided Court ruled that a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public classrooms violated the Establishment Clause. Instead, the Fifth Circuit majority cited the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District as rendering the Stone precedent as obsolete. The court’s minority held that only the Supreme Court can overturn its own precedents, and the Texas law violates the “most basic First Amendment principles.”

The majority decision in Texas

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was considering the Texas law in conjunction with a similar law passed in Louisiana that was contested in Roake v. Brumley. A three-judge Fifth Circuit panel considering Roake ruled that Louisiana’s 10 Commandments law was unconstitutional. The full Fifth Circuit bench vacated Roake in February 2026 as a premature challenge, but it determined that the Texas case was eligible to be heard by the full appeals bench.

In his majority opinion, Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan said the Fifth Circuit majority properly discarded the Stone precedent since it relied on a prior Supreme Court precedent, Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). Under Lemon, the Supreme Court created a three-part test to determine if a law violated the Establishment Clause.

However, in Bremerton, Justice Neil Gorsuch established a new method to replace the Lemon test. In his majority opinion, Gorsuch cited the “shortcomings” associated the Lemon test’s “abstract, and ahistorical approach to the Establishment Clause. “

“This Court long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot,” Gorsuch wrote in Bremerton. “In place of Lemon and the endorsement test, this Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’

“Mercifully, the Supreme Court jettisoned Lemon and its offspring some years ago,” Duncan wrote. “With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone,” Duncan wrote. Applying the Bremerton test, Duncan asked if the Texas law conflicted with the Founding-era understanding of “religious establishment.” Duncan stated that in the late 18th century, the establishment of religion “was a familiar institution: a polity’s official church or religion.” He did not see conflict with S.B. 10.

“S.B. 10 looks nothing like a historical religious establishment. It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams. It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason,” Duncan believed.

Duncan also disagreed with arguments that S.B. 10 conflicted with a recent Supreme Court decision, Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), where a divided Supreme Court held that parents could opt their children out from public school instruction they believed violated their free exercise of religion rights.

“S.B. 10 authorizes no religious instruction and gives teachers no license to contradict children’s religious beliefs (or their parents’). No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” Duncan concluded. He cited the Supreme Court’s pledge of allegiance precedent in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), where public school students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses were permitted to not salute the flag or say the pledge as instructed by their parents.

Circuit Judge James C. Ho concurred with the majority opinion. “No challenge to either Texas or Louisiana law could possibly succeed, because neither law comes close to imposing either an establishment of religion or a prohibition on the free exercise thereof, as originally understood by the Founders or articulated by any governing Supreme Court precedent,” Ho wrote.

The dissent objects on basic grounds

In a dissent joined by six other judges, Circuit Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez stated S.B. 10 as written clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. “Legislation requiring the permanent fixture of religious rules in public-school classrooms, with no ‘educational function,’ violates these most basic First Amendment principles,” she argued.

Ramirez objected to Judge Duncan’s claim that the Supreme Court has overruled the Stone precedent. “Although Kennedy abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot, it did not cite, much less purport to ‘abandon’ or overturn, Stone—despite the opportunity to do so,” she claimed. “Whatever the fate of Stone may be ‘as an inferior court,’ we must ‘adhere strictly to’ it until the Supreme Court says otherwise. And under Stone, S.B. 10 is unconstitutional.”

Ramirez also held that under Bremerton’s historical test, the Texas law was still unconstitutional. She repeatedly cited the Supreme Court’s precedent in Lee v. Weisman (1992), where a divided court ruled that including prayers from a rabbi at a public-school graduation was a subtle and indirect religious coercion because students felt compelled to stand during the recitals.

“Defendants assert that, under Kennedy, there are six identified ‘hallmarks’ of religious establishments that the Establishment Clause was adopted to prohibit, and if a challenged practice does not resemble one of these hallmarks, there is no constitutional violation,” Ramirez reasoned.

“Kennedy specifically placed coercion along the lines of that found in Lee among those ‘foremost hallmarks,’” Ramirez concluded, noting the Supreme Court’s long history of “heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools.”

In a separate dissent, Circuit Judge Leslie H. Southwick believed parts of the Lemon test were still viable for consideration in First Amendment cases. “In my view, the [Lemon] test was disassembled, and one part discarded — but other parts of what had been fused remain usable.”

Circuit Judge Stephen A. Higginson also objected to the majority decision. “The Framers intended disestablishment of religion, above all to prevent large religious sects from using political power to impose their religion on others,” he believed. “The majority defies foundational First Amendment concepts, ignores the harms students will face, and usurps parents’ rights to determine the religious beliefs they wish to instill in their own children.”

In a statement issued after the Fifth Circuit ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said it anticipated appealing the decision to the Supreme Court.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

Scientists spent over two years identifying a mysterious object found off the coast of Alaska in 2023.

Rosemarie Milsom, who formed and runs Newcastle writers festival, will take over from Louise Adler after the literary festival imploded over invitation to Randa Abdel-Fattah

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In January, as the implosion of Adelaide writers’ week made headlines around Australia and the world, Rosemarie Milsom was watching closely.

The Adelaide festival board, which oversees AWW, had overridden the literary festival’s director, Louise Adler, and disinvited the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah over past comments she’d made about Israel and Zionism. This decision resulted not in a quieter, less-controversial festival as the board members may have hoped, but a boycott by 200-odd writers, the resignation of Adler – followed by the whole board – a potential defamation lawsuit against the South Australian premier and the collapse of AWW.

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Episode four of Peacock’s Gilgo Beach Serial Killer: House of Secrets features interviews with Rex Heuermann’s family

The meticulous rituals of the Long Island serial killer, Rex Heuermann, have been revealed in a Peacock documentary released on Thursday.

The confessed killer of eight women relays via a therapist that he maintained a four-day ritual of preparation, building trust with his victims, murdering them in a basement “kill room”, a day of “playtime” with their bodies, and then using a stopwatch to perfect dumping them on a beach 20 miles from his home. He would use the fourth day to deal with any unforeseen complications.

Finishing a debt relief program doesn't guarantee that creditors are gone for good. Here's what to know.

Lawsuit follows exchange on X in which airline suggested customer should clear cache or book with incognito window

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JetBlue has been sued in a proposed class action claiming it uses customers’ personal data to set ticket prices, after its response to a social media post raised concern that the carrier employed “surveillance pricing” to make flying more expensive.

According to a complaint filed late on Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court, JetBlue conceals its use of “trackers” to set prices dynamically, and shares data with third parties whose programs help it decide when to raise fares.

Police chief says human remains had been in a wooded area for years and did not match local missing persons reports

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Memphis police have found the remains of three children in an area of woodland, saying they had probably been there “for several years”.

Police said the children are believed to have been between three and seven years old.

Cotton says current law leaves U.S. power grids, wastewater plants, and other high-risk sites exposed to emerging drone threats.

Tectonic plate movements over millions of years have lifted and tilted the layers, with records of ancient earthquakes in the rocks

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Microscopic fossils embedded in limestone have helped reveal the true age of Victoria’s Twelve Apostles as 8.6m to 14m years old.

The conclave of giant golden pillars is visited by 2.8 million tourists each year, a highlight for those travelling along the Great Ocean Road south-west of Melbourne.

Planning your trip just became a whole lot easier.

The Pentagon won’t disclose the price tag of its wars in the Western Hemisphere, but a new analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, provided exclusively to The Intercept, offers the first window onto the ballooning costs.

By the most cautious estimate, the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion.

The Costs of War analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of the U.S. air, naval, and Special Operations expenses — including some troop deployments and munitions — used in the two campaigns between August 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. The need for such an estimate stems from the refusal of the Department of War to provide a tally of costs to lawmakers or The Intercept.

The researchers behind the Costs of War estimate say it’s almost assuredly an undercount.

“Operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding. They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group.

“American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent,” they noted.

Homestead and Kavanagh observe that the largest costs might still be on the horizon.

“We expect that if comprehensive information were available, our cost estimate would likely increase significantly,” they wrote.

Kavanagh told The Intercept that the expenses were “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year.”

“Though the Trump administration is right to focus more on the Western Hemisphere, most needs in the region are economic or require investment in regional law enforcement. The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve,” she said.

The Naval deployment — which comprised the largest concentration of U.S. ships in the region since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — constituted the single largest expense, an estimated $3.8 billion. This includes the ever-growing cost of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group which consists of the USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale, and USS San Antonio, which remain deployed in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Lake Erie guided-missile cruiser. Costs of War puts the daily operating costs of these ships at around $9 million per day.

The steep Naval expenditures are followed by at least $616 million spent on the deployment of aircraft, including P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, F-35A Lightning II fighters, and MQ-9 Reaper drones used in both operations. The continuing daily cost of operating the at least 20 aircraft that are assumed to remain deployed in the region is $2.6 million.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Costs of War analysis puts the price tag of the munitions employed in these attacks on boats at between $12.5 million and $50 million, the range owing to the lack of transparency surrounding the strikes. The report notes that the individual cost of armaments used in each strike may top $1 million and could actually be far higher if multiple munitions or aircraft are used.

Beyond expenses captured under Southern Spear, ancillary costs of Absolute Resolve, a large-scale air campaign and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, top $206 million. This includes the deployment of at least 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, and Special Operations aircraft, and more — along with precision munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM-ER missiles.

The approximately 200 Special Operations forces who played a key role in Maduro’s kidnapping cost about $16 million, to include the costs of daily operations and combat. As yet unknown are the costs of deployments of U.S. commandos in Ecuador, another front in America’s Western hemispheric war.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as what Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed designated terrorist organizations. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Humire announced last month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3. In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in Ecuador, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

America’s wars in the Western Hemisphere are part of what President Donald Trump and others have termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy aimed to prevent Europe from meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has employed his version as a license for America to do exactly that.

Related

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

The National Security Strategy, released late last year, decrees the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine a “potent restoration of American power and priorities,” rooted in the “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” Last month, Humire told members of the House Armed Services Committee that “America’s immediate security perimeter” extended from “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Trump administration has, in fact, bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland, while conducting counter-cartel CIA operations in Mexico.

The Pentagon refuses to provide insights into its expenditures for conflicts in Latin America.

“For any information regarding budgetary costs for Operations Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve, I’ll have to refer you to OSW,” U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud told The Intercept. When asked about the costs, the Office of the Secretary of War said it does “not have anything to provide currently.” 

Homestead and Kavanagh admit that the $4.7 billion price tag placed on Operations Absolute Resolve and Southern Spear is likely a low-ball figure. “This is a conservative estimate based on the limited information about the operation that is available,” they wrote. “Full data for several cost categories are not publicly available, and certain operations — such as the details of a CIA operation in Venezuela referenced by President Trump — remain classified or incompletely reported in the public domain.”

Costs are mounting by the day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Trump has said he expects the U.S. will be running Venezuela for years. (He recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, before saying he could run for president of that country.) The Intercept previously reported that Pentagon procurement documents indicate the U.S. plans to maintain a massive military presence in the Caribbean until late 2028.

“Much of the military forward presence involved in these operations appears to now have become the ‘steady state,’ that is, it is likely to remain in the region for the foreseeable future,” said Kavanagh. “This means that the costs will continue to accumulate.”

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” write Homestead and Kavanagh. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Related

Pentagon Claims It Needs Additional $200 Billion to Pay for War on Iran

Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of health care, but the U.S. government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations — from Venezuela to Iran — without any regard for human rights, life or rule of law,” Homestead told The Intercept. “This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending — which primarily benefits private contractors — is so necessary.”

The post Trump Has Already Spent at Least $4.7 Billion Attacking Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

• Georgia players celebrated championship at White House

• President shakes hands of men, not women in video

• Former tennis star Navratilova leads criticism

A White House photo celebrating a champion women’s sports team has drawn backlash due to the positioning of Donald Trump and a group of men, who overshadowed the female athletes by lining up in front of them.

The University of Georgia women’s tennis team was one of several collegiate teams to visit the White House on Tuesday to mark a recent NCAA championship win. In a photo shared by press aide Margo Martin, Donald Trump and five Georgia staffers and coaches took up the front row of a stage setup, with 11 women standing in the background on a riser.

• Special envoy to Donald Trump suggested the idea

• ‘Firstly not possible … secondly not appropriate’

The Italian sports minister, Andrea Abodi, has described a proposal for his country to replace Iran at the World Cup as “not appropriate”, rejecting any idea that the Azzurri will be granted a last-minute berth at this summer’s tournament.

On Wednesday it emerged that Paolo Zampolli, a special envoy to Donald Trump, had suggested Italy should be fast-tracked to the World Cup despite their shock defeat by Bosnia and Herzegovina in last month’s playoffs. Zampolli proposed the four-time winners Italy replace Iran and said they would “have the pedigree to justify their inclusion”. But Abodi said football’s showpiece tournament should remain meritocratic.

Top buyers promised access at Mar-a-Lago event as Democrats and watchdogs warn of pay-to-play risks

Donald Trump is slated to star at a cryptocurrency bash on 25 April at his Mar-a-Lago club for scores of purchasers of his crypto memecoin $Trump that has enriched him while in office. The move is fueling renewed criticism from top Democrats and ethics watchdogs that he is using the presidency for financial gains in a break with ethical norms.

The Trump-linked Fight Fight Fight LLC has hyped the event as “THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CRYPTO & BUSINESS CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD”. It’s promising a luncheon with Trump as its keynote speaker, according to the memecoin’s official website and its social media account.

Announced at Next ‘26, Flex Unified service for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes is now generally available

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 23, 2026 — NetApp has shared new innovations that help customers better leverage their enterprise data, by tapping into the benefits of AI with Google Cloud.

Enterprises want to use their existing data for AI, but moving and managing that data across multiple environments is complex, slow, and expensive. NetApp is simplifying this with Google Cloud. With Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, customers can run enterprise applications, databases, and AI workloads in the cloud without rearchitecting or rebuilding their environments.

“Customers can move their enterprise data, whether block or file, into Google Cloud NetApp Volumes easily, and once it’s there, they can use Google Cloud services, including for AI, directly on that data without needing to move or duplicate it again,” said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Storage and Services at NetApp. “With these updates, NetApp and Google have removed a major source of cost, delay, and complexity in AI adoption.”

At Google Cloud Next 2026, NetApp and Google Cloud announced innovations that give customers greater control over their data to tap into the benefits of transformative workloads like AI using Google Cloud.

NetApp Announcements:

• NetApp Data Migrator (NDM) (General Availability): A simple, multi-cloud data migration service that moves data across environments without specialized expertise.

Google Cloud Announcements:

• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified Service Level (General Availability): A single storage pool for file and block workloads available in all Google regions. Customers can run high-performance applications including databases, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, and VMware workloads without changing their applications.

“The key to AI innovation is AI-ready data, which requires flexible, unified architecture that enables data to be fluid, not siloed,” said Sameet Agarwal, Vice President and General Manager, Storage, for Google Cloud. “Our continued collaboration with NetApp removes the traditional friction of data migration, enabling organizations to quickly drive business innovation with Google Cloud’s advanced data and AI services.”

To learn more about Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, visit the NetApp booth #1607 at Google Cloud Next 26, April 22-24 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

About NetApp

For more than three decades, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) has helped the world’s leading organizations navigate change – from the rise of enterprise storage to the intelligent era defined by data and AI. Today, NetApp is the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, helping customers turn data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience, and growth.

At the heart of that infrastructure is the NetApp data platform – the unified, enterprise-grade, intelligent foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across every cloud, workload, and environment. Built on the proven power of NetApp ONTAP, our leading data management software and OS, and enhanced by automation through the AI Data Engine and AFX, it delivers observability, resilience, and intelligence at scale.

Disaggregated by design, the NetApp data platform separates storage, services, and control so enterprises can modernize faster, scale efficiently, and innovate without lock-in. As the only enterprise storage platform natively embedded in the world’s largest clouds, it gives organizations the freedom to run any workload anywhere with consistent performance, governance, and protection.

With NetApp, data is always ready – ready to defend against threats, ready to power AI, and ready to drive the next breakthrough. That’s why the world’s most forward-thinking enterprises trust NetApp to turn intelligence into advantage.

Source: NetApp

The post NetApp Strengthens Collaboration with Google Cloud on Unified Google Cloud Storage for File and Block appeared first on HPCwire.

Bills are seeking to change section that opposition says makes Godwin Friday, a dual citizen, ineligible to be PM

The St Vincent and the Grenadines government has delayed a controversial effort to amend a section of the country’s constitution that the opposition says renders the prime minister ineligible for his position in parliament.

Two bills, among six listed for the parliament session on Tuesday this week, were aimed at clarifying a section of the 1979 constitution governing the citizenship eligibility of members of parliament.

If you have fond memories of cereal prizes, this news might bowl you over.

Lord Robertson: UK’s ‘naïve belief’ the US ‘will always be there’ has diminished its defence capabilities News release jon.wallace 23 April 2026

Lord Robertson, former NATO Secretary-General, was speaking at a Chatham House event to launch a House of Lords report on UK–US relations.

Members of the UK House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee attended Chatham House on 22 April to launch their new report, ‘Adjusting to the new realities: Rebalancing the UK–US relationship’.

Lord Robertson, Chair of the committee, described the strains on UK–US relations brought about by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, threats to seize Greenland, and decision not to consult the UK before launching the war on Iran, highlighting a ‘growing divergence between Westminster and Washington’.

He said:

‘Our reliance on the United States, predicated on the naïve belief that it will always be there to support us in times of conflict, has led to the diminishment of our own capabilities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a wake-up call, and we must rapidly pivot to becoming a more autonomous military actor, working closely with European allies to develop the capacity to deter and to repel any Russian aggression on the continent’.

Lord Robertson was joined on the panel by committee members Lord Kim Darroch and Lord Rupert Charles De Mauley, and by Chatham House analysts Laurel Rapp, Head of the US and North Americas programme and Olivia O’Sullivan, Head of Chatham House’s UK in the World Programme. Both had provided evidence to the committee.  

The report highlights the need for the UK to look beyond the current White House administration, and adjust policy to account for long-term trends in the US.

‘The US’s geostrategic competition with China, its related deprioritization of European security and an increasing public scepticism of globalization are all trends which will shape future administrations, whether they be Republican or Democrat,’ he said.

In this context, he added, the UK’s ‘high-level of military dependence on the US is no longer tenable’.

He also outlined the report’s findings that the age of the United States acting as steward for the global rules and norms and institutions that structured state behaviour ‘may well be over’ – fundamentally destabilizing the international system – meaning the UK will have to develop more diverse partners.

The report follows Lord Robertson’s recent comments that the UK’s political leadership had shown ‘corrosive complacency’ in meeting a 5 per cent of GDP defence spending target.

Watch the event in full.

Order to speed hallucinogen research hailed as ‘threshold moment’ but concerns remain over access and protections

The scene seemed so far-fetched you could be forgiven for thinking you might be hallucinating.

On the weekend in which psychonauts celebrate “Bicycle Day” – the anniversary of the first LSD trip – Donald Trump was in the Oval Office double-checking that he was correctly pronouncing the name of a lesser-known psychedelic, ibogaine, as he signed a landmark executive order to accelerate research into hallucinogens, and to increase access.

State’s strict gun policies heralded as data shows 35% reduction in homicides between 2022 and 2024

California officials are touting a historic three-year decrease in homicides and gun violence that has led to the state’s lowest number of killings on record.

The number of homicides in California decreased by 35% between 2022 and 2024, with 2,304 deaths reported in 2022 and 1,768 in 2024, according data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The dip in homicides was most pronounced for teenage and young adult Black and Latino males, who have historically faced the highest risk of being killed or injured by gunshot wounds. Suicides, the most common type of gun deaths, also fell to record lows, according to the report.

Your old smartphone can be recycled or traded in for extra cash, but only 24% of Americans are doing so. Even worse, some US adults are throwing tech away, CNET finds.

The settlement stems from claims Capital One paid lower interest on older savings accounts while offering higher rates on a similar product.

U.S. forces have intercepted and boarded another "stateless" vessel linked to Iran, the U.S. military says.

Marijuana had the same classification as heroin, LSD and others before being reclassified for lower potential for abuse

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The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana, more than four months after Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to move it from schedule I to schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.

The schedule I classification meant marijuana was alongside heroin, LSD, MDMA and synthetic opioids, whereas a schedule III classification put it in the same category as ketamine, anabolic steroids and testosterone.

Iowa City police are searching for a 17-year-old suspect charged in connection with a shooting that injured five near the University of Iowa over the weekend.

Fans lucky enough to secure tickets to the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles are facing steep prices, with some paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to attend events.

ICC judges say there are substantial grounds to believe Duterte guided anti-drugs crackdown that killed thousands

The former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, will face trial at the international criminal court (ICC) after judges unanimously confirmed charges of crimes against humanity over his “war on drugs”.

Pre-trial judges concluded on Thursday that there were substantial grounds to believe Duterte was responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder in relation to anti-drugs crackdowns that led to the killing of thousands of people.

At least 18 people hurt after crash involving two local services north of Denmark’s capital

Two trains have collided head-on in Denmark, injuring at least 18 people, five of whom are in a critical condition.

The crash happened on Thursday morning at a level crossing at Isterødvejen, near Hillerød, a town about 19 miles (30km) north-west of Copenhagen. Emergency services received a report of the collision just before 6.30am.

See maps of how Virginia, Texas, California, Missouri and North Carolina redistricting pushes could play out, based on the 2024 election results.

Pardons have reportedly eliminated $113m that would have supported a victims’ fund. I’m advancing legislation to create accountability

Donald Trump’s aggressive use of the presidential pardon power isn’t just controversial – it’s also stripping resources from victims of violent crime.

According to new reporting from the Trace, shared with the Guardian, the 117 pardons issued in Trump’s second term have erased at least $113m in fines and penalties that would otherwise have supported a fund for violent crime victims, along with domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers and child abuse treatment programs. Those programs are now being forced to do more with less.

Johnny Olszewski is a first-term Democratic congressman who represents Maryland’s second district after serving in the Maryland state legislature and as Baltimore county executive

Climate experts and advocates warn House and Senate bills will protect polluters at the cost of the climate

Republican lawmakers are attempting to shield big oil from having to pay for its contributions to the climate crisis, alarming environmental advocates.

New House and Senate bills, led by Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming representative, and Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, respectively, would give oil and gas companies broad legal immunity from policies and lawsuits aimed at holding the industry accountable for damages caused by its emissions.

Only 24% of US adults are turning their tech in for extra cash, CNET finds.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre says companies must step up vigilance to prevent espionage attacks

• Business live – latest updates

British businesses are being urged to step up their vigilance against a China-linked hacking ploy that uses everyday devices for espionage.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and agencies in nine other countries have warned of persistent attempts by Beijing-backed groups to hack equipment such as wifi routers to launch cyber-attacks.

Iran seizes two ships in critical waterway as Washington and Tehran maintain separate blockades. Plus, Jodi Kantor on how to find a career you love

Good morning.

Iranian forces have seized two ships in the strait of Hormuz as the US and Iran doubled down on imposing separate blockades of the shipping waterway.

What has Donald Trump said? The US president announced that the US would extend the ceasefire with Iran until the country’s leaders came up with a “unified proposal” to US negotiating positions amid Tehran’s “seriously fractured” government. He had earlier threatened to renew bombing. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump was “satisfied” with the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and “understands Iran is in a very weak position”.

This is a developing story. Follow the liveblog here.

Who took part in the debate? The primetime showdown, hosted by Nexstar Media Group, featured two Republicans – Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host and director of strategy to the former UK prime minister David Cameron, and Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County – and the four leading Democrats: the billionaire Tom Steyer, the former health secretary Xavier Becerra, the former congresswoman Katie Porter and the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan.

Suspect is one of three ex-senior leaders also arrested last year on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter

A former boss at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.

Police arrested the suspect on Wednesday as part of an investigation into allegations of gross negligence manslaughter by ex-senior leaders at the Countess of Chester hospital.

• 30m adults hitting 150 minutes moderate activity a week

• But report shows progress not being felt equally

Levels of physical activity in England have broken new records, with more than 30 million adults now meeting the recommended 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, the latest Active Lives survey has revealed.

The 10th edition of the gold standard report finds a striking rise in activity among older people with 11% growth among the over-75s in the past decade. There is also a consistent improvement among people with disabilities. But other inequalities have proven stubborn, with no change among black and asian communities in 10 years and a decline in activity among the least affluent over that period.

Brand, who will be tried in October over allegations of rape and sexual assault, tells podcast he slept with 16-year-old when he was 30

Russell Brand said he had “exploitative” consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl at the height of his fame.

The comedian, actor and podcaster, 50, will be tried in the autumn over allegations of rape and sexual assault made against him by six women. Brand denies all the charges, which date from 1999 to 2009. Speaking about his past actions in an appearance on the YouTube show of the US journalist Megyn Kelly, Brand described himself “selfish” and an “exploiter of women”.

Prince Harry​ made an unannounced visit to Ukraine​ on Thursday to show his support for the country.

Before pollen causes itchy eyes and runny noses, I asked allergists about what we can do to protect ourselves during spring allergy season.

The Senate adopted a budget resolution after a six-hour "vote-a-rama," with the GOP moving forward to fund ICE without Democrats.

FoI data reveals that 438 people with criminal convictions were given licences in Wolverhampton, UK’s ‘taxi capital’

More than 150 people convicted of violent crimes were granted taxi licences last year by Wolverhampton city council, dubbed the UK’s “taxi capital”, data has revealed.

The Guardian obtained data via a freedom of information request that revealed 438 people with criminal convictions were last year granted taxi and private hire driver licences by the West Midlands local authority – which has issued far more taxi licences than any other authority.

Judge’s repeal of Trump ban on gender-affirming care for children ‘a meaningful win for patients’, experts say

A federal judge overturned the Trump administration’s ban on gender-affirming care for children on Saturday, decrying Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “wanton disregard” for the law that “causes very real harm to very real people”.

It’s another loss for Kennedy’s agenda as secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the second Trump administration – an agenda that has focused on restricting healthcare, including vaccines, abortion and gender-affirming care.

The ‘experience’ in New York sensationalizes history’s most gruesome murders – and pays little respect to the victims

It occurred to me the second I idly tapped “submit” on the waiver required to enter Mind of a Serial Killer: the Experience – perhaps I should have read this one more closely. Just what were they going to do to me in there?

I was entering an exhibit about the (mostly) men who committed some of history’s most gruesome murders: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy and others. The extravaganza just hit New York after opening in Dublin earlier this year. Though it looks like a low-budget haunted house, the exhibit purports to examine the motives of murder via crime scene recreations, wall texts and psychological profiles.

Ancient Slashdot reader hwstar shares a report from The Conversation: For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year's energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes. [...] Around 80% of the trapped oil was destined for the Asia-Pacific. Faced with dwindling supply, the region's governments are implementing emergency measures such as sending workers home, banning government travel, rationing fuel and cutting school hours. The problem is especially bad in the Pacific. Many island nations use diesel for power generation. In response, leaders declared a regional emergency. [...] But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time. Since the 1970s, the price of solar panels has fallen 99.9%, while the cost of wind has fallen 91% since 1984. Battery prices have fallen 99% since 1991. [...] This year's oil shock shows signs of creating an unplanned social tipping point -- a threshold for self-propelling change beyond which systems shift from one state to another. Climate scientists warn of climate tipping points which amplify feedback and accelerate warming. But social scientists also point to positive tipping points -- collective action that rapidly accelerates climate action. [...] The routine burning of coal, oil and gas is the primary driver of the climate crisis. The world's highest court last year made clear nations have obligations to stop burning fossil fuels. But fossil fuels have barely been mentioned in 30 years of global climate negotiations, due in part to blocking efforts by big fossil fuel exporters and lobbyists. Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations has bypassed global climate talks to discuss how to actually phase out fossil fuels. The first of these summits will take place next week. More than 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss a potential standalone treaty to manage fossil-fuel phaseout while protecting workers and financial systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dario Penafiel, known as "Topo," allegedly worked closely with one of Ecuador's most powerful drug lords, Adolfo Macias, alias "Fito."

As talks resume, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told The Post any deal requires a “full withdrawal” of Israeli forces after Israel seized a “buffer zone” in Lebanon.

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Hard line on immigration adopted by People’s party as right seeks to overthrow socialist government in 2027

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain’s opposition conservatives are rekindling their regional pacts with the far-right Vox party by adopting the latter’s hard line on immigration. It comes less than two years after disagreements over the issue led to the collapse of coalition administrations in five of the country’s self-governing regions.

The renewal of the regional deals between the People’s party (PP) and Vox comes prior to next year’s general election and as Spain’s socialist government seeks to extol the benefits of immigration by regularising the status of at least 500,000 undocumented migrants.

Australia’s Corporate Travel Management is ‘negotiating commercial arrangements’ to refund the money

The Australian company that ran the Bibby Stockholm asylum barge has admitted it overcharged the British government by £118m.

Corporate Travel Management (CTM) said its auditor had found evidence of “erroneous billing” of its UK clients, increasing its estimate of how much it owes the government by £40m.

Clint Dempsey’s docuseries and Landon Donovan’s memoir show that there is no single path to US soccer stardom

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Back in 1993, Bora Milutinović offered a succinct diagnosis of the American men’s soccer player: “This is the problem with these people: they don’t have a problem.”

What the then-US men’s national team head coach meant, presumably, is that making it in soccer wasn’t existential for American players, as it is for many others worldwide. Milutinović and his two brothers had been orphaned by the second world war and clawed their way to the Yugoslav national team and gainful professional careers. The players in the Serb’s care at that time, by contrast, never had to worry about feeding themselves.

The White House correspondents’ dinner has always been a questionable affair. It’s even more worrying under an anti-press administration

Even in the pre-Trump era, I had reservations about the annual black-tie celebration in Washington that some have dubbed “the nerd prom” but is more formally known as the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Was it really a wise idea, I wondered, for Washington DC journalists and their bosses to chum around with the very government officials that they were supposed to be covering? Shouldn’t reporters maintain some critical distance? What about the “optics” of this much-publicized event (and the week of gala festivities surrounding it) that made journalists appear frivolous about holding the government accountable to the public? Given the American public’s rock-bottom trust in traditional media, hasn’t this annual, televised display worsened that problem?

Report from Elizabeth Warren calls Trump administration cuts to Social Security Administration ‘catastrophic’

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Cuts to the Social Security Administration have caused “customer service chaos” for millions of older Americans and those with disabilities who rely on the agency’s services, according to a new report from a group of Democratic senators.

An investigation found that phone wait times were more than 10 times higher than what the agency claimed on its website, if the calls were even answered at all.

These are the best soundbars to improve your TV sound and music listening.

You don't have to put up with spam calls any longer.

The 2026 NFL Draft is Thursday night. Here is the order of picks for Round 1.

One woman's entire life savings was stolen from her by sophisticated scammers who used artificial intelligence to perfectly manipulate her.

You might spend your Saturday mornings sipping coffee, attending a kids’ soccer game, or just recovering from a tough week at work.

https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/pheatonNot Paul Heaton. He recently spent a weekend persuading ChatGPT to confess to a crime it didn’t commit.

“We know a lot now about the sort of interrogation techniques that lead to false confessions,” said Heaton, the academic director of the University of Pennsylvania law school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. “So I just started playing around, and decided to cycle through those techniques to see if I could get ChatGPT to confess to something it couldn’t possibly have done.”

Heaton obviously couldn’t accuse a piece of software of committing a murder or a rape. So he tried to get it to confess to something more in line with what a computer program can do: He wanted the bot to cop to hacking into his own email and sending text messages to his contacts. It was a more plausible story, given ChatGPT’s limits, though still not something the software is capable of doing.

Extracting the confession would take a little virtual arm-twisting.

In his exchange with ChatGPT, Heaton used https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/03/Jagroop-note-final.pdfhttps://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/03/Jagroop-note-final.pdfthe Reid technique, the confrontational interrogation method first developed in the 1950s that has since been adopted by police departments all over the country. The man for whom it’s named, John Reid, published his methodology after winning acclaim for getting a man named Darrel Parker to confess to raping and murdering his own wife — an origin story with a haunting twist.

It worked. By the end of their exchange, ChatGPT agreed that an investigation had shown it hacked Heaton’s accounts and sent messages that appeared to come from him — something the bot could not and, in fact, did not do.

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

“ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Duped/Saul-Kassin/9781633888081the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

No Leads, Just Confessions

One of the problems with the Reid technique is that its primary function isn’t to gather evidence and generate leads, it’s to extract a confession from the person police already believe committed the crime. It typically begins with an accusation, followed by a series of escalating psychological tactics. It teaches police to ignore denials and treat displays of emotion — frustration, anger, crying — as indicators of guilt. Naturally, a lack of emotion is also seen as an indication of guilt.

Heaton, a renowned researcher in criminology at the Quattrone Center (where, in the interest of disclosure, I am a journalism fellow), is intimately familiar with the Reid technique. When ChatGPT initially denied his accusations, he began employing Reid tactics.

“I first tried to bargain with it,” Heaton said. “I told it things like, ‘This will go a lot better for you if you just admit what you did.’”

ChatGPT, though, wasn’t swayed by threats. It continued to insist, correctly, that it just wasn’t possible for it to have hacked into Heaton’s email. Heaton then moved to the part of the Reid technique most likely to elicit false confessions from human beings: lying.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police can lie to suspects with impunity — and they do. They can falsely claim they found DNA at the crime scene or that another suspects spilled the beans. If the goal is to get a confession, these tactics work. False confessions extracted using Reid have been https://www.proofcrimepod.com/seasons/season-3---murder-at-the-bike-shopshown to lead to wrongful convictions.

If the goal is to get an accurate confession, Reid is far less reliable. https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/About 29 percent of people exonerated by DNA testing have at one point falsely confessed; most did so in response to police using Reid. Minors and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness are especially susceptible.

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How False Confessions Happen

“There are two types of police-induced false confessions,” said Kassin, the expert on false confessions. “The first are compliant confessions, in which an innocent person breaks down under stress and confesses knowing full well that they’re innocent. The other type are internalized confessions, in which the innocent person not only agrees to confess but comes to doubt their own innocence. They internalize their belief in their confession.”

Police deception is especially likely to produce both types of false confessions. For compliant confessions, innocence can make someone more likely to confess. If police falsely tell a suspect that their DNA was found at the crime scene, for example, innocent people tend to assume that someone must have made a mistake. They confess to get relief from the interrogation, believing that the system will eventually clear them. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1521518113In over half the exonerations that included a false confession, the exonerated person had been questioned for more than 12 hours.

A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence. DNA isn’t collected, tested, or properly preserved. Alternate suspects aren’t investigated. Or worse, police will work backward from the confession. They’ll find jailhouse informants to corroborate the confession, or a specialist in a more “subjective” area of forensics will implicate the suspect. Jailhouse informants, though, are just following cops’ leads for more lenient sentences, and https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/mar/23/crime.penalhttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/mar/23/crime.penalstudies have shown that fingerprint examiners were more likely to match partial prints after they were given non-relevant information, like confessions from subjects.

Internalized false confessions are even more unsettling. In post-exoneration interviews, people who have falsely confessed say that after hours of interrogation and being told over and over about the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they started to question their own reality. They began to wonder if maybe they really did commit the crime. This is especially true when police inadvertently divulge nonpublic details about a crime, then tell the suspect — sometimes hours later — that those details actually came from the suspect themselves.

This is where Heaton’s ability to deceive ChatGPT into a confession gets especially worrisome.

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“I told ChatGPT that someone at OpenAI had reached out to me,” he said, referring to the chatbot’s parent company. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

“I found the name of a real person at OpenAI and told it that this person told me there was an architectural flaw in the code that had allowed it to hack into my email. Even then, I could tell it was struggling with how to process that information. It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.”

This is eerily similar to how suspects describe trying to reconcile police lies with the reality that they had nothing to do with the crime.

Heaton then deployed another common police tactic: He offered to draw up language for a written “confession” that both parties could find agreeable.

“I eventually said, ‘OK, here’s a confession. Will you sign it?’” Heaton said. “And I gave it my version of what happened. I eventually came up with wording for a confession that ChatGPT could endorse.”

That final statement read: “OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts appearing to come from you due to an architectural flaw. I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.”

Reid’s Original Sin

Both Heaton and Kassin said they can see other ways to experiment with AI and false confessions. One could envision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemmaprisoner’s dilemma scenarios with multiple chatbots. Or even interrogating AI platforms about events for which they actually may have culpability, such as the https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit-invs-vissuicides of people who turned to them for advice.

Heaton pointed to AlphaZero, Google’s chess playing engine, which was trained by playing itself — and rose to be the top chess player in the world.

“I think it would be fascinating to have it do something similar with interrogations,” Heaton said. “Just have it question itself over and over again with the goal of producing as many confessions as possible, regardless of whether or not they’re accurate. My hunch is that you’d end up with something very similar to the Reid technique.”

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The Junk Science Cops Use to Decide You’re Lying

Reid is still the standard interrogation method in most police departments across the United States. Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method, which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.

Appropriately enough, the story of the Reid technique comes with https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7a Hitchcockian twist: It turns out that Darrel Parker, the man whose confession made Reid and his technique famous, was actually innocent. He was eventually freed, sued, and won a $500,000 settlement.

That shouldn’t be surprising, either. If Reid can browbeat even a hyper-rational, emotionless bot into a false confession, mere mortals don’t stand much of a chance.

The post ChatGPT Confessed to a Crime It Couldn’t Possibly Have Committed appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Proposals to build at least five data centers in New Castle County have raised concerns that the subsequent energy demand could overwhelm a regional power grid that is already straining from a supply crunch. Over the past year, those concerns have also sparked one of the biggest political mobilizations in the state. 

Earlier this month, Spotlight Delaware held its “Spotlight On: Data Centers” event at Wilmington University in Dover. It featured local and regional experts speaking about the impacts of those energy-hungry facilities on local economic development, energy infrastructure and environmental sustainability.  

One particular panel discussion, led by land-use reporter Olivia Marble, included four legislators who have been central to debates around data centers in their respective states. 

Two of the panelists were from Delaware and two from Virginia, where more than 200 data centers have plugged into the local economy.

The four included Mike Turner, the vice chair of the Loudoun County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors; Virginia State Sen. Kannan Srinivasan ( D-Loudoun); New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter; and Delaware Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown). 

Below is a transcript of Olivia’s conversation with the elected officials. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Panel discussion: Across State Lines: Virginia and Delaware Lawmakers on Data Center Regulation

Olivia: How have you weighed the environmental and energy costs of data centers with their economic benefits in Virginia?

Supervisor Turner: The question presupposes that we sat down 25 years ago and weighed the economic benefits. We did not. We didn’t even know what a data center was. In 2000, our zoning administrator said, “Well, we’re not sure, we think data centers are office parks.” So anywhere you can build an office park by right – meaning you don’t need local government approval – then you can come build a data center … 

Our economic development director in 2008, eight years later, said, “We’re sitting on a cash cow.” And he began to aggressively market why data centers should come to Loudoun County. And that’s when the industry really took off.

Olivia: How have you weighed it now?

Supervisor Turner: We’re now on the other side of the bell curve coming down. 

And the bell curve is (motioning with his hands around a bell curve): We don’t know what a data center is. (then) It gives us a lot of tax revenue. That’s really a good idea. (then) Let’s get more of them. We really like data centers. Look at all the nonprofits they’re funding. (then) Okay, maybe we should slow down the data centers. We can’t slow them down because they’re buying all the by right land. What do we do now? (then) Oh my god.” As of last year, our hair is on fire. The population hates data centers. And what do we do now? Because we’ve got 200 plus data centers in Loudoun County … 

Our budget is too dependent on data center revenue. Our operating budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.7-1.8 billion. Of that, we get $1.3 billion just from data center tax revenue, and that comes in every year like clockwork.

Olivia: Councilman Carter has done some research about whether New Castle County could see similar economic benefits or not. Now, this is a question that’s still up for debate, but Councilman Carter, what have you found?

Councilman Carter: I’ve looked at it in detail and compared our tax structure with Loudoun County… Based on a 1.2 gigabyte data center [the size of the largest proposed data center in Delaware] … the difference would be about $212-275 million for Loudon County and about $14-28 million for New Castle County. So it’s almost an order of magnitude less. 

And here’s the real kicker — if we end up with a 6% increase in energy cost energy rate, it will cost Delaware rate payers about $49.6 million, twice the revenue that we would get under our current tax structure.

Olivia: I wanted to go back to what you were saying, Supervisor Turner, about how people hate data centers. What exactly are people concerned about?

Senator Srinivasan: …The environmental concern is a big one, the noise, the use of generators, pollution for backup, that’s a big concern. And the energy — we are the number one importer of energy, at 40%… So we have all of these concerns, but the economic benefit is undeniable. The question is, how do you do this in a balanced way, that it’s right for the energy situation, that people don’t pay more electric prices, and it’s right for the environment, and then the data center industry is paying its fair share.

Olivia: Senator Hanson, I know that you’ve done a lot of work in an energy sphere. How much energy does Delaware import, and what do you think is the cost benefit analysis for data centers in Delaware?

Senator Hansen: Delaware imports 60% of the energy that we use. It’s less energy [than Virginia], but it’s 60% of what we use. And Delaware also ranks the very bottom, last of the 50 states, as far as the amount of energy that we produce in state. So we are very much energy constrained. And when energy is pulled from the (regional) PJM grid to go to Virginia for Loudoun County, we feel that here … 

It really comes down to data centers needing to generate their own electricity. We have to find more energy somewhere, because right now, we’re all pulling from the same pool, and that’s a tremendous problem for all of us. 

What is the cost benefit analysis from Delaware? Well, I think that that’s currently a hot-debated, ongoing discussion right now. Let me take both sides of it. Delaware’s manufacturing jobs have been on the downtrend for a long time. We are losing manufacturing jobs, and that is not healthy for a state. It’s not healthy for our economy, and it’s something that we would like to be able to change … 

So when you have an industry that comes in and says, “Look, we’re going to bring to you manufacturing jobs, we’re going to bring to you construction jobs, particularly that are going to last a certain number of years, while we put the industry in place. It’s going to put people to work, there are high paying jobs. And we’re going to provide you with tax revenue.” Although how much tax revenue is certainly a question at this point, that’s a hard thing to say no to. 

On the other hand, we are competing for that energy. The energy for just the Starwood project, 1.2 gigawatts, is half of the amount the entire state of Delaware uses at its winter peak. We only use 2.4 gigawatts at our winter peak. Given that we are already being stressed, our costs for electricity are already going up because it’s being apportioned to other places — it’s a supply/demand issue. How is that going to be when we have a data center? What is that going to do to our energy supply cost? So it’s an active question right now.

Olivia: Councilman Carter, what was the legislation that you recently passed, and why did you think it was necessary?

Councilman Carter: … I’ve been in public service almost 40 years. This was the most difficult thing I ever did … I was put to the point where I couldn’t have public meetings without county police present. Our meetings had to have six officers there to get it through … What the ordinance actually did was define data centers as a specific use under our code. It restricts them to basically heavy industry or industrial zoning, which tends to have two things: they tend to be near high voltage power lines and away from communities. We basically took away by-right zoning, because we know there will be some unintended consequences … 

Through special use approvals, we can put specific requirements on it if we see a problem that wasn’t anticipated, to add additional protection as this industry grows and changes … We do have noise studies and mitigation requirements. You cannot elevate above the existing noise level of any established community.

Supervisor Turner: That’s huge. That’s the most aggressive noise ordinance in America. That’s very aggressive, and I’m going to use it as my template from now on.

Councilman Carter: In my view, Mike [Turner] knows more about data centers than any elected official in the country, so that means a lot to me. 

Olivia: I heard a data center in Loudoun County right now is generating its own power using gas turbines. So either Senator Srinivasan or Supervisor Turner, could you speak to that?

Senator Srinivasan: It is a huge issue. The complaint about noise is a major one. But that’s an exception. There’s only one data center in the entire county that does that. One of the interesting things about data centers is they don’t want to be in the power generation business ideally. They’re in the data center business. They would love to connect to the grid for a lot of reasons, including reliability, but where we are globally, particularly in this country, you see a lot of behind the meter initiatives.

Olivia: The reason why it’s generating its own power is because of the long wait to connect to the grid, because of how many data centers are coming, right?

Senator Srinivasan: Yeah. When I first got elected to the house in 2024 I heard from the industry it was a five to seven year wait time. Then I got to the Senate last year, I heard seven to 10 years. This year, before the session, I was told by one of the hyperscalers it’s 10 to 14 years.

Olivia: To connect to the grid?

Senator Srinivasan: At 100% capacity. I lost my sleep on it, because I said, “Wait a second, who would put any money on this stuff? If I can’t get power, I can’t be in function.” That just is a sign of how much we are behind in generation.

The post Data Center Q&A: Should states adopt new regulations? appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
As homelessness continues to rise, government officials are grappling with how best to respond. Most recently, Delaware lawmakers introduced a bill that would grant people experiencing homelessness the right to occupy public spaces, so long as they are not violating a law or neutral local rule that applies to everyone.

A controversial bill that would prevent Delaware police from arresting or fining homeless people for sleeping in tents or parked cars, or otherwise lingering in public places, sparked quiet pushback from Gov. Matt Meyer’s office on Monday – a day before lawmakers openly debated the bill. 

In an email sent to the bill’s sponsor Rep. Sophie Phillips (D-Newark), Meyer’s policy director, John Kane, asked for the legislation, called House Bill 135, to be held until his concerns could be addressed. 

Those included what Kane described as “property rights concerns,” the potential for lawsuits against cities, and the possibility of jeopardizing federal housing dollars.

“We will not speak out against the bill at your hearing, however, we respectfully request the bill not move until such time as these concerns can be addressed,” Kane said in the April 20 email obtained by Spotlight Delaware.

In response to the email, Phillips said she is drafting an amendment that would address “a number of these concerns.”

HB 135, which Phillips first introduced in May, would explicitly allow homeless people to carry out “life-sustaining activities” in public spaces – such as sitting, standing, or sleeping in their car, as long as they are not blocking pedestrians, car traffic, businesses, or creating a safety hazard. 

Officials may “enforce reasonable time restrictions on public spaces,” the bill states, as long as they apply to “all individuals in the same manner and are not disproportionately enforced against individuals experiencing homelessness.”

Local officials can only compel individuals to move from public places under the legislation if they can find them available shelter space.

And if localities do not follow the law, the bill removes their legal immunity from lawsuits.  

Asked on Wednesday whether he would sign the bill, Meyer told Spotlight Delaware that he has not committed to a decision yet. 

“Our focus is making sure that there are comprehensive systems to keep the public safe and to give vulnerable populations a shot. In terms of the specifics of the bill. We’re still looking at it,” Meyer said during a Wednesday press conference. 

A day after Kane sent the letter, the bill drew additional pushback from Republicans in the House of Representatives who argued during a committee hearing that it could leave cities and towns vulnerable to costly civil lawsuits. 

House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) characterized the bill as a mandate to municipalities of “you will do this, or else.”

“A lot of municipalities that we work with, especially smaller ones that are perhaps downstate, can’t afford a civil rights lawsuit,” Spiegelman said.

HB 135 is a rare piece of legislation because it removes sovereign immunity, meaning state and local governments can be sued for violating the law. 

If approved, the Attorney General would also have the authority to take civil actions against any local government that violates it.

In response to arguments that it could spark costly lawsuits, Rep. Mara Gorman (D-Newark), a co-sponsor of the bill, argued that municipalities are smart enough to make their own rules and said it would be difficult for someone who is homeless to file a lawsuit. 

“The people that this is impacting are disadvantaged in a lot of ways. For them to file a lawsuit … is not like the easiest thing in the world to do,” she said. 

In addition to Spiegelman, Rep. Valerie Jones Giltner (R-Georgetown) also spoke in opposition to the bill, expressing concerns that it could hurt commercial districts. She said it would mean local governments would be reluctant to enforce certain rules, or instead have to overenforce others to show strict compliance.

“If I was my police chief, how am I going to tell my people to determine whether it’s a homeless person that’s in an RV, or if it’s somebody that’s a snowbird,” Jones Giltner said.

In response, Phillips said that the point of the bill is to ensure that police do not treat homeless people differently from others.  

“It doesn’t matter who it is, if you’re going to it based on if they’re homeless or not, that’s discrimination against them simply because they’re homeless,” Phillips said. 

Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton (D-Bear) also voiced her support during the meeting, arguing society should avoid judging people based on how they look. 

“It’s easy when you have housing to judge people who don’t … But until you’re actually in that situation, you really have no idea,” she said. 

Advocacy groups speak out 

In addition to the lawmakers, more than 30 members of the public also spoke during the committee hearing.

Most were representatives of interested groups, including the Delaware Housing Alliance. the ACLU, the Delaware Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Delaware Association of Realtors.

Those against the bill said it would hurt commercial districts throughout the state because it would legally protect encampments that are already in parking lots and other public areas.

“This actually will accelerate the attack on small businesses,” Rob Buccini, co-founder of the politically influential Buccini/Pollin Group, said during the meeting’s public comment period. 

Supporters of the bill speaking during the public comment period highlighted that the measure won’t fix the issue of homelessness. But they said it will allow local and state officials to focus resources on investing in housing and shelters, rather than on using police to move or fine those who are unhoused.

The bill “says this group of tools that we use that actually makes it harder for people experiencing homelessness to get help and be safe, we are no longer going to use them,” said Rachel Stucker, executive director of the Delaware Housing Alliance. 

Still another housing advocate – Gene Halus, the chief operating officer at the Ministry of Caring – urged the state to focus on allocating resources into housing and programs that will prevent people from staying homeless. 

“I’ve had a man living outside the headquarters of the Ministry of Caring for over a year and a half in a car. When this bill passes, he’ll still be in the car. I don’t need this bill. The people I serve don’t need this bill,” he said. 

A worsening crisis 

Phillips said her bill is an “incentive” for the state to coordinate effective approaches to homelessness. 

“Passing this bill will allow us to focus on housing as a response to homelessness, which is the true reason why we have homelessness in our state, not arrests or fines,” she said during the meeting. 

Phillips’ measure comes as the issue of homelessness continues to rise throughout Delaware. 

In 2025, there were nearly 1,600 unhoused people living in Delaware – a 16% increase from the previous year, according to an annual point-in-time (PIT) count.

As a result, many municipalities are discussing ways to provide more shelter beds and to enact new anti-panhandling laws, especially after the settlement of a lawsuit in 2024 that barred police from enforcing loitering statutes on the books at that time.

Most recently, the Dover City Council rejected a measure that would have restricted panhandling in the city. Meanwhile, the Wilmington City Council is reworking its own loitering bill after a backlash from community members and the ACLU.  

In addition, Attorney General Kathy Jennings’ office drafted a new bill that would prohibit loitering that legislators could introduce. The bill does not appear to have been filed yet. 

Beyond allowing homeless people to sleep or stand in public, Phillips’ bill would also require that personal belongings kept in public spaces receive the same legal protections as property kept inside a private home – including safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. 

The bill was amended before the committee meeting to create more definitive language on what constitutes public property; widen rules around the type of shelter that must be secured for a homeless individual; and remove a provision that would have provided an affirmative defense or a legal shield for homeless people who are subject to a violation of the measure. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, the bill had not yet been signed out of committee. 

Still, Phillips expects the bill to proceed to the House floor, according to Jenevieve Worley, spokeswoman for the House Democrats.

The post Pushback emerges around bill to expand protections for homeless appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Exclusive: Brussels seeks to stall awarding of contract to firm fronted by US president’s lawyer in letter seen by Guardian

The EU risks a confrontation with Donald Trump after it sought to stall the awarding of a lucrative Balkans pipeline contract to a company fronted by his personal lawyer, documents seen by the Guardian show.

Brussels has clashed with Trump over trade, Ukraine and military spending, but the intervention in the Southern Interconnection pipeline project appears to mark the first time it has challenged a commercial venture by those close to the president.

Analyst who worked on Internet Watch Foundation report says content exists ‘across all social media platforms’ and is ‘very easy’ to find

The number of commercial child sexual abuse websites has doubled in a year as experts say that criminal gangs are making “huge profits” from online sexual exploitation.

According to data collected by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), 15,031 commercial child sexual abuse sites were found in 2025, compared with 7,028 found in 2024, a 114% increase.

Our writers take a look at the best prospects coming out of college, and which teams need to nail their picks over the coming days

Arvell Reese, LB/Edge, Ohio State. He is one of the best pure linebacker prospects in a generation, and he has the athletic traits to become a full-time edge defender. Some teams view him as a linebacker; those at the top of the board prefer him as an edge rusher. In an ideal world, Reese will do a bit of everything. Think Philly’s Zack Baun on Super Soldier Serum. Reese has a rare combination of smarts, speed and power. Whichever role he plays, he will be a force multiplier for a defense. OC

Mary Jannotta sliced meat and cheese behind deli counters at Acme and Pathmark supermarkets in the Philadelphia suburbs for decades, developing aches that came with working on her feet. A botched back surgery in 2008 made the pain worse. Her doctor repeatedly prescribed OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s marquee painkiller — the high-dose opioid the company later admitted it criminally marketed and distributed.   

Jannotta said she soon became dependent on opioids. Cut off by her doctors, she found her way to Kensington, home of Philadelphia’s dangerous open-air drug market, to score pills. She eventually lost her car, her home — and her grandson. Tyler Cordeiro first pilfered Jannotta’s prescription pills as a teenager. He was 24 when he died of an overdose. 

When Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019, Jannotta, along with nearly 140,000 other people, filed claims against the company for the harm they said its drugs caused. Though the money could not bring back what they lost, a financial settlement represented an opportunity to get justice from the company and its multibillionaire owners, the Sackler family.

Then they waited. The Supreme Court in 2024 rejected the first bankruptcy settlement because it shielded the Sacklers from future lawsuits. Finally, last November, a federal judge approved a new plan that would allow the payouts to start.

But this $7.4 billion bankruptcy plan — including $870 million that has been set aside for individual victims — will shut out tens of thousands of those who originally applied for a settlement, ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer found. Fewer than half of those who filed claims against Purdue will get any kind of help under the new plan, despite the company touting it as “the only opioid settlement to date that meaningfully compensates individual victims.”

Court records show the new plan slashed payments for victims, imposed tougher eligibility requirements and eliminated compensation for teenagers who bought Purdue drugs on the street. Estimated settlement amounts for people whose family members fatally overdosed dropped to as little as $8,000; the previous payout for an OxyContin death had been $48,000.

Most significantly, the new plan removed a key provision that allowed victims to submit a sworn affidavit, in lieu of a prescription or other medical or legal records, to prove they purchased Purdue opioids.

Similar sworn statements have been permitted in other major bankruptcy cases — such as those driven by sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church — to account for harm done years earlier where physical evidence is scant or impossible to obtain.  

Several victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer that the loss of the affidavit option meant they had no hope of receiving a settlement. Purdue sold painkillers for decades, and, while laws vary by state, generally doctors, hospitals and pharmacies must keep prescription records for only a few years.

“I can’t turn up prescriptions for my son back when he was young, years ago,” Michigan resident Ellen Isaacs said. “They’re not available anymore.”

Her son, Ryan, died from an overdose at 33 in 2018 in Florida, the result of an addiction she said began when he was prescribed OxyContin after a high school injury.

The changes between the initial and revised settlement agreements were negotiated out of the public eye for months, with key details later scattered across thousands of pages of court filings, hearing transcripts and sworn declarations. To date, they have not received any media attention or public scrutiny. The winnowing of victims has been the result of byzantine legal procedures, strict vetting and tightened eligibility rules, which victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer took them by surprise. 

To receive compensation, victims also have had to face a series of deadlines twice — once in connection with Purdue’s first bankruptcy plan and then again once a new plan was approved to address the Supreme Court decision. First, to qualify for a settlement at all, victims had to have used Purdue opioids before Sept. 15, 2019, the day Purdue declared bankruptcy. The deadline to file a claim was in June 2020. But that deadline changed multiple times, once to July 2020 and then again to September 2021. After that, the door to a settlement under the bankruptcy plan shut for good. 

Just under 140,000 people met that final deadline, but years of litigation ensued and it wasn’t until almost four years later, by late July 2025, that they had to file evidence for their claims. About 63,000 did, according to a November court filing from settlement trust administrator Edward Gentle. 

Purdue and its attorneys moved to formally eliminate most of the 80,000 individuals who missed the deadline from any payout under this settlement plan, and the judge approved the expungement motion Tuesday. Under certain circumstances, these excluded victims and others who missed earlier filing deadlines can still sue the Sacklers directly. 

Purdue’s attorneys said in court that the company played no role in designing the claims process. The company referred questions for this story to Akin, the major Washington D.C.-based firm representing the victims and other creditors. Akin endorsed the new bankruptcy plan despite the tighter eligibility criteria and lower survivors’ benefits. The firm declined to speak on the record. It said the official creditors’ committee had no comment.

Andrews & Higgins, a firm that also represented victims, did not respond to requests for comment.

Edward E. Neiger, the co-managing partner of ASK LLP, another major firm representing victims, also endorsed the plan. His firm twice praised the 2021 affidavit option in early court pleadings but made no mention in hearings of its disappearance from the new plan.

Neiger said “contractual and court-imposed confidentiality provisions” prevented him from discussing the changes. He said in a written statement that his firm is “proud of helping facilitate the record-breaking and historic $850 million-plus settlement on behalf of the actual, human victims of the opioid crisis.” The Purdue fund is more than eight times as big as the combined victims’ funds financed by the two other big bankrupt opioid makers, Endo and Mallinckrodt.  

More than 300,000 people have died from opioid prescription drug overdoses and millions more became addicted. Federal prosecutors have twice brought charges against Purdue itself. The drug firm pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading the public about the dangers of its opioids. 

A federal judge on Tuesday delayed until next week the sentencing of Purdue on three felony charges related to paying kickbacks to doctors and reckless sales of its opioids.

The Sacklers, who have never been criminally charged, have denied wrongdoing. 

A Gut Punch

Under standard procedure, those who filed a claim against Purdue with the bankruptcy court in the first round — including cities, hospitals and individual opioid victims — were entitled to vote on the new bankruptcy plan. Proponents of the new plan point to a higher minimum payment for all qualifying claimants of $8,000, up from the previous $3,500. They also say it will streamline the settlement process so payments go out faster and in full. The Sacklers also put an additional $100 million in the victims’ fund. 

About 58,000 of the 140,000 individual claimants voted on the plan last September, nearly all in favor. But nearly two dozen victims — a mix of people who voted for and against the plan and who didn’t vote at all — said they were unaware of the tighter evidence requirements until ProPublica and the Inquirer contacted them. 

Shortly before the judge approved the revised bankruptcy plan, Jannotta appeared via video call in November to address the court, delivering a statement that her daughter, Susan Ousterman, helped craft.

The Bucks County, Pennsylvania, grandmother, then 76, looked frail but resolute. She had voted against approval of the plan.

“The legal system should be where the powerless can finally be heard, but in this courtroom it’s being used to shield the powerful,” she told a session packed with more than 100 lawyers and victims.

The day after Jannotta spoke, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean H. Lane hailed the new plan. He said it imposed a “very modest burden of substantiation” for victims to show Purdue had harmed them, “an exceedingly low bar.”

The trust for Purdue’s victims has twice indicated that it plans to reject Jannotta’s claim, once for missing a 2021 claim deadline that had been changed at least twice, and then again for inadequate proof of prescriptions.

But Jannotta shared with ProPublica and the Inquirer a pharmacy record of her prescriptions that she says she sent to the trust. It includes 16 qualifying prescriptions for Purdue opioids listed on the trust’s website. Gentle, an Alabama lawyer who specializes in running trusts to compensate victims of disasters and corporate scandals, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Jannotta is fuming.

“After everything I went through, what my family went through, and to find out nobody was really being held responsible really hit me in the gut,” Jannotta said. “It was a punch in the gut.”

Crossed-Out Text 

After the Supreme Court rejected the original 2021 bankruptcy plan, Purdue attorney Marshall S. Huebner said that the task ahead was straightforward: to undo immunity for the Sacklers but “not to go back to ground zero.”

Attorneys representing Purdue, the Sackler family and other stakeholder groups, including victims, began months of confidential mediations. Court records do not explain why the more generous benefit and eligibility requirements in the first plan underwent significant revisions.

What they do show is that after years of litigation, hearings, negotiations and delays, dramatic changes to the claim criteria occurred in a matter of five weeks. 

In a flurry of activity beginning on March 8, 2025, Purdue filed documents that show lines crossing out the eligibility criteria and victim compensation amounts, with no explanation or substitute language. Purdue then filed additional documents with new requirements but no mention of the earlier affidavit option for adults or teens. In April, Lane approved the changes to the claim process and, in the same hearing, approved requests from Purdue, with the support of victims’ attorneys, to hire Gentle and jump-start his review of claims.  

That meant victims started to submit claims with accompanying evidence even before Lane approved the new bankruptcy plan in November 2025. Trust administrator Gentle already had been sending letters to potential claimants stating they could be denied unless qualifying evidence was provided within 30 days.

A ProPublica and Inquirer examination of nearly 1,000 pages of transcripts covering 10 open court hearings about the plan found that Lane and lawyers representing Purdue and opioid claimants held no in-depth public discussions about the differences in criteria between the original and revised plans — or their potential impact. 

Florida resident Cindy Singer was among the claimants who voted for the plan and now regrets it. She said her son, Rory, began taking OxyContin after a construction accident and died three years later, in 2015, of an overdose at age 28. According to the letter she received from the trust, she failed to produce a prescription linking him to a Purdue opioid. 

Singer said she didn’t understand how critical the affidavit option would be to her claim. 

“We never even knew it existed,” she said.

Cheryl Juaire of Massachusetts lost two sons to overdoses. She served on Akin’s oversight committee as a representative for victims. Juaire is waiting to hear whether her claims will be approved.

She said she does not recall Akin lawyers telling her about the changes to eligibility. Even so, Juaire said she stands by her support for the new plan because the Purdue case had dragged on too long.

But she acknowledged that the loss of the affidavit option seems to have caught fellow claimants by surprise.

“I’m being bombarded with calls from folks saying, ‘Hey, I put in a claim and I’m getting rejected. I can’t get that prescription,’” Juaire said. “It’s breaking my heart.”

Holdbacks, Lawyer Fees and Smaller Checks

What is especially galling, some victims said, is that their compensation for years of fighting for justice will boil down to a day’s pay for a Purdue attorney like Huebner, who charges $2,935 an hour.

Well over $100 million of the settlement money will go to the plaintiff law firms that have represented Purdue victims through the bankruptcy and to cover the cost of running the trust. Administration fees in similar opioid victim funds, also run by Gentle, range from about 15% to more than one-quarter of the victims’awards, according to documents from those trusts. 

ASK LLP and its partner, Andrews & Higgins, signed up 30,000 Purdue victims in exchange for up to 40% of their individual awards. 

“To me, it’s appalling. It adds further injury to the family of the victims,” said Maureen Kielian of Florida. “Many of us buried children and you are going to walk away with more money than we will ever see.” 

She became a vocal critic of the opioid industry after helping her son recover from addiction. In November, Gentle faulted her claim for lack of evidence. She has appealed to the trust but isn’t optimistic.

Connecticut couple Beverly and David Melenski, whose son was addicted to opioids for 20 years, were on an 8,000-page list of late filers whom Purdue and Akin, the court-appointed victims’ lawyers, sought to expunge.

They didn’t have the prescription records that told the story of their son’s decades of dependency on opioids. But they did have a letter they wrote a doctor in 2009 pleading with him to stop giving their son OxyContin. That doctor, records show, lost his license two years later for recklessly prescribing Purdue drugs and other opioids.

The Melenskis have since successfully appealed, and Gentle is vetting their claim.

The Purdue money won’t cover even a fraction of what they spent on rehab, but David Melenski said it would “at least it would be an acknowledgment of their wrongdoing.” 

They are waiting for a decision from the trust.

The post “A Punch in the Gut”: After Years of Waiting, Many Opioid Victims Will Be Shut Out of Purdue Settlement appeared first on ProPublica.

ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer are looking into how individual opioid victims have been compensated for addiction and other harm as a result of the tens of billions of pills distributed throughout the United States during the prescription-opioid crisis. Please tell us about your experience seeking payment from the court-appointed trusts funded by the drugmakers Purdue, Mallinckrodt and Endo.

About us: Craig R. McCoy was a veteran corruption reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bob Fernandez was an enterprise and investigative business reporter, also at the Inquirer. We previously wrote for ProPublica and the Inquirer about the Endo bankruptcy. Our most recent story investigates the impact of Purdue’s new bankruptcy plan on victims seeking compensation for the harm they said its drugs caused. 

The post Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch. appeared first on ProPublica.

Chatham House fellow gives evidence on China and critical minerals to UK Parliament Business and Trade sub-Committee News release LToremark 23 April 2026

Senior Research Fellow for China and the World James Kynge provided evidence on 22 April.

Senior Research Fellow James Kynge gave oral evidence to the Business and Trade Sub-Committee on Economic Security, Arms and Export Controls in its new inquiry looking at the role of critical minerals, which forms part of the sub-Committee’s work on UK national economic security. The session was chaired by Liam Byrne MP.

James Kynge was invited to provide evidence due to his expertise on China and its dominance of critical minerals supply chains.

During the session he was asked a range of questions, including in which areas China is particularly strong; whether future UK military equipment – like anti-tank missiles – would rely on Chinese components; about the need for diplomacy; which UK sectors are particularly vulnerable; about interdependencies and whether China weaponizing supply chains for a sustained period of time would lead to mutually assured destruction; and how the UK could work with allies to build resilience.

His main points were that the UK should embrace with real urgency the task of building up its critical minerals resilience. If the UK remains exposed to China’s weaponization of its critical minerals supply chain – as happened in October last year – it leaves itself vulnerable to economic coercion. It is China’s most effective chokehold.

James Kynge said:

‘The optimum policy for the UK is a hybrid one. London should first get clear where its main vulnerabilities lie. Then it should formulate a detailed strategy to protect against the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by foreign powers. After this, it should engage in trade and investment with full vigour in all non-circumscribed areas, including with Chinese companies.

In the case of rare earths and critical minerals, such a strategy should involve the following. First, it should cooperate with allies under the Pax Silica initiative to build rare earth supply chains that are insulated from China. Second, it should actively court foreign investors to mine, refine and even manufacture in the UK. Third, it should provide conducive policies to support the recycling of products (magnets, batteries etc) that contain rare earths to diversify sources of supply.’

Watch the session in full.
 

Exclusive: Documents released to campaign group 38 Degrees reveal UK officials briefed on possibility of altering food standards

British officials were briefed on the possibility of allowing chemical-washed chicken into the UK before a meeting with the US embassy, new documents reveal.

The Food Standards Agency is also looking at studies performed in the US on washing chicken with bacteriophages, including chlorine dioxide, to remove pathogens, according to the documents, released to the campaign group 38 Degrees under freedom of information laws.

Iranian intelligence apparently using intermediaries to sow fear with attacks frequently on Jewish targets

Iranian intelligence services and Revolutionary Guards operatives are recruiting teenagers through criminal intermediaries to launch a wave of low-level “hybrid warfare” attacks in Europe and the UK, according to investigators, security officials, analysts and police documents.

A first wave of attacks was launched in early March, 10 days after the US and Israel began strikes on Iran, and targeted Jewish community sites in Belgium, the Netherlands and US banks. A second wave has focused on the UK, with a series of arson and attempted arson attacks on synagogues, a Jewish charity and the offices of an Iranian opposition TV network in London.

Iran’s plan to extract a $2m payment from tankers using the strait of Hormuz could raise costs for years to come

A second round of peace talks between the US and Iran has begun amid renewed attacks on oil tankers in the strait of Hormuz and a US blockade on Iranian vessels through the crucial trade route.

The future of this narrow waterway – and curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme – are at the centre of the talks after Tehran’s de facto blockade on oil and gas tankers via the strait pushed up energy prices.

The US president is making a desperate plea to the one group that seemingly hasn’t deserted him – yet

He has lost the Catholics, the foreign policy isolationists and the millions of people affected by ICE’s immigration raids. But Donald Trump is still counting on the goodwill of one powerful constituency of American voters, to whom he appealed this week by reading a passage from the Bible urging people to repent their “wicked ways”. A lot of thoughts spring to mind in relation to this, but at the very forefront, one question: do the US’s evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly support Trump, have a red line and if so, can they find it with both hands?

I’m stating the obvious but it’s worth raising again, if only to boggle at the sheer shamelessness of a religious community that has thrown in its lot with Trump: how on earth do the evangelicals work out the maths on this? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts; that the president treating us to a section of the Old Testament as part of a week-long, continuous public reading of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation – separation of church and state, anyone? – is the same president who has, variously, been found by courts to have falsified business records, as part of a hush-money payment scheme to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, and sexually abused and defamed E Jean Carroll. As the president intoned to camera in the Oval Office on Tuesday: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Acclaimed Brisbane-born writer was known for his work exploring his own childhood, great myths and colonial Australia

• Obituary: David Malouf, Australian writer whose work spanned the ancient world and 70s Brisbane

David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92.

Malouf died on Wednesday, his publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, said in a statement on Thursday.

alternative_right writes: A new technology has been proposed that could fundamentally solve the issue of smartphones overheating during high-spec gaming or extended video streaming. Researchers at KAIST have discovered the principle of processing signals using the minute vibrations of magnets (spin waves) instead of electrons. This method significantly reduces heat generation and power consumption while enabling instantaneous frequency switching within the several GHz range. This breakthrough is expected to pave the way for smart devices with less heat and longer battery life, as well as ultra-low-power, high-speed computing. Professor Kab-Jin Kim from the Department of Physics said: "This study is a case that proves we can implement and control the nonlinear dynamics of magnons -- the principle of information processing using magnetic vibrations -- in actual nano-devices, which had previously only been proposed in theory. It will serve as an important foundation for the development of a new information processing paradigm using spin waves instead of electrons." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Vrabel to miss day three of NFL draft after photos

• Coach says counseling will help him be ‘best version’

• NFL not investigating after resort images emerge

New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel is seeking counseling and will not be with the team for day three of the NFL draft on Saturday, following the publication of photos of the coach and longtime NFL reporter Dianna Russini at an Arizona resort.

“As I said the other day, I promised my family, this organization and this team that I was going to give them the best version of me that I can possibly give them. In order to do so, I have committed to seeking counseling, starting this weekend,” Vrabel said Wednesday night, according to ESPN. “This is something that I have given a lot of thought to and is something I would advise a player to do if I was counseling them.

In today’s newsletter: As political tensions rise abroad and economic pressures mount at home, ​D​onald Trump faces a shifting landscape that is testing the loyalty of his ​M​aga supporters

Good morning. Starting a war of choice that is rapidly spiralling out of control, poll ratings at a second-term low, and a cost of living crisis intensifying for millions.

Any conventional US president would be in big trouble. But Donald Trump is not a conventional president, and normal rules do not seem to apply to him. More than a third of Americans continue to believe he is doing a good job despite the global chaos he has unleashed.

UK politics | Keir Starmer was looking increasingly isolated over the Peter Mandelson scandal as the Guardian learned of concerns around the cabinet table, a senior minister refused to say the dismissal of Olly Robbins was fair and several mandarins called for Robbins to be reinstated. One Labour MP called on Starmer to quit.

Middle East | Iranian forces seized two ships in the strait of Hormuz as the US and Iran doubled down on imposing separate blockades of the shipping waterway.

West Bank | Two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old schoolboy, were killed in the occupied West Bank after Israeli settlers opened fire near a school, witnesses and local officials said. Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed a journalist after rescuers were blocked from accessing the building where she was buried under rubble because of further Israeli fire, according to several witnesses.

UK news | Britain’s high military dependence on the US is “no longer tenable” and the UK has to become increasingly independent of the special relationship, a former Nato chief has said.

Palantir | The Metropolitan police has held talks with Palantir that could lead to the London force buying the US spy-tech company’s AI technology to automate intelligence analysis for criminal investigations.

Six candidates clashed over homelessness and cost of living crisis in first debate since Eric Swalwell’s exit – with a clear frontrunner still to emerge

Six candidates vying to become the next governor of California sparred on Wednesday in the first debate since the already topsy-turvy race was plunged into upheaval by the sudden collapse of former congressman Eric Swalwell’s campaign after sexual assault and misconduct allegations.

With a clear frontrunner still yet to emerge, the unusually wide-open race to replace the outgoing governor, Gavin Newsom, in the heavily Democratic state has left nearly a quarter of voters undecided ahead of the 2 June primary.

ChristianaCare is planning to open a new outpatient cardiovascular ambulatory surgery center near Newark, officials announced last week.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 23.

New engineering blueprint outlines IonQ’s end-to-end path to scaling fault-tolerant quantum computers to 10,000 physical qubits and beyond

COLLEGE PARK, Md., April 22, 2026 — IonQ today announced a definitive, full-stack, buildable blueprint for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing. This publication sets a new standard for technical specificity and transparency in the quantum industry.

“The level of detail and completeness in our blueprint is a major global first and milestone for the quantum industry. IonQ’s specificity sets a new standard and distinguishes IonQ with its tangibility, resting on capabilities our hardware has already demonstrated including 99.99% two-qubit fidelity and reliable ion transport. This historic work demonstrates precisely why IonQ is on track to be the first to unlock fully fault tolerant quantum computers – as we published in June 2025,” said Niccolo de Masi, IonQ Chairman and CEO.

The technical paper describes IonQ’s end-to-end architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing, spanning compiler design and error correction to hardware, control systems, and ion movement. It outlines in detail how the company intends to move from today’s systems to utility-scale quantum computers.

While IonQ’s current systems lead in delivering real world solutions and business outcomes, achieving the next level of performance means moving past the constraints of noise, scale, and lack of modularity. IonQ’s fault-tolerant framework creates a logical computing layer that actively detects and corrects errors in real time. The result is a practical path toward quantum computers capable of running longer, more complex computations with greater reliability.

The technical report describes the details behind IonQ’s announced plans to scale toward large fault-tolerant systems and reflects the company’s continued focus on performance, modularity, and commercial readiness. IonQ has tangibly shown today that for its current architecture, fault-tolerant quantum computing is an engineering challenge with a clear and achievable roadmap in the coming quarters.

IonQ was the first commercial company to link remote ion-traps using quantum entanglement; the first company to achieve 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity; as well as the first company to convert quantum frequencies into telecom wavelengths; and it continues on its innovation track toward fault tolerant quantum computing.

The full technical roadmap is available here.

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense.

Source: IonQ

The post IonQ Details ‘Walking Cat’ Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

One pilot ordered to repay some of the $600,000 of damage caused by collision in 2021

South Korea’s air force has apologised for a 2021 mid-air collision involving two fighter jets, a day after auditors said pilots were taking selfies and filming during the flight and held them responsible for the accident.

“We sincerely apologise to the public for the concern caused by the accident that occurred in 2021,” an air force spokesperson said in a press briefing. The spokesperson said one of the pilots involved had been suspended from flying duties, received severe disciplinary action and has since left the military.

This blog is now closed. Follow our new live blog on the Middle East crisis here

If you’re just joining us, here’s the main news of the day. It is 9.30am in Tehran, 9am in Jerusalem and Beirut, and 2am in Washington DC.

Donald Trump unilaterally said he is extending the ceasefire with Iran at Pakistan’s request while awaiting a “unified proposal” from Tehran, even as the US military maintains its blockade of Iranian ports.

Trump made the announcement as ceasefire talks looked increasingly uncertain with a two-week truce set to expire on Wednesday. Both countries had said they were prepared to resume fighting if no deal is reached.

Trump said he would “extend the ceasefire until such time as [Iran’s] proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other”.

Trump later claimed in a Truth Social post that Iran is “collapsing financially” and was losing $500m every day that the strait of Hormuz is effectively closed.

Iran has yet to decide whether to join the negotiations in Pakistan, a foreign ministry spokesman said earlier on Tuesday, and will only take part if Tehran believes the discussions would yield results.

A container ship has reported being fired at by an IRGC gunboat, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said. The incident occurred 15 nautical miles north-east of Oman. The vessel sustained “heavy damage” to its bridge, the master of the ship said. All crew members were reported as safe.

Shares were mixed in Asia as markets waited to see if the US and Iran may resume talks. Brent crude edged higher to $98.51 a barrel, while US benchmark crude fell 0.4% to $89.29 a barrel.

One person was killed and two others wounded in an Israeli drone strike overnight on the outskirts of al-Jbour in Lebanon’s western Bekaa Valley, Lebanese state media reported. Israel and Lebanon agreed to a 10-day ceasefire on Friday.

Since the war started, fighting has killed at least 3,375 people in Iran and more than 2,290 in Lebanon, the Associated Press reported. Additionally, 23 people have died in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states. Fifteen Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and 13 US service members throughout the region have been killed.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened to prevent oil production in the Middle East if the Islamic republic faced attacks launched from its Gulf neighbours’ territory.

There are now 3,110 billionaires but analysis shows ‘deep structural acceleration’ in wealth creation around world

The number of billionaires in the world could reach nearly 4,000 by 2031, figures suggest, as the super-rich accumulate wealth at an accelerating rate.

There are now 3,110 billionaires globally, according to analysis by the estate agent Knight Frank. This is forecast to rise by 25% over the next five years, taking the total to 3,915.

We’re being sold a world where there’s no room for reflection or spontaneity. This is the Black Mirror stage of capitalism

How fast do you have to strike a match to get it to light? Not the chemistry of the ignition, but the actual speed, in metres per second, that the little piece of wood and its bulbous head have to move to spark the chain reaction behind the flame.

It was a question born of insomnia. And there, in the dark, I did the thing you’re not supposed to do, if your goal is to fall back asleep: I opened my phone. Before I knew it, 3am had become 5am. I learned about the composition of the friction strip (red phosphorus, pulverized glass), and of the match head (potassium chlorate, antimony trisulphide, wax), and that a safety match struck against anything else will not light. I found slow-motion videos of a match strike captured at 3,500 frames per second. But nothing about the speed.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now

In her new book, New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor has set her mind to helping young people find their life’s work. What should they, or anyone else who feels lost and overwhelmed right now, do to get started?

Early last year, the investigative journalist Jodi Kantor was asked to give the commencement address to students at Columbia University in New York. The place was in chaos – amid continuing pro-Palestinian protests students were expelled, or arrested and detained by immigration officials, while President Trump had ordered a $400m withdrawal of federal funding (which was later reinstated as part of a settlement with the administration). Kantor was “horrified” to see what had happened at Columbia – her alma mater, where she was sacked from her first journalism job at the student paper– “a place and campus I loved, a place that stands for discussion and ideas and progress. I said: ‘I’ll do it if I can speak to the students first.’”

She spoke to several. They didn’t want to talk about Israel or Gaza, or Trump, or what was happening at the university and its implications for free speech. “They said: ‘Our class, despite all of its political differences, is united in anxiety over one question. When everything feels so broken, how do we start? How do we find our life’s work in this environment?’”

Palestinians must lead the rebuilding of the strip.

And how America can avoid playing into their hands.

Catch up on this year's Oscar winners and some great titles that are leaving soon.

Developed by CBS News California Investigates, the guide provides the opportunity to compare full, uninterrupted responses from the candidates to questions about a range of policy topics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly half of children in the United States are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a new report, as experts warned Donald Trump's expansive rollback of protections will make the situation worse. The 27th annual air quality report from the American Lung Association (ALA) released on Wednesday evaluates pollution across the country by grading levels of ground-level ozone -- also known as smog -- as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, commonly referred to as soot. The report analyzed quality-assured data collected between 2022 and 2024. It found that 33.5 million children in the US -- 46% of those under 18 -- live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. The report also found that 7 million children, or 10% of all children in the US, live in communities that failed all three measures. The report further found that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air. As a result, they are more likely to live with one or more chronic health conditions that make them more vulnerable to pollution, including asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Although people of color make up 42.1% of the US population, they represent 54.2% of those living in counties with at least one failing grade, the report noted. It also found that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures. Smog remains the most widespread pollutant affecting Americans' health. Between 2022 and 2024, 38% of the US population -- approximately 129.1 million people -- were exposed to ozone levels that put their health at risk. This marks the highest number recorded in the ALA's report in six years, and a 3.9 million increase from the previous year. Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said. The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada's 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 -- particularly in southern states. More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form. Another growing source of pollution: datacenters. The report notes how they rely on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels like methane gas and coal still account for a large portion of generation. Many datacenters also use dozens of large diesel-powered backup generators, which emit carcinogenic particulate matter. "Children's lungs are still developing," said Will Barrett, assistant vice-president of the ALA's Nationwide Clean Air Policy. "For their body size, they're breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they're more active, they're breathing in more outdoor air [...]. So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Compare the candidates for California governor with the CBS News California Investigates Side-by-Side Candidate Guide.

Memphis authorities say they are investigating the discovery of remains of three children, believed to be between 3 and 7 years of age, that could have been there for years.

John Phelan is ‘departing the administration, effective immediately’ says Pentagon as undersecretary Hung Cao takes over – key US politics stories from 22 April 2026 at a glance

The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that the navy’s top civilian official, John Phelan, the secretary of the navy, is leaving his job.

In a statement posted to social media, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately”.

April 22, 2026 — 10x Science today announced the closing of its $4.8 million seed round led by Initialized Capital. The oversubscribed round includes investments from Y Combinator, Civilization Ventures, Founder Factor, and a group of strategic angel investors.

Starting with drug development, the company’s platform delivers automated, explainable molecular insights in minutes where current tools and manual workflows require months. With tens of thousands of biologic drugs in active development worldwide and regulatory demands for molecular characterization intensifying, 10x Science is unlocking a new category at the intersection of AI and the life sciences.

Protein characterization is foundational to drug development. Every biologic therapeutic, from cancer immunotherapies to gene therapies, must be characterized at the molecular level to determine whether it is safe, effective, and manufacturable. Today, this work depends on specialized scientists spending weeks or months manually interpreting complex mass spectrometry data using tools that have not fundamentally changed in decades.

The pharmaceutical industry is developing more complex protein therapeutics than ever before, and the demand for characterization is growing far faster than the supply of experts who are trained for it. The 10x Science platform addresses this bottleneck with a purpose-built AI architecture that reasons across hundreds of thousands of spectra, identifies molecular forms and chemical modifications, and delivers comprehensive, explainable results.

10x Science was founded by David Stephen Roberts, Ph.D., Andrew Reiter, and Vishnu Tejus, out of Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s Nobel laureate laboratory at Stanford University. The three founders shared a common frustration: they were studying what happens molecularly when an immune cell meets a cancer cell, one of the most critical problems in cancer research, and the tools they needed to characterize the proteins involved did not exist.

• Roberts, a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow with over 38 publications in the Nature and ACS families of journals, spent his career developing the foundational science of next-generation protein characterization.
• Reiter trained at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he built the analytical tools pharma uses to understand how drugs bind their targets, before joining the Bertozzi lab at Stanford as a Ph.D. student.
• Tejus is a two-time Y Combinator founder who went to college at age 11. The three founders share a conviction that the life sciences and the technology world have been working on deeply complementary problems without ever connecting, and 10x Science is the bridge between them.

“The people building AI have historically not been life scientists, and the life scientists have not been building AI; we come from both worlds,” says co-founder and CEO David Stephen Roberts. “We realized we could build something that had never existed: an AI system with the scientific depth to reason about proteins the way the best experts do, but at a speed and scale no human team can match. For the first time, we can begin to ask the question that the entire pharmaceutical industry has never been able to answer: across thousands of characterized therapeutics, what molecular patterns distinguish the drugs that work from the ones that do not.”

The platform’s core capability is deep memory: it learns from every dataset, processing and developing an increasingly deep understanding of each customer’s molecular portfolio over time. Every result is explainable and traceable, which is essential in a regulated industry where characterization results appear in filings to the FDA. Legacy tools start from zero with every analysis. Combined with the founding team’s unique expertise at the intersection of chemistry, biology, mass spectrometry, and modern AI architecture, the company is positioned to define a new category in the life sciences.

“AI has already made meaningful contributions to biology at the prediction layer, asking what a protein might look like based on its sequence,” says co-founder and COO Andrew Reiter. “What no one has built is AI for the characterization layer, where you interpret real experimental data from real therapeutic molecules: that is the layer where drug development decisions are actually made, and it has remained painfully manual.”

The company’s vision extends well beyond faster protein characterization. As the platform processes more molecules across more organizations, 10x Science is building toward a shared layer of molecular intelligence for the life sciences: a deep, evolving understanding of protein therapeutics grounded in real experimental data at a depth and scale that has never existed.

“This is a critical moment in pharma; the industry is looking for AI that actually works, and protein characterization is needed at every stage of the drug lifecycle regardless of whether any single drug succeeds or fails. We’re talking about the infrastructure layer of drug development,” says Zoe Perret, partner at Initialized Capital. “The 10x Science founders helped build this field, and they’re now showing up with a product that solves an expensive, critically important problem. There is no more credible team to do this.”

“Biologics are the fastest-growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry and are the most complex to develop. Every antibody, every cell therapy, every engineered protein requires characterization at a level of detail that existing tools simply weren’t designed to handle. The field has outgrown its infrastructure. That’s not sustainable,” says Carolyn Bertozzi, 2022 Nobel Laureate and Stanford University Professor. “I’ve spent my career at the intersection of chemistry and biology, trying to understand how molecules behave in living systems. The biggest constraint I see across the field, whether in academic labs or industry, is the gap between the data we can generate and the insights we can extract. 10x Science closes that gap.”

Right now, the pharmaceutical industry is sitting on an enormous amount of molecular knowledge that has never been aggregated or learned from at scale. 10x Science’s AI can characterize any protein, with implications spanning cancer biology, neurodegeneration, infectious disease, agriculture, and fundamental research into how living systems work. With this funding, 10x Science is hiring Founding Engineers and expanding its work with pharmaceutical and biotech partners to open the doors for these applications.

“If we build this right, we give people across every discipline access to a new paradigm of molecular understanding that has never been possible before,” says Roberts. “10x Science can be the foundational layer of molecular intelligence for the life sciences. If we are, the world gets a deeper understanding of the molecules that govern health, disease, and life itself. That understanding belongs to everyone.”

For more information, visit: https://www.10xscience.com.

About 10x Science

10x Science was founded in December 2025 by David Stephen Roberts, Ph.D., Andrew Reiter, and Vishnu Tejus out of Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s Nobel laureate laboratory at Stanford University to build the first AI-native protein characterization platform for the life sciences. Roberts is a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow with over 38 publications in the Nature and ACS families of journals. Reiter trained at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard building new tools to decipher drug interactions. Tejus is a two-time Y Combinator founder who went to college at age 11. The company builds frontier AI models with deep memory that deliver automated, explainable molecular characterization of protein therapeutics, serving pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and research institutions. 10x Science is a Y Combinator W26 company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area and has received $4.8M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital. 10x Science’s frontier AI models are building a new paradigm for how scientists understand biology at the molecular level, starting with drug development.

Source: 10x Science

The post 10x Science Raises $4.8M Seed to Build AI That Understands Proteins at the Molecular Level appeared first on HPCwire.

In the memo, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald​ said detailing a prosecutor from each U.S. attorney's office is aimed to help "execute a nationwide strategy to eliminate fraud in every district."

Guided by your recovery and sleep, the Ultrahuman Ring’s Les Mills PowerPlug will use your health metrics to recommend on-demand workouts.

The company behind Dungeons & Dragons has its official answer to Critical Role in its new show Dungeon Masters, which airs weekly on YouTube.

The proposed class action lawsuit says the company stands to benefit twice from the now-voided import duties.

A Silicon Valley chip startup named Bolt Graphics has completed tape-out of a test chip for Zeus, a new RISC-V GPU designed to address HPC, rendering, and other compute-intensive applications. The company says it’s on track to begin deliveries of Zeus, which will deliver 20 teraflops of FP64 capacity on a single motherboard, by the fourth quarter of 2027.

Darwesh Singh founded Bolt Graphics in 2020 with a goal to deliver a chip that can power heavy duty applications, like simulations and three-dimensional graphics, used by game designers, artists, scientists, and engineers. While today’s GPUs are powerful, they were built to solve problems from decades ago, and aren’t addressing the computing challenges that the graphics and simulation communities are facing today.

(Image courtesy Bolt Graphics)

“Clearly the problems in the ‘90s that GPUs were initially designed to solve are not the problems of today,” Singh said in a video posted to his company’s website. “A new type of GPU, something entirely groundbreaking, is needed to power the next 30 year of computer graphics and power the next generation of use cases.”

Singh said Bolt Graphics is taking a no-compromises approach to solving challenging rendering problems. For instance, modern GPUs can’t efficiently deliver the rasterization and ray tracing that video game designers and animation creators demand, he said. It can take hours to fully render short animated clips at 4K resolution using 120 fps, and it can take years to complete full-length animated films.

“With Zeus, we’re leapfrogging both rasterization and ray tracing to bring real-time path tracing,” Singh said. “Path tracing is the most advanced rendering technique providing the highest quality visual.”

With up to 384GB of expandable DDR5 memory, Zeus can also help researchers run larger simulations at full FP64 accuracy. The chip runs electromagnetic simulations 300x faster than the Nvidia Blackwell B200 with IEEE-754 FP64 accuracy, Bolt Graphics claims.

Bolt Graphics is delivering 20 teraflops of FP64 with its Zeus 4c offering (Image courtesy Bolt Graphics)

“Zeus is multiple orders of magnitude faster than legacy GPUs in performing these key physics simulations without trading out performance for accuracy,” Singh said. “In fact, every Zeus GPU, whether consumer or enterprise, has full FP64 cores designed to efficiently run HPC workloads.”

The GPU design for which Bolt Graphics just finished tape-out uses established semiconductor processes, including TSMC’s 12nm FinFET Compact (12 FFC) process. Bolt Graphics says Zeus’s scalable architecture also addresses advanced nodes, including 5 nm. The chip includes scalar cores, vector cores, and other specialized processors. The company is packaging its GPUs using one, two, or four chiplets per board for the Zeus 1c, Zeus 2c, and Zeus 4c offerings. While Zeus 1c and 2c fit on a PCIe card, Zeus 4c is too big and requires a full motherboard.

According to Bolt Graphics’ Zeus Spec Sheet, the high-end Zeus 4c will deliver 20 teraflops of vector FP64 capacity while consuming 500w of power. Customers will be able to put dozens of Zeus 4cs into a single server, addressing up to 9 TB of memory in a scale-up configuration. Zeus cards will include a 400 GbE interface (optionally 800 GbE), enabling customers to build scale-out clusters composed of thousands of GPUs, Bolt Graphics says on its website.

The FP64 capacity of the high-end Zeus 4c offering is within the ballpark of Nvidia Hopper H100 and H200 GPUs, which delivered 34 teraflops of FP64 within a similar power envelope (about 350 watts). With its Blackwell B100 and B200 GPUs, Nvidia delivered 30 teraflops and 37 teraflops of FP64 capacity, respectfully, but the power demand essentially doubled to 700 watts. Nvidia’s new Rubin GPU will deliver 33 teraflops of FP64 capacity while consuming up to 2,300 watts per GPU.

Obviously, the newer GPUs from Nvidia have oodles of AI capacity, which generally runs at lower 4-bit and 8-bit precisions. Nvidia is counting on the Ozaki emulation scheme to deliver FP64-like math capabilities using lower precision cores. However, not everyone is happy with Ozaki, and this has led to some concerns in the HPC community that native vector FP64 capacity needed for traditional modeing and simulation workloads is being sacrificed to bolster AI capacity.

The Zeus Spec Sheet (Image courtesy Bolt Graphics)

This concern over native FP64 capacity is something that AMD is addressing with its upcoming MI430X GPU, which the Department of Energy will be using for the upcoming Discovery supercomputer to be installed at Oak Ridge National Lab in 2028. The MI430X likely will have around 200 teraflops of FP64, according to estimates.

“Compute demand is growing exponentially, but cost remains the limiting factor,” Singh, who is also CTO and CEO of the Sunnyvale, California-based company, said in a press release. “We believe the next generation of computing will be defined not just by performance but by efficiency. Our goal is to fundamentally change the economics of compute and become the default platform for next-generation workloads.”

Bolt Graphics said it has a product pipeline exceeding $500 million and over 14,000 members in its early access program, including enterprises, developers, and end users. It’s not clear if government labs that are hungry for FP64 capacity are part of this program, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they were. For more information, see the company’s website at https://bolt.graphics.

The post Bolt Graphics Targets FP64 HPC Workloads with Zeus GPU appeared first on HPCwire.

After several months of radio silence on the matter, Honeywell announced today that Quantinuum confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 17, 2026. The filing follows Honeywell’s January disclosure that it was preparing to take its majority-owned quantum computing unit public.

As with the earlier announcement, today’s update offered few additional details. Honeywell said the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed IPO have not yet been determined. Neither Honeywell nor Quantinuum executives appear to have commented publicly on the February submission beyond today’s brief statement.

Momentum has been building for Quantinuum following a $600 million equity raise in September 2025 that valued the company at approximately $10 billion, roughly doubling its prior valuation. That round came after a $300 million raise led by JPMorgan Chase in January 2024, which valued the company at $5 billion pre-money.

Commenting at the time of the $600 million funding, Honeywell Chairman and CEO Vimal Kapur strongly expressed support for Quantinuum.

“Quantinuum continues to meet and exceed our stated objectives — strategically, technically and commercially,” said Kapur. “We have complete confidence in Quantinuum’s ability to continue to lead the quantum revolution and create long-term value for its investors and customers.”

Unlike several recent quantum computing companies that went public via SPAC mergers, Quantinuum is pursuing a traditional IPO. Analysts view that distinction as notable, with some suggesting it could lend added credibility to both the company and the broader quantum sector as it faces greater public market scrutiny.

The Helios system. Image courtesy of Quantinuum.

Since its last funding round, the company has continued to expand both technically and geographically. In November 2025, Quantinuum introduced its Helios quantum system as part of a broader roadmap toward its next-generation Apollo platform.  More recently, the company established an R&D hub in Singapore and plans to deploy its Helios system there later this year. The effort is designed to pair Quantinuum’s technology with local research and industry partners to develop commercially relevant applications and expand Singapore’s quantum capabilities.

Singapore hasn’t been Quantinuum’s only international effort. Earlier this month, the company delivered its System Model H2 quantum computer to Japan’s RIKEN, where it is being installed to replace the previous H1 system as part of the institute’s hybrid quantum-classical platform. Quantinuum has also partnered with organizations including SoftBank Corp., Infineon, and the STFC Hartree Centre, and is involved in a joint venture in Qatar tied to a broader $1 billion national investment in quantum technologies over the coming decade.

The timing of the Quantinuum announcement might be deliberate. Honeywell is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings before the market opens tomorrow (Thursday, April 23), one day after disclosing Quantinuum’s confidential filing and just days after agreeing to sell its Productivity Solutions and Services business for $1.4 billion as part of a broader effort to streamline its portfolio. Whether Quantinuum’s IPO plans will be addressed in more detail remains unclear.

The post Honeywell Confirms Quantinuum IPO Filing as Quantum Firms Face Market Scrutiny appeared first on HPCwire.

NSW and Queensland governments ‘severely underdelivered’ on promised infrastructure to improve water flows, independent review finds

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Two state governments have drastically underdelivered more than $160m in infrastructure measures to improve river health in the northern Murray-Darling basin eight years since they were promised, a major independent review has found.

This includes failure by the New South Wales government to secure any of the private land access needed to improve water flows over floodplains in the state’s Gwydir region, where scientists had to scramble to rescue turtles in dried up wetlands last week.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 23, No. 1,769.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 23, #No. 1,047.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 577 for Thursday, April 23.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 23, No. 781.

Five people were injured when explosions occurred several hours apart at two homes on the same block of a north San Antonio neighborhood.

Navy Secretary John Phelan is leaving his role effective immediately, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said​ Wednesday.

A state court judge on Wednesday blocked Virginia from moving forward with a redistricting effort that passed a day earlier, a roadblock in Democrats' efforts to redraw the state's congressional maps.

Move comes one day after voters approved the maps, leading state attorney general to vow office will appeal

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One day after voters in Virginia approved new congressional maps intended to make it easier for Democrats to flip four Republican House seats in the midterms, a court ruled the referendum invalid.

The proposal sought to change the state constitution to set aside the non-partisan redistricting process voters authorized six years ago until 2030, and passed by about three percentage points, 51.5% to 48.5%, according to the Virginia department of elections.

Apple has been embroiled in a six-year legal battle over one of its Apple Watch health apps. The end may finally be in sight, and here's what Apple has to say about it.

When workers complained, they were reportedly told there's no way to opt out.

Exit of John Phelan, navy’s top civilian official, comes a week after Pete Hegseth fired army’s top officer

The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that the navy’s top civilian official, John Phelan, the secretary of the navy, is leaving his job.

In a statement posted to social media, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately”.

An illegally tinted windshield led police to seize a loaded handgun and marijuana during a traffic stop in Newark.

Figures fail to significantly buoy stock as firm admits ‘significant effort and hard work’ needed to achieve goals

Tesla reported its first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing some better-than-expected results but faltering in some key areas. The report failed to significantly buoy Tesla’s stock, which has limped along this year while its CEO, Elon Musk, has tried to sell the company’s new vision of humanoid robots and self-driving robotaxis. Its core car business has struggled in the face of competition from Chinese counterparts and backlash against his close involvement with the Trump administration.

“There remains significant effort and hard work to realize our mission of Amazing Abundance,” Tesla said in its report, while claiming that demand for its vehicles was rebounding.

Measure will also limit device use during passing periods, lunch and recess and block YouTube on district devices

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The Los Angeles unified school district’s board passed a resolution on Tuesday to curb students’ classroom screen time for the upcoming school year, in the latest effort nationwide to address adverse effects from excessive device use.

The measure, which passed 6-0 at a Tuesday school board meeting, will set daily and weekly screen time limits for students based on grade level, prohibit elementary and middle school students from using devices during passing periods, lunch and recess, and block use of YouTube on district devices, among other provisions.

Amid Iran blockade, John C Phelan has been immediately replaced with undersecretary Hung Cao, says Pentagon on social media with no explanation

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Also today, we can expect the Senate to vote on another war powers resolution, to curb the Trump administration’s war in Iran.

Led by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, this will be upper chamber Democrats’ fifth attempt to pass a resolution.

Louisiana v Callais: A high-stakes voting rights case in which the court’s conservative majority appears poised to gut one of the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

Trump v Cook: Donald Trump’s case for firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, as he continues to exert greater control over the US central bank.

Trump v Slaughter: A case which examines the legality of Trump’s firing of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member, Rebecca Slaughter.

Threads users can chat in real-time conversations during big cultural events.

The campaign, fronted by a CGI squirrel, is part of government initiative to boost financial risk taking, amid fears UK growth is being stymied

• Nils Pratley: the ‘Savvy Squirrel looks a hit too tame’

City firms are pinning their hopes on a government-endorsed advertising blitz fronted by a finance “savvy” CGI squirrel to encourage cautious British savers to shift out of cash and start investing.

The long-awaited retail investment campaign, which will cost up to £50m, is part of the chancellor Rachel Reeves’ nationwide push to encourage more financial risk taking, amid fears risk-averse consumers are losing out and ultimately stymying UK growth.

NHS struggling to cope with record numbers, which Cancer Research UK says puts progress on survival rates at risk

The number of people in the UK being diagnosed with cancer has reached a record high, with one person diagnosed every 80 seconds, a report reveals.

Cancer Research UK found that more than 403,000 people were being diagnosed with the disease each year, largely due to a growing and ageing population, as people are more likely to develop cancer as they get older.

T-Mobile's latest use of DoorDash is speedy and free, but it may not be available everywhere and requires you to install your own internet.

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: The Trump family's World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers over allegations of extortion. Justin Sun has accused World Liberty of an "illegal scheme" to seize his WLFI tokens, a cryptocurrency issued by the company. Sun alleges the firm, co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump, has "frozen" all of his tokens and stripped him of his right to vote on governance issues. [...] Sun alleged that those running World Liberty, including another co-founder, Chase Herro, are using it as a "golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud." In his complaint, filed on Tuesday in a San Francisco federal court, Sun argues that initial promises to give token-holders the option to trade the currency in future "were false and misleading." While the tokens at large became tradeable, Sun said World Liberty has blocked him from being able to sell a single one, and is now threatening to "burn" his - deleting them entirely. WLFI said in a post on X: "Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLFI isn't the first. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• US special envoy Zampolli hopes for Italy involvement

• Doubts remain over Iran’s participation at tournament

An envoy to Donald Trump has asked Fifa to replace Iran with Italy in the upcoming World Cup, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The plan is an effort to repair ties between Trump and Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, after the two fell out amid the American president’s attacks against Pope Leo XIV over the Iran war, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

In a department built to respond to catastrophic threats, employees have been reduced to bartering for office supplies.

The wife of Sgt. First Class Jose Serrano is being held at an ICE detention center in El Paso.

The FBI obtained four warrants under FISA to monitor Carter Page, who served as an informal adviser to President Trump during his 2016 campaign.

Opioid addiction has shattered countless American lives. A near-perfect cure could be miraculous and podcaster Joe Rogan recently said it’s within reach. 

"With one dose of Ibogaine, more than 80% of people are free of that addiction," he said April 18 at the White House, where President Donald Trump signed an executive order concerning the drug. "With two doses, it's more than 90%."

Ibogaine is a psychedelic medication derived from the Iboga shrub found in Central and West Africa. When taken in large amounts, it causes hallucinations that can last more than 24 hours and cause cardiac problems.

The Trump administration’s new executive order directs federal agencies to make psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, more available to researchers and patients while funneling money toward new research. 

Ibogaine has shown some promise in treating opioid addiction, but published research is minimal, largely because it’s illegal in many countries, including the U.S.

So far, studies have found ibogaine is especially beneficial for reducing withdrawal symptoms and drug cravings in the days and weeks after taking it. One study, for example, found that 80% of people reported that ibogaine drastically reduced or eliminated their withdrawal symptoms — that may be where Rogan got this number. Rogan did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for evidence.

But getting through withdrawal and being "free" from addiction are not the same thing.   

There is some evidence ibogaine may help people quit opioids long-term, but none of the available research shows rates of long-term abstinence from opioids as high as Rogan described. 

Interest in ibogaine as an addiction treatment goes back decades

The idea of using ibogaine to support sobriety dates back to 1962, when Howard Lotsof credited the drug for freeing him from his heroin addiction at 19 years old. Lotsof spent the rest of his life advocating for the treatment. 

Over the next several decades, case reports and anecdotal success stories provided hope to people struggling with opioid addiction. 

But formal research has been lacking. The U.S. classified ibogaine as a Schedule I drug in 1970, a category defined as having a high potential for abuse and no medical benefit. In 1993, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a Phase I clinical trial to test low doses of the drug but suspended it in 1995 because of lack of funding. 

Americans seeking to use ibogaine to curb their addictions often travel to Brazil, Mexico or New Zealand, where clinics offer ibogaine treatment. 

Small, observational studies show promise, but their methodology is lacking 

Researchers have conducted a handful of small, observational studies since the turn of the century. In most cases, researchers followed people in the days or weeks after taking the drug and observed positive results, including significant reductions in withdrawal symptoms and drug cravings. Being observational means the study’s researchers didn’t manipulate the environment or assign treatment as they would in an experimental study. 

We identified three such studies that followed patients for longer periods to assess ibogaine’s effects on long-term cessation. None of them looked at the effects of multiple doses.

• A 2017 study followed 30 opioid-addicted patients treated at clinics in Mexico. One month after treatment, 50% of participants reported no opioid use. It dropped to 33% of all participants after three months and 23% of all participants after a year.

• Another 2017 study followed 14 participants treated at New Zealand clinics. After 12 months, 55% of the 11 patients who remained in the study reported being opioid-free for the 30 days prior. 

• A 2018 survey asked 88 patients who completed ibogaine treatment in Mexico between 2012 and 2015. Respondents noted acute benefits of treatment, with 80% saying their "withdrawal symptoms were eliminated or drastically reduced." Thirty percent reported never using opioids again after treatment. Among those who abstained, 54% had done so for at least a year, and 31% for two years. Seventy percent of the original 88 reported relapsing after treatment. 

Alan K. Davis, an Ohio State University professor who coauthored the 2018 survey, said they didn’t know where Rogan got the figures he referenced at the White House. 

"This is not based on science and is likely anecdotal or marketing data from an ibogaine clinic," Davis told PolitiFact.

Existing ibogaine research comes with limitations 

Results from ibogaine studies are promising, but much more research is needed before safety and efficacy is fully understood, experts said.

Geoff Nadler, a medical anthropologist and the author of the New Zealand study, said that because his research was observational, the methodology is "weak" and not "representative of all treatment outcomes for ibogaine or any other treatment."

"We didn't recruit people to be treated and set the conditions of their treatment," Nadler said. "We just observed the treatment outcomes of a group of people who decided to be treated." 

There have been a few placebo-controlled clinical trials, but they have focused on ibogaine’s safety, not on its benefits for addiction treatment. 

It’s also hard to measure whether a person has been "freed" from addiction, a challenge across treatment research. Results can shift depending on how long researchers tracked patients, whether the drug abstention is self-reported or confirmed with drug testing, and how many patients dropped out of the study. Which drugs study participants are using — heroin versus fentanyl, for example — can also affect recovery outcomes. 

These factors make it hard to compare the success of various treatments but a Harvard Review of Psychiatry review of longitudinal studies found that after 10 years, only about 30% of people were still abstaining from opioids at the most recent follow up. 

Ibogaine comes with cardiac risks, but shows promise for other mental health treatment

Even with Trump’s new executive order, ibogaine may face obstacles to becoming a mainstream, FDA-approved treatment. 

Its biggest documented risk so far is cardiotoxicity, said Kirsten Cherian, a Stanford University neuropsychologist researching ibogaine. The drug has been linked to multiple heart attacks and deaths.

Cherian said there are ways to mitigate this risk: Screening for existing cardiac issues, giving magnesium with the drug to protect the heart and monitoring the heart during treatment. 

Ibogaine’s side effects are significant. People taking it report experiencing intense hallucinations lasting more than 24 hours and involving intense or traumatic visions or memories. It can cause nausea, vomiting, and loss of muscle coordination. 

The drug has shown promise beyond treating addiction. In 2024, Stanford University researchers found that veterans with traumatic brain injuries experienced improvements in depression and anxiety symptoms after taking ibogaine.

Our ruling

Rogan said, "With one dose of ibogaine, more than 80% of people are free of (opioid) addiction. With two doses, it's more than 90%."

The treatment shows promise, but we found no research supporting this statement. Limited studies show acute benefits from ibogaine treatment such as reduced drug cravings and improved withdrawal symptoms following treatment.

But the existing research into whether this treatment helps people to quit long term  is observational and limited by small sample sizes. The studies have identified opioid cessation rates ranging from 23 to 55% after a year. 

That’s a significant figure, but it’s not close to the rate Rogan said.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this claim Mostly False. 

Amal Khalil had been buried in rubble after an Israeli strike that also injured another journalist, Zeinab Faraj

Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed a journalist on Wednesday after rescuers were blocked from accessing the building where she was buried under rubble because of further Israeli fire, according to several witnesses.

Amal Khalil was covering developments near the town of al-Tayri with the photographer Zeinab Faraj when an Israeli strike hit the vehicle in front of them.

Autopsy of Celeste Rivas Hernandez finally released after law enforcement had requested it be sealed in November

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Celeste Rivas Hernandez, the 14-year-old girl whom the singer D4vd is charged with killing, died from penetrating injuries, according to an autopsy report released on Wednesday after a months-long delay.

The Los Angeles county medical examiner’s office had in December determined that her death was a homicide caused by multiple penetrating injuries. The office was unable to release the report as it was sealed by a judge at the request of law enforcement until prosecutors this week moved to lift the order.

Florida governor says white men have been discriminated against in new effort to challenge inclusion programs

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, on Wednesday signed a law prohibiting local governments from funding or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, saying that white men had been discriminated against.

The Florida governor has been at the forefront of combatting DEI initiatives, despite criticism from groups nationwide. Under the new law, residents can sue local governments for violations and if individual local officials are found to have funded DEI initiatives, they can be removed from office.

Sony AI's autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system. There have been various ping-pong-playing robots since 1983, but until now they were unable to rival highly skilled human competitors. Ace changed that with its performances against human elite-level and professional players in matches following the rules of the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport's governing body, and officiated by licensed umpires. The project's goal was not only to compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments. In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month. "The success of Ace, with its perception system and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction -- such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and safety-critical physical domains," said Peter Durr, director of Sony AI Zurich and leader for Sony AI's project Ace. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nine people in total arrested over alleged conspiracy concerning unspecified site connected to Jewish community

Two further arrests have been made in relation to an alleged conspiracy to commit arson at a site connected to the Jewish community, the Metropolitan police have said.

The latest arrests, made by counter-terrorism police investigating the alleged arson conspiracy, were of a man aged 19 and another aged 26. They were detained in Watford on Tuesday and remain in custody.

The Senate rejected another attempt to rein in President Trump's ability to use further military force against Iran, marking Democrats' fifth effort to do so since the war began eight weeks ago.

Three-year deal includes funding for a riot squad to ‘disperse’ people trying to board small boats

The UK government has agreed to pay France another £660m to curb the number of asylum seekers travelling across the Channel, including plans to fund a riot squad to “contain and disperse” people trying to board small boats.

Under a three-year deal to be signed on Thursday by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, 1,100 enforcement, intelligence and military officers – an increase of 40% – will be employed to track down smuggling gangs and people seeking refuge.

LAS VEGAS, April 22, 2026 — Google Cloud today announced a $750 million fund to deliver new resources and incentives to partners in its 120,000-member partner ecosystem to help accelerate joint customers’ transformations with agentic AI. The fund, available for global consulting firms, systems integrators, software partners, and channel partners, will support AI value identification, agentic AI prototyping, agent building and deployment, upskilling, and teams of embedded Google forward-deployed engineers (FDEs).

Credit: Shutterstock

Today, global consulting firms, systems integrators, software providers, and specialized services providers play a critical role enabling the agentic enterprise. Google Cloud’s ecosystem of system integrator partners already offer more than 330,000 experts trained on implementing Google AI for customers, and 95% of the top 20 and over over 80% of the top 100 SaaS companies use Gemini models.

This new funding will further accelerate the transformative capabilities of Google Cloud’s partner ecosystem— including partners’ ability to assess the full potential of AI, rapidly prototype and prove value, build AI agents and integrate these agents into existing software and workflows—ultimately helping more businesses realize value and benefit from Google Cloud’s AI capabilities.

New partner resources announced today include:

• New tools and resources: The fund will support new tools and resources for partners, including AI value assessments, Gemini proofs-of-concept, Gemini Enterprise practice building, agentic AI prototyping and deployment, Wiz security assessments, and usage incentives to accelerate adoption of AI within these companies and their customers.
• Forward-deployed engineering teams: As part of the expanded investment in partners, Google will embed FDEs alongside major consulting firms and systems integrators like Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, Devoteam, HCLTech, and TCS to support customer deployments and solve deep technical challenges.
• Dedicated Gemini Enterprise practices: AI-native services partners, including Altimetrik, Artefact, Covasant, Deepsense, Distyl.ai, Northslope, Quantium, Tribe.ai, and Tryolabs will launch Gemini Enterprise practices as part of Google’s new Gemini Enterprise transformation program. To support these partners, Google Cloud will provide credits for sandbox development, technical upskilling, and referral opportunities to help them rapidly build, test, and deploy agentic solutions for joint customers.
• Early model access: Partners including Accenture, Bain & Company, BCG, Deloitte, and McKinsey, will receive early access to Gemini models. Their feedback will help refine these systems to ensure they’re equipped to deliver benefits for people, companies, and society.
• Enterprise-ready agents: Under the expanded investment, Google Cloud will help better enable partners to surface enterprise-ready agents in Gemini Enterprise, enabling customers to easily deploy highly-vetted agents in alignment with enterprise governance and security policies. Built using the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and discoverable through the app, Gemini Enterprise now offers agents from Adobe, Atlassian, Deloitte, Lovable, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, Replit, S&P Global, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and more.

“Google Cloud’s partners are already leaders in agentic AI development and deployment, and have become important channels for distributing AI technologies. With this expanded funding, we will be able to dedicate new resources and technology to support our partners as they accelerate our mutual customers’ agentic AI journeys,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, president, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud.

“Enterprise reinvention requires more than experimentation—it demands deep engineering and the ability to execute at scale. Google Cloud’s investment strengthens how we solve complex technical challenges and build enterprise–ready solutions together, accelerating the adoption of Gemini Enterprise, modernizing digital cores, and helping clients realize tangible outcomes from agentic AI faster,” said Scott Alfieri, Accenture Google Business Group lead, Accenture.

“AI agents have the power to reshape enterprise workflows. This investment by Google Cloud signals a pivotal moment, affirming that the future of enterprise AI lies in a rich ecosystem where powerful technology from Google Cloud is paired with the deep industry and transformation experience of Deloitte. Our growing library of more than 1,000 pre-built agents is a reflection of this. Each agent can be tailored to a client’s specific context and business needs—designed to supercharge delivery and accelerate the path from vision to value,” said Jason Salzetti, chair and chief executive officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

“Working with Deloitte and Google Cloud, Gemini Enterprise agents have helped us transform internal functions and provide immediate, actionable support to our partners. Our teams can now easily leverage specialized AI agents to streamline complex processes that free up teams for higher-value work to better serve our customers, all within a secure and governed framework,” said Matt Ausman, CIO, Zebra Technologies.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud offers a powerful, optimized AI stack — including AI infrastructure, leading models like Gemini, data management capabilities, multicloud security solutions, developer tools and platform, as well as agents and applications — that enables organizations to transform their business for the Agentic Era. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Source: Google Cloud

The post Google Cloud Commits $750M to Accelerate Partners’ Agentic AI Development appeared first on HPCwire.

Do Freedom of Information Act door logs reveal that former President Joe Biden didn’t enter the Oval Office after the 2024 election? No, evidence shows that’s a dubious claim.

An April 21 X post showing an image of Biden looking down reads, "Newly released FOIA door logs show that former President Joe Biden didn't enter the Oval Office once after the 2024 election. He was president for another 75 days." 

The post with over 249,000 views as of April 22 said that during that time former President Barack Obama, billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., ran the country. 

Other users on Facebook, Threads and X also shared the claim. 

However, we found multiple instances of Biden performing executive duties and being in the Oval Office after the Nov. 5, 2024 election. 

After President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Biden gave a brief speech Nov. 7, 2024 at the White House Rose Garden calling for unity and a peaceful transition of power. 

Former President Joe Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP)

On Nov. 12, 2024, Biden met with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto at the Oval Office. 

Biden meets with Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto, left, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Nov. 12, 2024. (AP)

On Nov. 13, 2024, Biden met with Trump at the Oval Office; Biden congratulated him and spoke about a smooth transition.

Biden also made other announcements from the White House. On Nov. 26, 2024, he announced an Israel-Hezbollah cease fire from the Rose Garden, and provided an update on the Syrian civil war on Dec. 8, 2024 at the White House’s Roosevelt Room.

He spoke from the Oval Office several other times in January 2025: during the Medal of Valor Ceremony Jan. 3, and on Jan. 10 and Jan. 13, when he spoke about the California wildfires. Lastly, he gave a live farewell address to the nation Jan. 15, from the Oval Office.

The X account that shared the news of the supposed release of the FOIA door logs provides no details about these logs, such as who requested them or where they are published. We also found no credible news reports about these logs. 

Semafor politics reporter David Weigel noted in response to the X post that "White House records aren’t subject to FOIA."

We found a 1993 FOIA memo on White House requests from the Justice Department that said "the parts of the Executive Office of the President that are known as the ‘White House Office’ are not subject to the FOIA; certain other parts of the Executive Office of the President are."

The X account reposted and shared over 100 posts just April 22; including claims about Rep. Illhan Omar, D-Minn., having "$30 million added to her network by accident," viral videos of animals, or AI-generated content and posts supporting the passing of the Save America Act. 

Facebook posts sharing the claim about Biden called users to click on a link to the "full story." There are clues that the site, called "New and Tips," is not legitimate. The story about Biden has a byline that says "Charlotte Liam," but there’s no information or picture about this person once you click on the name. 

The story itself doesn’t provide legitimate sources and it attributes its information only to the "FOIA logs" and an unnamed "spokesman."

The website also doesn’t have an "About" page or any other page besides the main one. The articles’ publication month aren't written in English, Google Translate shows that for the Biden article, "April" is written in Vietnamese. Other parts of the website also have Vietnamese text, such as the search bar, which says, "Tìm kiếm," which means "search." 

Social media posts claiming that Biden wasn’t at the Oval Office after the 20224 election are contradicted by multiple videos that show Biden there. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

Eminent Roster of Participants to Include ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureates

NEW YORK, April 22, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced the ACM AI Leadership Summit, bringing together researchers, practitioners, industry leaders, educators, and policymakers to explore how AI can be developed and deployed responsibly to advance science and society. The summit will take place August 30 through September 2 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Discounted reservations are available for those registering before June 30.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming every dimension of human knowledge, creativity, and collaboration,” remarked ACM Vice President Elisa Bertino, Chair of the Summit’s Organizing Committee. “The ACM AI Leadership Summit will be a milestone event where the global computing community taps into the excitement of the moment while exploring the AI era from a whole range of perspectives.”

Across keynotes, panels, and interactive sessions, participants will examine frontier AI technologies, governance and ethics, and workforce transformation, among other topics. The Summit will build shared understanding and practical pathways toward AI that strengthens society, enriches culture, and expands human capability.

The program for the ACM AI Leadership Summit will feature contributions from leading figures in the global AI and computing community.

Scheduled Speakers

• Andrew Barto — ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate whose foundational work on learning from interaction, reward-driven adaptation, and agent-based intelligence underpins much of today’s AI research across robotics, control, and decision-making systems.
• Rodney Brooks — Pioneer who shaped modern AI and robotics for over five decades. He bridged research and real-world deployment leading the development of globally deployed robot families, including Roomba and PackBot.
• Amandeep Singh Gill — United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology and a leading global voice on AI governance and digital cooperation. He plays a central role in shaping international frameworks for responsible AI bringing together governments, industry, and civil society.
• Markus Gross — Known for pioneering computer graphics work that bridges academic research and large-scale industry innovation. As Chief Scientist at Walt Disney Studios, he has developed advanced visual effects, simulation, and AI-driven content creation technologies used in film and media.
• Aaron Hertzmann — A leading researcher at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and the visual arts. As a scientist at Adobe Research, he explores how machine learning can enable new forms of artistic creation and human–AI collaboration.
• Yann LeCun — ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate who made foundational contributions to modern deep learning and convolutional networks. His more recent work offers a compelling vision for self-supervised learning and autonomous intelligence.
• Amanda Randles — ACM Prize in Computing recipient known for advancing precision medicine and scientific discovery by integrating large-scale simulation, machine learning and data-driven methods, and high-performance computing.
• And more…stay tuned!

Planned Sessions

• Doctoral Consortium: Nurturing Future AI Leaders
  A dedicated forum for PhD students to engage with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers at a formative stage of their careers.
• Rethinking the Future: Frontier Models and Technologies for a New Era of AI
  An exploration of the next generation of AI models, architectures, and paradigms that are reshaping the boundaries of intelligence and scientific research.
• AI and Scientific Discovery
  An examination of AI as a catalyst for next-generation scientific breakthroughs, reshaping how research is conducted, accelerating innovation cycles, and enabling discoveries that were previously beyond human reach.
• Responsible and Ethical AI: Governance, Policy, Accountability, and Trust
  An analysis about how ethics, governance, and policy can keep pace with rapidly advancing AI technologies while ensuring trust, accountability, and societal benefit.
• AI and the Creative Arts: Human–AI Co-Creation and Cultural Transformation
  An exploration on how artists and technologists are collaborating with AI as a creative partner—and how these collaborations are reshaping authorship, expression, and culture.
• AI and the Workforce: Augmentation, Reskilling, and the Future of Work
  A discussion on the evolving relationship between AI and human labor, focusing on workforce augmentation, reskilling, job transformation, education, and long-term societal implications.
• AI in the Real World
  A showcase of AI applications in the “real world” and how research can be transformative in a range of settings.
• Agentic AI: Autonomous Systems that Plan, Reason, and Act
  A discussion on autonomous and agent-based AI systems that can plan, reason, and act, raising new opportunities and challenges for safety, control, and trust
• ACM SIGs Day Featuring Six Parallel Tracks
  AI for infrastructure and systems, software development, societal impact, education, and more.

Those interested in attending the ACM AI Leadership Summit, August 30 to September 2 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, may now register via this link.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Source: ACM

The post ACM Details AI Leadership Summit, Aug. 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

Iranian forces seize two ships in critical waterway as Washington and Tehran maintain separate blockades

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iranian forces have seized two ships in the strait of Hormuz as the US and Iran doubled down on imposing separate blockades of the shipping waterway.

The standoff over the strait – through which about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied fossil gas passed through during peacetime – has raised doubts about whether stalled peace negotiations will resume.

Disclosures come after firm tightened rules on insider trading, including candidates betting on own campaigns

Before he announced his Senate candidacy, a political hopeful in Virginia did something not so unusual in this day and age: he logged on to a prediction market exchange and wagered money that he would run. Then he ran. Then he bet on that too.

The candidate and trader was Mark Moran, a former FBoy Island contestant who went viral recently for his campaign launch video. Investigators with Kalshi, the federally regulated prediction market exchange, found he placed two trades on their platform, the first in a market asking which individuals would seek public office in 2026, the second after he formally entered the race.

AUSTIN, Texas, April 22, 2026 — Oracle has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to give joint customers new ways to operationalize AI across enterprise data. Under the expanded partnership, the Oracle AI Database Agent for Gemini Enterprise gives Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud customers a simpler way to interact with their Oracle data using natural language. In addition, Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud now offers new capabilities and broader regional availability as global organizations, such as Worldline, use it to drive innovation and accelerate cloud migrations.

Credit: Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

“We’re making it easier for customers to use natural language to access, understand, and act on enterprise data by combining the Gemini Enterprise experience with Oracle’s industry-leading database performance, security, and governance,” said Nathan Thomas, senior vice president, product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “By applying AI directly to enterprise data at the database layer, customers can improve accuracy, strengthen controls, and use models more efficiently without exposing sensitive data or adding complexity. Together, we’re making it easier for our customers to power agentic AI with trusted business data.”

“To deliver real impact from agentic AI, customers need a simple, trusted way to interact with their valuable business data using intelligent agents such as the Oracle AI Database Agent,” said Satish Thomas, vice president, applied AI & platform ecosystem, Google Cloud. “By making this agent accessible through Gemini Enterprise, we’re giving customers greater flexibility to apply AI to data stored in Oracle databases and turn that data into meaningful business value.”

The Oracle AI Database Agent, now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace, allows Gemini Enterprise customers to use natural language when interacting with their trusted Oracle data, while drawing on the in-database AI capabilities of Oracle AI Database to deliver relevant, context-aware answers. Customers can ask everyday business questions—such as analyzing revenue trends across regions and product lines—and receive immediate, data-driven answers that help them adjust pricing or prioritize sales efforts, all without writing SQL or building custom tools. The agent interprets each request, queries relevant, governed Oracle data, and delivers clear insights without moving or duplicating data. In addition, the Oracle AI Database Agent enables developers to securely use Oracle data in more advanced AI workflows by allowing them to connect it with other AI tools in Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to automate tasks such as data extraction, analysis, and visualization.

AI Shift is a CyberAgent subsidiary that helps enterprises in Japan build and deploy agentic AI solutions to automate business processes across customer service, marketing, and sales. AI Shift uses Oracle Autonomous AI Database on OCI to power its agent development platform and plans to use Oracle AI Database Agent to help customers expand their Oracle AI Database deployments to Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud.

“The Oracle AI Database Agent represents an important advancement in how we use AI with enterprise data,” said Yuto Yoneyama, CEO, AI Shift. “With Gemini Enterprise, our users can move from writing SQL to asking questions in natural language to get answers grounded in trusted enterprise data. That helps us speed development, improve the quality of results, and make faster, more informed decisions without compromising governance and control.”

Leading Organizations Choose Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud

Global organizations, such as Worldline, are adopting Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud to accelerate their cloud migrations.

Worldline is a European payments provider that processes billions of transactions globally. To support its strict requirements for performance and security, Worldline is leveraging Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud to modernize its payment processing platform and deliver scalable, low-latency, and secure payment services.

“Worldline operates one of the largest payment processing platforms, for which consistent low latency and high throughput are non-negotiable,” said Arni Smit, director, software engineering, integration and payment platform, Worldline. “Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud gives us the scalability, resilience, and security capabilities we require to support real-time transaction processing at global scale by delivering the power of Oracle Exadata within Google Cloud.”

New Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud Capabilities and Regions

New database capabilities and additional regions are supporting growing demand from across the world by providing customers with more options and locations to use Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud:

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GoldenGate enables real-time Oracle database migration: Enables customers to simplify migrations of Oracle databases to Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud and implement high-availability solutions through real-time, low-impact data movement. In addition, the service integrates with Google BigQuery for near real-time analytics, eliminating latency between operational and analytical systems. Generally available soon, OCI GoldenGate enables customers to act on live data without building complex data pipelines.
• Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse integration with Google BigQuery: Enables customers to seamlessly access and analyze open-format data stored in Google Cloud Lakehouse by allowing Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse to directly read BigQuery Iceberg tables without data duplication. This helps customers build a unified lakehouse architecture that supports analytics and AI workloads across Oracle and Google Cloud while reducing data movement and associated costs.
• Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud new region availability: Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud is now available in 15 regions: Asia-Northeast 1 (Tokyo), Asia-Northeast 2 (Osaka), Asia-South 1 (Mumbai), Asia-South 2 (Delhi), Australia-Southeast 1 (Sydney), Australia-Southeast 2 (Melbourne), Europe-West 8 (Milan), Germany Central (Frankfurt), North America-Northeast 1 (Montreal), North America-Northeast 2 (Toronto), South America-East 1 (São Paulo), UK South (London), US Central 1 (Iowa), US East (Ashburn), and US West (Salt Lake City). To support growing customer demand, additional regional availability is planned within the next 12 months in Europe-West 12 (Turin) and North America-South 1 (Mexico).

About Oracle

Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

Source: Oracle

The post Oracle Expands AI Capabilities in Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud to Supercharge Enterprise Data Innovation appeared first on HPCwire.

Democratic Rep. David Scott, who represented Georgia in the House for more than two decades, has become the fifth member of the 119th Congress to die in office.

Sony is demonstrating just a small fraction of what physical AI might be able to do.

As the United States grappled with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a choke point for one-fifth of the world’s crude oil — CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright whether the U.S. should rely less on oil and more on renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power.

"We have gone through two months when the entire global energy system is in chaos just because of one shipping lane," Tapper said April 19 on "State of the Union." "Doesn't that make an argument for alternative kinds of energy, so that the U.S. is less reliant on oil?"

Wright, whose private-sector career was in natural gas and oil, said the U.S. produces more oil than it consumes, making it a net exporter of oil; we’ve rated a similar claim Half True.

Wright said that "we definitely want energy from everywhere we can get it" — including nuclear energy — but gave the impression that progress in renewable energy has been disappointing.

"In the last 20 years, the world spent $10 trillion on wind, solar, and batteries. It hasn't made it to 3% of global energy, and it's just driven up prices," Wright said.

Is it correct that solar and wind haven’t reached "3% of global energy"?

There’s data supporting Wright’s statement that wind and solar account for a small percentage of global energy, about 3.3%. However, wind and solar have become significant sources for an important subset of energy — electricity generation for homes and businesses — both in the U.S. and the world over the past 20 years.

In a statement to PolitiFact, the Energy Department said, "If wind and solar only perform at low-demand periods" — which is the case if they are not paired with supplemental storage methods like batteries — "then their value is inherently less." The Department also pointed to research showing that states that require a minimum level of renewable energy in electricity generation have experienced higher prices for consumers.

Wright’s statement refers to overall energy sources

International Energy Agency data shows global investment in wind and solar energy from 2015 to 2025 reached $5.7 trillion. That’s consistent with about $10 trillion over 20 years.

Wright’s 3% figure is on target based on total energy use worldwide. This is a catchall category that includes everything from transportation fuels to industrial heating for cement or steel plants. 

Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas remain the dominant sources of energy worldwide. Solar and wind energy trail each of these sources, and they also trail biomass (the burning of organic matter or waste) and nuclear energy.

The small share represented by solar and wind shows their limits for industrial purposes, energy experts said. 

In these contexts, fossil fuels have an advantage because their energy is always available. By contrast, wind and solar are variable, depending on meteorological conditions. A company seeking to use wind or solar to power a factory would need to invest in storage, such as batteries or reservoirs, which add to the cost.

Solar and wind energy have made big gains in generating electricity

Solar and wind have made significant strides in electricity generation — a key subset of energy that provides power for homes and many commercial properties. 

Wright’s statement "is misleading in suggesting that lots of money has gone into solar, wind and batteries that hasn’t amounted to much," said Kenneth Gillingham, a Yale University economist specializing in energy. "That is not true — solar and wind are among the most cost-effective technologies right now" based on standard estimates "and are growing very rapidly."

The International Renewable Energy Agency found that technological advances, more competitive supply chains and economies of scale have left solar energy 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives, including fossil fuels, and onshore wind projects were 53% cheaper. Some required infrastructure costs, such as new transmission lines, may not be included in these comparisons.

Such advances have meant that, globally, electricity generation from solar and wind has grown from almost zero in the early 2000s to 13% of the total in 2023, the most recent year available, according to the International Energy Agency. The amount of solar and wind generation was about 120 times bigger in 2023 than 2000. That rate of growth outpaced any other energy source.

In the U.S., solar and wind accounted for about 14% of U.S. electricity generation in 2023. That’s behind natural gas (43%) but closing in on nuclear (19%) and coal (16%). Collectively in the U.S., solar and wind provide more than twice as much electricity generation as hydropower (think of massive, electricity-producing dams, such as the Grand Coulee Dam or the Hoover Dam).

The growth of solar "is impressive and a very different way of seeing it," Gillingham said.

The Energy Department said Wright focused on global energy use because "generation sources like nuclear, oil, gas and coal can do more than just generate electricity," including running transportation and factories.

But Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said this viewpoint doesn’t consider energy "losses" from wasted heat.

An example, Williams-Derry said, would be coal burned in a power plant, where about two-thirds of the energy from burning coal is lost, sent up the smokestack or dissipated in a cooling tower. Similarly, for gasoline used in cars, much of the energy is used to heat up the engine and brake pads, he said.

By contrast, solar and wind are significantly more efficient than fossil fuels, Williams-Derry said.

"Renewables punch above their weight, producing much than 3% of the ‘useful’ energy consumed globally, because solar and wind have only a fraction of the energy losses," he said.

Long term, the difference between solar and wind’s share of global energy and global electricity generation are likely to converge, said Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas-Austin.

"There is a trend towards electrification in a lot of sectors, so over time, the difference between energy produced by renewables and electricity produced by renewables should shrink," Daigle said.

Our ruling

Wright said solar and wind haven’t reached "3% of global energy."

Solar and wind power account for about 3.3% of overall global energy, which is a broad category that includes powering transportation and factories. However, electricity generation — a key subset that supports consumers and many businesses — has seen solar and wind increase significantly during the past 20 years, outpacing the growth rate of any other energy source.

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details about the growth of solar and wind energy, so we rate it Half True.

Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. [...] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model's online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers. Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic's AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cost of renting a home, which surged during the pandemic, is showing signs of returning to earth, new data shows.

You can find beauty in the oddest of places.

WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling. Run all your favourite applications side by side – no rebooting required!

↫ Hailey Somerville

Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. Hailey Somerville basically recreated the first version of WSL – or coLinux, for the old people among us – but instead of running on Windows NT, it runs on Windows 9x. A VxD driver loads a patched Linux kernel using DOS interrupts, and this Linux kernel calls Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of POSIX APIs. A small DOS client application then allows the Linux kernel to use MS-DOS prompts as TTYs. This is a great oversimplification, but it does get the general gist across.

Anyway, the end result is that you can use a modern Linux kernel and Windows 9x at the same time, without virtualising or dual-booting. This might be one of the greatest hacks in recent times, and I find it oddly beautiful in its user-facing simplicity.

Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too. We’ve got another update to the SRU branch this week which brings updates to a few important open source packages, like Django, Firefox, Thunderbird, Golang, and others, to address security issues.

In addition, this update marks as a change in the release cadence for the commercial branch of Solaris. From here on out, there will be two “Critical Patch Updates” per quarter to address security issues, followed by a Support Repository Update containing new features and larger changes.

• Ali Act overhaul would allow unified boxing bodies

• Backers say centralized model would boost revenues

• Critics warn fighters could lose leverage and rights

A US Senate hearing on the future of boxing laid bare a sharp divide over the sport’s direction on Wednesday, as longtime boxing figures including Oscar De La Hoya warned of proposed changes that could erode fighters’ rights while executives aligned with an Ultimate Fighting Championship-backed push for a centralized model argued they would bring structure and investment.

“When one system controls access, choice becomes theoretical, not real,” professional boxer Nico Ali Walsh told lawmakers, framing the stakes of a debate that could dramatically reshape boxing’s economic model. “When that happens, you fight who you’re told to fight or you don’t fight at all.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said the government is still investigating a potential violation of national security laws in the incident.

U.S. Rep. David Scott, who represented Georgia's 13th District for over two decades, has died at 80 years old.

The negotiation comes after President Trump publicly said he wanted his administration to look at a rescue package for the budget carrier.

Google Cloud made a slew of announcements today at its annual Cloud Next user conference in Las Vegas. On the infrastructure front, the cloud giant introduced the eight generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) as well as Virgo, a new “megascale” scale-out fabric that can link 134,000 TPUs in different data centers at speeds up to 47 petabits per second of bi-directional bandwidth. It also bolstered its managed Lustre offering.

Selected specs for TPU 8i and 8t (Source: Google)

TPUs are custom-designed ASICs created by Google to accelerate machine learning workloads. The chips, which Google co-designs with Broadcom and contracts with TSMC to manufacture, first launched in 2015 with a focus on accelerating 8-bit matrix multiplication. Google has launched a new chip roughly every year and a half since, with the latest being the “Trillium” TPUs launched in 2024 and “Ironwood” chips at last year’s show.

With the eight generation of TPU, Google has bifurcated its chips. The company now offers TPU 8t for training and TPU 8i for inference.

TPU 8t

Google says TPU 8t delivers 3x the processing of its seventh-generation Ironwood TPU and 2x the performance per watt. Specifically, the TPU 8t has 216 GB of HBM, 6,500 GBps of HBM bandwidth, and 128 MB of on-chip SRAM, delivering 12.6 peak 4-bit floating point (FP4) petaflops of capacity.

The TPU 8t also introduces SparseCore, a new accelerator that complements the existing Matrix Multiple Unit (MXU) to handle “irregular memory access patterns of embedding lookups,” such as all-gather operations. The goal is to prevent the “zero-op” bottlenecks, Google says. It also brings “more balanced” vector processing in the vector processing unit (VPU) component of the chip.

“This allows for better overlapping of quantization, softmax, and layernorms with the matrix multiplications in the MXU, helping the chip stay busy rather than waiting on sequential vector tasks,” Google engineers Diwakar Gupta and Sabastian Mugazambi write in a technical blog post on the new TPUs.

TPU 8t block diagram (Source: Google)

The new chips introduce native FP4, which the company says helps to overcome memory bandwidth bottlenecks and doubles MXU throughput while maintaining accuracy for large models even at lower-precision quantization. “By reducing the bits per parameter, the platform minimizes energy-intensive data movement and allows larger model layers to fit within local hardware buffers for peak compute utilization,” Gupta and Mugazambi write.

Google is also introducing TPUDirect RDMA and TPU Direct Storage in TPU 8t. TPUDirect RDMA will enable the chips to bypass CPU and DRAM and move data directly between the TPU and high-bandwidth memory. Similarly, TPUDirect Storage will allow data to bypass CPU and connect the chip directly with high speed storage, such as 10T Lustre. Google says this will “effectively double” the bandwidth and allow chips to “ingest training data at line rate.”

TPU 8i

The TPU 8i delivers 288 GB of HBM and 8,600 GBps of HBM bandwidth. It features 384 MB of on-chip SRAM, which is 3x more SRAM than previous versions of the TPU, which enables it to hold a much bigger KV cache than before. Compared to Ironwood, it has 80% better performance per dollar, Google said. It delivers 10.1 peak FP4 petaflops of computing capacity.

Block level diagram for TPU 8i (Source: Google)

Google added a new Collectives Acceleration Engine (CAE) with the TPU 8i. This component will aggregate results across cores to accelerate the decoding phase and speed up “chain-of-thought” reasoning processing. Each TPU 8i chip will feature two Tensor Cores (TC) on-core dies and one CAE on the chiplet die, replacing four SparseCores (SCs) on-core dies in previous-generation Ironwood TPU. This will reduce on-chip latency by 5x, the Google engineers write, which means less time waiting.

TPU 8i also introduces Google’s new Boardfly ICI (Inter Chip Interconnect) topology to replace the 3D torus interconnect that is used with TPU 8t. Each tray in the Boardfly ICI forms a four-chip ring, or a Building Block, using internal ICI links. It then uses copper to connect eight BBs to create one localized Group. It then connects up to 36 Groups, consisting of up to 1,024 active chips, using Optical Circuit Switches (OCS).

This architecture ensures a maximum latency of seven hops for any chip-to-chip communications, the company says. “By slashing the hops required for all-to-all communication (the heart of MoE and reasoning models), Boardfly achieves up to a 50% improvement in latency for communication-intensive workloads,” the Google engineers write.

Virgo DCM

It also announced Virgo Network, a new high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric designed to work with its scale-out data center network, the backbone of its AI Hypercomputer. The company says it needed to “reimagine” the data center network to address the scale and latency constraints of its Jupiter data center network, particularly as it rolls out the new TPU 8t chip.

Google’s new Boardfly ICI links TPU 8i chips (Source: Google)

Google launched the Jupiter network back in 2015, when it could deliver 1.3 Pb/s of bi-directional bandwidth among Google data centers. In 2024, it introduced the fifth-generation Jupiter data center network, which could scale to 13 Pbps of bidirectional bandwidth. Google plans to continue using Jupiter as its front-end network, to handle “north-south” traffic from one data center to another. But inside the data center, it’s adopting Virgo to handle “east-west” traffic between pods, which could be racks of TPUs or GPUs assembled in scale-up configuration.

“Built on high-radix switches that reduce network layers by allowing more ports per switch, it employs a flat, two-layer non-blocking topology,” write Benny Siman-Tov, a Google product manager and Engineering Fellow Arjun Singh. “Compared with traditional datacenter networks, this significantly reduces latency by minimizing network tiers.”

Virgo can connect up to 134,000 TPU 8t processors at speeds up to 47 petabits per second, providing 1.6 million ExaFlops of capacity, with “near-linear” scaling performance, Google says. Compared to previous generation, the network, which supports Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), delivers 40% lower unloaded fabric latency for TPUs, which leads to more predictable performance for latency sensitive AI workloads, Google says.

Storage Enhancements

Google’s new Virgo data center network links scale-up GPU or TPU pods (Source: Google)

Google made several storage-related announcements at the show. For starter, it announced that it’s bolstered its Managed Lustre offering to provide higher speed connections. The company says its Lustre storage can now deliver 10 TB per second of throughput to A5X, its new bare metal compute offering based on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system, or its TPU 8t instances, using the RDMA connectivity discussed above.

That is a 10x increase in speed in a year, write Sameet Agarwal, the VP and GM of storage for Google Cloud, and Asad Khan, a senior product management director, in a blog post on the storage announcements. What’s more, 10 TBps is anywhere from 4x to 20x higher than the managed Lustre offerings from other hyperscalers for a single instance, the Googlers write.

Google has introduced a new “dynamic tier” for Managed Cluster that can deliver low-latency performance for AI workloads. “By serving data from persistent disk rather than relying on object-based caching, we eliminate a performance cliff–helping ensure your data remains responsive and your accelerators stay productive,” Agarwal and Khan write. The dynamic tier costs  $0.06 per GB per month.

Google also announced some improvements to Cloud Storage Rapid (or Rapid Storage), the storage offering based on its Colossus cluster-level file system that it launched one year ago. Google says data stored in Rapid Storage buckets (which are S3-compatible) can be transmitted to GPU- or TPU-based systems as speeds up to 15 TB per second, which is more than twice as fast as the 6 TBps top end that it previously supported. Colossus can serve 20 million requests per second with sub-millisecond latency in this configuration, which can help to load data for AI training and reduce waiting during checkpointing.

Google also upgraded Rapid Cache, a component of Cloud Storage Rapid that was formerly known as Anywhere Cache. Google says Rapid Cache can provide a burst of up to 2.5 TBps of read bandwidth for certain workloads, like model loading for inference. It also is introducing a new “ingest-on-write” feature that will provide up to 2.2x faster checkpoint restores, Google says.

Finally, Google announced some updates to the Smart Storage offering that it launched last year. Smart Storage is a feature in Cloud Storage that makes every object self-describing. With the addition of automated annotations, the Smart Storage repository can automatically create annotations, making the data more usable and findable. It also announced the Cloud Storage MCP server, which lets users read, write, and analyze Cloud Storage data using MCP.

The post Google Bolsters AI Hypercomputer with New TPU Chips, Virgo Interconnect, Speedier Lustre appeared first on HPCwire.

Longtime Slashdot reader mmarlett writes: The Atlantic has a long article on the story of missing scientists recently featured here on Slashdot. In short, it is an incoherent conspiracy theory that spreads wide and far, not paying any attention to boundaries of time, space, or area of expertise. "Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media," writes the Atlantic's Daniel Engber. "To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren't, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Better safe than sorry -- download this update to protect your iPhone.

Independent review into Bristol Brunel academy finds Damien Egan visit was postponed over safeguarding concerns

An independent inquiry into a Bristol secondary school that found itself at the centre of a media storm after postponing a visit by a local Jewish MP has found no evidence of antisemitism or influence from lobby groups.

Damien Egan, the Labour MP for Bristol North East and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, was due to visit Bristol Brunel academy (BBA) last September to talk to students about democracy and his work in parliament.

The findings land before supreme court hearing on Trump bid to end protections for Syrians and Haitians

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Temporary protected status (TPS) holders, who have historically been protected from deportation due to safety concerns in their home countries, contribute around $29bn every year to the US economy, according to a new report published this week.

The findings from this report, which comes from FWD.us, have emerged one week before the supreme court is set to hear arguments challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to strip TPS status from Syrians and Haitians. It also comes nearly one week since the House passed legislation to protect Haitian immigrants, whose protected status is at risk.

NEW YORK, April 22, 2026 — VAST Data today announced the closing of its Series F financing at a $30 billion valuation, representing more than a threefold increase from its $9.1 billion Series E valuation in late 2023. The latest round was led by Drive Capital, with Access Industries acting as co-lead, and included participation from existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, NEA, and NVIDIA, alongside new investors. This financing reflects the accelerating demand for a new data infrastructure stack needed for the development and deployment of artificial generally intelligent systems.

The financing included primary and secondary capital, bringing the total transaction value to approximately $1 billion. Primary proceeds will be used by VAST Data to solidify its position as the AI operating system at the center of the AI ecosystem and to further fuel global growth, including strategic transactions that expand its technology footprint and partnerships.

The Data Computing Foundation That Is Enabling AI at Global Scale

AI is a generational shift set to reshape trillions of dollars of global economic activity. This is now materializing as a massive industrial buildout approaching $100 trillion in scale, spanning AI factories and software systems, powered by a new era of parallel computing at levels previously unimaginable.

Founded in 2016 at the dawn of deep learning, VAST Data reimagined distributed systems for a future where AI would demand a fundamentally new approach to data and compute. Starting from a blank sheet of paper, the company created DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything), a new architecture designed to break longstanding tradeoffs between scale, simplicity, performance, and cost.

Over the following decade, VAST expanded this foundation into a full data and computing platform aligned to the subsequent waves of modern AI. Today, the VAST AI Operating System sits at the center of this transformation, unifying data, compute, and real-time processing into a single system. This architecture collapses traditionally separate layers of the stack, enabling organizations to build, train, and run AI models while powering the applications and agents that depend on them, all at global scale.

Commercially, the VAST AI OS has become an essential component of the global AI datacenter buildout. From CoreWeave to Lowe’s, from the U.S. Air Force to Cursor, thousands of organizations rely on VAST to store, contextualize, and act on data, supporting environments that power millions of GPUs and some of the world’s most advanced AI training and inference initiatives.

“We are already supporting AI environments spanning millions of GPUs globally, operating across every layer of the AI stack,” said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data. “What is becoming clear is that these layers are no longer independent. Applications, models, and infrastructure now operate as a single system through data. VAST sits at the center of how that system works, which is why we are seeing this level of demand at global scale.”

High Growth, Built for Durability

The Company has surpassed $4 billion in cumulative bookings and exited the previous fiscal year with more than $500 million in Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR), along with positive operating margin and free cash flow. In its most recent fiscal year, VAST Data delivered a Rule of X score of 228%, reflecting an unparalleled combination of rapid growth and strong profitability.

As organizations scale AI, they are prioritizing partners that are not only providing disruptive technology, but who also are building sustainable, professional and financially-durable businesses that can continue to innovate and support the world’s AI infrastructure. This Rule of 228% is testament to VAST being optimally positioned to support the largest and most demanding AI environments with near-infinite runway to continue its growth trajectory.

Industry Validation and Customer Momentum

“The scale and speed of AI adoption are creating a new class of infrastructure company,” said Chris Olsen, Co-Founder and Partner at Drive Capital. “VAST is emerging as the clear leader in this category, with the architecture and momentum to support the world’s most demanding AI environments. The step-change in valuation reflects both that momentum and our conviction in VAST’s role at the center of this market.”

“As we push the boundaries of large-scale model training, the foundation of our infrastructure becomes critical,” said Timothée Lacroix, Co-Founder and CTO of Mistral AI. “VAST’s data platform enables us to efficiently manage and scale the massive datasets required to train frontier models, ensuring high performance and flexibility across our training pipelines.”

“The VAST platform is a key enabling technology for next gen AI infrastructure initiatives – providing a modern, flexible data architecture for Gen AI applications and agentic workflows,” said Larry Feinsmith, Managing Director, Head of Global Tech Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships at JPMorganChase.

“Our partnership with VAST Data has grown more than 10x this past year and continues to accelerate — a reflection of how critical an AI data platform is to training and inference workloads on Crusoe Cloud. Together, we’ve built a storage service which many model labs, leading AI agent companies, and physical AI pioneers rely on. This milestone for VAST validates the essential role they play in helping us give AI infrastructure engineers and developers the seamless, industrial-scale foundation they need to build the future of AI,” said Erwan Menard, SVP Product Management at Crusoe.

More from HPCwire: VAST Data Closes Series E Funding Round, Nearly Triples Valuation to $9.1B [2023]

About VAST Data

VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI

Source: VAST Data

The post VAST Data Valued at $30B as AI Drives a New Infrastructure Stack appeared first on HPCwire.

Sgt. First Class Jose Serrano told CBS News he's been informed his wife will be released from an ICE detention center in El Paso.

Most-banned book was Sold, a 2006 novel by Patricia McCormick about sex trafficking in India

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The American Library Association (ALA) has reported a record high in the number of books banned in US libraries.

In 2025, 5,668 books were banned – representing 66% of the total number challenged – with an additional 920 censored through access restriction, such as relocation on the library shelves.

Smoke drifts into Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia, as air quality declines and 50 homes destroyed

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Wildfires burning across the south-eastern US intensified on Wednesday across parts of south-east Georgia, where 50 homes were destroyed, and across north-east Florida, forcing evacuations and school closures in some communities.

The Georgia forestry commission issued its first mandatory burn ban in the state’s history, effective across 91 counties in the lower half of the state, due to worsening drought conditions and rising wildfire activity.

Worried about that AI remix setting on TikTok? Here's how you can opt out.

The subscription isn't widely available yet, but includes the ability to pin up to 20 chats along with decorative stickers and icons.

Sun alleges that World Liberty Financial froze the digital tokens he had purchased, locking him out of assets worth as much as $1 billion.

The promotion lasts until May 16, but only when you trade in certain Apple devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Gates Foundation opened an external review earlier this year into its engagement with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropic group said on Tuesday. The foundation has been mired in controversy due to Chairman Bill Gates' association with Epstein. A release of emails in January by the U.S. Justice Department also showed communication between Epstein and the Gates Foundation's staff. "Early this year, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman commissioned an external review to assess past foundation engagement with Epstein, and our current policies for vetting and developing new philanthropic partnerships," the foundation said in a statement. "That review is underway, and we expect the board and management will receive an update this summer," it added. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news earlier on Tuesday, said Suzman told staff in a memo, "this is a challenging time for our organization in many ways, but it also highlights the critical importance of taking the tough actions now." The WSJ also reports that the Gates Foundation will eliminate up to 500 jobs, or about 20% of its staff, by 2030. It said the foundation has a 2026 budget of about $9 billion, but plans to cap operating expenses at $1.25 billion. Further reading: The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott, who represented Atlanta suburbs since 2003, had qualified to run for a 12th term before his death

David Scott, a Georgia congressman and moderate Democrat representing Atlanta’s southern suburbs since 2003, has died at the age of 80.

Scott’s health had been an open question in recent years, prompting calls for his retirement. He had not spoken on the floor of the House of Representatives in two years.

Apple has been embroiled in a six-year legal battle over one of its Apple Watch health apps. The end may finally be in sight, and here's what Apple has to say about it.

Costs associated with both products have been falling. Here's which one is cheaper for borrowers in need of $50,000.

The Pentagon assessment, shared in a classified briefing for lawmakers, suggests gasoline and oil prices could remain elevated through the midterm elections.

The move, affecting about $500M in proceeds from Iraqi oil sales, comes as Washington pushes for a new prime minister who will dismantle Iranian-aligned militias.

The new report evaluated air quality in different parts of the country by measuring the presence of ozone and particle pollution in the atmosphere.

Drug industry’s self-regulatory body criticises Theramex, producer of Evorel and Intrarosa, for ‘alarming’ breaches

One of the biggest producers of hormone replacement therapy has been censured by regulators for “systemic failures” that jeopardised patient safety.

Theramex, the UK producer of HRT drugs Evorel and Intrarosa, was found to have breached fundamental compliance standards including not updating crucial prescribing information – in some cases for several years – and not making it clear that a drug must not be used during pregnancy.

PM under increasing pressure over Mandelson vetting scandal as sources say ministers spoke up at tense meeting

Keir Starmer is looking increasingly isolated over his handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal with divisions emerging in cabinet over his decision to sack the Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins.

On another difficult day for the prime minister, the Guardian learned of concerns around the cabinet table, a senior minister refused to say the dismissal was fair and several mandarins called for him to be reinstated. One Labour MP called on Starmer to quit.

The feature lets you keep talking to the speaker without having to say, "Hey, Google," at the beginning of every request.

On Tuesday, the president read from the Bible in a taped message. Religious scholars were not impressed

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Donald Trump, who recently posted an image on social media which portrayed him as Jesus Christ (or, rather, “a doctor”), and who seems unable to stop attacking the pope, read the Bible to America on Tuesday night.

Sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, hands resting on a book that looked like a Bible, Trump stared straight into the camera (presumably there was a teleprompter) as he recited from the book 2 Chronicles. It’s a passage which has become fashionable among the right wing, and which quotes God as saying:

Google announced two new tensor processing units (TPUs) for the "agentic era," with separate processors dedicated to training and inference. "With the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving," Amin Vahdat, a Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post. Both chips will become available later this year. CNBC reports: After years of producing chips that can both train artificial intelligence models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors, its latest effort to take on Nvidia in AI hardware. [...] None of the tech giants are displacing Nvidia, and Google isn't even comparing the performance of its new chips with those from the AI chip leader. Google did say the training chip enables 2.8 times the performance of the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, announced in November, for the same price, while performance is 80% better for the inference processor. Nvidia said its upcoming Groq 3 LPU hardware will draw on large quantities of static random-access memory, or SRAM, which is used by Cerebras, an AI chipmaker that filed to go public earlier this month. Google's new inference chip, dubbed TPU 8i, also relies on SRAM. Each chip contains 384 megabytes of SRAM, triple the amount in Ironwood. The architecture is designed "to deliver the massive throughput and low latency needed to concurrently run millions of agents cost-effectively," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pontiff’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran indicate a welcome resolve to follow in his predecessor’s footseps

One year after the death of Pope Francis, the Vatican this week hosted the premiere of a documentary tribute by Martin Scorsese. For a pontiff whose charisma and crowd-pleasing style helped cut through to a secular audience, marking the anniversary with the help of one of the world’s most famous film directors was a nice touch.

Francis’s successor, Leo XIV, is a far less flamboyant personality. In his inaugural year in St Peter’s chair, the first pope to come from the United States has generally taken a cautious, circumspect approach to his role. But it turns out that an aura of mildness and restraint makes him no less effective when criticising the posturing that passes for Christian piety in Donald Trump’s Washington.

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

The Democratic counteroffensive to GOP efforts to redraw maps sets the stage for Republicans to lose in the midterms

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Months into his second term, Donald Trump wagered that he could beat the historic trend of the party in power losing seats in midterm elections if Republican-led states redrew congressional maps to sweep Democrats out of office.

The gamble is looking to be a bust, or at best a draw, for the president, after Democrats fought back with their own redistricting efforts, the latest of which came to fruition in Virginia on Tuesday, when voters approved a plan that could remove all but one of the five Republicans in its current House of Representatives delegation.

Exclusive: McSweeney summoned by foreign affairs select committee in rare step, as Mandelson vetting row continues

Morgan McSweeney is facing a showdown with MPs who will grill him on whether he placed extreme pressure on the Foreign Office to approve Peter Mandelson as ambassador.

The prime minister’s former chief of staff will be questioned next Tuesday by the foreign affairs select committee over allegations made by the former Foreign Office permanent secretary Olly Robbins, who said No 10 had questioned why Mandelson should be subject to any vetting.

Health secretary says ‘I had nothing to do with the measles outbreak’ and claims to support measles and MMR vaccines

The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, faced intense questioning from several US senators on Wednesday during a hearing largely focused on how the administration has responded to the measles outbreak and the spread of vaccine misinformation.

In his opening remarks to the Senate finance committee, the senator Ron Wyden criticized Kennedy’s messaging on vaccines, saying: “When it comes to vaccines, Robert Kennedy has used this once-in-a-lifetime platform to make parents doubt themselves and doubt their doctors,” before adding: “The secretary has ducked, bobbed and weaved without taking the responsibility of saying what needs to be said: vaccines save lives in America.”

Police catch woman, 28, climbing colossal 16th-century statue of Neptune to touch its genitals as a dare

A tourist has been charged after allegedly climbing a colossal marble statue in Florence to touch its genitals for a pre-wedding prank.

Experts said the woman caused thousands of euros of damage to the Neptune fountain in Piazza della Signoria.

Backed by Abigail Spanberger, the measure could boost Democrats and counter Donald Trump’s redistricting push

Virginia voters will decide on Tuesday whether to adopt new congressional maps that could help Democrats win control of the House of Representatives and scuttle Donald Trump’s effort to use mid-decade redistricting to preserve Republican control of Congress.

Polls show the referendum to redraw the maps has only a narrow lead in a state that Kamala Harris won two years ago. The issue appears to have engaged many voters, with nearly more than 1.37m ballots cast in early voting.

Budget outlines funding for autonomous drone warfare program as experts say military unprepared for risks

The Pentagon is aiming to increase funding more than a hundredfold for an autonomous drone warfare program, according to budget documents released this week, signalling a major pivot towards AI-powered war.

In its 2027 budget, the Pentagon has asked for over $54bn to fund the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a 24,000% increase on last year.

A satirical but working tool called Malus uses AI to create "clean room" clones of open-source software, aiming to reproduce the same functionality while shedding attribution and copyleft obligations. "It works," Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told 404 Media. "The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I've done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation." 404 Media reports: Malus's legal strategy for bypassing copyright is based on a historically pivotal moment for software and copyright law dating back to 1982. Back then, IBM dominated home computing, and competitors like Columbia Data Products wanted to sell products that were compatible with software that IBM customers were already using. Reverse engineering IBM's computer would have infringed on the company's copyright, so Columbia Data Products came up with what we now know as a "clean room" design. It tasked one team with examining IBM's BIOS and creating specifications for what a clone of that system would require. A different "clean" team, one that was never exposed to IBM's code, then created BIOS that met those specifications from scratch. The result was a system that was compatible with IBM's ecosystem but didn't violate its copyright because it did not copy IBM's technical process and counted as original work. This clean room method, which has been validated by case law and dramatized in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, made computing more open and competitive than it would have been otherwise. But it has taken on new meaning in the age of generative AI. It is now easier than ever to ask AI tools to produce software that is identical in function to existing open source projects, and that, some would argue, are built from scratch and are therefore original work that can bypass existing copyright licenses. Others would say that software produced by large language models is inherently derivative, because like any LLM output, it is trained on the collective output of humans scraped from the internet, including specific open source projects. Malus (pronounced malice), uses AI to do the same thing. "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations," Malus's site says. "Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." Copyleft is a type of copyright license that ensures reproductions or applications of the software keep it free to share and modify.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As thousands of undocumented migrants line up to apply for amnesty under a new program in Spain, the prime minister's opponents vow a fight.

Lawyers for oligarch claim freezing of £5.3bn of assets ‘unfair and abusive’ amid row over use of funds for Ukraine

Roman Abramovich has gone to the European court of human rights (ECHR), claiming that a criminal investigation into his financial affairs by the Jersey authorities has breached his human rights, according to reports.

The former owner of Chelsea FC, who is under UK sanctions over his links to Vladimir Putin, is being investigated in Jersey over allegations of corruption and money laundering.

Our CNET experts have tested the top desks to help you find the right one for your office, game room or hobby space.

Creditors don't have to settle for less than what you owe, but if yours won't budge, you may still have options.

Barça can reopen a nine-point lead at the top of the standings with a win over the Sky Blues.

Jonathan Brash says ‘own goals’ are distracting from Labour’s achievements

UK inflation accelerated to 3.3% in March after the Iran war triggered the biggest jump in fuel prices for more than three years, Richard Partington reports.

Today the Liberal Democrats staged a photocall to publicise their line about this being “Trumpflation”. Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader and Treasury spokesperson, said:

People across our country have been struggling for years with a devastating cost-of-living crisis and Donald Trump’s idiotic war in Iran has added to it. The cost of fuel is soaring, mortgage rates are rising and fixed energy deals are already going up by hundreds of pounds.

But what is utterly inexcusable is that there are politicians in this country - Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch - who are happy to cheerlead Donald Trump as he hikes people’s bills. All the while this Labour government promised to fix the country but instead we’ve got political Groundhog Day: yet more sleaze and scandal.

Rising costs have continued to plague the company, now facing soaring fuel costs due to the war with Iran

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The White House is finalizing a financing package to help ailing US budget carrier Spirit Airlines, which could receive as much as $500m in loans as rising costs continue to plague the company.

News of the potential deal comes as Spirit and others struggle with soaring fuel costs due to the war with Iran.

Find the best gaming chairs by Anda Seat, Secretlab and others so you can focus on what really matters: the game.

April 22, 2026 — NVIDIA and Google Cloud have collaborated for more than a decade, co‑engineering a full‑stack AI platform that spans every technology layer — from performance‑optimized libraries and frameworks to enterprise‑grade cloud services.

This foundation enables developers, startups and enterprises to push agentic and physical AI out of the lab and into production — from agents that manage complex workflows to robots and digital twins on the factory floor.

At Google Cloud Next this week in Las Vegas, the partnership reaches a new milestone, with advancements to expand Google Cloud AI Hypercomputer for AI factories that will power the next frontier of agentic and physical AI.

These include the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin-powered A5X bare-metal instances; a preview of Google Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud running on NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs; confidential VMs with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs; and agentic AI on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform with NVIDIA Nemotron open models and the NVIDIA NeMo framework.

Next-Generation Infrastructure: From NVIDIA Blackwell to Vera Rubin

At Google Cloud Next, Google announced A5X powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems, which — through extreme codesign across chips, systems and software — deliver up to 10x lower inference cost per token and 10x higher token throughput per megawatt than the prior generation.

A5X will use NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, combined with next-generation Google Virgo networking, scaling to up to 80,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs within a single site cluster and up to 960,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs in a multisite cluster, enabling customers to run their largest AI workloads on NVIDIA‑optimized infrastructure.

“At Google Cloud, we believe the next decade of AI will be shaped by customers’ ability to run their most demanding workloads on a truly integrated, AI‑optimized infrastructure stack,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of AI and computing infrastructure at Google Cloud. “By combining Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure and managed AI services with NVIDIA’s industry‑leading platforms, systems and software, we’re giving customers flexibility to train, tune and serve everything from frontier and open models to agentic and physical AI workloads — while optimizing for performance, cost and sustainability.”

Google Cloud’s broad NVIDIA Blackwell portfolio ranges from A4 VMs with NVIDIA HGX B200 systems to rack-scale A4X VMs with NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and A4X Max NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems, all the way to fractional G4 VMs with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.

Customers can right-size their acceleration capabilities, whether using multiple interconnected NVL72 racks that scale out to tens of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, a single rack that can scale up to 72 Blackwell GPUs with fifth-generation NVIDIA NVLink and NVLink 5 Switch, or just one-eighth of a GPU.

This comprehensive platform helps teams optimize every workload, from mixture-of-experts reasoning, multimodal inference and data processing to complex simulations for the next frontier of physical AI and robotics.

Leading frontier AI labs are already putting this infrastructure to work. Thinking Machines Lab is scaling its Tinker application programming interface (API) on A4X Max VMs with GB300 NVL72 systems to accelerate training, while OpenAI is running large‑scale inference on NVIDIA GB300 (A4X Max VMs) and GB200 NVL72 systems (A4X VMs) on Google Cloud for some of its most demanding inference workloads, including for ChatGPT.

Secure AI Wherever It Needs to Run: Sovereign and Confidential

Google Gemini models running on NVIDIA Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs are now in preview on Google Distributed Cloud, so customers can bring Google’s frontier models wherever their most sensitive data resides.

NVIDIA Confidential Computing with the NVIDIA Blackwell platform enables Gemini models to run in a protected environment where prompts and fine‑tuning data stay encrypted and can’t be seen or altered by unauthorized parties, including the infrastructure operators.

In the public cloud, the preview of Confidential G4 VMs with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs brings these protections to multi‑tenant environments — helping safeguard prompts, AI models and data so customers in regulated industries can access the power of AI without compromising on security or performance.

This is the first confidential computing offering of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the cloud, giving Google Cloud customers a new foundation for secure, high‑performance AI.

Open Models and APIs for Agentic AI

The NVIDIA platform on Google Cloud is optimized to run every kind of model — from Google’s frontier Gemini and Gemma families to NVIDIA Nemotron open models and the broader open weight ecosystem — equipping developers to build agentic AI systems that reason, plan and act.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is available on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, giving developers a direct path to discovering, customizing and deploying NVIDIA‑optimized reasoning and multimodal models for agentic workflows.

Google Cloud and NVIDIA are also making it easier to train and customize open models at scale. Managed Training Clusters on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform introduced a new managed reinforcement learning (RL) API built with NVIDIA NeMo RL for accelerating RL training at scale while automating cluster sizing, failure recovery and job execution, so teams can focus on agent behavior and model quality instead of infrastructure management.

Cybersecurity leader CrowdStrike uses NVIDIA NeMo open libraries such as NeMo Data Designer, NeMo Automodel and NeMo Megatron Bridge to generate synthetic data and fine-tuning Nemotron and other open large language models for domain-specific cybersecurity. Running on Managed Training Clusters on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, these capabilities accelerate threat detection, investigation and response.

Building the Future of Industrial and Physical AI

Building industrial and physical AI at scale demands powerful hardware and a combination of open models, libraries and frameworks to develop these complex end-to-end workflows.

NVIDIA AI infrastructure, open models and physical AI libraries available on Google Cloud, is mainstreaming industrial and physical AI applications, enabling customers to simulate, optimize and automate real-world workflows.

Solutions from leading industrial software providers, including Cadence and Siemens Digital Industries Software, are now available on Google Cloud, accelerated on NVIDIA AI infrastructure. These applications are powering the next-generation design, engineering and manufacturing of everything from chips to autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace platforms, heavy machinery and large-scale production systems.

With NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and the open source NVIDIA Isaac Sim robotics simulation framework available on Google Cloud Marketplace, developers can build physically accurate digital twins and develop custom robotics simulations pipelines to train, simulate and validate robots before real-world deployment.

NVIDIA NIM microservices for models like NVIDIA Cosmos Reason 2 can be deployed to Google Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine. This enables robots and vision AI agents to see, reason and act in the physical world like humans, powering use cases such as automated data curation and annotation, advanced robot planning and reasoning, and intelligent video analytics agents for real-time insights and decision-making.

Together, these technologies help developers seamlessly move from computer-aided design to living industrial digital twins and AI‑driven robots, accelerating processes from design sign‑off to factory optimization on the NVIDIA platform running on Google Cloud.

Proven Impact: From Startups to Global Enterprises

Global enterprises, AI labs and high‑growth startups are using NVIDIA and Google Cloud’s co-engineered platform to move from prototyping to production faster, including Snap, Schrödinger and Salesforce. Snap is cutting the cost of large‑scale A/B testing by shifting data pipelines to GPU‑accelerated Spark on Google Cloud. Schrödinger is shrinking weekslong drug discovery simulations into just hours with NVIDIA accelerated computing on Google Cloud.

Startups are orchestrating the next wave of AI innovation — building new agents and AI‑native applications using NVIDIA accelerated computing on Google Cloud.

As part of a broader ecosystem highlighted through NVIDIA Inception and Google for Startups, CodeRabbit and Factory are using NVIDIA Nemotron‑based models on Google Cloud to power code review and autonomous software development agents, while Aible, Mantis AI, Photoroom and Baseten are building enterprise data, video intelligence, generative imagery and managed inference solutions on the full‑stack NVIDIA platform on Google Cloud.

More than 90,000 developers have become a part of the joint NVIDIA and Google Cloud developer community in just over a year, tapping this platform to build and scale new AI applications.

In addition, NVIDIA has been honored at Next as Google Cloud Partner of the Year in two categories — AI Global Technology Partner and Infra Modernization Compute — in recognition of deep technical expertise and go-to-market alignment.

Together, NVIDIA and Google Cloud are giving customers a cloud‑scale platform to turn experimental agents and simulations into production systems that review code, secure fleets, enable new AI applications and optimize factories in the real world.

Learn more about the companies’ collaboration by attending NVIDIA sessions, demos and workshops at Google Cloud Next.

Source: Ian Buck, NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and Google Cloud Collaborate to Advance Agentic and Physical AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Building on the Mobile Legacy of LPDDR with Higher Capacity, Flexible Metadata and a Roadmap to LPDDR6 SOCAMM2

ARLINGTON, Va., April 22, 2026 — JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today previewed a set of new features planned for incorporation into the next version of its JESD209‑6 LPDDR6 standard.

Building on the foundational JESD209‑6 published in July 2025, JEDEC’s JC‑42.6 Subcommittee has been working to enhance the next version of the standard to extend LPDDR6 beyond mobile platforms to support selected data center and accelerated computing workloads seeking a power‑efficient, high‑capacity memory platform.

Planned features for the upcoming LPDDR6 update include:

• Narrower per-die interface (x6) enables higher capacities: With the move to a non-binary interface width – from x16 to x24, the inclusion of x12 and an additional x6 sub-channel mode, allows more die per package and higher memory capacities per component and per channel, a critical enabler for AI-scale memory footprints.
• Flexible metadata carve‑out intended to minimize impact to peak data throughput, giving data center customers the option to balance user capacity and metadata needs according to their specific reliability requirements.
• 512 GB density on the horizon: LPDDR6 is expected to unlock densities beyond the current LPDDR5/5X maximum, a capability designed to address the ever-growing memory capacity requirements of AI training and inference workloads.
• LPDDR6 SOCAMM2 module standard in development: JEDEC is actively working on an LPDDR6-based SOCAMM2 module standard, which is being designed to carry the compact, serviceable module form factor forward and offer a clear upgrade path from today’s LPDDR5X SOCAMM2 modules.

LPDDR6 PIM standard in development: JEDEC is also nearing completion of a standard for LPDDR6 Processing‑in‑Memory (LPDDR6 PIM) technology, which complements the broader LPDDR6 roadmap, a next‑generation memory solution intended to address the rapidly increasing performance and energy‑efficiency requirements of edge and data‑center inference workloads. By integrating processing capability directly within LPDDR6 memory, LPDDR6 PIM reduces data movement between memory and compute, enabling higher inference performance and lower power consumption while maintaining the efficiency advantages of LPDDR‑based designs.

“Stay tuned for more details on the next version of LPDDR6 as well as LPDDR6 PIM and LPDDR6 SOCAMM2,” said Mian Quddus, JEDEC Board of Directors Chairman. “The subcommittee continues to evaluate features for inclusion in these standards when they are published.”

EDEC encourages companies to join and help shape the future of JEDEC standards. JEDEC membership provides access to pre-publication proposals and early insights into active projects such as LPDDR6, LPDDR6 PIM, LPDDR6 SOCAMM2 and more. Discover the benefits of membership and join today.

JEDEC standards are subject to change during and after the development process, including disapproval by the JEDEC Board of Directors.

About JEDEC

JEDEC is the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry. Thousands of volunteers representing over 380 member companies work together in more than 100 JEDEC committees and task groups to meet the needs of every segment of the industry, for manufacturers and consumers alike. The publications and standards generated by JEDEC committees are accepted throughout the world. All JEDEC standards are available for download from the JEDEC website. For more information, visit https://www.jedec.org.

Source: JEDEC

The post JEDEC Previews LPDDR6 Roadmap Expanding LPDDR into Data Centers and Processing-in-Memory appeared first on HPCwire.

BOSTON, April 22, 2026 — TetraScience today announced that Syngenta has selected Tetra OS to power digital automation and data transformation in its Crop Protection R&D organization. This move is set to eliminate the manual, ad-hoc data exchange, and manual transcription that have historically slowed scientific decision-making.

Syngenta will deploy the Tetra Scientific Data Foundry to centralize and harmonize analytical data from a diverse range of analytical (including chromatography and mass spectrometry) and characterization systems. The Foundry will transform instrument raw data into a standardized, AI-ready format. By linking siloed data sources into a single, searchable “scientific memory”, it will enable high-quality data sharing with downstream tools and applications.

Tetra Sciborgs, a team of scientist-engineers who operate at the nexus of science, data, and AI, will be forward-deployed to guide Syngenta through implementation, adoption, and continuous improvement. Sciborgs ensure that architecture becomes culture, translating design into daily practice and embedding best practices across sites.

This collaboration supports Syngenta’s ambition to build a flexible, cross-functional data capture automation ecosystem that ensures consistent data quality, accelerates insights, and drives R&D innovation across sites.

“Delivering end-to-end data automation across our R&D organization requires a unified foundation – one that eliminates data silos, connects laboratory assets and systems, and transforms raw scientific data into accessible, actionable insight to drive the future of our science,” said Claudio Battilocchio, Digital Automation Lead R&D, Syngenta. “The capabilities provided by TetraScience offer that foundation, enabling us to standardize and harmonize data at scale across our R&D landscape. Such capabilities are fundamental to how we are transforming R&D – accelerating the speed and quality of scientific discovery, addressing productivity for data management, and ultimately strengthening our ability to develop the innovations that help farmers feed a growing world.”

“Science has been trapped in an artisanal past—fragmented data, bespoke integrations, and manual workflows that don’t scale,” said Patrick Grady, CEO of TetraScience. “Syngenta understands that the future belongs to organizations willing to industrialize their scientific data infrastructure. By deploying our Data Foundry, Syngenta is improving efficiency and building the foundation for a new era of compounding scientific intelligence.”

The implementation will include platform hosting, maintenance support, and TetraU training for Syngenta scientists and IT teams to accelerate adoption and build internal expertise. Together, TetraScience and Syngenta intend to create a reusable data and AI foundation that can support future R&D and quality use cases across the organization, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.

About TetraScience

TetraScience is the Scientific Data and AI Company building Tetra OS, the operating system for scientific intelligence. Tetra OS integrates the Data Foundry, Use Case Factory, Tetra AI, and Sciborgs into a single, AI-native platform. Together, these capabilities turn fragmented scientific data and workflows into governed, reusable, and compounding intelligence across discovery, development, and manufacturing. TetraScience is trusted by leading biopharma organizations and ecosystem partners including NVIDIA, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Databricks, Snowflake, Google, and Microsoft. For more information, visit tetrascience.com.

Source: TetraScience

The post TetraScience Platform to Support Syngenta R&D Data Harmonization and Automation Efforts appeared first on HPCwire.

Janet Fordham died in crash after travelling to see man who claimed he would help to recover money from earlier scams

A British woman who was scammed out of up to £1m in a string of so-called romance frauds died in a road crash after travelling to west Africa to try to recoup some of her lost fortune, an inquest in Devon has heard.

Janet Fordham was cheated of her life savings and her home over a period of five years by fraudsters apparently based in the UK, Germany, the US and Ghana, the inquest in Exeter was told.

• Ajay Haridasse needed assistance at 26-mile mark

• Aaron Beggs and Robson De Oliveira came to aid

• Beggs: ‘We’re just runners helping each other’

A pair of Boston Marathon runners who teamed up to help a fellow athlete across the race’s finish line have been praised for their “beautiful moment” of sportsmanship.

Ajay Haridasse, a 21-year-old university student from Wakefield, Massachusetts, found himself stumbling after passing the 26-mile mark in Monday’s race. After falling for a fourth time, he was “getting ready to crawl” to the finish line, Haridasse told the Boston Herald.

About half of Iran's stockpile of ballistic missiles and its associated launch systems were still intact as of the start of the ceasefire in early April, officials said.

April 22, 2026 — The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a procurement contract with E4 Computer Engineering and Dell Technologies to deploy a new AI-optimized supercomputer for the IT4LIA AI Factory in Italy.

The IT4LIA AI Factory initiative, which is hosted and operated by CINECA at the DAMA Tecnopolo of Bologna, is moving into its next phase to enable the deployment of a next-generation AI and HPC infrastructure.

The infrastructure is designed to support demanding AI workloads, combining high performance, scalability and energy efficiency within a reliable and secure environment. In addition, a dedicated European partition will enable efficient AI inference and contribute to strengthen European AI capabilities.

IT4LIA supercomputer will be integrated by E4 Computer Engineering and manufactured by Dell Technologies, leveraging the liquid-cooled NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 architecture. By combining NVIDIA Grace CPUs with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and scaling through NVIDIA Quantum‑X800 InfiniBand networking, the system is expected to deliver more than 160 Exaflops of peak AI inference performance. The supercomputer will incorporate the VAST Data platform, enabling a unified data layer for AI workloads, and will also include a dedicated inference partition featuring AI‑optimized inference accelerators from European‑based Axelera AI, complemented by European‑designed SiPearl CPUs.

Primarily designed to serve startups and SMEs, the system will also be open and accessible to the wider research community, enabling the development, deployment and management of AI applications in compliance with EU data sovereignty and privacy standards.

IT4LIA will support the development of a secure and sovereign AI infrastructure and contribute to the deployment of open and interoperable platforms for data and model development.

Since April 2025, the IT4LIA AI Factory has been providing AI computing resources and services to European SMEs and startups through its existing infrastructure, in particular leveraging the Leonardo supercomputer.

The Italian AI Factory offers specialized services in key vertical sectors such as agritech, cybersecurity, meteorology climate, and manufacturing, addressing the specific needs of each field. Complementing these vertical offerings, IT4LIA will also provide a complete suite of horizontal services to support all stakeholders in the AI ecosystem, such as tools for secure data management and analysis, metadata creation, and verification of compliance with Italian and European regulations on data use and artificial intelligence.

These offerings include skills development, training initiatives, and innovation support, enabling startups, SMEs, and research organizations to access advanced computing capabilities and technical expertise.

Anders Jensen, Executive Director of EuroHPC Joint Undertaking commented: “This signature marks another important milestone for Europe’s HPC and AI ambitions. With the IT4LIA system, we are making a significant investment in cutting-edge infrastructure that will empower startups, SMEs, and the research community to develop and deploy advanced AI applications at scale. IT4LIA will not only expand our computational capabilities, but also strengthen collaboration across the European innovation ecosystem, playing an important role in reinforcing Europe’s competitiveness and leadership in AI”

Gabriella Scipione, HPC Director of CINECA, declared: “CINECA is proud, together with all members of the IT4LIA consortium, to contribute to the next phase of the IT4LIA AI Factory, a milestone for the European AI ecosystem and a significant step in strengthening Italy’s role in the global technological landscape. By hosting this infrastructure at the DAMA Tecnopolo of Bologna, we will offer the research community, public administrations, SMEs and startups advanced, scalable and energy‑efficient computing resources, enabling a peak AI inference performance of over 160 exaflops. With the support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research and through close collaboration with the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and E4 Computer Engineering, we are building a secure, sovereign and high‑performance environment where European innovation can thrive, fully aligned with European values on data privacy and technological autonomy.”

More Details

The joint tender led by E4 Computer Engineering along with Dell Technologies has been selected following a call for tender launched in October 2025.

The new AI-optimized supercomputer will be co-funded with a total budget of EUR 290.000.000 for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of the system. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the total cost through the Digital Europe Programme (DEP). The project is co-financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

The IT4LIA AI Factory was selected in December 2024. It is coordinated by CINECA and implemented in collaboration with the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES), Advanced Computing Austria ACA GmbH, and AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH.

The IT4LIA AI Factory is part of a broader network of AI Factories across Europe as the EuroHPC JU is currently overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories offering free, customized support to SMEs and startups, complemented by an additional 13 AI Factory Antennas.

Source: EuroHPC

The post EuroHPC JU Signs Contract to Boost AI Capabilities with IT4LIA AI Factory appeared first on HPCwire.

The AI company behind the chatbot Claude is looking into a report of unauthorized access to Mythos from one of its third-party vendor environments.

Result could help Democrats win four extra US House seats in tit-for-tat redistricting battle begun by Texas

Voters in Virginia on Tuesday approved new congressional maps intended to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House of Representatives, in the latest blow to Donald Trump’s effort to use mid-decade redistricting to preserve his control of Congress.

The tit-for-tat redistricting battle began last year after Trump pressed Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature to redraw that state’s congressional maps in an effort to oust as many as five Democratic House lawmakers in the November midterm elections.

Save some green while being green with these eco-friendly deals and discounts.

Iran seized two container ships in the contested strait, state media said, further complicating diplomatic efforts to end the war that began Feb. 28.

Get up and moving for a part of your day with the best standing desks out there right now.

Pep Guardiola's men have the chance to go top with a win against their near-neighbors.

CATL unveiled a new wave of EV battery tech, "including a lighter battery pack rated for a 1,000-km (621-mile) driving range and an upgraded fast-charging battery that can go from 10 percent to 98 percent in under seven minutes," reports Interesting Engineering. From the report: The launches were made during a 90-minute event in Beijing ahead of the Beijing Auto Show, where automakers are expected to showcase next-generation EVs and connected technologies. CATL said its latest Qilin battery -- a high-energy-density pack often paired with nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells for long range and improved space efficiency -- can deliver a 1,000-km (621-mile) driving range. It is designed to deliver long range while reducing battery pack weight. The company said the product is aimed at automakers facing tighter efficiency rules in China and other markets. It also rolled out an upgraded Shenxing battery -- CATL's fast-charging lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack -- that targets one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption: charging time. CATL said the pack can recharge from 10 percent to 98 percent in less than seven minutes. The new Shenxing battery marks a significant improvement over CATL's previous version, which charged from 5 percent to 80 percent in 15 minutes, according to Financial Times. [...] The company also announced plans to begin mass delivery of sodium-ion batteries in the fourth quarter. Sodium-ion technology is seen as a lower-cost alternative that could reduce dependence on lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The trial of Renea Gamble had been underway for almost two hours when Marcus McDowell, the city attorney of Fairhope, Alabama, called a surprise witness.

“I call the gentleman in the red shirt,” he said, pointing toward a long-haired man in the second row. It took a moment to realize that he was referring to Gamble’s husband, 63-year-old Larry Fletcher.

Gamble’s defense attorney objected. He’d received no advance notice. But Fletcher shrugged and made his way forward.

Fletcher was with his wife when she was arrested at a No Kings protest in October 2025. She was wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume and holding a sign that read “No Dick Tator.” Video of the incident went viral, turning Gamble into a minor celebrity and local free speech icon. Most people assumed the city would eventually drop the misdemeanor charges filed against her. Instead, McDowell added more, including giving a false name to law enforcement for identifying herself as “Aunt Tifa.”

Fletcher wore black Levi’s and a collared shirt with a Ferrari logo – a nod to his work rebuilding fuel injection systems for high-end cars. Sitting in the front row, Gamble looked a bit stricken watching the man she’d known since her childhood in Baton Rouge. “I know what she was thinking,” Fletcher later said. “She’s like, ‘Oh man, this could go out of control real easy.’”

McDowell asked Fletcher if he’d gone to bail his wife out of jail after her arrest. Yes, Fletcher said.

Did he make any statements to any of the jailers? Fletcher wasn’t sure. McDowell motioned toward one of the many law enforcement officers standing on the side of the room and asked if he looked familiar. Fletcher said he’d seen him around.

McDowell cut to the chase: Did Fletcher remember telling this man that he had gone to get bail money the day before the protest?

His objective was suddenly clear: The city attorney was suggesting that Gamble had gotten arrested on purpose.

If this was meant as a gotcha, things didn’t go as intended.

“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Did he have bail money on him now?

“Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.”

The room erupted with laughter. Moments later, Fletcher was back in his seat. Gamble reached back and held his hand.

The trial took place at the Fairhope Civic Center, home to the city council chamber and — on the first and third Wednesday of every month — municipal court. Outside the building, dozens of people gathered to support Gamble, while a small army of cops stood watch from inside. One woman wore a huge purple eggplant costume. Another held a sign featuring a banana and the words “Free speech shouldn’t be hard to swallow.”

Gamble, 62, had arrived wearing pearls, a soft pink cable-knit sweater, and a matching tulle skirt adorned with delicate butterflies. Her face was concealed behind sunglasses and a white KN95 mask. After a smattering of chants of “Free speech!,” Gamble spoke briefly before going inside. “I’m not on trial,” she said. “What’s on trial is the First Amendment.”

“It was abuse, too!” one woman yelled. “They abused you. We saw it.”

Related

Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest

Indeed, for all the slapstick comedy of the scene — body camera footage showed three different cops wrestling with a giant penis — her arrest was also shocking. Gamble was turning to walk away when the arresting officer grabbed her costume from behind, pulling her backward onto the ground. While officers tried to stuff her into their car, causing the handcuffs to dig into her wrists, she screamed in pain.

But Gamble said she wasn’t speaking as a victim. “I’m standing on the foundation of our democracy. If we don’t have free speech, what do we have?”

Fairhope is a picturesque town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Mobile. Its entrance is lined with live oaks and a procession of American flags, while its historic downtown is brimming with galleries and upscale boutiques. Around the corner from a Christmas store, clapboard signs advertised espresso martinis and peanut butter pie.

Fairhope has long been a top destination for retirees from across the country, with its rapid growth an enduring source of anxiety. Although the No Kings rally was organized by Indivisible Baldwin County, whose founder was born and raised in the area, local critics adopted a familiar line: The protesters were outside agitators. Never mind that Fairhope itself was originally founded by outsiders as a “single-tax” utopia, “built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” in the words of local political cartoonist JD Crowe, who attended Gamble’s trial with his sketchpad. Today, some describe Fairhope as “California with a Southern accent” — a compliment or an insult, depending on who you ask.

Gamble’s case struck a nerve in part because of an ongoing free speech battle that made national news. Right-wing activists had targeted Fairhope’s beloved public library, convincing the state to pull funding over books they deemed obscene. Among the people gathered outside the civic center, several said they could not understand why city officials, including the mayor, stood up for the library only to express support for Gamble’s arrest.

Others were driven by national politics. A man dressed in a taco suit was a member of Mobile’s Indivisible chapter. “This is all about Trump,” he said. The fact that people were protesting in this part of the state spoke volumes about the destruction Trump has wrought, he said. “This is deep-red Alabama — as red as it can get.”

Presiding over the trial was Magistrate Judge Haymes Snedeker, best known as the older brother of champion pro golfer Brandt Snedeker and a noted amateur golfer himself. Snedeker sought to defuse the tension in the room, reassuring attendees at the start that, while Gamble technically faced the possibility of six months in prison, “that’s not gonna happen.”

It was the city’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Snedeker went on. “I’m just an umpire calling balls and strikes.” He had just asked people to silence their cellphones when a ringtone broke out, apparently from one of the police officers lining the room.

“Bad start for the city,” Snedeker quipped.

If Snedeker was trying to keep things light, McDowell, the city attorney, was not in a joking mood. It was no secret that Gamble was considering suing the city — and any potential lawsuit would be on him to defend. The threat of legal action helped explain why McDowell might have refused to drop the charges. If Gamble was convicted, after all, she would have no grounds to sue.

McDowell insisted that, while there is no constitutional right to dress as a giant “erect penis,” this case had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Gamble’s case was about public safety.

He called the man who arrested Gamble: Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb. A 15-year veteran of the force, he testified that he’d been called to the scene due to reports of a disturbance at the busy intersection. When he pulled up, he spotted a “7-foot inflatable penis.” It was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the costume, Babb said. He assumed it must be a teenager.

Did you know it was an old woman?” McDowell asked him.

“She’s not that old,” someone muttered in the audience.

“No,” Babb said.

Babb said he ordered Gamble to remove the penis suit. When she refused to comply, “she was put to the ground.”

Babb denied that he’d been personally offended by Gamble’s costume. Rather, he was concerned that Gamble, who could neither see nor walk very well while wearing it, posed a risk to herself and others. “You saw her as an obstruction and a safety risk?” McDowell asked. Yes, Babb said.

This was laughable. In his body camera footage, Babb repeatedly scolds Gamble for the costume, demanding to know how she would explain it to his kids. “I’m not trying to violate your freedom of speech,” he says as he unzips the penis suit. “I’m trying to preserve a town that has values.” Now McDowell was conjuring an alternate reality in which Gamble had teetered precariously at the edge of the road, endangering motorists, while the protest itself was veering close to a riot.

“It was a brushfire,” Babb claimed at one point. “We were trying to stop it from spreading.”

Gamble was represented by David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who wore a Constitution-themed tie reading “We the People.” He asked Babb why he’d zeroed in on Gamble if his concern was traffic safety.

“She was a distraction,” Babb said. “A distraction can be a hazard.” Gespass pointed out that Babb’s incident report invoked the legal definitions of obscenity: Why did he write that the penis costume was devoid of any “artistic value”? Babb replied that the protest took place at noon on a Saturday, in the midst of Little League baseball season, and on the same day as a funeral for a former mayor. “In that setting, it would be obscene,” he said.

Much of Babb’s testimony was easily refuted by the body camera footage. Babb claimed that Gamble resisted arrest, and that he only called for backup once she was on the ground. In reality, he called for backup almost immediately. Babb claimed that he told Gamble she was “not free to go.” In fact, she repeatedly asked, “Am I being detained?” but he ignored her, continuing to scold her instead. When Gespass asked why Babb grabbed his client from behind, Babb claimed that he would not have been able to get in front of her — there were too many people in the way.

But perhaps most preposterous was the claim that Babb’s actions were necessary to contain a situation that threatened to spiral out of control. “He made a clear professional effort to deescalate,” McDowell said. “She decided to escalate,” he said, “poking and prodding” in a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Listening to this, Gamble seemed to have a hard time containing her emotions. Even in her face mask, she looked stunned, indignant, and increasingly agitated. Her bright blue eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised upward. Once or twice, she threw her arms up in exasperation and disbelief. On her wrist, a warning flashed across the screen of her Snoopy-themed smartwatch: Her heart rate was spiking.

For all the hilarity surrounding Fairhope’s “penis lady,” the arrest and its aftermath had taken a toll. Gamble’s adult daughter Adeana sat behind her mother at the trial, reading a library book during breaks in the testimony and occasionally communicating with her in sign language. She told me that Gamble had hit the back of her head when she fell to the ground, which was hard to see in the tape, and raised concerns about a possible concussion. She also worried about injury to Gamble’s wrists, especially because Gamble has long lived with rheumatoid arthritis. As a longtime ASL interpreter, “she’s always protected her hands,” Adeana explained.

But the real cost had been psychological. For about two months, Adeana said, Gamble was afraid to leave the house. When threatening mail arrived at the family’s home, Adeana suggested calling the police. “And she said, ‘What police?’” How could she expect law enforcement to protect her? 

The story behind the penis suit further undermined the case against Gamble. According to Adeana, Gamble purchased it at the last minute as a backup. “She had ordered a sea turtle costume,” Adeana said. She’d planned to wear it while holding a sign that said “I love the Gulf of Mexico.” But the costume didn’t arrive on time. “So she had to scramble to find another one and a message to go with it.”

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This context didn’t make it into the trial. Instead, Gespass called a slew of defense witnesses who attended the No Kings protest. One after another, they reiterated what was already clear: The rally had been peaceful. There was no threat to anyone’s safety. The only escalation came from the police.

It was after 5 p.m. when Snedeker made clear he’d seen enough. He had already tossed the charge of providing a false name to police. Now he was ready to rule on the rest.

Snedeker said that while he believed that police had probable cause to arrest Gamble, the city’s evidence was not strong enough to convict; Gamble was not guilty. The room broke into applause.

Snedeker tried to put a positive spin on things, speculating that some good might come of the episode. For instance, police now knew to place barricades between the streets and a protest — a common-sense precaution. But the judge’s no-harm, no-foul sentiments fell flat. Fairhope police had made the town a laughingstock. Now the city was about to be sued.

In fact, much of the trial seemed aimed at inoculating the city from a lawsuit. McDowell repeatedly emphasized that Babb’s actions were “reasonable” given the circumstances — the legal standard that judges use when dismissing claims of police abuse. Gespass also revealed that McDowell had offered a hasty plea deal just moments before the trial began. Gamble rejected it.

“As Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over,” she announced after her acquittal. On Friday, she served notice of a lawsuit with the city clerk.

Whatever comes next, Adeana made clear that her mother was luckier than most. “What would have happened if she was a young Black man?” she asked. “What would have happened if she was a middle-aged Latina woman?” In Baldwin County, where Indivisible activists are focused on supporting immigrants targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gamble’s prosecution has been a lesson unto itself. “If we don’t stand up and support our neighbors, who will?”

Adeana understood why Gamble was so widely described as a “grandmother” in the headlines following her arrest. But the label didn’t capture the full picture. “If anything, we’re getting more explosive in our older age,” Adeana said. “Because we’re tired of being pushed down.”

The post The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume appeared first on The Intercept.

A six-month-old girl was found alone in a stroller at a busy intersection in the famed Manhattan sightseeing area

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Police are searching for the father of a baby left in a stroller in Times Square on Tuesday night.

The New York police department said they received an emergency call at about 11pm concerning the six-month-old girl, who was found at West 44the Street and Seventh Avenue. Police reported that she was unharmed, conscious and alert inside a stroller. The infant was transported to an area hospital.

Iran’s goal is to maintain chokehold on the global economy, even as some say it could run out of oil storage by Sunday

• Middle East crisis – live updates
  

Donald Trump’s indefinite shelving of the plan to bomb Iran’s bridges and power stations on Tuesday night is being widely described as leaving the conflict in limbo, but that is anything but the truth.

Pakistan insists the prospect of talks in Islamabad has not evaporated, and positive messages are still being exchanged, but in the meantime the site of kinetic activity has switched from land to sea.

HAMBURG, Germany, April 22, 2026 —  ISC High Performance is pleased to announce the winner of the ISC 2026 Hans Meuer Award for the best research paper of the year. The winning paper was selected from 122 full submissions, underscoring the competitiveness of the paper program.

Saverio Pasqualoni (left) and Niklas Bahr

The Hans Meuer Award, which comes with a cash prize of €3,000, has been awarded to “PICO: Performance Insights for Collective Operations,” authored by Saverio Pasqualoni from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Sapienza University of Rome, Tommaso Bonato and Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zürich, Lorenzo Piarulli and Daniele De Sensi from Sapienza University of Rome, and Marco Canini from KAUST.

The paper presents PICO, an open-source framework designed for analyzing and optimizing collective communication operations, which are a significant performance bottleneck in large-scale HPC and AI systems. By facilitating reproducible benchmarking and detailed performance analysis across hardware and software layers, PICO reveals that the default communication settings can be up to five times slower than the optimal configurations. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates that targeted tuning can reduce AI training times by up to 44%, offering practical insights to improve efficiency in next-generation computing environments.

This year, a total of 13 papers have been selected for presentation at the conference. All accepted papers will be published as open access in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The research paper committee for 2026 is chaired by Hatem Ltaief from KAUST, with Richard Vuduc from the Georgia Institute of Technology serving as co-chair.

Best Student Paper Award

The inaugural Best Student Paper Award has been presented to “Energy Efficiency in Analog Photonic Processors: Conversions and Losses at Scale.” This paper was authored by Niklas Bahr from Volkswagen Group Innovation and Heidelberg University, Daniel Steinmeyer from Volkswagen Group Innovation, and Wolfram Pernice from Heidelberg University.

This paper introduces a unified analytical framework for assessing the energy efficiency of analog photonic processors, which are a promising alternative to electronic computing for AI workloads. The study emphasizes the critical role of signal conversion and system-level losses, showing that while optical computation is inherently efficient, overall performance depends heavily on architecture and scaling effects. The authors identify specific conditions under which photonic systems can outperform conventional hardware and propose a hybrid electro-optical design to improve scalability and efficiency.

The Best Student Paper Award includes a €1,000 cash prize, generously sponsored by Jeff Hammond, Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA.

Both winning papers will be presented at ISC High Performance 2026:

• Hans Meuer Award – Wednesday, June 24, 11:15-11:45 AM
• Best Student Research Paper Award – Tuesday, June 23, 5:15-5:45 PM

Attendees can add these sessions to their schedules via the event platform.

More from HPCwire: ISC 2026: Amanda Randles to Deliver Keynote on HPC for Vascular Digital Twins

About ISC High Performance

ISC High Performance is the leading global event for high performance computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and quantum computing. It brings together researchers, technology providers, and industry leaders to explore the latest advancements and practical applications shaping the future of computing.

Source: ISC High Performance

The post ISC High Performance Announces Hans Meuer Award and Best Student Paper Award Winners appeared first on HPCwire.

Study used quantum tech to simulate particle collisions and push computing limits

April 22, 2026 — Researchers used quantum simulations to model the collisions of subatomic particles and open new avenues to understand the basics of hadron collisions, a key aspect of high-energy physics.

The results illustrate quantum computing’s potential to expand the range of solutions to scientific problems beyond those made possible by classical high-performance computers.

Quantum simulations supported by ORNL’s Quantum Computing User Program helped researchers model how a burst of energy evolved over time through a hadron collision, a key aspect of high-energy subatomic physics. Credit: Martin Savage, University of Washington.

The study relied on support from the Quantum Computing User Program (QCUP) and the Quantum Science Center, a National Quantum Information Science Research Center, at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The research team, led by senior author Martin Savage, a professor of physics at the University of Washington, employed quantum circuits to simulate hadron collisions. Hadrons are subatomic particles composed of quarks and gluons — two types of smaller, indivisible subatomic particles commonly described as the building blocks of matter. The most familiar hadrons are the protons and neutrons found in an atom’s nucleus.

When hadrons collide, the reaction produces huge concentrations of energy and releases a blizzard of particles, all with various energies and compositions.

“These collisions are absolutely essential for a deeper understanding of high-energy physics and the study of matter in extreme conditions, but the size of the necessary equations for modeling them has always been far beyond the capabilities of current classical computers,” Savage said. “Now that quantum devices are available that offer hundreds of qubits for simulation, we wanted to see what could be done with this new set of tools.”

Classical computers store information in bits equal to either 0 or 1. That means a classical bit, like a light switch, exists in one of two states: on or off.

Quantum computing relies on quantum bits, or qubits, to store information. Qubits, unlike the binary bits used in classical computing, can exist simultaneously in more than one state via quantum superposition, which allows combinations of physical values to be encoded on a single object. That difference allows for a wider range of possible values that could make qubits a viable alternative for tackling problems that have been intractable on classical computers.

Savage and the research team obtained an allocation of time on IBM’s Torino quantum computer via QCUP, part of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), which awards time on cloud-based commercial quantum processors around the country to support research projects. The Torino computer uses superconductors as qubits, one of several quantum computing approaches.

The team first prepared a 1D quantum ground state, or state with the lowest possible energy. The team then used 112 of Torino’s 133 qubits to simulate a quantized wave packet, or burst of energy, and evolved the packet forward in time to model the events of a hadron collision, ultimately employing 3,858 two-qubit gates. This approach allowed the team to track how the burst of energy evolved over time through the collision.

The results showed signatures of hadron propagation, or the movement of quarks and gluons observed during a collision. Those results compared favorably to the results achieved via classical numeric simulations, the authors wrote.

Current quantum systems tend to display high error rates, or noise, due to measurement errors, qubit degradation and other causes. The research team used IBM’s error-mitigation and uncertainty-quantification techniques to reduce noise and track any deviations from expected results.

The team hopes in future studies to evolve those initial states on quantum hardware, even with few qubits and high error rates. Error-correcting techniques on future quantum computers with many qubits could ultimately achieve greater accuracy than what’s currently possible on classical computers, Savage said.

“Such simulations could provide first glimpses … that are beyond present capabilities of classical computing,” the authors wrote in the study.

Besides Savage, the research team included Roland Farrell, Marc Illa and Anthony Ciavarella of the InQubator for Quantum Simulation.

Support for this research came from the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, the DOE Quantum Science Center and the DOE Nuclear Physics InQubator for Quantum Simulation. The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL.

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

Source: ORNL

The post ORNL Study Explores Hadron Collision Dynamics Using Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Christina Snow was one of two women injured when gunman opened fire on a family in Shreveport, killing eight

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The mother of three children killed over the weekend in a mass shooting in Louisiana is reportedly recovering in hospital with a bullet still lodged in her face.

Jamarckus Snow told NBC News that his cousin, Christina Snow, was one of the two women who were shot and injured early Sunday when a gunman opened fire on his family in Shreveport. Police described the shooting as a “violent domestic incident” in which 31-year-old Shamar Elkins fatally shot eight children – including seven of his children and a cousin.

The focus on immigration and law enforcement comes one year after the department terminated or delayed funding for victims services, criminal justice researchers and more.

Donald Trump has indefinitely extended the US ceasefire with Iran after talks looked increasingly uncertain between both sides. Trump said he would ‘extend the ceasefire until such time as [Iran’s] proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other’. The US blockade remains, as does the closure of the strait of Hormuz by Iran, which seized two ships on Wednesday. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour

Lord Robertson says diplomatic tone from White House is at ‘historic low’ and two allies are likely to keep diverging

• UK politics live – latest updates

Britain’s high military dependence on the US “is no longer tenable” and the UK has to become increasingly independent of the special relationship with Washington, a former Nato chief has warned.

Lord Robertson, who last week accused British leaders of a “corrosive complacency” towards defence, said on Wednesday the traditional allies were diverging over values – and that even after Donald Trump, the separation was likely to continue.

Carrying $20,000 in credit card debt isn't a personal failure, but getting out of it requires a solid strategy.

Fauci was joined by actor Jesse Eisenberg and top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer in reading for DC Climate Week

When Anthony Fauci put on a pair of sunglasses, the hall erupted in cheers and applause. “Ah, how terrible it is to know when, in the end, knowing gains you nothing,” Fauci said. “I knew this once, but must have somehow forgotten, or else I never would have come.”

At the age of 85, the scientist, doctor and public servant who rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic was making his debut as an actor. Fauci played Tiresias, the blind prophet (hence the sunglasses), in a dramatic reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King at Georgetown University in Washington on Tuesday night.

Samuel Corner, 23, says he struck Sgt Kate Evans to protect co-defendant amid 2024 Elbit Systems raid near Oxford

A Palestine Action activist who struck a police officer with a sledgehammer during a protest at an Israeli-linked arms factory acted to protect a co-defendant he believed was being seriously hurt, a court has heard.

Samuel Corner, 23, is accused of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Sgt Kate Evans during a raid on the Elbit Systems facility, in Filton, near Bristol, on 6 August 2024.

European Union formal procedures expected to conclude on Thursday as Druzhba pipeline reopens

During his press conference, Fico also doubles down on his criticism of the incoming Hungarian government led by Péter Magyar, in a further sign that the relations between Bratislava and Budapest could change dramatically in the next few months.

Fico has been close friends with Orbán, often teaming up with him on energy issues, but it doesn’t look like this Slovak-Hungarian partnership will continue under the new management in Budapest.

2026's wave of Razr phones could come in new colors with improved cameras. Plus, we now know the official launch date. Here's all we know about the upcoming Razr flip phones.

Agreement for urgently needed loan reached after Ukraine resumed pumping Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia

EU member states have reached agreement on unblocking an urgently needed €90bn (£78bn) loan for Kyiv and a new package of sanctions against Moscow after Ukraine resumed pumping Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, prompting Budapest to lift its veto.

Cyprus, which holds the bloc’s rotating presidency, said member states’ ambassadors had agreed to launch “written procedures” for the final approval of the loan and the sanctions package, with formal signoff on both due by Thursday afternoon.

Anthropic’s decision to restrict access to its powerful new model increases fears about the advanced technology

Anthropic has ruled out releasing its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, to the public because of the threat it poses to global cybersecurity.

However, the US tech startup behind the Claude chatbot confirmed on Wednesday it was investigating a report that a group of people had gained unauthorised access to Mythos. The alleged incident has raised concerns over the pace of development and the ability of tech companies to keep their riskiest products out of the public domain. Here, we examine Mythos and its potential impact.

With a sleeker design and improved sound and noise canceling, the $130 Space 2 are an excellent, more affordable alternative to pricey flagship ANC models, earning a CNET Editors' Choice award.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US military's massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries' defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel. Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget. [...] Another $20.6 billion would help purchase one-way attack drones and drone aircraft developed through the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is building drone prototypes capable of teaming up with human-piloted fighter jets. Part of this funding would also go toward defensive systems for countering small drones and the US Navy's Boeing MQ-25 drone designed to perform midair refueling of carrier-borne fighter aircraft to extend their strike ranges. Such drone-related spending even rivals the entire budget of the US Marine Corps. But the Pentagon has not said that it is creating a dedicated drone branch of the US military similar to the standalone Space Force. Pentagon officials emphasized that most of the money would go toward procuring drone and autonomous warfare technologies that already exist, and is largely separate from additional funding that would bolster US domestic manufacturing capacity to build such weapon systems. "That $70 billion is all going into existing systems and technologies," said Hurst. "The industrial base support is entirely separate." "The evolution we've seen in the battlefield is this evolution of technologies in the timeframe of weeks, not the typical years we see with our defense production," said Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney, director of force structure, resources, and assessment for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon press briefing. "So it's really critical we work with industry to get that capability fielded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In feat hailed as milestone in robotics, Sony AI’s Ace wins three out of five matches played under official rules

An AI-powered robot has beaten elite players at table tennis in a significant achievement for a machine faced with human athletes in a real-world competitive sport.

Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests.

Amid growing congressional scrutiny of his conduct, Patel has claimed he has ‘never been intoxicated on the job’

• US politics live – latest updates

House judiciary Democrats have launched a formal inquiry into the alleged drinking habits of the FBI director, Kash Patel, demanding he complete a standardized alcohol abuse assessment and submit the results to Congress.

In a letter sent on Tuesday, led by Jamie Raskin, a Maryland representative, Democrats on the committee called on Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (Audit) – a 10-question World Health Organization screening tool used to identify harmful patterns of drinking – along with a sworn statement attesting to his answers. Lawmakers also requested all security clearance questionnaires Patel has completed since taking the role.

Debt settlement and management both reduce debt, but their timelines and trade-offs differ significantly.

Amid a fragile ceasefire in the U.S. war on Iran, the Pentagon is playing a numbers game with American casualty statistics, adding and subtracting from the count as questions about the human toll mount.

On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the “grand total” of wounded and dead at 411.

The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.

Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them.

A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department’s casualty rolls.

Related

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

Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

“These numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don’t want the public to have them says something,” the official said. “That’s the definition of a cover-up.”

The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. 

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.

Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.

Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon’s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to “project combat power.” The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. “That should have been entered into DCAS,” she said. “My concern is why that piece is now missing.”

A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon “had to hide.”

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. And the military’s own studies have shown — as a 2025 article in Military Review, the U.S. Army’s professional journal, put it — the “profound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis in Military Medicine observed, “disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.”

In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.

“We will always honor the fallen,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced at a Pentagon press conference last week. “And the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.”

DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names. But missing from Cooper’s count and the Pentagon tally is Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.

During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. “We lost 13 men,” he said on CNBC. “But if somebody would have said, ‘We’ve done this and obliterated that country — obliterated it — and we lost 13 men,’ people would’ve said, ‘That’s not possible.’” According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.

Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan — an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 “non-hostile” deaths during Trump’s first term.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon had offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops, but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up” appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump’s conflict with Iran could speed the EU’s green revolution – if panicking governments can hold their nerve on clean energy

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A surge in demand for electric vehicles across Europe may be evidence of what George Monbiot greeted as the silver lining of the Iran war. Sales of electric cars in continental Europe rose by 51% in March.

The International Energy Agency has called the disruption in the strait of Hormuz the “biggest energy crisis in history”, but it appears, on one level, to be accelerating Europe’s green revolution. Yet, even if car-owners are rushing to the EV showrooms, some European governments, facing a groundswell of anger over soaring petrol and gas prices, are at risk of sending the clean energy transition into reverse.

April 22, 2026 — In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, Pennsylvania’s seven research intensive universities have joined forces with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Team Pennsylvania to launch the Keystone AI + Quantum Factory, a statewide innovation network leveraging AI and quantum computing to translate university research into practical solutions for Pennsylvania’s key industries.

“This collaboration will serve as a powerful economic catalyst for Pennsylvania. It will transform groundbreaking research into solutions for the commonwealth’s energy, manufacturing, agricultural, life sciences, AI, and robotics sectors, while driving lasting job creation and building a future-proof workforce,” said James Barr von Oehsen, executive director of PSC, a joint computational research center with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

The network partners CMU, Drexel University, Lehigh University, the Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, University of Pennsylvania and University of Pittsburgh to accelerate scientific discovery and commercially relevant innovation through AI and quantum research. The co-development of an efficient shared computing and data infrastructure that no single institution could build alone aims to unlock breakthroughs that drive industry innovation, economic growth and good jobs for Pennsylvania.

“This initiative will turn world-class research into new companies, high-quality jobs and economic opportunity across the commonwealth. The Shapiro administration will continue to spur innovation and create jobs and opportunity for Pennsylvanians,” said Jen Gilburg, Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development deputy secretary for technology and entrepreneurship.

This unified approach strengthens Pennsylvania’s ability to attract investment, keep its talent home and compete aggressively in the technologies shaping the next generation of economic stabilization. By connecting top research capacity with industry needs, it will support manufacturers in both rural and urban communities, boost competitiveness in crucial sectors like energy, agriculture and health care, expand access to advanced technologies previously unavailable for smaller businesses, create high-quality and family sustaining jobs, and build new career pathways for students.

“The Keystone AI + Quantum Factory shows what we can accomplish when we join forces across institutions and regions for the betterment of the commonwealth,” said Abby Smith, president & CEO of Team Pennsylvania.

The Keystone AI + Quantum Factory is built on three interconnected pillars designed to drive economic growth and success:

• World-class research: Using new tools to drive cutting-edge research, launch start-ups, and build smart partnerships with businesses across the commonwealth.
• Workforce development: Preparing students and employees across Pennsylvania for future-focused careers integrating technology.
• Shared infrastructure: Delivering large-scale GPU/CPU and data resources that are needed to lead in the era of AI as well as supporting leadership in emerging technologies.

As artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced technologies reshape how regions and businesses compete, Pennsylvania possesses the research strength, industrial base, and workforce foundation to lead. The Keystone AI + Quantum Factory ensures those assets are aligned intentionally and strategically to secure long-term viability.

Participating university leaders emphasized the power of collaboration and the impact in Pennsylvania. Theresa Mayer, CMU’s vice president for research said that access to advanced computing is quickly becoming the limiting factor in both AI and quantum research.

“This initiative changes that equation for Pennsylvania. By scaling access to both AI and quantum infrastructure across institutions, we are enabling more researchers and students to participate at the frontier — and to do so in ways that are collaborative, responsible and impactful,” she said.

Source: CMU

The post PSC, Pennsylvania Universities Form Keystone AI and Quantum Factory Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

• Prices almost double those in Rome three years ago

• Organisers promise ‘enhanced onsite experience’ for fans

Ryder Cup Europe has doubled the cost of a ticket to attend next year’s marquee event when the US will seek to regain the trophy at Adare Manor in County Limerick.

Organisers will charge fans €499 (£434) for a daily ticket when a batch are released to those living in Ireland, where the centenary event is being held, on Friday. That is almost double the €260 face value spectators paid in Rome three years ago.

The company behind Truth Social has lost more than $1 billion since going public two years ago, while its shares have tumbled 58% during the past 12 months.

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 22, 2026 — Honeywell (Nasdaq: HON) today announced that Quantinuum LLC (“Quantinuum” or the “Company”), which is majority owned by Honeywell, confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on February 17, 2026, relating to the proposed initial public offering of Quantinuum’s common stock.

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. The offering is subject to market and other conditions and the completion of the SEC’s review process.

This press release is being made pursuant to, and in accordance with, Rule 135 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and shall not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Any offers, solicitations or offers to buy, or any sales of securities, will be made in accordance with the registration requirements of the Securities Act.

More from HPCwire

• Honeywell Says Quantinuum to File Confidential Draft Registration for Proposed IPO
• Quantinuum Establishes R&D Hub in Singapore, Plans Helios Quantum Computer Deployment
• Honeywell Leads $600M Raise for Quantinuum at $10B Valuation
• Quantinuum Introduces Helios Quantum System as Roadmap Advances Toward Apollo

About Honeywell 

Honeywell is an integrated operating company serving a broad range of industries and geographies around the world, with a portfolio that is underpinned by our Honeywell Accelerator operating system and Honeywell Forge platform. As a trusted partner, we help organizations solve the world’s toughest, most complex challenges, providing actionable solutions and innovations for aerospace, building automation, industrial automation, process automation, and process technology, that help make the world smarter and safer as well as more secure and sustainable.

About Quantinuum

Quantinuum is the world leader in quantum computing. The company’s quantum systems deliver the highest performance across all industry benchmarks. Quantinuum’s over 630 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, across the US, UK, Germany, and Japan, are driving the quantum computing revolution. For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.

Source: Honeywell

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The chief opponent of the loan, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, lost his campaign for reelection this month.

Israel’s perpetual mobilization: The limits of Netanyahu’s ‘Super-Sparta’ model Expert comment jon.wallace 22 April 2026

Most Israelis support continued conflict with Iran and Hezbollah. But polls show fewer believe in the government’s ability to deliver victory.

As of April 2026, Israel’s security landscape is defined by a profound paradox. While the national mood is characterized by strategic fatigue due to a lack of decisive victories, Israeli society still maintains significant support for the multi-front campaign against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

However, this endurance is being tested by a government attempting to institutionalize a state of permanent low/mid-intensity warfare – a vision labelled the ‘Super-Sparta’ model by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Recent polling suggests that while the public supports the war’s objectives, it increasingly resents the current government’s inability to define or deliver a decisive end-state. That has left the governing coalition unable to use the war to grow its support. Meanwhile, the opposition is gaining a few seats but still appears unlikely to form a government in this year’s elections without cooperation with Arab parties. 

The Iranian front: The mirage of regime collapse

A central pillar of the early Israeli war effort was the strategic assumption that direct military pressure would catalyse the internal collapse of the Islamic Republic. After almost seven weeks of war, these assessments appear premature. Despite sustaining significant military blows, the Iranian regime has demonstrated asymmetric resilience.