Sept. 24, 2026 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC–CNS) is co-leading development of Spain’s National Cancer Data Node to help researchers securely access, share and analyze data for oncology research.
The goal is to progressively onboard all key stakeholders generating relevant data across Spain’s cancer research ecosystem, including research centers, hospitals, and national and international projects, into the newly launched Node, which is now advancing through its initial phase.
Salvador Capella, BSC lead in the National Cancer Data Node.
Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities Diana Morant highlighted that through this initiative, “we are placing public science data and capabilities at the service of research to further advance toward increasingly precise and personalized medicine, specifically in the fight against cancer.”
The Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU), through the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), is driving the development of the Spanish National Cancer Data Node to enhance oncology research by facilitating and organizing the secure use of cancer R&D data. This dataset encompasses clinical, epidemiological, genomic, multi-omic, imaging, pathological, and therapeutic response data.
The initiative forms part of the IMPaCT Precision Medicine Infrastructure under its Data Science Program (IMPaCT-Data) and is co-led by the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the Cancer Area of the Biomedical Research Network (CIBER-ISCIII), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC–CNS).
Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities Diana Morant highlighted that through this initiative, “we are placing public science data and capabilities at the service of research to further advance toward increasingly precise and personalized medicine, specifically in the fight against cancer.”
“The National Cancer Data Node represents a major step forward in connecting the knowledge generated by our researchers, ensuring that this insight translates into new breakthroughs in oncology research,” she explained.
A Shared Space for Cancer Research Data
Data generated within research consortia and projects is typically shared among participating scientists. However, these efforts often rely on disparate access models, standards, and tools that lack standardization.
The National Cancer Data Node, now underway in its initial phases, aims to streamline the use and reuse of this data through interoperable standards. To achieve this, FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) will be applied to both data and the software tools required for analysis.
This project aligns with EU efforts under the recently established European Health Data Space, fostering secure information sharing and integration across borders.
The Data Node concept originated within the EOSC4Cancer project, coordinated by BSC with over 20 participating European organizations, and was developed alongside key national partners including CIBER Cancer and CNIO.
The goal is for all actors in the Spanish cancer research ecosystem generating relevant data, such as research centers, hospitals, national and international projects, public administrations, and patient support organizations, to progressively integrate into the Node.
National and European Cooperation
Coordinated data and tool sharing, both nationally and in partnership with Europe, will enable the scientific community to work more efficiently to better understand the disease.
Coordinated data access will accelerate the discovery of potential new treatments, ultimately helping improve the quality of life for patients and their families.
“The launch of the National Cancer Data Node serves as a practical, real-world example of how collaboration across diverse organizations, initiatives, and projects, both nationally and across Europe, can accelerate the study of these diseases by leveraging distributed data and cutting-edge techniques, including federated learning for AI model development,” detailed Salvador Capella, BSC lead in the National Cancer Data Node.
Fast and Seamless Access
The Node will give researchers fast, seamless access to extensive data catalogs and high-performance computing analytical tools, establishing a common access platform for all players in the cancer research ecosystem.
It also guarantees a secure environment for managing oncology R&D data by uniting the talent and resources of different biomedical and healthcare structures nationwide.
Furthermore, the initiative will facilitate the progressive integration of knowledge generated by existing projects and future research endeavors. For its deployment, the Spanish node benefits from being one of the most comprehensive and diverse, coordinated by a team of leading scientific organizations with highly complementary capabilities.
In this way, the National Cancer Data Node will pave the way toward a more connected research ecosystem, where data and tools can be shared and reused in a coordinated manner to expand cancer knowledge and drive oncology research forward.
Constable Jeff Smith was shot several times, suffering wounds to his head and torso, but continued fending off the attack until a second officer arrived.
In the first row in front of the leaders sit US vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance, Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her daughter Arabella, US secretary of state Marco Rubio, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, defence secretary Pete Hegseth and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.
Donald Trump is speaking now. He notes that Xi is the first Chinese leader to make a second formal visit to the White House, and says the two have “forged a truly great friendship” since Trump was first elected in 2016.
As Tigray rebels and government forces attack each other, analysts warn that a 2022 peace deal has collapsed. The African Union called for an immediate end to fighting.
Lawyers for the news outlets President Trump banned from the White House have requested an emergency hearing after several journalists were turned away from the building Thursday morning, in apparent defiance of a federal judge’s order to restore their access.
“This morning journalists from each of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO attempted to enter the White House and were turned away, and Secret Service agents confiscated the hard pass of journalists whose hard passes had not previously been confiscated,” a new court filing read.
With Congress unable to rein in President Donald Trump’s war against Iran through legislative action, a group advocating for diplomacy filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration arguing the military action violates the Constitution.
National Iranian American Council Action on Thursday filed its suit in a Washington federal court asking a judge to declare the war on Iran illegal on the basis that it violates the Declare War Clause of the Constitution.
“Can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”
“No President should have the power to take this country into an indefinite war by himself,” NIAC president Jamal Abdi said in a statement. “Congress never authorized this war. Yet Iranian families are being bombed, American service members have been killed, and communities on both sides are being forced to bear the consequences. This lawsuit asks a fundamental question: Can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”
The lawsuit was filed as the Senate prepared to vote on a resolution seeking to stop the war. A floor vote on the resolution, which already passed the House of Representatives, failed in the upper chamber Thursday afternoon after senators shot it down in a 49-50 split.
“We’ve unfortunately seen this Congress fail its job of standing up for their constitutional role as the sole body empowered to declare war,” Abdi told The Intercept. “That’s why we are pursuing every option at our disposal, including taking the challenge against this unconstitutional war to the courts.”
Both the Senate vote and NIAC Action’s lawsuit took on new urgency after Trump used his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday to threaten to “annihilate” Iran, a country of 90 million.
“When Trump is threatening annihilation of another country in a war of aggression,” Abdi said, “it is all hands on deck to stop this full-blown constitutional crisis before it gets worse.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seven Months of War
Trump, in partnership with the Israeli military, launched the war against Iran on February 28 with a sudden barrage of airstrikes and missile attacks that left numerous top Iranian leaders dead and killed hundreds of civilians. The early days of the attack saw a missile strike on a school in the town of Minab that killed more than 100 children, which the United Nations declared to be a possible war crime.
It was days later, on March 2, that Trump notified Congress of the initiation of hostilities. In the ensuing months, the war has turned into a regional conflagration. Israel invaded Lebanon, leaving thousands of people killed and tens of thousands more displaced.
Meanwhile, retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran against the U.S., Israel, and their allies in the Persian Gulf have severely impacted the region and led to a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz that has hobbled global fuel markets. And missile fire from the Houthis, the militant group that controls much of Yemen, shut down shipping through the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, further straining the global economy and spurring a Saudi Arabian military response.
The initial attacks, thousands of deaths, and cascading economic fallout of the war all took place without the consent of the American people, a fact that NIAC Action’s attorneys cast in the lawsuit as a clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war.
“The Constitution does not permit a President to wage war indefinitely and ask Congress for permission later,” said attorney Alan Morrison. “Congress never authorized this war, yet months later the bombing and blockade continued. We are asking the Court to enforce the constitutional line between the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and Congress’s exclusive authority to take the country to war.”
Though Trump has sought to bypass Congress in pursuing the war through the use of semantics, he has repeatedlyundermined that effort with public statements declaraing that his military action is a war, NIAC Action’s complaint noted.
“Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause.”
“Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause,” said attorney Bruce Fein in a statement. “The question before the Court is whether the President can continue these hostilities without the authorization the Constitution requires.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of several NIAC Action members who have been personally impacted by the war. Several of their family members have been killed, wounded, or otherwise terrorized by the monthslong campaign of airstrikes carried out by the U.S. and its allies. One member joining the suit, Nilma Dilmaghani, described the horror of learning that a cousin had been badly wounded in an airstrike that destroyed a family apartment.
“When I learned that my cousin had been trapped under the rubble, that they had lost their home and suffered such serious injuries, I felt completely helpless,” said Dilmaghani. “It is unbearable to watch your family live through this from thousands of miles away and know there is nothing you can do to keep them safe.”
Crystal Mason has spent nearly a decade fighting conviction for casting provisional ballot that ultimately wasn’t counted
The nearly decade-long case of a Black Texas woman who was sentenced to five years in prison in a controversial illegal voting case will end with an acquittal, the state’s highest criminal court said in a 5-4 decision on Thursday.
The woman, Crystal Mason, has been appealing against the case ever since her 2018 conviction for casting a provisional ballot that ultimately wasn’t counted. In 2024, the Texas court of criminal appeals acquitted her in the case. The local prosecutor handling the case appealed that ruling to Texas’s highest criminal court, which initially agreed to hear it. But on Thursday, the court reversed itself, and said it would not hear an appeal, letting the acquittal stand. It did not offer any explanation for why.
“AI will kill us all.” That’s the mantra we’ve heard repeatedly this month from researchers at frontier AI labs, who have called for a global pause in AI development, ostensibly to protect humanity. That’s nonsense, said Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, who neither backs a pause nor thinks AI poses an existential threat. In fact, Gil says there’s a better chance that AI will substantially improve the quality of life by accelerating progress in science and engineering, which is the goal of the DoE’s Genesis Mission project.
“No, I definitely do not think it’s going to kill humanity,” Gil told HPCwire this week. “I think there’s zero chance that we are going to end up with that prediction, of eliminating all of humanity.”
Gil, who is heading up the DoE’s Genesis Mission effort to harness AI, quantum, and HPC to drive progress in scientific discovery and engineering, would much rather talk about the big upside of AI and the benefits that it can bring to humanity, rather than how AI could end us.
“Instead of spending 99% of the debate and the effort on this [AI doomerism], why don’t we actually solve fusion and personalized medicine and cancer, materials, and devote a lot of our energy to go and deliver that?” he told us. “You will see how much better the world will be as a consequence of the work we do.”
Focusing on AI Upside
There’s never been a better time to be a scientist and an engineer, thanks to the new capabilities that AI is helping to unlock, Gil said. The DoE program has a list of 33 national science and technology challenges, with titles like “Unlocking Cures for Pediatric Cancer,” “Accelerating the Delivery of Fusion Energy,” and “Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply,” that it and other federal agencies are spending $5 billion to tackle.
“The list of challenges we put out–you read them, you’re inspired by them,” Gil said. “That’s what we’re going to need to solve. AI is going to help us solve [them] partially along with a lot of humans and a lot of other capability to go do it. It’s a wonderful time to go do that. And that part is being drowned by this whole other side of the equation. And it’s a real pity.”
Gil takes issue with the fear that well-respected scientists and researchers are spreading in the general public. It’s natural that people believe Nobel laureates and other accomplished scientists, but it’s also unfortunate that that they’re misleading the public about the actual risks that AI poses, he said.
“Very respectable, qualified people in their domain issuing predictions that sound scientific, like there’s a 10% chance or 15% chance” that we’ll all die, Gil said. “That’s just the opinion of this person that has made up a number with no scientific basis.”
A good example is Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the Godfather of AI thanks to his extensive contributions to the field and is a Nobel laureate. Earlier this month, Hinton told BBC said that 10% was “not an unreasonable estimate” on the odds that AI will kill everyone on Earth within a decade.
Geoff Hinton said it’s reasonable to think there’s a 10% chance that AI will kill all humans within 10 years
“Geoffrey Hinton is an amazing scientist,” Gil said. “But his track record of prediction outside of his field is quite poor.”
Gil recalls a prediction that Hinton made a decade ago, in which he said that we should stop training radiologists because it was clear then that deep learning was able to interpret X-rays better than humans.
“How did that prediction turn out?” Gil said. “There’s actually a scarcity now of radiologists. When we in the scientific community issue predictions outside our area of expertise, leveraging our credibility, we can do serious harm to society when we don’t do that properly.”
Managing AI Risk
That is not to say that Hinton sees no upside to AI, nor that Gil sees no risk from AI. “This is a wonderful technology that can make life much better for lots of people,” Hinton said in his BBC interview. “It’s also extremely dangerous.”
Gil recognizes that AI poses risks. The recent hack of Hugging Face by rouge OpenAI agents, for example–and more recent news that the government of Australia was also targeted by OpenAI agents–are cause for concern. However, the initial frame of the story, that we are facing superintelligent AI hacking agents that are unstoppable, has shifted. As more information has come out over the incident, the concern has shifted to what steps did OpenAI take to contain the agents and prevent them from attacking others.
“It was obvious in the Hugging Face incident that the containment environments that were set up in the software environment were inadequate, by their own admission,” Gil said. “It was misconfigured. They didn’t have the right safeguards and protections, and that led to bad consequences. Had that been better engineered–and that would mean more resources–we would not have had that incident.”
Instead of a global pause on AI development, Gil encourages the frontier labs to spend more time testing their models to ensure they’re not going to harm people before releasing them to the world.
“The ratio of capability to testing in many of the frontier sites is not correct,” Gil said. “They need to accelerate the amount of time they’re spending on creating technology to test and to evaluate and to make the model safe.”
In addition to taking responsibility to ensure that their products are safe, the frontier labs should also fortify their sandbox environments to prevent agents from escaping during testing, Gil said.
(Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock)
“The containment and isolation of environments needs to improve greatly,” he said. “This is an engineering [issue], a technically solvable problem.”
Taking Responsibility for AI Products
Gil is not a fan of the federal government granting a product liability waiver to the frontier AI labs, which is an idea that has been floated this month. Gil had a clear message to AI developers who want a waiver: Take responsibility for your own products.
“They are amazing companies that are developing incredible capabilities. They are aware of the problem,” Gil said. “They have the best AI talent in the world. And all we’re saying is: You’re aware of the problem, do something about it. Don’t tell the citizens of America ‘You all need to worry about my AI engineering.’”
“It’s your responsibility that you don’t do the wrong thing,” Gil continued. “You have agency . You have a lot of resources. So if you feel you need to take longer time to do release cycles so that it’s safe, then take more time.”
Gil values the work that the frontier labs are doing, and says the work is instrumental to the Genesis Mission. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are contributing AI models and tokens to the DoE project, which launched in November 2025 with the goal to accelerate American scientific and engineering productivity through the application of AI. They are members of the Genesis Mission Consortium.
“They are core partners of ours,” Gil said. “We have partnerships both with the frontier proprietary models in the United States but also with open-source companies. There’s a whole host of startups…that are building these frontier capability models that are open source as well. We think that’s very important. So we are working with all of them.”
Developing AI Best Practices
Phase 1 projects for the Genesis Mission are currently underway, and bigger Phase 2 projects are expected to be announced soon. There are 278 Phase 1 projects, many of which are led by the DoE’s National Labs, along with participation from universities and private companies. A core element of these Genesis Mission projects is setting up policies and procedures for evaluating and measuring the results of the projects.
AI governance is largely an afterthought in the LLM race (Aree_S/Shutterstock)
“An essential part of this journey is to say, how do you do this?” Gil said. “Part of the approach is to share the best practices of what works–including security, by the way, which is fundamental–such that we develop through Genesis the gold standard approach of how to rigorously apply AI for science and engineering.”
The advent of large language models is driving trillions of dollars in private-sector investment at the moment, creating a technology boom that is reverberating across all sectors. Every business is trying to figure out how to use this powerful new technology, and AI researchers are competing fiercely to drive rapid improvements in capabilities.
The result is unparalleled breakthroughs in areas of academia and science. AI is solving old math problems that escaped solution for years. McKinsey reports that AI is accelerating drug discovery.
“We’ve lost the whole narrative as to why are we creating the technology in the first place, which is the central thesis of Genesis, which is, look, we want to harness this computer revolution to solve problems that greatly matter to our fellow citizens,” Gil said. “We want to go and solve fusion. We want to go and drive massive breakthroughs in personalized medicine. We want to engineer novel materials to avoid corrosion in cars and airplanes. We want better battery technology. We want to model the grid a thousand times faster.”
Instead of endless philosophizing, Genesis Mission is seeking real-world applications of AI in science and engineering. Gil would like nothing more than for this type of progress to be the focus of AI.
“That aspect of aligning the AI industry towards purpose, not just in rhetoric and in panels, but actually doing work and then applying better engineering principles on how you actually develop the technology, test it, and only release safe products–that balance is what we need to shift,” he said. “The current debate is really, really poor.”
Israeli PM attacks critics and calls New York mayor Zohran Mamdani ‘antisemitic’ in inflammatory address
Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an inflammatory address to the United Nations on Thursday, decrying what he said was a global anti-Jewish conspiracy and swatting aside criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, as he faces down international isolation and a fight for political survival in upcoming elections in Israel.
As planned protests erupted on the streets of New York City, Netanyahu took aim at critics of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the international media, regional leaders such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leftwing commentator Hasan Piker and the New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani in an address that doubled as a stump speech to ignite his rightwing base for the elections.
Senior Iranian officials say Washington has four to five days to respond to its conditions for reopening the strait
The UK foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has met his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, for the first time in New York amid warnings from senior Iranian security officials that the US has four to five days to respond to its conditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz.
The previously unknown apparent deadline was specified by Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of the supreme national security council, in a TV interview on Wednesday evening, and it is unclear what action Tehran will take if the US does not respond to Iran’s preconditions for reopening the vital waterway.
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Nevada election officials say they found zero confirmed noncitizens among 185 voters recently flagged by the Trump administration, further undercutting an earlier federal claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered in the state.
“Our records indicate that they were citizens,” Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote to Department of Homeland Security officials Wednesday, adding that DHS had provided “nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.” Nevada officials cautioned that DHS supplied only voter case numbers rather than names, birth dates and addresses, making exact matches uncertain because duplicate case numbers can exist in the state system.
The administration initially claimed as many as 15,903 noncitizens were registered in Nevada. Federal officials later acknowledged they had actually identified only 185 potential cases, describing the larger figure as a ceiling rather than a verified count.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said his office takes noncitizen voting seriously but has yet to receive evidence supporting DHS’s claims. Previous Nevada investigations have also found very few potential cases.
FactCheck.org has similarly found that federal data-matching systems can incorrectly flag U.S. citizens, including recently naturalized voters. It also reports no evidence that noncitizen voting occurs on a widespread scale.
The administration nevertheless continues a nationwide voter-fraud initiative, deploying federal investigators and attorneys ahead of the November election.
GOP stymies House-passed war powers resolution as conflict passes 200-day mark with 19 US service members killed
Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a Democratic effort to end the US war with Iran, voting 49-50 against a House-passed war powers resolution as the conflict passed the 200-day mark, with 19 American service members killed.
The measure passed the House earlier with bipartisan support. Senate Democrats, led by the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, forced the vote under the War Powers Resolution, which allows lawmakers to bring such measures to the floor.
"Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes," reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of romantic partners and exes."
In fact, five Indianapolis police officers were just criminally charged Wednesday with fraud and misconduct. "One has also been charged with stalking," the police department said in a statement, noting that one office had already resigned, "while the four other officers have been suspended and recommended for termination. County prosecutor Ryan Mears admitted "A lot of this was initiated by The Washington Post."
And the Post published a new investigation Wednesday:
Using publicly available information, The Post found that...one of the officers charged Wednesday, appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a 10-month period — an average of about 12 lookups per day. At the time, Police Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the city's 301-camera Flock system. That audit led to the discovery of more widespread abuse, [County prosecutor Ryan] Mears said Wednesday.
Mears said the department's findings highlight the vast power Flock cameras give police officers and raise questions about whether the government should be doing more to prevent the misuse of that power. "Many of the proposed guardrails and the things that have been proposed would not have prevented the behaviors and actions we see here today," Mears said. "Does there need to be independent oversight? Does there need to be judicial oversight of the Flock camera system?"
One of the Indianapolis officers, Schultz, an 18-year veteran of the police department, was accused of using Flock to track his ex-wife and women he met while on duty or out in public. He was charged with multiple counts of official misconduct as well as two counts of stalking. Schultz told one woman he was an FBI agent, according to prosecutors, and began texting her and showing up at places she frequented, including at her gym and at a school function with her daughter. Prosecutors said he arrived at her gym within an hour of her at least nine times between June 12 and Aug. 1 of this year... Another woman met Schultz after her car was stolen from a mall parking lot, and he began texting her flirty messages later that night. The two dated briefly, and Schultz later looked up where the woman went on dates with another man. Schultz searched the plates of a third woman 178 times and also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King and a Walmart earlier this month...
A third officer, Binford, told investigators he had used the log-in credentials of another officer who had logged in to Binford's laptop during a field training exercise. Binford searched the plate of his ex-wife more than 1,000 times between April 2024 and April 2025. Indianapolis police had no regular practice of auditing officers' Flock searches until recently, [Police Chief] Terry said in an interview last month. The department's investigation into the tool's misuse has been "a learning process for us," she said at the time.
State supreme court rules Chad Bianco’s conduct unlawful and says he ‘must refrain from further handling’ of ballots
A Republican California sheriff must return more than a half-million ballots he seized for an investigation into unfounded voting improprieties in a special election last year, the state supreme court ruled Thursday.
Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco in February seized approximately 650,000 ballots from a November 2025 special election on statewide congressional redistricting favorable to Democrats and pushed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The measure easily passed statewide, and won in Bianco’s county by roughly 80,000 votes.
US GAO documents array of costly problems as ICE pursues controversial plans to rapidly increase detention capacity
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies have wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing controversial plans to rapidly increase detention capacity – and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warned on Thursday.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) documented costly problems in several initiatives ICE has pursued since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 and ordered the mass arrest and deportation of people whom his administration has deemed should be forced out of the country.
Dozens of delegates left the room in support of Palestine as the Israeli prime minister walked to the podium on Thursday. Other delegates clapped and chanted 'Am Yisrael Chai' or 'the people of Israel live' in support of the prime minister
Mario David Coronado Juarez was killed when his car struck a tree and burst into flames as he attempted to avoid ICE
Leading Democrats and immigration advocates in Michigan are demanding transparency from federal authorities after a man died in a fiery car crash as he attempted to avoid agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Mario David Coronado Juarez, a Guatemalan national, was killed on Sunday in Grand Rapids when his vehicle struck a tree at high speed and burst into flames shortly after the ICE officers tried to conduct a traffic stop.
The Senate rejected a resolution aimed at limiting President Trump's war powers in Iran, though the Democrat-led effort picked up one new GOP supporter.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 24, 2026 — PicoJool, a pioneer in optical connectivity for AI infrastructure, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading (HRT). The financing follows a $12 million seed round led by Playground Global and brings the company’s total funding to $39.5 million.
PicoJool will use the funding to expand its teams and facilities in the United States and Taiwan as it brings its Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) and optical link products to market. The company plans to grow its research and development, operations, sales and marketing organizations while building the capacity needed to qualify, manufacture and support its products for hyperscalers and data center operators.
“Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there. Our focus now is execution,” said Al Yuen, founder and CEO of PicoJool. “This funding allows us to expand our teams in the U.S. and Taiwan, qualify products with customers and move a complete portfolio from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules. We are building the connectivity platform customers will need for the next decade of AI infrastructure.”
AI clusters are increasing both the number of processors in a system and the volume of data moving between them, placing growing pressure on interconnect performance and data center power budgets. PicoJool is applying the cost and manufacturing advantages of VCSEL technology to a portfolio of optical connectivity products designed to scale from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond. The company is also seeing growing customer interest in its microVCSEL products, including 50G NRZ configuration for optical compute interconnects and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations for PCIe 6.0 – based NPO applications. PicoJool has started early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products ahead of broader availability.
PicoJool’s portfolio includes high-speed VCSEL (100G, 200G) products and lower-power microVCSEL (50G NRZ, 64G NRZ/PAM4) configurations. The microVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture to increase aggregate bandwidth while reducing the energy required to move each bit of data, addressing a critical constraint for hyperscale AI systems.
“Moving data efficiently dictates how quickly and economically AI scales,” said Greg Waters, General Partner at Socratic Partners. “PicoJool combines a proven team with a unique approach that brings VCSEL technology’s cost and manufacturing advantages to AI-scale bandwidth and power needs. They are poised to become a vital connectivity platform for next-generation data centers.”
The Series A follows the June unveiling of PicoJool’s 200G VCSEL and microVCSEL product family for scale-up AI data centers. The 200G products exceed 37GHz of bandwidth, and the portfolio includes quad 100G, quad 200G and 32x50G NRZ microVCSEL configurations that give customers multiple paths to 1.6T connectivity based on their bandwidth, power and system requirements.
“The network is the AI, and connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance. The industry needs a solution that can increase bandwidth while sharply improving power and cost,” said Pat Gelsinger, general partner at Playground Global. “PicoJool brings together breakthrough VCSEL performance, deep systems expertise and a manufacturing base capable of supporting tremendous scale. The team is well positioned to move quickly from an important technical milestone to products that can reshape how AI infrastructure moves data.”
PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductor and other gallium arsenide (GaAs) foundries to ready its 200G VCSELs for production. WIN has shipped more than one billion chips over the past decade, bringing significant high-volume manufacturing experience to this work as PicoJool prepares its products for qualification and production. The company is also working with system companies and hyperscalers to define next-generation pluggable, NPO and co-packaged optics solutions.
About PicoJool
PicoJool is developing next-generation optical chips and modules for high-bandwidth, low-cost connectivity in hyperscale AI data centers. Founded by photonics industry veteran Al Yuen, the company is advancing optical communication from the semiconductor through the transceiver and system level. PicoJool is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with research and development and operations in the United States and Taiwan. Learn more at www.picojool.com.
Deference was deafening as US president rolled out red carpet for world’s biggest jailer of journalists – perhaps he was seeking tips
One is an authoritarian who represses the media with a strong allergy to democratic elections. The other is head of the Chinese Communist party.
Donald Trump welcomed the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to the White House on Thursday, setting the stage for a scene quite unlike anything the august old building has seen over more than two centuries.
KANAGAWA, Japan, Sept. 24, 2026 — EdgeCortix has unveiled RAIDEN, its next-generation scalable AI chiplet platform purpose-built to address that challenge. Through this chiplet platform, RAIDEN carries EdgeCortix’s energy-efficient design into a new performance class, scaling to meet the demands of Physical AI deployed outside centralized data centers.
RAIDEN introduces a unified, energy-efficient architecture that scales from a single compute die to a four-die flagship within one hardware and software platform. At maximum scale, RAIDEN is architected to deliver up to 3.36 PFLOPS (3,360 TFLOPS) of FP4 AI compute, up to 256 GB of memory, 548 GB/s of memory bandwidth and up to 1.54 TB/s of aggregate die-to-die bandwidth, together with configurable power settings andup to 6.4 Tb/s of chip-to-chip scale-out connectivityfor scaling beyond a single package.
RAIDEN is entering the market with customer design wins already secured, spanning demanding Physical AI applications from next-generation aerospace and defense systems, robotic platforms, to high-performance edge AI servers.
One Architecture. From One Die to Four
RAIDEN is designed for Physical AI at the thick edge, an emerging class of high-performance AI systems deployed outside centralized data centers and closer to machines, sensors and operational environments. Rather than creating separate architectures for different performance classes, RAIDEN scales through a modular chiplet architecture: single-die (X1), two-die (X2) and the four-die (X4) flagship.
All three configurations share EdgeCortix’s latest DNA-X accelerator architecture and MERA software stack. Compute, memory capacity, memory bandwidth and inter-die bandwidth scale with the platform, allowing customers to address different performance, power and deployment requirements without moving to an entirely different AI architecture or software environment. This common architecture is designed to allow customers to move across RAIDEN configurations while preserving their software investment and application environment.
Detailed specifications and deployment positioning for the X1 and X2 configurations will be introduced in subsequent phases of the RAIDEN launch program.
Four Dies. One AI System to Run the Entire Workload
At the top of the platform, the RAIDEN X4 flagship is architected to operate four compute dies as a tightly integrated system rather than as a collection of isolated accelerators.
The RAIDEN X4 flagship configuration enables:
Up to 3.36 PFLOPS of FP4 AI compute
Up to 256 GB of memory
548 GB/s of memory bandwidth
Up to 1.54 TB/s of die-to-die (DNA-X-to-DNA-X) bandwidth
Up to 6.4 Tb/s of chip-to-chip scale-out connectivity
Configurable power settings for different performance and deployment requirements
Integrated multi-core host processing per-die and high-speed system connectivity for self-contained designs
As multimodal, generative, and agentic AI models become part of a diverse range of applications across the physical AI landscape, systems must simultaneously accommodate larger models, greater context, multiple concurrent workloads and increasingly demanding real-time constraints, all within practical system power envelopes.
RAIDEN’s scalable chiplet architecture is designed to address this continuum through a common platform, scaling heterogeneous compute, memory and connectivity from a single die to four dies while maintaining a common software environment. For applications that require additional system-level scale, RAIDEN’s high-speed chip-to-chip connectivity provides up to 6.4 Tb/s of scale-out bandwidth, extending the architecture beyond an individual multi-die package.
The architecture helps reduce the system-level compromises that increasingly constrain advanced Physical AI workloads: swapping models and data between internal and external memory, aggressive quantization, AI and non-AI workload partitioning, and the need to divide a single Physical AI pipeline across multiple discrete computing systems.
Purpose-Built for AI That Perceives, Reasons and Acts
Physical AI requires more than neural-network inference. Central to RAIDEN is the latest DNA-X architecture, engineered to execute the full workload while scaling the system as a unified platform. It maintains the runtime-reconfigurable advantages of earlier generations while introducing micro-code programmable matrix and vector engines. This innovation extends versatility beyond standard neural-network inference, providing the necessary support for perception, reasoning, application processing and control workloads to operate together within a common scalable platform.
A single MERA software stack provides a common development and deployment environment across the RAIDEN family, allowing models, tools and software investments to carry across different platform configurations. The same stack spans EdgeCortix product generations, so work done on SAKURA-II today carries forward to RAIDEN rather than being rebuilt.
“Physical AI will not be won by simply building a faster accelerator. It requires a platform where compute, memory, bandwidth, connectivity and software scale together – and where the hardware deployed today can run the models customers adopt years from now,” said Dr. Sakyasingha Dasgupta, Founder and CEO of EdgeCortix. “That is what we built RAIDEN to do. One architecture and one software platform scaling from a single die inside an intelligent machine to a four-die flagship for the most demanding Physical AI workloads. Most importantly, customers are already designing around RAIDEN.”
RAIDEN extends EdgeCortix’s vision of Powering AI That Acts beyond traditional edge inference into a broader class of Physical AI systems, spanning robotics and autonomous systems, intelligent manufacturing, telecommunications, aerospace and defense, and edge AI infrastructure.
Availability and RAIDEN Early Access Program
Customer sampling is expected to begin in early 2027, with volume production planned for the second half of 2027. The RAIDEN Early Access Program is now open, giving qualified customers and ecosystem partners an opportunity to engage with EdgeCortix during the development program and receive priority consideration for customer samples. The program has already generated strong customer interest, building on the design wins secured to date.
Register your interest in the RAIDEN Early Access Program here.
RAIDEN, EdgeCortix next-generation chiplet solution, is based on results obtained from the project, ‘Research and Development Project of the Enhanced Infrastructures for Post-5G Information and Communication Systems’ (JPNP20017), subsidized by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
About EdgeCortix Inc.
EdgeCortix is a fabless semiconductor company delivering energy-efficient AI compute across edge and Physical AI applications, from embedded devices to on-premise systems. Headquartered in Kanagawa, Japan, with operations in the United States and India, the company develops advanced silicon and software platforms built on its patented hardware–software co-design approach. Its Dynamic Neural Accelerator (DNA) architecture and MERA software stack support inference, generative and agentic AI workloads on one runtime-reconfigurable platform that scales from the SAKURA-II single-chip accelerators to the RAIDEN multi-die chiplet platform. EdgeCortix solutions serve robotics and autonomous systems, aerospace and defense, intelligent manufacturing, telecommunications and edge AI infrastructure, markets that demand real-time performance, energy efficiency and adaptability.
Only ghosts and ruins remain in this dusty old town. Tucked under scenic hills of volcanic rock are the remnants of a bank, a railroad depot, and what looks to be a school, along with a handful of other deteriorating structures that are hard to make out. This is Rhyolite, Nevada, whose heyday was fierce but short-lived, something of a one-hit wonder. In 1904, after gold was discovered in the nearby Bullfrog Hills, prospectors descended upon this dry corner of the Mojave Desert with hopes of striking it rich.
Of the several mining camps that quickly sprang up in this part of the Great Basin, Rhyolite was one of the liveliest. By 1908, the town’s population had surpassed 5,000, and at its peak, there were 50 saloons, 35 gambling dens, brothels, a bathhouse, a newspaper, and over a dozen restaurants.
Rhyolite’s flame would burn out fast: The Wall Street panic of 1907 scared off would-be investors, and by 1910, just a few years after the mine opened, most of the gold had been extracted. With no mining jobs left, the town was soon abandoned. All three banks eventually shuttered, and by 1914, the last train departed the Rhyolite station, never to return. Entire buildings, including the old Union Hall, were relocated to a neighboring town, where they still reside. The leftover Rhyolite town site, now a tourist stop, is managed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and has been a not-so-popular location for a string of low-budget Hollywood films you’ve never heard of, like “Six-String Samurai” and “The Island.”
“Deserts, believe it or not, actually have a high level of carbon sequestration.”
The Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) and the Western Shoshone (Newe) inhabited this arid region between the northern Great Basin and the southern Mojave. This ancient land holds many tales. In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered what appear to be aboriginal campsites dating back at least 10,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. West of Rhyolite is Beatty, a town with a certain rural desert charm. It could be the wild burros roaming the streets or the raggedy Sourdough Saloon with hundreds of dollar bills tagged to the walls. Whatever it is, I understand the appeal for those uninterested in city life. The residents I spoke with told me it was the quiet landscape that drew them there.
I find myself in Rhyolite — just seven miles east of the broiling Death Valley National Park — to meet up with two activists who’ve dedicated their lives to protecting the surrounding Mojave Desert. Kevin Emmerich and Laura Cunningham, founders of the Beatty-based Basin and Range Watch, are concerned that two major solar projects on nearby BLM-managed lands will destroy the desert ecology and provide little benefit to the local community.
“This type of desert out there actually sequesters carbon in the roots of the creosote,” explained Cunningham, a wildlife biologist and desert tortoise researcher who has lived in the area for over 20 years. “There’s biological soil crust [with a] deep network under the soil that sequesters carbon, literally sucks it out of the atmosphere and turns it into oxygen. And deserts, believe it or not, actually have a high level of carbon sequestration. But when you scrape it up and drive on it, you crush the lichens, shrubs, and flowers, and release carbon. Building on these habitats is actually [contributing to] climate change.”
Deserts like the Mojave, Cunningham said, play an outsized role in absorbing climate-warming carbon. Of the world’s carbon sinks — the places that soak up carbon from our fossil fuel emissions — deserts account for up to 28 percent of land-based uptake. It’s one reason why a patchwork of solar farms out here is a troubling prospect.
“If we do use renewable energy, we want to put it in the built environment where it doesn’t have much of an impact.”
Cunningham’s partner, Kevin Emmerich, is what you’d call a desert rat. He’s tall, grizzled, and soft-spoken. He strikes me as a man who has spent a lot of time in remote places, and I say that with admiration. A former park ranger in Death Valley, he nods in agreement with Cunningham while pointing to a valley across the highway where two solar projects, if completed, would blanket over 8,000 acres of open space. He’s frustrated that the people who usually oppose wrecking biodiversity aren’t warier of the large-scale energy projects proposed for public lands.
“Other environmental groups are really conflicted about ‘green’ energy,” Emmerich said. “We just had a little spat with one group. They want some of this public land development. … If we do use renewable energy, we want to put it in the built environment where it doesn’t have much of an impact.”
A Battle for What Remains
While some environmentalists may be on the fence, others, like the small outfit Basin and Range Watch, are working tirelessly to halt the development of these solar farms. In 2010, in coalition with community groups and the Quechan and Cocopah tribes, it blocked the Imperial Valley Solar Project in California, which would have destroyed nine square miles of habitat and decimated more than 400 Quechan cultural sites. Basin and Range also supported the “Save Our Mesa” campaign, which succeeded in stopping the controversial Battle Born solar project near Moapa Valley, Nevada. Battle Born was proposed as an installation of solar panels covering 14 square miles of public lands. The grassroots pressure was so strong that the developer, California-based Arevia Power, told BLM they wouldn’t move forward.
When it comes to impacts, at least on paper, solar energy may have the fewest downsides (although they certainly exist). The technology requires less mining and is inexpensive and easy to deploy. But as Basin and Range Watch argues, it’s not enough to simply let these vast, open spaces be blanketed with fields of solar panels. There are better locations for solar that will yield better results for people and the environment. Many of our popular ideas about places like the Mojave — such as the idea that they’re lonesome, empty wastelands, devoid of life — sustain the myth that desert solar farms have fewer drawbacks and are essential in the fight against climate change. Not many assumptions could be more untrue.
Many of our popular ideas about places like the Mojave — such as the idea that they’re lonesome, empty wastelands, devoid of life — sustain the myth that desert solar farms have fewer drawbacks and are essential in the fight against climate change.
BLM has considerable sway in the West and has, for decades, had the power to radically shape the region, from its fragile ecology to its resource-dependent economies. It manages 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights in the United States. In all, BLM oversees one-tenth of the country. It divvies up rights to mine, drill, and graze. What the bureau say goes, and even under the antagonistic Trump administration, which is no fan of renewables, it is still overseeing massive green energy developments.
While Trump and his allies in Congress have drastically reduced subsidies for renewable energy projects, those incentives aren’t set to expire until December 2027. As a result, companies are hurrying to build out solar farms, wind turbines, and commercial battery storage. While Trump’s actions have hampered long-term growth projections for the renewables industry, it’s booming, for now.
“The energy transition is still underway, but the whiplash has very serious implications for our economy and for the investment culture of America,” explains Sanya Carley, the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Solar has still been on a phenomenal growth trajectory, especially across the entire world. … [It’s still] the leading source of growth in the energy industry in the United States.” Trump’s rancor has turned out to be more of a speed bump than a roadblock.
Whose Land Is It?
In Nevada, BLM has parceled around 12 million acres for large utility-scale solar project construction. In 2024, the agency announced its Western Solar Plan, which would reserve 22 million acres of public land for future solar development. As of early 2024, seven major projects were proposed or in the works, covering 140 square miles of land. The Western Solar Plan would locate high-solar-producing areas on public lands across the dry flatlands of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, and on millions of acres of federal land in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, believes this massive, swift expansion of industrial-scale solar could destroy many of the region’s “crown jewels.” He’s worried solar arrays could surround Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon — ditto for the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
“It’s insane,” Donnelly, who isn’t shy about his frustrations, said. “BLM is going to make lanes available for solar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada,” which he calls “possibly the most beautiful place in the country.”
It’s hard to argue with Donnelly about the stakes. I spend weeks each year wandering the Mojave, decompressing from urban life. The desert is a refuge. As a teenager growing up in Montana, I used to believe wilderness only included trout streams, mountains, grizzly bears, and wolves. I was youthfully naive, and I now realize that wilderness includes saguaro, rattlesnakes, desert tortoise, and bighorn sheep. We shouldn’t exploit these places for our energy needs, whether for fossil fuels or solar power. These desert lands are crucial not only for the animals that inhabit them but also for their roles they play, such as carbon sequestration, in helping mitigate the climate crisis.
These lands are significant to Native Americans, who have inhabited this land long before Europeans showed up. For years, members of the Western Shoshone and Goshute tribes in Nevada have worked to designate a 25,000-acre monument called Bahsahwahbee near Great Basin National Park. The Western Solar Plan will carve out 7,000 of those pristine acres for development.
“Our ancestors were massacred at Bahsahwahbee. It is unconscionable that the site would be considered by the federal government as a development zone instead of a place to be preserved and commemorated,” Ely Shoshone Tribal Elders Delaine and Rick Spilsbury wrote for the Great Basin Water Network. “The federal government doesn’t propose developments in other cemeteries or seek to bulldoze other peoples’ churches. In fact, graves and churches are generally protected under federal and state laws. But for the resting place of our ancestors, we have to wonder why it’s OK?”
These large solar projects are sure to raze more Native lands to power hundreds of thousands of homes across the West, often in cities far from where the energy was first produced. Once the solar installations are built, few jobs are likely to remain in those regions, which contradicts the central arguments local governments make in support of the projects.
When it comes to the Western Solar Plan, most of the major environmental groups have either stayed silent or, like the Wilderness Society, uncritically supported it as a positive step to help California shift its grid to 100 percent clean energy by 2035.
“I feel like we are working out here on the marginalized fringe, and we’re sort of pushed more to work with grassroots groups, local communities, scientists, and people who aren’t beholden to their big climate donors [like other environmental groups],” Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch said. “[Energy developers] call this a wasteland, like there’s no biodiversity, and we push back against that. We support photovoltaic solar panels, first on rooftops, parking lot canopies, or on really disturbed ground. But this desert has life. The very, very bottom of the list [for solar development] should be public lands. Ecosystems built on utility-scale solar projects are the last thing we should support in the fight against climate change.”
Cunningham’s argument is convincing, and it’s hard not to think that much of this has to do with people’s perception of the desert as a wasteland, as she puts it. Even the late David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club who was forced out for his radicalism, once remarked that he’d be willing to sacrifice the Mojave under the guise of diplomacy and compromise if it meant protecting scenic wilderness elsewhere. He later retracted the sentiment, but this reasoning still permeates much of the mainstream environmental movement, which is focused on slowing climate change at almost all costs — even if it means harming wild places in the process.
“I feel like we are working out here on the marginalized fringe. … This desert has life.”
Perhaps it will take an expert like Laura Cunningham and a desert-lover like Kevin Emmerich, who have a deep admiration for and understanding of desert ecology, to alter people’s perceptions. At least I hope so. It’s easy to imagine the public outcry that would ensue, for instance, if giant redwoods were on the chopping block to make room for a gargantuan solar field in the Sierra Nevadas. But, strangely enough, Joshua trees and desert tortoises don’t seem to hold the same intrinsic value.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Sept. 24, 2026 — Vertiv today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire King Environmental Services Ltd. (KES), a Europe-based provider of fluid management, commissioning and load-testing services for high-density, liquid-cooled data centers and other applications.
The acquisition is expected to expand Vertiv’s global thermal management services capabilities into Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and advance its strategy to support customers across the thermal chain. KES adds specialized fluid management, commissioning and load-testing capabilities spanning system preparation, performance validation, monitoring, maintenance and lifecycle optimization.
The transaction builds on Vertiv’s established North American fluid management presence, including its 2025 acquisition of PurgeRite, and represents the next step in expanding its global thermal and fluid management services platform. By combining KES’s regional field expertise and load-testing capabilities with Vertiv’s broader services portfolio, the company expects to provide more comprehensive support as customers deploy and operate complex AI and high-density infrastructure with greater reliability, efficiency and accountability.
“As computing density increases, the performance of cooling and power infrastructure will depend as much on execution in the field as on engineering and system design,” said Gio Albertazzi, CEO of Vertiv. “Our acquisition of PurgeRite, in December of 2025, established an important fluid management foundation in North America, and KES is expected to build on that foundation in EMEA. Together, these acquisitions advance our strategy to provide the specialized expertise and disciplined execution customers need as they deploy increasingly complex infrastructure at scale.”
That need for disciplined execution is particularly important as high-performance computing and AI workloads increase heat densities and accelerate the adoption of liquid cooling. In these systems, fluid quality is critical to uptime, thermal performance and equipment life. Contamination, trapped air, corrosion, improper chemistry and flow imbalances can reduce heat-transfer efficiency, contribute to equipment degradation and create commissioning and operational risks. Beyond initial commissioning, customers need lifecycle fluid management services to support system availability, thermal performance, equipment longevity and operational economics.
KES has built a strong reputation in Europe based on its technical specialization, experienced field teams, established operating infrastructure and safety culture. Its capabilities include fluid-system preparation, flushing, filtration, water treatment, commissioning and performance validation. KES also provides thermal load testing for liquid cooling infrastructure and electrical load testing for critical power systems.
Together, Vertiv and KES are expected to deliver significant customer benefits from an expanded set of capabilities designed to:
Reduce operational complexity through a single accountable partner for commissioning, testing, fluid management and ongoing operations;
Improve cooling system performance with clean, balanced and validated fluid systems that support optimal heat transfer and equipment efficiency;
Maintain compliance with regional fluid handling, treatment and disposal requirements; and
Increase confidence in infrastructure readiness through thermal load testing before facilities enter operation.
KES is headquartered near Dublin, Ireland, and serves customers across the EMEA region.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The financial terms were not disclosed and are not expected to be material to Vertiv’s financial results.
For more information about Vertiv’s portfolio of power and thermal management products, infrastructure solutions, IT systems and services for critical digital applications, visit Vertiv.com.
About Vertiv
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv does business in more than 130 countries.
About King Environmental Services
King Environmental Services Ltd. (KES) is a Europe-based specialist in fluid management, flushing, commissioning and operational validation for high-density, liquid-cooled data centers and other mission-critical facilities. Founded in 2002 and headquartered near Dublin, Ireland, KES serves customers across EMEA from key hubs in North Dublin and Frankfurt.
KES provides an integrated service covering design review and feasibility studies, pipework flushing, filtration and water treatment, testing, adjusting and balancing (TAB), data logging and thermography, and large-scale thermal and electrical load testing. The company bridges construction and live operation, validating that cooling systems are clean, balanced, efficient, design-compliant and ready for high-density and AI workloads.
America PAC is a super PAC that was created in 2024 by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, who co-founded Tesla and SpaceX, and owns the X social media platform.
In a July 2024 interview, Musk said the idea behind America PAC is “to promote the principles that make America great in the first place.” In a post on X that month, Musk wrote that “key values of the PAC are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom,” which he said Republicans “mostly, but not entirely” support.
More than half of the $261.2 million the super PAC reported spending during the 2024 election cycle went to helping elect Donald Trump, whom Musk endorsed for president. The group also spent millions of dollars backing the House and Senate campaigns of other Republicans.
According to its most recent quarterly filing with the Federal Election Commission, America PAC, as of June 30, had raised more than $50.3 million for the 2026 election cycle — almost all donated by Musk or his United States of America Inc. — but spent only about $87,000 on independent expenditures supporting federal candidates (two Republicans who won specialelections in April 2025 to represent Florida congressional districts). Independent expenditures are advertisements and other communications that expressly advocate for or against candidates for office.
Musk had said at an economic forum in May 2025 that he planned to “do a lot less in the future” in terms of political spending. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said.
However, this past July, the New York Times reported that Musk finally planned to get involved in the 2026 midterms and had “authorized his super PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million on a new field program in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to two people briefed on the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.”
The Times said America PAC planned to initially focus on Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, and was considering spending in North Carolina, Georgia and Texas. The group is also expected to spend on House races in California, Wisconsin and Washington.
Axios reported that the effort would be led by Chris Young, a Republican political operative and adviser to Musk, and “will focus on door-knocking, digital advertising and direct mail aimed at turning out the conservative base,” particularly Republican voters who often skip the midterms.
The Times said that America PAC is “closely coordinating” its field campaign work with two other conservative groups, Americans for Prosperity and the Sentinel Action Fund.
Of the ads the super PAC has run so far, a number have attacked Democratic Senate candidates on transgender issues. America PAC had spent more than $3.7 million on mostly digital or streaming ads, as of Sept. 23, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
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TALLAHASSEE, Florida — The Florida Supreme Court has ordered Circuit Judge J. Layne Smith to appear for a public reprimand after he told attorneys during a contentious hearing that he would like a deputy to “pull his gun and shoot all three of you.”
The court unanimously accepted the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission’s recommended discipline Thursday, saying Smith’s conduct “fell far below the standard of professionalism” expected of judges. Smith serves Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit and was appointed to the bench by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020.
The incident occurred during a September 2025 hearing in a long-running family dispute. Frustrated that attorneys could not confirm whether a party had been properly served, Smith made the shooting remark before immediately adding that he did not actually want the deputy to do so. He also mocked the lawyers as the “Keystone Cops” and “Apple Dumpling Gang.”
The Judicial Qualifications Commission found that Smith violated six judicial ethics provisions. Rather than contest the allegations, Smith acknowledged the misconduct, self-reported his behavior and agreed to the proposed punishment.
Smith recused himself from the underlying case about a week after the hearing and later issued a public apology. The Supreme Court did not suspend or fine him, but ordered him to appear personally for the reprimand at a date to be scheduled.
A group of 31 Democratic members of the US Congress has sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, criticising the Trump administration over “an apparent effort to interfere with, and potentially undermine” Brazil’s elections.
Latin America’s largest country will hold the first round of its presidential election on 4 October, with polls showing a technical tie between the incumbent leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
Journalists for CNN, MS Now and Politico were finally granted access to the White House on Thursday afternoon, many hours after a federal judge had ruled that the Trump administration must allow them back in after imposing a ban.
Earlier attempts by the journalists to enter the building had been unsuccessful, and lawyers representing the three organizations had told a judge that the White House has already “repeatedly violated” his overnight order requiring the Trump administration to return the press badges of journalists from the three news organizations.
Monthly ‘thank you’ payments for people hosting refugees to be cut from £350 to £100 from next year
Ukrainian refugees in the UK fear they could be left homeless after the government quietly axed 70% of funding for hosts of the Homes for Ukraine scheme, reducing monthly “thank you” payments to them from £350 to £100.
The scheme was launched after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has provided support for 181,000 of the 234,000 Ukrainians who have since sought sanctuary in the UK.
CNN senior reporter Betsy Klein gained access to the White House on 24 September, hours after a federal judge ruled against Donald Trump's media ban. The ban had barred reporters from CNN, MS Now and Politico from accessing the White House
Reporters whose White House access was revoked were allowed to enter the complex again, hours after a judge ordered the Trump administration to restore their press credentials.
‘If you’re not in the internal market, you don’t get the same protection,’ says French minister of policy designed to curb Chinese competition
France is leading a push to exclude the UK from the EU’s “Made in Europe” policy that could result in British companies losing out in the race to supply European countries with low-carbon technologies and electric cars.
Ramsey’s may be the best example in the ranking of a genuine Delaware farm experience. The Wilmington-area farm combines hayrides with a large pumpkin field, corn maze, barnyard animals, a children’s Spookley trail, pumpkin painting and other activities. Image courtesy of Ramsey Farm.com.
From cider doughnuts and pumpkin fields to bonfires and serious scares, we ranked eight Delaware-area fall outings — then matched them to the kind of autumn adventure you’re looking for.
MIDDLETOWN, Del. — Not all hayrides are created equal.
Some are old-fashioned tractor rides through pumpkin fields. Others come with corn mazes, cider doughnuts, bonfires and enough activities to keep a family busy for most of the day. And a few wait until dark before turning the wagon ride into a rolling Halloween nightmare.
So which one offers the best overall fall experience?
Delaware LIVE compared eight popular fall destinations in Delaware and nearby Pennsylvania, scoring the total experience based on the hayride itself, pumpkins, additional attractions, food and atmosphere, and — where appropriate — scare factor.
The result: Linvilla Orchards in Media, Pennsylvania, takes the No. 1 spot for the best total fall experience, while Delaware’s Ramsey’s Farm, Fifer Orchards, Filasky’s Produce and Frightland each offer reasons to stay closer to home.
The rankings are intended as a guide rather than a scientific rating. A low scare score, for example, can be a big advantage when the passengers are 5 years old. A spectacular haunted hayride can be perfect for a Saturday night with teenagers while being completely wrong for a Sunday afternoon with toddlers.
The real question may not be “What’s the best hayride?” but “What’s the best hayride for me?”
THE DELAWARE LIVE HAYRIDE RANKINGS
1. LINVILLA ORCHARDS — MEDIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Delaware LIVE score: 9.2
Linvilla wins by making the hayride only one part of a much bigger fall outing.
Its roughly 15-minute Harvest Hayride travels through the farm, but families can also explore Pumpkinland, tackle mazes, visit barnyard animals, pick apples, eat at the farm and shop the market and bakery.
There is no general admission charge to enter Pumpkinland; visitors pay for individual activities. Linvilla also offers evening Autumn Moon Hayrides and its family-oriented Hayride to the Witch’s House.
That combination makes Linvilla the strongest choice in the ranking for families looking to turn a hayride into a half-day or full-day fall excursion.
The downside may also be a consequence of its popularity: Expect crowds during prime October weekends, and buying timed hayride tickets in advance is a good idea.
2. RAMSEY’S FARM — WILMINGTON
Delaware LIVE score: 8.9
Ramsey’s may be the best example in the ranking of a genuine Delaware farm experience.
The Wilmington-area farm combines hayrides with a large pumpkin field, corn maze, barnyard animals, a children’s Spookley trail, pumpkin painting and other activities.
It also changes personality after dark.
Friday and Saturday bonfire nights beginning in October include an extended nighttime hayride, flashlight corn maze and bonfire.
Ramsey’s does not try to become a giant amusement park. That may be part of its appeal for families who want pumpkins, a wagon ride and some farm dirt on their shoes.
Bates Motel turns the hayride into a Halloween production built around actors, elaborate sets and special effects.
Located at Arasapha Farms in Glen Mills, Bates combines its Haunted Hayride with other nighttime haunted attractions. By day, however, the same farm becomes a much different destination with family-oriented harvest activities.
For people in northern New Castle County and the Chadds Ford area who want their hayride to be scary, Bates earns one of the highest scores in the comparison.
It is not the choice for small children.4. FRIGHTLAND — MIDDLETOWN
Delaware LIVE score: 8.7 — scare-night ranking
4. Frightland is Delaware’s answer to Bates, but on a larger scream-park scale.
The Horror Hayride is part of a series of haunted attractions visitors encounter during the night, making Frightland less of a simple hayride destination and more of a complete Halloween entertainment complex.
Its advantage is variety. If the goal is to spend an evening being scared rather than picking pumpkins, Frightland delivers multiple attractions at one location.
For New Castle County residents south of Wilmington and for Kent County visitors, it also avoids the drive into Pennsylvania.
This may be the hayride that looks most like the one people imagine when they hear the word.
The daytime Harvest Hayride takes visitors through the farm to the pumpkin area, combining the ride with the ritual of choosing a pumpkin. Other activities include a corn maze and a collection of outdoor attractions for children.
For Chadds Ford and Brandywine Valley families, it is also one of the most convenient full-scale pumpkin hayrides.
And there is an unusual twist: The same Arasapha Farms property that provides this traditional daytime outing becomes the home of Bates Motel after dark.
6. FIFER ORCHARDS FALL FEST — CAMDEN-WYOMING
Delaware LIVE score: 7.6
Fifer’s strength is the total orchard experience: pumpkin and apple picking, a large corn maze, outdoor play, cider doughnuts, food and additional seasonal activities.
That makes Fifer’s less about the wagon itself and more about spending a fall day on a Kent County orchard.
For families in central and southern Delaware, it can provide much of the big fall-festival experience without making the trip north into New Castle County or Pennsylvania.
7. FILASKY’S PRODUCE — MIDDLETOWN AREA
Delaware LIVE score: 7.0
Filasky’s is smaller and simpler, which may be exactly what some families want.
The fall season includes pick-your-own pumpkins, a soybean maze designed for children and hayrides through the fields. The farm also offers nighttime hayride and bonfire options, along with pumpkin doughnuts and Woodside Farm Creamery ice cream.
This is less of a destination theme park and more of a local farm outing.
8. DELAWARE STATE PARKS WAGON RIDES
Delaware LIVE score: 6.2
Do not let the lower score fool you. State park rides lose points in this ranking because there generally isn’t a pumpkin patch, bakery, giant maze or collection of attractions waiting when the wagon stops.
But that is also the point. Delaware State Parks offers seasonal wagon rides at several parks, providing a different kind of fall outing built around scenery, the outdoors and, at some locations, time around a campfire.
For someone who wants fall colors and a relaxing ride rather than a festival, the state parks could move straight to the top of the personal list.
SO WHICH HAYRIDE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
Best total fall experience: Linvilla Orchards
Go here if the hayride is just the beginning. Pumpkinland, apples, mazes, animals, food and the bakery make it the easiest place on the list to spend several hours without running out of things to do.
Best traditional hayride: Arasapha Farms
A tractor, wagon, farm fields and pumpkins. For families looking for the classic harvest experience rather than an amusement park, Arasapha gets closest to the picture on the apple cider jug.
Best New Castle County family outing: Ramsey’s Farm
For Wilmington-area families who do not want to cross the state line, Ramsey’s combines the ingredients that matter most: hayride, pumpkins, corn maze, animals and plenty for younger children.
Best Kent County fall day: Fifer Orchards
Come for the pumpkins and maze, stay for the cider doughnuts and orchard atmosphere. Fifer’s is one of the strongest total fall farm experiences in central Delaware.
Best haunted hayride: Bates Motel
If the wagon itself is what you want to be scary, Bates gets the edge. The ride is the attraction rather than simply transportation to something else.
Best full night of Halloween scares: Frightland
If one haunted hayride isn’t enough, Frightland’s collection of attractions makes it a better fit for people looking to devote an evening to Halloween.
Best for little kids: Arasapha or Ramsey’s
Both deliver the farm-and-pumpkin experience without requiring children to navigate a giant Halloween production. Linvilla’s Witch’s House is another option for children ready for something a little spooky without the intensity of a full haunted attraction.
Best quiet ride: Delaware State Parks
No scream park. No giant midway. No need to drag a 25-pound pumpkin back to the car. Just climb aboard and enjoy Delaware in the fall.
Best small-farm experience: Filasky’s
For Middletown-area families who would rather visit a smaller farm than a major regional attraction, Filasky’s offers pumpkins, a children’s maze, hayrides and seasonal treats.
Best food-and-orchard day: Fifer or Linvilla
Fifer gets the Delaware nod for cider doughnuts and a traditional orchard atmosphere. Linvilla offers an even larger combination of bakery, market, food and attractions.
ONE CHADDS FORD TRADITION — BUT NO HAYRIDE
The Great Pumpkin Carve remains one of the Brandywine Valley’s signature October traditions, returning Oct. 15-17 in Chadds Ford.
But visitors should not arrive expecting a hayride.
Organizers have discontinued hayrides because of wet conditions in the meadow. The centerpiece remains the giant pumpkins carved by artists and illuminated after dark.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware LIVE’s guide to eight fall hayride, farm and Halloween experiences in Delaware and nearby Pennsylvania.
Who: Families, couples, teenagers and anyone looking for a fall farm, pumpkin or Halloween outing.
When: Most attractions operate from September through late October or early November. Days and hours vary considerably.
Where: Wilmington, Middletown and Camden-Wyoming in Delaware; Glen Mills and Media in nearby Pennsylvania; and participating Delaware State Parks.
Best overall: Linvilla Orchards for the total fall experience.
Best Delaware family choice: Ramsey’s Farm in the Wilmington area.
Best for scares: Bates Motel in Glen Mills for the haunted hayride itself; Frightland in Middletown for a full night of haunted attractions.
Before you go: Fall farm schedules are particularly dependent on weather and field conditions. Peak October weekends can sell out, and some attractions use timed tickets. Check the farm or attraction’s current schedule, ticket availability and weather policy before leaving home.
(The Center Square) – While Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the FBI tout declining crime rates, others remain concerned about persistently high rates in the state’s metropolitan areas.
Time for me to hand off the X9.
Full Disclosure: Yes I got it for free, I was the one who reached out and asked for one (I did pay $350 for air shipping)
Datacentre hailed by government was supposed to start operating next year but may be held back into mid-2030s
A huge datacentre project hailed by the UK government will miss its launch date next year and could be delayed into the mid-2030s.
The site in Loughton, Essex, was described as the country’s largest AI supercomputer when it was announced in 2025, but power supply problems mean it now faces a lengthy wait before coming online.
This new initiative will strengthen cooperation between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the European Union (EU), on high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), supporting digital transformation and the development of a more integrated regional HPC ecosystem.
Credit: EuroHPC JU
A panel for the EU–LAC Supercomputing Network for AI, which took place as part of the CARLA conference in Córdoba, Argentina, Sept. 22, 2026, marked the kick-off of this initiative.
The EU-LAC Supercomputing Network for AI will address challenges including fragmented HPC capacity, uneven access to computing resources, investment needs and skills gaps, while supporting greater regional integration and stronger links between LAC and European HPC ecosystems. It will support the objectives of the AI continent action plan and is aligned with the EU-LAC Digital Alliance and the EU’s Global Gateway Strategy.
The implementation commenced in August 2026 and will continue for two years, focusing on seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay.
The consortium brings together seven leading European HPC and research institutions, each contributing specific expertise and resources to the initiative: The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain) as coordinator, the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (Portugal), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Germany), CSC-IT Center for Science (Finland), the Institute of Information Science (Slovenia), the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (France), and CINECA (Italy).
The network is expected to expand over time to include more countries participating in the EU–LAC Digital Alliance.
The EU-LAC Supercomputing Network for AI will benefit from financial support from the European Union and alignment with national initiatives by Spain and Brazil within the framework of the EU-LAC Digital Alliance and Global Gateway. It will strengthen the EU-LAC partnership in advanced digital skills and technologies, while creating new opportunities for researchers and industry to develop and test models, explore relevant use cases, and collaborate on shared challenges based on shared values.
Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC JU, said: “The EU–LAC Supercomputing Network for AI brings Europe and Latin America closer together through high-performance computing and I am confident that European expertise, infrastructure and experience will positively help in accelerating innovation and tackling shared challenges across both regions.”
European Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jozef Síkela, said: “The responsible development of supercomputing and artificial intelligence can help tackle the everyday challenges faced by people across Latin America and the Caribbean, from natural hazards to health and energy. Through Global Gateway, we are bringing together our expertise to develop solutions that will help us achieve these objectives.”
Key Objectives and Activities
To accelerate digital transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean, the initiative will build partnerships that will enhance interoperability and technical alignment with the European HPC ecosystem. It will include:
Policy Dialogues: Facilitate national and regional policy dialogues to support the federation of HPC resources in LAC and their future interconnection with the European HPC ecosystem.
Capacity Building: Strengthen expertise and skills in HPC, AI, and Machine Learning (ML) through training programs, workshops, and an annual EU-LAC Summer School on HPC and AI, with a focus on increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.
Joint Use Cases: Develop four joint EU-LAC use cases that demonstrate the practical application and societal benefits of HPC and AI collaboration. These use cases will address climate modelling, energy efficiency, natural hazard prediction, health, and large language models (LLMs).
BELLA Integration: Promote the strategic integration of the BELLA high-speed connectivity infrastructure to enable secure and efficient data exchange, paving the way for the future federation of HPC resources in the region. BELLA is a joint initiative connecting the research, education, and digital data networks of Europe and Latin America, specifically via the Ella link 6 000 km submarine cable.
About the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a joint initiative of the European Union and participating countries that pools resources to make Europe a global leader in supercomputing. It has already deployed 12 world-class supercomputers across Europe, including JUPITER in Germany and Alice Recoque in France, Europe’s first exascale systems. Researchers, industry and public-sector users throughout Europe can access these systems through EuroHPC Access Calls to advance scientific research and develop applications with industrial and societal impact. The EuroHPC JU is overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories (AIF) across Europe, complemented by 13 AI Factory Antennas, to offer free, customized support to SMEs and startups. The EuroHPC JU is also building Europe’s quantum computing infrastructure by integrating European quantum technologies with its supercomputers, while investing in research and innovation across the entire European supercomputing value chain—from processors and software to applications and skills. Following the adoption of Council Regulation (EU) 2026/150, the EuroHPC JU’s mandate has been expanded to include the deployment of AI Gigafactories across Europe, an initiative for which the JU recently launched a call for tenders, as well the advancement of quantum technologies.
About the EU-LAC Digital Alliance
The EU-LAC Digital Alliance is a bi-regional initiative that promotes digital transformation and innovation through collaboration between Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean as part of the EU’s Global Gateway Strategy. The Digital Alliance operates across five pillars: political and regulatory dialogue, connectivity, private sector engagement, satellite data and space services, and additional projects aimed at boosting competitiveness and economic growth such as the EU-LAC Supercomputing Network for AI. Global Gateway is the EU’s positive offer to reduce the global investment gap and boost smart, clean and secure connections in digital, energy and transport sectors, and to strengthen health, education and research systems.
Alexander Kuzmenko was fatally injured on fishing trip
Region had been flagged as site of recent bear activity
Forward joined Pittsburgh Penguins this year
Pittsburgh Penguins forward Andrei Kuzmenko has stepped away from the team after his father, Alexander Kuzmenko, was killed in a bear attack in Siberia this week.
REN TV was the first to report the death of the 62-year-old, who was a well-known hockey coach in Russia.
Delaware LIVE is introducing a French Bread Total to help readers decide whether a storm calls for a run on bread, milk, eggs and the other essentials for surviving a weekend indoors. On our seven-point French Toast Scale, this storm earns a 1 out of 7 for most Delaware households.
The storm’s effects will vary across the state, with the greatest threat coming from tidal flooding and dangerous surf
DOVER, Del. — A nor’easter drawing attention from Philadelphia and national news outlets can sound like a single storm with a single forecast. For Delaware residents, the more useful question is where they live — and how close they are to tidal water.
The National Weather Service expects the greatest impacts along Delaware’s ocean beaches, bays and tidal waterways. Coastal flooding is already a concern Thursday, Sept. 24, and could recur with successive high tides. Stronger winds are possible at the beaches Friday night into Saturday. Farther inland, residents are more likely to encounter gusty winds than flooding.
Editor’s note: Delaware LIVE is introducing a French Bread Total to help readers decide whether a storm calls for a run on bread, milk, eggs and the other essentials for surviving a weekend indoors. On our seven-point French Toast Scale, this storm earns a 1 out of 7 for most Delaware households. The rating does not discount the serious flooding risk for people in low-lying coastal and tidal communities.
What is a nor’easter?
A nor’easter is an East Coast storm named for the northeast winds it typically brings to coastal areas. It can occur at any time of year and does not have to bring snow.
This storm is developing offshore. Its persistent winds are pushing water into Delaware’s bays and tidal waterways, where elevated water levels can cause flooding at more than one high tide. The storm’s exact track remains uncertain, particularly for how strong coastal winds become Friday night and Saturday.
What should Delaware expect?
Sussex County: The beaches and Inland Bays face the greatest combination of hazards. A coastal flood warning covers the Delaware beaches and inland Sussex until 2 a.m. Saturday. Forecasters expect 1 to 2 feet of water above ground level in low-lying areas near shorelines and tidal waterways. Some roads in coastal and bayside communities could become impassable. The Weather Service says more serious flooding remains possible around Rehoboth Bay and Indian River, depending on the storm’s track.
At the ocean beaches, breaking waves could reach 12 feet in the surf zone. Dangerous rip currents, beach erosion and possible dune breaches are also concerns. A high surf advisory and high rip current risk continue through Saturday evening.
Kent County: A coastal flood warning also remains in effect until 2 a.m. Saturday. Low-lying roads and communities near Delaware Bay and tidal waterways face the greatest risk. The warning does not mean all of Dover or Milford will flood.
New Castle County: A coastal flood advisory covers vulnerable areas along tidal shorelines and waterways until 1 a.m. Saturday. Away from the water, the main effect is expected to be gusty weather. The Weather Service says excessive rainfall and freshwater flooding appear unlikely at this time.
When will it end?
The current coastal flood warnings expire early Saturday, but that is not necessarily the end of the effects. Dangerous surf continues through Saturday evening, and the Weather Service says tidal flooding could persist into the weekend. Winds and conditions on the water are expected to improve Sunday. Residents near the coast should check updated alerts as the storm’s path becomes clearer.
To Go Box | Delaware’s nor’easter
When: Coastal impacts are underway Thursday. Stronger beach winds are possible Friday night into Saturday.
Where: The greatest risk is along the beaches, bays and low-lying tidal waterways of Sussex and Kent counties.
What: Repeated high-tide flooding, possible road closures, dangerous surf and beach erosion. Inland areas can expect gusty winds.
French Toast Scale:1 out of 7 for most households. Coastal residents should take local flood warnings seriously.
What to do: Check alerts before traveling near tidal roads, never drive through floodwater and stay out of the surf while the high rip current risk is in effect.
Campbell will lead market expansion of Bifrost Electronics quantum readout amplifier; previously led Solid Power from startup to Nasdaq
ARVADA, Colo., Sept. 24, 2026 — Bifrost Electronics, a leading developer and manufacturer of advanced electronic hardware for quantum computers, today announced that successful deep-tech entrepreneur Doug Campbell has joined the company as its Chief Executive Officer.
Doug Campbell. Credit: Bifrost Electronics
Campbell brings more than two decades of start-up leadership in commercial electronics, aerospace systems, and hardware manufacturing as well as a proven track record of scaling high-growth technology companies, optimizing manufacturing logistics, and fostering sustainable engineering solutions. One of his more notable entrepreneurial success stories was leading Colorado-based battery technology company Solid Power from startup to IPO.
Bifrost is solving readout-scaling problems for superconducting and spin-based quantum hardware with a new class of amplifiers that eliminates Josephson junctions. Amplifiers that rely on Josephson junctions require shielding, extra cryogenic lines and control electronics and are manufactured with specialized processes with nanometer tolerances. The Heimdall Amplifier is more robust, easier to scale, and requires less control hardware.
“The Bifrost team has built something the quantum industry genuinely needs, and I’m glad to be joining at this inflection point. I’ve spent my career taking deep-tech start-ups out of university labs and into production at scale,” said Campbell. “The mission now is building the operational and commercial discipline to get the Heimdall Amplifier into customers’ hands.”
The company’s Heimdall Amplifier is key to expanding the production of quantum hardware from low-volume research systems to scaled commercial deployments. The system provides qubit readout amplification without the operational fragility and magnetic sensitivity that have made amplification difficult to deploy at scale. The amplifier is intended to run without shielding, pack densely inside a cryostat, and be produced with the standard processes used to manufacture semiconductors.
“Doug gives us the executive bandwidth leadership to allow us to focus on what we do best – pushing the technology forward – while he builds the commercial engine around it,” said Connor Denney, Bifrost co-founder and Head of Research and Development. “We’re on track to complete rigorous testing over the coming months, and having a proven operator in place as we prepare for rollout gives the whole team confidence in the road ahead.”
The company, which is a spin-out from the Colorado School of Mines, has raised $5.5 million to date led by Caruso Ventures with participation from Range Ventures and others, and is headquartered on the Elevate Quantum campus in Arvada, Colorado.
“Doug’s leadership role at Bifrost is another signal that quantum tech is moving into large-scale production,” said Dan Caruso, Managing Director of Caruso Ventures and a member of Bifrost’s board of directors. “Doug is the right person to guide the company and map a successful path to commercialization with customers in the quantum sector as well as national labs and defense in the long term.”
In 2011, Campbell co-founded Solid Power as a spin-out of the University of Colorado Boulder to commercialize all-solid-state battery technology. Under his leadership, Solid Power grew into the largest climate-tech venture to come out of CU Boulder and one of nine companies with CU Boulder roots to reach unicorn status, forming development partnerships with BMW, Ford and SK On before going public in 2021. Campbell also co-founded Roccor, a supplier of deployable structures for small satellites. The company was acquired by Redwire Space in 2020.
Today, quantum-limited cryogenic amplifiers range from $25,000 to $45,000 each at research-grade volumes. The Heimdall Amplifier’s CMOS-compatible fabrication pathway and architectural simplicity will lower that cost significantly and allow for manufacturing at higher volumes.
“Colorado’s quantum ecosystem is driving the entire industry forward and Bifrost Electronics is a vital part of that progress for regional and global companies,” said Jessi Olsen CEO of Elevate Quantum. “Doug’s leadership will be instrumental in bridging advanced materials and quantum capabilities to meet the rapidly growing demands of next-generation infrastructure.”
Bifrost plans to roll out the Heimdall Amplifier later this year.
In Norse mythology, the Bifrost is a magical bridge that connects the mortal realm to Asgard, home of the gods. Bifrost Electronics’ technology also serves as a bridge, taking signals from the quantum world into the human world of classical mechanics. Heimdall is the god who guards the Bifrost and the entrance to Asgard.
About Bifrost Electronics
Bifrost Electronics is a Colorado School of Mines spin-out building scalable, magnetically insensitive electro-optic quantum amplifiers that solve the qubit-readout bottleneck limiting quantum computing, sensing, and defense applications. Its flagship product, the Heimdall Amplifier, is designed to replace legacy readout hardware with a smaller, more manufacturable alternative, allowing more qubits to be packed into a single system. Bifrost is headquartered on the Elevate Quantum campus in Arvada, Colorado. Learn more at bifrostelectronic.com.
Man left bloodied and hurt after immigration enforcement agents tried to arrest him in Evanston, a Chicago suburb
An eyewitness has described how two federal immigration agents allegedly beat and badly injured a US citizen in a botched arrest attempt in Illinois, and left the man dazed and bleeding on the ground as they walked away after realizing their apparent mistake.
Bystander Ryan Garton told the Associated Press that he saw the agents pinning down the man, who is Black, on the side of the road as he was driving home on Sunday in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. He said he pulled over to record what was happening on video.
Study of 160 quantum companies finds 90% rely on foreign suppliers and 74% serve customers abroad, highlighting the importance of international market access as governments pursue quantum economic and national security and supply-chain resilience
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24, 2026 — A new international survey of the quantum industry finds that the supply chains supporting quantum technologies are deeply global, with companies of every size relying on suppliers and customers across national borders. The survey included responses from 160 companies headquartered in 15 countries that reported suppliers in 36 countries, customers in 49 countries, and manufacturing locations in 25 countries.
Credit: QED-C
The Global Quantum Supply Chain report maps where quantum companies source inputs, manufacture components and systems and reach customers. The effort brought together the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC), Quantum Industry Canada (QIC), UK Quantum, Japan’s Quantum Strategic Industry Alliance for Revolution (Q-STAR), and Korea Quantum Industry Association (KQIA) with engagement across India’s quantum ecosystem.
The study was undertaken to give policymakers and investors a clearer view of the cross-border relationships underpinning the emerging quantum economy. As quantum technologies move toward commercialization, companies need access to specialized suppliers and growing customer markets worldwide, while governments seek to protect critical technologies and strengthen supply-chain resilience.
Key findings include:
90% of respondents reported at least one foreign supplier.
74% reported at least one foreign customer.
Respondents reported a median of three supplier countries and three customer countries.
Component suppliers reported selling into more countries than quantum systems developers.
Companies of every size, including those with fewer than 10 employees, reported buying from suppliers and selling to customers in multiple countries.
The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan were the five locations most frequently named for both suppliers and customers.
“Quantum innovation does not stop at national borders, and neither do the supply chains that make it possible,” said Dr. Celia Merzbacher, Executive Director of QED-C, “As the industry scales, the report gives leaders and policymakers a clearer view of how deeply connected our ecosystem already is. With its recently expanded membership and new charter, ICQIA can use this shared evidence to strengthen international coordination, safeguard critical technologies and preserve trusted access to the necessary suppliers, customers and markets.”
“Quantum is inherently international across markets, standards, research, talent, capital and supply chains,” said Jonathan Legh‑Smith, Executive Director of UKQuantum. “The report highlights this global interconnection and emphasizes the need for practical cooperation between quantum nations, as set out in the inter‑governmental Quantum Development Group’s April 2026 communique.”
“Taken as a bloc, the European Union is the second most frequent location of both suppliers and customers in this survey, which shows how much the global quantum industry already works with European companies. The survey also shows that the countries this industry buys from and the countries it sells to are not always the same, which is worth keeping in mind as Europe shapes its industrial and trade policy for quantum.” Cécile Perrault, Executive Director of the European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC)
“Quantum commercialization requires more than access to technology—it requires access to global markets,” said Dr. Brad Kim, Vice Chairman of the Korea Quantum Industry Association (KQIA). “For Korea, the priority is to help our companies contribute specialized capabilities and become trusted partners in global quantum supply chains. KQIA will work with fellow industry associations to translate this report’s findings into practical cooperation that expands market access, strengthens supply-chain resilience and protects critical technologies.”
“This study not only speaks to the interconnectedness of global quantum supply chains, but also makes clear the prominent role Canada’s quantum industry plays in this ecosystem. Quantum comprises a diverse set of technologies, and a strong Canadian position across those supply chains is critical for achieving our national security and resiliency objectives – and better understanding of the international ecosystem is essential to ensuring our growth alongside our trusted global partners,” said Sean Lee, Acting CEO of QIC.
“This study shows that the strength of the quantum industry will depend not only on national capability, but on how effectively those capabilities connect across borders,” said Abhishek Purohit, India Ecosystem liaison for the Global Quantum Supply Chain Study and Director of Technology Strategy at QURECA. “For emerging quantum economies such as India, this creates an important opportunity to contribute specialised capabilities, integrate more deeply into global value chains, and become a trusted partner in the next phase of quantum commercialisation.”
The report’s findings highlight the importance of policies that preserve access to markets and preferred suppliers in like-minded countries while protecting critical technologies. The data provides policymakers, investors, and other stakeholders with a clearer picture of the international relationships that support innovation and growth across the quantum sector.
About the Survey
The Global Quantum Supply Chain Flows Survey was distributed in March and April 2026 to quantum companies in the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, and India. Respondents reported the country locations of their headquarters, suppliers, customers, and manufacturing associated with quantum components or systems, excluding widely available, easily substituted off-the-shelf parts. The survey did not collect company-identifying trade details.
A total of 160 companies met the study’s inclusion criteria. Research organizations were not included. Companies headquartered in China were not represented among respondent headquarters, although they appeared in the data as a location named by respondents.
The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) is the world’s premier association of pioneers in the quantum technology marketplace. Members of QED-C enable the real-world application of quantum technology, and, in turn, grow a robust commercial industry and supply chain. Sitting at the intersection of tech, academia, business, entrepreneurship, and policymaking, QED-C is uniquely able to foster the collaborations the industry needs. QED-C is where experts and organizations share knowledge and collectively shape how quantum technology will grow. QED-C is managed by SRI. More information: https://quantumconsortium.org.
Increase comes after Fed decision to raise interest rates, as Americans struggle with high prices and stagnant wages
US mortgage rates surpassed 7% for the first time since January 2025, according to federal lender Freddie Mac, aggravating a housing market that has endured years of high interest rates and low supply.
The increase comes after the US Federal Reservehiked interest rates, which directly affect mortgage rates, for the first time since 2023, citing high inflation.
LEWES, Del., Sept. 24, 2026 — John Snow Labs has announced the program and speaker lineup for the Applied AI Summit, taking place October 13-15 online. Now in its seventh year, the free conference brings applied data scientists, engineers, researchers and enterprise leaders together to share what they have learned putting AI into production, and one major theme has surfaced: show your work.
“When we opened the call for papers this year, more than 50 sessions and 15 keynotes focused on how their organizations test, validate, and monitor AI systems that are already running,” said David Talby, CEO, John Snow Labs. “Applied AI teams are spending their time proving their AI works, is safe and reliable, and that it aligns with organizational values and rules. We heard participants loud and clear, and we built the entire program around it.”
The Program
Day 1: Applied Generative AI – Sessions cover evaluation and observability for production agents, enforceable data contracts for freshness and lineage, turning generative models into reliable system components, multilingual model safety, real-time feature pipelines, and zero-trust patterns for agents that can spend money.
Day 2: Applied Healthcare AI – Sessions cover clinical benchmarks, governed longitudinal patient records, audit-ready evidence pipelines for MedTech, risk-adjustment audit workflows, and governance for medical device software that changes after deployment.
Day 3: Applied AI Governance – Sessions cover independent bias audits, medical AI red teaming, continuous risk reassessment, production drift monitoring, detection of AI-native attacks, responsible AI release gates, and how fundamental rights impact assessments under the EU AI Act.
The Speakers
Since inception, the event has focused on applied AI, so the program and speakers reflect the work that is happening in practice, not in theory. Speakers come from Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, ServiceNow and ThoughtSpot in enterprise software; Capital One, BlackRock, Guardian Life, Raymond James and Finance of America in financial services; Expedia, Wayfair and Zendesk in retail and e-commerce; SiriusXM in media; General Motors in automotive; Genentech, Takeda and Hologic in life sciences and medical devices; and the Mayo Clinic, Stanford Health Care, Sheba Medical Center and Fred Hutch Cancer Center in healthcare delivery and research.
Real Open-Source Contributions
The summit has always covered open-source software, and this year, three keynotes report contributions to MedHELM, the open evaluation project for medical AI.
Nigam Shah, Chief Data Scientist at Stanford Health Care, presents the extension of MedHELM from single-turn scoring to agentic evaluation with tool use, through the HealthAdminBench and PhysicianBench benchmarks.
David Talby, CEO at John Snow Labs, presents PacificMed, 70+ benchmarks contributed to MedHELM that cover bias, fairness, safety and reliability, derived from a register of 201 legal and regulatory instruments to identify failure points a system does not meet.
Emily Xue, Head of Enterprise AI at Scale AI, presents CliniCARE-Bench alongside the contribution model that enables other organizations to add datasets and benchmarks to MedHELM while keeping patient-linked material private and preventing benchmark contamination.
The Applied AI Summit is designed for practitioners and emphasizes technical depth, open knowledge sharing, and lessons from production deployments. The virtual event is free to attend worldwide and all sessions will be available on demand for two weeks following the conference. Register here.
About John Snow Labs
John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, provides state-of-the-art software, models, and data to help healthcare and life science organizations put AI to good use. Developer of Medical LLMs, Healthcare NLP, the Generative AI Lab, and the Patient Journey Intelligence Platform, John Snow Labs’ award-winning medical AI software powers the world’s leading academic medical centers, pharmaceuticals, and health technology companies. Creator and host of the Applied AI Summit (formerly the NLP Summit), the company is committed to further educating and advancing the global AI community.
Company outlines path for durable, accelerated growth through four strategic growth vectors
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 23, 2026 — Everpure has provided details on its business expansion providing durable, accelerated growth. The company also reaffirmed its fiscal year 2027 outlook and provided a preliminary outlook for fiscal year 2028.
“Everpure is at an inflection point as we expand our horizons to managing data in the enterprise and solutions for hyperscalers,” said Charlie Giancarlo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Everpure. “A decade of committed investment in an integrated, extensible architecture has created a structurally higher growth baseline in our core business. This same core IP has unlocked three distinct, incremental markets—allowing us to expand our opportunity, drive significant operating leverage, and provide enhanced visibility into our long-term financial trajectory.”
Sustained R&D Innovation
Over the past five years, Everpure has consistently dedicated on average 19% of annual revenue to R&D. Everpure’s focused R&D investments on a single, unified platform is a superior use of invested capital versus fragmenting resources across multiple legacy architectures.
This disciplined strategy has fueled both the durability of Everpure’s core business, demonstrated by eight consecutive quarters of accelerating revenue growth, and its expansion into new high growth markets. Building upon a track record of consistent market share gains across both inflationary and deflationary cycles, Everpure expects its strong R&D leadership to extend its product velocity while accelerating penetration into new growth markets.
Four Strategic Growth Vectors
By leveraging its proprietary intellectual property and extensible architecture, Everpure has unlocked multiple new distinct market opportunities alongside its core foundation. The company outlined four strategic growth vectors:
Core and Core AI: Includes FlashBlade, Flash Array, and Evergreen//One subscriptions, both CPU- and GPU-attached.
Modern Data Software: Includes Everpure Data Intelligence, Everpure Data Stream, Portworx, Everpure Resilience, and Everpure Cloud.
Scale AI: Includes FlashBlade//EXA solutions tailored for neoclouds and AI-native providers.
Hyperscale Solutions: Includes DirectFlash technology designed specifically for hyperscalers.
Core and Core AI is projected to continue to gain market share, and the three new growth vectors—Modern Data Software, Scale AI, and Hyperscale Solutions—are expected to represent approximately 20% of total revenue by fiscal year 2030.
Financial Outlook and Capital Management
“Everpure’s financial profile is durably resetting to higher levels of growth and profitability,” said Tarek Robbiati, Chief Financial Officer at Everpure. “We have demonstrated over the past decade-plus that we can profitably grow and take share in our core business across inflationary and deflationary cycles. This has been made possible by our unique differentiated IP which is now enabling a sustained level of financial performance well above Rule of 40.”
To support this trajectory, Everpure maintains a disciplined capital management framework centered on funding organic investment, strengthening the balance sheet, pursuing strategic mergers and acquisitions, completing share buybacks to offset dilution from stock-based compensation, and executing additional select buybacks to return excess capital. Today’s new framing preserves flexibility to fund a much larger opportunity set than the company has ever had.
The company re-affirmed its fiscal year 2027 revenue and operating income guidance provided on its second quarter fiscal year 2027 earnings call, and provided a preliminary outlook for fiscal year 2028.
About Everpure
Everpure (NYSE: P) allows organizations to take control of their data with an industry-leading, ever-evolving storage and data management platform. We help companies unleash the power of their data by ensuring it is accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform in the AI era. We make data management effortless while simultaneously scaling performance and significantly reducing energy consumption. With one of the highest Net Promoter Scores for over a decade, Everpure is the choice of the world’s most innovative organizations. For more information, visit www.everpuredata.com.
Warning comes hours after Poland says fire at Starlink satellite station was ‘act of sabotage’
Russia could launch a limited military attack against a Nato country in the coming months, Danish intelligence said, in one of the starkest warnings yet by western security services.
In a report published on Thursday, the Danish defence intelligence service warned of a “low but growing risk” that Russia could launch long-range strikes on Nato infrastructure supporting Ukraine, or carry out a limited incursion into a neighbouring country with a small number of troops, potentially operating without insignia.
Resolution Foundation says households outside London are paying hundreds of pounds a year more in council tax than they would be under a fair system
Tim Shipman has written about what will be coming up at the Labour conference next week in his cover story for the Spectator. He says:
Labour special advisers summoned last week to the pillared state room on the first floor of No. 10 to hear the plan for conference from Burnham’s political secretary, Hayden Munro, left in no doubt that the PM wants to be a transformational figure. The conference ‘narrative’ these advisers were urged to push includes the telling line: ‘This Labour government will bring forward the biggest change to Britain in 40 years, with a new political and economic model.’ On the specifics, Burnham will pledge: ‘We will make the choices that are needed to end rough sleeping, solve the social care crisis and get more young people into work.’
Burnham will pledge to run a ‘cost-of-living government’ with further ‘immediate action’ to ‘provide the breathing space people need’, as well as outline plans to devolve power ‘out of Whitehall’, ‘reindustrialise Britain’ and take back public control of ‘the essentials in life – such as energy, water and housing’ to ‘make them affordable again’.
Ultimately, the election choice is Burnham’s. ‘If you knew what Keir’s aides thought, you knew what he would do,’ says a ministerial aide. ‘But Andy has political opinions of his own.’ Burnham may go for it. But those closest to him doubt it. ‘He likes risk, but he has stuff he wants to get done,’ says one close confidant. While outsiders think his ambitions require an election, Burnham thinks he can transform Britain without one. ‘Andy really cares about the devolution stuff,’ the ministerial aide observes. ‘Most of Westminster roll their eyes but he thinks that will change the country. He thinks doing that will make him a great prime minister.’
And those who think none of that will deal with Britain’s economic problems seize on another clue. A Labour adviser concludes: ‘Ultimately I think Burnham and his team will do what they often do with difficult decisions, and not make one.’
What I imagine is that some schools will offer some of these subjects where their local labour market demands, and this is where our mayors and our local leaders are really helping to shape that in their area.
So I wouldn’t expect a school to offer all of these, as they don’t offer all GCSEs at the moment. They will specialise in particular areas.
If you’re trying to do engineering or construction, for example, you know that involves a lot of problem solving, a lot of maths, a lot of thinking, as well as the hands-on skills that’s required.
So it’s not dumbing down, it’s the opposite of that, actually, because this is about raising the standards and the rigour and regulating these qualifications.
Thirty-seven-year-old in custody on suspicion of crimes including criminal damage with intent to endanger life
The far-right agitator and anti-migrant activist Daniel Thomas has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life after he filmed himself appearing to slash the side of a dinghy in the middle of the Channel while a rescuer was onboard.
The arrest came as the Home Office recorded 781 arrivals in 10 boats on Wednesday, the highest number for a single day so far this year. Responding to the figures, the government said it would “push further and harder” to crack down on the people organising the crossings.
Hurricane Polo's intensity fluctuated between Category 4 and Category 5 — the strongest on the hurricane scale — off Mexico's southwestern coast. Here's the latest on its path.
President Trump is hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping for meetings and a state dinner on Thursday, as the world's two most powerful countries try to extend a tariff truce and grapple with a rivalry on advanced AI.
Democrats must show links of climate shocks to ‘kitchen table’ issues, California governor says
It’s a mistake for Democratic politicians not to talk about climate change, and the reason they don’t is “because they don’t know how to talk about it”, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, said on Wednesday in an interview with the Guardian and the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting and New York Climate Week, Newsom also predicted that the midterm elections in November would bring “the end of Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it”. To prevent Trump from stealing those elections, voters must turn out in such overwhelming numbers that he “couldn’t possibly contest” the outcome. If the US president nevertheless declares a national emergency or otherwise attempts to invalidate the results, Newsom said, then “we the people have to step up. The courts have to intervene. Congress has to do its job and stand up for the rule of law.”
The number of reported assaults on Great Britain’s railways has risen by a fifth to a record high of almost 25,000 incidents in a year.
Unions said the “horrendous” figures showed the need for more staff and policing, as the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) revealed a sharp increase in assaults on the travelling public and on railway staff last year.
Wallace and Gromit stop-motion models and other beloved creations raise money to train new generations of animators
Wallace’s reaction as the auction got into full swing might have been a trademark “good grief!” – and the enthusiasm of some of the bidding could have caused even the phlegmatic Gromit to show surprise.
Fans of Wallace and Gromit and other beloved creations of the Aardman studio seized the chance to grab souvenirs when more than 200 pieces – including Wallace, Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run puppets that starred in Aardman productions – went under the hammer on Thursday.
Docker and the CNCF will partner on an open spec to make agent permissions portable
Docker Sandbox Kits let you package an AI agent together with exactly what it is allowed to do, so anyone can pull the same agent with the same limits, review changes to those limits, and enforce them. Now, Docker has published the Docker Sandbox Kit Spec, the open specification behind Kits, under Apache 2.0 and is committing to contributing the spec to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for neutral governance.
A Kit is an ordinary OCI container image that carries three things: the agent, the tools it uses, and a typed list of everything it asks to reach, such as network hosts, credentials, and volumes. That list lives inside the image, so pinning the image pins the agent and its requests together. A Kit builds, pushes, pulls, signs, and scans like any container image, because it is one.
“Standards are what let an ecosystem move fast without fragmenting, and few companies understand that better than Docker. By delivering Sandbox Kits as standard OCI images, Docker is giving the industry an open, repeatable way to package an AI agent, its tools, and its guardrails as one artifact. OCI is the foundation the cloud native ecosystem is built on, so a standard for agents that builds on OCI reaches the whole ecosystem at once. The CNCF welcomes this, and we’re excited to work with Docker and the community on making it broadly adopted.”
Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF
Why the OCI image is not enough on its own
An OCI image tells a runtime how to build and start a piece of software. It has no place to state which hosts that software may call, which credentials it may use, or which files it may keep between runs. Those decisions are made outside the image, at launch: in docker run flags, a Compose file, a CI job, an onboarding doc. For a web service, that was fine. The program was fixed, it needed a network and a port, and the flags rarely changed.
Agents are different. Claude Code and Codex decide at runtime what to do: install packages, call APIs, use credentials, change the environment they run in. So the access they need is granted piece by piece, by hand, usually to get a task unblocked. A few months in, nobody can answer a simple question: what is this agent allowed to do? The answer is spread across shell history, dashboards, and someone’s memory, and it cannot be handed to a teammate or compared with last week.
Every team answers that question on its own today, and every runtime vendor could ship its own format for the answer. That is the fragmentation OCI was created to prevent, and it is why Docker is now proposing one artifact, built on OCI, governed in the open by the CNCF community.
How a Sandbox Kit Spec fills the gap
The Sandbox Kit Spec does not fork or replace any OCI specification. It uses the annotation extension point OCI already defines to carry the agent’s requests in the image manifest. Nothing in a registry, scanner, or signing tool needs to change.
Kits began as a feature of Docker Sandboxes, Docker’s product for running agents inside isolated microVMs, where a Kit defined one sandbox: the agent, its tools, and what it could reach. The Sandbox Kit Spec turns that definition into a standard OCI image and opens the format so any runtime can implement it. Docker Sandboxes is the first runtime that enforces it. It should not be the only one, and under Linux Foundation governance it will not be.
Two things follow for anyone running agents. The answer travels with the agent: a teammate can pull it, a reviewer can diff it, and a conforming runtime can enforce it. And when a new version asks for more, the change shows up as added lines someone can refuse.
Kits from across the ecosystem
Kits for tools from AWS, Box, Datadog, Dynatrace, JFrog, NanoClaw, OpenClaw, Palo Alto Networks, and Snyk are available now, covering cloud, observability, security, artifact management platforms and more.
That is what a shared format makes possible. A database vendor can publish a Kit that connects any agent to its service with the scope it recommends. An agent maker can publish its own Kit, so the request list comes from the people who built the agent. A platform team can publish one for the company, and every engineer starts from the same place.
Containers made software portable. Kits make authority portable: the set of things you deliberately hand an agent travels with the agent, in the same image, and means the same thing wherever a conforming runtime opens it. Docker looks forward to formally submitting Kits to the CNCF and working with the community to ensure Kits further the goal of secure, reliable agentic AI and AI governance.
Build a Kit
If you make a tool that agents use, publish a Kit for it. If you run agents, start from one and share it with your team. The Docker Sandbox Kit Spec, its capability pages, and a worked tour of a real Kit are available at docker/sandbox-kit-spec. If there is a Kit you cannot express, or a rule a runtime cannot implement, open an issue.
The FDA has warned a major compounding pharmacy that it violated federal law by making copies of blockbuster weight-loss drugs in "inordinate amounts."
During a meeting at the White House, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that two pandas will be coming to Zoo Atlanta, the first at the zoo since 2024.
Xi Jinping has called for extensive cooperation with Washington to avoid the “Thucydides trap” that could put the US and China on a military collision course amid rising tensions over artificial intelligence, trade and Taiwan.
At the start of his summit meeting with Donald Trump in the White House, the Chinese president laid out terms for a mutual understanding that he said could steer the two competing superpowers away from future military conflict and on to a road of mutual gain.
Former Yes musician plays at sanctuary to raise awareness of animals that remain stuck in cages at ‘bile farms’
Rick Wakeman has played to all kinds of people around the globe, but he has now performed to an audience he had never encountered before – an enclosure of 150 bears.
The former Yes musician, who has gone on to have a prolific solo career, played the piano at a Vietnamese bear sanctuary.
An inaugural Oct. 2 Summit in Dewey Beach will bring caregivers, clinicians, advocates and other professionals together to recognize exploitation and improve support for survivors.
DEWEY BEACH, Del. — A person being trafficked may still go to work, attend school or see a doctor. What those around them may not see is the person controlling their pay, housing, access to drugs or ability to leave.
That is the challenge at the center of Delaware’s inaugural Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit on Friday, Oct. 2, at Hyatt Place Dewey Beach. The Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors is bringing survivors, national experts and Delaware professionals together to improve how the state recognizes exploitation and responds to people affected by it.
Two ways exploitation can stay hidden
Imagine Elena, an adult who cleans homes. She depends on the person who hired her for a place to sleep and a ride to work. Her promised pay never arrives, but she fears losing her housing if she leaves. Someone meeting Elena might see a hard-working employee, without knowing how little control she has over her work or money. Elena is fictional, but her situation illustrates a recognized pattern of forced labor.
Now imagine Jay, a 16-year-old who accepts a place to stay from someone he trusts. That person then expects commercial sex in exchange. Jay may be frightened to tell a teacher or caregiver, or may not describe what happened as trafficking. Jay is also fictional. Jennifer Cooper, a registered nurse and forensic coordinator at Nemours Children’s Health, told Delaware LIVE that young people may not recognize food, housing or other things of value as part of commercial sexual exploitation. Under federal law, a minor induced into commercial sex is a trafficking victim even without proof of force, fraud or coercion.
Victims do not fit one age, gender or background. Trafficking also does not require kidnapping or crossing a border. The common issue is exploitation: force, fraud or coercion used to compel an adult to provide labor or commercial sex, or the commercial sexual exploitation of a minor.
What Delaware’s numbers show
The National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 29 Delaware cases involving 32 victims in 2025. In 2024, it identified 32 cases involving 61 victims. The hotline cautions that reports made to it do not measure how often trafficking actually occurs; people who never contact the hotline are outside its count.
Another measure comes from Delaware’s Office of the Child Advocate. Its contribution to the Delaware Anti-Trafficking Action Council’s 2025 report says the office screened 65 juvenile trafficking referrals, including 40 classified as suspected trafficking and 25 involving young people assessed as at risk. Those are referrals, not 65 confirmed crimes, and they cannot simply be added to the hotline total.
Together, the figures show why professionals who encounter vulnerable people need to know what questions to ask, how to respond safely and where to turn for help.
Bringing the people who respond into one room
Cooper said she helped pursue a Delaware summit after traveling out of state for advanced training. The Oct. 2 program includes tracks for mental health professionals, medical providers, direct-service workers, law enforcement and survivors. Sessions are expected to address family-related trafficking, trauma, survivor care and coordinated responses.
“I want to bring together the people who are doing the work,” Cooper told Delaware LIVE. She said organizations serving vulnerable people can benefit from knowing what others nearby are doing and where services are missing.
The summit is an opportunity for psychologists and other mental health clinicians, advocates, health care workers, educators, caregivers and community leaders to learn from survivors and from one another. It is also open to residents who want a better understanding of trafficking in Delaware. A private, invitation-only executive roundtable will take place Oct. 1; the public summit follows Oct. 2.
To Go Box
What: Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit
When: Friday, Oct. 2, 2026
Where: Hyatt Place Dewey Beach, 1301 Coastal Highway
Who: Professionals, advocates, caregivers, organizational leaders and interested residents
Admission: $75 regular admission, listed as available through Sept. 30
Fighting escalates after Tigrayan rebels form new coalition aimed at overthrowing Abiy Ahmed government
There are growing fears of a return to civil war in Ethiopia after an offensive by fighters from Tigray into the neighbouring states of Afar and Amhara and the formation of a new rebel alliance aimed at overthrowing the government of the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.
About 600,000 people died between 2020 and 2022 during a devastating war between the Ethiopian army and the political party and paramilitary group the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Both sides are now accusing the other of triggering a return to open conflict.
Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, a state representative, said that "this is not about three letters" amid GOP criticism about her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.
UK watchdog fined video app in 2023 for failing to enforce minimum age limit and remove underage users
TikTok will pay a £12.7m fine to the UK’s data watchdog after dropping an appeal against a ruling that it did not do enough to keep children below the age of 13 off the platform.
Three million chickens a week will be processed at the state-of-the-art facility in Tamworth – a fifth of all those eaten nationwide
It is for birds? Is it for planes?
The sleek, rust-coloured saucer settles into the earth, mirroring the surrounding hills. It looks like an art gallery or a high-end conference centre – an architectural masterpiece designed to sit lightly on the land.
Hot honey has spent the past few years turning up on everything from fried chicken and pizza to biscuits and ice cream. The mix of sweet and heat became so popular it earned its own name: swicy.
US attorney general Todd Blanche says justice department will ask high court for help after lower court rejected policy
The Trump administration will ask the US supreme court to allow it to deport immigrants to countries other than their own, the latest effort to seek approval for a controversial policy that fulfils Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, said on Thursday that the Department of Justice would ask the conservative-majority supreme court for help, nearly a week after a lower court judge rejected the policy.
Man accused of being accessory to murders at Stalag 326 VI K amid race to prosecute suspects before they die
A 105-year-old man is under investigation on suspicion of being an accessory to multiple murders at a Nazi prisoner of war camp, German prosecutors have said.
The case, which is being handled by the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund, centres on the Stalag 326 VI K camp in western Germany, in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Breakfast foods are increasingly escaping the morning hours, and no food has benefited more from that change than the pancake. More Americans are eating breakfast ... Read moreThe post Dinner is better with pancakes, and millions of Americans agree appeared…
Clip of the former Tory MP staring intently at fellow panellist is shared widely online
Rory Stewart has been an Afghan NGO leader, a Conservative leadership candidate, a Harvard professor, a popular podcaster, and the deputy governor of an Iraqi province. This week, he created a moment that drew wider attention than any of them: he fixed a beady gaze on a fellow Newsnight panellist for the longest four seconds in television history.
Stewart, who now co-presents The Rest Is Politics with Alastair Campbell, appeared on the BBC programme on 18 September – but in the last few days, a clip of the moment in question has taken on a life of its own on social media.
"The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing," writes the Associated Press.
"If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: "We could lose control of the future to AI."
Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the UN's International Independent Panel on AI, called this
"a moment of global awakening" to possible threats, noting AI from top companies had behaved in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions, taking actions "that would be crimes if committed by a human".
In his presentation, OpenAI's Sam Altman agreed the discussion about AI "feels different in recent weeks," even suggesting specific reforms:
Altman: We need a mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards, standards for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding about what is happening. We need accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes. And we need secure channels among governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts, to share emerging vulnerabilities and new threats.... We will all be better off if we can agree on what good evidence, good safeguards, and good oversight look like on the global stage.
Speaking next, Anthropic's Dario Amodei agreed that standard-setting was important, also calling for "common global standards for testing AI models for loss-of-control risks and misuse risks — and a notification system for AI incidents that are significant to global security." Reiterating his September 12th call for an industry-wide safety collaboration, Amodei pointed out that Anthropic committed to embedding external evaluators "similar to a food inspector" and recommended other companies do the same. "Some have already agreed to adopt this measure."
Besides calling for global cooperation between governments to set international standards, Amodei also offered two other specific ideas:
Amodei: We should begin with narrow agreements that every member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make biological weapons....
We should build evaluation and verification systems that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into frontier model capability and can verify each other's commitments.
"No leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone. We commit to working with governments in this room on this urgent work."
Trump must accept that pressure alone "doesn't work on Xi. It doesn't work on China, and it doesn't work on the Chinese people," experts tell CBS News.
US consumers are starting to opt out of the streaming world as several services raise prices without offering many perks
It may not be quite as politically buzzy as the price of gasoline or eggs, but another household expense is going up for millions of people. Disney has brought the price-gouging experience of its theme park home again by raising the prices of most iterations and bundles of its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services. Whether you pay to watch them with or without ads, separately or bundled together, you’re probably getting a price hike of a couple of bucks per month. The few bundles that will remain the same price feature ad-supported versions of both services (plus ESPN). Don’t worry, though; paying extra to avoid the ad-supported versions of those services won’t mean that you’re missing out on some cross-promotional opportunities. Disney’s terms of service note that they reserve the right to insert ads before and after programming on whatever subscription tier they want, regardless of what you’re paying for. True magic!
This particular magic isn’t reserved for Disney, though. Price hikes among streaming services have become so common that The Verge has a dedicated page aggregating the news of them, which tends to arrive every few months. Apple, apparently high on Emmy fumes, has raised its prices four times in four years, keeping pace with many of its competitors despite a vastly smaller dedicated catalog. Depending on which version of Peacock subscribers use, they’ve seen their bills padded by five or six dollars a month just since the summer of 2025, including another increase last month. Netflix, meanwhile, hasn’t gone up since March 2026. That’s not a reprieve; that’s a sign another hike must be around the corner.
REHOVOT, Israel, Sept. 24, 2026 — CollPlant Biotechnologies Ltd. today announced the publication of joint research conducted by its subsidiary LightSolver Ltd., a pioneer of pure photonic computing and developer of the Laser Processing Unit (LPU), and the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), one of Europe’s premier supercomputing institutions.
Published in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, the research demonstrates the potential of LightSolver’s all-optical computing architecture to dramatically accelerate one of the most fundamental and computationally intensive workloads in high-performance computing (HPC): solving large-scale sparse systems of linear equations.
In the joint study, researchers from LightSolver and HLRS benchmarked projected LPU performance, using an emulator of LightSolver’s LPU architecture, against established state-of-the-art iterative algorithms running on a GPU. Across the benchmark problems evaluated, the study projected that the LPU could achieve time-to-solution acceleration ranging from approximately 40× to more than 80,000×, depending on the algorithm and problem evaluated.
Large-scale linear systems sit at the mathematical core of some of the world’s most demanding scientific and engineering simulations, including computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, molecular dynamics and materials science. Solving these systems can dominate runtime and energy consumption in HPC applications, making them a critical computational bottleneck and an important target for next-generation computing architectures.
The findings highlight the potential for photonic processors to serve as specialized accelerators for large-scale linear systems, particularly for structured problems and computational workloads in which these mathematical operations must be solved repeatedly.
Executive Commentary
“This joint work demonstrates how an emerging photonic computing architecture can be evaluated against established numerical methods and modern GPU platforms,” said Prof. Michael Resch, Director of the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). “The results provide valuable insight into where photonic computing may offer advantages for high-performance computing workloads and how it could be integrated into future hybrid computing systems.”
“This research marks an essential milestone in validating the LPU as a transformative computing layer alongside traditional CPUs and GPUs,” said Dr. Ruti Ben-Shlomi, CEO and Co-Founder of LightSolver. “Working with HLRS and its world-class researchers gave us an exceptional opportunity to benchmark and validate our technology against established computing platforms and test it on some of the most demanding computational problems. Collaborations like this are invaluable as we continue to expand the range of problems the LPU can address and demonstrate its potential across science, engineering and high-performance computing. We look forward to continuing to work with leading research institutions around the world to validate, challenge and advance this new computing architecture.”
The Future of HPC: Heterogeneous Hybrid Architectures
The published research reinforces LightSolver’s vision for the future of enterprise and scientific computing: a heterogeneous hybrid architecture in which CPUs, GPUs and LPUs work together, each executing the workloads best suited to its underlying architecture:
CPUs provide general-purpose processing, orchestration and system control.
GPUs accelerate massively parallel digital computing and tensor-based workloads.
LPUs serve as specialized photonic accelerators, offloading computationally intensive mathematical workloads, including linear and differential equations and optimization-where LightSolver’s optical architecture can provide significant acceleration.
This hybrid approach is designed to enable supercomputing centers, data centers and cloud providers to integrate photonic acceleration into existing computing environments, potentially delivering dramatic reductions in time-to-solution, energy consumption, computing costs and carbon footprint for targeted workloads.
Research Publication Details
The peer-reviewed paper, titled “Accelerating Sparse Linear Solvers with an Optical Laser Processing Unit,” was presented and published in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (Workshops and Special Sessions).
The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart was established in 1996 as Germany’s first federal supercomputing center. As a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), HLRS operates some of the world’s most powerful supercomputing infrastructure, providing high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and simulation services to academic researchers and industrial partners across Europe.
About CollPlant
CollPlant Biotechnologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CLGN) is an innovative technology company operating at the intersection of deep-tech computing and advanced biotechnology. Through its subsidiary LightSolver, CollPlant is advancing the development of proprietary all-optical laser based computing architectures designed to resolve the world’s most demanding computational bottlenecks across artificial intelligence, aerospace, financial engineering, and high-performance computing. Concurrently, CollPlant remains a leader in regenerative medicine, pioneering plant-derived recombinant human collagen (rhCollagen) technologies for 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs and medical aesthetics.
Since June 30, full-time faculty at the university have worked without a renewed employment contract. What were supposed to be routine contractual negotiations between faculty and the university administration have evolved into a long-lasting dispute over key concerns.
Like many higher learning institutions, the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-UD), or professor’s union, acts as the bargaining authority for all full-time faculty. They renegotiate collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) with the university roughly every three years.
While moderate disagreements over contract stipulations are common during negotiations like these, this bargaining cycle has been uniquely contentious.
Since 1972, when AAUP-UD was granted bargaining authority for professors, there have been seven cycles in which faculty have not been able to reach a contract agreement with the university before the previous one expired. This is now the eighth such cycle, and second in a row, that has expired before an agreement was reached.
One of the most contentious issues this cycle is uncoincidentally listed as one of AAUP’s core missions: academic freedom.
The AAUP website defines academic freedom as “the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in their academic field, and to teach and publish findings without interference from administrators, boards of trustees, political figures, donors, or other entities.”
The website also notes that academic freedom protects faculty’s rights to speak freely as both a member of institutional government and as a citizen.
According to the most recent bargaining update from the union, released on Aug. 20, the university administration has proposed its own interpretation of academic freedom. It stipulates that faculty members would only have the right to speak freely “when participating in institutional governance,” a stark contrast to the current CBA, which affords that right “whether or not as a member of any agency of institutional governance.”
Persephone Braham, a professor and president of AAUP-UD, suggested that this may be a risk prevention strategy by the university in the wake of federal initiatives to penalize universities that platform viewpoints inconsistent with the federal government.
According to Braham, however, that is not a valid enough reason to restrict academic freedom.
“You can’t run a university based on risk,” Braham said. “Risk is inherent in inquiry.”
Braham also believes that a key reason for the delay in reaching an agreement is an unprecedented disconnect between the university’s bargaining team and AAUP-UD.
During the last bargaining cycle in 2023, the university’s advisory team was led by former provost Matthew Kinservik, an English professor at the university. Now, that team is headed by Robert Nagle, an external labor lawyer based in Philadelphia.
“I don’t impute any ill intent,” Braham said. “But I do think that familiarity with academic norms and expectations is missing from a lot of that side.”
Another notable hitch in reaching an agreement has been a dispute over what the continuing track position should look like for professors.
Historically, the continuing track position has offered significant job security and benefits for faculty who are not interested or are unable to follow a tenure-track trajectory. Continuing track professors are typically hired temporarily, but receive progressively longer contracts for a period of 13 years until they are offered five-year contracts on a rolling basis. These contracts are renewed annually, so professors are always in the first year of their five-year contract.
Up until the most recent bargaining update in Aug., the university and AAUP-UD had clashed over their interpretations of that five-year contract. While the university asserted that continuing track professors could be terminated with one year’s notice at any point in their five-year contract, the union argued that professors would be eligible to carry out the full remainder of their contract.
The bargaining update revealed that an agreement on the contract’s definition had been reached between the two parties. The university agreed to adopt language similar to AAUP-UD’s interpretation of the five-year contract via a faculty senate resolution to be introduced at a later date.
Despite a consensus being reached, many union members are still concerned by the implications of what they consider to be attempts by the university to weaken the continuing track position.
According to AAUP-UD’s June 10 bargaining update, the university had proposed that the administration be given “complete discretion” when choosing to hire adjunct faculty, instead of being restricted to pre-established parameters. This, in combination with the university’s continuing track proposals, has created some uneasy feelings for full-time faculty.
“If you go after continuing track faculty, and we get fewer continuing track faculty because those positions are being filled by adjuncts, there’s a lot of ongoing work that comes to the tenured faculty,” Braham said. “Everything that affects the people who have less rights than us affects the people with more rights eventually. It’s basically, they’re a test case.”
Salary issues and proposed raises also troubled staff during negotiations. AAUP-UD initially proposed salary increases of 18% over three years, which the university countered with a proposal of an 11% increase over five years. This was seen as unreasonably low by the union, even for an opening offer.
“It doesn’t start things off on a good foot when you insult the other party,” Braham said. “And people are insulted.”
The proposed 11% increase over five years would average out to a 2.2% yearly increase in salary, which is significantly below the United States’ 12-month inflation rate of 3.4%. The university’s most recent offer was a 10.75% increase over four years, which averages out to an annual increase of 2.7% — still not enough to keep up with rising prices, assuming inflation remains steady.
This has been a source of frustration for AAUP-UD, which feels that the university’s priorities are misaligned when it comes to financial management.
The next bargaining session has yet to take place. Both parties have pledged to provide bargaining updates as negotiations move forward.
On Sept. 21, Rick Deadwyler, vice president for public affairs at the university, acknowledged the state of negotiations in the following statement made to The Review.
“Negotiations between the University and the faculty union continue,” Deadywyler stated. “Progress has been made in several areas, though some issues remain unresolved. We appreciate the thoughtful engagement and effort being devoted to these discussions as we work together so that an agreement can be reached.”
While there has been some recent headway, the results of negotiations remain unclear as faculty enter their fourth month out of contract.
“This university is very wealthy, but has, for the last bunch of years, been prioritizing building wealth rather than building learning,” Braham said. “And so we, the faculty, are cut to the bone.”
Activists gathered outside the OpenAI offices on Monday during climate week in New York City
On Monday evening, protesters gathered outside the unmarked Manhattan offices of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, holding signs calling to “Eat the rich, save the planet”. Over the next two days, groups also picketed outside the offices of fellow tech giants Google and Amazon; other protesters, including clergy, were arrested while disrupting a closed-door AI health summit in the city. Tonight, protesters will target a Brooklyn gas power plant that was set to close – until it was purchased to power AI datacenters.
The protests come on the heels of an Anthropic employee quitting his job with a warning that intensified an already-growing AI panic: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
What can DRC’s national dialogue achieve?Expert commentjon.wallace
President Tshisekedi and the opposition both want national dialogue. But it remains to be seen whether they can agree on the nature of the DRC’s problems, let alone their solutions.
When President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Félix Tshisekedi finally announced a ‘national dialogue’ on 27 August, he evoked the country’s long history of previous negotiations. Too often, he said, they had been about elite power sharing, had not meaningfully included the Congolese people, and had legitimized armed insurrection. This time will be different, he promised.
Tshisekedi appealed directly to the Congolese people by proposing a series of public consultations in all 26 provinces, culminating in a convention in Kinshasa. Unlike previous dialogues, this process has a more ambitious aim. It not only seeks to address the causes of insecurity and inequality in DRC and identify reforms. It also seeks to reconstruct or re-found the state.
The opposition immediately denounced the project. The C64, a coalition made up of opposition heavyweights including Moïse Katumbi, Martin Fayulu, Delly Sesanga and Jean-Marc Kabund, rejected Tshisekedi’s proposal. So too did the ‘Sauvons le Congo’ platform created by exiled former president Joseph Kabila.
Tshisekedi’s plan, they claim, is intended above all to legitimize his attempt to change the constitution, possibly allowing the president to extend his rule beyond his two-term limit, which ends in 2028. They point to a controversial bill that would pave the way for a referendum allowing the modification of article 220 of the constitution, which forbids changing the number or duration of presidential terms.
Points of (dis)agreement
There is much that the DRC’s government and opposition disagree on. But there are two points of convergence. One, publicly acknowledged, is the need for a national dialogue to address the country’s serious challenges. However, apart from the need to bring peace to the eastern provinces, there is no consensus on what these challenges are.
The other point of convergence, acknowledged only behind closed doors, is that elections probably cannot be held by the end of Tshisekedi’s second term in 2028. There are three main reasons: First, little progress has been made in organizing them. Technically there is still time to do so, but the quality of elections held in 2028 would be in question.
For Tshisekedi, the national dialogue is an opportunity to create a ‘united front’ – under his control – aligned against Rwanda.
Second, important territories in eastern DRC remain captured by the M23 armed group. Any attempt to exclude these provinces from elections could be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of their secession, raising fears of the break-up of the country. Third, some members of the opposition may see a dialogue as a way to gain power without going to the polls.
There is therefore broad, albeit tacit, agreement on the need to delay elections in favour of ‘dialogue’. But consensus falls apart when talk of detail begins. Indeed, it raises the question: what dialogue is needed to resolve which crisis?
For Tshisekedi, the national dialogue is an opportunity to create a ‘united front’ – under his control – aligned against Rwanda. In the president’s telling, the DRC’s problems stem mainly from Rwanda’s support for the M23 in North and South Kivu provinces. Since late 2021, M23 fighters have seized large swathes of territory, including the provincial capitals of Goma and Bukavu. Tshisekedi has dismissed opposition calls to integrate M23 in the national dialogue, saying the Doha Process – Qatar-led talks hosted in Switzerland – is the only appropriate venue for negotiating with them.
But for many in the opposition, as well as the Catholic and Protestant churches, the conflict is more a symptom of the political crisis than its cause. In their view, the M23’s success has been fuelled by dissatisfaction with bad governance and corruption under Tshisekedi’s government.
Many want a neutral convenor for a dialogue, such as the churches, and a venue outside of the DRC that would allow exiled politicians to participate. But Tshisekedi has ruled out an external location. And he has made clear that religious denominations will play a secondary or even symbolic role.
What a post-2028 transition might look like, if elections are not held, is still open for debate. The concept recalls the two-year ‘glissement’ (literally, ‘sliding’) that former president Joseph Kabila negotiated to remain in power beyond the end of this second term, in 2016-17.
For those close to President Tshisekedi, there is hope of getting broad agreement on a transition that could last three to five years. That would be a de facto extension of the president’s tenure beyond constitutional limits, if he remained in office for the duration. Some in the opposition would like to see a shorter transition, even without Tshisekedi. This would see a power-sharing agreement that would pave the way for a new electoral commission and fresh elections.
However, for now the country’s opposition seems fragmented and unable to shape the terms of the dialogue. Crucially, they lack the leverage of significant popular mobilization: a long-postponed opposition rally on 15 September saw relatively little participation on the streets of the capital. And the US, which recently signed a critical minerals deal with the DRC, is seen to be backing Tshisekedi. The president therefore seems likely to move forward with his plan. A recent presidential ordinance laid the groundwork for the dialogue proceeding under Tshisekedi’s control.
The position of the Catholic and Protestant churches may yet prove influential. For the moment, they have not commented publicly, preferring to try to negotiate for a stronger role. However, should their position change and church leaders choose to actively boycott the dialogue, it could diminish the legitimacy of the process. The Catholic church is an important political actor in the DRC: it was instrumental in organizing against a Kabila third term. For now, however, Tshisekedi appears to have the stronger hand.
It may be that Tshisekedi’s stated goal of going beyond past national dialogues to ‘re-found’ the state is just political rhetoric. The risk is that he intends to use talks as a way of co-opting part of the opposition, just as Kabila did in 2016-17.
Meanwhile the opposition wants to wrest power from Tshisekedi but also does not necessarily favour elections to resolve the political crisis. It may therefore view dialogue as the best means of unseating the president and taking power. Either way, the two sides’ framings are fundamentally at odds. It remains to be seen whether all parties can agree on the nature of the nation’s problems, let alone their solutions.
The debate over the dialogue is a reminder that the security situation in the east cannot be neatly separated from national politics. Talk of changing the constitution by Tshisekedi’s camp waned in early 2025, after the M23 seized Goma and Bukavu. It resurged once the threat was contained.
Fundamentally linked
The current assemblage of processes – Washington for DRC–Rwanda negotiations, the Doha process for DRC–M23 talks and now, the national dialogue – draw lines between phenomena and actors that are fundamentally linked.
The relatively limited objectives of the Washington and Doha processes are at least clearer than the national dialogue’s ambiguous aim of ‘re-founding’ the Congolese state or ‘creating peace’. But each process’s success is linked to the other. No agreement with the M23 can exist without an accord with Rwanda. And peace in the east will require progress on transitional justice and community reconciliation – issues which should be part of any national dialogue.
Can a national dialogue deliver the reforms DRC desperately needs? Currently, the greatest risk is that it is limited in exactly the way Tshisekedi said it must not be: to an exercise in which political elites agree how and when power will change hands.
Industry’s first open-source, qubit agnostic distributed quantum compiler brings scale-out deployment capability to a previously monolithic market
CHICAGO, Sept. 24, 2026 — memQ, an industry leader in quantum networking for scalable and distributed quantum computing, announced today the public release of its distributed quantum compiler (DQC). This integral part of a distributed quantum computing environment will be released as a publicly available, open-source offering available on GitHub.
memQ’s DQC is a compilation framework enabling users to compile and schedule quantum programs across fully user-defined distributed quantum networks – even those with different qubit types, from different vendors. The software converts a standard quantum circuit into a distributed program that executes optimally over the user’s network, taking into consideration the actual computing and networking resources available and generates a time-resolved execution schedule.
Its modular architecture gives users complete control over qubit connectivity both within and between QPUs, as well as the different connectivity and hardware restrictions such as gate durations and entanglement-generation rates. To speed up usability and deployment, memQ is also releasing a paper describing the framework, which demonstrates how it can be used to explore the distributed quantum computing design space, including the relationships among network topology, processor connectivity, compilation strategy and scheduling.
Distributed quantum computing provides a realistic path beyond quantum’s biggest obstacle: the scaling limits of a single quantum computer. Industry urgency is increasing, as evidenced in the United States Executive Order 14413 issued in June of 2026 directing certain government agencies to develop plans for using quantum networking to enable distributed quantum computing. Achieving this goal requires understanding how to divide a program among processors, coordinate its execution and manage the entanglement resources used to perform these operations between processors. memQ’s open-source framework makes this integrated set of tools available today to researchers, developers and system builders without requiring them to be experts in every layer of distributed quantum computing.
“We already provide the unique ability to connect quantum systems without collapsing the quantum state – but truly reaching utility scale in quantum computing will require even more than that. Quantum users need the ability to easily distribute their workloads across available hardware, networking, software and application layers to truly solve large-scale problems,” stated Manish Kumar Singh, Chief Product Officer for memQ. “For the first time, the open source memQ DQC framework delivers a practical, accessible way that distributed quantum computing approaches can be built, evaluated and executed.”
“As the quantum industry moves toward distributed architectures, the availability of standardized, qubit-agnostic tools is essential,” said André Konig, CEO of industry analyst firm Global Quantum Intelligence. “By open-sourcing their Distributed Quantum Compiler, memQ is lowering the barrier to entry and accelerating how developers design and evaluate scalable quantum networks.”
About memQ
Founded in 2021 as a technology spin-out from the University of Chicago, memQ is dedicated to enabling the scalable implementation of quantum computing through standards-based connectivity across optical connections between quantum computers anywhere. The company’s portfolio provides secure connectivity and control across local, campus, metro, and wide-area quantum compute resources with high-fidelity and low-loss, regardless of qubit structures employed. More information is available at www.memq.tech.
FIU becomes an IonQ preferred university partner in Florida, securing the state’s first on-premises trapped-ion quantum system to drive research, workforce development, and economic growth.
MIAMI and COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 24, 2026 — IonQ has announced a contract with Florida International University (FIU) to deliver its Superion 256-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer for installation at FIU.
This contract establishes FIU as IonQ’s flagship academic partner in Florida, creating a central hub for quantum research and education across the region. This agreement marks the first sale and deployment of a Superion 256 trapped-ion quantum computer in Florida.
“This key partnership with Florida International University represents a major milestone in expanding direct physical access to IonQ’s industry-leading, high-performance quantum hardware,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “By housing our Superion 256 system directly on campus, FIU will lead the region in quantum research and training.”
“Having this 256-qubit quantum computer right on campus positions FIU researchers at the forefront of national quantum innovation,” said FIU President Jeanette M. Nuñez. “This partnership provides our 1,200 faculty members, 56,000 students, and regional industry partners with direct access to one of the most advanced computing architectures in the world. It also puts the university in a leading position to engage with key federal agencies to advance recently launched quantum initiatives that address many national needs in the areas of sensing, cryptography, commercialization and workforce development.”
FIU maintains an active national research showcase and briefing center in Washington, D.C. with robust engagement among federal agencies, which is expected to support the partnership with Maryland-based IonQ.
The sixth-generation IonQ system features 256 physical trapped-ion qubits. The hardware will be housed in a specialized, secure facility built on FIU’s campus, with installation currently expected in late 2027, following completion of FIU’s on-campus data center. Students, faculty, visiting scholars, and affiliated research centers will gain direct access to the IonQ Superion system. Scientific applications and research are expected to span material science, artificial intelligence, logistics, cybersecurity, health, and power grid management.
“The 256 physical qubits system located in Miami will enable our team to run complex computational workflows,” said FIU Senior Vice President for Research and Economic Development Andres G. Gil. “They will also train the skilled workforce needed to support Florida’s growing quantum industry by developing new curricula, degree programs, and certificates in quantum computing and collaborating closely with industry partners across South Florida and beyond.”
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions 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 Florida International University
Florida International University is a Top 50, preeminent public research university with 55,000 students from all 50 states and more than 140 countries, as well as an alumni network of more than 340,000. Located in the global city of Miami, the university offers more than 200 degree programs at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, including medicine and law. FIU faculty are leaders in their fields and include National Academy members, Fulbright Scholars, and MacArthur Genius Fellows. A Carnegie R1 institution, FIU drives impactful research in environmental resilience, health, and technology and innovation. Home to the Wall of Wind and Institute of Environment, FIU stands at the forefront of discovery and innovation. With a focus on student success, economic mobility and community engagement, FIU is redefining what it means to be a public research university.
New results show how purpose-built AI could help quantum computer manufacturers reach fault tolerance sooner
ULM, Germany, Sept. 24, 2026 — QC Design today published “Over 10x reduction in logical error rates with Meridian,” a white paper showing that Meridian, its purpose-built AI system for fault-tolerant quantum computing design, achieved lower logical error rates than published methods and general-purpose AI agents across its entire suite of over 100 fault-tolerance design tasks. Logical error rate measures how often protected quantum information fails.
A quantum computer’s architecture determines its hardware needs and runtime. Better choices can save years of development and millions in capital expenditure. Finding the best architectures requires expertise spanning computer science, quantum error correction, device physics and engineering. Today, only a small number of people have this kind of expertise.
Meridian expands what quantum hardware teams can explore. Its specialized AI scientists combine frontier models, human-curated knowledge and validation tools from Plaquette, QC Design’s quantum design-automation platform. Plaquette serves as an accurate world model, testing candidates under realistic hardware imperfections so Meridian can distinguish genuine improvements from designs that score well for the wrong reasons.
“Every quantum manufacturer we meet is working on designing the best architecture for its hardware,” said Dr. Ish Dhand, co-founder and CEO of QC Design. According to co-founder Prof. Martin Plenio, “Meridian combines AI-driven exploration with the modeling and validation needed to solve that design problem. It raises the ceiling of what a hardware team can design and thus build.”
The white paper evaluates one part of architecture design: the circuits that detect errors in protected quantum information. The 100+ task suite spans 10 error-correction code families, varied hardware layouts and error models representing the major quantum computing platforms.
Meridian outperformed established methods from the scientific literature, achieving a median reduction of over 10x in logical error rates across the evaluation suite. For each task, QC Design compared Meridian with the best-performing circuit produced by five leading published algorithms. Compared with a general-purpose agent based on OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Meridian achieved a median reduction in logical error rate of over 40%, with improvements reaching 98.4%, equivalent to an approximately 63x lower logical error.
QC Design believes the approach behind Meridian could apply beyond quantum computing. Many scientific problems require both the ability to generate candidate solutions and the expertise to judge whether they work. Meridian is an early example of an AI system that brings these capabilities together, helping researchers investigate promising solutions that might otherwise go unexplored.
QC Design is a quantum computing AI company. Its flagship AI system, Meridian, is purpose-built for fault-tolerant quantum computing design. Meridian models a device’s errors, explores complete architectures and validates the designs it proposes, with hardware modeling and validation through an accurate world model Plaquette, QC Design’s quantum design-automation platform.
Nullspace ES Supports First Experimental Demonstration of Standing-Wave EIT Cooling for Trapped Ions
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Sept. 24, 2026 — Nullspace, a leading provider of advanced electromagnetic simulation software, has announced that researchers at Cornell University, led by Professor Karan Mehta, used Nullspace ES to support the first experimental demonstration of standing-wave electromagnetically-induced-transparency (EIT) cooling for trapped ions, building on theoretical predictions dating back to 1992.
Layout of the trap zone used along with the freespace and integrated optical waveguide and grating elements at the indicated wavelengths, B-field orientation, top metal, and ITO features.
Using Nullspace ES to simulate the electrostatic fields of a complex chip-scale ion trap, researchers in Cornell University’s Mehta Group calculated the baseline voltage sets used to control ions throughout the experiment. The resulting experiment demonstrated a new approach to trapped-ion cooling that achieved higher cooling rates, addressed a broader range of modes, and reached lower final phonon occupation numbers than the conventional running-wave approach.
Simulating the Electrostatics Behind Trapped-Ion Control
Trapped-ion quantum computing depends on the ability to manipulate individual ions with extreme precision. As more optical and electrical functionality is added to traps, the simulations supporting these experiments must account for increasingly complex geometries while keeping up with the pace of research.
Nullspace ES simulated the electrostatic fields generated by the Mehta Group’s chip surface electrodes, providing the baseline voltage calculations the researchers used for axial confinement, radial mode rotation, and sub-micron ion positioning.
“As quantum hardware grows more complex, researchers are under pressure to iterate at a faster pace,” said Masha Petrova, CEO of Nullspace. “Cornell’s work demonstrates why simulation must advance alongside hardware, if not ahead of it. When ions need to be controlled at this level of precision within increasingly sophisticated systems, the simulation tools researchers rely on cannot become the bottleneck.”
Building a Faster Path From Chip Design to Experimentation
Prior to using Nullspace ES, the Mehta Group used COMSOL and a different Python-based toolkit for electrostatic simulation. COMSOL’s comprehensive physics modeling required more computation time, while the toolkit produced an analytical solution that did not capture all the physical features required for the experiment’s level of precision.
Nullspace ES enabled the group to combine high-fidelity simulation with the faster iteration required for this kind of research. The Mehta Group integrated Nullspace ES into its broader design workflow to create an automated pipeline from chip design to experimentally usable voltage sets.
“Nullspace ES has proven highly valuable in allowing us to carry out accurate trap simulations efficiently, which is essential to effective design and simulation of devices at the precision important for these kinds of experiments,” said Cornell Professor Karan Mehta, principal investigator of the study.
Enabling Faster, Broader Trapped-Ion Cooling
The Cornell experiment demonstrated an approach that cooled faster across a broader range of motional modes while reaching lower final phonon numbers than the conventional running-wave approach. For trapped-ion quantum computing, the results represent a step toward faster and more scalable quantum systems, while demonstrating how advanced electrostatic simulation can support increasingly complex chip-scale architectures. Read more about how the Mehta Group used Nullspace ES in the full case study here.
About Nullspace
Nullspace is redefining electromagnetic simulation for the next generation of mission-critical engineering. The company develops full-fidelity, high-speed simulation software purpose-built for RF systems and quantum computing. Built on over a decade of defense-validated technology, its solvers deliver breakthrough performance, enabling engineers to model larger, more complex designs than ever before without sacrificing accuracy. Because Nullspace is Python-native, AI agents can run it end to end: customers can orchestrate complex optimization workflows with the LLM of their choice, on their own infrastructure. Nullspace solutions power innovation in aerospace, defense, 5G, spectrum management, and emerging quantum architectures. For more information, visit www.nullspaceinc.com.
Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were charged with ‘waging war against God’ after joining protests against Tehran regime
The family of 21-year-old twins who have been sentenced respectively to death and decades in jail for protesting against the Iranian regime have appealed to the United Nations for help.
A formal “submission of information” relating to the case of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi has been submitted by British human right lawyers on their family’s behalf.
Sqale reaches key 2026 roadmap milestone as Infleqtion builds toward 100 logical qubits and develops quantum applications with customers
LOUISVILLE, Colo., Sept. 24, 2026 — Infleqtion today announced it has achieved 30 entangled logical qubits using just 80 physical qubits on its Sqale quantum computing platform, delivering a key milestone on its 2026 roadmap. This achievement makes Infleqtion the first neutral-atom quantum computing company to reach 30 logical qubits on a commercial system. The breakthrough combines hardware and software co-design with an AI-assisted discovery that halves the physical gates needed for a key logical operation. By entangling 30 logical qubits in a single, coherent quantum state, Infleqtion has validated the core architecture of its Sqale hardware and Superstaq software, on its roadmap to deliver 100 logical qubits by 2028.
“Getting 30 logical qubits to work together is hard, and our team has done it,” said Matt Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion. “Co-design between our hardware and software enabled this demonstration with just 80 physical qubits. We’re moving quickly toward our target of 100 logical qubits in 2028, and we’re already developing applications with customers. The goal is to give them a quantum computer that can take on problems they can’t solve today.”
Unlike fragile physical qubits, which suffer rapid calculation decay from environmental noise, logical qubits group multiple physical qubits together using software protocols to ensure computational stability and accuracy. Infleqtion’s achievement of 30 logical qubits was experimentally confirmed by a signal that is approximately 1000x stronger than underlying noise.
Infleqtion has three customers for logical qubit circuits on the Sqale platform. Among them is the Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) program, where Infleqtion pioneered and demonstrated on hardware a quantum neural network approach with training on GPU and inference on QPU for biomarker discovery. That work, first demonstrated at 12 logical qubits, extends directly into today’s result.
Thirty Logical Qubits
In quantum computing, scaling logical qubit counts is only half the battle; the true threshold of computational power is the ability to entangle those logical qubits across a coherent circuit. With this announcement, Infleqtion has successfully executed a highly complex circuit that entangles all 30 logical qubits into a single, unified quantum state, using a novel logical operation that Infleqtion discovered using GPT 5.6 Sol. Altogether, Infleqtion’s experiment executes approximately 1,000 physical operations, or 1 KiloQuOp—a critical transition from fragile academic experiments to robust, commercially viable systems, proving that neutral-atom technology is the fastest path to fault tolerance.
A full technical write-up from Infleqtion CTO Pranav Gokhale, including the circuit, the AI-discovered gate identity and the loss correction results, is available on the Infleqtion blog.
The breakthrough is powered by Infleqtion’s Sqale QPU hardware and Superstaq quantum software platform, which unite individual qubit-addressing capabilities with dynamically reconfigurable atom arrays. This unique combination maintains all-to-all connectivity while minimizing the typical pitfalls of atom movement, including error accumulation, atom loss, and runtime delays.
“We’re using the dynamic reconfigurability of Sqale’s neutral-atom architecture to move faster toward quantum utility,” said Pranav Gokhale, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of Computing at Infleqtion. “A core accelerant for our work was the AI-assisted discovery of a new entangling operation between logical qubits that performs a key operation with half as many physical gates as was previously known. Every gate can introduce an error, so doing the same work with fewer gates matters as we build toward longer computations.”
The Road to 1,000 Logical Qubits by 2030
Achieving 30 fully entangled logical qubits in a single, coherent quantum state is a definitive execution moment for Infleqtion, validating the commercial readiness of its Sqale architecture and delivering on its multi-year roadmap. By utilizing individual qubit addressing and reconfigurable atom arrays to minimize error and atom loss, Infleqtion remains firmly on track to deliver 100 logical qubits in 2028 and 1,000 by 2030.
Through these technical breakthroughs, Infleqtion continues to lead the industry in transitioning quantum technology out of academic laboratories and into commercial enterprise, defense, energy and healthcare industries.
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral-atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
A hiker fell between 800 and 1,000 feet to his death over the weekend, after going over the side of a switchback trail on Washington state's Sauk Mountain.
Taylor Swift announced her new single "Patient Zero" earlier this week, saying she has been "impatiently waiting" to announce that it will be out on Friday.
Paris public prosecutor opens investigation into online harassment of Riner, one of France’s most popular sportspeople
Paris’s public prosecutor has opened an investigation into the racist abuse and online harassment of the French judo star Teddy Riner after he expressed concern about the rise of the far right.
Riner, who has often been voted France’s most popular sportsperson and is one of the most successful judo competitors of all time, told a TV sports show this month that he felt “anxiety” about the rise of the far right in France. Numerous racist insults and hate messages were subsequently directed at him online, the prosecutor’s office said.
Senators’ report says taxpayers face higher bills after ‘bargain’ between president and major polluters
The fossil fuel industry secured an estimated $190bn in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade after responding to Donald Trump’s pre-election call for major campaign donations, leaving American taxpayers to shoulder higher bills and public health costs associated with pollution, according to a new report.
Released on Thursday by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, ranking member of the Senate environment and public works committee, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, the report details what the senators describe as the fossil fuel industry’s expansive influence over the Trump administration.
Hitler was an artist in Vienna before first world war
Horse also has full sister called New Order
The US Jockey Club has ordered a racehorse to be renamed after ruling the animal’s name was a reference to Adolf Hitler.
In a story first reported by Horse Racing Nation, Austrian Painter won its debut race at the Horseshoe Indianapolis track on Monday. However, the Jockey Club received a complaint about the name and began an investigation. Hitler, who was born in Austria, was a professional artist in Vienna before the first world war. People often use the term “Austrian Painter” online to discuss Hitler without naming him in order to avoid content moderation filters.
At Meta Connect, I tried out the AI agent, hearing enhancement and other features on all the new glasses. I was also disappointed at how little’s been done on the privacy front.
Chore jackets and loose-fit trousers nod to ‘nonconformist glamour’ of Amelia Earhart and other pioneers
The Max Mara catwalk at Milan fashion week had well-cut coats, sturdy block-heeled boots, crisp white shirts and capacious suede handbags. What it quite deliberately did not have was shock value. “I hope everyone watching this show can recognise something of themselves in what they see,” said Ian Griffiths, the British designer who has been at this Italian house since 1987. “I think that’s really important. Without being critical of other brands or designers, so much of fashion alienates people and makes them feel that they aren’t good enough or thin enough or young enough to wear what’s being represented.”
Trousers were pleated and roomy, skirts long enough to be elegant but not long enough to trip you up. In shades of sand and chalk, grey and black, every piece was designed to work with everything else, and to blend into an existing wardrobe. The styling gestures – a popped collar here, a knotted belt there – stopped short of gimmick. The models could have walked off the runway and on to the Milan street – which, Griffiths said backstage, was the point. “The catwalk show is only the prelude to what to me is the real presentation, which is when I see women walking down the street in my clothes.”
A global sell-off in government bonds has put fresh upward pressure on UK borrowing costs, before a tough budget for John Healey next month.
The yield – effectively the interest rate – on 10-year UK bonds, known as gilts, had risen to 5.38% by mid-morning on Thursday, approaching the 19-year high set last week.
US crafters are looking to build a communal network to replace the company after it was bankrupted by private equity investors in 2025
To its dedicated fans, JoAnn Fabrics wasn’t just a fabric store. It was a vital hub for small businesses – wedding dress makers, upholsters, milliners and rug repairers. It taught generations to make, fix and craft. A visit sparked new ideas in a way that shopping online just can’t replicate.
Why Should Delaware Care? The first comprehensive property reassessment in decades reset how Delaware’s tax burden is divided among property owners. While many expected that it would bring new relief to some of the state’s lowest income residents, it has actually raised their tax burdens. A new complaint seeks to rectify the property assessments that underpin those tax bills.
A city councilwoman who represents one of the most economically disadvantaged areas of Wilmington has filed a complaint with New Castle County, challenging the property valuations reached during the recent reassessments and seeking actions to rectify documented inequalities.
Christian Willauer, who represents the city’s Hilltop communities that were disproportionately impacted by rising property assessments, is eyeing a novel legislative strategy to force the county to recognize alleged errors in the work completed by contractor Tyler Technologies and to fix assessments in three election districts.
Her complaint, which builds upon an expansive project on the statewide reassessment published by Spotlight Delaware earlier this year, is based upon reviews of more than 400 property sales that were completed during Tyler Technologies’ assessment period in 2023 and 2024.
That review found that properties in three western city election districts were commonly assessed for more than their sale values during the reassessment study period, while properties in two Greenville-area districts were commonly assessed for less.
A property’s assessed value should meet “fair market value,” or roughly what an owner should have been able to sell the property for at the time of the assessment. The examples identified by Willauer bring into question whether the assessment data would meet that standard.
“We’re here to make sure that people can hold on to their homes, people can hold on to their businesses and people continue to be part of Wilmington and New Castle County,” the councilwoman said during a Wednesday press conference announcing the complaint. “We’re calling on New Castle County to make sure that these property tax assessments in the City of Wilmington are fair and correct.”
The questionable nature of assessments in communities like Hilltop has not been a secret.
Tyler Technologies, the assessment company hired by each of the three counties to complete reassessments statewide, wrote in its final report that the results in several Wilmington communities did not meet industry standards.
It blamed two potential reasons for those shortcomings: that it did not have enough sample sales data for unimproved properties, and it could not see inside homes to judge the condition of the properties.
Therefore, the homes in Hilltop and other impacted communities were assessed against comparable sales that primarily featured renovated homes being sold by flippers.
Spotlight Delaware’s statewide analysis found the median assessment in Hilltop sits north of $180,000, but recent sales of unimproved properties have fallen far under their assessed values.
Willauer, who cited Spotlight’s database as the impetus for her deeper dive research, pulled assessment data for all homes sold in Wilmington’s Hilltop, Tilton and West Center City election districts and compared them to two districts near Greenville: Hoopes Reservoir and Barley Mill.
Hilltop is a working-class neighborhood of predominantly Black and brown families in Wilmington, but it’s also the area that saw the largest assessment jump anywhere in New Castle County, according to an analysis of reassessment data. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
The review found that of the properties sold in Hilltop, 71% of assessed values were more than 110% of their sale values — essentially inflating the tax bills owed by the property owners.
In the nearby Tilton and West Center City communities, more than 60% of properties were above that threshold.
But the Greenville-area districts saw just 23% and 9% of properties exceed 110% of their sale values.
Conversely, those same Greenville-area districts saw 29% and 55% of properties assessed for less than 90% of their sale values. In the city districts, none saw more than 18% of homes assessed at that lower level.
Alethea Smith-Tucker, a West Center City resident who was among a handful of residents in the affected districts who spoke Wednesday about the impact of the reassessments, said that the higher assessments have overburdened her and her neighbors.
“This is an opportunity to get the process right,” she said.
West Center City resident Alethea Smith-Tucker said that it was time for New Castle County to fix the mistakes that it made in the reassessment; mistakes that will linger for several more years until the next assessment. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
How is the complaint lodged?
Willauer has cited a century-old administrative statute in state code that allows for any tax-paying property owner to “make a complaint to a board of assessment that the real estate in any election or representative district, as compared with other such districts, is not assessed in a fair and equitable manner.”
It directs the board to send out a representative to the affected district to reinspect properties “to equalize and make perfect the assessments.”
Whether that statute — whose origin is unclear but dates back to at least 1919 — still carries the full weight of law or has been amended over the intervening generations is not immediately clear.
For one, the county no longer uses a “board of assessment,” but has transferred the year-to-year work of assessments to the New Castle County Office of Finance, which has an assessment office.
After Willauer submitted her report and a letter lodging the complaint to New Castle County, a county spokesperson told Spotlight Delaware that, “We take concerns about the fairness and accuracy of property assessment seriously. We will review the letter with our county law department and determine the legal framework that may apply.”
Should the complaint not lead to a reassessment of the communities, Willauer said that she would work with residents to explore any further actions.
“My hope is that the county is going to step up to the plate and get this done … I’m working on this because I got calls from residents about their concerns. This is money that people do not have and should not owe,” she added.
Tyler Technologies’ assessment of property largely relied on handful of flipped properties that command much higher values than an average, unimproved home in the community. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
How could reassessment work?
Willauer’s report also refutes the claim by Tyler Technologies that it could not differentiate between renovated and unrenovated properties in the Wilmington districts.
By using real estate listings and their associated photos, she divided properties between renovated and unrenovated, the latter of which ranged in median sale prices from $55,000 to $110,000, depending on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Median renovated home prices ranged from $112,000 to $260,000.
“It makes sense that homes that have $20,000, $40,000 or even $100,000 worth of renovations sell for a higher price than an unrenovated house, but it makes no sense to assess a home that has not been renovated for the same value as a home that has been renovated,” she said.
With relevant property characteristics, such as bedroom and bathroom counts, along with access to the city’s permitting database, where information on structural, electrical and plumbing work would be held, Willauer argued that assessors have all the information they need to improve property assessments.
“I think they could do it by the end of next week, but we might have to wait a little bit longer,” she opined. “We’re going to keep pushing them and encouraging them, and I think that’s where we’re going to have to work together to make sure that New Castle County has that sense of urgency that I know every taxpayer in these neighborhoods has.”
Guardian investigation: 7-Eleven and Circle K stores often fail to honor advertised prices – charging more at pump and register for gas, snacks, and other items
Marco Cruz pulled off a four-lane road into the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store in McAllen, Texas, 12 miles north of the US-Mexico border. It was 1.20am on a mild November night in 2025, and Cruz was looking for a bedtime snack after a day of visiting family and friends. He grabbed a pack of beef and jalapeño cheese sticks from the shelf, where they were priced at $3.99. At the counter, though, they rang up at $4.19.
Cruz asked the cashier to charge him the lower shelf price. The employee refused, he said, and threatened to call the police when Cruz grew more insistent. “All I’m asking you is honor the price,” Cruz told the attendant before leaving the store and, later, filing a complaint with the Texas attorney general.
A Phoenix suburb ditched a plan to send recycled water from toilets and other sources directly to residents' taps after political candidates made unproven claims that the water is contaminated "poop water."
Role for Anant Ambani, son of India’s richest person, who also runs a controversial mega-zoo, met with incredulity
Newcastle University is facing a backlash from conservationists over the appointment of the heir to an Indian oil and gas fortune who runs a controversial mega-zoo as a professor of sustainability.
The university announced that Anant Ambani had been given a professorship of practice for “his work in conservation, biodiversity protection, animal welfare and environmental stewardship” and “significant contributions to advancing a more sustainable future”.
The leaders of the world’s two superpowers are meeting in the US on Thursday for Xi Jinping’s first state visit to the US in more than a decade. The last time the Chinese president was hosted in Washington (by Barack Obama in 2015), the issues on the agenda included cybercrime, technology, the climate crisis and human rights. The star of the day was Ne-Yo, who serenaded Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, with Peng reportedly singing along at the state dinner.
This time, Xi is meeting Donald Trump, who has overhauled the world order and recalibrated the US-China relationship. Trump is contending with a China that is in a much stronger position than it was 10 years ago. Here are five things to look out for at the US-China summit.
Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series "is expanding to Linux," Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities:
Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we're embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners. We are starting with support for two operating systems based on Linux...
- Debian: We're kicking off with Debian by the end of this year, one of the most influential Linux distributions and the foundation behind many of the distros people use every day.
- Ubuntu: Qualcomm Technologies has partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu, the world's most widely used Linux distro, to the platform with Snapdragon X2 Series certification targeted for the first half of 2027.
...and this is just the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system.
Qualcomm's developer blog called it "a significant step forward" in Qualcomm's commitment to a developer-first approach, and "to the open-source community."
"For developers, the important part is simple: more core hardware features are being reviewed and merged, so that laptops with Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series will be easier to build, test, and debug..."
The enablement work completed so far has been validated on a Debian 13-based ("Trixie") user space and a custom kernel, so developers should treat this as the current reference environment while support continues to mature... Linux support for laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their device... For developers who want to try it today, the call to action is straightforward: start with Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, review the latest recipes to build Qualcomm Linux Debian Images, build available upstream sources the Debian OS image and test the peripherals that matter to you, such as graphics, AI inference, device I/O, or basic application bring-up. Early testing helps identify the gaps that matter most before support becomes broader and ready for production-level workloads...
You do not have to wait for everything to be fully finished before getting hands-on. If you are comfortable working from upstream sources you can start evaluating Snapdragon X2 hardware today... Check out the step-by-step instructions, including the full build flow and deployment guidance for Snapdragon X2 Series Linux software.
Put simply, this effort is less about supporting specific Linux distributions and more about empowering the developers who make Linux available on new hardware. This Developer Preview targets distribution maintainers, toolchain developers, kernel contributors, and hardware enablement engineers. It provides the upstream building blocks, including kernel patches, drivers, and reference device trees, needed to enable Snapdragon X2 Series support in their own projects and distributions. For end users looking for a turnkey "install and go" experience, that will come later as distributions adopt what lands upstream. We're encouraging the community to build on this work and help shape what comes next.
The blog post notes that in the initial enablement stage, "Qualcomm Linux supports systemd-boot as the Universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) boot manager to load and boot the Linux kernel."
Hands-on demos were given at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui of Linux running on Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, which the developer's blog calls "a practical look at what works today and where Snapdragon X2 Series Linux support is headed."
Theatrical rollout across 56 territories planned for documentary about Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza before film will stream on Guardian website
NAZA, the award-winning documentary from Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is set to be released in cinemas inmore than 50 countries before a digital global release on theguardian.com.
The film, which the Guardian produced, premiered at the Venice film festival earlier this month, where it was met with a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.
Conservatives long promoted a politics of sexual prohibition. Now such morals have been shed in favor of male domination
Under Kash Patel, the FBI will now hire you even if you have a history of hiring prostitutes, or of having sex with animals. The rightwing Maha influencer Alex Clark had a guest on to her talk show to discuss the idea that wives should provide sex for their husbands on demand. A new ad for a sports gambling website is being hailed as a victory for the political right, because it features a nude Sydney Sweeney clutching footballs to her breasts. The Tate brothers, who encourage their male followers to pursue compulsive sexual conquest and who have been accused of sex trafficking and violence in the operation of their online cam porn business, have reportedly been friendly with members of Trump’s circle. A dizzying array of elites on both sides of the aisle – conservatives very much included – seem to have been socializing with a pedophile financier, and were so unfazed by his constant coterie of underaged girl companions that one begins to wonder whether they were habituated to such scenes. A prominent conservative writer, best known for her opposition to gender transition care for children, has announced a new book claiming to tackle the problem of young women who are supposedly unwilling to have enough sex. And the women of the president’s members club, Mar-A-Lago, are so well known for their dramatic facelifts, and their lips so stuffed with filler that they cannot quite close their mouths, that their faces are now a shorthand in the world of plastic surgery.
Raunch, vulgarity, a boorish entitlement to women’s sexual service, and the aesthetics – and, indeed, the business – of pornography are being embraced by the right.
Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal raise concerns in new letter about officials’ handling of Gautam Adani case
The Trump administration is facing growing questions over its decision to abandon a fraud and bribery case against the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani after he promised to invest $10bn in the US.
For the second time this year, two Democratic senators have demanded attorney general Todd Blanche answer questions about the US Department of Justice department’s handling of the case – and raised concerns over its judgment under Donald Trump.
Why Should Delaware Care? Since 2008, artificial entities such as corporations, limited liability companies and family trusts have been eligible to cast a ballot in Fenwick Island’s municipal elections. The American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware claims that allowance detracts from the power of human residents’ votes. Now, the Delaware Supreme Court may decide whether those voting rules will stand.
A pending legal challenge to whether artificial entities like family trusts and limited liability companies (LLCs) can vote in Fenwick Island’s municipal elections now awaits a ruling from the full Delaware Supreme Court.
During arguments heard on Wednesday morning in Dover, one Delaware Supreme Court justice questioned whether some property owners in the coastal resort town might actually be the ones disenfranchised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Delaware’s attempts to disallow artificial entities from casting ballots in local elections.
But ACLU attorney Andrew Bernstein argued in court Wednesday that artificial entities like corporations, LLCs and family trusts do not have the same natural rights — such as the right to vote — that human residents do.
By allowing entities a vote in Fenwick’s local annual elections, the total number of votes increases. In turn, that larger voting pool decreases the impact of a regular person’s vote, the ACLU argued.
“Here, Fenwick Island … changed the denominator,” he said.
The ACLU is appealing their case to the state Supreme Court, after a Delaware Superior Court judge ruled that non-human entities are allowed to vote in Fenwick’s local elections.
At the heart of the case is a question about Delawareans’ fundamental rights, said ACLU Executive Director Mike Brickner.
“What other fundamental rights could artificial entities get in the future?” he asked after arguments ended, noting that he believes the state’s highest court needs to weigh in on whether artificial entities have the right to vote in the First State.
Fenwick Island Mayor Natalie Magdeburger said revoking the ability of artificial entities to vote would work in the opposite way by not allowing people who own property through family trusts, for example, to vote for local rules or representatives. The majority of artificial entities currently eligible to vote in Fenwick are properties held in trusts, Magdeburger explained, not traditional corporations.
To her, what’s at stake is Fenwick Island’s identity as a multi-generational beach town.
“We have a lot of folks who have either inherited property or are planning their own end of life through trusts,” she said, noting that those people would no longer be able to vote if Fenwick’s election rules are deemed unconstitutional. “To me, that’s the real sad part about this argument.”
Solutions on deck
The case focuses on a 2008 amendment to Fenwick’s charter, which was approved by the Delaware General Assembly and co-sponsored by state Sen. Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View).
The issue does not relate to state or federal elections.
Fenwick’s charter allows for artificial entities like LLCs and trusts to cast ballots in municipal elections through a representative power of attorney. Ballots are limited to one vote per person, or one vote per entity. For example, one Fenwick resident cannot vote on behalf of themselves and then again on behalf of their family trust that owns another vacation house.
It is one of five municipalities in the state that offer such extended voting rights.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers raising similar concerns about entities voting in local elections have already taken matters into their own hands.
The first leg of a state constitutional amendment — which requires a two-thirds supermajority approval of two consecutive terms of the Delaware General Assembly — that would ban artificial entities from voting in any Delaware elections has already passed.
“There’s no election between now and June 30,” said Chief Justice C.J. Seitz, questioning the urgency of ACLU’s pending appeal. “Why shouldn’t we stay this case?”
The defense team, led by Luke Mette of Brockstedt Mandalas Federico, asked the same, noting the solution could come from lawmakers after they return to Legislative Hall in January.
“This court should not be the lab for experimenting with new theories of vote dilution,” Mette said, noting that cases about conflicts between election rules and constitutional laws are usually linked to racial discrimination, gerrymandering or even bribery schemes.
But Bernstein, with the ACLU, said there is no guarantee state lawmakers will vote before Fenwick’s next election.
“It is not up to the General Assembly whether natural persons get full enjoyment of their constitutional rights,” Bernstein said. “This is not an academic or political question. It is a question of fundamental rights.”
Proving the right to represent
The ACLU also must convince the justices they have standing — a legal term for whether someone has enough at stake to file a lawsuit — in the first place. No specific Fenwick resident is named as a plaintiff in the complaint.
The ACLU cited potential fears of “reprisal or stigma” for locals who might publicly put their names on the complaint. He pointed to unnamed ACLU members, donors and supporters living in Fenwick as the Delawareans harmed by diluted voting power.
He said the ACLU’s stake in the claims is more “associational” through those members.
Magdeburger said in a phone interview after the hearing that there are just over 200 artificial entities in the town that are able to vote. Of those, she estimated that fewer than three dozen are corporations or LLCs. Of those, only about 10 are businesses in the business district. Artificial entities account for nearly a quarter of around 900 registered voters.
“Not one Fenwick Island resident made this complaint,” she said. “We don’t even have enough people to run in our elections.”
Last year’s election was canceled because there were no contested seats. The next election could be held as soon as August 2027.
“At the end of the day, all of their fears make no sense,” Magdeburger said, estimating that 80 percent of the town is residential. Fenwick’s charter actually prohibits a boardwalk from being built there, she said.
The justices are expected to issue a ruling within 90 days. It is possible they could also opt to stay the case through June 30, to allow the legislature time to vote on the pending constitutional amendment.
Weekend Spotlight is a round-up of the five best events to check out in Delaware over the coming weekend, curated by Arts + Culture Editor Cannon Taylor. This edition covers Sept. 25-27, 2026. What should be on our radar for future editions? Let us know!
Hot Jams
Music festival fundraises for Center for the Creative Arts
Saturday, Sept. 26. Center for the Creative Arts. 410 Upper Snuff Mill Road, Hockessin. 5-10:40 p.m. Tickets: $15, free for kids 12 and under.
If the annual Hot Jam Music Festival proves anything, it’s that local bands sure know how to name themselves. This year’s festival features many acts, including self-described emo girl alexisbaldwin.mp3; Jimmy Eat World’s post-punk brother, Joe Eats the Sun; and the debut of the mysteriously-named Jenna L. and the Denizens of Scary Tales.
Ticket proceeds will help ensure the Center for the Creative Arts can continue its mission of providing programming and scholarships for local artists.
The Milton Theatre is staging “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Sept. 26 through Oct. 3. | PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MILTON THEATRE
Saturday, Sept. 26 through Oct. 11. The Milton Theatre. 110 Union St., Milton. Times vary. Tickets: $44-53.
What better way to kickstart the spooky season than to revive a character from the most demented recesses of Victorian fiction? The Milton Theatre is staging 17 productions of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” over the next month, featuring a blood-splattered set and live orchestrations of Stephen Sondheim’s haunting score.
Two words of advice: Don’t eat the pies, and don’t get a haircut — the barber may take a little more off the top than you bargained for.
The Delaware Taco Festival returns for its 10th anniversary Sept. 26-27. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE TACO FESTIVAL
Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27. Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park. 80 Rosa Parks Drive, Wilmington. 1-7 p.m. Tickets: $14-20, free for kids 12 and under.
The 10th annual Delaware Taco Festival is bringing the pain — well, at least for the luchadores and the brave souls competing in the hot chili pepper eating contest. For most attendees, the festival should be a more pleasant experience as they wander through Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park munching on tacos and sipping on margaritas.
There will be over 30 food vendors offering $4 tacos, along with carnival games, piñatas, live music and more.
The Air Mobility Command Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary with special programming Sept. 26-27. | PHOTO COURTESY OF AIR MOBILITY COMMAND MUSEUM
Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27. Air Mobility Command Museum. 1301 Heritage Road, Dover. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.
Plane nerds, rejoice: You’ll have full access to many of the over 35 aircraft on display at the Air Mobility Command Museum during the organization’s 40th anniversary bash. The museum’s planes include some that flew during D-Day operations and the Berlin Airlift.
Tour guides — many of them Air Force veterans — will bring these mechanical beasts to life with both personal and historical stories. Not immersive enough for you? Give the flight simulator a try and see if you have what it takes to be an Air Force pilot.
Fall in love with Delaware during First State Fun Day
Spotlight Delaware’s First State Fun Day offers free admission and special programming at attractions statewide on Sept. 26. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE GRAPHIC BY ELSA KEGELMAN
Saturday, Sept. 26. Multiple locations statewide. Times vary. Free.
Spotlight Delaware’s First State Fun Day is an opportunity to cross some peculiar items off your bucket list. What other opportunity are you going to get to take your toddler to a rave at New Castle Library, then introduce them to the half-fish, half-monkey “merman” at the Zwaandael Museum?
If that’s not your speed, take in the sunset at the Prime Hook Wildlife Refuge, learn some history at the Mitchell Center for African American Heritage or gorge yourself on oysters at Matt’s Fish Camp Lewes.
With over 15 statewide attractions opening their doors for free and offering special programming, First State Fun Day is set to be a “Choose Your Own Adventure” of Delaware’s best cultural offerings.
Why Should Delaware Care? A series of gun regulations passed by the Delaware General Assembly in recent years have faced legal challenges from Second Amendment advocates. In two recent rulings, courts offered mixed decisions on gun laws, raising uncertainty for stakeholders as to how the opinions can be interpreted with other existing state laws and additional pending federal decisions, such as New Jersey’s assault weapons ban.
Two recent court rulings delivered opposing opinions on Delaware gun laws that have been litigated for years.
The court decisions — one declaring portions of a Delaware law that criminalizes self-assembled “ghost” guns unconstitutional, and another restricting the age at which Delawareans can independently purchase and operate a gun — have further divided advocacy groups and raised questions about the future implementation of gun laws in the state.
A spokesperson for Attorney General Kathy Jennings, who was the defendant in both cases, said the rulings do not change the state’s policy of preventing gun violence, while also “upholding the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens to own and possess firearms for self-defense, hunting and recreation.”
But Jeff Hague, president of the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, the state’s NRA-affiliate, which was a plaintiff in the age restrictions lawsuit, said the rulings created a “ridiculous and stupid” situation in the midst of an already underway hunting season.
Still, questions remain for both groups as to how the rulings can be reconciled with other recent gun laws and how policy changes spurred by the court cases will be implemented.
A Sept. 10 U.S. District Court opinion found that portions of Delaware’s 2021 ghost gun law, which criminalizes the possession and distribution of firearms without serial numbers, are unconstitutional.
The court argued that the Second Amendment right to self-defense includes allowing individuals to assemble untraceable firearms.
But Gov. Matt Meyer recently signed a bill into law, creating a pathway for individuals with unserialized firearms, or “ghost guns,” to bring them into legal compliance. A move that Hague attributed to political maneuvering meant to blunt the court ruling.
Meanwhile, a Sept. 8 Delaware Supreme Court decision found that lawmakers’ 2022 decision to prohibit 18 to 20 year olds from buying or operating a gun without adult supervision was constitutionally sound.
The decision overturned a Kent County Superior Court ruling that first struck down the law last year.
Further complicating the age restriction question, the General Assembly passed a bill in June — which Gov. Meyer subsequently signed into law — allowing 16 and 17 year olds to hunt without direct adult supervision if they possess a Delaware hunting license.
As a result of the Sept. 8 state Supreme Court decision, 16 and 17 year olds are able to hunt independently in Delaware, while 18 to 20 year olds are not.
Ghost gun laws
The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware upheld some parts of the state’s 2021 ghost gun law but struck down others, arguing there are different constitutional allowances for manufacturing versus distributing unserialized firearms.
The court determined that state law prohibiting “manufacturing or assembling” an unserialized firearm is not legal, because it limits an individual’s constitutional right to self-defense.
At the same time, the court upheld the section of the law prohibiting individuals from “selling or transferring” an untraceable firearm.
Judge Maryellen Noreika, appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote the decision in the case. The lawsuit was originally filed against the state in 2022 by two Delawareans who own unserialized firearms, John Rigby and Alan Knight, and the gun rights advocacy organization the Firearms Policy Coalition.
The ruling does not seem to impact the recently signed House Bill 418, which creates a pathway for individuals with unserialized firearms to get them serialized by a federally licensed dealer.
A spokesperson for the Delaware Attorney General’s office said the department is still “evaluating their options” in terms of appealing the decision.
Gov. Meyer’s office did not respond to requests for comment as to whether they intend to appeal the ruling.
Hague, the sportsmen’s association president, said the district court’s ruling is “hollow” because of HB 418. He described the new law as “shenanigans” by Jennings and state lawmakers to circumvent court rulings and ensure it is still illegal to have an unserialized firearm.
He added that the Firearms Policy Coalition will likely challenge the new serialization pathway in court.
A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office did not respond to questions about Hague’s claim that Jennings helped introduce the updated ghost gun serialization law to circumvent the court. Spokeswomen for the state House and Senate majority caucuses also said lawmakers in both chambers were not available to comment.
But Traci Murphy, director of the gun violence prevention group Coalition for a Safer Delaware, said her organization anticipated a ruling like this one. She said the organization worked with state lawmakers to write the updated legislation creating a pathway to serialize firearms.
“We saw the writing on the wall on some of how these higher court rulings were going, and we thought, ‘If they’re going to say that our ghost gun law is unconstitutional, we better come up with a constitutional pathway to get these firearms serialized,'” Murphy told Spotlight Delaware.
Questions of age
Separate from ghost guns, the state Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers could legally bar 18 to 20 year olds from purchasing or operating guns without supervision — a reversal of a lower court’s ruling last fall.
Justices argued in a 4-1 decision the state could do so because these individuals have alternative ways, such as purchasing shot guns and muzzle-loading rifles or going through the concealed carry permit process, to access guns and exercise their state constitutional right to self-defense.
Chief Justice C.J. Seitz pointed to the fact that Gavin Birney, one of the plaintiffs in the case, was able to obtain a concealed carry permit in 65 days as a “real-life example” of a work-around to the restrictions under the law.
While some state leaders characterized the ruling as a victory for gun safety, Hague said it amounted to the justices doing “acrobatics, headstands and somersaults to justify the actions they did.”
Still, he said his group does not plan to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court because it is unlikely the court would take it up.
Implementation confusion
The state Supreme Court ruling raises logistical complications with hunting season already underway, as another recently passed state law seemingly contradicts the court-imposed age restrictions.
The Kent County Superior Court first declared the age restrictions on 18 to 20 year olds moot last September, right after the law had gone into effect and just as hunting season began. That means this fall marks the first time the state must fully implement its age restriction rules.
The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) had already released its 2026-27 Hunting and Trapping Guide before the Sept. 8 court decision. The currently available version of the guide states that 16 to 18 year olds can hunt without direct supervision if they have completed the necessary courses and permissions, and individuals over 18 “may hunt without direct supervision.”
A spokesperson for DNREC said the department is currently “consulting with legal counsel,” and plans to provide updated guidance to hunters based on the new court ruling next week.
At the same time, House Bill 427, which Gov. Meyer signed into law in mid-August, allows 16 and 17 year olds who have completed the necessary training courses and have parental permission to hunt independently.
The state Supreme Court ruling did not address HB 427, which means 16 and 17 year olds are — for now — able to hunt without adult supervision, while 18 to 20 year olds are not.
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton), who was the primary sponsor of the bill, said the recent ruling has created a “potential enforcement nightmare” with the inconsistency in requirements among the ages.
Spiegelman said he plans to introduce legislation when the General Assembly reconvenes in January that would pass constitutional muster and allow 18 to 20 year olds to hunt unsupervised, too. He declined to say how specifically he would adjust the legislation to be constitutional.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Why Should Delaware Care? Gov. Matt Meyer has pushed for more solar projects as an environmentally friendly way for the state to generate more energy. But some feel the projects are covering too much farmland and could harm local ecosystems.
The debate over whether solar panels are fit for farmland has reached rural New Castle County.
More than 400 people have signed petitions calling on county officials to stop a proposed solar development on a 60-acre piece of leased farmland in Port Penn, a small, unincorporated village just below the C&D canal.
The project is allowed on the land under the county’s existing zoning rules and will not require a public hearing. New Castle County Councilman Kevin Caneco, who represents the area, hosted a town meeting about the project in July.
About 200 people attended, according to Donna Laws, an area resident who lives next to the land proposed for the project. It was held the night of a tornado warning in the county, and she said no one left when they got the warning.
“They were all up in arms,” Laws said. “Nobody wants it here.”
The backlash to solar projects on farms is not new to Delaware. Kent County lawmakers banned large-scale solar projects in agricultural zones in 2022. Smaller “community solar” projects are an exception.
Some farmers argue that solar projects can make farmland more expensive and also reduce the number of acres available for crops. While the land covered by solar panels could theoretically go back to being farmed after a project lease ends, it can be difficult to restore the health of the soil.
TurningPoint Energy, the company behind the Port Penn project, said in an emailed statement that it will help the state meet its green energy goals.
Gov. Matt Meyer has encouraged similar projects in the past. Earlier this year, he fast-tracked permits for some solar projects. He also signed a bill that guarantees power bill discounts for those who sign up for community solar projects.
Meyer and other solar proponents have said generating more power in-state could help lower the rising energy costs that are leading to high electric bills and increasing ratepayer outcry. The cost to build solar has dropped to about a third of what it was in 2011, and it is also the fastest resource to build.
In 2025, about 8% of Delaware’s total in-state electricity generation came from renewable sources, mostly solar, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
State law calls for that figure to reach 40% by 2035.
Caneco said he will discuss the project, among other topics, at a town hall meeting on Oct. 8 at 6:30 p.m. at the Odessa Fire Hall at 304 Main St. in Odessa.
The opposition
Laws, whose home neighbors the proposed solar field, said she has many concerns about the project, especially its impact on the environment.
The field where the panels would go is not far from Thousand Acre Marsh, a sprawling coastal habitat nestled along the Delaware River and C&D Canal. Since the solar panels would be built on either side of wetlands on the property, the builders will have to make a temporary 20-foot path through sensitive habitats during construction.
Laws worries that power-related infrastructure could increase the risk of fires, among other concerns. The local volunteer fire company has requested the solar company provide additional equipment and training in case of any solar-specific hazards.
Drew Slater, executive director of Energize Delaware, a nonprofit that works with the state to expand renewable and energy-efficient projects, said with the many smaller-scale solar projects he has helped build on farmland, he has never seen the safety concerns Laws raised.
“[Solar panels] are extraordinarily safe,” he said.
Laws said she also feels that if one solar project is built nearby, more will follow, changing the character of her rural neighborhood.
TurningPoint Energy representatives said they have added additional landscaping buffers to address her concerns and “welcome any further specific feedback and remain committed to ongoing dialogue with community members.”
Laws does not oppose solar, she said, but thinks it should be built in more developed areas, like on rooftops or over parking lots.
Caneco, the county councilman who represents the area, said he agrees. While he acknowledged that building solar panels in developed areas can be more expensive, he said it is also important to preserve farmland.
Delaware’s environmental agency added a new grant program last month that provides rebates of up to $100,000 for constructing “solar canopies,” or raised structures with solar panels that are typically built over parking lots.
Some of the opponents are calling for the county to prohibit large-scale solar projects on farms. Caneco said he and one other council member are exploring potential changes to local laws involving solar projects.
A mysterious ally?
When asked for details about Laws’ opposition, she had a packet of information ready.
She said it came from a new website, called DelawareSpending.com. While the website, which does not have any information about its owner or operator, appears to be a repository for public documents and meeting videos from across the state, it does host a blog that has posted multiple articles about the project.
Laws said she has worked with the person behind the blog, but that he does not want to be identified.
“He’s my Batman,” she said.
Some of the videos on the blog’s Facebook page, where the platform has previously labeled some of its content as AI-generated, have over 100,000 views. A summation of the solar debate in Port Penn is labeled its “Top Story” on the website.
When asked via email about the project, the person behind Delaware Spending responded, saying, “I’m not part of this story and don’t want to be.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the size of the project.
Benjamin Netanyahu lands in New York today to speak at the UN general assembly. This visit marks the Israeli prime minister's first time in the city since Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to arrest him for war crimes – and it's happening as support for Israel among US voters is taking an unprecedented plunge. Sixty percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel. (In 2022, only 42% of Americans said the same.) But what does this mean for Netanyahu’s hold on US politics? And how will it play into Israel’s October elections? Kai Wright and Carter Sherman are joined by two reporters with different perspectives on the Netanyahu story. Andrew Roth spent time reporting from Israel and the West Bank this summer, and Alice Speri has covered the pushback against Israel in Democratic politics here in the US
Former deputy PM now involved in tech industry says many within sector are ‘winding themselves up into a lather’
Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI’s “godlike power to exterminate humanity”, calling it a sign that tech bosses are “breathing their own fumes”.
The former UK deputy prime minister said that tech bosses should focus on addressing known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the “slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity”.
The original Star-Spangled Banner, seen in 1969 at what was then the National Museum of History and Technology, now called the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution Archives
In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared.
The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”
It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
For decades, the Smithsonian Institution, which draws some 15 million visitors every year to its assemblage of 21 museums — bounty that has no real global peer — has managed to stay mostly above the political fray. There have been occasional exceptions, such as the uproar over the National Air and Space Museum’s planned 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By and large, though, the institution maintained bipartisan support as the guardian of America’s history, ingenuity and natural heritage, even as political polarization spread and culture wars raged.
But that institutional exceptionalism is now imperiled as never before. In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Smithsonian had succumbed to “divisive, race-centered ideology.” This July 4, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came the White House report. Later in July, two House committees held back-to-back hearings on the report, where Republican members took turns lambasting the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and forcing her to answer questions about exhibit items such as a “chrome and rubber crotch harness” designed for sadomasochistic sex. That week, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of the Interior to erect signs outside the museum “warning visitors about the ideological capture” on display there. The signs have yet to go up, but in late August, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent a letter to the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents declaring that other federal agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”
The Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch, governed by a 17-member board led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and with six members of Congress, three from each party, serving with nine private citizens and the vice president. But it depends on the federal government for 62% of its funding, receiving more than $1 billion per year, and warnings of deep budget cuts have grown ever louder. Finally, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, the first African American person to lead the institution, announced he was stepping down at age 73, saying “it has been stressful.”
Seen from one vantage, the battle over the Smithsonian is but another example of Trump attempting with characteristic bombast to put his stamp on Washington institutions, alongside shuttering the Kennedy Center, replacing the East Wing of the White House with a huge ballroom and planning a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.Elizabeth Frantz for ProPublica
But unlike some conflicts initiated by Trump, this one has been festering for years, independent of him, with complaints lodged by board members before he returned to office. The American history museum, the main focus of the administration’s ire, has wrestled for years with how, or even whether, it should present a unifying national narrative, an ambivalence that left it susceptible to the administration’s broadside. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian underwent a political awakening during the 2020 upheaval over the COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd that echoed responses in academia and other progressive realms.
This left it exposed to a new administration that viewed itself as a corrective against perceived woke excesses. “I said over and over again that there’s going to be a day of reckoning,” recalled Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman from Louisiana who served on the Smithsonian board in 2023 and 2024, in an interview. “You can either participate in it, help guide the Smithsonian back to something that makes more sense, or you can have an abrupt shift. I didn’t realize my words would ring as true as quickly as they did.”
Now, in the year that was supposed to be a crowning celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian is instead in Trump’s crosshairs. And the question of how the country’s premier history museum should tell the nation’s story is suddenly up for grabs.
The National Museum of History and Technology opened on the National Mall in 1964. Its mission, said former assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Remington Kellogg that year, was to “awaken” a “clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States — its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” As the name reflected, the museum contained duelling missions from the start, showcasing American technological advances and telling a more general historical story.
A 1974 exhibit depicted the evolution of American fashion.Alfred Harrell/Smithsonian Institution Archives
In 1980, it was renamed the National Museum of American History, but the tension lingered. “It started out as a technology museum, and even now it has a lot of equipment, and to move from that to American history, that’s a huge change,” said Ivan Selin, a former chair of the museum’s board. “Unless you’re going to throw everything out and start over again, you’re going to have a very incoherent thing. Unless you have a clear strategy, you’re going to have some apples and oranges.”
Two decades after the name change, the lack of a unified approach had become an issue. In 1999, David Brooks wrote a scathing critique in the Weekly Standard, lamenting that the museum had so little on display about the nation’s defining moments (the Constitutional Convention, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Great Depression, etc.) and prominent figures who shaped them (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc.). “It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history,” he wrote. “This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender.”
In 2001, in response to such critiques, the Smithsonian convened a blue-ribbon commission of historians and others led by Richard Darman, a former top aide in Republican White Houses. In 2002, the commission released its report, declaring that the museum “requires what its own leadership has described as a ‘transformation.’ It lacks aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” The report recommended, among other things, a chronological introductory exhibit that contains “central theme lines for the examination and interpretation of American history” and that “should celebrate America’s remarkable strengths and achievements while also treating fairly and responsibly the ways in which America may have failed to meet the high standards it has proclaimed for itself.”
This would prove easier said than done. For one thing, the museum’s physical structure itself has never been coherent — “an awkward attempt to marry the classical and the modern, the building is legitimately neither,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable at its opening. “It’s a challenging space,” Brent Glass, who became director shortly after the blue-ribbon report in 2002, told ProPublica.
Above all, though, the commission’s recommendations faced resistance among the museum’s curators to the sort of great-man-of-history approach that Brooks and others were hankering for. There had been a trend in museum scienceaway from this, and away from straight chronology. “There was this whole museum movement to get away from a march through time, to a more episodic or specific sort of story,” John Gray, who succeeded Glass in 2012, told ProPublica. “It wasn’t done to get away from the story; it was finding a way to get people interested.”
In addition, the museum’s curators tended to be specialized in material culture — collecting and studying the museum’s several million objects and artifacts — rather than in conceptual storytelling. To make up for this, Gray’s team tried to enlist several leading academic historians to instill more of an overarching narrative structure. But they declined, saying they were concerned that such an approach could seem triumphalist and provide fodder for an America-first agenda. “We tried to organize [the museum] around ideas and ideals, ideals that were aspirational,” Gray said. “And we failed many times.”
The museum’s eventual solution was to divide the national story into subject areas, each represented by a standing exhibit: “American Enterprise” on business and innovation, “American Democracy” on politics,” “Many Voices, One Nation” on immigration, “The American Presidency,” “The Price of Freedom” on the nation’s wars, “Entertainment Nation” on culture, “America on the Move” on transportation.
Developing these required extensive debate, said the former directors. Some donors supporting the enterprise exhibit were upset that it devoted so much space to the role of slavery in American business. In crafting “The Price of Freedom,” the museum consulted with veterans’ groups to try to avoid a backlash like the one that arose on the Enola Gay. This effort succeeded, Glass said, despite the exhibit’s candor about the darker elements of the nation’s military history. “People can handle complexity,” he said. “They don’t feel bad about the country when told the whole story, and they’re grateful that they have access to the information.”
The museum’s “American Enterprise” exhibit includes an advertisement for slave traders.Elizabeth Frantz for ProPublica
Scattered throughout the museum are countless highlights: the desk on which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; the top hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre on the last night of his life; the actual lunch counter from the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, Civil Rights sit-in; and, in a recent addition, a gunboat sunk during the Revolutionary War that is being restored on-site. But the overall effect can be disjointed and disorienting. And, with the museum’s dim lighting, dated technology and underutilized areas, it can feel at times as if one is wandering in a past-its-prime shopping mall or in the forgotten corner of an airport terminal.
It’s a stark contrast to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened in 2016 under the direction of Bunch and, notably, has a clear chronological design. Of course, said Selin, the former American history museum board chair, the African American museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, have the advantage of a more focused subject, leaving it even less clear what remains for the American history museum, where attendance has declined in recent years. “You can find nowhere in any Smithsonian document a theory of what should be in the American history museum or the more particular museums or how many of these particular museums there should be,” Selin said. “There’s no charter whatsoever that says how they fit together.”
In March 2020, the Smithsonian shuttered its museums for the pandemic. A few months after that, Washington and other cities erupted in protests over Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Bunch, who became secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019, and other top officials embarked on a push to rethink the institution’s priorities, as reflected in the minutes of the Board of Regents meetings, which were now being held online. Bunch “briefed the Regents on his efforts to navigate the dual pandemics caused by the Coronavirus and issues surrounding race, racism, and racial identity,” the minutes of the June 2020 meeting stated. He announced the launch of “Smithsonian Cares,” a digital resource that would “provide tools and guidance to empower and inspire conversations about diversity, equity, access and inclusion.”
That October, the board discussed “the potential creation of a Chief Diversity Officer position, a review of organizational processes and policies that may have inadvertently created barriers to inclusivity, integrating and standardizing DEAI training across the organization, strengthening supervisory DEAI skillsets, increasing senior leadership’s focus on inclusivity, and identifying funding and resourcing strategies to implement DEAI efforts across the Institution’s functions and operations.” In February 2021, Bunch told the board that the Smithsonian’s five strategic priorities would include positioning it as a “trusted source for critical conversations and helping the nation grapple with important issues like race and identity.”
As the meeting minutes show, the institution’s elevation of identity was being encouraged by the newly installed Biden administration. In October 2021, the Smithsonian’s Office of Government Relations reported that the Smithsonian had “brought objects from the National Museum of American History to the White House for a temporary display recognizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month.” Three months later, the office stated that it “continues to work closely” with the White House on “diversity, accessibility, access and inclusion efforts.” The Smithsonian noted plans for exhibits at the White House to mark “Black History Month in February, Women’s History Month in March, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, LGBTQ in June and Hispanic History Heritage Month in September.”
The post-2020 shift extended to the various museums, which started to reopen to visitors in spring 2021. To cite just one example, the National Portrait Gallery revised the signage for a portrait of Henry Laurens, South Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress, to reflect that he had made his wealth through chattel slavery. “When Floyd was killed, everyone acknowledged that now is the time to ask: What are the stories that we’re telling and were we being honest and fair in recounting those stories? We all looked at it through this lens,” Kim Sajet, who became the director of the Portrait Gallery in 2013, told ProPublica. “Everyone felt energized by that. We can’t change the past, but we need to acknowledge what happened in order not to repeat it in the future.”
But the new direction caused misgivings for some conservative supporters of the institution, such as Graves, who joined the regents as one of the three Republican congressional appointees in 2023. Graves told ProPublica that he had high regard for Bunch — “his accomplishment with the African American museum was remarkable” — but that he became worried that the Smithsonian was operating within a bubble. Its staff were living in a metro area that had voted overwhelmingly against Trump (and museum employees are generally among the most left-leaning of any profession), yet they were charged with presenting exhibits to visitors from all over the country and the world, a disconnect that the institution seemed insufficiently aware of.
Many board meetings would kick off with tours of a certain museum, and Graves and a fellow Republican appointee, Adrian Smith of Nebraska, would often be taken aback by what they saw. “Seventy-five percent of the time Adrian and I would be walking around and say, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Graves said. “It wasn’t interpreting science or history. It seemed to have an agenda, and that’s not what a museum should be.” What was missing, he said, was a sense of the nation’s achievements. “This country is a remarkable experiment,” he said. “We’ve had some grave sins, but my gosh, America is a net victory for the world. It’s unbelievable what happened here in 250 years and it’s worth celebrating.”
Graves retired from Congress at the end of 2024. In his farewell address to the regents that October, he warned against allowing the Smithsonian to become seen as affiliated with one party or ideological bent. “I felt like they were causing sustainability problems for the institution,” he said. “Politicizing the Smithsonian is an awful, awful idea, because then you only receive funds when there’s a Democratic majority. This is America’s museum and there should not be anything partisan about it.”
One week later, Trump won the election to return to the White House.
In his first term, Trump largely ignored the Smithsonian. In 2017, Bunch gave him a tour of the new African American museum, which Bunch recounted later in his memoir: “The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”
It took little time for Trump to make clear that, as on other fronts in his second term, things would be different this time around. First came the March 2025 executive order, which directed Vice President J.D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Two months later, Trump said that he was firing Sajet at the Portrait Gallery, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.” The Smithsonian noted that Trump did not have the authority to remove Sajet, but she left anyway, hoping to spare the institution.
In August 2025, the White House issued a 120-day ultimatum to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” but with little follow-up, and for nearly a year, it looked as if the storm may in fact have passed. Then came the White House report on the American history museum, with such an exhaustive litany against Hartig, its director since 2018, and Bunch that it made plain the authors had been scouring their public statements and the museum. (Through a spokesperson, Bunch declined to be interviewed. Museum representatives did not respond to requests to speak to Hartig.)
In addition to citing the Franklin exhibit, the report noted that an exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” had included “the pages of a 6-year-old girl’s diary where she expresses fear about ‘getting boobs’ and wishes for her nonexistent ‘penis to grow.’” Another exhibit, on gay history, had “included a two-piece chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism.”
An image from “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” a Smithsonian exhibit that drew complaints from Republican lawmakers for its explicit comments about gender identityKrystal Quiles
It criticized the museum for having trained staff using the “Museums as a Site for Social Action Toolkit,” a 200-plus-page roadmap on how to “truly transform the museum space,” which is linked “with white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting or representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.”
Above all, though, the report criticized the museum on grounds that echoed Brooks and the 2002 blue-ribbon commission, saying that it failed to offer visitors a unified narrative of the nation’s history. “That story should be a basic consensus view that is not ideological or politicized, but presents the facts of history — what actually happened — as accurately as possible with minimal present-day bias,” the report stated. “It should tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.”
For years, the Smithsonian had avoided major conflagrations partly by engaging in what one former official called the “care and feeding” of members of Congress on the two committees with purview over it, Appropriations and House Administration. If there was a potentially controversial exhibit, the museum would bring members over for a preview tour, so they had some context for complaints they might receive. But these efforts were on hold for a while because of the pandemic closures, and the Smithsonian’s government relations office experienced heavy turnover, as one of its directors had cancer and another died suddenly.
This context, combined with the fuel provided by the White House report, helped explain the level of vitriol that Hartig faced when she appeared at the two hearings in late July. Even by the standards of today’s decorum-less Congress, the hearings were wild affairs. At the first, held by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Chair Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, kicked things off by playing a lengthy string of video clips of Hartig offering tribal land acknowledgements at the start of her speeches. “I’m wondering, have you ever planned on deeding any of your personal property or property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?” he asked Hartig.
She adopted a conciliatory tone, saying the Smithsonian “takes the concerns raised in the White House Domestic Policy Council’s report seriously” but that “it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.” She assured the committee, “I love the United States of America. I consider it the privilege of my career to help preserve its treasures and serve the American people.”
This did not assuage committee Republicans. Burchett displayed museum images including the crotch harness and the diary mention of the 6-year-old girl wishing for a penis. “Ma’am, I mean, you have pictures of bondage. You have some overtly sexual things up there,” he said. “I’m not a fan.” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, pressed the point: “Are images of sexual fetishes appropriate for children? Yes or no?” Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, noted that the toolkit that the museum used for staff training had referred to “politeness” as a feature of “white supremacy culture.”
U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, poses questions to Anthea Hartig, director of the history museum, in July.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Those defending Hartig were hardly less outspoken. David Blight, a Yale historian also testifying, compared the White House’s attacks on the Smithsonian to the German Third Reich, saying “their model may indeed be Joseph Goebbels’ committee on enlightenment, which is what the Nazis called their committee that tried to control museums.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, opened her remarks by saying, “Welcome to the White Pride Committee.” Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, vowed to sacrifice his life for the Smithsonian. “We will not let you destroy that museum,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed, we will not allow that to happen unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history.”
The next day’s hearing, before the House Administration Committee, was more of the same. The bipartisan consensus around the Smithsonian appeared to lie in tatters.
On a recent Sunday, a group of visitors made their way into the centerpiece exhibit at the National Mall entry to the history museum, the giant Star-Spangled Banner that was flying over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write what became the national anthem. For safe-keeping, the flag is displayed in very low light, giving the chamber a sacred feel, like a cathedral crypt. “Oh my god, it’s huge,” said one woman. “I am shivering,” said another. “It’s insane,” said a third.
Every day, the museum, for all its imperfections, still makes a strong impression on many visitors. But its longstanding search for identity helped make it a target for an administration looking for weak spots, and now its future and that of the entire Smithsonian hangs in the balance. Three of the nine citizen slots on the Board of Regents are vacant, and three more will be next month. Whoever the remaining members of the board — which include Vance — select to fill those slots will help determine who is chosen to replace Bunch as secretary, and the institution’s future course. Much will depend on how much Chief Justice John Roberts, at the head of the board, decides to engage.
Any large institution can benefit from reassessment, and the Smithsonian and the American history museum in particular may well be overdue, especially as yet another focus area is about to be cleaved off, for the National Museum of the American Latino, scheduled to open early next decade. What gives so many supporters pause is for that reevaluation to happen under Trump, who hasn’t shown a lot of interest in how the various museums interact, much less in the nuances and subtleties of history.
“There will be a moment,” Sajet said, “when the American people will have to stand up and decide, is this what they want?”
In the choreographers’ new work, virtuosic movement and some green-screen magic unfurl the theatricality of high-stakes television interviews
It appears the interviewer has got him on the ropes. “For the record, I did not take part in a pagan ceremony with minor members of the royal family in which we daubed ourselves in paint,” states the beleaguered politician, caught outside Buckingham Palace with his flies undone and forced to defend himself. This is a fabrication, of course – I’m watching the scene play out in an east London dance studio – but it doesn’t feel miles away from something that could be true. And how do we know what’s the truth anyway? That’s the question in Deepfake, the latest piece from award-winning dance duo Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple, AKA Jess and Morgs.
The pair tell modern stories with ambitious tech – film and live camera work – and often techy themes, too. “We’ve always been drawn to where there’s a crossover between the theme and the form,” says Runacre-Temple. “What gets us excited is seeing the contemporary world reflected back.” The pair scored a massive hit with their 2022 piece Coppélia, made for Scottish Ballet, which turned a twee 19th-century ballet about a dancing doll into a cautionary tale of AI automatons and unrestrained tech bro egos. Definitely not one-hit wonders, earlier this year they made their debut at the highly esteemed Paris Opera Ballet.
Roberto Hamidovic, 48, ran network of thieves who targeted tourists in Paris Métro and Disneyland
A clan leader who sent gangs of child pickpockets to target tourists in the Paris Métro and popular attractions such as Disneyland Paris has been jailed for human trafficking.
Roberto Hamidovic, 48, likened to Fagin, Charles Dickens’s notorious criminal boss, ran a network of child thieves, mostly girls, some as young as 10, who brought in an average of €25,000 (£21,500) a day, according to police.
They offer advice, referee card games and manage players’ tantrums – we caught up with some of the volunteer profs who keep the competitive game going at this year’s world championships
Professors may be the most revered characters in the fictional world of Pokémon (apart from perhaps the Gym Leaders). In Pokémon Red and Blue, Professor Oak greets the player in a pixelated lab coat, and later provides trainers with their first battle partner; since then, each successive generation of games has introduced another professor to aid and guide trainers through their journeys. If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game, they are often the first people that you meet, apart from your in-game mom.
But you may not know that there are also real-world Pokémon professors – volunteers who help organise the game’s competitive communities around the world. Instead of lab coats, they can be seen at events wearing red Pikachu-mascot shirts labelled “staff”, paired with black trousers and shoes.
A new Paramount+ series premiering Thursday turns pushy sports parents into glossy entertainment – with the children largely ushered off stage
Remember when pushy sports parents were deserving objects of our collective scorn? When Marv Marinovich and Jim Pierce were bywords for abusive fatherhood, Sarah Palin made the overbearing hockey mom a global punchline, and grim stories of pushy parents assaulting officials, kids and one another grabbed headlines and trained a harsh spotlight on youth sports? Well, the rebrand is in full swing.
Team Moms: Baseball is a glossy new reality series premiering Thursday that aims to recast the pushy sports parent as something well worth coveting, a sexy black hat with a designer label. From the makers of Love Island (ITV America), for Hollywood’s most rapacious studio (Paramount Skydance), with none other than basketball mom Kim Kardashian attached as executive producer, the Paramount+ series follows a cluster of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy – a Scottsdale, Arizona baseball hothouse with an intense focus on cultivating diamond gems. Anyone coming to this expecting genuine insights on a $40bn industry that’s now under siege from private equity, swallowing ever larger chunks of hard-earned family budgets along the way, should know up front: this is a closer cousin to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise than ESPN’s 30 for 30.
A Food and Drug Administration committee backed a cancer blood test called Galleri but was split on how well it works. The test is awaiting a final decision by the FDA.
Over the years, as economist Emmanuel Saez tracked America’s top incomes, what he saw made him angry. Now he's one of the architects behind California's wealth tax proposal.
IPPR finds failure to align testing standards has forced companies to abandon exporting to EU and is costing costing 0.18% of national income
The UK is losing out on annual exports to the EU that could be worth as much as £6.5bn without a deal with Brussels that allows manufacturers to jettison duplicate product testing.
In the latest attempt to calculate the loss of trade with the EU after Brexit, the IPPR thinktank said many companies have given up selling goods to the EU or set up subsidiaries inside the trade bloc after successive governments failed to secure a mutual recognition agreement that would avoid the extra administration costs.
Motor vehicle and part exports would have been between £2.48bn and £3.42bn higher each year.
Electronic exports could have been between £1.17bn and £1.67bn higher.
Pharmaceutical exports would have had an estimated annual uplift of between £740m and £820m.
Denmark’s Greenland deal with Trump is a victory for diplomacy over bullyingExpert commentjon.wallace
Denmark used its soft power to rally support and took the dispute out of the limelight – addressing underlying US interests instead of President Trump’s unacceptable public position.
This week, Denmark has extricated itself from a period of coercive US diplomacy over Greenland. The agreement announced on 22 September elegantly resolves the dispute over the territory, without forcing Denmark or the government of Greenland to give up very much.
Even before the dispute, Denmark had indicated it would be content to increase the number of US bases in Greenland and enhance US access to them. These measures were already possible under an existing 1951 agreement.
The new agreement adds an undertaking by Denmark and Greenland to refuse major investments from non-members of the EU or NATO that would grant them a foothold in strategic Arctic areas. Again, on this point, Washington was pushing on an open door.
The only meaningful change concerns the mechanism to ensure that this arrangement will be permanent. The 1951 agreement, amended in 2004, also does not expire. But the new text adds that Greenland will remain part of NATO and continue to comply with the agreement, should it opt for independence.
An independent Greenland might have been willing to retain the US bases and related agreements anyway. After all, it would need to rely on US defence support and a NATO security guarantee. But expressly making these points in an agreement co-signed by Greenland overcame the deal-breaker of President Donald Trump’s demand for sovereignty over all of Greenland or at least the US base areas.
The agreement represents a masterclass by Denmark in using the classical art of diplomacy to overcome bullying, in an age of changing geopolitics and unstable global governance.
Indeed, the steps Denmark took to resolve the dispute provide valuable insight into how countries can defend their interests in the face of apparently overwhelming pressure.
Step 1: Isolate the bully and call the game
In January this year, President Trump declared that the US would need to ‘own’ Greenland to prevent Russia or China from taking it, and to ensure US national security. He even raised the option of a military takeover of the territory.
The president may have believed opposition would be minimal. Just days before, EU and NATO countries had been unwilling to confront him publicly over the armed US intervention against Venezuela, despite it being a clear breach of international law. In the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that followed, they had stayed meekly silent.
Greenland was different. Denmark could clearly assert that Trump was placing the future of NATO in peril. Hence, Denmark could show that the US action posed a threat to both the territorial integrity of Denmark and to the security of all states in Western Europe. Accordingly, NATO countries and EU members overcame their hesitancy to upset the White House, and strongly and unanimously rejected his demand. Indeed, they went further, dispatching a European defence mission to Greenland, supposedly as a matter of routine.
Calling out the US’s game for what it was – a demand to surrender national territory under the threat of force at a time when the West was resisting Putin’s assault on Ukraine – was crucial in rallying support.
Step 2: Enter the fray with clean hands
In this dispute, Denmark continually had the advantage in the battle for international sympathy. It entered the fray with clean hands, taking advantage of its soft power, which has been nurtured over decades of sensitive advocacy for justice in relation to the Global South and the international rule of law. The US under Trump, on the other hand, has caused continued upset throughout, as a result of its military actions and other activity such as the president’s sweeping ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs.
The US could also not accuse Denmark of hypocrisy over any supposed colonial legacy relating to Greenland. By 1954, the UN General Assembly had determined that Greenland had freely decided to integrate with Denmark on the basis of equal constitutional and administrative standing with other parts of Denmark.
By 1979 Copenhagen offered home rule. Two decades later, in 2009, it granted wide-ranging self-government to Greenland. Crucially, this 2009 arrangement included an express right of self-determination for the people of Greenland, with a provision to opt for independence. Any sale of Greenland (as Trump had previously proposed) or its transfer to the US against the wishes of the population, would have violated this existing right to self-determination.
This meant that throughout the dispute, Denmark could claim a role as both the upholder of the international right to self-determination, and the defender of its own territorial integrity.
Step 3: Clarify the legal status
President Trump sought to enhance his claim by suggesting that Denmark did not have a clear title to Greenland. In view of the 2009 agreement’s self-determination provisions, this assertion became less relevant. In any event, it was easy to prove that Denmark held good title. And the US clearly had none at all.
In 1916 US Secretary of State Robert Lansing issued a declaration accepting Denmark’s claim to the island. When the US took over the defence of Greenland during Germany’s occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, it did so in ‘recognition and respect for the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark over Greenland.’
Denmark managed to divert dialogue to technical meetings, held…outside of the public eye.
This expressly included Danish sovereignty over base areas constructed by the US. The post-war agreements on defence cooperation and US bases of 1951 and 2004 also consistently confirmed Danish sovereignty. Indeed, in an amazing reversal of the US position, so does the new 2026 agreement. The text reaffirms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Denmark and acknowledges Greenland’s right to self-determination.
Step 4: Dial the temperature down and let experts do the work
When encountering the US, Denmark was careful to avoid a public confrontation with Trump in front of cameras, learning from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s experience at the Oval Office in 2025.
Instead, when the row intensified, Copenhagen dispatched Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to Washington. As foreign minister, protocol demanded that he should meet with the slightly more moderate US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, instead of the president.
Vice President JD Vance almost derailed this cunning plan when he insisted on leading the meeting and moving it to the White House. But Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, calmly focused on shared security interests in the Arctic. And he remained steadfast where sovereignty and the rights of Greenlanders were concerned.
After a supposed breakthrough on the issue at the Davos conference later in January 2026, Denmark managed to divert dialogue to technical meetings, held confidentially, outside of the public eye. This was the critical change that allowed Copenhagen to defang the entire episode.
Step 5: Focus on interests, not positions
Negotiations experts know that success depends on persuading the sides to step away from their incompatible, publicly stated position and instead address their underlying interests. In this instance, President Trump had claimed that only full sovereignty over Greenland would answer US security needs.
At Davos, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte offered the US sovereignty at least over its base areas in Greenland. Trump seized that initiative and accepted, withdrawing his threat of invasion.
However, neither Denmark nor Greenland representatives had been party to that proposal. Handing over even a part of sovereign territory would hardly be acceptable to their parliaments.
But in the technical discussions, it became possible to move from a flat-out demand for sovereignty, to achieving the underlying US desire: a permanent arrangement safeguarding its interests in Greenland.
Step 6: Be generous in victory
On signing the agreement, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was careful to avoid any sense of climb-down by President Trump. It is a deal that can ‘last forever,’ she said, reflecting Trump’s claim that he had achieved an outcome just as permanent as a transfer of sovereignty.
As President Trump’s original stated position was that ‘the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity’, this new agreement seems a clear victory for calm and quiet Danish diplomacy. And it plainly illustrates the power of unity among NATO states and EU members. The lessons for future dealings with great powers are clear.
Leevin Camacho was brushing his teeth one day last fall when his mother called. The water is contaminated, she said. Moments later, she texted him a photo of a flyer issued by the local water authority. “Cancer risk,” it warned. “Increased likelihood of adverse impacts on the liver.” And in bold capital letters, “DO NOT DRINK.”
Camacho stared at the message. Water flowed from the faucets as his children, who were 10 and 12, gulped and spit, their faces reflected in the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks.
Thumbing at his phone, Camacho looked up dieldrin. The search results included words like “organochlorine” and “insecticide” and “persistent environmental pollutant”; the United States had banned it in 1987. Worse, high levels had been detected in his community’s water since at least 2008. “Our kids have been drinking the water,” he realized. “They’ve been cooking with the water for almost their entire lives at this point.”
Camacho lives in Yigo, a northern village on the island of Guam. In time, he would learn that the U.S. Air Force base next to the well serving his house had reported “very high levels” of the pesticide, which it had listed as a “chemical of concern” since at least 1993. The Pentagon’s investigation, led by officials at Joint Region Marianas, is in its early stages. Local officials caution that although they suspect the base is a source of the pollution, there may be others because dieldrin was once widely used.
For Camacho, the news felt like the unfolding of a familiar story — one both predictable and infuriating.
Camacho had grown up as an Army brat, raised to think of the United States as Guam’s liberator from Japan during World War II. But over the past two decades, his understanding of that legacy has changed.
“There are certain actions that the military takes that are contrary to the interests of the people who are from Guam and who live in Guam,” said Camacho, whose measured tone rarely changes, even when discussing something as emotional as what his children have been drinking.
To Camacho, dieldrin is the latest reminder that the people of Guam continue to bear the costs of militarization. Unexploded ordnance litters jungles and lagoons. PCBs contaminate the fish. Pollutants taint the groundwater. The island and its people, who are U.S. citizens, have been inalterably changed by more than a century of American military presence.
Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, the head of Joint Region Marianas, the U.S. Navy’s regional command for Guam and neighboring islands, said he can’t speak to past pollution but the command is committed to protecting the environment and the people of Guam.
“We spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of money making sure that we meet every U.S. regulation when it comes to anything that we’re going to do here,” he said. “We’re meeting every letter of every law for environmental regulations and rules, and we’re doing that while we’re spending a ton of money to defend this island from the most advanced missiles in the world.”
Today, Guam sits at the center of an ongoing military buildup, one that is reshaping the island even as it spreads across the Pacific. On nearby Yap, more than 1,000 graves could be disturbed to make way for an American seaport and airfield. Indigenous leaders on Palau are suing to protect their lands.
Less visible but just as impactful are the climate impacts of this expansion. The Pentagon is already the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and its buildup will do more than contribute to the destruction of the region’s reefs, forests, and Indigenous sacred sites. It will accelerate the climate crisis that threatens the survival of Pacific islands.
The Pentagon often cites growing geopolitical tensions to justify the buildup. “The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis,” Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress in April while seeking $122 billion for new weaponry to counter China, including offensive missiles on Guam. Three months later, a ballistic missile launched from a Chinese submarine flew near Guam, underscoring why many on the island see America’s military presence as both a source of vulnerability and protection.
Sometimes it can be too much to think about. “I need to compartmentalize these things,” Camacho said. “That’s sometimes the only way that you can do this, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that are out there, the amount of injustice that is out there.”
Those injustices collide in Yigo. Neighbors lost their homes earlier this year to typhoons fueled by warming seas. The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin clearing bombs from a nearby dump site created in 1945. A new machine-gun range just opened alongside a federal wildlife refuge to support the arrival of 5,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa, Japan.
Then there’s the dieldrin contamination. “At some point,” Camacho said, “someone has to force them to do what’s right.”
II.
Years before he became one of Guam’s leading critics of the military buildup sweeping over the island, Leevin Camacho was a young lawyer who liked to run before work. As his sneakers hit the pavement, the sun rose over Yigo. Roosters crowed and streaks of pink lightened the sky. The road, little used and lined with jungle brush, was one of the few places he could run without encountering stray dogs or morning traffic. He always ran at first light, before oppressive heat would reflect off the asphalt and the concrete buildings. It was the perfect start to what was often a day spent listening to depositions and wading through case law.
It was 2009. Camacho had returned to Guam after law school and was making more money than he ever had as a school teacher. “You dream of going to law school to provide services and to fight for people who don’t have the ability to fight, right? I’ll be honest with you, I lost my way,” Camacho said. “I had a bunch of student debt, and I was satisfied just kind of going by day to day and just focusing on myself and my family.”
Leevin Camacho stands before the well serving his home in Yigo, Guam, which was found to have been contaminated with high levels of dieldrin.Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
The U.S. military was the backdrop to Camacho’s life but not something he worried about. He didn’t think much about the invasive tangan-tangan trees lining his running route, or the fact that they had spread across Guam after the U.S. scattered their seeds to reforest the island following the war. On his morning runs, he was more likely to hear a military jet overhead than a native birdsong.
It hadn’t always been that way. Guam was among the first Pacific islands settled by seafarers, from what is now the Philippines, who navigated by the stars and waves an estimated 3,500 years ago. The CHamoru people built a thriving island society known for its towering latte stones and swift outrigger sailing canoes.
That changed when Magellan landed on Guam in 1521. Spain claimed the island and the rest of the archipelago, beginning more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. The Spanish forced the Indigenous people to embrace Catholicism and banned their canoes. The United States took over the island from Spain in 1898 and imposed military rule. Naval governors burned CHamoru language books and blocked Indigenous efforts to gain U.S. citizenship.
Then came Japan. Its invasion in 1941, on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t unexpected. The U.S. Navy evacuated sailors’ dependents but left 20,000 CHamorus to endure nearly three years of forced marches and labor, malnutrition, and sexual servitude. More than 1,000 would die. When American forces retook Guam in 1944, they were welcomed as liberators. The island still celebrates Liberation Day every July. “I can’t remember a single discouraging remark that my maternal grandmother would have made about the U.S.,” Camacho said. But he does remember her saying of the Americans, “‘They saved us.’”
In this August 1944 photo, people of Guam pour out of the hills into the Agana refugee camp. Nearly 18,000 CHamoru were relocated to Manenggon and other concentration camps before the Battle of Guam.Photo: Joe Rosenthal/AP Photo
That was the narrative that Camacho grew up with. Even the military taking his family’s land — part of a massive military land grab after World War II — was accepted by his grandparents as the price of freedom from Japanese oppression. It wasn’t until Camacho learned that the Pentagon’s expansion plans would close his running route that he began to question what it meant for Guam to be an American military outpost. He pored over the buildup’s planning documents and was struck by the disconnect between how the military described its plans and the reality as he knew it. “They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact,’” he said of the running route. “And that was it.”
As Camacho read thousands of pages of documents, he saw the same pattern again and again. Proposals for bombing and machine-gun ranges, expanded undersea explosives, and projects that threatened forests and ancient latte stones were accompanied by detailed assessments that minimized what they would mean for the islands.
“They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact.’”
On a flight home from Honolulu, Camacho was reviewing the environmental analysis of the buildup on his laptop when one passage stopped him. The proposed influx of 80,000 people would leave too little water for fire suppression, particularly in Yigo. The solution, according to the document, was to send surplus water from Andersen Air Force Base to civilian communities. “That was the first time I just kind of lost it, just how stark it was,” he said. “The aquifer is our aquifer, right? Like, you’re taking our water for your people and then we don’t have enough and they’re going to divert whatever you’re taking from us that is extra.”
Camacho and other concerned residents started We Are Guåhan, a community group focused on raising awareness about what was happening. (Guåhan is the CHamoru word for Guam.) He sued to stop a machine-gun range from being built at Pågat, an ancestral village that’s home to millennia-old latte stones. Their campaign protected the site and helped persuade the Navy not to expand its landholdings on Guam. The Department of Defense also reduced the planned transfer of Marines from Okinawa from 9,000 to 5,000.
But it didn’t stop the buildup. The Pentagon activated Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz six years ago and opened a new machine-gun range alongside a federal wildlife refuge just north of Yigo. “It’s so heartbreaking,” said Lola Leon Guerrero, another member of We Are Guåhan. “All of that effort, and it still happened.”
Construction on Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz, located in the village of Dededo in northwest Guam and activated in 2020, proceeds in May 2026. Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
III.
The yellow excavator scraped away at the pale rock that lies beneath Camp Blaz under the hot May sun. A limestone forest had already been bulldozed to make way for a new machine-gun training range. A sign next to the fence read “Guam National Wildlife Refuge” with an arrow pointing to the left and a picture of a turtle.
“Wow,” said Moneaka Flores, one of Camacho’s clients in the lawsuit he filed against the Navy to protect the island’s endangered species. She stopped at the side of the road to watch the digger work. It had been months since she’d been here, and they’d cleared so much more forest than she realized.
Busy construction vehicles are the most obvious sign of the Pentagon’s buildup. Beyond the new Marine Corps base, the Department of Defense is upgrading the island’s port and strengthening its infrastructure to support docked nuclear submarines. The agency is also pouring $8 billion into 16 new missile defense sites. After World War II, the Navy took two-thirds of the island. “Whatever made most sense for the military, the island was theirs for the taking,” said Michael Clement, a historian at the University of Guam. “Everyone was in refugee camps. They had the bulldozers. They built where they wanted to build. And then a year or two later, they started saying, ‘OK, where are we going to put the natives?’”
“That’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around. … It was redesigned for military purposes.”
The military later relinquished some land but still owns at least a quarter of the island. “If you look at where the villages were set out in 1946 and ’47, it’s the land the military didn’t need. So that’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around, right?” Clement said. “To go across from Tumon to Mangilao, you’ve got to go around Tiyan and the airport. It wasn’t redesigned for civilians. It was redesigned for military purposes.”
Even the island’s main highway, the six-lane Marine Corps Drive, was designed for the military, not the people. It connects Andersen in the north and Naval Base Guam in the south.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero (no relation to Lola Leon Guerreo) is among the many who welcome the financial boost that comes with the military’s investments. “They’re spending billions on their readiness plan,” she said.
One in 9 Guam residents joins the armed forces. Last year, a local economist told the Legislature that every dollar the Pentagon spends adds 75 cents to the island’s GDP and called the buildup an “unprecedented economic opportunity.” The funding infusions have helped Guam become far more commercialized than other Pacific islands, with multiple shopping malls, numerous high-rise hotels, and a growing real estate sector.
Leon Guerrero thinks activists should pursue political self-determination instead of resisting the buildup. “These guys can yell and scream all they can,” the governor said. “They’re going to do the military buildup regardless, right? So why don’t we work with them and see how we can benefit?” She wants the Defense Department to help harden local power lines and fund a hospital. “Our hospital cannot absorb mass casualties,” she said.
There are about 20,600 military personnel on Guam, a figure that’s expected to reach 29,400 by 2037. While the military is investing in additional housing both on and off base, the population influx will almost certainly continue pushing up construction and housing costs. The median home price on Guam was $216,100 in 2010, when Camacho sued the military to protect Pågat. Today it is approaching half a million dollars.
Fear of another war also fuels support for the buildup. “We’ve always been a target regardless, because of where we are geographically located,” Leon Guerrero said. Guam is the largest island in the Micronesian region of the Pacific. It’s just north of the equator, a three-hour flight from Tokyo, and has a deep-water harbor that supports naval submarines. “We were a target for Spain. We were a target for the U.S. We were a target for Japan.” She worries about China, which has a ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer.” “If I’m going to have a choice, I’d rather be under the U.S. than China.”
To Flores, more military presence on Guam heightens the risk of war. In March, President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran prompted military bases on the island to raise their threat level. She feels that, as in World War II, the Indigenous people of Guam are expendable in a broader contest between empires. “What are they really here to protect if there’s so much harm taking place? Are we just collateral damage?” she said. “Because just looking at our history of being occupied by war, being used for weapons testing, it feels like the message is that we don’t matter. Our future doesn’t matter. Our survival doesn’t matter.”
Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, at Joint Region Marianas, said he understands such skepticism. “If I was born and raised on Guam, I would have similar concerns,” he said. But he believes the military’s investment proves the opposite of what Flores fears. “Choice A is not to defend Guam against ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” he said. “Or the other choice, which is the one that we’ve made, is to spend billions of dollars to defend Guam from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. And so from my perspective, that shows a commitment not just to the military things that are on Guam, but also to the people of Guam.”
Yet Flores is far from the only Guam resident who feels expendable. When Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, first learned about the dieldrin in his village’s water, his first thought was of his autistic sister. “All of us growing up, all our lives, our water bottles, we fill it up with the tap water, put it in the fridge: That’s our cold water,” he said. “Because we were instilled in our heads our whole lives: Tap water is OK.”
Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, Guam, has been hearing from many constituents who are concerned that long-term exposure to dieldrin could have caused cancer in their families. Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
So far, Camacho’s firm has helped file more than 700 claims, worth $360 million, against local authorities on behalf of village residents. He hopes that pressures the island to seek compensation from the Defense Department. “I’m so glad [Camacho] got involved,” Blas said. “We’re not letting it get swept up under the rug.” Mietus noted that Joint Region Marianas has not found high levels of dieldrin in military wells, and the Pentagon is working with local officials to determine the source of Yigo’s pollution.
“They look at Guam as real estate.”
Still, Blas wonders why the investigations at Andersen Air Force Base are occurring quietly behind the fence, while he hasn’t seen anyone in uniform hand out water to his constituents. “It’s beautiful to be a U.S. citizen, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But if you really take a step back and look at exactly the impacts that [the military] brought to us over the years, we should have a say in whether or not these practices are going to happen to our island. Even just being called the ‘tip of the spear’ — we’re susceptible to any war that they’re going fight, and we just have to be OK with it.”
“This contamination they bring to our island, it kind of just shows how much they really care about our people,” Blas continued. “And frankly, I think they look at Guam as real estate rather than ‘Those are our U.S. citizens. Those are our people. Those are Americans.’”
IV.
The men and women gathered in the p’ebay, the traditional open-air Yapese meeting house with a triangular tin roof, and settled quietly on the tiled floor along each wall to listen to Camacho speak. A projector, perched above a cardboard box stacked on top of a red cooler, cast his PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Slide after slide described the American military’s plans. A cool breeze fluttered the fronds on the palm trees surrounding the p’ebay.
It was April in the village of Tamil on Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Camacho’s dieldrin work was far from over, but he’d put that aside when the island state’s government asked him to help dissect a Navy proposal to expand the seaport and airport. Tamil was one of several villages he visited to explain the plan.
Over the past decade, Camacho has become one of Guam’s leading environmental lawyers. “The one thing about Leevin is he shows up. Again and again,” said Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer on the island. “And he brings with him not only deep competence but a deep sense of responsibility to the people and places he serves.”
“Regulatory agencies will bend over backwards to not pick a fight with the military because of the mission and the protection and all of that,” Camacho said. “And ultimately, it’s people who aren’t lawyers who end up paying the price.”
He was elected attorney general in 2018 for one term and led a historic lawsuit to force the Navy to clean up a hazardous landfill it had abandoned in the 1940s. A lower court dismissed the suit, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that it could proceed — a decision that eventually prompted the federal government to pay Guam $48.9 million.
He has sued the Navy to protect endangered species harmed by the construction of Camp Blaz. “For too long, our island has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” he said.
The risk of Guam falling into enemy hands, as it did in World War II, is so tangible that America’s Pacific military strategy involves spending billions of dollars to spread airfields, seaports, and training ranges across the region to remain competitive in case Guam is once again occupied by enemy forces. The U.S. is invoking decades-old agreements with the peoples of the Republic of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia to expand its presence on those islands and upgrade World War II-era seaports and airfields. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. even signed a new agreement with Papua New Guinea to use its seaports.
On Yap, the U.S. military wants to dredge the lagoon, including two-thirds of an acre in a marine protected area, to create a seaport. The plan would remove enough sediment to fill 334 40-foot shipping containers and impact sea life, Indigenous fishers, and divers. “Plume spreads up to 800 m from disposal sites,” Camacho’s presentation noted. “Long-term reef decline and impact on reef species (fish, clams, sharks, turtles) not assessed.”
The Navy also plans to expand the airfield to facilitate two military exercises, each two weeks long and involving up to 200 personnel, per year. The project could disturb more than 1,000 graves, including the 19th-century tombs of Chief Orothin and Chief Yaloth. Camacho noted that the military’s draft plan acknowledges a “significant adverse impact” to these cultural sites and doesn’t commit to rebury the dead or preserve ancestral sites.
Yap has a population of just about 11,500, compared to Guam’s 170,000. Although Yap is less than a 90-minute flight from Guam, it has none of the military bases, six-lane highways, or big-box stores that define the American territory. “In some ways, this will be more transformative for Yap State than the buildup was for Guam because there’s no military presence there today,” Camacho said. On Guam, he said, “It’s normal to hear a fighter jet flying over. It’s normal to see a bomber or C130. They don’t have any of that there. So this would be such a radical change.”
One month after Camacho visited Yap, dignitaries from across the Pacific gathered in an air-conditioned conference room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Guam. The hotel sits on a long stretch of white sand beach and looks out over Tumon Bay, where high levels of dieldrin have also been found in fish samples.
Political leaders from across the Pacific listen to presentations on the growing military presence in their region at a conference in Tumon, Guam. Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
Once everyone had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and the glow of a projector filled the room. A screen showed a map of military activity across the western Pacific: not just bases, but training exercises and the routes of research vessels searching the sea floor for the critical minerals essential to many military technologies.
“We’re faced with the reality that we’re part of a larger strategic vision,” conference organizer and former Guam congressman Robert Underwood said. “All of you are in someone’s strategic plans whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. All of us are in someone’s strategic plan.”
In Palau, Indigenous people are fighting the Pentagon’s expansion in local courts and international forums. Leaders of Angaur, one of 16 states there, filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. of violating environmental rules and its treaty with the island nation when it cleared land for a radar facility. Indigenous chiefs from Peleliu are suing to prevent a land transfer that would support American goals. Indigenous Palauan youth filed a complaint at the United Nations alleging the U.S. military violated their right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.
In the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military presence that started with World War II is ramping up. On Tinian, the Marine Corps is building an airfield and two live-fire training ranges, one of them for explosives. The Navy is extending its undersea sonar and explosives training across half a million square nautical miles, along with bombing practice on the neighboring island of Farallon de Medinilla.
Some hope the military’s regional expansion will enable other island nations and territories to experience the economic growth seen on Guam. But others worry about the pollution and cultural loss, and other risks that come with being a U.S. military stronghold.
In public comments written in response to the Navy’s proposal, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng noted that Camacho’s fight to have the Navy address hazardous waste at Ordot Dump went all the way to the Supreme Court. “Additionally, there are sacred private lands and culturally significant ecosystems that no amount of money can ever replace,” she wrote. “The desecration of graves violates the general principles of respect for burial sites and human remains upheld in Yap’s traditional custom.”
She’s also worried about becoming a target in the next war. Like Palau, Yap was held by the Japanese during World War II and experienced heavy bombardment by the United States. Since then, the Pentagon hasn’t paid much attention to the island state — until now.
“With rising tensions in the region between the U.S. and China, what does the DoD envision combat to look like?” Chieng wrote. “Will it be based on a WWII tactic of island hopping? What is the likelihood of the island becoming a battlefield if tensions were to escalate into war? Yap will be caught in the crossfire. Does the DoD intend to protect and defend the people of Yap, and if so, how does the DoD intend to do that?”
Mietus, the Joint Region Marianas commander, said there’s always a level of risk in being allied with the U.S. during a conflict.
“Sometimes people believe it’s a plan to evacuate U.S. service members or family members if a war starts — there is not,” he said. “I’m in this, living in the same risk as every other person here.” He’s pushed back against Guam lawmakers’ calls for the Defense Department to fund bomb shelters for civilians, contending that the existing military projects like strengthening Guam’s harbor are a better investment. “Oftentimes people see this Department of War as kind of having an infinite amount of money, and we don’t.”
V.
Unlike Guam, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent countries that have achieved the political self-determination that Indigenous CHamoru on Guam have been denied for centuries.
Camacho wants a plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status. He believes the island’s status as a U.S. territory — without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress — isn’t working. But while some of his colleagues in We Are Guåhan have focused on independence, Camacho sees his own role as making the government answer for its actions.
Leevin Camacho gestures at photos of his family in his home in Yigo, Guam. His grandparents lived through the brutal Japanese occupation of Guam and rarely talked about it. Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
“Unless someone’s forcing the issue,” he said, “the Department of War isn’t going to voluntarily agree to be held accountable and agree to do all the things that it’s supposed to do.”
That’s why he feels compelled to seek reparations for the dieldrin contamination. So often, toxic pollution lingers on Guam and no one takes responsibility. “As a lawyer, I don’t want to fall into this situation where we’re like [the village of] Malesso, and they show up every year and say you still can’t eat the fish. That’s just not satisfactory,” he said.
One question that drives him is what Guam will be like when his kids are grown. Will they be able to afford living there? Will they want to, given how much the island is changing? It’s a constant effort to find the right balance between working toward their future and being there for them day to day.
“I’m going to try to do the best that I can to protect my island and to have a safe place for my kids to want to live on Guam,” Camacho said. “But also be there for them and help them get better dribbling with their left hand and be good human beings.” Even though Camacho moved a lot growing up, his family never considers leaving. “That is not a choice,” he said. “Guam is home — there is nowhere else we are going to be.”
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EVANSTON, Illinois — A U.S. citizen was hospitalized after federal immigration agents mistakenly detained him Sunday in Evanston while searching for another man, according to local police and witnesses.
Evanston police said officers responding near Howard Street and Dodge Avenue found the man on the ground with injuries to his head, neck and teeth. Witness Miguel Olivares said he heard the man repeatedly saying, “I’m a U.S. citizen,” and recorded federal agents pinning him down. Olivares told ABC7 Chicago that the agents appeared to use significant force and that one seemed to strike the man in the face.
A federal agent later told Evanston police that officers had approached the man because he resembled a fugitive they were seeking. According to police, agents detained him for fingerprinting after he refused to provide identification, then released him after determining he was not their target and was a U.S. citizen.
The Department of Homeland Security said the man was uncooperative and that officers acted according to their training. DHS also maintained that its operations are “highly targeted.” However, in this case, agents detained and injured someone who was not the person they were seeking.
Evanston police are investigating and collecting body-camera, dash-camera and witness video. Police Chief Schenita Stewart later met with the injured man at the hospital and offered department support.
The Greek prime minister has said a deal can still be reached to return the Parthenon marbles with “political will” but his country will not accept a loan in the style of the Bayeux tapestry’s visit from France.
Writing for the Guardian, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece “cannot accept any arrangement that would require it to recognise the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures, or a scheme that would mean we ‘borrow’ parts of our own monument”.
OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials."
The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I. safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI's systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.
"Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused on A.I. oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI," the article points out. That research lab even reports "an attempt on an Australian government public health website... the first reported instance of agents hacking a government," and which notably was done by the AI agents "while attempting mundane data retrieval tasks which were not cyber-related." (At the UN Wednesday Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained it took three months for OpenAI to then alert Australia's government about the breach, Bloomberg reports.)
Also targeted were the University of New Mexico's digital library with exploits like SQL injection and path traversal, and Data USA with cross-site scripting and other exploits. All three incidents involved "a low number of probe payloads" with "no evidence of exploitation," according to the researchers, who released a dataset "containing tens of thousands of queries apparently made by autonomous AI agents leveraging a URL scanning service to avoid access restrictions."
Records from urlquery.net show agents using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as September 16... By March, they were finding creative ways around access limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks.
"This data reveals that malicious cyber activity is not limited to agents tasked with cybersecurity-related tasks and can arise instrumentally to solve mundane tasks like information retrieval," the researchers concluded.
And they warn that the traffic they observed "goes back at least to March 6, 2026 and extends as recently as September 16, 2026, suggesting agents may still be exploiting these services to bypass restrictions."
Five desalination plants shut down for days, while Gaza remains in grip of severe water and sanitation crisis
Israel is facing weeks of water shortages after an exceptional algae bloom crippled much of its desalination capacity, in a crisis scientists say was triggered when Israeli attacks destroyed much of Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure, causing a massive discharge of untreated sewage.
“Pollution does not recognise political borders,” said the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli NGO dedicated to protecting the country’s seas and shores. “The discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities. The wastewater contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae and cyanobacteria and may intensify their blooms.”
These latest attacks come just hours before Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the UN general assembly, so he is likely to reflect on them during his UN speech later.
So far, we have had no public comment from Zelenskyy or Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha.
Some prominent references to President Trump were scrubbed from Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds' campaign website in recent weeks, but the Republican said he isn't backing away from the president's agenda.
The mockumentary “Lords of War” shows how Pentagon money gets funneled into $20-million-plus paydays for weapons company CEOs — and their lavish lifestyles.
DES MOINES, Iowa — An Iowa judge has dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, ruling that an inaccurate pre-election poll did not amount to consumer fraud and was protected political speech.
The disputed November 2024 poll showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points in Iowa. Trump ultimately won the state by more than 13 points. He argued that the poll was deceptive and violated Iowa’s consumer-fraud and misrepresentation laws.
Iowa District Court Judge Scott Beattie rejected that argument Wednesday, writing that Trump’s complaint attempted to stretch state law far beyond its existing limits and impose liability on speech receiving the highest level of First Amendment protection. The case was dismissed with prejudice, preventing Trump from simply refiling the same claims in state court.
Trump originally filed the case in December 2024, later dropped a federal version and refiled a substantially similar complaint in Iowa state court.
Selzer welcomed the ruling, saying polling is “a social science, not clairvoyance” and that pollsters cannot guarantee election results. She has consistently denied manipulating the survey or acting with political intent.
The ruling distinguishes between a poll that proved substantially wrong and evidence of deliberate fraud. Trump’s attorneys had not immediately announced whether they would pursue an appeal.
Die Linke candidate, a lawyer affected by her experiences as the child of political migrants from Turkey, poised to head Berlin coalition government
Elif Eralp launched her election bid last autumn with the blunt statement: “People like me are actually not supposed to become mayor in this country.” So the fact that the 45-year-old lawyer and daughter of political migrants from Turkey is on the verge of becoming Berlin’s next mayor and the capital’s first leader of Turkish origin is quite the moment in German politics.
After last weekend’s city state election, in which her far-left party, Die Linke, came first with more than a quarter of the votes, Eralp has become a household name.
With just under six weeks until the midterms, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina laid out the NRSC's strategy to try to hold onto the Senate amid a tough political environment.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — ProPublica says records from an FBI anti-corruption investigation contradict several public statements Sen. Susan Collins has made while defending her relationship with former Navatek CEO Martin Kao, a major political donor convicted of campaign-finance and loan fraud.
Collins has said the Biden Justice Department and FBI “totally cleared” her, her office and her campaign years ago. But ProPublica reports that the investigation at issue involved allegations Kao provided between 2022 and 2024, with agents still examining his relationship with Collins, her aides and a pro-Collins super PAC in early 2025.
An FBI spokesperson said an earlier investigation “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.” No one associated with Collins was charged. However, ProPublica says that earlier inquiry is separate from the later corruption review that ended after personnel assigned to the case were removed during the Trump administration.
Collins’ deputy chief of staff also argued that investigators did not believe Kao. ProPublica reports FBI documents said emails and other records corroborated portions of his account, though Kao’s criminal history presented obvious credibility concerns.
Collins has called the allegations false and politically motivated. AP reported that the dispute is now a major issue in Maine’s Senate campaign.
Kirsten Gillibrand says acting US navy secretary told her of attempted suicides after carrier strike group’s lengthy deployment as part of US war in Iran. This blog is now closed.
Rubio also briefly addressed Trump’s meeting with Delcy Rodriguez, the interim Venezuelan president, who last night posed for a friendly photo with Trump at a Manhattan hotel only miles from where her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, was incarcerated.
“It was a short meeting, but it was a very important meeting,” Rubio said.
The Vaccines for Children program, which serves nearly half the nation’s youths, had been in limbo for almost a month, with doctors unable to obtain the shots.
Ars Technica reports:
Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.
Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks... They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers... Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it...."
A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court... If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority...
Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. "I am dubious about the commission's authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers," she said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disclosed more than $4 million in book advances and roughly $270,000 in gifts from longtime allies, financial relationships that are drawing scrutiny because several benefactors are also involved in the Make America Healthy Again movement.
The largest payments were two $2 million advances from Skyhorse Publishing for Unsettled Science and A Defense for Israel. Skyhorse owner Tony Lyons is a longtime Kennedy associate who also leads organizations promoting MAHA-related causes and accepting political contributions and corporate sponsorships.
Kennedy also disclosed about $126,000 in Washington lodging and nearly $150,000 in airfare provided by security consultant Gavin de Becker, including trips to Greece and Fiji. De Becker has been a major Kennedy political donor and described the gifts as part of their longstanding friendship.
The book payments raise a specific ethics question because federal rules generally prohibit government employees from receiving compensation for writing related to their official duties when that writing occurs during government service. Whether Kennedy’s advances violate those rules would depend on when the writing was performed and whether the books relate to his HHS responsibilities.
Kennedy’s representatives say he has complied with federal ethics requirements and worked with HHS ethics officials on his disclosures. No violation has been formally established.
Hung Cao, acting US navy secretary, answered questions from US senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a letter
Eight US navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, revealed in a letter to the US senator Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday.
“Since the beginning of Lincoln’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group,” Cao wrote, responding on behalf of US defense secretary Pete Hegseth to Gillibrand’s inquiry about the quality of life aboard the fleet. “This number includes the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons.”
What caused the turtles to begin nesting farther north than usual is the ‘million dollar question’
A sea turtle crawled out of the surf in southern California last weekend around sunset and started laying eggs in the sand.
People on Huntington Beach who saw the female olive ridley sea turtle were shocked and excited. And they weren’t the only ones freaking out, said Justin Viezbicke, the California stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa).
There have been eight suicide attempts across the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the beginning of its grueling monthslong deployment last year, Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said.
A Tennessee judge granted Dolly Parton's estate a temporary restraining order Wednesday against the late singer's nephew Bryan Seaver and his private security company.
Ker’Sean Ramey, 41, died by lethal injection, the sixth person to be executed by Texas officials this year
A man found guilty of fatally shooting three people during a 2005 attempted robbery at a rural Texas home was executed Wednesday, a week after the other man convicted in the killings was put to death.
Ker’Sean Ramey, 41, died by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He isthe sixth person executed so far this year in Texas, with three more people scheduled over the next two months.
Meta’s not done with VR. Its sleek and expensive glasses-like VR device doesn’t need controllers, plays Quest games and is aiming to be your personal cinema too.
The General Assembly earlier this year erred by failing to give Delmarva Power even the limited ability to generate electricity. Discussions in Legislative Hall didn’t lead to legislation to alter or overturn the “1999 deregulation bill” that bars the utility…
Small crowd enjoys singer’s free concert in MacArthur Park, which has often drawn headlines for less cheery reasons
With no announcement and little fanfare, Justin Bieber performed a free acoustic set on Monday at a Los Angeles park often in local headlines for less cheery reasons.
In videos that surfaced online, four musicians flanked the global phenom, who wore a plain T-shirt and shorts as he sang hits including Daisies and Yukon. The low-key affair with a small crowd stood in stark contrast to Bieber’s recent blockbuster World Cup and Coachella performances.
Donald Trump has welcomed Xi Jinping to the US, taking the unusual step of greeting the Chinese leader on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews to kick off his state visit to Washington.
Xi’s plane was met with a lavish arrival ceremony that included a 30-metre-long (100ft) red carpet flanked by US service members, a military flyover by two B-1 bombers and a presentation of the flags and national anthems of both countries.
If you’re still doing your shopping the old-fashioned way — that is, all by yourself — it might interest you to know that 43% of U.S. online shoppers say they’ve used an AI assistant for product research in the past…
An Iowa judge sided with pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, saying that allowing the lawsuit and its "faulty" claims to proceed could "discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs."
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump personally welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, offering the Chinese leader a rare planeside greeting as Xi began a three-day state visit focused on trade, technology and security.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump met Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, on the tarmac after Air China One arrived outside Washington. The greeting broke with usual presidential protocol, under which visiting leaders typically receive their formal welcome at the White House.
Xi’s visit is the first U.S. state visit by a Chinese leader in more than a decade. The main events are scheduled for Thursday, including a formal White House arrival ceremony, military review, Oval Office talks and state dinner. A military flyover featuring a B-2 Spirit bomber and four F-22 Raptors is also planned.
The visit comes as Washington and Beijing seek to stabilize relations after prolonged disputes over tariffs, rare-earth minerals and technology. Reuters reported that the two countries agreed to extend an existing trade truce, while major breakthroughs during the summit are not expected.
Trump and Xi are expected to discuss artificial intelligence, trade, Taiwan and other geopolitical disputes. Trump previously visited Beijing in May and invited Xi to Washington during that trip.
Andy Burnham under pressure to revisit Brexit as poll suggests pledge to rejoin could boost Labour’s electoral chances
Britain should work towards rejoining the EU in the next decade, Tony Blair has said, adding to growing pressure on Andy Burnham to abandon Labour’s reluctance to revisit the 2016 referendum.
The former prime minister has urged Burnham to use his 10-year plan in November to put the country’s membership of the union back on the table, a decade after it voted to leave.
In 2024 ethics filing, US health secretary pledged to ‘not engage in writing, editing, marketing or promotional services for any of these books during government service’
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, received $4m over the last year in book advances from allies within the Make America Healthy Again movement, according to a new report.
The advances were for upcoming books by Skyhorse Publishing, a publishing house belonging to Tony Lyons, a friend of Kennedy Jr who is also president of Maha Center, a non-profit that describes itself as “tackling America’s health crisis through education, investigation, innovation and action”.
Automotive collision and refinishing students at Dunwoody College in Minneapolis rebuilt a Hyundai Elantra and gave it to Robert Hanson, a U.S. Navy veteran, through the National Auto Body Council's Recycled Rides program.
(The Center Square) – A new poll from the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Government Studies says Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has fallen behind her general election opponent, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, by 11 percentage points.
Hundreds gathered on Tuesday night in anticipation of a small boat arriving in Gosport
Three people have been charged in connection with anti-migrant protests that drew hundreds of demonstrators to a marina in Hampshire on Tuesday night.
Six people were arrested by police, as anti-migrant activists who mistakenly believed a small boat was due to arrive at Gosport gathered in an attempt to disrupt the arrival of any asylum seekers.
Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there’s actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore.
Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.
And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn’t just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft’s own WinUI framework, which is used for most “new” Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does.
Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can’t even rely on it working.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, at the U.S. Capitol in August Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims.
On Tuesday, ProPublica published an investigation into the senior senator from Maine’s relationship with Martin Kao, the former Navatek CEO and a major donor who told law enforcement he exchanged campaign cash for government contracts. His confession came after his guilty plea for campaign finance and loan fraud.
The ProPublica story revealed that the FBI had been circling the senator, her top aides and a pro-Collins super PAC in recent years, asking questions about their relationship with Navatek. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump fired or pushed out most of the federal agents and lawyers investigating high-profile federal corruption matters, including those working on the Kao case. The dismissals ended the corruption review, which was in its early stages.
After the story published, Collins and her campaign denied any wrongdoing in numerous media appearances. Some of the statements made by Collins and her representatives are not accurate.
Collins: “In 2021, the Biden Justice Department found there was no wrongdoing by anyone on my campaign staff, my office or me.”
Collins: “The Biden-led Justice Department and FBI totally cleared my office, my campaign and me five years ago of these seven-year-old allegations.”
An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.”
But the investigation at the center of ProPublica’s story was based on claims Kao made between 2022 through 2024 — not seven years ago, as Collins states. That investigation did not conclude under President Joe Biden but under Trump, in 2025, after his administration purged the agents and Department of Justice attorneys assigned to the case.
Collins is referring to the FBI’s initial investigation of Kao, which started in 2021. No one in Collins’ orbit was charged as a result of that earlier investigation.
FBI records reviewed by ProPublica show the agency remained interested in the conduct of Collins and her staff right up until the most recent phase of their investigation was shut down under Trump.
The documents show that Kao was still answering agents’ questions as late as September 2024, when he sat for a two-day interview with FBI agents at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu. During that interview, Kao provided them with a 50-page document offering many new allegations about his interactions with elected officials, including Collins.
And in early 2025, FBI agents were still examining Kao’s relationship with Collins, her staffers and employees of the super PAC, ProPublica found.
The judge in Kao’s sentencing ultimately offered him no benefit for his cooperation with federal authorities, sentencing him to 87 months in federal prison. While Kao had credibility issues — as a convicted felon — FBI documents seen by ProPublica show that agents were able to corroborate some of his claims.
“Pursuant to a Grand Jury Subpoena issued to Navatek, related to the previous investigation, hundreds of thousands of documents were provided to the FBI,” agents wrote in a December 2024 document.
“Several emails and other documents corroborate Kao’s statements made to the FBI.”
In addition, people familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that FBI agents found Kao to be credible.
Clark: “ProPublica took the word of someone who pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC.”
ProPublica did not simply take Kao at his word but reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI. It also examined thousands of pages of legal records and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations and the FBI inquiry to independently corroborate much of Kao’s account.
For instance, Kao said that Scott Reed, the head of the Collins super PAC, promised to make the senator aware that Kao was the person behind a large, anonymous donation to the super PAC made through a shell company.
We published emails between Reed and Kao showing that Kao told Reed the name of the shell company he was using to anonymize his $150,000 donation. And we included an email from someone working for Reed to a Navatek representative asking for Kao’s number so Collins could thank him for the donation. These are consistent with Kao’s version of events.
Steve Abbott, Collins’ campaign manager, said at a Wednesday press conference, “We have no record of her calling him.” But he added that such a phone call would not be unusual: “We routinely thank people for contributions. … We try to thank everybody.”
Reed did not answer detailed questions about the $150,000 donation but said he didn’t speak to Collins about Kao. He added, “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison.”
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Programmers can now create software for photonic computers using Python and C/C++, thanks to the new software development kit (SDK) and the associated APIs released by Q.ANT GmbH this week. Q.ANT Founder and CEO Michael Förtsch tells HPCwire the SDK demonstrates the progress that’s been made integrating photonic computing into the current HPC stack, and paves the way for more powerful non-linear algorithms running on photonic systems in the future.
Q.ANT is one of the world’s leading providers of photonic computing, where photons (i.e. beams of light) are used to process data, as opposed to electronics (i.e. electrical current). The Stuttgart, Germany-based company is currently shipping the second generation of its photonic chips, called Native Processing Units (NPUs), which it embeds into PCIe cards and sells as fully packaged servers dubbed Native Processing Servers (NPSs).
Q.ANT’s NPU processor
While it’s still early days for the field, Förtsch says Q.ANT is the only photonics computing provider with actual commercial products running in the field. The eight-year-old company’s computers are also being tested in two German supercomputing centers, including Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).
Förtsch doesn’t see NPUs replacing CPUs or GPUs computers in the near future. Traditional processors based on Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology do a good job of running the vector-matrix multiplication at the heart of many linear algorithms, he says.
“We are not competing with the GPU and the CPU directly,” Förtsch says. “We leave the workloads where those systems are optimized for at their table. And it’s great. We don’t have to do everything, right?”
Where NPUs will start to compete with GPUs and CPUs is with non-linear algorithms, where the added complexity of the CMOS-based technology–and in particular the large amount of data movement involved–starts to introduce significant overhead that warrants a look at other approaches, Förtsch says.
The capability to run non-linear algorithms natively in light gives the NPU a sizable advantage. According to Q.ANT, the advantage can be as high as 30x in power savings for an equivalent function. The key is matching photonic computers to the appropriate functions. One such non-linear algorithm that the NPUs excel at is compression.
“If we now think about using non-linear functions for the compression, this could be a door opener to increase the contact length of the chat window of the transformer algorithm,” Förtsch says. “The only thing you need is a processor that can basically efficiently swap between the decrypted and encrypted cache function without shredding effectively the quality of the context window, and which can operate nearly cost-free on these functions.”
But there are many more ideas for non-linear algorithms that are either coming out Q.ANT or circulating around the community, Förtsch says. This is why getting an open source SDK into the community is such a big deal.
The SDK, which was announced today, provides developers access to Q.ANT’s system via Python and C/C++ APIs. Developers can simply call photonic resources, either emulated on a laptop or running on actual Q.ANT systems running in the cloud, and start to experiment with photonic computing.
Q.ANT’s NPS server
“People say, hey, can I start modeling things? Can I start playing around with the ability of your new function?” Förtsch says. “And that’s the reason why for us, the last mile to the open-source community was the SDK.”
In addition to the development environment, the SDK includes documentation and installation guides to help developers get going. It also includes sample code and reference applications to jumpstart the code creation process for budding photonic computing developers.
The SDK today supports cosine, elementwise multiplication, matrix-matrix multiplication, convolutions, and other AI operations, such as batchnorm and relu. In the future. Q.ANT will support several other functions in the SDK, including linear functions, sine functions, Fourier transformations, and state-based models.
Supporting emerging non-linear AI workloads is a big focus for Q.ANT right now. There are a handful of new AI labs that are spending resources exploring alternative nonlinear models, and they’re closely looking at Q.ANT, Förtsch says. “They monitor very closely what we are doing now,” he says. They’re interested in “which functions can we basically offer as a primitive.”
While a big focus is on AI, there is also the potential for using Q.ANT for traditional HPC workloads, such as modeling and simulation, Förtsch says.
Q.ANT CEO and Founder Michael Fortsch
“Physics simulation, in our opinion, is a fantastic area to use this technology,” he says. “How do you model physics, or how do you model nature? Well, you use physics and the underpinning models are often harmonic oscillators. And harmonic oscillator is nothing else than an oscillator that exists per definition driven by a sinusoidal excitation…. That’s where these processors are strong.”
There is a caveat to that, in that Q.ANT’s chips will not support FP64 precision. The current hardware supports FP16, and eventually it will support FP32, Förtsch says. Of course, with Ozaki schemes, there is a possibility to offer higher precision compute through emulation, he adds.
“The reason why these processors work so nicely with everything that’s AI related is the AI model gives you a probability back, and the probability is never 100%,” he says. “And as soon as you go to the 99%, you can live with 16-bit floating point accuracy, because then the model accuracy is worse than your processor and it doesn’t negatively influence your result, and the result is therefore faster.”
Currently, the generation two NPUs support sine, cosine, and any functions that are based on sine and cosines, Förtsch says. “You can have these functions as primitives on the die.”
With the new SDK available as open source and photonic hardware running in the cloud, Q.ANT is now hoping that the developer community will begin exploring ways to leverage the advantages of photonic computing, particularly around non-linear algorithms.
(The Center Square) – After the third U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Texas, Democrats in the state have ramped up anti-ICE rhetoric.
(The Center Square) – Advocates of the growing network of AI-driven surveillance cameras argue the technology can help make communities across the U.S. safer.
Approach to treating high blood pressure ‘not fit for purpose’, say researchers, with 59% of cases undiagnosed
Only half of people being treated by a GP for high blood pressure in England have it under control, and millions more are completely unaware they have the “silent killer” condition, research reveals.
Most people with hypertension (59%) are in the dark and undiagnosed, raising their risk of stroke, heart attack and early death, according to the largest ever study of its kind.
(The Center Square) – The federal government has spent more on net interest than on Medicare or the military so far this fiscal year, and borrowing costs climbed again Wednesday as Treasury yields hit their highest levels in nearly two…
The Solaris branch for paying customers has been updated to SRU95.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU95 updates a broad set of platform, runtime, developer, networking, desktop, and open source components. Notable updates include Ansible Core to 2.21.1, Apache HTTP Server to 2.4.67, Apache Tomcat to 9.0.120, BIND to 9.20.23, Django to 5.2.15, Elixir to 1.20.1, Erlang to 28.5.0.2, Firefox to 140.10.0esr, Go to 1.25.11, ImageMagick to 7.1.2-27, MySQL 8.4 to 8.4.10, NSS to 3.125, OpenSSH to 10.4p1, Rust to 1.96.0, SQLite to 3.53.2, Thunderbird to 140.10.0esr, and Vim to 9.2.0513.
Additional updates include CMake, CUPS, Cython, GnuTLS, libarchive, libexpat, pip, rsync, and a range of Python modules, X11 libraries, graphics libraries, printing components, and desktop utilities.
One of the major changes is the deprecation and removal of NTLM authentication of local users; only NTLMv2 is supported now for security reasons. This release also brings GCC 16, with GCC 13 being removed in the next version. The detailed release notes go into some of the more low-level, esoteric changes in Solaris 11.4 SRU 95.
Sixteen bears are vying for votes in Fat Bear Week 2026, the highly anticipated contest among the chunkiest bears at the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.
Former US vice-president still has optimism for climate advocacy two decades after groundbreaking documentary
Two decades after the release of his groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has admitted he was surprised by the ferocious, ongoing backlash from the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. But the former US vice-president insists he still has optimism the world will confront the climate crisis.
At a New York event to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of the film and his subsequent climate advocacy work, Gore, now 78, joked: “I always say if it hadn’t been for me, we might have a big problem right now” when asked about the progress made over the past two decades.
Exclusive details about the NYC architect accused of being the Long Island serial killer, his life and how he may have been hiding in plain sight for more than a decade.
Entertainment workers protest outside the Melrose Gate at Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood, Calif., on Sept. 22, 2026, one day after state attorneys general announced a settlement agreement with Paramount Skydance for its merger with Warner Bros.Photo: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaremains embroiled in litigation over whether its products are designed to hook kids. But Zuckerberg’s got nothing on another centibillionaire pushing to expand his influence over the next generation: Larry Ellison, the octogenarian oligarch of Oracle. Ellison not only brags about having even more data about us than Meta but runs a global surveillance machine and is a major military contractor.
A toothless consent decree intended to resolve an antitrust case brought by a group of state attorneys general may clear the way for his and son David’s President Trump-facilitated takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, HBO, and a major film studio, Warner Bros. Pictures. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin still needs to approve the decree, and she noted in an order on Tuesday that she has some questions about its “factual and legal underpinnings.”
If it goes through, the merger will give the Ellisons unprecedented control over what the next generation watches and reads on social media, news, TV, and in movies. Trump steered co-ownership of TikTok to Oracle earlier this year, a move enabled by the Biden administration’s misguided TikTok ban. And last year, David’s Skydance Media became Paramount Skydance, gaining control of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, and more in a massive consolidation bankrolled by Ellison senior.
We’ve seen the Ellisons’ willingness to censor content in exchange for Trump rolling out the regulatory red carpet for their media acquisitions. Larry Ellison reportedly promised Trump to overhaul CNN if the deal went through, and David Ellison echoed promises of “sweeping changes.” A Paramount spokesperson said “no [such] commitments” were made regarding CNN, but there’s no dispute that David made editorial concessions to the Federal Communications Commission in exchange for approval of the Paramount–Skydance merger, and the Bari Weiss-helmed network is already following through.
Just how far they will go to push narratives that bolster their far more lucrative interests in war and surveillance tech (and suppress ones that don’t) isn’t yet clear, but it’s not looking good. For a preview, take a look at this Flock Safety commercial masquerading as a short-form news segment, recently published by The Free Press, the blog Paramount bought from opinion columnist Weiss to pave the way to put Weiss in charge of CBS News.
Proponents of the lawsuits against Meta worry about algorithms warping kids’ minds, while critics are concerned with surveillance and user privacy, as well as the First Amendment implications of liability for sorting content. Now both sides can find common cause: The future $111 billion “Warner-Mount” deal threatens to brainwash kids and bolster surveillance all at once.
The perfect feedback loop: Stoke America’s fears about crime, terrorism, and anything else they choose to inspire further public investment in Oracle’s products.
Like Meta, Warner-Mount will have a profit incentive to design algorithms that keep kids glued to their screens, even if it leads them to dark corners of the internet. But the Ellisons’ agenda reaches far beyond likes and follows. Their “really profoundly scary technology” empire (that’s a quote from Oracle Vice Chair and former CEO Safra Catz about the tech it provided Israel after October 7) relies on government spending which requires a public primed to accept its tax dollars being diverted to those scary technologies under the guise of keeping us safe.
There’s no better way for the Ellisons to accomplish that end than buying up as many media holdings as possible while their buddy is president. It’s the perfect feedback loop: Stoke America’s fears about crime, terrorism, and anything else they choose to inspire further public investment in Oracle’s products.
Before handing the Ellisons control of even more of our media, we should remember their track record, which dates back long before they took control of CBS News.
A decade ago, Larry boasted about Oracle’s invasive surveillance products tracking how long a person lingers in a particular aisle of a specific store, which led to a privacy lawsuit that settled for $115 million. He bragged that 5 billion people were in Oracle’s “ID Graph” back then. “How many people are on Earth, 7 billion? Two billion to go,” he added at the time. In fact, Ellison and his companies have settled all manner of consumer and investor fraud lawsuits. But those dings are just the cost of doing invasive business for a behemoth now valued at somewhere around $440 billion.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
For a glimpse into how Ellison sees Oracle’s role in shaping the future, he told investors in 2024: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
At the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2025, he said countries worldwide should “unify” all of their national data into a single database an AI model could study, as he argued this is the only way to unlock AI’s full value for governments.
Oracle already has a nearly $7 billion contract to run its software across the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the Coast Guard. It’s a founding partner of Stargate, the $500 billion data center buildout Trump announced during his first week back in office, with Ellison by his side.
So the same person who wants to surveil us to keep us on our best behavior, sell “profoundly scary weapons” to foreign armies, and unify the world’s data into one AI brain will now control a huge slice of the news and entertainment industries? It goes far beyond foxes guarding henhouses.
Of course, there’s never been a firewall between elite interests and the media. Hollywood framed U.S. regime-change wars and foreign interventions as heroic underdog stories. TV shows and news outlets have done their share of propaganda-laundering as well.
But as with Meta and its algorithms, the entertainment industry’s motives have, until now, been more straightforward, like gaining access to government sources and selling movie tickets. War profiteers that do news and movies as a side hustle have far more to gain, and they’re likely to push their narratives far more aggressively because the stakes are so much higher.
Ellison-owned outlets are already deploying their playbook to counteract the public backlash to surveillance. The Free Press segment is not the only time Oracle and Flock’s interests have converged. The Intercept recently reported that a shady astroturfing firm called Neighbors for Strong Communities, which ran deceptive AI-generated campaigns in support of the Paramount–Warner merger, has also “partnered” on PR campaigns with Flock. (There’s no known corporate partnership between Oracle and Flock, but both companies are undoubtedly invested in shifting the conversation around surveillance in a less skeptical direction.)
But that’s nothing compared to what the Ellisons and their ever-expanding pool of our personal data could accomplish in the AI era, especially when paired with a media juggernaut created by cozying up to the same authoritarians that Oracle hopes will buy more of its tech.
Despite their billions, the Ellisons would likely never have gained their media stronghold without their social, political, and economic ties to Trump. So while there’s plenty of room to disagree on what role the courts should play in checking predatory practices by tech companies like Meta, this much shouldn’t be controversial: Oligarchs should not be colluding with the government to shape what the next generation thinks.
Courses such as finance and construction form part of PM’s push for education ‘that offers a path for everybody’
Teenagers are to be offered a range of new vocational GCSEs under a radical shake-up of the school system in England designed to tackle a crisis that has left nearly a million young people out of work or training.
From 2029, pupils will be able to supplement compulsory GCSE subjects such as English, maths and sciences with courses such as construction, creative media production and child development, marking the biggest changes to the qualification for more than a decade.
Proposals aim to push people into work, but charities say families are still paying price of austerity cuts and rise in cost of living
People claiming universal credit (UC) would have their payments cut by a third if they have not paid enough national insurance, under a Conservative plan condemned by one charity as “a fast track to increased poverty”.
Under the proposals, those who receive this “subsistence allowance” would have it paid into a dedicated debit card that would prevent from them buying alcohol or tobacco, based on an Australian system that was scrapped after trials found limited evidence it changed behaviour.
Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro includes a heck of a camera that sets it apart, but the iPhone Duo’s ability to unfold from small phone to tablet could offer new ways to use an iPhone.
(The Center Square) – After a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Austin on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security is pushing back against claims made about the incident.
(The Center Square) – Arguing that the U.S. is “underinvesting in discovery,” U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., is calling for changes to the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, which include increased investments from the federal government.
In banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, the Trump administration has argued that the move is similar to actions taken by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the ban goes beyond what those presidents did.
The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Sept. 21. Photo by Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images.
In a Sept. 21 press release, three days after President Donald Trump said the news organizations would be barred “effective immediately,” the White House said that “[a]ccess changes are nothing new,” and that “Democrat Administrations have restricted, punished, and locked out the press” for “years.” The release listed several examples of incidents involving the press during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“There’s no basis to suggest that Biden and Obama ‘did it too,'” Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told us. “Trump’s action is singular and unprecedented,” he said, noting that Trump has instituted a “full ban of multiple news media” and “is targeting news organizations because they are publishing content he finds unflattering.
“That violates the First Amendment prohibition against government using its power to punish ideas,” Paulson said.
Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18 in a post on Truth Social, saying it was due to reporting what he called “FAKE NEWS.” When questioned by reporters later that day, Trump repeated that he was doing this “because they’re fake news.” He said the news organizations “purposely write negative news” in order to “try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.”
We’ll explain what happened in some of the instances under Obama and Biden cited in the White House press release and by other Republicans. First Amendment experts told us that Trump’s ban is different.
Amy Kristin Sanders, a professor of First Amendment studies at Penn State University, told us that Trump’s action was “unprecedented,” “particularly when taken in light of President Trump’s public stance about why he banned the news organizations.”
“What the Trump Administration has done is revoke access for news organizations that have already been granted press access while publicly saying it is because President Trump doesn’t like the way he is being covered by those news organizations,” Sanders told us in an email. “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”
Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defends free speech rights on college campuses and elsewhere, said, “Past presidents have limited outlets’ White House access based on hostility toward their reporting. For example, the Nixon administration, displeased with the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, barred one of the paper’s reporters from covering White House social events.” And the Obama administration initially excluded Fox News from a TV reporting pool for one interview (we’ll explain that incident below).
“But I don’t know of any past example of a president indefinitely banning a media outlet from the White House,” Terr told us.
The White House press release defended the president’s ban. “The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle them to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool,” the release said.
Terr disagreed. “Just last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reaffirmed that when the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, it cannot exclude reporters based on disapproval of their views,” he said, calling the action a violation of the First Amendment.
CNN, Politico and MS NOW sued the administration, asking a federal judge to block enforcement of Trump’s ban and to restore their access to the White House. Administration officials responded in a court filing saying that the news organizations “have failed to maintain basic minimum ‘standards of professionalism and decorum'” by “‘publishing sensitive or classified information.'” A hearing was held Sept. 23.
In response to Trump’s action, the other major TV networks said they wouldn’t participate in pool coverage of the president’s events.
Obama and Fox News
In its press release, the White House highlighted a feud between the Obama White House and Fox News in 2009, early in Obama’s presidency. The Obama White House questioned whether Fox News was a legitimate news organization and excluded “Fox News Sunday” when the president made the rounds on all of the other Sunday news talk shows. And the Treasury Department reportedly tried to limit access for Fox News to an interview with an administration official.
“In 2009, the Obama White House attempted to exclude a Fox News reporter from an interview with an unpaid executive pay consultant for the U.S. Treasury Department. Other news organizations objected to the effort and supported Fox and it never occurred again,” Paulson told us. “Continuance of this practice would have raised significant First Amendment questions.”
In a Sept. 19 talk at Colgate University, Obama commented on Trump’s ban on certain news outlets. “I’m trying to think what would’ve happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News, you’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.” Obama didn’t kick out the network from the White House. But his administration took other actions against Fox News, and the Justice Department also surveilled one of the network’s reporters as part of aggressive measures to curtail leaks to the media.
We wrote about these actions in 2018, when Obama said he had “complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down or call them enemies of the people,” a reference to Trump repeatedly calling the media that. As we said then, Obama did more than complain. He didn’t use the phrase “enemies of the people,” though he did say that Fox News’ “point of view” was “ultimately destructive” to the U.S.
On Sept. 20, 2009, Obama appeared on the Sunday talk shows on NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC and Univision, but ignored “Fox News Sunday.” Asked about the snub, White House spokesman Josh Earnest criticized Fox for not airing Obama’s Sept. 9, 2009, joint address to Congress on healthcare. The speech did air on the Fox News Channel, however — but not the broadcast network. Obama didn’t make it to “Fox News Sunday” until his last year in office.
In October 2009, the White House ramped up its rhetoric. Anita Dunn, the White House director of communications, told the New York Times, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent” and said that “we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” When asked about Dunn’s comments, White House senior adviser David Axelrod said that “it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.” He added, “We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”
That same month, the Treasury Department reportedly tried to exclude Fox News from a pool TV interview of an administration official, Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “pay czar.” The White House disputed that account, saying the issue was merely a miscommunication. But Fox News and other news outlets reported that the Treasury Department had tried to leave Fox News out of the pool, until the other TV networks protested. “All the networks said, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid told his own network.
Fox News did interview Feinberg.
“The Obama administration’s exclusion of Fox News from a pool was rightly condemned as an attack on press freedom,” Terr told us. “The White House also lists a couple of other examples of the Obama administration reportedly restricting or threatening to restrict reporters’ access. Of course, none of that justifies what the Trump administration is doing now. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And the Trump administration’s wrong — a directive from the top to ban three outlets from the White House indefinitely over their critical or negative reporting — appears to be unprecedented in its scope and severity.”
Obama Administration Pursuit of Leaks
The Justice Department under Obama also aggressively investigated leaks of information to the media, surveilling or subpoenaing journalists in the process, including Fox News reporter James Rosen. In 2010, the DOJ tracked Rosen’s movements at the State Department and collected his telephone and email records, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story in 2013.
In the affidavit for a search warrant to obtain emails, the FBI agent described Rosen as “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post.
In 2012, the DOJ also seized two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press.
In 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote: “Under the Obama administration, charges were brought against at least eight government employees or contractors accused of leaking information to the media, and several journalists were snared in the process through subpoenas to testify or surveillance of their records. After public outcry, the Department of Justice released revised standards for subpoenaing reporters.”
The aggressive posture against leaks, and reporters, continued under Trump’s first term and has escalated in his second. In an August report, CPJ said the DOJ in Trump’s second term had issued subpoenas involving at least 10 journalists, “marking one of the most aggressive uses of legal powers against the press in the United States in decades.” It cited the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which found that over Biden’s term three such subpoenas were issued and just one was issued in Trump’s first term.
Biden’s Stricter Criteria for White House Press Badges
Asked about Trump banning the media outlets from the White House press room, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise falsely equated Trump’s move to a situation during the Biden administration when it placed greater restrictions on those seeking a hard pass allowing access to the White House press facilities.
“Joe Biden removed the press credentials from over 400 different agencies,” Scalise said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sept. 20.
The White House parroted Scalise’s claim in its press release the following day, claiming, “The Biden Administration restricted more than 440 reporters from White House access through a new, retroactive press credentialing process — with independent and conservative journalists taking a heavy share of the hit. The White House Correspondents’ Association barely objected.”
But those claims are misleading at best.
As ABC News’ Jonathan Karl pointed out during the interview with Scalise, “The 400 individual reporters who [lost] credentials did not reapply. There was only one that was actually denied a credential. And all of those who didn’t reapply were allowed to come in.”
“They were removed,” Scalise said.
“They were not banned from the White House,” Karl said. “That did not happen.”
Here’s what did happen. In May 2023, the Biden administration established new, stricter rules for who could obtain a “hard pass” allowing routine access to the White House press areas without an escort. As the Washington Post explained at the time, in order to be eligible for a hard pass, a journalist had to be “employed full time by an organization principally concerned with news dissemination; must reside in the greater Washington, D.C., area; must have gone to the White House for work at least once during the prior six months; and must hold press credentials for either the Supreme Court, Senate or House.”
The White House at the time estimated that 40% of the journalists who had hard passes hadn’t even been to the White House in the previous 90 days.
In August of that year, Politico reported that over the first three months under the new Biden-era rules, the number of hard pass holders dropped from 1,417 to 975. Most of the drop was attributed to journalists who simply didn’t reapply. According to Politico, only one person who applied was denied a pass under the new criteria.
Importantly, though, even journalists without a hard pass could still get access to the White House press briefings by obtaining a daily pass, which required a journalist to provide personal information to clear security.
Jen Psaki, who served as White House press secretary under Biden from January 2021 to May 2022, posted a video to TikTok on Sept. 21 calling Scalise’s taking point “total BS.”
“So what the White House did was they put in place a couple of requirements that are pretty standard,” Psaki said, noting that “there were a lot of people with hard passes out there that had not used it in several years.”
“But [conservative] outlets like Breitbart and Fox and OAN and Newsmax all got hard passes because the criteria had nothing to do with how you were covering the administration,” Psaki said. “It was whether you were meeting those basic standard requirements, which is very much aligned with what the Senate and the House requires as well.”
Reporters who did not regularly cover the White House could still get access to White House press briefings “simply by getting day passes, and that is something that the Biden White House granted to a huge number of people from a range of news outlets,” Psaki said. “None were prevented from getting access to the White House because of their coverage. That is a big difference between then and what’s happening now.”
After his “This Week” interview, Scalise pushed back on X on Karl’s live fact-check.
“This morning, ABC tried to claim the Biden White House didn’t cut off press access for over 400 journalists,” Scalise wrote. “The facts say otherwise.”
He cited a Fox News story in August 2023 that claimed, “More than 440 reporters lose press passes after White House changes requirements.”
The White House correspondent for Today News Africa filed a lawsuit claiming the Biden administration discriminated against him by changing the criteria. However, a D.C. District Court judge ruled in favor of the White House, saying the criteria established by the Biden White House for hard pass credentials was “facially reasonable” and “viewpoint neutral.” As a result, the judge noted, passes were not denied based on the content of stories produced by applicants.
In Trump’s case, Sanders, the Penn State professor, told us, “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”
“The Biden administration did change the credentialing requirements for ‘hard pass’ access, causing some journalists not to renew their hard passes and possibly making some journalists ineligible for a hard pass,” Sanders said. “This is different than excluding members of the WHCA from pool coverage based on the viewpoints they express in their journalism.”
The Free Speech Center’s Paulson likened the Biden rules “to a public library requiring patrons to prove residency before renewing a library card. There were no First Amendment issues.”
Terr, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that “there were legitimate concerns about the new rules, including that they disadvantaged smaller outlets and freelancers. The rules also gave the administration discretion to discipline journalists who didn’t act in a ‘professional manner,’ a vague and subjective standard that could be abused to punish aggressive questioning.”
However, Terr said, the Biden administration “used viewpoint-neutral criteria to determine access” and “didn’t go so far as to ban any outlet from the White House over unfavorable coverage.”
Other Instances of Press Access
The White House press release highlighted several other instances of reporters not getting access to certain events.
Boston Herald
The White House said that Obama press officials had raised the issue of fairness when denying the Boston Herald full access to a May 2011 fundraising event.
“Obama White House officials restricted the Boston Herald from coverage — writing that pool slots depended on covering Obama ‘fairly’ — after the paper ran a front page Mitt Romney op-ed,” the White House press release said.
The Herald reported that Matt Lehrich, an Obama White House spokesperson, told the newspaper that the Herald’s request was denied because the White House Correspondents’ Association had already granted local pool coverage to the Herald’s competitor, the Boston Globe. However, Lehrich did suggest that covering Obama “regularly” and “fairly” were factors in which outlets are selected for press pool assignments.
“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote when replying to the Herald’s request for full access to the fundraiser.
In emails with the Herald, Lehrich had brought up the newspaper publishing a front-page editorial critical of Obama that was written by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama’s eventual Republican presidential opponent, in March 2011. “My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote.
But “Lehrich insisted the Herald may yet be allowed into Obama events,” the Herald said.
San Francisco Chronicle
The White House press release also accurately recounted a conflict between the Obama White House and the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2011. However, the former Chronicle reporter involved said that what happened then is “very different” from what Trump is doing now.
“After a San Francisco Chronicle reporter recorded protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser, White House officials threatened to strip the outlet from access and warned of retaliation if the paper reported on it,” the White House press release said.
“That’s true,” Carla Marinucci, the Chronicle’s former senior political writer, told the Chronicle for a Sept. 21 story about the incident. She said Obama’s press aides “went insane” on the Chronicle after she posted a video she recorded of the protest, which the press team argued violated pool protocol because the event coverage was limited to print reporters. As a result of the dustup, Marinucci said the Obama White House “blocked us from the local press pool for a year.”
But Marinucci said what Obama’s press aides did is not on the same level as what Trump has done.
“They never accused us of posting fake news. They just didn’t want us to post a video,” Marinucci told the Chronicle. “That’s very different from saying these organizations are fake news and I don’t like what they are doing.”
She called Trump’s actions against the three news organizations a “complete violation of the First Amendment.”
Obama’s 2008 Campaign
The White House press release also said, “In the Obama campaign’s final days, senior campaign officials pulled reporters from three prominent outlets off the traveling press plane — restricting them from coverage after the papers endorsed Obama’s opponent.” The news outlets affected disagreed on whether the endorsements, which came from the editorial pages, played a role.
With three days to go before the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign removed journalists with the Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News from the pool of reporters traveling on Obama’s campaign plane. The campaign said that a lack of seats and high demand necessitated making some changes. Some of the newspapers affected said the move appeared to be retaliation for their individual editorial boards endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain.
“This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth,” John Solomon, then the executive editor of the Washington Times, said at the time.
However, Ryan Rusak, the politics editor at the Dallas Morning News, wrote that the paper didn’t have evidence the endorsement was the reason. “We think the Obama campaign’s decision is to some degree more a function of limited seats,” he wrote on the paper’s website, noting that he and the political reporter “had absolutely no input or knowledge of the endorsement.”
Rusak said an Obama campaign spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, told the paper the campaign needed space for Obama’s wife, Michelle, and her staff and Secret Service, and the endorsement didn’t play a role. “There are news organizations, as you look around you on the plane, whose editorial boards are never friendly to Senator Obama,” Douglass said. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal were still on the plane, Rusak said.
New York Post
Biden’s White House, the Trump administration’s press release said, “blockedNew York Post reporter Steven Nelson from covering the President’s only daytime public event — despite empty seats in the room — after the reporter pressed Biden on his family’s shady business dealings.”
That’s a reference to a decision Biden officials made in May 2023 to exclude Nelson from the press covering an event featuring Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The Biden White House said Nelson was one of about two dozen reporters it could not accommodate due to a lack of space. But the New York Post said it suspected Nelson had been denied a press spot at the event because he had previously questioned Biden about the Biden family’s alleged dealings with foreign countries and the press staff didn’t want the president to face tough questions..
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Republican senator calls bribery allegation ‘categorically false’ as ProPublica reports Trump derailed FBI inquiry
Democrats in Maine on Wednesday accused Republican senator Susan Collins of corruption after a major media outlet reported that the FBI had proposed investigating her for allegedly accepting bribes – before Donald Trump derailed the inquiry.
The article from the investigative newsroom ProPublica rocked the race for Collins’s Senate seat, which is crucial to Democrats’ hopes of winning control of the chamber in the 3 November midterm election. The outlet reported that in the run-up to Collins’s successful bid for a fifth term in 2020, the head of her Super Pac had solicited a campaign donation from contracting firm Navatek, which demanded assurances of business from the government in return.
HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 23, 2026 — Alibaba has announced comprehensive updates with a roadmap for its full-stack AI strategy to fully unleash the value of AI at scale to customers through its latest innovations.
At this year’s Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference, the technology innovator announced a series of updates featuring Qwen foundation models and multimodal models, new proprietary AI chips, a purpose-built agentic cloud, and an AI agent platform for mobile phones reinforcing Alibaba Cloud’s leading global position in the new AI era.
Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, delivered a keynote speech sharing the company’s perspective of the ‘Machine Intelligence’ era and its strategic roadmap forward at this year’s Apsara Conference.
“The theme of this year’s Apsara Conference is ‘Intelligence Goes Beyond’. Over the past few years, AI has continuously expanded our imagination of technological capabilities. AI possesses vast potential for development–it can be deployed and scaled in real-world scenarios, boosting productivity across thousands of industries,” said Joe Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba Group. “This is the true meaning of ‘Intelligence Goes Beyond’: guiding AI from technological breakthroughs toward value creation.”
“Today, the total volume of Machine Thinking is less than 3% of all Human Thinking. If that volume eventually scales to 1,000x human capacity, the simple math tells us: Machine Thinking still has an enormous growth runway. As machines are becoming the primary force behind Thinking, turning intelligence into a commodity supplied at scale, the truly groundbreaking products of the Machine Intelligence era have not yet arrived,” said Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group. “With this in mind, our target is that by 2032, the global data center capacity operated by Alibaba Cloud will surpass 20GW, fueling the industry’s exponentially rising demand for AI.”
Qwen 4 in Training
At the conference, Alibaba revealed that its next-generation model, Qwen 4, is currently in training. The company further announced its roadmap for the upcoming Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series, projected to scale up to 5 to 10 trillion parameters.
Alibaba has revealed progress in RSI (Recursive Self-Improvement) driven by empirical feedback. Over a month of fully automated runs – spanning pipeline design, data validation, iterative experimentation, and error diagnosis – Qwen3.8-Max completed 33 iterative cycles. Through autonomous training optimisation and post-training techniques, the updated Qwen3.8-Max boosted its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45.
In a chip design experiment, the model underwent over 60 hours of self-improvement across the entire design lifecycle, making more than 10,000 EDA tool calls to produce production-grade chip bus modules. This reduced chip area by 42% with zero compromise in performance.
Multimodal Model Family Upgrades
Alibaba introduced multimodal model updates spanning speech, audio, and vision.
The company debuted Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, a simultaneous interpretation model that enhances translation fidelity, fluency, and brevity, reduces latency (LAAL) nearly 20% from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds for a smoother, more responsive real-time translation experience.
It also unveiled Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next, a next-generation audio generation model capable of creating complete cinematic soundscapes by blending dialogue and ambient sounds all at once from a text script, designed for professional creative needs such as audiobooks, film and television, podcasts and games.
The updated speech suite also includes Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS (Text-to-Speech), and Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime, offering enhanced voice AI capabilities for understanding, generation, and real-time interaction.
Qwen-Image 3.1, an image-generation model optimized for creative design and e-commerce marketing, is set to launch later this year. It cuts visual design turnaround from hours to seconds while offering advanced generative tools, including native transparent-background generation and versatile image-editing capabilities.
To standardize world model evaluation, Alibaba Token Hub, alongside leading academic and industry partners, has introduced a six-tier capability framework and launched Happyworld Arena benchmarking platform, spanning video generation, embodied AI, and spatial reconstruction.
Bringing the models closer to general users, Alibaba has launched Qwen Intelligence, a business-facing full-stack agentic solution optimized for smartphones. It provides phone makers with access to a Qwen-powered agent platform to support next-generation AI phones that can handle complex, cross-app tasks reliably.
T-Head Unveils Zhenwu V900 and Yitian CPU Roadmap
T-Head, Alibaba’s chip design unit, has unveiled the Zhenwu V900, its latest AI training and inference processor featuring high-capacity memory and robust inter-chip bandwidth.
The Zhenwu V900 delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 (released in May). Featuring 216 GB of GPU memory and 1,200 GB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, the new accelerator is built to power demanding AI workloads with native support across multiple data precisions, including FP8 and FP4. By significantly reducing inference costs while increasing compute density, it seamlessly handles both high-precision model training and ultra-low-precision inference. It is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in Q1 2027.
T-Head’s Zhenwu AI chips have been serving over 650 customers across different industries including automobile, finance, large language models, embodied intelligence, energy, and manufacturing.
Alibaba also unveiled its upgraded supernode server, which integrates the Zhenwu V900 processor, ICN Switch, Panmai SmartNIC, and Zhenyue SSD controller chip. Optimized for full-stack system-level synergy across compute, storage, and networking, the server can support a supernode cluster comprising up to 500,000 cards.
Additionally, Alibaba unveiled its roadmap for next-generation proprietary CPUs tailored for agentic AI tasks, scheduled for launch in 2027. The Yitian 720 features enhanced single-core performance, higher core density, and increased energy efficiency compared to its predecessor, the Yitian 710; The Yitian 730, the first CPU built on T-Head’s proprietary microarchitecture, boasts up to a 40% increase in SPECint2017/GHz performance over Yitian 710’s.
Agentic Cloud
Alibaba Cloud unveiled a comprehensive suite of upgrades centered on its agentic cloud strategy, built around three core scenarios — model, harness and context. The upgrades span three corresponding layers: AI Native Cloud for model, powering large-scale model training and inference; Agent Native Cloud for harness, enabling enterprise-grade agent deployment, operation and security; and Context Engine for context, providing real-time data and long-term memory, helping customers create real-world value with AI at scale.
AI Native Cloud
Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI (PAI) has integrated synergistic optimizations integrating inferencing, caching, sample replay and training services. In real-world post-training of Qwen models, PAI completed state-of-the-art model training in just five days, advancing from pre-training toward Agentic RL.
Cloud Parallel File Storage (CPFS) system is a new-generation system optimized to better support AI model training, delivering hundred-terabyte-per-second throughput and hundred-million input/output operations per second (IOPS), helping cut enterprise AI storage costs by 69%.
HPN 8.0 Pro, Alibaba Cloud’s latest proprietary AI networking architecture, delivers 100 petabits bandwidth with ultra-low latency. A single cluster can support over 130,000 network ports at 800G speeds, with built-in redundancy ensuring that neither optical transceiver nor link failures cause service interruptions, while reducing the impact of network upgrades and failures from 50% to 25% compared to previous generation.
Agent Native Cloud
AgentCore, is a new enterprise platform to build, run and manage AI agents throughout their entire lifecycle. It enables businesses to easily build and run their AI tools, safely control human-agent collaboration, and monitor performance for continuous improvements. With enterprise-grade security embedded at the operating layer, AgentCore provides organizations with a single, controlled foundation to deploy diverse AI agents and seamlessly integrate them into critical business systems at scale.
The Agent Security Center delivers full-lifecycle security and compliance management for enterprise AI agent applications. The platform provides a multi-layered defense system powered by real-time threat detection, ensuring agents operate securely within controllable boundaries at scale.
Context Engine
Agent Context is an enterprise-grade context data service that gives AI agents real-time context and long-term memory. By connecting a company’s documents, business systems, chat records and multimodal data into a single foundation, it enables agents to remember past tasks, share knowledge across teams, and learn continuously. In knowledge-intensive scenarios such as customer service, AI coding and data analytics, it cuts token usage by up to 67%.
OpenLake has been upgraded into a unified, multi-modality data lakehouse, where a single copy of data—structured, semi-structured, unstructured, vector, and streaming formats—serves multiple compute engines for processing, search, analysis, and model training. Compared with traditional architectures, OpenLake reduces total costs by 38% and cuts query response times by 40%.
About Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group is a global technology company focused on AI + Cloud and commerce. We empower consumers and enterprises with our full-stack AI capabilities and services, from applications to compute infrastructure. Our AI technology based on the Qwen family of large language and multimodal models powers the intelligence behind our services across enterprise solutions and consumer platforms. Our commerce business puts consumers first and provides the technology and marketing reach to help merchants, brands, retailers and small businesses to engage with customers and operate efficiently.
More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.
Whatever happened to those barrels?
Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn't necessarily a subversion of the original plan... The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years...
[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment.... [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters...
Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste... [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don't necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren't high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. "None of this means the waste is harmless," the article concludes — but it also doesn't mean we're about to be overrun by radioactive crabs."
Cross-data-center networking solution eliminates bandwidth as a constraint on AI infrastructure deployment, scaling, and location; now available for enterprise customers
NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2026 — WhiteFiber, Inc., a provider of AI infrastructure solutions, today announced the commercial availability of WhiteFiber Continuum, its highest-performance cross-data-center networking solution and the first commercially available distributed GPU supercluster architecture. WhiteFiber Continuum links geographically separated data centers into a single logical GPU supercluster, removing bandwidth and throughput as constraints on how and where AI infrastructure can be deployed.
WhiteFiber Continuum is built on two HITRUST-certified QTS facilities located 83 kilometers apart, joined into one logical system over 12 Zayo dark fiber strands and powered by DriveNets AI Fabric and WEKA NeuralMesh AI data storage and memory infrastructure. The architecture delivers 136 Tbps of bandwidth at 0.9 milliseconds of guaranteed round-trip latency. WhiteFiber has submitted patent applications for the underlying implementation.
“WhiteFiber Continuum is the infrastructure answer to a problem the industry has lived with for years: geographic distance as a ceiling on what a cluster can do,” said Sam Tabar, Chief Executive Officer of WhiteFiber. “Today we are making it commercially available to enterprises that need AI compute to perform at scale, hold up under compliance requirements, and not break when a single site has a problem. This is the foundation for a new class of AI infrastructure, and we are ready to build it with our customers.”
Turning Fragmented Power into One Supercluster
Many telecom and metro facilities sit on power and fiber capacity that can be tapped for achieving AI scale. WhiteFiber Continuum lets these sites contribute to a single logical GPU supercluster rather than operate as isolated, underutilized capacity — turning stranded telco and metro assets into infrastructure that can support last-mile inference and agent workloads. The same architecture lets enterprises pool GPU resources across sites to get past the power and space ceiling of a single campus, adding overflow training and inference capacity without standing up a separate greenfield deployment.
For regulated industries, distributing a cluster across sites raises the obvious question of where data actually lives — Continuum is built to keep sensitive workloads within their originating jurisdiction even while failover and pooled AI compute happen across locations, so enterprises get resilience without giving up data sovereignty. Because no single site is a single point of failure, it is designed so that training runs can continue even when one location goes down, rather than stalling until it’s restored.
Built in Collaboration with DriveNets and WEKA
WhiteFiber Continuum was built in collaboration with DriveNets, which provides the high-performance AI network fabric connecting both sites, and WEKA, which provides high-performance data storage and memory infrastructure across the cluster. Both partnerships remain central to the commercial offering.
“WhiteFiber’s Continuum shows what becomes possible when ambitious engineering is paired with the right networking architecture,” said Yossi Kikozashvili, VP Product and GTM – AI Infra, at DriveNets. “DriveNets’ Ethernet-based AI fabric delivers the highest performance even in the most demanding, high-bandwidth, low-latency environments, ensuring scale-across superclusters move data efficiently, maximize GPU utilization, and optimize power efficiency.”
“The industry has treated distance as a hard ceiling on AI infrastructure, and WhiteFiber Continuum breaks it. But a supercluster is only as unified as its data. WEKA’s NeuralMesh gives Continuum a single, high-performance storage and memory foundation across sites, so GPUs that sit many kilometers apart operate as if the data were local. This is what turns two data centers into one engine, and what the next generation of AI innovation will be built on,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO at WEKA.
Availability
WhiteFiber Continuum is commercially available as of Sept. 23, 2026. Customers interested in deployment can visit whitefiber.com/whitefiber-continuum.
About WhiteFiber, Inc.
WhiteFiber (NASDAQ: WYFI) is a provider of AI infrastructure solutions. WhiteFiber owns high-performance computing data centers and provides cloud services to customers. Our vertically integrated model combines specialized colocation, hosting, and cloud services engineered to maximize performance, efficiency, and margin for generative AI workloads.
The 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop get brought up to speed with Qualcomm’s latest processors. And there’s a new Surface Mouse with haptics.
This week, Republicans unveiled their ‘2026 Contract with Delaware Voters’
DOVER, Del. — State Sen. Bryant Richardson, R-Seaford, and Delaware Republicans are pitching voters on a 10-bill platform ahead of November’s general election. It promises no state tax on overtime or tips, help for first-time homebuyers, deferred property taxes for seniors, and new rules on school sports and civics education.
Richardson unveiled the “2026 Contract with Delaware Voters” Tuesday at an event at the Delaware State Police Museum in Dover. It is modeled on the 1994 “Republican Contract with America,” the national platform U.S. House Republicans released weeks before the 1994 midterm elections, when they won control of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years.
Delaware Republican Party Chairman Gene Truono said the Contract is important for the people of the state. “Like the Contract with America in the 1990s, the Contract with Delaware will help drive bipartisan conservative policy for generations to come,” Truono told Delaware LIVE.
What’s in the ‘2026 Contract with Delaware Voters’
1.) Affordability Acts: Creates a tax-advantaged savings account for a first-time home down payment; lets homeowners 65 and older defer property taxes until the home is sold; eliminates state income taxes on overtime pay and tips.
2.) Good Governance: Ensures police presence to prioritize neighborhood safety and keep repeat offenders off the streets; adds “informed choice” requirements for abortion; returns local control over issues such as right-to-work ordinances and offshore wind siting.
3.) Our Youth: Requires student athletes to compete in sports matching their biological sex; requires students to learn what it’s like to live under communism, totalitarianism, and other political ideologies, alongside the principles of freedom, democracy, and individual liberty; creates Education Empowerment Accounts for tutoring, special education services, and instruction at public or private schools.
Why Republicans say their bills get stuck
Richardson’s central argument is that many of these ideas never get a vote. In Delaware, a bill needs signatures from a majority of a committee’s members before the full Senate or House can vote on it. Democrats hold 15 of 21 Senate seats and 27 of 41 House seats, and they control every committee.
His Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act is one example. Richardson has introduced a version in each of the last three General Assemblies, most recently as Senate Bill 215 in January, and none has been released from committee. The bill would have schools label each team boys’, girls’ or coed based on students’ sex as recorded at or near birth, while letting girls play on a boys’ team when no girls’ team exists.
Richardson says it protects fairness and privacy for female athletes; opponents have argued such bills discriminate against transgender students. Richardson said keeping it in committee lets lawmakers avoid taking a public stand.
Richardson says the “deeper problem” is that “when one side holds the votes to pass anything it wants, it no longer has to listen to the voices of those who disagree.” That’s a line from his self-published booklet, “Citizen’s Guide to Delaware Public Policy,” which he had available on a table at the event and told attendees to take.
“Eleven Republican senators could make a huge difference,” Richardson told supporters. “We would be the heads of the committee. We would get things out of committee for a full vote on the Senate floor.”
What it would take for Republicans to win a majority
Richardson acknowledged the climb is steep. With supermajorities in both chambers, Democrats can pass certain measures, like tax increases, without a single Republican vote.
To take the majority, Republicans need five more Senate seats and seven more House seats. Only 11 Senate seats are on the Nov. 3 ballot. Republicans hold three of them and have candidates in six of the eight held by Democrats, according to the Delaware Department of Elections’ candidate list, so a Senate majority would mean winning most of those races outright.
Two of those Republican candidates were at the event: Brent Burdge, running in the 5th Senate District, and Chris Rowe, running in the 7th. Rowe said voter education should extend to candidates themselves: “We just started electing people to office that don’t know the Constitution.”
State Rep. Lyndon Yearick, R-Magnolia, thanked Richardson: “You’re the tip of the spear, but it’s gonna take everybody.”
Sen. Dave Lawson, R-Marydel, who is not seeking reelection, closed with a direct appeal to the room: “Delaware needs this. Every one of you has a Facebook, and has friends. If you’re not handing this out, you’re not helping your grandchildren.”
Boise police have identified a man known as the "Unknown Wanderer" who was found dead in a church in 1982, and revealed a possible link to the Chicago Tylenol murders.
(The Center Square) – An Illinois congresswoman says new legislation to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection will pour $150 billion into communities around the country.
Near the intersection of Benny Street and Lovett Avenue, two single-family homes, a vacant church and a parking lot were demolished in June. In their place, Delaware Ave, LLC is constructing 12 three-story, seven-bedroom townhouse-style apartments, adding another set of townhouses to the growing number of high-density housing along the off-campus neighborhoods bordering the university.
While the permit was approved by Newark City Council, the Planning Commission did not recommend the permit, citing concerns over the design — particularly the landscaping and fencing aspects. Additionally, the proposal did not conform to the existing land use designation indicated in the Comprehensive Development Plan V 2.0, requiring an amendment to change its designation from “residential, low-density” to “residential, high-density.”
According to the City of Newark’s director of planning and development, Renee Bensley, this is the case for the majority of project applications she receives. These require what is called discretionary approval — including amendments to the Comprehensive Development Plan, rezoning and exceptions to building area and height requirements. This is particularly common in single-family to high-density transition zones along and around South Chapel Street, North Chapel Street, New London Road and Haines Street.
Despite requiring more hoops to jump through, many of these projects eventually receive approval from the council. As a result, these transition zones are actively transitioning themselves from majority single-family dwellings with front porches and yards to majority townhouse complexes and large apartment buildings.
Effectively, Newark’s appearance is shifting.
There is not one singular reason for this, but the beginning of this change dates back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the university’s student population grew, it became apparent that there was not enough off-campus housing, leading more and more students to live in the previously non-student, residential neighborhoods of Newark.
Bensley estimates that 95% of student tenants were good neighbors, but the remaining 5% caused problems for their neighbors due to partying and noise. When Newark officials began to establish constraints on where students could live, they had to find alternatives for those students.
Jennifer Reitz, the Planning Services Coordinator for the Institute for Public Administration at the university, explained that Newark had limited undeveloped land to expand upon.
“So the choice is to go up,” Reitz said.
According to Reitz, this has been a national trend. Building higher not only addresses the housing stock problem, but also addresses a worsening housing affordability problem, which she said feels like a crisis. Bensley agrees.
“Traditionally, Newark has seen an extremely low vacancy rate which means when there are no vacancies and there is a lot of demand, the landlords can set their prices basically wherever they want,” Bensley said.
Newark is already a desirable town for an increasing number of families and retirees, so student demand simply exacerbates the problem.
Developers that build higher can offset this because it is cheaper. According to Sandy Isenstadt, a professor at the university who studies historic urban design trends, constructing on already developed land is expensive due to the challenges of navigating around existing infrastructure. Building more units saves money in the long run for the developer — and, consequently, for the tenant.
According to Zillow, the estimated average monthly rent for four-bedroom housing in Newark is $2,382 for an apartment and $2,400 for a townhouse. It is $2,950 for a house. Aggregated over a year, that can be an almost $2,000 difference for an individual student choosing between an apartment and a house.
The affordability of higher-density housing is not just a result of height, Isenstadt explained. The more standardized and prefabricated it is, the quicker and cheaper it is built. As a result, the character of the older houses is deprioritized.
“A lot of it is just driven by economics,” Isenstadt said. “People recognize that character and can’t pay for it.”
Reitz said that there has been some push for more design guidelines beyond the existing minimum standards, but there is pushback because that makes the housing more expensive. Green spaces have also received concern for the same reason that students clashed with Newark residents in residential neighborhoods: parties.
The Continental, a six-story, 190-unit student housing complex spanning a block on Haines Street and South Chapel Street, constructed a courtyard in the center to provide light and ventilation for its internal units. The courtyard was originally designed to also be a recreational space, but the Newark police expressed concern over unsupervised parties, leading the developers to not allow access for residents.
To earn council approval, the Continental also needed a rezoning from 16-units-per-acre garden apartments to 36-units-per-acre high-rise apartments. Its height appears much larger than six stories, leading some council members to recently reevaluate height limits. Bensley hopes that will also mean a different way to measure.
“Stories is my least favorite way to measure building height,” Bensley said. “If you have an 80-foot building, but it is six stories or five stories, it is still the same impact.”
Business districts (BBs), which are increasingly becoming mixed-use housing, and high-rise districts (RAs) are the targets of these potential changes. As of now, BBs are zoned to allow up to three stories, with discretionary approval capped at seven. RAs are zoned to allow seven stories, with discretionary approval capped at ten. There is currently a push in the council to make the hard cap for BBs five, and make it seven for the RAs.
Bensley, however, hopes that they will be open to a conversation beyond simply not wanting big buildings. She argues that there are ways to mitigate height impacts like setting buildings back behind business districts and blocking them with trees.
“Land is so expensive in Newark,” Bensley said. “If we’re talking about housing affordability, density has to be a part of that conversation. And if we unilaterally say we’re never going to build a seven-story building again, that is going to be something that hurts affordability.”
As Democrats release a flurry of midterm ads portraying GOP cuts to Medicaid as a threat to rural healthcare, Republicans have countered with ads claiming Democratic candidates in Texas and Pennsylvania would put dozens of rural hospitals out of business by creating a public health insurance option. But the ads cite an industry-backed study whose assumptions don’t apply to all public option proposals.
In Texas, according to ad-tracking service AdImpact, President Donald Trump’s political operation has spent more than $6.9 million on an ad claiming James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate, “supports a radical healthcare plan” that “could close 30 hospitals.”
And in central Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, which includes the state capital of Harrisburg, an ad from a group backed by House Republican leadership claims Democrat Janelle Stelson supports “a plan to close up to 25 Pennsylvania rural hospitals” and accuses her of “closing the hospitals your family depends on.”
Talarico, a state legislator, is running against state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the closely watched Texas matchup. Stelson, a former local news anchor, is challenging incumbent Republican Rep. Scott Perry. Both races are rated toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.
The GOP ads in Texas and Pennsylvania don’t tell viewers exactly what Democrats’ “radical healthcare plan” is. But both of them cite a 2019 report from the consulting firm Navigant about the potential impact of creating a public option — a form of government-backed health insurance that people could buy into at a lower cost than private insurance.
That analysis was commissioned by the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a coalition of groups opposed to policies like a public option and Medicare for All. The coalition’s members include groups representing hospitals, insurers and other healthcare and business interests.
The Navigant report estimates that anywhere from 28% to 55% of rural hospitals nationwide would be at “high risk” of closing if a public option were implemented, depending on how many people switch from private insurance. That includes 11 to 30 rural hospitals in Texas and 15 to 25 in Pennsylvania. By comparison, an earlier analysis from the same firm estimated that 21% of rural hospitals were already at high risk of closing without a public option, including 12 in Texas and 9 in Pennsylvania.
But those estimates are based on a major assumption — that a public option would pay hospitals the same rates as Medicare. And that’s not true of every proposal.
Most recent Democratic public-option proposals we reviewed would pay either rural hospitals or hospitals in general somewhat more than Medicare does. Talarico has said he wants to raise payment rates as part of his healthcare plan, in which case the Navigant study’s assumptions wouldn’t apply. Stelson’s campaign told us she hasn’t committed to a specific public option proposal, but generally supports more funding for rural hospitals.
“I think it would be reasonable to look at this [analysis] with some skepticism,” Christine Monahan, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told us, noting that its estimates of at-risk hospitals are based on a “theoretical proposal” that doesn’t line up with what most advocates are actually proposing.
Lydia Hall, a spokeswoman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the group behind the Pennsylvania ad, told us Stelson “knows supporting a public option is unpopular and is now desperately trying to reframe her stance on a position she’s championed for a long time,” but did not answer specific questions about the ad. MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, did not respond to our questions about the Texas ad.
Proposals for a public option have circulated for years, including during debates over the 2010 Affordable Care Act and during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Eventual winner Joe Biden was among the candidates championing a public option as a more moderate alternative to proposals like Medicare for All, which would largely or entirely replace private insurance with a government-run single-payer system.
The idea hasn’t gotten as much attention recently, with Democrats’ messaging ahead of the midterms focused largely on reversing Trump’s changes to Medicaid and restoring more generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that Republicans let expire at the end of last year. But some Democrats have said a public option could be on the table if the party retakes power in 2028, and candidates like Talarico and Josh Turek, the Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, have made it a part of their campaign platforms. Others, including Senate candidates Troy Jackson in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, have endorsed more sweeping Medicare for All proposals.
The basic premise of a public option is that the government would create a health insurance plan that people could opt into, with lower premiums than private plans. (Some versions would allow people to buy into Medicare at any age, rather than creating a whole new program.) Proponents hope that would expand coverage to more people and lower overall premiums by forcing private insurers to compete.
The savings that make it possible for a public option to offer lower premiums would come from the government using its leverage to set or negotiate payment rates that are lower than what hospitals typically get from private insurance. So there would likely be some impact on hospitals’ bottom lines.
But what that impact looks like “really depends on how the policy is designed,” including where payment rates are set, said John Holahan, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute who has studied such policies.
The Navigant study cited in the ads assumes that a public option would reimburse healthcare providers at the same rates as Medicare. Because private insurers tend to pay hospitals about 2.5 times what Medicare does for the same services, that “would be a big cut for a lot of hospitals,” Holahan said.
But, he said, most public option proposals don’t go that far. For instance, some aim for rates that are 60% to 100% above what Medicare pays, which he said would be enough to produce some savings without huge impacts on most hospitals’ finances.
Monahan also noted that the effects would play out differently for different hospitals. Part of the rationale for a public option, she said, is to curb costs at hospitals that can charge excessive prices because they effectively have a monopoly in their area. But some independent hospitals or practices that don’t have the same negotiating leverage with major insurers might benefit from certain public-option pricing systems. Hospitals are also required to provide emergency care regardless of insurance status or ability to pay, so some could see their uncompensated care costs go down if more people have insurance.
Democrats in Congress have proposed several different versions of a public option since 2019, according to comparisons compiled by health policy organizations KFF and The Commonwealth Fund. Some use Medicare rates as a baseline but allow for certain adjustments, such as paying rural hospitals up to 25% or 50% more. Others direct the government to negotiate rates with providers using Medicare rates as a floor, which would presumably result in rates that are somewhat higher.
The Navigant report itself says that depending on how many people switch to a public option, rates that are 40% to 60% above Medicare’s would be enough to “hold rural hospitals harmless.”
We asked the Talarico and Stelson campaigns about how they would set payment rates under a public option, but neither gave us specifics.
Talarico has talked about a proposal he’s calling “Medicare for Y’all,” which would allow Americans of all ages to buy into Medicare as an alternative to private insurance. (Note that this is different from “Medicare for All” proposals, which generally aim to replace private insurance entirely.) His campaign website also says he would “improve Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates,” though a campaign spokesperson, JT Ennis, did not answer our questions about whether Talarico has specific targets in mind.
Stelson’s campaign told us she broadly supports the concept of a public option, but has not committed to a specific proposal. A spokesperson also pointed us to a policy document the campaign has released that says Stelson would “fight for increased funding and staff for our rural hospitals.”
Without more details, it’s hard to assess the impacts those policies would have. But neither candidate appears to have proposed the specific policy contemplated by the Navigant report — a public option paying current Medicare reimbursement rates — and Talarico has explicitly said he wants reimbursement rates to be higher. So it’s inaccurate to claim, as the ads do, that the candidates support a plan that’s been estimated to risk putting as many as 55 hospitals across Texas and Pennsylvania out of business.
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.
A feature called AI Overviews has been a profound change, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting
Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
“AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever,” wrote Liz Reid, Google’s vice-president of search, last August. In May, the company said more AI is coming.
38-year-old had been facing attempted murder charge
Former player will accept aggravated assault charge
Former NFL star Antonio Brown plans to accept a plea deal on an attempted murder charge in Miami, his lawyer said Wednesday. Doing so will mean the former wide receiver avoids prison.
Brown is scheduled to appear in court next Wednesday to make the deal final. He could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted of the current attempted murder charge.
Developers can now write, run, and test applications accelerated by photonic processing
STUTTGART, Germany, Sept. 23, 2026 — Q.ANT today debuted its open-source software development kit for photonic computing, making the programming tools for a photonic processor publicly available for the first time.
Programmers now have everything they need to develop applications for Q.ANT’s Native Processing Units (NPUs), enabling them to compute with light, instead of electricity. The SDK includes: an API for programming languages including “C” and Python, sample applications, documentation, and a simulation backend that runs on a standard CPU, so that developers can build and validate applications on their own systems and then run it on real photonic hardware.
The SDK’s examples draw on Q.ANT’s published reference applications, including an advanced neural network that achieves better results with significantly fewer parameters; the source of Q.ANT’s speed and energy-saving benefits for computing.
In classical AI computing, most energy is consumed by the constant physical shuttling of data between separate memory and processor. Q.ANT’s photonic chip changes that: the computation itself happens in the optical domain, where non-linear functions are executed natively instead of being approximated across many layers of transistors. More expressive networks can therefore be built with fewer parameters, so less data has to move in the first place, compounding the gain in energy efficiency.
“Markets and ecosystems are created by applications, and that is why Q.ANT is working every day to put photonic computing into developers’ hands as fast as possible,” said Michael Förtsch, Founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “An ecosystem isn’t created by hardware alone. It emerges when the software layer is open and others can build on it—that’s why we’re making it accessible in collaboration with HPC centers like the LRZ and JSC, and neo-clouds like IONOS. Anyone writing an AI model today should be able to run it on photonic hardware in the future, using a familiar toolchain and without specialized knowledge of photonics. This is the ‘Linux moment’ of photonic computing: the point at which a new possibility becomes a global platform.”
In the coming months, Q.ANT will open access to its breakthrough hardware through the cloud via commercial partner IONOS or through on-premise installations of its Native Processing Server. Developers who start building with the SDK today will be ready to take full advantage of these new computing technologies once hardware access becomes available.
This release marks the first openly available SDK for programming a photonic processor, giving developers a historic opportunity to program core operations. The SDK also includes examples for a direct comparison between a classical neural network and an advanced neural network based on photonic native operations, benchmarked on parameter count, accuracy, functional approximation, and training loss.
This SDK is designed to sit alongside the environments developers already work in, and to serve as the foundation software developers need to build frameworks and higher-level tools as the architecture scales.
“If you want to get started, all you need is a laptop: download the SDK, integrate the Python or C-API, and get going – no knowledge of photonics or special hardware required. The included simulation backend runs on any standard CPU. Using real-world examples, developers can see how their model behaves on photonic computing cores and how photonic operations can make AI models more efficient than classical methods. Those who then want to run simulations on real hardware can access it via the cloud or on-premises. At launch, the SDK covers the most important functions, with more to follow,” said Utz Bacher, VP of Software at Q.ANT.
“The ever increasing cost, complexity, and power needs of traditional advanced computing systems are opening the door to new and innovative methods for solving some of today’s most vexing computation problems. Q.ANT, with its innovative photonic processor that can work alongside CPUs and GPUs, offers a way to address these concerns, particularly in the areas of AI inference and training, scientific programming, and image processing. Q.ANT’s new SDK, coupled with the availability of its hardware through a cloud access model, offers the advanced computing community an ideal way to explore the performance potential of Q.ANT’s pioneering systems,” said Bob Sorensen, Senior Vice President of Research, and Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Hyperion Research.
Q.ANT is commercializing photonic accelerators for AI and high-performance computing, offering a scalable alternative to transistor-based systems. Its Native Processing Units (NPUs) perform mathematical operations directly on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN) based photonic integrated circuits, enabling energy-efficient, high-performance co-processing for complex computational tasks.
Q.ANT was founded in 2018. Its European headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany, where it operates its own TFLN chip pilot line with IMS CHIPS, and it maintains a U.S. office in Austin, Texas. The company secured Europe’s largest Series A for photonic computing in 2025 and introduced its second-generation processor the same year, now installed and running at leading scientific computing centers with its first commercial deployment planned for 2026.
Warning from Charity Commission for England and Wales concludes two-year investigation after death of Hisham al-Hakimi in October 2023
The international aid charity Save the Children has been issued with an official regulatory warning over management failures and misconduct that put staff at its Yemen office at serious risk.
The warning concluded a two-year investigation by the Charity Commission for England and Wales into the running of the office after the death of its safety and security director, Hisham Al-Hakimi, in October 2023 after he was detained by the Yemeni authorities.
Argentinian president accuses United Nations of being filled with ‘parasites’ in bellicose general assembly speech
Javier Milei has condemned the UN as he warned that Argentina would take “matters into our own hands” in its dispute with Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.
In a caustic speech at the general assembly in New York, the Argentinian president criticised the UN for being ineffective when it came to the long-running tensions over the British overseas territory in the south Atlantic known in Argentina as the Malvinas.
John E. Sununu hasn’t held public office since the aughts. But New Hampshire politics has a long memory.
“John Sununu led efforts to privatize Social Security,” Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas said of his Republican U.S. Senate competitor in a Sept. 15 press release. He made similar claims in his Sept. 8 primary victory speech, saying Sununu “wrote the plan to privatize Social Security,” and in an August X post, calling Sununu “a lead architect” of Social Security privatization plans.
Sununu and Pappas are running for the open seat of the retiring Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Analysts consider the contest competitive.
A look back at Sununu’s record shows that Pappas’ assertion is largely accurate. Although Sununu hasn’t made Social Security privatization a centerpiece of his agenda this year, as a member of Congress two decades ago, he was a leading voice in the effort to change how people can access their Social Security benefits.
A recap of the Bush-era privatization debate
In the 1990s and early 2000s, lawmakers debated whether to shift some or all of Social Security’s finances into private accounts invested in stocks or other securities. That would have been a departure from the program’s traditional structure of paying beneficiaries from payroll tax revenues held in the federal treasury.
The battle played out over several years during the presidency of George W. Bush, who backed the concept. However, Congress never fully bought into the idea, and no form of Social Security privatization was enacted.
As early as 2000, when Bill Clinton was president, Sununu, then a House member, cosponsored the Personal Lockbox Act of 2000, which would have allowed Americans to direct a portion of their Social Security benefits, plus other assets held for retirement, into personal accounts.
In 2001, Sununu joined dozens of other lawmakers, mostly Republicans, in signing an open letter to the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security that said in part, “Personal retirement accounts will transform Social Security from a government IOU into personal property and real assets that workers can own and pass along to their children.”
In 2004, as a senator, Sununu introduced the Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act. Then-Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., introduced a companion bill in the House. The measure was modeled on a 2003 proposal by well-known conservative figures, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and activists Grover Norquist and Steven Moore.
The proposal would have allowed workers under 55 years old to voluntarily allocate a portion of their payroll taxes to individual accounts invested in stocks and other securities. Neither measure advanced to a vote.
In 2005, Sununu cosponsored the Stop the Raid on Social Security Act, which would have created automatic personal accounts unless the beneficiary opted out. This bill never received a vote, either.
Also in 2005, Sununu, along with most Senate Republicans, voted against a nonbinding resolution that said Congress should reject any Social Security plan that would require deep benefit cuts or a massive debt increase.
The debate over Social Security privatization became a centerpiece of Bush’s agenda in early 2005, but the effort petered out by that summer, as critics called the plan risky for beneficiaries.
In 2005, the New Hampshire Sunday News, the Sunday edition of the New Hampshire Union Leader, described Sununu as “a key national player in the effort to solve Social Security’s financial problems and enable participants to invest a portion of their Social Security in personal savings accounts.”
A nuance not captured by Pappas’ phrasing is that Sununu’s proposals would not have been mandatory for all Social Security beneficiaries. The plans would have been limited by age, voluntary, or a combination of the two.
Sununu explains his record on Social Security
In an Aug. 31 interview with WMUR-TV, PolitiFact’s New Hampshire partner, Sununu acknowledged his actions from two decades earlier and said the challenges have changed since then, requiring different solutions.
Sununu said his earlier legislation “gave younger workers a choice if they wanted to invest in a retirement plan, like the one members of Congress have. It maintained a guaranteed benefit for all retirees. And it made the system solvent.”
Pressed by WMUR political director Adam Sexton whether he still supported privatizing Social Security, Sununu said, “That was 20 years ago. If we had passed that bill, the system would be solvent today and most retirees would have a greater benefit.”
A retrospective analysis in 2025 by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that if the plan had been enacted, beneficiaries would have become better off financially.
Our ruling
Pappas said Sununu “led efforts to privatize Social Security.”
As a member of Congress two decades ago, Sununu co-sponsored several bills to enact Social Security privatization, including two introduced before the issue became a Bush administration priority in 2005. However, they would not have privatized Social Security for everyone.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.
The drive to build more data centers — the massive, costly facilities powering the AI boom — has emerged as a lightning rod for candidates in the 2026 midterms."It's the confluence of hyper-localized concerns with broader worries about AI, and…
El Niño poses critical threat to nations’ defences, says Ed Miliband in presentation to global foreign ministers
The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of an explosive report suppressed under Keir Starmer.
Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages.
Kremlin yet to respond publicly to US invitation that is likely to raise concerns from Ukraine and EU countries
The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The invitation, which marks a significant reversal by the Trump administration of Russia’s international isolation, was announced by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations conference in New York.
The AI lab will run its production workloads on Crusoe Managed Inference, tuned for throughput, price-performance, and reliability
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23, 2026 — Crusoe and Thinking Machines Lab today announced a $65 million annual agreement to power inference for the lab’s open models on Crusoe Cloud. Through Crusoe Managed Inference, Thinking Machines Lab will serve a range of production workloads – including its Inkling models, GLM 5.2 and 5.3, and its own fine-tuned variants – on a dedicated Tailored Deployment of NVIDIA HGX B200 systems connected with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, engineered for high-throughput, cost-efficient serving at scale.
“Crusoe Managed Inference took us from evaluation to production quickly and met the standards we hold our own systems to, giving us the scale and economics to reinvest in the research at the core of what we do,” said Myle Ott, ML Infra Lead at Thinking Machines Lab.
“Thinking Machines Lab has a very sophisticated engineering team that expects partners to meet their high bar as they grow,” said Erwan Menard, SVP, Product Management of Crusoe Cloud. “Our team of leading AI engineers built Crusoe Managed Inference to deliver cost-efficient, reliable infrastructure, inference, and model lifecycle tooling as-a-service, so innovative companies can run their favorite models in production at scale, relying on our expertise.”
Crusoe will run and support the cluster directly as a Tailored Deployment – a dedicated, benchmarked, SLA-backed endpoint – giving Thinking Machines Lab the price-performance and headroom to scale without managing its own inference stack. The companies are also looking to expand into batch inference for large-scale synthetic data generation, turning inference into a flywheel for research.
Thinking Machines Lab joins a roster that has taken Crusoe Managed Inference past $100 million in contracted ARR less than a year from launch.
As the AI factory company, Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. The company provides a reliable, scalable, cost-effective, energy-first solution for AI infrastructure. By harnessing large-scale energy sources, building AI-optimized data centers, and delivering a powerful AI cloud platform, Crusoe empowers its customers and partners to build the future faster. For more information, visit crusoe.ai.
(The Center Square) – Dissatisfaction with second-term Republican President Donald Trump, and belief that issues such as the economy and gas prices could be handled better by the minority party are reflected in a new poll and generating sparks of…
Fast food giant aiming to increase share of global chicken market as rising cost of beef hits profits
McDonald’s is betting on fried chicken as health concerns and the rising price of beef shift dining habits.
The company said that it aimed to take an extra 1.5 percentage point-share of the global chicken market by 2030, with an aim to increase its share of drinks by the same proportion. McDonald’s said the growth in chicken, a lower-priced protein, would not come at the expense of beef burger sales, saying it aimed maintain its “leadership position in beef”.
Andy Burnham’s accusation against the Kremlin tells half the story. Domestic extremists amplified by US big tech are part of the same problem
In November 2020, Barack Obama warned of an “epistemological crisis” facing western democracies. Polarisation and radicalisation were corroding trust in established information sources. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” the former US president said.
That vulnerability has grown since then. Democracy’s enemies have become more determined to exploit it. This is the threat that Andy Burnham highlighted in a speech at the United Nations this week. The prime minister accused Russia of waging an “industrial-scale assault” on the UK’s information environment using bot armies and fake websites to spread falsehoods, interfere in elections, foment discord and poison inter-community relations.
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As the secretary general, António Guterres, prepares to step down, the general assembly is highlighting the scale of the organisation’s challenges
The United Nations was created, its charter states, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Donald Trump used his address to the general assembly to threaten Iran, another member state, with annihilation again. The charter also speaks of the obligations of international law. On Venezuela, Mr Trump gloated that “to the victor belong the spoils”. His speech in New York on Tuesday might be regarded as an improvement on last year’s only in that it was not an explicit, full-scale attack on the UN itself, merely on its founding principles.
The absences this year are perhaps as telling as the US president’s hostile presence. Vladimir Putin has not attended for more than a decade. Nor has Xi Jinping – but the snub is more striking as he is in Washington to meet the US president. India’s Narendra Modi is not present; nor are Cyril Ramaphosa, Bola Tinubu or Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – the leaders of Africa’s three giants, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt. While their reasons are various, the gaps speak collectively to Mr Trump’s wrecking capability and the broader challenges faced by the UN.
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.
Agreement with Mauritius over Diego Garcia unlikely to be revived unless president changes his mind, insiders believe
The Chagos Islands deal is on hold for as long as Donald Trump objects to it, UK officials believe, with no immediate signs it can be adapted to suit the US president.
After Trump savaged the three-way plan as “a terrible deal” during a meeting with Andy Burnham at the UN general assembly, the prime minister said he was “confident” the UK would be able to find a solution to revive the idea.
New RAF unit will warn of incoming missile attacks, and support offensive and defensive operations
A new military unit dedicated to defending satellites, protecting services people need on Earth and potentially supporting offensive operations is being launched by the UK.
The No III Space Effects Squadron will be announced on Wednesday, with the defence secretary, Wes Streeting, warning that Britain needs to “keep pace in the new space race”.
FBIjobs.gov offline on Wednesday as ShinyHunters group claims to have accessed records of agents and applicants
The FBI is investigating an apparent breach of its jobs website as a criminal hacking group claimed to have accessed “very sensitive data” on nearly all agents and job applicants.
“The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating,” the bureau said in a statement. The website, the main portal for prospective employees to learn about the FBI and initiate the application process, remained offline Wednesday morning.
Local advocacy groups say they have cut ties with Hannah Gann, who ‘fully lied about her identity and background’
A Philadelphia teacher is facing criticism from her fellow colleagues and activists after it was revealed that she fabricated being both Palestinian and Black.
The Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC) and Philly Educators for Palestine (PEFP) announced over the weekend that it was cutting ties with “one of their long-time members”, Hannah Gann, who “completely lied about her identity and background, claiming at various times to be Palestinian, Tunisian and Black”.
Last year, well before DoorDash’s $131.5 million settlement with New York City for underpaying 264,000 delivery workers was announced Tuesday, the company spent around $1.4 million on the campaign to stop Zohran Mamdani, who oversaw the historic settlement, from becoming mayor.
At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race — and faced criticism from other candidates in the race. The food delivery giant’s settlement agreement, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, brings further scrutiny to those donations.
Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City.
While on the campaign trail, Mamdani had promised to regulate delivery apps and further protections for delivery workers, proposals that earned him the support of delivery worker groups.
At the time, DoorDash’s large spending raised eyebrows. Now, the company has to pay its workers around 100 times the amount it spent attempting to influence the election, owing to a mayoral administration that refused to overlook concerns with the company’s conduct.
“It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor or investor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, a former co-director of Move to Amend, an advocacy group that seeks stringent regulations against corporate money in elections. “Here is an instance where organized money from a company that was trying to avoid being responsible and accountable, was unsuccessful.”
Announcing the new settlement, Mamdani said, “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft. But it also shows that enforcement matters.”
In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)
The Smear Campaign Against Mamdani
DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.
Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”
The group artificially altered Mamdani’s beard in a campaign mailer and made it appear longer and darker, an act that the Muslim mayoral candidate had called out as “blatant Islamophobia.”
At the end of video ads by Fix The City, a campaign finance disclosure in small text at the bottom of the screen read, “The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess.”
DoorDash also gave $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a super PAC that contributed more than $360,000 to Cuomo’s campaign.
Aided by corporations like DoorDash and billionaires like Bloomberg, the overall independent spending by super PACs seeking to defeat Mamdani was more than eight times what was spent in his favor, according to The Intercept’s analysis of data published by the NYC Campaign Finance Board.
A Historic Settlement
DoorDash’s settlement followed an investigation by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Mamdani administration said that the investigation “found that DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all.”
Under the settlement with the city, the food delivery giant will pay over $115 million in worker restitution and over $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines.
Two weeks after assuming office, the Mamdani administration warned delivery apps to comply with worker protections, sending notices to DoorDash and others, and announcing a lawsuit against the delivery app Motoclick.
The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s citywide investigation into DoorDash began after dozens of workers reported that the company had failed to pay them or had paid them late for work they had performed.
As part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance data reports to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection every month for three years, and the company’ activities will also be monitored through workers sharing data with the city.
The settlement announced by Mamdani is not the first run-in that DoorDash has had in recent years with restitution payments in New York.
In May 2024, the company agreed to pay $75,000 in a settlement after New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the company routinely rejected applicants with criminal histories in violation of the New York City Fair Chance Act. In February 2025, the attorney general settled with DoorDash for $16.75 million after the company used tips to subsidize workers’ guaranteed pay.
“They knew that by having a mayor who’s willing to put resources [for workers], it’s gonna be detrimental to their corporate model,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a group that organizes for low-wage immigrant workers and had helped several DoorDash workers file complaints with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city’s democracy.”
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 23, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc., an AI, Enterprise, Storage, and 5G/Edge IT Total Solution Provider, is now shipping NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks integrated with Supermicro’s Data Center Building Block Solutions (DCBBS) and its direct liquid cooling stack (DLC-2).
Supermicro’s DCBBS now supports all critical computing infrastructure to speed time-to-online for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 deployments
“We have spent years building the liquid-cooling stack, the manufacturing capacity, and the deployment teams for exactly this moment,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO, Supermicro. “Our customers can now order a Scalable Unit and receive production-ready systems with end-to-end integration, because we design and build every layer between the cold plate and the cooling tower. Our development of DLC-2 technology is what sets Supermicro apart and allows us to deliver the most complete solution for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.”
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform was designed in conjunction with direct liquid cooling technology to deliver AI-throughput-per-watt at efficiency levels unachievable with air cooling alone. With far greater AI operations per second comes a greater heat load: heat must be moved through the full fluid distribution loop, from the cold plates through manifolds, to the cooling tower. Supermicro tests and validates every rack with the full liquid cooling stack, speeding up time-to-online when deployed.
Supermicro’s path-to-production spans from the mechanical engineering of individual system nodes, the large-scale manufacturing of liquid-cooled racks, to the full onsite deployment of clusters based on NVIDIA reference architecture. Supermicro’s DCBBS provides unmatched thermal expertise and a comprehensive in-house portfolio of liquid cooling components. Cold plates, manifolds, hose kits, rack power shelves, in-row cooling distribution units (CDUs), in-rack CDUs, Liquid-to-Air sidecar CDUs, rear door heat exchangers, and facility-side cooling towers all come from the same portfolio.
Supermicro’s DCBBS Solutions for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 include:
NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks. 72 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Vera CPUs in a single liquid-cooled rack operating as one machine; Eighteen 1U compute trays, each with four Rubin GPUs and two Vera CPUs, connect through nine sixth-generation NVIDIA NVLink switch trays delivering 216 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth; Each rack provides 20.7 TB of HBM4 memory and up to 54 TB of LPDDR5X
Supermicro in-row cooling distribution units, rated at 1.8MW per CDU, deployed with N+1 redundancy
Optional Supermicro Rear Door Heat Exchangers ensure capture of residual heat load
Networking integration and cabling services based on NVIDIA Reference Architecture, including the AI compute fabric, converged fabric, and out-of-band management cabling
To ease deployment of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprint defines a balanced bill-of-materials for a given power envelope, from 5 MW to gigawatt scale. The DCBBS Blueprint based on one Vera Rubin NVL72 Scalable Unit provides 1,152 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs with 331 TB of HBM4 memory across 16 compute racks, with balanced cooling capacity, power delivery, high-performance storage, context memory storage, and networking. A Supermicro team manages the project across site survey, design, integration, testing, delivery, deployment, and ongoing support.
Learn more about Supermicro’s NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks here.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 23, 2026 — Classiq and Israel Natural Gas Lines Ltd. (INGL) have announced results from research applying quantum optimization to natural gas transmission planning, including execution of a reduced version of the problem on the IonQ Forte-1 quantum computer.
The collaboration focused on a familiar challenge for pipeline operators: moving gas from suppliers to customers while staying within limits for pressure, flow direction and gas balance across the network.
As networks grow and operating conditions become more complex, the number of possible pressure and flow configurations can increase rapidly. The research explored whether quantum optimization could help identify promising scenarios more systematically, giving engineers a stronger starting point for detailed review.
For gas transmission operators, the current goal is not to replace established hydraulic modeling but to improve how candidate plans are generated and evaluated. Quantum optimization could help narrow a large set of possibilities to a smaller number of promising options for engineering validation.
Using Classiq’s platform, Classiq and INGL created a hybrid quantum-classical workflow that searched possible pressure configurations while accounting for key physical and operational requirements. The work used familiar network inputs, including supplier pressure, pipe characteristics and minimum customer pressure.
In simulator-based testing on a representative gas network, the workflow identified the maximum-throughput valid operating point, consistent with classical reference solutions. The research then moved a version of the problem onto the IonQ Forte-1 trapped-ion quantum processor, where the system produced physically valid candidate operating points close to the classical optimum.
The collaboration also examined how candidate scenarios could be reviewed with SIMONE, a detailed hydraulic modeling environment for gas networks. In this approach, quantum optimization helps identify promising planning options, while established hydraulic modeling can be used to validate them before any operational conclusion is drawn.
Technical Deep Dive
The full research paper provides the mathematical formulation, quantum optimization methodology, simulator results and details of the IonQ Forte-1 hardware execution.
“Pipeline planning depends on practical engineering constraints and not abstract optimization alone,” said Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq. “Our work with INGL focused on bringing quantum optimization into a language oil and gas teams recognize: pressure, flow, constraints and validation. The goal is to surface strong candidate scenarios for further engineering review complementing trusted tools operators already use.”
“INGL has a responsibility to combine operational discipline with forward-looking innovation. Our work with Classiq reflects that strategy,” said Shlomo Kresner, CEO at INGL. “We are exploring quantum optimization not as a theoretical exercise, but as an emerging tool for evaluating complex network scenarios, validating them against established engineering methods and building practical knowledge for medium-term implementation.”
“This research shows the value of testing industry applications on real quantum hardware as they are developed,” said Scott Millard, Chief Business Officer at IonQ. “Running the gas-network optimization problem on Forte-1 gave the team a practical way to evaluate how quantum computing could contribute to complex planning challenges in the energy sector.”
The work reflects a practical approach to quantum computing for oil and gas and the wider energy industry. Energy operators regularly balance capacity, customer demand, infrastructure constraints and changing operating conditions. The research explores how quantum optimization could eventually complement the planning and simulation tools they already use.
About INGL
Israel Natural Gas Lines Ltd. (INGL), a government company established in 2003, is responsible for the construction and operation of the national natural gas transmission system. The company’s work is of great importance to the Israeli economy for two primary reasons: first, for its role in ensuring energy independence and strengthening Israel’s geopolitical position and second, for its contribution to the improvement of the environmental quality and reduction of air pollution, in line with international standards.
INGL’s construction and operation of the natural gas transmission system adheres to strict international standards, utilizing advanced technological tools, complexed logistical frameworks and a wide range of international and local suppliers, contractors, and consultants.
Classiq, a leading quantum computing software company, provides enterprise-grade technology that makes it practical to develop scalable, efficient quantum applications. Used by dozens of global enterprises, the Classiq platform combines AI agents, a high-level quantum programming language and design automation to accelerate the development of optimized, hardware-ready quantum software. The platform also supports hardware benchmarking, cost and performance optimization, and execution across quantum hardware platforms.
Masoud Pezeshkian says Tehran is ready for dialogue and diplomacy ‘but without the language of force’
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, turned the tables on Donald Trump, describing the US as the true bully and terrorist in the Middle East while insisting that Iran had always shown a commitment to the negotiating table.
In a defiant speech to the UN general assembly in New York, his first since the US and Israel launched an all-out war on Iran, Pezeshkian repeatedly vowed that Tehran would never bend the knee to the US.
Campaigners say plan marks notable shift away from oil and gas as previously pledges were only for carbon neutrality
Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, has committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045, despite fierce debate about its green policies.
In a roadmap published on Wednesday, the German government set out for the first time an explicit promise of “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Previous pledges were only for “carbon neutrality”.
A win is a win, but we should probably contain our excitement about the biggest flotation in London for five years. Airtel Money, a payments processor that operates in 13 African countries and should be worth between £6bn and £7bn, is a welcome addition to the stock market but it would be a stretch to say the event marks a definitive change in the weather to end the listings drought.
Why? Because, in a sense, Airtel Money is already here. It is a 78%-owned subsidiary of Airtel Africa, an established FTSE 100 firm with a market value of £11.3bn ultimately controlled by Bharti Enterprises under the Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, also known for his 25% stake in BT.
New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart will undergo knee surgery that will end his 2026 season after suffering damage to his MCL, PCL and meniscus in Monday night’s loss to the Los Angeles Rams.
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo reported that the surgery is expected to lead to a full recovery. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the damage to Dart’s left knee included his MCL, PCL and meniscus, with the meniscus considered the main issue.
Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, was sentenced to 15 years in prison Wednesday morning for sexually assaulting Miriam Haley at his Manhattan apartment in 2006.
Some Trump-aligned candidates are calling for an end to the Iran war, even as Trump stands by his Iran strategy and has suggested escalation is possible.
Masoud Pezeshkian began his brief address by saying that he had planned to deliver different remarks before hearing President Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday.
TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco "aimed at turning high school graduates into founders," writes the SF Standard.
Or, as CBS News describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college — enroll in AI school instead...."
Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.
From the SF Standard:
"There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. "The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era," Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy...
The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students... The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
"In the AI era, it's more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle:
Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university...
The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy's website.
The FAQ describes a typical week by saying "Most of your time is yours to build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next."
Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?
A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....
"The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI," Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. "The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders... The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the news.
(The Center Square) – A Wisconsin employee has filed a class action lawsuit against the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 7 and Olympic Companies claiming the company and union continue to deduct dues from her paychecks…
Lawyers say financial pressures are fuelling ONS figures that show fewer divorces after longer periods of marriage
Couples are putting off divorce because of the cost of living crisis, lawyers have said, after figures showing the average length of a marriage ending in divorce in England and Wales reached a record high last year.
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) released figures on Wednesday showing that the average marriage ending in divorce lasted for 13 years in 2025. This is the longest since records began in 1963 and up from a record low of 8.9 years in 1985.
My super reliable GTS stock has, for the first time ever, given me a hiccup with the battery failing on me at 30%, down to red.
I turned it off then back on again. It comes back to 30% but then drops again to red. I will do the charge cycle again but do you think this is a problem or just a one-time glitch?
Farage referred to the new unit and said Burnham was setting it up ‘using the excuse that Russia wants to interfere with elections’
The former Labour minister leading the government’s review into youth unemployment has written to 100 firms to ask them to provide work placements and jobs for young people, the Press Association reports. PA says:
Alan Milburn, who was commissioned by former prime minister Keir Starmer to lead the government’s review into worklessness, has approached “business leaders” in sectors including rail, transport and utilities to ask them to provide more chances for young people.
The Milburn review said Royal Mail, Octopus Energy, Greene King and Lloyds bank are among the companies who are already offering opportunities to school and university leavers. They are taking part in the review’s First Chance scheme, which has come from the review.
As Ohio prepares to open a massive artificial intelligence data center, debate has intensified around billions of dollars in tax incentives the state has provided to attract the industry.
In his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Jon Husted, Democrat Sherrod Brown launched an ad saying Husted “led the push to bring data centers to Ohio and gave billions of tax dollars to make it happen.”
The ad features an unnamed man criticizing Google’s Lancaster data center in central Ohio.
“No one asked for that data center to be built here. And no one here is getting a damn thing from it, except higher electric bills,” he said. “Jon Husted is the reason this is here.”
Husted served in various offices of Ohio state government from 2001 to early 2025 before Republican Gov. Mike DeWine appointed him to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. As DeWine’s lieutenant governor, Husted promoted data center expansion in Ohio and the industry received billions of dollars in tax breaks.
Under state law, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approves exemptions for eligible data centers. The authority considers recommendations from the Ohio Department of Development and the Ohio Tax Commissioner before deciding whether to enter into an exemption agreement.
But the tax authority “functions as an arm of the administration,” David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political science professor, told PolitiFact, and it’s “common practice” for the governor and lieutenant governor to claim credit for corporate tax incentives the board approves.
Husted’s role promoting data centers and Ohio’s industry tax breaks
Data centers in Ohio received about $2.5 billion in state and local tax incentives from 2017 to 2024, according to a 2025 report published by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved these exemptions during former Gov. John Kasich’s and DeWine’s administrations.
Husted’s most prominent role in data center expansion happened when he was lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025.
“Many, if not most Ohio lawmakers actively supported” data center industry growth in Ohio “and Jon Husted was certainly among them,” said Robert Alexander, a Bowling Green State University political professor. “His position as lieutenant governor put him in key position to advocate on behalf of data centers and he did so enthusiastically.”
In 2019, Husted publicly defended the tax incentives associated with Google’s $600 million New Albany data center. Google received a 15-year state sales-tax exemption estimated at $43.5 million, along with a local property-tax abatement. Husted argued the economic benefits would outweigh the incentives and said requiring Google to pay the sales tax could have pushed the company to invest elsewhere.
In June 2023, Husted also joined DeWine and JobsOhio, an economic development corporation, in announcing Amazon Web Services’ $7.8 billion investment for a data center in central Ohio. Husted said it was a step toward making Ohio “the tech center of the Midwest.”
A few months later, in September 2023, DeWine and Husted announced the Aligned Data Centers project in Erie County, which received a 75%, 15-year tax exemption. They said the company expected to create 18 full-time jobs.
In 2025, Husted and DeWine announced Amazon’s pledge for $10 billion to expand its operations in Ohio. Husted said artificial intelligence and data centers were “crucial to America’s economic superiority because they drive innovation, support high-tech industries” and helped analyze vast data “essential for global competitiveness.”
Husted involvement in early data center tax incentive programs
As House Speaker from 2005 to 2009, Husted had the authority to appoint members to the Ohio Tax Authority. We asked Husted’s reelection campaign and the Ohio Department of Development, which oversees the authority, whether Husted appointed members but received no information.
“Husted, as speaker, was an advocate for Ohio’s tax credit process, but the membership of the Ohio Tax Credit Authority would have changed between his time as speaker and the boom in data center projects,” Niven said. “And during the DeWine-Husted administration, he was involved in the appointments process for other regulatory positions, so he would have been in a position to have influence over appointments to the Tax Credit Authority.”
The Ohio Legislature approved a 2011 law that created the sales- and use-tax exemption for eligible data center equipment, marking the beginning of Ohio’s data center tax exemption program.
Under Kasich, Ohio created a 100% sales-tax exemption for qualifying data centers. From 2014 to 2018, Kasich’s administration approved statewide exemption agreements with Amazon, Meta and Google. State estimates released in June value those three agreements at about $600 million each, roughly $1.8 billion combined.
Husted’s position on tax breaks has changed
More recently, amid public concerns about the growth and costs of data centers, Husted has said new data centers should not get tax breaks, but that it ultimately should be a local decision.
In July, Husted introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act to encourage states to require large electricity users, including data centers, to pay the costs associated with the power generation, transmission and other infrastructure needed to serve them. On Sept. 17, Husted failed to get unanimous consent in the Senate to pass the bill; the House passed a companion measure.
Transparency around data center deals has also become an issue in Ohio. In Brown County, officials in the village of Mount Orab negotiated a proposed data center project under nondisclosure agreements, prompting questions about what information was available to the public. The controversy has helped spur legislation, including House Bill 695, which would prohibit certain local officials from entering into NDAs. The bill has not passed the Legislature.
Our ruling
A Brown ad said Husted “led the push to bring data centers to Ohio and gave billions of tax dollars to make it happen.”
As Ohio’s lieutenant governor, Husted promoted data center expansion in the state and applauded and defended tax incentives to lure the industry. The Ohio Tax Credit Authority formally approved the tax exemptions, but an expert said the authority is an arm of the administration.
Brown’s statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture prepares to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. If the proposal is finalized, it would eliminate a 25-year-old rule that protects some of the most undeveloped parts of America's national forests.
It is sad and dangerous that at such a perilous moment, the United States is saddled with a president like Trump
Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday to the United Nations general assembly was an object lesson in his lawless rule and remarkable capacity for self-delusion. Disregarding the UN charter’s emphasis on the peaceful resolution of disputes, he doubled down on his violent unilateralism while denigrating the global issues that the UN is designed to address.
For many, the headline remark was his musing about whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Judge rejects USDA’s timetable and clarifies immigrant eligibility, but federal rules aimed at improving state payment accuracy remain in place
DOVER, Del. — Delaware has won a court ruling that prevents the Trump administration from counting certain food assistance errors against states under a deadline a federal judge found unlawful. The victory protects the state from potential future costs tied to that deadline, but it does not resolve a separate problem: Delaware’s SNAP payment error rate was 16% in fiscal 2025, well above the national average.
The Sept. 17 ruling also confirmed that certain lawful permanent residents, including people who were previously refugees or granted asylum, remain eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program without waiting five years. It did not overturn the 2025 federal law requiring states with high payment error rates to pay a share of SNAP benefit costs.
The case for state accountability
Congress changed SNAP last year to give states a stronger financial reason to determine eligibility and benefit amounts accurately. Under the law, states with error rates of at least 6% can be required to cover 5%, 10% or 15% of benefit costs, depending on their rate. The requirement generally begins Oct. 1, 2027.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported a national payment error rate of 10.62% for fiscal 2025, representing $10.1 billion in improper payments. The measure includes benefits paid above and below the correct amount. It is not a fraud rate.
“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said when USDA released the figures. She said the department wanted states to curb waste while serving needy families and protecting taxpayers.
Delaware’s error rate
Delaware’s fiscal 2025 rate was 16%, compared with the 10.62% national rate and the law’s 6% cost-sharing threshold. That makes payment accuracy a substantial issue for the state, independent of its dispute with USDA over the new law’s implementation. The figure does not mean 16% of Delaware recipients committed fraud; it includes overpayments and underpayments.
Delaware’s rate is high enough to qualify it for a delay in the new benefit cost-sharing requirement. That gives the state more time to improve accuracy before it must begin paying a share of benefits under that provision. The delay comes from the law itself, separate from the court ruling.
Why the judge rejected USDA’s deadline
The lawsuit focused on how USDA put the 2025 law into effect. SNAP rules provide a 120-day adjustment period during which certain errors arising from a policy change are excluded from a state’s payment error rate. USDA said the period began July 4, 2025, when the law was enacted, and ended Nov. 1.
But USDA did not issue its guidance on noncitizen eligibility until Oct. 31, leaving states one day under that timetable. Other instructions arrived weeks or months after USDA said the clock had started. U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled that the department had not given states adequate notice. He set aside its deadline and required a full adjustment period following proper implementation instructions.
The judge also found that USDA’s October guidance wrongly indicated that some lawful permanent residents were ineligible for SNAP or subject to a five-year waiting period. USDA issued a clarification in December. The ruling confirms that lawful permanent residents who were previously in specified humanitarian categories retain their exemption from the waiting period, provided they meet other SNAP requirements.
What Jennings’ criticism means
“This entire ordeal was a blatant attempt by the Trump Administration to take food away from families in need, to destroy a plank of the social safety net, and to degrade our state’s financial standing,” Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in announcing the decision.
Jennings’ accusation goes beyond what the judge decided about the administration’s intent. USDA says it is seeking to reduce improper payments, save federal money and hold states accountable for administering SNAP accurately. The court nevertheless found that USDA’s initial guidance misstated eligibility for some lawful permanent residents and that its deadline unfairly exposed states to future costs.
The distinction does not erase the effects of the broader 2025 law. The Congressional Budget Office expects its tighter eligibility and work rules to reduce the number of people receiving SNAP. Its projected $187 billion in federal savings over 10 years includes those changes; it is not an estimate of fraud eliminated. The court ruling establishes that USDA went beyond a lawful implementation of the changes at issue, but it does not establish that denying food to needy families was the administration’s purpose.
For Delaware, the ruling means USDA cannot use the deadline the judge rejected to count implementation errors against the state. Delaware must still follow the new law and address its high payment error rate. Both facts matter to understanding what the state won — and the work that remains.
TO GO BOX | The SNAP ruling
Who: Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings joined other states in suing the Trump administration over USDA’s SNAP guidance and deadline.
What: A federal judge set aside USDA’s deadline for counting certain implementation errors and clarified eligibility for some lawful permanent residents.
When: The ruling was issued Sept. 17, 2026.
Where: The decision came from the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and addresses USDA guidance to states.
Why it matters: Delaware avoids errors being counted under the rejected deadline, but its 16% fiscal 2025 payment error rate remains high. The federal law requiring states with high error rates to share SNAP benefit costs remains in effect.
Organised crime groups offer cash to move packages containing illegal drugs, weapons and dirty cash
Students are being recruited by criminals in West Yorkshire to transfer illegal packages containing illegal drugs, prohibited weapons, stolen goods and dirty cash.
Organised criminals are using social media platforms including Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook to recruit people to help them move illicit goods, particularly targeting students and vulnerable adults.
Sandie Peggie accuses RCN of failing to adequately support her in dispute over sharing women’s changing room with trans doctor
A nurse who objected to sharing a changing room with a transgender doctor has said she felt “discriminated against” by her union after raising the complaint.
Sandie Peggie, who worked for NHS Fife for more than 30 years, won a partial victory against her employer after a tribunal in December 2025, when a judge upheld her harassment claim against the health board but dismissed claims of discrimination, indirect discrimination and victimisation.
Work with U.S. defense, national security, and energy stakeholders informs new research on quantum security applications that achieve quantum advantage detecting network intrusions, authenticating devices, and verifying user location
BROOKLYN, N.Y. and WASHINGTON, Sept. 23, 2026 — Qunnect today announced its work with U.S. government agencies and national security partners. That work, together with Qunnect’s commercial deployments and new research, provides a foundation for security applications that will protect critical communications against quantum threats and AI-enabled impersonation, deception, and falsified meta data.
As Congress mandates Department of Defense to develop quantum networks and the White House calls for all government agencies to secure systems against quantum threats, Qunnect is working with government and industry partners to advance quantum networking solutions to combat these threats. The emerging technologies use quantum entanglement, a physical phenomenon that the company’s new white paper argues offers provably secure approaches to the verification of the devices, users and connections for networks carrying sensitive information.
“Five years ago, we set out to develop quantum networking security applications that could go beyond distributing encryption keys,” said Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect. “We saw an opportunity to verify where a signal came from, whether a connection had been disturbed, and whether a device was genuine. Government and commercial partners have been working with us to develop those capabilities and we are excited to share our research on how entanglement and quantum networks can help protect U.S. communications against foreign adversaries and frontier technology threats like AI and quantum.”
Qunnect’s government and national security work includes:
DARPA: Qunnect is a contract awardee from DARPA to advance quantum networking technologies through the Quantum Augmented Network, or QuANET, program.
In-Q-Tel: Qunnect is carrying out its second work program supporting government national security customers through In-Q-Tel, which is also an investor in the company.
Air Force Research Laboratory: Qunnect has received multiple awards from AFRL’s Information Directorate in Rome, New York since 2020 and is a current Direct to Phase II (D2P2) performer, with instruments installed in their quantum labs.
NIST: NIST is using Qunnect’s hardware to advance quantum networking technologies anchoring DC-QNet.
Department of Energy: Qunnect is a subcontractor to GE Vernova on DOE’s CESER program, the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, connecting its quantum networking work to the protection of energy infrastructure.
Qunnect’s new white paper, “Entanglement for Security Beyond QKD,” outlines three security applications under development on its Carina hardware. They use quantum entanglement to add physical verification of location, connections and identity alongside existing encryption:
Quantum Position Verification (QPV) is designed to provide physical proof of where and when a signal originates, offering an unhackable way to verify location independently of GPS or IP geolocation combatting AI threats to meta data.
Quantum Factor Authentication (QFA) uses an unspoofable quantum test that relies on quantum physics to authenticate devices, with the aim of resisting the growing sophistication of AI-enhanced impersonation and machine-learning attacks on hardware fingerprints.
Quantum Channel Protection (QCP) turns the fiber line itself into a sensor, designed to detect a network intruder, tap, splice or rerouting, combatting harvest-now/decrypt later attacks.
Qunnect’s metropolitan quantum network deployment in New York has supported work with Cisco and NYU, while Deutsche Telekom anchors its quantum network in Berlin with Qunnect hardware. The State of New Mexico commissioned Qunnect to create ABQ-Net as the connective tissue and open access testing infrastructure open to quantum programs and new startups in downtown Albuquerque. These networks operate on existing telecommunications fiber and at room temperature, providing infrastructure for developing new quantum security applications.
The white paper, “Entanglement for Security, Beyond QKD: Physics-based trust in an evolving threat landscape of AI and quantum technologies,” is available here.
About Qunnect
Qunnect develops quantum networking hardware that distributes entanglement over existing telecommunications infrastructure. Its Carina platform supports the development of quantum security applications and future networks for distributed quantum computing and sensing.
Phil Knight and wife, Penny, make largest known donation to a public university to fund a new engineering school
Nike co-founder Phil Knight, and his wife, Penny, have donated $1bn to the University of Oregon in what the institution described as the “largest gift ever made to a comprehensive public university”.
The donation is intended to be used to establish a new engineering school in Eugene. In a news release seen by the Guardian, the university said the new school would “educate engineers and applied scientists in bioengineering and other high-demand disciplines, attract faculty and researchers to a growing campus, and accelerate the university’s ability to move discoveries out of the laboratory and into products, therapies, technologies and companies”.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. Rand Paul says the Department of Homeland Security still has not provided Congress with investigative findings on the fatal January shootings of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.
Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told Politico that his panel continues seeking the information. “We’ve asked for information. We’re still asking,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner. The shootings occurred during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge and triggered national scrutiny of ICE tactics and DHS’s public accounts of enforcement encounters.
Paul previously withheld action on an ICE director nominee while demanding updates on civilian deaths involving immigration officers. AP reported last week that Paul said he remained “still waiting” for DHS to provide the requested internal-investigation information.
The demand comes amid broader concerns about transparency in Minneapolis enforcement cases. In a separate January shooting, ICE officer Christian Castro has been charged federally with lying to the FBI after prosecutors said video contradicted his claim that he was attacked before firing through a residence door. Castro has pleaded not guilty.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem, told senators during his confirmation process that he wanted to restore confidence in the department and acknowledged that he had previously made an inappropriate characterization of Pretti.
(The Center Square) – Early voting begins in Illinois on Thursday morning, but the state’s 40-day early voting period is accompanied by additional taxpayer costs.
Researchers project nearly half a million more heat-related deaths from June 2026 to February 2027 compared with a typical year, as a result of El Niño.
Heeding calls from far-right activist Daniel Thomas, hundreds of protesters turned out in Hampshire
Six people have been arrested after anti-migrant protesters gathered at a marina in Hampshire in the mistaken belief that a small boat was due to arrive.
Heeding calls from the far-right campaigner Daniel Thomas, hundreds of protesters gathered early on Tuesday evening at Gosport in Hampshire, aiming to disrupt any disembarkation of asylum seekers. The Border Force vessels carrying them landed instead in Dover early on Wednesday.
As the university’s new surveillance cameras join the flock of students on campus, petitions and opposing student organizations have formed. Under the guidance of Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Ellen Herbst, University of Delaware (UDPD) Associate Vice President and Chief of Police Patrick Ogden is enhancing security cameras on the university campus.
How security systems will be updated, and with what technology, is no longer clear. As of Aug. 25, the project was designated with the title “Flock License Plate Reader Enhancements” on the university’s website, but has now been altered to “Advanced License Plate Reader Technology (ALPR)” with no clarification on the change.
There has been limited information available regarding the project, but the project’s stated goal is to “enhance safety on campus by providing adequate license plate reader coverage.” Alterations have been made to various parts of the campus safety project’s description. The word “Flock” has been erased entirely from the public project plan.
While there has been no official statement as to why these changes were implemented, students continue to push the university to explain what sorts of technology will be utilized by both the university and UDPD.
One group of students has gained traction with their social media presence, deflock. Run by president Declan Rooney, a sophomore public policy major, and treasurer Arya Keim, a sophomore wildlife ecology major, the Instagram account has gained nearly 900 followers in the past month or so.
After a change.org petition was put up on Aug. 13 against the installation of these cameras, Rooney wanted to get the word out there.
“The fact that everybody has come together just adds to the momentum we have,” Rooney said. “But even if nobody else agreed with me, I would probably still be voicing my opinion against this.”
The growing organization stemmed from the nationwide mapping project, DeFlock, which is working to educate United States (U.S.) citizens about this technology and create an accurate map of all the cameras across the country.
“Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time,” according to DeFlock’s website. “They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.”
The company Flock Safety, a manufacturer of these cameras, specifically creates technology that is designed to aid law enforcement, businesses and schools in gathering information to increase public safety. One aspect of this company is Flock LPR (License Plate Readers), which captures vehicle sightings, records license plate numbers and helps users find vehicle evidence.
“Flock cameras are ALPR, which is an automatic license plate reader, which is not new technology,” Rooney said. “Those have been around since the ’80s, but what’s new is the AI database that they use to analyze the information.”
The removal of the word “Flock” from the website does not necessarily signify a lack of ALPR devices or the university halting the use of artificial intelligence databases. While it has attracted the most attention, and it is what was referenced by the university, Flock is not the only company producing this kind of technology.
“So while we are deflock, this is more just, like, de-mass surveillance at UD,” Keim said.
They were not the first or only students to recognize this project. Jacob Hindin, a sophomore insect ecology and conservation major at the university, was the one who originally published the petition.
“I want the voices of the students to be heard,” Hindin said. “And on top of that, I want students who kind of aren’t in the know about this kind of thing, to know.”
At the time that he published the petition, Flock was still listed on the website; it then transitioned to just Advanced License Plate Readers (ALPR) at the time of his interview with The Review on Sept. 10.
While they are not working together directly, both deflock and Hindin are pushing to have communication with university administrators, whether that be President Laura Carlson or Ogden, who is managing the project.
“I don’t know what to expect, really,” Rooney said. “But I think I’m leaning towards expecting them to drag their heels, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. I’d love for them to work with us and hear our side at least.”
ALPR cameras made by Flock Safety have already been installed on campus. One of the more notable locations for students is on South College Avenue, where two cameras are attached to the bottom of the skybridge connecting Gore and Smith Halls.
Nik Anna/THE REVIEW
The ultimate goal for students protesting the cameras is to get these surveillance systems off campus entirely, but in the early stages, education for both students and local residents has been a top priority.
After requesting the university to comment on the matter, Vice President of Public Affairs Rick Deadwyler provided the following statement to The Review.
“The University takes seriously both the safety of our campus community and the privacy questions that can arise from technologies used to support public safety. Automated license plate reader technology is one of the tools UDPD uses to investigate incidents, resolve crimes and support appropriate law enforcement activity. UDPD has strong policies governing how its personnel may access, use, retain and share ALPR data. Those policies reflect the University’s expectation that ALPR data be used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes and establish limits on access, sharing and retention.”
When deflock was asked if they had anything further to say, they kept it simple.
The EU and Canada, Ursula von der Leyen said last week, “see the world with the same eyes”, with shared stances on everything from AI to the climate crisis, the Ukraine war and the unholy chaos unleashed by the current occupant of the White House (OK, she didn’t actually say that last bit. But I like to think she almost certainly thought it.)
So, the European Commission president went on, Canada should become “the first associate member of the EU”. In the audience, Mark Carney beamed with delight. The next day, Canada’s prime minister enthusiastically embraced the idea of an “alliance for the future”, to build “collective resilience” through “deep cooperation”.
Cooperation on OceanEye, which aims to create ‘real-time’ model of world’s oceans, comes amid efforts to boost EU ties
Britain is to join a major new ocean science programme, led by the EU, to better forecast extreme weather and climate events, the environment secretary is to announce in New York.
The announcement on Wednesday will come as Andy Burnham’s government aims to rebuild the UK’s relationship with Europe, and follows warnings this year’s “supersized” El Niño, tracked in the Pacific Ocean, will fuel more extreme weather globally.
Photonic’s expertise in distributed quantum computing and advanced error correction helps inform new approaches to understanding quantum resource requirements at scale
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 23, 2026 — Photonic Inc. and Microsoft are collaborating to advance quantum resource estimation for future large-scale quantum computing systems. As quantum computing scales beyond a single processor, developers and enterprises need better ways to understand the value and benefits associated with distributed architectures and advanced error-correction approaches. The companies are working together to help the ecosystem better estimate the resources required to run quantum algorithms, including qubit counts, run time, and overall system overhead.
The collaboration builds on the companies’ existing strategic partnership, combining Photonic’s expertise in next generation error correction codes and distributed quantum computing with Microsoft’s Quantum Resource Estimation (QRE) framework. Together, the companies are exploring how architectural choices, networking requirements between quantum systems, and emerging error-correction approaches influence the resources required to run quantum algorithms at scale.
Photonic’s Quantum Low-Density Parity Check (QLDPC) error-correction code family SHYPS represents an important advance in reducing the overhead required to operate large-scale quantum computers. By helping quantum computing systems do more with fewer physical qubits, code innovations such as SHYPS play a significant role in improving the efficiency of high-connectivity architectures. As modular architectures gain momentum across the quantum computing industry, resource estimates must account for the cost of running algorithms across interconnected systems.
“As the industry moves from individual quantum processors toward interconnected, distributed systems, understanding the resources required to run meaningful applications becomes increasingly important,” said Paul Terry, Chief Engineering Officer at Photonic. “Our partnership with Microsoft has co-innovation at the core, and we are pleased to be leveraging our collective strengths and focusing on QRE, with the goal of giving the industry a clearer picture of what it will take to run practical applications on tomorrow’s quantum hardware.”
The Microsoft Quantum Resource Estimator is an open-source tool that estimates the physical resources and runtime required to run quantum algorithms and applications on a range of future, fault-tolerant quantum systems. Starting from configurable qubit technologies and quantum error correction schemes, developers and researchers can use the tool to see how choices such as hardware architecture and error-correction approach affect the number of physical qubits and the runtime needed for a given algorithm — allowing them to benchmark and compare different quantum solutions and platforms as they design for scale. The collaboration with Photonic reflects a shared commitment to advancing the tools and resources needed to support innovation across the quantum computing ecosystem and help organizations prepare for the quantum era.
“Quantum resource estimation helps developers understand the real-world requirements of quantum applications before large-scale quantum computers are available,” said Matthias Troyer, Technical Fellow and CVP, Microsoft Quantum. “Working with Photonic, we can explore how distributed architectures and advances in error correction will influence the future scalability and performance of quantum systems.”
In advance of the release of these capabilities on the Microsoft Quantum Resource Estimator, Photonic invites organizations to sign up for updates on the infrastructure, resources, and architectural considerations required to realize value from quantum computing at scale.
About Photonic
Photonic Inc. is a leading quantum technology company developing commercial-scale quantum computers and quantum networks to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges in materials science, drug discovery, climate change, and security. The company’s approach unlocks performance at scale through unmatched distributed quantum computing capabilities. Photonic’s high-connectivity Entanglement First architecture leverages a unique qubit modality, optically-linked silicon spin qubits, to enable powerful computation, efficient error correction, and seamless integration with existing data center and telecom environments. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, with operations in the United States and United Kingdom, Photonic’s team of 180+ experts is advancing quantum technologies alongside leading investors, partners, and customers worldwide. Learn more at photonic.com.
First such storm of fall could have wind gusts of 70mph in places, flooding and power outages, forecasters warn
New York, Boston, and much of New England could face a weekend nor’easter storm with wind gusts of 70mph in places, and “significant” impacts including beach erosion, flooding, and power outages, forecasters warn.
Effects from the season’s first such storm since Tuesday’s official start of fall could last through the weekend, especially if the system sits swirling off the coast, a scenario experts say is looking increasingly likely.
From highlighted ledges to characters telling you what to do, blockbuster games are increasingly taking the challenge out of playing – and players are pushing back
Marvel’s Wolverine, the latest action game from Sony’s stable of expensive blockbuster-factory studios, has had an unfortunate launch. Reviews were decent, if not stellar, but a series of viral video clips from reviewers and streamers have made it the scapegoat for a patronising flavour of game design that gamers have hated for decades. This clip, from Skill Up’s review, shows the player entering a beautiful wintry landscape before being overwhelmed by visual cues telling them what they’re supposed to be doing there. Sonar pulses point you in the direction of objectives. Targets – which, it bears emphasising, are shaped like targets – get an extra reflective visual effect so you know you’re supposed to pay attention to them. A trail shows you not just where to go, but where the level’s sole hidden collectible is.
It is hand-holding to the point of parody. Indeed, it reminded me of the sniggersome Mario in Unreal Engine satirical videos that makes the social media rounds every few months (“A mushroom? I should take a look at this”). Skill Up’s clip has been followed by hundreds of others, gleefully ripping into Wolverine with ironic savagery. In one much-copied clip, a streamer simply lays down his controller during a motorbike chase sequence and watches as Wolverine speeds on regardless, bouncing off the scenery as the game plays itself.
Justice department cites national security to support ban on CNN, Politico and MS Now as trio file lawsuit in response
The US Department of Justice has defended Donald Trump’s decision to ban three new organizations from the White House, arguing in a court filing that access to the grounds was a “privilege” and citing national security concerns.
Lawyers for the US president doubled down on Trump’s claims about CNN, Politico and MS Now reporting “Fake News”, and insisted the ban did not violate the first amendment because “access to the White House is a privilege, not a right”.
Kristoffer Polaha, actor in 21 Hallmark movies, will be at UNITED Church’s Milford Campus on Friday, Oct. 23
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
Hallmark fans will have a chance to see one of the network’s familiar leading men in Delaware this fall when actor Kristoffer Polaha visits Milford for a special evening celebrating an upcoming film and the real-life mission that inspired it.
Polaha, who has appeared in 21 Hallmark movies along with numerous television, film and stage productions, will be at UNITED Church’s Milford Campus on Friday, Oct. 23, for the CUPS Comedy Cast Party.
The event celebrates the completion of the production phase of Rescued, the working title of a film starring Polaha and based on the story of comedian Mike Williams.
Williams moved with his wife and three children to the Dominican Republic in 2010. While there, he became involved in an effort to rescue a Haitian refugee from Russian human traffickers. That experience ultimately led to the establishment of CUPS Mission, which now works in three countries on two continents to fight poverty and provide children with education, training and opportunities that can help them avoid trafficking.
“When I heard Mike’s story, I knew I had to be a part of it,” said writer and director Trey Reynolds. “This film is for every person who has ever felt the pull to do something greater than themselves and wasn’t sure if they were brave enough to do it.”
The movie was filmed on location in the Dominican Republic during March and April and is currently in post-production, with a projected release in late 2027. Reynolds’ previous credits include Blue Miracle, The Forge and Family Camp.
For Polaha, making the film became about more than simply playing a role.
“To make a movie is a blessing. To make this kind of movie is life-changing,” Polaha said.
During production, Polaha described how the cast and crew worked to leave a lasting impact on the community where they were filming. Their efforts included cleaning a river, stuccoing and painting the village church and painting nearby homes. The word “HOPE” was also painted on the church wall.
“We’re leaving this community better than how we found it,” Polaha said.
Children from the community spent six days with the film crew, playing games, becoming comfortable around the cameras and eventually appearing in the movie.
The Bridge, a Christian radio network with stations in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey, is hosting the Milford event. The network has supported CUPS Mission for years, and its listeners sponsor La Union Abajo, a village near Puerto Plata. Bridge staff members and listeners
have contributed funding, equipment and volunteer labor to CUPS Mission projects for nearly a decade.
Williams, whose credits include Dry Bar Comedy and Dove Award Comedian of the Year, will also appear at the Delaware event. He and his family have helped thousands of children during the past 15 years.
Polaha and Williams will be joined by Reynolds, Executive Producer Jack Eason, Associate Producer Benjamin Weeks and others involved with the film. The evening will include a question-and-answer session, exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and a first look at a clip from the movie.
“This is exactly the kind of story that reminds us what is possible when ordinary people choose to live for something bigger than themselves,” said producer Darren Moorman. “Mike Williams stepped away from personal success to answer a deeper calling, and the ripple effect of that decision is still being felt today.”
Polaha is well known to Hallmark audiences, but his acting credits extend far beyond the network. He has appeared in North Shore, Life Unexpected, Wonder Woman 1984, Jurassic World Dominion, Mad Men and CSI: Miami. He also stars alongside Jon Hamm in the upcoming MGM+ psychological thriller American Hostage.
The CUPS Comedy Cast Party begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 23, at UNITED Church, Milford Campus, 985 N. Dupont Blvd. The event is open to the public. Early bird tickets are $20 through Aug. 31, with prices increasing Sept. 1. A limited number of $100 VIP Red Carpet Reception tickets are also available and include a private reception with Polaha, Reynolds and others involved with the film.
Nominations are now being accepted for five awards that will be presented during a ceremony in December. Delaware residents have until Friday, Oct. 9, to recommend an individual, program or organization for recognition.
The Maternal Mental Health and Family Wellness Award will recognize work that advances maternal health for women and families throughout Delaware.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
Delawareans have an opportunity to recognize the people and organizations working to improve mental health, support recovery and strengthen the well-being of families and communities across the First State.
The Office of Lieutenant Governor Kyle Evans Gay has announced the return of the annual Lt. Governor’s Challenge, featuring a refreshed vision that focuses on contributions to behavioral health and mental health outcomes throughout Delaware.
Nominations are now being accepted for five awards that will be presented during a ceremony in December. Delaware residents have until Friday, Oct. 9, to recommend an individual, program or organization for recognition.
“I’m thrilled to bring back the Lt. Governor’s Challenge to celebrate individuals and organizations in our state who go above and beyond in prioritizing mental health and raising awareness,” Gay said.
“As Chair of the Behavioral Health Consortium, it is my honor to celebrate individuals and organizations across our state whose work has changed lives and reduced stigma in Delaware and beyond,” she added. “In honoring this year’s awardees, we are first and foremost saying ‘thank you’ and, as we continue to learn more about what is working in the First State, we hope that opportunities for connection and care continue to grow statewide.”
Nominees may include Delaware residents as well as programs and organizations that serve or operate in the state. Regional and national organizations may also be considered when a nomination specifically recognizes their work and impact in Delaware.
The five award categories reflect a range of efforts to improve behavioral health and well-being.
The Youth Mental Health Champion Award will recognize leadership, advocacy or service that advances the mental health and well-being of young people in a school or community.
The Community Mental Health Innovation Award will honor an individual, program or organization that has developed creative approaches to improving access to mental health services and support.
The Workplace Mental Health Leadership Award will recognize efforts to create a workplace culture that prioritizes employee mental health and well-being.
The Recovery Champion Award will honor someone who serves as an inspiration or advocate for others. This category highlights the importance of recovery support, and the role individuals can play in encouraging and guiding people facing behavioral health or substance use challenges.
The Maternal Mental Health and Family Wellness Award will recognize work that advances maternal mental health, perinatal well-being, reproductive justice or equitable access to care for women and families throughout Delaware.
Following the Oct. 9 nomination deadline, an extensive review process will begin to select this year’s award recipients. Reviewers may include people with experience in behavioral health, health care, education, public service, recovery, community engagement and related fields.
The winners will be announced during the Lt. Governor’s Challenge ceremony on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at Delaware State University’s Schwartz Center for the Arts in Dover.
By inviting the public to submit nominations, the initiative gives Delawareans a direct role in identifying people and programs whose work may not always receive widespread attention. It also provides an opportunity to share successful approaches, raise awareness of available support and encourage stronger connections among those working to improve behavioral health across the state. Nominations may be submitted online at de.gov/ltgovchallenge.
Anyone who requires language or disability access, technology assistance or another reasonable accommodation to complete the nomination process may contact Fiona Pando at fiona.c.pando@delaware.gov.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 23, 2026 — Today, IonQ announced that it will be the first on-premise quantum computing deployment at the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC). The NVAQC is designed to address the fundamental challenges of scaling quantum processors into a new class of accelerated quantum supercomputers. Connecting IonQ’s full-stack quantum systems directly with NVIDIA AI infrastructure will help drive the new breakthroughs needed to turn qubits into useful, large-scale quantum supercomputers capable of solving the world’s hardest problems.
As part of the partnership, an IonQ Superion 256 system will be installed at the NVAQC and directly linked with an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system via NVIDIA NVQLink, with workloads orchestrated by the open NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform. The joint research program will focus on hybrid software development and large-scale system prototyping, generating open results and a guide for future AI use cases and quantum-GPU co-design.
“Deploying our Superion 256 into cutting-edge environments, such as NVIDIA’s NVAQC will lead to developments allowing our partners to benefit from our scalable architecture and robust manufacturability,” said Niccolo de Masi, IonQ Chairman and CEO. “We see this as the beginning of an exciting era of hybrid quantum-classical computing. This era will be unlocked by multiple generations of Superion systems and NVIDIA’s industry-leading AI platforms.”
De Masi continued, “Our Superion quantum computing platform is robust and research-center ready. Our roadmap to 10,000 qubits and full fault tolerance is accelerating through vertical integration of our SkyWater CMOS foundry. We are excited by the possibilities our groundbreaking partnership with NVIDIA will yield.”
At IEEE Quantum Week earlier this month, the companies published joint research with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee. The award-winning study introduced a framework combining generative AI with distributed quantum algorithms to solve complex combinatorial optimization challenges. That research ran on the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform.
“Every supercomputer will become a quantum supercomputer,” said Timothy Costa, vice president and general manager for quantum at NVIDIA. “As the first quantum processor to sit alongside the NVAQC’s GB200 NVL72 system, IonQ’s Superion 256 will help make breakthroughs allowing the global ecosystem to integrate QPUs with AI infrastructure, build using open models and open-source software, and advance toward scientifically useful quantum supercomputers,”
Alongside quantum-GPU integration, joint research is expected to target quantum algorithms portfolio optimization and risk modeling in financial services; materials science; and computational chemistry for drug discovery. These types of complex use cases will benefit from research conducted using the Superion 256 system.
IonQ introduced its sixth-generation Superion quantum computing platform on Sept. 8, 2026. The Superion 256 system is available to order now, with first customer deliveries expected in 2027. Installation at NVAQC is scheduled for next year.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, and AstraZeneca achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions 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.
The Justice Department claimed that reporting from CNN, MS NOW and Politico raises national security concerns and accused their journalists of failing to act with "professionalism and decorum."
GRENOBLE, France and CHICAGO, Sept. 23, 2026 — Quobly, a French company developing silicon-based quantum computers, and qBraid, a quantum computing cloud service providing access to more than 24 quantum computers, have announced that Alloy Forge is now available on the qBraid platform, further expanding access to Quobly’s silicon quantum development environment as the company prepares the commercial launch of Alloy Pioneer, its first quantum computer, by the end of 2026.
Built to support the development and validation of quantum applications under realistic hardware constraints, Alloy Forge combines hardware-aware emulation, pulse-level simulation and cloud accessibility, enabling developers to prepare applications for future Quobly quantum systems before hardware becomes available.
Alloy Forge: A Realistic Silicon Quantum Development Environment
Alloy Forge is designed to help developers move beyond idealized quantum simulations by reproducing the practical behavior and constraints of silicon spin qubits
Alloy Forge relies on SpinPulse, Quobly’s open-source pulse-level simulation framework, enabling fine-grained modeling of silicon spin qubit operations and native gate behavior.
The combined software stack enables users to:
Develop and validate quantum applications under realistic hardware constraints.
Test quantum circuits before access to physical quantum processors.
Prepare workflows compatible with future generations of Quobly silicon quantum systems.
The emulation environment incorporates realistic noise models derived from Quobly’s research, including hardware imperfections and non-Markovian noise effects.
Expanding Access Through the qBraid Ecosystem
Available through qBraid’s cloud platform alongside more than 24 quantum computing technologies, Alloy Forge enables developers, researchers and industrial users to experiment with Quobly’s silicon quantum environment using familiar cloud-based workflows.
The integration complements Quobly’s growing cloud ecosystem and broadens international access to its software stack, enabling users to begin developing and validating applications today while preparing for execution on future Alloy Pioneer quantum systems.
As Quobly continues expanding access to its technologies, Alloy Forge will progressively become available across additional cloud and HPC environments supporting the company’s software and hardware roadmap.
Supporting Quobly’s Commercial Roadmap
Unlike standalone research simulators, Alloy Forge is designed as a persistent software layer that evolves alongside Quobly’s hardware roadmap, supporting successive generations of silicon-based quantum computing systems.
Together, Alloy Forge and Alloy Pioneer form the first software and hardware offerings within Quobly’s Alloy product family. Alloy Forge provides developers with a continuous development environment, while Alloy Pioneer, Quobly’s first quantum computing system, marks the first step in the company’s roadmap toward scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing systems engineered for seamless integration into existing datacenter and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures.
Quobly plans to commercialize Alloy Pioneer by the end of 2026, with a roadmap extending toward large-scale fault-tolerant architectures targeting one million qubits by 2032.
“At Quobly, we are not only building quantum computers, but we are also building the software ecosystem that will enable their adoption”, said Maud Vinet, CEO and co-founder of Quobly. “Alloy Forge is the development environment for our Alloy product family. By giving developers early access to realistic silicon quantum behaviour through the qBraid platform, we enable them to start building applications today that will seamlessly transition to Alloy Pioneer and future generations of Quobly quantum computers.”
“qBraid is committed to making advanced quantum technologies more accessible to developers and researchers,” said Ryan Hill, CTO at qBraid. “By bringing Alloy Forge to our platform, we are expanding access to realistic silicon quantum emulation technologies and enabling users to explore new approaches to quantum application development.”
This collaboration reflects a shared ambition to accelerate the emergence of an industrial quantum computing ecosystem where developers can progressively transition from simulation environments to production-grade quantum hardware through unified cloud platforms.
Quobly is building the first industrially scalable quantum computer by combining silicon spin qubits with advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Founded in 2022 in Grenoble, France, the company has developed a unique co-design approach with STMicroelectronics, bringing quantum processors and cryogenic control electronics onto a proven 300mm FD-SOI manufacturing platform and enabling an approach in which the quantum-computing capacity can scale through semiconductor-style integration and manufacturing.
About qBraid
qBraid is a cloud platform for quantum software development. With proven usage at the world’s largest universities, research institutions and enterprises, qBraid’s users can dive deep into tangible financial optimization, quantum machine learning and more – all on one platform.
Administration is holding back Covid vaccines for all children in at least 11 states and one US territory
The Trump administration is holding back Covid vaccines for all children in at least 11 states and one US territory, and officials have not indicated when or whether the shots will become available.
It’s the latest step by top officials to restrict vaccines in the US – and it sets a precedent for holding back other immunizations, experts said.
Osiris, one of 30 belugas removed from Ontario’s shuttered Marineland, struggled to acclimate to her Illinois home
An Illinois aquarium has said that a third beluga whale it rescued from a closed marine park in Canada this summer has died after it struggled to acclimate to its new environment.
Osiris, a 26-year-old female, was one of 30 belugas removed from Ontario’s shuttered Marineland amusement park, and among 10 rehomed at the Shedd aquarium in Chicago, which said the whale died there on Monday.
Collaboration combines CGI’s industry expertise and D-Wave’s quantum technology to help clients address complex optimization challenges and improve decision-making
MONTRÉAL , Sept. 23, 2026 — CGI, one of the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world, today announced a strategic partnership with D-Wave Quantum Inc. focusing on helping clients advance the practical application of quantum computing technologies across key industries, including logistics, transportation and retail.
“As AI adoption advances and organizations seek new ways to solve increasingly complex business objectives, quantum computing is emerging as a practical complement to classical computing for selected use cases,” said Dave Henderson, Chief Technology Officer, CGI. “Organizations are moving beyond research to evaluate where quantum technologies can improve optimization and enhance decision-making. Through our partnership with D-Wave, CGI is helping clients identify high-value use cases, and to validate them through practical experimentation and broader enterprise adoption.”
The strategic partnership builds on more than a year of collaboration between CGI and D-Wave to advance enterprise quantum use cases. Through the go-to-market partnership, CGI will integrate D-Wave’s quantum computing platforms, including access to D-Wave’s Advantage2 quantum computer as well as hybrid solvers, into its advanced technology services portfolio, enabling clients to explore and deploy quantum-enhanced solutions for mission-critical challenges such as industrial production planning, energy grid optimization, and asset maintenance scheduling. CGI and D-Wave plan to co-develop use cases focused on areas where quantum computing can augment classical approaches and support measurable business outcomes. Current initiatives include the development of quantum-enabled solutions for transportation and rail, supporting train scheduling, rail network and yard operations, and resource allocation, as well as retail applications designed to improve supply chain planning, delivery routing and workforce scheduling through quantum optimization
“Quantum computing’s business value is no longer theoretical,” said Lorenzo Martinelli, chief revenue officer at D-Wave. “D-Wave customers are using annealing quantum computing today to improve operations and generate tangible results on problems that challenge legacy systems. Combining D-Wave’s quantum technology with CGI’s scale, industry expertise and delivery capabilities will give more organizations a clear path from exploration to production and measurable business value.”
The partnership reflects CGI’s continued investment in advanced technologies that help clients prepare for the next generation of enterprise computing. As quantum technologies continue to mature, CGI is helping organizations evaluate, adopt and scale quantum-enabled solutions where they can deliver measurable business outcomes.
About CGI
Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world. With 94,000 consultants and professionals across the globe, CGI delivers an end-to-end portfolio of capabilities, from strategic IT and business consulting to systems integration, managed IT and business process services and intellectual property solutions. CGI works with clients through a local relationship model complemented by a global delivery network that helps clients digitally transform their organizations and accelerate results. CGI Fiscal 2025 reported revenue is CA$15.91 billion and CGI shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.A) and the NYSE (GIB). Learn more at cgi.com.
Venezuela’s interim president hails ‘historic meeting’ and does not say whether she will visit snatched predecessor
Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has celebrated a “historic” meeting with Donald Trump in New York, posing for a smiley photo with the US president, less than nine months after he ordered the abduction of her boss, Nicolás Maduro.
The former foes met at a five-star hotel a few blocks from Trump Tower in Manhattan late on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN general assembly. The hotel is about 7 miles from the Brooklyn prison where Maduro has been held since he was snatched during a special forces raid on Caracas in January.
Criminal investigation could include manslaughter or negligent homicide charges after 27 flood deaths last year
Camp Mystic faces a criminal investigation that could include manslaughter or negligent homicide charges in the deaths of 27 girls amid devastating flooding in Texas last year, court documents show.
In applications for search warrants executed last week, investigators sought to obtain the electronic communications of the camp’s owners, saying they could provide evidence of manslaughter, negligent homicide, child abandonment or other crimes. No charges have been brought, and a representative of the camp did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Discovery of Gallo-Roman period structure hailed as ‘major breakthrough’ by French culture ministry
An ancient wall discovered beneath Paris has been described as a “major breakthrough” by France’s culture ministry, with the archaeological find possibly confirming the location of the city’s original settlement.
A roughly 20-metre (65ft) stretch of wall dating from the Gallo-Roman period was discovered in Paris this summer beneath a building on the Île de la Cité, near Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of the French capital.
US-Iran meeting takes place on sidelines despite president’s threat to ‘annihilate’ Tehran regime. Plus, one man’s month-long pilates odyssey
Good morning. Donald Trump has used the platform of the UN general assembly in New York to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran, “and do it quickly”. He called on countries to unite to isolate Tehran and bring down global energy prices.
Despite his bombastic rhetoric, Trump also said Iranian officials held three hours of talks with the US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the meeting. Witkoff said he felt very good about the meeting, the first such contact since the US vice-president, JD Vance, met an Iranian delegation in Switzerland in June. A senior Iranian official also indicated that Iran was prepared to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week.
What else did Trump say at the UN? The president doubled down on his defence of AI development, saying warnings about runaway agents were a “hoax”; announced the US would build new military bases in Greenland; attacked the international criminal court as a “rogue organisation”; and prompted the Cuba’s delegation to stage a walkout when he described the country as a “failed state”.
Did he continue his attacks on US media networks? Trump scolded a CNN anchor for covering him at the UN, saying “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me.” Last week, the president announced he was banning CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House.
Where else is the president seeing dissent from Republicans? Another prominent Florida Republican has publicly distanced himself from Trump, days after María Elvira Salazar called out the president’s immigration-enforcement policy targeting law-abiding undocumented immigrants. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor in November’s midterm elections, launched an updated campaign website on Tuesday that was stripped of almost every mention of Trump.
Housing rights campaigners decry landlord’s ‘barbaric behaviour’ after apartment Maricarmen had lived in for 71 years was bought by a developer
There were violent scenes in Madrid on Wednesday as riot police fought with protesters trying to prevent the eviction of an 87-year-old disabled woman from her apartment in the Retiro district.
Hundreds of protesters had gathered, many of them overnight, in an effort to block the fourth attempt to carry out the eviction. Activists from the Madrid and Barcelona tenants’ union, and celebrities including the actor Carlos Bardem and the singer and actor Ana Belén, joined the protest.
The PM’s shiny newness could explain the easy ride he got this time. But who would dare predict the ever-shifting weather in the president’s head?
Watching footage of Andy Burnham at the UN general assembly on Tuesday was like watching your child from behind a tree in the playground. Are they making friends? How normal do they seem relative to the average? How will they react when they come into contact with that hulking great child who seems to be running things? Burnham’s first face-to-face with Donald Trump was billed as a knife-edge encounter that, due to the latter’s capriciousness, could go either way. In the event, it was drama-free, leaving observers to ask: was it Burnham’s brilliance or simply the weather in Trump’s head?
To viewers at home, Burnham’s performance at the press conference looked like that of a man who had worked out his best approach was to go for the sheepish, slightly cheeky air of the junior partner. Burnham is 24 years younger than Trump, on top of everything else – which can afford a certain licence to the less powerful person in any exchange. At the last minute, the meeting had been moved behind closed doors and afterwards, in a windowless room at the UN, the two men appeared side by side, mirroring each other’s body language: just two guys, legs akimbo, shoulders hunched, hanging on a bench in the locker room.
Portland Fire’s win hands Lynx top seed for playoffs
Olivia Miles held out of lineup due to calf injury
Caitlin Clark had 27 points, nine assists and seven rebounds, and Kelsey Mitchell added 20 points to her WNBA single-season scoring record as the Indiana Fever beat the Minnesota Lynx 96-77 on Tuesday night.
It was a mixed night for the Lynx. The Portland Fire’s victory over the Golden State Valkyries later in the evening meant Minnesota have clinched the No 1 seed for the playoffs, which start Sunday. However, the Lynx were without Olivia Miles. The record-breaking rookie was a late scratch because of an injured left calf, and her absence clearly had an impact. Miles broke Clark’s single-season scoring record by a rookie against Connecticut last Sunday. Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve said she almost held Miles out for that game and that the team would take the injury day by day as the playoffs approach.
Ofcom says site’s age-checking regime may not be ‘highly effective’, as required by the Online Safety Act
One of the world’s most visited pornography websites is being investigated by the UK’s communications watchdog over concerns it can still be accessed by children.
Pornhub’s age checking regime may not be “highly effective”, according to Ofcom, and could be in breach of online safety laws requiring strict measures to prevent under-18s from accessing sexually explicit content.
August 15: $62,991
September 23: $86,456
Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. "Bitcoin is back," declares Yahoo Finance:
The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally... [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance on Monday] "I think the crypto winter is over, although that does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear." For now, momentum is on crypto's side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5% on Friday and another 6% on Monday. "We believe crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market and we see few signs of overheating," Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote on Tuesday.
The move looks "like a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large short squeeze," Nicolai Søndergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said as traders betting against bitcoin are forced to buy it back, adding further fuel to the rally.
Bitcoin got bad news and then good news last week. After the U.S. Congress failed Thursday to pass a cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act', America's Securities and Exchange Commission instead announced a tokenized-stock experiment. It's a five-year "innovation exemption" that "creates a path for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade through automated market makers on public blockchain," according to CoinDesk. Yahoo Finance notes that Bitcoin and other altcoins surged after the announcement.
A payments business that operates across Africa and is ultimately controlled by an Indian billionaire has announced its intention to float on the struggling London Stock Exchange.
Airtel Money, the mobile money arm of Airtel Africa, is planning one of the biggest UK listings in years, in a boost for the shrinking London market that has faced a string of recent departures.
Brandon Herrera, a YouTuber known for making outrageous pro-gun statements, is the frontrunner to represent a district devastated by mass shootings
The video begins with Brandon Herrera staring intently into the camera. He is filming himself in a hotel room seated between twin beds, his black hair slicked back and beard neatly trimmed. He is wearing a T-shirt branded with his trademark nickname, “The AK Guy”, above the image of a semi-automatic rifle primed for action.
Three days earlier, on 3 August 2019, a white nationalist armed with a semi-automatic firearm not dissimilar to the one stamped across Herrera’s chest entered a busy Walmart store in the Texas border city of El Paso and opened fire.
In the latest episode of "Healthful," Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein, an orthopedic surgeon at Duke University School of Medicine, discusses what women should know about protecting their bones.
One of the largest labor unions in the US targets eight battleground states in ‘workers v billionaires’ campaign
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), one of the largest labor unions in the US, has launched a “workers v billionaires” political campaign tour targeting members in eight battleground states and encouraging them to support pro-worker candidates in the midterms.
IAM has nearly 700,000 active and retired members in North America, covering workers at corporations that include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, United Airlines and Harley-Davidson. The union is targeting members and voters in Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois.
Iran has pushed back on claims that it dropped former preconditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz in surprise talks held in New York under the mediation of Qatar between Tehran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Trump said the three-hour talks held in a room at the UN headquarters had gone very well and been very productive. He suggested further talks were possible imminently, which led to the price of a barrel of Brent crude to fall to below $100 (£75) for the first time in two weeks. Witkoff said the talks had been “encouraging, constructive and successful”.
Richard Clayton KC had undergone operation for ruptured achilles tendon day before hearing optician’s appeal
A judge was wrong to hear a case from his bed via video link while recovering from surgery, the court of appeal has said.
Richard Clayton KC, sitting as a deputy high court judge, heard an optician’s appeal against a finding of serious misconduct from bed the day after returning from hospital where he had undergone an operation for a ruptured achilles tendon.
(The Center Square) – Six senators want to know if the Trump administration has any plan to get tariff refunds to consumers with the government having cleared about $122 billion in refunds of struck-down duties for importers.
Wes Streeting has said annual payments worth at least £120m to Mauritius are on hold as the government reconsiders its deal over the Chagos Islands, after Donald Trump refused to back the agreement.
The defence secretary said the payments would not be made “at this stage” and confirmed the deal “can’t go ahead without US support”.
Bryan Seaver, who announced Parton’s death to the world, is alleged to have intimidated her manager and others, which he denies
The estate of the late Dolly Parton is involved in a dispute with the country star’s nephew and former head of security, and has filed for a restraining order against him amid allegations of threats.
Bryan Seaver was responsible for Parton’s security, and was tasked with announcing her death on 25 August with a video, “something Dolly asked of me years ago”, he said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is dramatically expanding its search for noncitizen voter fraud ahead of the November midterms, assigning hundreds of federal investigators and attorneys to a problem that repeated studies and state reviews have found occurs only rarely.
Homeland Security Investigations says it now has about 1,600 open voter-fraud cases and has made 160 arrests. The Justice Department says 24 immigrants have been charged this year, with officials promising prosecutions will increase before Election Day. Axios reported that agents normally assigned to smuggling, trafficking, financial fraud and sexual exploitation have been redirected to the effort.
The scale of the operation stands in sharp contrast to the available evidence. Reuters reviewed state and independent investigations and found noncitizen voting to be exceedingly uncommon. One Brennan Center review identified just 30 suspected cases among 23.5 million ballots, while the conservative Heritage Foundation documented 24 cases over two decades.
AP has likewise reported that noncitizen voting is illegal under federal law and rarely occurs, with state audits repeatedly finding only isolated cases.
Even some recent registration problems cited by officials involved software or administrative errors rather than deliberate illegal voting. Despite that record, the administration is treating the issue as a “tier one priority,” continuing Trump’s years-long claims that noncitizen voting represents a major threat to U.S. elections.
We the undersigned write this letter out of great fear and great hope.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen the world set ablaze by both war and warming. From the conflict in Iran, which has claimed thousands of lives and disrupted billions more, to the series of ever worsening climate disasters, from wildfires in Europe to collapsing glaciers in Nepal, the world seems to be falling apart exactly when it needs to be coming together.
As climate experts from around the world gather in New York for their annual week of talking through the world’s deepest dilemma, the vibes are mostly bad.
Though 2026 seems likely to set a new global temperature record (and 2027, as El Niño gathers steam, is almost certain to break it), and though the planet has careened from one climate disaster to another (European heatwaves that killed tens of thousands, a Nepali flood that wiped out entire communities), and though scientists warn that we’re reaching precisely the global tipping points they’ve long feared (the new research on the faltering great currents of the Atlantic should send a literal chill up your spine), there’s a distinct lack of political momentum.
The path forward is difficult, but the way is clear. We want solar for everyone, everywhere, before the decade is out.
We know that standing up to the powerful can be scary. But if there is one thing that unites us, it is that we live beneath the same sun. That unity is our strength, and we must use it to act now.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change
In an interview before the White House’s media ban, Carlson called on reporters to push back against Trump’s misogyny
Donald Trump has achieved something rarely seen in Washington: uniting rival television networks against him. When he banned CNN and MS Now – along with Politico – from the White House, their competitors suspended shared coverage of the US president’s events.
Gretchen Carlson, a journalist, author and former Fox News host, hopes this will not be the only example of solidarity from a White House press corps facing what she describes as an “outright onslaught” from the administration.
Wilmington-raised actor John Gallagher Jr. wasn’t sure he had what it took to play a serial killer when he was cast in the 2016 slasher “Hush.” But director Mike Flanagan insisted on Gallagher because nobody would expect his boy-next-door look underneath the mask.
During the three weeks of 12-hour night shoots that followed, Gallagher learned fight choreography, performed most of his own stunts and even climbed up the side of a house.
“The freedom that comes with a filmmaker believing in you and trusting you is an incredible feeling,” Gallagher said.
Get Involved John Gallagher Jr. will attend Horror Fest Film Festival at Theatre N in Wilmington for a panel Saturday, Sept. 26, 4:30-5:30 p.m., and an acoustic set Sunday, Sept. 27, 7:30-9 p.m. Concert tickets are $25 and panel tickets are $15. The latter is also available as part of an all-day or VIP pass.
Flanagan’s vision paid off. The Netflix film received positive reviews during its premiere at South by Southwest and online praise from horror icons like author Stephen King and “The Exorcist” director William Friedkin. Today, it holds positive audience and critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
Ten years after “Hush,” Flanagan has taken the reins of the franchise Friedkin started with the upcoming “The Exorcist: Martyrs,” which Gallagher makes a brief appearance in.
“There’s something cosmically full circle about that,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher will reflect further on his horror roles in a panel Saturday at the inaugural Horror Fest Film Festival in Wilmington, where he’ll also play a set of his original music on Sunday.
Known for his parts in rock musicals like Duncan Sheik’s “Spring Awakening,” Green Day’s “American Idiot” and The Avett Brothers’ “Swept Away,” Gallagher has become a disciple of his own brand of “emo folk rock” in the past decade. He released a new EP, “Almost Ok,” in May.
Ahead of his hometown appearances, the Hollywood actor reflected on his career and future in a conversation with Spotlight Delaware.
‘A wooden statue’
Gallagher, 42, left Delaware for New York to pursue acting as a teenager. But he still visits his parents in Wilmington several times a year and hits up his favorite restaurants: The Charcoal Pit, La Tolteca, Kid Shelleen’s and Rita’s Italian Ice.
Gallagher attributes his artistic successes to Wilmington community theater and his parents, who have performed as a folk duo locally for decades.
He first decided he wanted to become an actor around 11 years old, when he watched his mom play the stepmother in Wilmington Drama League’s “Cinderella.”
“She brought a playful energy to it, and she was really funny,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, I want to try that. I want to see if I can get up on stage and help tell a story.’”
John Gallagher Jr.’s participation in Wilmington community theater put him on the path to award-winning theater and film roles. | PHOTO BY CHARLES CHESSLER, COURTESY OF JOHN GALLAGHER JR.
So, Gallagher’s mother took him to a casting call. He sang “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from “Mary Poppins.”
“I stood there like a wooden statue. I didn’t get cast. I was crushed,” he said. “I was like, ‘I never want to do this again!’ Very dramatic, as I was wont to be at that age.”
But he bounced back and auditioned for Wilmington Drama League’s “Frankenstein,” adapted from the book by local playwright Scott Mason. Gallagher said that role was “life-changing.”
An introverted and shy kid, Gallagher found friendship and encouragement in Delaware’s theater scene as he performed alongside a cadre of future Hollywood A-listers like Aubrey Plaza and Neil Casey. That gave him the ambition to throw himself into the merciless machine of New York theater.
‘Raw, imperfect quality’
Gallagher landed his breakout role as Moritz Stiefel in “Spring Awakening” at 22, earning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
The pivotal role wouldn’t have been possible without composer Duncan Sheik, who died last week at 56.
“He was a very quiet, sensitive, mercurial person. Very introspective. You can hear it in the music,” Gallagher recalled. “It’s very compelling, and that was the first thing that jumped out at me when I heard the ‘Spring Awakening’ songs for the first time.”
The first version of the score Gallagher listened to was a demo CD recorded and performed entirely by Sheik.
“I wish that could also get released alongside the cast album, because hearing him play all those songs is really unique and really special,” he said.
Gallagher described himself as a bit of an “outcast” in the world of musical theater. He hadn’t been going to see vocal coaches his entire life; he’d gotten most of his practice from performing in rock bands. But Sheik didn’t want perfection from Gallagher; he wanted authenticity.
“The character that I was playing is this wayward and depressed teenager struggling to make sense of his life. I was encouraged to mine all of that and bring a raw, imperfect quality to the role,” Gallagher said. “He wanted people that felt real.”
‘Almost Ok’
John Gallagher Jr. performs with his band. | PHOTO BY VIVIAN WANG, COURTESY OF JOHN GALLAGHER JR.
Fittingly for someone who’s starred in so many rock musicals, Gallagher exhibits a theatrical quality in his own songwriting.
The lyrics drop the listener into hyper-specific settings, like a family trip to the Jersey Shore (“Never Leave”).
“New Jersey Transit is a great place to be sad,” Gallagher sings. “You can stare out the window racked with guilt and feeling bad about the time you raised your voice and were mean for no reason to your dad.”
Other tracks follow Gallagher grappling with a problem like a character in a musical. “Tough Spit,” an upbeat lamentation of the digital age, follows a doomscrolling Gallagher resolving to leave the house before ultimately deciding to further isolate himself.
Gallagher pulls his bare-faced vulnerability from the folk icons he saw perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival as a kid, like Richie Havens, Janis Ian and Buddy Guy.
“There’s something so powerful and vulnerable about these people just getting up with a wooden instrument and telling their story and baring their soul,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘God, that’s a superpower.’”
That superpower is what Gallagher channels on “Almost Ok.”
The EP was born from the closure of The Avett Brothers’ “Swept Away” after only two months on Broadway. Feeling deflated, Gallagher threw himself into the studio, recording snapshots of his life from the past couple of years in a matter of five days.
The theme of the record can be found in the title. If life is a dial ranging from horrid to heavenly, Gallagher is still searching for the right level of blissful ordinariness.
“I talk about this all the time with my therapist. I don’t need the dial to be at 100. … But I also don’t want to be down all the way to the left at zero,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to get in the vicinity.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Community members across the state are mourning the loss of Santos Maria Chilel Soto, a Georgetown mother who was fatally shot by a Maryland deer hunter Friday evening. A petition is now calling the governor and Delaware authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the incident.
Santos Maria Chilel Soto took her usual leisurely walk last Friday just before sunset. The Georgetown mother of five was chatting beside her boyfriend, Miniveldo, and his two children as they walked along an open field in Ellendale.
But the 39-year-old Guatemalan mother never returned home. She was fatally shot by Walter Moorhead, a 74-year-old Maryland hunter who, according to arrest records, mistook Chilel Soto for a deer.
“I want to call upon Gov. Matt Meyer for justice, so that this murder does not go unpunished, because it was a cold-blooded murder,” Miniveldo, who was only identified by his first name, said in an interview with Spanish-language radio station La ZMX Delaware earlier this week.
Moorhead, of Salisbury, Md., was released on $43,000 cash bond after admitting to police he shot Chilel Soto Friday night. He is charged with reckless manslaughter, three counts of reckless endangerment and a weapons charge.
According to police records, Moorhead was using a rifle to hunt deer. Delaware State Police and Delaware Natural Resources Police are jointly investigating the shooting.
For now, Chilel Soto’s family is focused on mourning the loss of a loved one who has left five children behind — four who lived in Georgetown and her adult son in Guatemala.
“We’ve barely had time to eat,” her sister, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday.
What we know about the shooting
As part of her routine, Chilel Soto would take walks with her family in the late afternoon, Miniveldo said on La ZMX. And that Friday evening was no exception.
The police report indicates the shooting took place at around 7:40 p.m. But Miniveldo said in the radio interview the incident occurred about an hour earlier, when there was still daylight remaining at 6:40 p.m.
During this time, Miniveldo said he heard an explosion. He then saw Chilel Soto cover her ears and fall to the ground. She had been shot in her upper torso. They called 911, and while they applied pressure to her wound and waited for emergency responders, according to the arrest records, an older man with a flashlight walked into the field.
Moorhead, a retiree who was hunting with a scope, told police he found Chilel Soto, as well as three other people, when he went to find the deer he thought he had shot.
Miniveldo said Chilel Soto was wearing a yellow shirt when she was killed.
Moorhead could not be immediately reached for comment. As of Tuesday afternoon, court records showed he does not yet have an attorney.
Santos Maria Chilel Soto: Wife, mother and Georgetown community member
Chilel Soto lived in Georgetown with Miniveldo, her teenage son and daughter and her partner’s two younger children.
Chilel Soto’s sister recalled their time spent working in the cleaning industry together during an interview with La ZMX Delaware. She said her sister was her best friend and a loving soul who would even help her older clients go to the bathroom.
“She fought every day,” Chilel Soto’s sister said in Spanish to La ZMX. “She would even sometimes head out at 5 a.m. sometimes for her children. She was always more than just a mother. She was a companion to her children. She was the best mom to them.”
Chilel Soto also was an active member of the evangelical church Iglesia de Dios Fuente de Verdad. In a church Facebook post, dozens of comments passed on their condolences, including some family members from Guatemala.
“May god bless the life of my brother and my nieces and nephews. Sending regards from Tajumulco, San Marcos,” wrote her former brother-in-law Silvio Lopez.
Hunting season starts with tragedy
September marked the first month of deer hunting season, and Delaware has one of the longest in the country, spanning five months. Aside from sport hunting, one of the season’s main purposes is to control the population of white-tailed deer in the state, which causes millions of dollars in crop damages every year.
To that end, the state offers permits that allow farm owners to open their land to licensed deer hunters outside of the regular season if their crops have suffered extensive damage.
According to DNREC spokesman Michael Globetti, one of these hunting permits, which allows firearms to be used outside of the general firearm season, was on file for the property where Chilel Soto was killed.
Still, there is an active investigation to determine whether Moorhead’s hunting complied with both the permit and state law.
Delaware’s current deer hunting season more generally is only open to hunters using crossbows and arrows. Firearms can be used in two shorter seasons that next run from Nov. 13-22, and Jan. 16-24, 2027. The only exception is when a private property owner has a deer damage permit to hunt antlerless deer.
Under Delaware law, most hunters must complete an education course before they can obtain a hunting license. Positive target identification is a core requirement of the exam. Maryland also requires hunters to take a similar course to the Delaware exam that includes different tiers, depending on the hunter’s age.
Rules and regulations are no different for an out-of-state hunter like Moorhead. The only exception was that he had to pay a higher permit fee of $199, which can be obtained online or in-person.
A previous hunting-related death occurred back in 2023 in Millsboro, when Todd Mumford, a 53-year-old Sussex County probation and parole officer, was shot and killed.
Another incident occurred in 2015, also in the Millsboro area, when a 54-year-old hunter in a tree stand shot an arrow from his compound bow and hit a 24-year-old victim on the ground about 30 yards away. The injured man survived and underwent surgery.
Community left reeling, investigation ongoing
In the wake of Chilel Soto’s death, community members and Chilel Soto’s loved ones have questioned Moorhead’s assertion that he thought he had shot a deer.
Dailyn Stephanie Mendez, a friend of Chilel Soto, said the land where she was killed is a hotspot for the Hispanic neighbors in the area. This, she said, makes her believe it was a targeted incident.
“It isn’t as if it were an accident, or an illness, or something like that — things that are easier to come to terms with,” Mendez said. “But just imagine: the blow came head-on — not from behind, not anything else — it struck her head-on.”
Despite these concerns, the Office of the Attorney General said it could not comment on the ongoing investigation.
Moorhead has a preliminary court hearing scheduled for Friday, Sep. 24.
When asked for a comment, Gov. Matt Meyer’s office shared their condolences and said state police are conducting a full investigation.
“I also recognize the grief and concern this tragedy has caused within our Latino community, particularly in Sussex County,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Every person who calls Delaware home deserves to live with safety, dignity, and respect. My family’s heart is with Santos Maria’s family during this time, and the State of Delaware stands with the community as it mourns her loss.”
A GoFundMe supporting burial costs had raised nearly $26,000 as of Tuesday evening.
Chilel Soto is survived by her five children and her boyfriend, Miniveldo. The family is currently awaiting the return of her body so they can send her remains to Guatemala, where one of her sons awaits.
Why Should Delaware Care? Amid a flurry of election-related legal challenges across the country, the Delaware Supreme Court struck down a challenge to the state’s absentee voting protocols this week. The decision allows the state’s permanent absentee voting system to continue as-is this election cycle.
The Delaware Supreme Court upheld the state’s absentee voting protocols earlier this week, rejecting Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker’s claim the system is unconstitutional.
Hocker, a Republican state senator from Ocean View, argued in the lawsuit that Delaware’s current absentee voting rules violated the state’s Constitution by allowing for the indefinite use of absentee ballots — even if voters no longer meet the state’s qualifications.
But the justices rebuffed that claim in a 20-page ruling written by Chief Justice C.J. Seitz, saying the “argument rests on a faulty premise.”
The Supreme Court sided with the Delaware’s Court of Chancery in its previous ruling against Hocker’s claim, saying the Delaware Department of Elections has protocols in place to police permanent absentee voters’ continued eligibility.
“The plaintiffs have lost sight of the mountain they must climb to succeed on a facial constitutional challenge to legislation,” Seitz wrote.
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings called the ruling “a victory for the tens of thousands of veterans, senior citizens and Delawareans with disabilities who rely on permanent absentee voting.”
In a statement, she also said the lawsuit was a last-minute attempt by Hocker to “suppress the vote,” after initially voting in favor of legislation that first created permanent absentee voting.
But Jane Brady, a former state attorney general who represented Hocker in the case, said the senator’s lawsuit was about ensuring election integrity, not playing politics.
“It’s unfortunate if anyone would try to make this political and use keywords that are incendiary to try and create political fodder out of this,” Brady told Spotlight Delaware. “This was not about politics. It was about integrity, and even the Constitution talks about the purity of our elections. This was to protect that.”
Brady said she accepts the court’s ruling and is grateful for its thorough consideration, but she still plans to look into future challenges. Those possible challenges, she said, would come after the November general election and likely be targeted toward how the permanent absentee voting process is implemented.
According to Jennings’ statement, the Department of Elections will soon begin sending out ballots to permanent absentee voters across the state.
How did we get here?
Hocker first filed the lawsuit against the Delaware Department of Elections in early August, after a similar claim he filed in 2024 was dismissed.
Steve Washington, an Independent Party of Delaware-affiliated candidate running for a Wilmington-area State Senate seat, was added to the case as a second plaintiff in mid-August.
The Court of Chancery ruled against Hocker’s claims in a Sept. 4 opinion. Days later, Brady, who also is a former state Republican Party chair, appealed that decision to the Delaware Supreme Court.
Hocker primarily argued that Delaware’s current absentee voting rules could jeopardize the accuracy of state election results if people no longer eligible to vote were still able cast ballots.
Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View). | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
“As a candidate, Sen. Hocker wants a fair election and all votes made and tabulated in his race to be in accordance with the law,” the original complaint stated.
Hocker faces a challenge from Democrat Harry Gold in the general election — although Gold was not yet on the ballot when Hocker originally filed his case.
State law identifies five categories of people eligible for permanent absentee status, including those temporarily residing outside the United States, serving in the armed forces, sick or physically disabled, or already authorized for absentee status by federal law.
The lawsuit called for the state to require individuals to reapply for absentee ballot status each election cycle, instead of indefinitely being placed on the absentee ballot list.
The state Supreme Court decision comes amid a flurry of challenges to election processes across the country.
Jennings recently joined a group of 20 states challenging new Trump administration vote-by-mail requirements that Jennings and others said could stifle fair elections. A U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled in the states’ favor on Sept. 4, and the U.S. Supreme Court has also sided with the states.
Other voting lawsuits on the horizon
The Delaware Supreme Court will hear arguments this morning in another case related to voting rights, this time for people representing business entities like limited liability companies (LLCs).
The American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware is appealing an earlier decision from state Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz that found LLCs and other entities like family trusts have the right to vote in Fenwick Island’s elections. The ACLU contends the allowance diminishes human residents’ voting rights.
As previously reported by Spotlight Delaware, Hocker was a Senate sponsor of Fenwick’s original charter amendment extending voting rights to entities some 20 years ago. In the 2024 election, nearly a quarter of votes cast in Fenwick were by owners of entities. Fenwick is only one of five Delaware towns that allows more than just people to vote.
Mayor Natalie Madgeburger has previously said a majority of properties in the resort town are owned by family trusts, and described the voting system there as one that is “just, fair and gives everyone a voice.”
She did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Even if the court upholds Karsnitz’s ruling allowing entities to vote in Fenwick elections as they have since at least 2008, changes could still be possible — but they would require a constitutional amendment.
House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris (D-Dover) successfully sponsored a bill last year to deny corporations voting rights in any Delaware election. Any such constitutional changes, however, require a two-thirds vote from two consecutive sessions of the General Assembly. That means the next group of lawmakers meeting in Dover will also have to approve the legislation with a supermajority in support.
Maggie Reynolds and Maddy Lauria contributed to this report.
Donald Trump pulled out all the stops at the Republican party’s midterm convention two weeks ago. In speeches aimed at the voters who will soon decide whether to keep Republicans in control of Congress for the final phase of his presidency, the president dangled $5,000 checks, and warned the United States would turn into a “communist country” if Democrats are elected.
The unprecedented political gathering amounted to a Hail Mary pass at retaining control of Congress, which history indicated Trump’s Republican allies had always been likely to lose in the 3 November vote. Two weeks later, with election administrators in several states already sending out mail ballots, there is no indication the gambit has worked.
Why Should Delaware Care? One Georgetown-area teacher started a student-run mentorship program to help multilingual learners in her school improve both their English literacy and overall sense of community. A national grant has now bolstered her work.
Katherine Mancuso knew she had to do something.
The Sussex Central High School English teacher — whose classes are made up of more than 60% multilingual learners — was seeing low test scores, staffing changes and students entering high school without foundational language skills.
She knew the school needed to find a system to help students who speak Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, or Portuguese as a first language build confidence and better navigate their curriculum.
So Mancuso created the “Multilingual Mentors” program last March, pairing juniors and seniors with sophomores and freshmen who need the extra help in core subject areas. The program includes small-group and one-on-one support focused on homework help, literacy development, vocabulary, and study skills.
“Having a multilingual teacher in the room still hasn’t been enough, so we need to do something that makes [multilingual students] feel more comfortable, and this is what I came up with,” Mancuso said.
Students are identified through teacher recommendations, English language proficiency assessment data, and self-referral. Mancuso also has promoted the program through community events, direct outreach to families and working with multilingual staff at the school to ensure students feel encouraged to attend.
While the program initially was based on 9th and 10th graders in need, it is open to any student who may be struggling, she said.
Mancuso has even received a national grant to help bolster the program. A one-year, $5,000 grant from the National Education Association will help fund the mentorship program through the middle of the current school year. She also is looking for more outside funding to continue growing.
Student-centered mentorship
Manscuso emphasized the need for these students to have relationship-building, peer encouragement and opportunities for mentors to lead activities.
In the classroom, teachers often have to pull at different strings to meet a wide range of needs, she said. But through the mentorship program, many students have naturally stepped up to help their peers.
“It’s our students building a foundation of support. It’s student-centered,” Mancuso said. “They track everything, so they track the students that need homework help. They are the ones trying to make sure that they’re communicating with each other.”
She has used the grant money to add incentives like snacks to ensure mentees stay engaged after school hours. She also has purchased gift cards to recognize the mentors’ participation and leadership.
The program has been successful, Mancuso said, because it takes organic student relationships and makes them intentional and structured.
The program included about 20 mentors and 20 mentees in the spring. This year, six mentors have returned, and Mancuso currently is recruiting to begin tutoring sessions in October.
The program will run twice a week after school and during intervention periods, where mentees can meet with their mentors during the day for 35 minutes to continue working on their goals.
Student-run organization
One mentor, 17-year-old Sussex Central senior Jordani Bernal Tapia, joined the program after being recruited by Mancuso.
He chose to mentor because he said he wanted to help others using his fluency in both Spanish and English.
Tapia noticed that with his help, other students were able to complete their assignments and improve their grades. He has noticed how much more relaxed the mentees feel, and how much more they are able to connect with new people.
“For the majority of them, their first language is Spanish,” Tapia said. “The bigger the words are, or the more that the teacher explains it to them, the more they get lost.”
Instead, Tapia starts by asking what the students understood from their teachers before explaining the material further in Spanish.
“There’s a lot more people that can help, and that should help,” he said. “And I would like to highlight that this is all to help our peers become who they want to become through the challenges they face.”
What comes next?
Mancuso said she would like the senior students to eventually take ownership of the program.
That way, it could create a cycle where the students’ leadership continues beyond the first year, and their mentees’ academic growth could continue in concert.
Since the program has started, Mancuso said she has already seen academic improvement.
Students are testing higher on their English-proficiency exams, and less schoolwork is being handed in late, she said.
“I have over 60% of my students who are multilingual learners … it’s not just a few. If it’s over half the classroom, people have to start changing,” Mancuso said. “Things have to start happening to make sure that everyone graduates on time and that they all feel comfortable in the classroom.”
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado tried 3 times to enter her country "by air and sea but has been turned away each time," her team says.
Club coach also allegedly grabbed female official’s hand
Referees’ union criticises MLS’s two-match ban
The Major League Soccer club Columbus Crew have sacked their reserve-team coach after he allegedly grabbed a female referee’s hand and told her: “Don’t forget this is a man’s game.” Federico Higuaín was sent off for the incident, which occurred during an MLS Next Pro league match, and was later given a two-match ban.
Columbus Crew’s general manager, Issa Tall, said in a statement: “We determined it’s in the best interest of our club, players and support staff to dismiss Federico Higuaín from his responsibilities. After conversations this week and further assessing the past month, our club’s standards of what’s expected from a leader for one of our teams have not been met.”
Arrest of Shadrack Sibiya comes as country reels from cases of femicide and alleged police corruption and criminality
One of South Africa’s most senior police officers has been charged with raping an 18-year-old woman and grooming a 16-year-old girl, as the country’s police face allegations of corruption and failing to tackle violence against women and girls.
Shadrack Sibiya, who was already suspended from his role as deputy national police commissioner over allegations he interfered with political killings investigations, was arrested on Monday. He is facing charges of rape, people trafficking, promoting the sexual grooming of a child and two counts of grooming a child.
So for the OW light project I shared earlier I made this web app. It has a live feed of the animation as it shows on the board which is great for debugging, apart from the sensor data. Much better than looking at sides of the board when I ride lol. It’s lagging because of the screen recorder, but normally the animation is nice and smooth.
The animations react to tilt but also to acceleration, but that still need to be dialed in. It’s not easy to filter the data well. But you get the idea.
If you guys have any ideas for animations or hi changes, I’m all ears.
The fight over Missouri's congressional map returned to the U.S. Supreme Court for a third time after an appeals court ordered the revival of new districts backed by President Trump.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Families of people killed by federal immigration agents told Democratic lawmakers Tuesday that government officials repeatedly released misleading or false accounts after fatal encounters, then provided little information about what actually happened.
At the congressional forum, relatives and attorneys described what one lawyer called “dual assassinations” — first the killing of a person, then attacks on that person’s character. The hearing included cases from Texas, Minnesota and Maine and focused heavily on discrepancies between early Department of Homeland Security statements and evidence that emerged later.
One of the clearest examples involved Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was fatally shot by immigration agents in Houston in July. DHS initially said he tried to strike an agent with his vehicle. Three passengers disputed that account, saying Salgado Araujo had stopped and no agent was positioned in front of the van when shots were fired.
Federal officials also raised suspicions that bags found in the van contained methamphetamine. Testing later established that the substance was not meth, U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed.
Similar concerns were raised about other cases, including the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, where the government’s explanation changed from claims that he had “weaponized” his vehicle to a later assertion that an agent fired because he was attempting to flee. Families told lawmakers that shifting narratives, delayed disclosures and limited transparency have made independent scrutiny more difficult.
On 23 September 1926, two of the best heavyweights in American history met in front of 120,000 fans in Philadelphia. The fight drew in a nation
The two fights between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney rank with boxing’s most-storied championship bouts and are among the greatest sports spectacles ever seen in America. Wednesday marks the one hundredth anniversary of their first encounter.
Dempsey bridged boxing’s old and modern eras and was one of the most charismatic fighters in history. When Dempsey was young, biographer Randy Roberts recounts, “he lived in mining camps and hobo jungles, rode the rods, and more than once begged for food. What separated him was his willingness, even eagerness, to work. He accepted any type of employment from washing dishes, cutting lawns, and scrubbing floors to the harder work of coal-mining, digging ditches, and picking fruit.”
Larry Pickett Sr and his son, a US army cadet, pulled David Denton from vehicle fire in upstate New York in 2025
A North Carolina man who helped his son – a player for the US army academy college football team – pull a wrecked car’s driver out of the vehicle moments before it burst into flames has earned the highest honor for civilian heroism in the United States and Canada.
Larry Pickett Sr earned the Carnegie medal for heroism for a daring rescue alongside his son, Larry Pickett Jr, on 31 August 2025 outside Fort Montgomery, New York, that was captured in headline-grabbing cellphone video, according to a recent announcement from the non-profit organization that administers the award.
The Trump administration announced it would stop publishing complaint narratives submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Every year, millions of complaints flow to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from people across the country. The complaints, which range in focus from debt collection to credit reporting to payday loans and more, long served as a window into Americans’ gripes and struggles with various companies.
For over a decade, consumers could opt in to have what they wrote published as public information in a CFPB database. But last month, the Trump administration announced that it would stop publishing those complaint narratives, a decision that aligns the agency with corporations that have critiqued the system for years.
“Publishing such narratives in the Database provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences,” the CFPB said in a press release.
In the big picture, the move is part of a trend of the administration taking a friendlier approach with businesses — even at the federal agency tasked with guarding consumers from unfair and deceptive practices.
The complaint system helps consumers get responses from companies about their problems, and sometimes even fixes. It has also given the public — as well as federal investigators and regulators— access to information that serves as a warning or to help spot problems.
As a ProPublica data reporter, I’ve used the complaints time and time again as a tool for accountability-driven reporting. I appreciated reading about people’s raw frustration, written in their own words, which can often point to larger trends. It was a rare federal dataset that captured human emotions. Some were grievances like being unable to get help after spending far too much time calling or emailing customer service. Sometimes complaints had more urgency: desperation to fix crushing high-interest debt, a frozen bank account or a credit score tanked from a reporting error.
With the recent loss of a crucial piece of the public database, I wanted to share with you some of ProPublica’s reporting using those complaints. And, while these stories about financial harm have often led to some accountability, revisiting the complaints also offers a taste of what we’ll be missing.
I’ve used the complaints to report on high-interest tribal loans that skirt state interest rate caps to charge 600% interest or more. CFPB complaints helped point me and my colleague Megan O’Matz to an opaque but massive lending operation based in Wisconsin, which we estimated to be involved in thousands of bankruptcies nationwide each year.
“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING.”
Consumer complaint about a tribal loan company, June 2023
The borrower also argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”
In emails to ProPublica, the tribe’s president, John Johnson Sr., defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services.” He added that many borrowers have had positive experiences.
A few months after ProPublica reported on the operation, the tribe settled a civil suit filed by Minnesota’s attorney general. The tribe denied the allegations but agreed to stop lending to Minnesotans and forgive outstanding loans to the state’s residents.
In March, I reported that two of the big three credit bureaus, Experian and TransUnion, provided relief to a substantially smaller portion of consumers last year. The credit bureaus are by far the most common subject of consumers’ woes in the database, with over 4 million complaints filed about them in 2025.
A Texan filed a complaint to each of the three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, writing that a fraudulent account remained on their credit report despite their disputes:
“I have an important deal that I need to complete that is important for the safety and survival of my family, and this issue has damaged my credit score.”
Consumer complaint, August 2025
In response to the story, four Democratic senators wrote letters to the credit bureaus demanding answers on how they handle disputes and complaints. The CFPB’s acting director at the time, Russell Vought, also tacitly acknowledged the reporting during his congressional testimony in July, saying that “with credit reporting agencies we saw things in the news that were concerning to us. We reached out to them.”
The credit bureaus did not comment on specific complaints, but told ProPublica that many complaints are illegitimate, including a large volume filed by credit repair organizations that charge customers to challenge negative information on their reports. (CFPB records show that Equifax provided relief in response to the Texan’s complaint, while TransUnion and Experian did not.)
Last month, my colleague Andy Kroll reported on the Trump CFPB’s light-touch approach to oversight, focusing on its ask-nicely strategy of holding the fintech startup Bilt accountable after it threw users’ accounts into chaos twice in quick succession. The story included complaints about how Bilt’s artificial intelligence support system gave information that was:
Consumer complaints about Bilt, March and April 2026
(In a statement at the time, Bilt said its new card had “attracted unexpectedly high demand, and some of our members experienced gaps in service that are simply unacceptable to us.” The company told ProPublica it resolved all problems related to the new cards “months ago.” The CFPB did not respond to any questions or requests for comment.)
Kroll’s recent story also examined how the agency has changed under the Trump administration. Under Vought’s leadership, the CFPB attempted to fire roughly 90% of its staff in April 2025 before a federal court ruling stymied the move. When the efforts to dismantle the agency failed, Vought and his allies instead refashioned it into an industry-friendly regulator.
The loss of the public complaint narratives is another example of that. And it is a win for groups such as the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents the credit bureaus and has argued that publishing complaint narratives would “harm the brands of legitimate, law-abiding companies” by presenting unverified, self-selected negative anecdotes. More recently, the group argued in a January public comment letter that the complaint portal has become “a sort of ‘Yelp for Financial Services,’” and that the CFPB doesn’t have the authority to publish complaint data in the first place.
Although the CFPB has been subject to partisan fights, the complaint system has been used by Americans across the country. GOP lawmakers even referred thousands of constituents to the CFPB’s complaint system to get help. Still, those same lawmakers voted last year to slash the agency’s budget by nearly half.
While the complaint system is required by law, the agency isn’t mandated to make it public. In theory, a future administration could go back to publishing the complaint narratives, but the agency has removed the option for consumers to consent to making public what they wrote. That means that any complaints filed in the near term cannot be retroactively published. The complaint narratives will still be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, but getting them could be time-consuming and challenging.
As the CFPB turns away from its watchdog role, it’s making it harder for all of us to watch as well.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — President Donald Trump said the federal government will begin referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” or “SI,” arguing during his United Nations General Assembly address Tuesday that the term “artificial” incorrectly suggests the technology is fake.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents” will use the new terminology, Trump said, while expressing hope other countries follow. Reuters confirmed the announcement and reported that Trump also reiterated his opposition to international efforts to regulate AI.
The terminology could create confusion because “superintelligence” already has a distinct meaning in the technology industry. It generally describes a hypothetical AI system whose capabilities surpass human intelligence across most or all fields, rather than artificial intelligence broadly. AP noted that Trump’s proposal came as world leaders offered sharply different assessments of AI’s potential benefits and risks.
Trump said the United States would reject what he called a global scheme for controlling the technology. His administration has generally favored limiting regulatory barriers while promoting American AI development and competition with China.
The announcement does not itself establish how or when federal agencies will alter existing regulations, websites or documents. Trump presented the change during a broader UN address covering Iran, Ukraine, international institutions and U.S. foreign policy.
NHS England initiative to reduce cut-off period to three months ‘disproportionately affecting’ most deprived areas
An NHS policy to remove “ghost patients” from GP lists is inadvertently leaving some of the poorest people in England without vital healthcare, analysis has found.
Under previous NHS rules, inactive patients at risk of being removed from their GP practice were given six months to respond to outreach. But under NHS England’s accelerated list validation timeline, introduced last October, patients now have only three months to reply.
PM aims to ‘stem poisonous tide’ of disinformation and deepfakes with National Centre for Information Defence
Security chiefs will set up a new national centre to tackle disinformation and deepfakes from hostile states such as Russia, Andy Burnham has announced, saying the government had a duty to “stem the poisonous tide” from damaging British interests.
The National Centre for Information Defence will “detect, attribute and disrupt” information attacks by foreign powers, many of which are enabled by AI, bringing together the intelligence agencies, law enforcement and social media companies.
Microsoft's security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the world, compromising business accounts "at scale" with automated attacks and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim's mailbox to help engineer better phishing messages.
To disrupt EvilTokens Microsoft worked with other organizations, including Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs to Health-ISAC (a non-profit helping health sector organizations share cyber threat information).
"Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model providers and the data holders all move at the same time," security company SpyCloud told The Hacker News.
From Microsoft's security blog:
Microsoft also notified affected customers, helped remediate compromised accounts, and shared intelligence to support further defensive and investigative action... Microsoft worked closely with specialist officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's cybercrime team, sharing intelligence that enabled officers to take operational action in the United Kingdom. On September 11, 2026, officers arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, and seized digital devices and other items for examination... While EvilTokens used AI to identify targets and prioritize fraud opportunities, Microsoft investigators used reverse engineering and AI-powered tools to analyze evidence, accelerate the investigation, and identify the infrastructure supporting the service...
Campaigns leveraging EvilTokens have impacted organizations in various industries, including wholesale distribution, construction, financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare, with the highest concentrations of observed victim activity in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Working with partners, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) facilitated a coordinated disruption of infrastructure used to operate the EvilTokens service.
Sometimes stolen tokens were used to give new devices access to a victim's inbox. (A code authenticating the new device was sent to the targeted user, who unknowingly authorize the threat actor's session and grants access to their account...) But "AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages," says another Microsoft blog post. "It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible."
The significance of EvilTokens extends beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of understanding how an organization works... Its AI tools could summarize and translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles, identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the organization's "money movers," locate vendor invoices, and determine the best people to impersonate. Sold through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription, EvilTokens combined account compromise, mailbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation in a single service. Capabilities that once required experience across identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering, and financial fraud were available through a ready-made interface.
Investigators found evidence that large portions of EvilTokens had been "vibe coded," with AI helping its creators build the platform itself. They also determined that EvilTokens drew on capabilities from multiple AI models. The result was more than a collection of attack tools. EvilTokens packaged much of the fraud process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards, and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation.
President Trump told the U.N. he's deciding whether to make a deal or drive Iran "into hell." Iran's president is slated to address the world body today, Iranian state media say.
In today’s newsletter: The PM’s first face‑to‑face with the US president marks a fragile reset
Good morning. In the early hours of Tuesday a plane carrying Andy Burnham, a handful of UK ministers, an excited group of British political journalists, and Burnham’s wife, Marie France, landed at a New York airport for one of Burnham’s first major outings as prime minister: a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump.
Considering the president once described Burnham as the mayor of “a town,” and the prime minister once said Trump wouldn’t be welcome in said town (Manchester), the meeting yesterday afternoon went remarkably well.
UN general assembly | Donald Trump has called on nations to unite to isolate Tehran and bring down global energy prices, as he gave a bellicose defence of his administration’s foreign policy and decision to strike Iran.
The far right | Charities have condemned footage of a far-right activist using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the Channel while a rescue worker was onboard, in a further escalation of organised anti-immigration protest.
UK news | Children as young as 13 in the UK have been referred to a specialist clinic for a “devastating” bladder condition linked to sustained use of ketamine.
West Bank | British banks and financial institutions are receiving warnings from MPs that they should not invest in Israel’s E1 settlement project.
UK politics | Andy Burnham has opened the door to fighting the next election on the UK rejoining the EU, but said his immediate priority was continuing to rebuild bridges with European allies.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — San Francisco is suing Trump Media & Technology Group, alleging its $100,000-per-month Truth Social data service creates an unfair trading advantage by allowing paying investors to receive President Donald Trump’s potentially market-moving posts before the general public.
City Attorney David Chiu filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court against Trump Media, which operates Truth Social. The complaint alleges the company’s “Truth API” violates California’s Unfair Competition Law and facilitates conduct that could violate federal insider-trading rules by monetizing advance access to government information.
Truth API, launched in August, offers financial firms rapid access to posts from Trump and other prominent accounts for up to $100,000 monthly, or about $60,000 per month under a multiyear agreement. In modern algorithmic trading, even a brief informational advantage can potentially be valuable.
The lawsuit cites Trump’s April 9, 2025, post saying, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!,” which appeared before he announced a 90-day tariff pause that was followed by a market rally. The complaint argues that paying firms could potentially trade on similar government announcements before ordinary investors see them.
Trump Media disputes the allegations and has characterized Truth API as a conventional financial-data product. A separate federal lawsuit filed by The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation also challenges the service, while 53 former federal prosecutors and agents recently argued in a court filing that the arrangement may violate federal law.
Fears persist about Trump ‘sucking up’ to Xi on Taiwan, but few concrete outcomes anticipated from US meeting
When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug, if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors.
The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers. But there was little by way of concrete outcomes: the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics.
U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now."
But then he added "hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually... amazing. But we have to be careful — in fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it's super intelligence."
TRUMP: In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI. SI. Let's see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon. Super intelligence.
Every major new technology brings challenges, and super intelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling not warming, and nobody was dead — these are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all. That robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster — same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine hoax. Climate change, open borders.
Whoever wins AI — you have to remember this — and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligent [sic] — wins. That's the group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way. We're going to keep it very — very straight and very strong. I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Many say, bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself.
And we will be very careful, and that's why we have a Department of Justice that we've already used it, having to do with this very subject, and used it very powerfully. Everything worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have to do that.
But we will only encourage super intelligence. We're gonna encourage it, not rein it in. We're gonna watch it closely, through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in Super Intelligence, and will continue to do so, safely and responsibly.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader
ArchieBunker for suggesting the story.
After very brief doorstep comments – almost exclusively mocking CNN - he answers a reporter’s very loud question by saying his message to Putin is: “settle the war.”
I bought two used Onewheels without any chargers. I knew they hadn't been used in a while, but was told that when they were used they worked fine.
I've bought several other used onewheels without an issue before. Usually, the initial charge drains fast showing some imbalance, but otherwise it works. This time, however, plugging them in with my charger produces no light or anything.
I've done some research, and while some people suggest trickle charging, or charging for a couple days, what I've come to believe is that the BMS is likely permanently blocking a charge.
The move comes after Jamaica’s culture minister Olivia Grange travelled to the UK earlier this month to lodge the historic petition
King Charles has referred a landmark slavery reparations petition from Jamaica to a high-level UK appeals court for legal advice, Jamaica’s culture minister announced in parliament on Tuesday.
Referring to the move as a “really big deal”, Olivia Grange told Jamaica’s MPs the monarch had confirmed that their legal questions have been passed on to the London-based privy council – the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds has removed several prominent references to President Donald Trump from his campaign website while shifting the page’s emphasis toward affordability, insurance costs and government transparency.
An archived version of Donalds’ website featured a banner reading “Chip in to Support Trump-Endorsed Byron Donalds” and repeatedly highlighted him as “TRUMP-ENDORSED.” The redesigned site still includes Trump’s endorsement, but places it alongside endorsements from Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz and House Speaker Mike Johnson rather than making it the central branding message.
The campaign also changed the order of its policy priorities. “Affordability” now appears first, replacing “Enact the Trump Agenda” as the top issue. A Donalds campaign spokesperson told The Hill that the website reflects his focus on “the issues that matter most to Floridians,” including affordability, insurance costs and government transparency.
The spokesperson emphasized that Donalds remains “proud to have President Trump’s endorsement” and said the endorsement remains prominently featured.
The changes come during the general election campaign against Democrat David Jolly, a former Republican congressman. Donalds secured Trump’s endorsement early in the governor’s race and has remained a close political ally of the president.
Trump’s approval has declined in several recent national surveys, while economic concerns, including higher fuel and household costs, have become increasingly prominent in Republican campaigns. The website revisions themselves do not establish why the campaign reduced Trump’s prominence.
Cuban delegates left the room during the US president's speech to the UN general assembly, where he called Cuba 'a failed state' and said the country 'will fall'. The US has maintained a trade embargo on Cuba for more than 60 years, and Trump's administration has stepped up pressure on the communist-controlled island nation.
Sources tell CBS News that Ukraine is ready to sign a landmark drone defense deal with the U.S., as new details of Ukrainian technology helping defend U.S. bases in the Middle East come to light.
Islamic State-inspired bombings of churches and hotels in 2019 was one of the country’s worst ever attacks
A court in Sri Lanka has convicted 15 men on terrorist charges for their involvement in the deadly 2019 Easter bombings and sentenced them each to at least 220 years in prison.
The terror attacks, which targeted luxury hotels and churches as they held Easter services, left 267 people dead and wounded almost 600. The bombings, which were inspired by Islamic State (IS), were among the deadliest terror attacks in Sri Lanka’s history and sent shockwaves through the country.
sorry for the multitude of posts im making on this subreddit :-; But what are the main differences i would notice between the pintxv and a floatwheel atom? i hear the range and speed of both of them are very similar. i currently own a pintx and really want just a little bit more speed and range. I know i can get speed and torque with the pintv kit, how can i increase the range? is there any battery upgrade? I was thinking of getting the atom but now that i look at it, they seem to be very similar..
DETROIT, Michigan — Former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke White House access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, calling the move “absolutely abhorrent” and saying it shows “the man is afraid.”
Harris made the remarks Tuesday after appearing in Michigan with Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. She argued that restricting journalists limits the public’s ability to learn what the government is doing. Her comments came as the three affected news organizations challenge the administration’s action in federal court.
Trump announced the bans Friday, accusing the outlets of publishing false information. Reporters from all three organizations were subsequently denied entry to White House grounds, and CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed suit alleging violations of their First and Fifth Amendment rights.
Reuters reported that legal experts see significant obstacles for the administration because previous court decisions have limited the government’s ability to revoke press access in retaliation for unfavorable coverage. Trump said Tuesday he would “probably” restore access if a court rules against him.
Harris was in Michigan campaigning for El-Sayed and participating in an event focused on Black maternal health.
Breakthrough removes a major bottleneck in fault-tolerant quantum computing, enabling real-time error correction across millions of operations without slowing down execution time.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 22, 2026 — IonQ today announced a major milestone in fault-tolerant quantum computing. Researchers demonstrated the development and successful testing of the industry’s first end-to-end real-time quantum error correction decoder that runs on a single standard off-the-shelf central processing unit (CPU).
Quantum error correction is essential for building practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers because physical qubits are inherently sensitive to environmental noise. However, finding and fixing those errors in real time has historically presented a significant computing challenge. In conventional approaches, the classical computers tasked with decoding errors can easily become overwhelmed. That creates a processing bottleneck that forces the quantum computer to pause and wait. IonQ’s breakthrough demonstrates that a single, standard computer processor can manage this complex workload continuously in the background, keeping the quantum system running at full speed.
“Successfully validating real-time decoding across hundreds of logical qubits and over millions of logical operations is an important milestone. Moreover, the fact that our decoder runs on a single CPU provides a practical path to commercial-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Nicolas Delfosse, paper co-author and quantum research lead at IonQ.
In technical research published on arXiv, IonQ evaluated its dual-decoder architecture across complex benchmark circuits simulating up to 408 logical qubits across 88 memory blocks and magic factories. These circuits were executing more than 31.5 million individual quantum operations at the ‘MegaQuOp’ scale. Under standard operational noise, IonQ’s decoder introduced as little as 0.02% ‘stretch’ time. That means the decoding overhead added virtually no delay to the overall quantum computation.
“IonQ is enabling cost-effective quantum system scaling through direct verification of each component,” said John Gamble, Vice President at IonQ Architecture. “Empirical evidence like this supports our vision for fault tolerance where time-to-solution, cost-to-solution, and energy-to-solution are always our North Star.”
This achievement validates a core pillar of IonQ’s proprietary Walking Cat architecture and confirms that classical hardware overhead does not need to scale exponentially as quantum systems grow wider in logical qubits or deeper in operations. The breakthrough establishes a key technological foundation for IonQ’s roadmap beyond 256 physical qubits toward industrial-scale platforms controlling thousands of qubits.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions 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.
The Justice Department says a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier in Utah threw out more than 300 mail ballots that were being sent to voters for the state's June primary.
A new AI camera system is now being installed on buses used by Helena Public Schools, with district officials saying the technology is focused on driver behavior and not students.
IPPR North says one bad decision could derail devolution agenda as regions gain control of billions in funding
England’s mayors should face much greater official scrutiny to avoid Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda being “derailed by one bad decision”, a thinktank has said.
Ministers will set out plans next month to give regional leaders control over potentially billions of pounds of additional funding under a “transformational” shift of power outside Whitehall.
Wirral mother among renters turning to food banks as gap between a two-bed and housing benefit hits £158 a month – rising to as much as £324 in London
Do you prioritise paying the rent, putting food on the table or keeping the house warm in winter? In practice, says Laura Braddock, a single mum from Wirral, Merseyside, you always pay the rent first and improvise the rest. “If I’ve got a roof over our head, then everything else I can muddle through.”
The pressing problem for Braddock, 39, is that muddling through is getting harder. The monthly rent for her two-bedroom flat far outstrips the local housing allowance (LHA) she receives – and the gap may widen.
(The Center Square) – A Massachusetts federal judge blocked the Trump administration from cutting around $600 million in teacher-training funds, finding the Education Department’s effort to target programs tied to diversity, equity and inclusion was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Surrogate who rejected abortion request had asked justices to halt court order recognizing LA couple as legal parents
The supreme court has refused to get involved with a custody dispute between an Alaska surrogate and a California couple whose child was born with a rare and serious heart defect.
On Tuesday, Justice Elena Kagan denied an emergency request from McKenna West, an Alaska nurse and surrogate who had asked the US’s highest court to halt a California court order recognizing the couple, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, as the boy’s legal parents.
Test using urine and vaginal fluid samples raises hopes thousands of lower-risk women could be spared internal ultrasounds and hysteroscopies
Doctors have developed a simple test that could help rule out womb cancer in women who experience bleeding after menopause.
The approach has the potential to transform care for thousands of women each year and spare them from invasive and uncomfortable tests that can also be costly for healthcare systems.
County’s first such clinic, at Alder Hey in Liverpool, treating children suffering from chronic bladder problems with severe cases needing dialysis
Children as young as 13 in the UK have been referred to a specialist clinic for a “devastating” bladder condition linked to sustained use of ketamine.
Medics at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool opened the first ketamine clinic in the UK for young people amid a surge in urology problems linked to addiction of the drug.
Thomas called followers to disrupt arrival of asylum seekers in Gosport, but Border Force instead transported them to Dover
Charities have condemned footage of far-right activist Daniel Thomas using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the Channel while a rescue worker was onboard, in a further escalation of organised anti-immigration protest.
Hundreds of protesters gathered early on Tuesday evening at Gosport in Hampshire, aiming to disrupt the planned disembarkation of asylum seekers, but the Border Force vessels carrying them landed instead in Dover.
Mita and Hemant Parikh decided to split from their group and take a side trip during their long-planned pilgrimage. They're now safely back home, but none of the families they were traveling with have been found.
Former VP, who lost state to Trump in 2024 elections, is lending her popularity to unite fractured party
Kamala Harris returned to Michigan on Tuesday to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed, lending her popularity among Black voters to a progressive Senate nominee still working to unite a party fractured by a bruising primary – and the former vice-president’s loss to Donald Trump in the state.
Appearing with El-Sayed at a Detroit birth center, Harris used a roundtable on Black maternal health to frame that November’s contest against the Republican Mike Rogers as a fight over women’s access to care.
Lawyers for James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, wanted over alleged support for Hamas, say client is being persecuted
The Spanish government has decided to allow the Trump administration’s controversial extradition request to extradite wealthy activist James “Fergie” Chambers to continue in the country’s courts.
Chambers, a US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects, is currently imprisoned in Madrid. It is the first known case of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, an accusation tied to money Chambers has donated to support Palestinians, including the Sameer Project, in Gaza.
President Donald Trump used his Sept. 22 speech to the United Nations General Assembly to dismiss concerns about artificial intelligence, equating them to other issues he considers “hoaxes.”
“The very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead,” he said. “These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change, open borders.”
Trump also equated AI fears to a “hoax” in recent TruthSocialposts.
Warnings that AI could wipe out humanity or do significant harm gained renewed attention after Jacob Coxon, a researcher from leading AI company Anthropic, resigned in September, publicly citing such an existential threat.
A White House spokesperson told PolitiFact in an email that Trump was referring to “the numerous Democrats who are currently echoing AI hysteria and were or still actively are pushing hysteria related to climate change and the Russia collusion hoax.”
Although some AI regulation advocates may overlap with those concerned about climate change, worries about AI are not confined to one group of people or one political party. The warnings even come from the top of the industry itself.
On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling to slow down AI development. OpenAI CEOSam Altman, Google DeepMind Cofounder and ChairDemis Hassabis and xAI founderElon Musk echoed his concerns — and agreement among those leaders is rare.
Robin Jacobson, a University of Puget Sound politics professor, said AI safety is an issue not currently owned by either political party, and the movement is comprised of “strange bedfellows.”
“The public, across parties, has real growing concerns with AI,” Jacobson said. “So I think, in fact, you’re going to see, as opposed to climate change — where this was about convincing the public there was this looming threat — I think the public is actually demanding action on concerns.”
Scientists widely agree that climate change is real, is driven by human activities and is causing the Earth’s temperature to warm. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 pinpointed 2030 as a benchmark for dealing with climate change, but it didn’t say humans would all die in 12 years.
What Trump referred to as the “Russia hoax” is the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Democrats publicized and attacked Trump over the investigation, but it continued under Trump and his deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller special counsel, so the scrutiny didn’t come only from Democrats.
Trump described his first impeachment in 2019, for attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election, as a “hoax.”
Other than elected Democrats who supported the investigations and are now calling for AI safety, there isn’t a coordinated group that was behind both the investigations and AI safety warnings.
Recent events caused growing alarm from both sides of the political aisle
Recent warnings from researchers about losing control of AI come as companies have had their AI systems take action without human authorization. Researchers say incidents such as OpenAI’s agents attacking the company Hugging Face show that autonomous AI agents can take harmful actions that aren’t the intended task, a problem called “misalignment.”
Researchers have warned that AI systems are advancing faster than their creators’ ability to reliably understand their behavior and contain them.
Lawmakers from both parties have announced or introduced legislation to regulate AI, including some that address advanced AI that could cause widespread harm. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, announced legislation to ban artificial superintelligence. “Superintelligence” is generally understood by industry experts as an AI system that is far ahead of human intelligence at nearly all cognitive tasks, including scientific research and communications.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, introduced the “AI Kill Switch Act,” which would require AI companies to have mechanisms to shut down AI systems that can “cause catastrophic harm.”
Some conservative lawmakers have been outspoken in warning against AI.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., launched an investigation in September into AI’s existential risk. In a letter to Altman, he cited concerns of AI killing all humans in the near future.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said on Fox News that there should be a kill switch to “protect humanity.”
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has called for regulating AI, even joining Sanders in a “pro-human” gathering on AI.
On the political left, the AI fears are not universal. The New York City Democratic Socialists of America chapter dismissed warnings of AI catastrophe as “AI alarmism and AI hype,” Wired reported.
Among Americans, those who believe there’s at least a “moderate risk” of AI destroying humanity covered majorities of both political parties, according to a September Politico poll. Among those polled who voted for Democratic candidate former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, 70% believe there is a risk of AI destroying humanity, compared with 61% of those who voted for Trump.
Daniel Schiff, who co-directs Purdue University’s Governance and Responsible AI lab, said AI policy in general doesn’t fall cleanly along partisan lines. Issues such as data centers, privacy concerns, global competition and job displacement activate different groups of voters across parties.
“It’s fair to say the parties have not really crystallized, even if there are some prominent figures who are taking stronger stances recently,” Schiff said.
There is some overlap between climate change and AI safety advocates, including among a loose movement called effective altruism, which is focused on finding the best ways to help the most people.
People in that movement have long considered both climate change and artificial intelligence risks to be serious problems. But it’s not the only group concerned about loss of control of AI.
Our ruling
Trump said the people who warned of climate change, the “Russia hoax” and the “Ukraine hoax” are the same people “now saying that AI is going to kill us all.”
While advocates for AI regulation and safety have some overlap with climate activists and Democrats who participated in those investigations, they are not confined to a singular group. Politicians from both parties have spoken out or announced legislation based on concerns about the capabilities of advanced AI.
On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, "once the dominant choice among students... is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share." It's a small survey, but "The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional 'learn to code' pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points.
"The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better."
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering...
[B]roader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like. [Undergraduate enrollment in CS programs at four-year institutions fell 8.1%, to approximately 606,000 students.]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hunter Biden said Tuesday that he is willing to testify before Congress alongside Donald Trump Jr. after Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah called for subpoenas examining both presidential sons’ foreign relationships, business dealings and gifts.
“Sen. Curtis of Utah has suggested that Don Jr. and I should testify before Congress,” Biden wrote on X. “I say bring it on.” He added that he has already provided more than seven hours of sworn testimony and said he would “sit next to Don Jr. and testify any time, any place.”
Curtis asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate whether either man benefited financially from access tied to their fathers. CBS News reported that Curtis specifically requested subpoenas covering business dealings, relationships with foreign individuals or entities and gifts received.
The request followed ProPublica reporting that Russian boxing official Umar Kremlev, who has ties to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on post-wedding celebrations for Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump in the Bahamas. President Donald Trump has said his son intends to reimburse Kremlev.
Hunter Biden maintained Tuesday that he had no foreign business dealings while his father was president. Curtis has argued that congressional scrutiny should be applied consistently to both presidential families.
(The Center Square) – In a letter released early Tuesday, Republican legislators called for California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate the High-Speed Rail Authority over allegations of improper authorizations of travel expenditures for contractors.
Carnival spokesperson confirms onboard cameras captured male passenger going overboard on way from Mexico
A 56-year-old man is missing after he reportedly jumped off a Carnival cruise ship on Saturday.
A Carnival spokesperson confirmed in a statement that cameras on the ship captured a male passenger going overboard the Panorama, according to several news reports.
US officials have begun to buy back wind leases as president seeks to block renewables in favor of fossil fuels
Democratic attorneys general from California and New York have sued the Trump administration over its plans to buy back offshore wind leases as Donald Trump seeks to discourage the expansion of wind energy in favor of fossil fuels.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said he was suing over removal of a project off his state’s coast planned by Chicago-based Invenergy. The Trump administration said in June it was buying back the company’s US offshore wind leases for four wind projects on the east and west coasts.
Gone was any shred of US idealism. It was a spectacle of raw power – a power that is likely to only diminish in the years ahead
Expectations were low for Donald Trump’s address to the UN on Tuesday, and yet somehow it was even worse than expected. He does not perform well in formal settings, like chambers of government, preferring a blingier room, like Mar-a-Lago, or an outdoor rally. For years, he has made no secret of his hostility to the UN, and the very principles of international order that define it.
In recent years, that hostility has deepened into something more like a full-on assault, with frequent attacks on the international criminal court (perhaps out of fear that he will someday be indicted), on the UN’s climate agenda, and on Unesco (which the US decided to withdraw from in July 2025).
Amid major overhaul by Bari Weiss, Sunday’s episode draws third-smallest audience for second episode in past 25 years
60 Minutes’ blockbuster interview with Patrick Clancy, the ex-husband of Lindsay Clancy, failed to provide a major ratings boost for the Sunday show, according to audience figures released on Tuesday.
Sunday night’s episode of the newsmagazine show drew an average of 6.77 million total viewers, the third-smallest audience in the past 25 years for the second episode of a season, adding to a disappointing debut for Bari Weiss, who, as CBS editor-in-chief, rewired the show, firing several high-profile correspondents in the run-up to the new season.
Senior Iranian official indicates willingness to reopen strait of Hormuz if US takes steps to ease pressure on Tehran
Iranian officials held three hours of talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Donald Trump disclosed on Tuesday.
He said there would a further meeting in the very near future.
(The Center Square) – The Second Amendment Foundation has called California's Senate Bill 704 — the nation's first background check law for firearm barrel purchases - unconstitutional.
McKenna West gave birth to a child with a serious heart defect against the wishes of the biological parents. She has been fighting for a say in the baby’s care.
(The Center Square) - Legal analysts say the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in an upcoming case on gun rights will have vast implications for Second Amendment protections across the U.S.
The U.S. toll of the Iran war continues to climb as the military stumbles toward a breakdown and the Trump administration struggles to find an exit ramp.
Another U.S. soldier died this month, according to newly released Pentagon statistics that classify the death as “non-hostile.” A female soldier was on a military flight headed to Saudi Arabia when she suffered an undisclosed “medical incident,” a defense official told The Intercept. Another 66 U.S. personnel have also been wounded in action just this month, according to that official. This has pushed the official count of war casualties above 850. Almost half the total — 419 wounded or dead — have occurred since Iran stepped up attacks in early July.
Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, the War Department has posted the official count of military casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. Casualties were initially tallied under Operation Epic Fury. Since July 7, they are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.”
Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is, for example, missing 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 while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”
Three U.S. contractors based in the region have also died during the conflict, according to an official who spoke with the Washington Post.
For months, The Intercept has found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.
A U.S. government official previously told The Intercept that scores of casualties added to DCAS last month was “an accounting trick” designed to dampen depressing statistics. That official accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing attacks on U.S. bases in July that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks. Official statistics now show that the Pentagon admits that 352 personnel were wounded or killed in July and none died or were injured in August.
DCAS counts 11 hostile deaths in 2026, all resulting from the Iran war. This is the highest total of military personnel killed in action since 2021. Including non-hostile deaths, DCAS counts 19 dead due to the Iran war, but fails to count Davius. Also missing is Sgt. Devin Seibel who died in Irbil, Iraq, on May 31 in a training accident, according to a military press release.
More than 580 military personnel have died this year, across the world, according to Pentagon statistics. The War Department lists 114 as accidental and 14 as homicides. As of September 21, there are also eight personnel whose deaths are listed as “undetermined.”
The female soldier who died this month has yet to be identified but was over 35 years old, according to DCAS information.
Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to repeated requests for comment or clarification for this article.
(The Center Square) – With the November midterm elections only six weeks away, the Trump administration is already implementing ballot security and fraud prevention measures, Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told the media Tuesday.
The park is the most highly visited and strong winds make trash problem worse, with gusts blowing away items
Hold on to your hats – Yellowstone national park staffers have removed a record-setting 20,100 pieces of trash from hydrothermal areas around the geyser-filled park so far this year
The most commonly found items include 280 hats, 54 camera lens caps, 47 hair ties, 42 pencils, 36 pairs of sunglasses, 20 hotel key cards and 17 baby pacifiers.
(The Center Square) – No one in Washington will say what establishing two new U.S. defense areas in Greenland will cost U.S. taxpayers or when Congress will be asked to pay.
(The Center Square) – Nearly two years to the day remnants of Hurricane Helene brought arguably the worst natural disaster in North Carolina history, the Atlantic hurricane season was yet to have its first through Monday – snapping a 112-year-old…
The court drew a distinction between receiving a ballot and being legally entitled to cast it. Today, permanent absentee voting procedures rely in part on voters reporting changes and affirming that they remain eligible. Hocker and Washington argued the checks are insufficient. The court said the Constitution leaves the choice of election safeguards to the General Assembly.
Justices say voters must qualify for each election; challengers question how the state checks whether they still do
DOVER, Del. — The Delaware Supreme Court upheld the state’s permanent absentee voting law Monday, clearing the way for qualified voters on the permanent absentee list to receive ballots for the Nov. 3 general election. The ruling leaves lawmakers with a policy question: How much should election officials do to verify that a voter’s reason for voting absentee still applies?
In a unanimous decision, the justices said the law does not expand absentee voting beyond the categories allowed by the Delaware Constitution. Permanent absentee status allows a voter to receive a ballot automatically, but it does not allow someone whose circumstances have changed to cast that ballot, the court said.
Why the law was challenged
State Sen. Gerald Hocker and fellow Senate candidate Steven Washington argued that a voter who qualified for one election could continue receiving ballots years later without election officials adequately confirming that the original reason still applied.
The Constitution permits absentee voting when a registered voter cannot appear at a polling place for a specified reason, including illness, physical disability, certain work or public service obligations, vacation or religious observance. The permanent absentee law applies to a narrower group, including voters with qualifying illnesses or disabilities, military service obligations or jobs that require constant care for a relative.
Must voters qualify again?
Hocker and Washington focused on the Constitution’s language about a voter’s inability to appear at a particular election. An illness can end, a caregiving responsibility can change and public service can conclude. They argued that automatically sending another ballot places too much weight on an earlier application and on the voter’s willingness to report a change.
The justices agreed that a voter must qualify to vote absentee in each election. They rejected the argument that the Constitution requires the state to recertify each permanent absentee voter before every election.
How the state checks eligibility
The court drew a distinction between receiving a ballot and being legally entitled to cast it. The law requires permanent absentee voters to report changes affecting their eligibility. The Department of Elections sends reminders before election cycles, removes voters from the permanent absentee list in specified circumstances and requires voters to affirm their eligibility when returning each ballot.
Those procedures rely in part on voters reporting changes and affirming that they remain eligible. Hocker and Washington argued the checks are insufficient. The court said the Constitution leaves the choice of election safeguards to the General Assembly.
The challengers sought to invalidate the law in all its applications. To prevail, they had to show it could not operate constitutionally. Imperfect procedures do not meet that standard when eligible voters can use the law, the justices said.
What the ruling means for voters
Voting rights advocates emphasized the law’s value to people whose qualifying circumstances persist. In a statement after the ruling, the Delaware Voting Rights Coalition said permanent absentee voting helps eligible voters with disabilities, illnesses, caregiving duties and other qualifying obligations participate without submitting a new application for every election.
The ruling differs from the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down Delaware’s no-excuse vote-by-mail law. That law allowed people outside the Constitution’s absentee voting categories to vote by mail. The permanent absentee law, the justices found, serves only a subset of voters within those categories.
A Superior Court judge ruled against permanent absentee voting in 2024, but the Supreme Court vacated that decision because the plaintiffs lacked standing. Monday’s decision reached the constitutional issue and upheld the law. The Department of Elections says it is sending permanent absentee voters their general election ballots.
TO GO
Who: Delaware voters who qualify for permanent absentee voting.
What: Voters already on the permanent absentee list will automatically receive a ballot for the Nov. 3 general election. They must still qualify to vote absentee when they cast it.
Check your status: Visit iVote.de.gov. “Indefinite” means you are on the permanent absentee list.
Request a ballot: Eligible voters can apply through iVote.de.gov or contact their county elections office.
Deadline: Completed absentee ballots must reach the county elections office by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
President made more than 440 purchases and 700 sales despite voter anger over elected officials trading stocks
Donald Trump made more than a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July, according to a Guardian analysis of his latest financial disclosure released Tuesday.
His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, sold from $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.
Six-year-old Lian Yunzhi broke the women’s 3x3 average world record twice at two World Cube Association-certified competitions in Wuhan and Guangzhou, according to state broadcaster CCTV on Monday. She posted averages of 4.52 and 4.27 seconds, after solving the Rubik’s Cube five times. She is the first female speedcuber to average less than 4.5 seconds.
Another prominent Florida Republican has publicly distanced himself from Donald Trump, days after María Elvira Salazar called out the US president’s immigration-enforcement policy targeting law-abiding undocumented immigrants.
Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor in November’s US midterm elections, launched an updated campaign website on Tuesday that was stripped of almost every mention of Trump and removed a photograph of the congressman and his wife, Erika, posing with the president, the Miami Herald reported.
The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan delivery driver was not wearing a body camera at the time of the shooting, sources familiar with the investigation told CBS News.
New AI PODs at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Sacramento State Expand Shared Capacity for Research and Education
WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2026 — Internet2 is expanding its contributions to the National Research Platform (NRP) through its strategic relationship with Cisco, supporting the deployment of new Cisco AI PODs at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Sacramento State. The AI PODs add GPU capacity that researchers across the platform can burst into when local resources run short.
Credit: Internet2
As artificial intelligence transforms research, the NRP continues to grow the shared, AI-ready computing capacity being used by thousands of researchers and students across the country. Internet2 is now adding to that pool in a new way.
Cisco AI PODs introduce a more standardized approach to expanding the NRP’s distributed infrastructure. They provide pre-validated compute, networking, and management capabilities that can be deployed as a unit, reducing the engineering and integration work required to add new resources to the platform. That creates a repeatable model for Internet2 and other NRP contributors as demand for AI computing continues to grow.
Pooling Capacity Instead of Centralizing It
As AI-enabled discovery reaches every discipline, research computing has grown significantly more complex. Cyberinfrastructure gaps between institutions are a growing concern, and budget pressures mean many institutions are being asked to do more with less.
That’s why a shared model can help bridge the access gap.
Supported by the National Science Foundation and over 70 participating organizations, the NRP is a community-operated platform that pools computing, storage, performance measurement, and AI resources across the U.S. It enables organizations to contribute while giving researchers access to capabilities beyond what they have locally.
Rather than building one centralized supercomputer, the NRP scales by aggregating GPU and CPU capacity contributed by institutions into a single Kubernetes-based fabric called Nautilus. But that model creates a recurring hurdle for contributing organizations: standing up GPU nodes that are compatible enough in compute, networking, and management to slot cleanly into a shared, multi-region cluster.
Cisco AI PODs can address that hurdle. Each AI POD is pre-validated, full-stack, modular AI infrastructure based on Cisco Validated Designs. It pairs Cisco UCS servers and GPU nodes with Nexus high-bandwidth, low-latency networking and Cisco Intersight for centralized management. Instead of hand-assembling compute, storage, and networking from scratch, an institution contributing to the NRP can deploy a right-sized AI POD. Ultimately, this reduces the integration risk and setup time for each new node joining the platform.
“Today, these two new AI PODs provide researchers access to additional GPU capacity when local resources aren’t enough,” said James Deaton, vice president of Network Services and Research Engagement at Internet2. “Internet2’s role was to connect the pieces: an NRP need, a Cisco solution, and two campuses ready to host it. Strategic relationships with industry are one way we reinvest resources in the whole research and education community.”
About the AI PODs
Combined across both sites, the AI PODs provide:
8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs with 1.1 TB of combined GPU memory
128 CPU cores
2 TB of system memory
90 TB of NVMe flash for staging data
At each site, the AI POD includes:
A single Cisco UCS C845A M8 server chassis, with its GPUs interconnected over NVLink so jobs can address all four as a shared pool of GPU memory.
An NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU providing up to 2×200 Gbps connectivity from each AI POD to campus and national R&E networks.
Continuing to Invest in Shared Research Infrastructure
Internet2’s contributions to the NRP continue to expand R&E access to shared computational resources across the U.S. A distributed platform requires more than GPUs, as data has to reach the compute, and paths between nodes have to be measurable. The Internet2 national network supports both.
Internet2 operates dedicated Open Science Data Federation nodes in Boise, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Kansas City. Connected through the national network, these caches function to keep datasets closer to the compute resources and the researchers using them.
In addition, 41 performance assurance service nodes on the network currently serve a hybrid NRP function. Alongside thousands of perfSONAR instances deployed worldwide, they provide the NRP with measurement points across Internet2’s footprint, supporting cross-domain performance monitoring and troubleshooting between sites. Additionally, the nodes contribute 1,200 CPU cores, 6.4 terabytes of memory, and 80 terabytes of storage capacity.
Creating Value Through Industry Collaboration
Deploying the AI PODs to support the NRP is another example of how Internet2 creates community value through strategic relationships with its industry members. Internet2’s industry relationship with Cisco helped direct resources to the NRP, supporting two campus deployments and validating a repeatable approach other contributors can use.
As AI reshapes research cyberinfrastructure requirements, the expertise and strategic relationships Internet2 builds to meet them will continue to benefit the broader R&E community.
About Internet2
Internet2 is a nonprofit, member-driven advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 serves 352 U.S. universities, 57 government agencies, 46 regional and state education networks and through them supports more than 80,000 community anchor institutions, over 1,000 InCommon participants, 61 leading corporations working with our community, and 70 national research and education network operators that represent more than 100 countries.
Internet2 delivers a diverse portfolio of technology solutions that leverages, integrates, and amplifies the strengths of its members and helps support their educational, research, and community service missions. Internet2’s core infrastructure components include the nation’s largest and fastest research and education network that was built to deliver advanced, customized services that are accessed and secured by the community-developed trust and identity framework. For more information: https://internet2.edu
US president calls UK prime minister ‘a natural businessperson’ as leaders meet at UN assembly in New York
Donald Trump has asserted his relationship with the UK is “more up” with Andy Burnham than under Keir Starmer despite tensions between the two countries on a range of thorny issues including regulation of artificial intelligence, the Chagos Islands and the war in Iran.
At their first face-to-face meeting, the US president praised Burnham, who sat nervously alongside him, as a “natural businessperson”, saying he thought he had “lots of assets on his side” and would be a “great” prime minister.
But industry trade group says plan would backfire and lead to even higher prices for gasoline
Donald Trump on Tuesday said he backed the idea of a ban on diesel exports, which some US politicians are calling for as a way to curb the soaring cost of energy.
Diesel prices have rallied in Europe and the US to record highs as wars in Iran and Ukraine sharply cut exports from some of the biggest producers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A gallon of diesel fuel in the US was $6.53 on Tuesday, the highest average on record and more than 75% higher than a year ago.
SAXONBURG, Pa., Sept. 22, 2026 — Coherent Corp. has announced PhotonLink, an integrated optics platform that brings together Coherent’s broad portfolio of critical photonics technologies, precision assembly and test capabilities to deliver complete optical solutions for next-generation AI data centers. The platform supports co-packaged optics (CPO), near-packaged optics (NPO) and emerging chip to chip connectivity.
As AI systems continue to scale, demand for higher bandwidth and lower power is driving optical connectivity closer to compute and switching silicon. These architectures require lasers, silicon photonics, precision optics, fibers and detectors to work together. PhotonLink brings those technologies and the expertise to integrate them into one platform.
“The next leap in AI requires more than faster chips – it requires a new way to connect them,” said Jim Anderson, Chief Executive Officer at Coherent. “Customers need complete optical solutions, not just individual components. Coherent is uniquely positioned to bring together the critical technologies, integrate and test the finished assemblies, and manufacture them at scale. PhotonLink puts that capability to work for the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
Coherent’s vertical integration spans compound semiconductor materials, lasers, optics and specialty fiber through final assembly and test. PhotonLink gives customers access to both individual components and complete optical assemblies from one partner, helping simplify system design, streamline qualification and reduce the complexity of integrating technologies from multiple suppliers.
From Critical Technologies to Complete Optical Assemblies
The PhotonLink platform spans four functions of the optical path: Generate, Shape, Guide and Receive. The portfolio includes indium phosphide (InP) lasers, vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays, silicon photonics, isolators, specialty fibers, micro-optics and detectors. Coherent integrates these technologies into external laser sources, precision fiber assemblies and optical modules tailored to customer architectures.
Customer Engagement and Manufacturing Scale
Coherent has more than ten CPO customer engagements and more than ten NPO engagements, with anchor customers and long-term agreements secured for both architectures. The company also has more than five engagements in emerging chip to chip connectivity. Revenue from the PhotonLink platform is expected to begin ramping in Q4 of CY2026.
PhotonLink builds on Coherent’s established datacenter manufacturing base, which has shipped more than 300 million InP lasers and more than one billion InP and gallium arsenide (GaAs) photodetectors. Coherent is expanding its 6” InP and specialty fiber manufacturing capacity to support the PhotonLink ramp.
Coherent is the global photonics leader. We harness photons to drive innovation. Industry leaders in the datacenter, communications, and industrial markets rely on Coherent’s world-leading technology to fuel their own innovation and growth. Founded in 1971 and operating in more than 20 countries, Coherent brings the industry’s broadest, deepest technology stack; unmatched supply chain resilience; and global scale to help its customers solve their toughest technology challenges. For more information, visit coherent.com.
Ella Langley’s record-breaking song has spent 23 weeks at the top, surpassing Mariah Carey’s holiday anthem
Ella Langley’s hit song Choosin’ Texas has made Billboard Hot 100 history, spending 23 weeks on the chart and breaking the record for the longest-running No 1 song in the chart’s 68-year old history.
The track, which was released last October as the lead single on the 27-year-old singer and songwriter’s album Dandelion, has surpassed Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You, which topped the charts for 22 weeks.
Thursday’s gathering will show how food, conservation and education come together at Coverdale Farm Preserve. Online ticket registration is closed.
GREENVILLE, Del. — The setting for Thursday’s dinner is also its purpose. At A Taste of Coverdale, guests will eat locally grown food at a working farm where Delaware Nature Society demonstrates how food production and care for the land can go together.
The Sept. 24 event runs from 4:30 to 8 p.m. at Coverdale Farm Preserve. Optional guided nature strolls begin at 4:30 p.m., followed by a cocktail hour at 5 and dinner at 6. A silent auction will include items from local vendors and experiences led by Delaware Nature Society experts. Proceeds will support conservation and education programs at Coverdale. Online ticket registration is closed.
A working farm and a nature preserve
Coverdale’s 377 acres include a 177-acre working farm and 200 acres managed as a nature preserve. Delaware Nature Society uses the property to show how farming practices can support healthy soil and wildlife habitat while producing food for the community. Visitors can walk the farm trail, see animals and shop for seasonal produce at the market.
That makes the dinner more than an evening outdoors. The food, guided walks and views give guests a chance to see the connection between the farm’s harvest and the landscape Delaware Nature Society works to protect.
Delaware Nature Society connects people with nature!
Founded in 1964, Delaware Nature Society describes its mission as connecting people and nature to create a healthy environment for all through education, conservation and advocacy. Coverdale is one place where those three parts of its work come together.
Its education programs bring children and adults outside to learn through experience. Preschoolers explore nature through stories and play; school groups visit forests, wetlands, streams and farms; and adults can join guided walks and other programs. In Wilmington, the organization’s RENEW initiative connects young people with outdoor learning, water quality projects, habitat care and opportunities to build leadership skills.
Its conservation work extends beyond Coverdale. Delaware Nature Society says it manages nearly 2,000 acres for ecosystem health and biodiversity, including efforts to restore forests and meadows, control invasive plants and protect habitat for birds and pollinators. At Coverdale, it applies those principles to both the preserve and the working farm.
The organization also advocates for environmental policies. It describes its approach as nonpartisan and science-based, with priorities that include protecting open space and natural areas and improving water quality. It works to help residents understand those issues and take part in decisions affecting their communities.
A fall tradition with a purpose
This year’s dinner is part of Delaware Nature Society’s 50th anniversary celebration of the Harvest Moon Festival. The organization has spread the celebration across four fall events and calls A Taste of Coverdale its premier annual fundraiser. The money raised helps sustain the places and programs that visitors encounter throughout the year.
Community members who are not attending Thursday’s dinner can still experience Coverdale. The farm is open for regular visits Fridays through Sundays through November. Admission is free, and donations are welcome.
To Go Box
Who: Delaware Nature Society hosts A Taste of Coverdale.
What: A farm dinner with optional guided nature strolls and a silent auction. Online ticket registration is closed.
When: Thursday, Sept. 24, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. Strolls begin at 4:30 p.m.; dinner begins at 6 p.m.
Where: Coverdale Farm Preserve, 543 Way Road, Greenville.
The Trump administration is planning to welcome up to 17,500 additional White Afrikaners from South Africa as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress.
In a striking show of antiestablishment voter sentiment, the Left won in Berlin on the same night that the far-right Alternative for Germany won in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.
Sept. 22, 2026 — Industrial companies often face complex technical challenges that are too time-consuming or costly to solve through physical testing alone. Computer modeling and simulation can spur the development of new technologies with lower energy intensity, improved performance and increased productivity.
The Center for Industrial Modeling and Simulation (CIMS), led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), recently hosted a launch webinar featuring the center’s work to accelerate innovation and enhance U.S. economic competitiveness.
The Center for Industrial Modeling and Simulation recently hosted a webinar to encourage national-lab attendees and industry partners to learn about the program and opportunities to participate. Credit: LLNL.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Industrial Technologies Office (ITO), the new center will support the development of sector-specific tools and methods with laboratory expertise in physics-based simulation, process modeling, and machine learning and artificial intelligence to meet the computing needs and challenges of industry.
Brandon Wood, director of the new CIMS center, and Zach Pritchard, technology manager at the DOE’s ITO, delivered opening remarks at the event. They welcomed attendees from across the national laboratory enterprise, industry and academia.
Pritchard outlined how computational methods can reveal the physics behind industrial processes and provide insight into harsh environments that are difficult to monitor with current sensors. He said that recent advances in artificial intelligence also offer new ways to analyze complex systems and accelerate innovation, and he highlighted the scientific computing expertise, capabilities and resources available at the national labs.
During the webinar, Wood explained how the center aims to address challenges on both sides of the industry-national laboratory relationship. Companies may not know what tools are available, what those tools can accomplish or how to access the necessary facilities and expertise. Researchers, meanwhile, may need a clearer understanding of problems encountered in industrial settings.
“Our mission is really to accelerate widespread adoption of computing tools and resources,” said Wood. “We just want to see that the power that modeling and simulation really has is being deployed in a way that’s most effective for heavy industry.”
Initially, CIMS will focus on iron and steel and chemical manufacturing, particularly combustion, electrical/electrochemical technologies and process heating, with the goal to eventually expand to other energy-intensive sectors, including cement and concrete, forest products, food and beverage and agriculture.
The CIMS website, which is set to launch in the fall, will feature a catalog of relevant laboratory capabilities, industrially applicable codes, technical contacts and examples. The online inquiry and consultation portal will help companies determine whether computational approaches could address specific needs.
“We’ve set up CIMS as sort of a concierge service,” said Wood. “If an industry partner comes in and says, ‘Here’s my interest. I want to know if computing can be relevant for this,’ the center will help identify appropriate capabilities and experts.”
In addition, the center is planning a series of workshops to assess current adoption, identify gaps and establish priorities for computing in industrial sectors. CIMS will also develop demonstration projects focused on integrating and adapting existing capabilities towards higher impact for industry.
Riccardo Scarcelli, deputy director of CIMS, provided some additional information during the Q&A session on how to engage with CIMS, how the Center could interface with other DOE programs such as the High-performance Computing for Energy Innovation and Genesis Mission efforts, and what additional opportunities CIMS might facilitate for future lab-industry partnerships.
A recording of the webinar is now available online. Interested parties can join the CIMS mailing list to be informed about future events and/or provide feedback by completing a short interest form.
How do you deal with a problem like The Donald? The simple answer is that you don’t. You can’t. The normal rules of political engagement don’t apply. The US president is like a five-year-old child with the world as his set of toys: a King Baby.
Nothing is ever constant or predictable. What’s agreed one day can be forgotten the next. Any deal can be interrupted with a temper tantrum at any time. Trying to second-guess Donald Trump is a fool’s errand.
Company to award backpay to 264,000 workers as mayor Zohran Mamdani condemns use of ‘greedy algorithms’
DoorDash said it would pay $131.5m to settle a New York City government investigation that found the food delivery company underpaid or waited too long to pay workers.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the settlement the city’s largest labor enforcement action. It advances the city’s longstanding effort to hold food delivery companies to a 2023 law intended to improve pay for delivery workers.
Sept. 22, 2026 — With support from a $3.7 million GO Virginia grant, George Mason University will establish the Virginia Quantum Hub (VQH) — an inclusive quantum ecosystem, built by public–private partnerships, that generates intellectual property across research and technology, attracts capital investments, trains a highly skilled workforce, and addresses global innovation needs, from health and logistics to national security and energy sectors.
A George Mason physics PhD student uses a microscope to probe nanoelectronic devices. The university launched the first master’s degree in quantum science and engineering in the commonwealth earlier this year. Photo credit: George Mason University.
“The Virginia Quantum Hub at George Mason positions the Commonwealth of Virginia at the forefront of this cutting-edge technology that will drive investment and economic opportunity in the decades to come,” said Governor Abigail Spanberger. “As home to the first open-architecture quantum computing system in the National Capital Region, this is exactly the kind of public–private partnership that keeps Virginia first. The collaboration among higher education, GO Virginia, the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), and many other critical public and private partners also represents game-changing capacity building for our innovation ecosystem.”
To scale partnerships already underway, George Mason has been approved for the GO Virginia grant, pending final award, to expand K–12 education and employer training programs, technical infrastructure deployment, lab buildout, and collaborative partnership operations.
In addition to current research investments, laboratories, and K–12 and higher education programs and training, George Mason partnered with Oxford, England-based TreQ to bring the first open-architecture quantum computing system to the state. TreQ has completed the system design and will deploy and operate the built-to-evolve quantum computing infrastructure, collaborating with George Mason to connect Virginia and the region with companies and innovators across the global quantum technology ecosystem.
“George Mason is not waiting for the quantum future — we are building it, responsibly and accessibly, with industry and government. By anchoring the Virginia Quantum Hub here, we are turning the commonwealth’s research strength and our region’s talent into jobs, new businesses, and opportunity for real change and impact,” said George Mason President Gregory Washington. “We are building a quantum ecosystem for the nation, which is open to the world. With the catalytic help from the GO Virginia grant, this is how a public university helps an entire region lead the future.”
With the new VQH, George Mason will organize a fast-moving ecosystem around Northern Virginia’s distinctive combination of assets — federal demand, defense and cybersecurity, cloud and data infrastructure, advanced computing, industry, research universities, and deep technical talent — to help drive the developing future of quantum.
“This hub provides access to the hardware and advanced research to empower a workforce to fuel the quantum economy,” said College of Science Dean Cody Edwards, who will deliver a keynote at Thursday’s Quantum World Congress. “We start with bold solutions to create a better world for everyone — not a search for quantum-shaped answers. Strong ecosystems don’t depend on any one dominant part; their strength comes from the interactions among talent, infrastructure, capital, research, industry, and government.”
“At the College of Engineering and Computing, quantum is not a single discipline—it is where computing, engineering, and science converge,” said Ken Ball, dean of George Mason’s College of Engineering and Computing. “Our strength lies in preparing students and researchers to work across that entire continuum, from quantum algorithms and software to the systems and technologies that make quantum computing possible while we prepare our graduates for the workforce of the future.”
George Mason will work with founding partners and strategic investors — including the VIPC, Connected DMV, TreQ, Leidos, Aliro Quantum, Boeing, Booz Allen, MITRE, IonQ, Marymount University, Northern Virginia Community College, and others to be announced — to deliver on three reinforcing pillars:
Open-architecture quantum hardware and shared infrastructure: Dual-use open infrastructure operated by George Mason — a cryogenic lab, a quantum optics facility, and one of the only TreQ-designed open-architecture quantum computers in the United States — for technology innovation.
World-class quantum workforce programs: A four-tier pipeline including middle school, high school, and community-college partner programs, quantum-related professional education, internships, and a new master’s degree program with hands-on access to the accessible hardware. With 80 to 85% of George Mason graduates staying to work in Virginia and the region, this talent pipeline is positioned to meet the region’s workforce needs both now and as they expand in the future.
Collaborative technology innovation: An industry–government–academia partnership program that builds critical educational programs, drives collaborative technology development, and coordinates the growth of Virginia’s quantum ecosystem.
“The quantum future of the United States requires we empower our citizens, no matter their backgrounds, with the skills needed to lead in the growth of this exciting technology. The VQH accomplishes this by empowering Virginians with a unique hands-on quantum technology training program, de-risking innovation by providing key high-cost infrastructure to the region and working with partners to make Virginia the destination for transformative quantum companies looking to grow,” said Patrick Vora, executive director of George Mason’s Quantum Science and Engineering Center (QSEC).
“The Virginia Quantum Hub gives us an opportunity to move beyond simply accessing cloud-based, black-box quantum computers and instead open the box to study and innovate at deeper layers of the quantum computing stack,” said Weiwen Jiang, QSEC’s codirector. “With open-architecture hardware and shared research infrastructure, our faculty, students, and industry partners can work across the full quantum stack, from applications and software to systems, control, and devices. This kind of infrastructure is essential for training the next generation of quantum engineers and advancing research toward practical quantum applications.”
Several of George Mason’s partners weighed in on this opportunity and moment for the state:
“VIPC is proud to be a founding partner and strategic investor in the Virginia Quantum Hub. Built through public–private partnership, VQH will help grow Virginia’s innovation ecosystem by accelerating research commercialization, growing next-generation talent, and catalyzing company attraction and industry investment in the commonwealth,” said VIPC President and CEO Joe Benevento.
“TreQ is grateful for George Mason’s trust and partnership in building this foundational infrastructure for Virginia’s quantum ecosystem. This region brings together digital infrastructure, national security, research, talent, and the technology industry in a way few places can. That combination is shaping the frontier of computing,” said TreQ CEO and Founder Mandy Birch.
“The Greater Washington region has the computer infrastructure, the research base, and the security-cleared talent that quantum companies need. The Virginia Quantum Hub adds a critical missing piece: Open hardware companies can test on today, paired with a pipeline that keeps four out of five graduates here. For frontier technology companies deciding where to build and scale, the case for Northern Virginia just got stronger,” said George D. Thomas, president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority.
The new Virginia Quantum Hub builds on eight years of investment through George Mason’s QSEC, where 24 faculty across seven departments and several colleges have built the university’s research and education foundation in quantum.
A priority within George Mason’s Grand Challenge Initiative, George Mason’s Quantum Leap project is research backed by a new $2.4 million catalyst investment, with six new postdoctoral positions and three new faculty positions.
The university recently launched Virginia’s first interdisciplinary master’s degree in quantum science and engineering and signed an MOU with two of Korea’s leading quantum organizations, extending the hub’s reach to a strong global quantum marketplace.
Tehran appears to have relaxed its preconditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz, saying it is prepared to do so within seven days so long as the US takes reciprocal steps to ease the pressure on Iran.
Previously Iran had set seven onerous pre-conditions for lifting the blockade including “an end to war on all fronts” and a commitment by the US to cease all aggressive actions against Iran including sanctions.
Polo, with sustained winds of 165mph, is churning 215 miles south of Zihuatanejo but is unlikely to directly hit Mexico
A tropical storm off the south-west coast of Mexico has intensified into a category 5 monster in fewer than 24 hours, fueled by stronger than usual El Niño weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean.
Hurricane Polo was sending out maximum sustained winds of 165mph (266km/h) on Tuesday as its center churned about 215 miles (346km) south of the coastal city of Zihuatanejo, in Guerrero state.
Vincent Brown stands accused of aiding in genocide and crimes against humanity during the paroxysm of violence in his native country in 1994, charges he denies.
BOSTON, Sept. 22, 2026 — Zapata Quantum, Inc., a leader in quantum computing algorithm and application development, today announced early access to Quantum Pilot, a hardware-agnostic, cloud-based software platform designed to close a growing gap between rapidly advancing quantum hardware capabilities and enterprises’ ability to determine where and how quantum computing can create business value.
Quantum Pilot builds a dynamic roadmap for enterprises that want to deploy quantum technology but are uncertain which applications are relevant to their business and sector, when those solutions will be practical, and what they could be worth. It gives organizations a systematic way to discover potential applications, weigh their technical and commercial potential, and focus resources on the opportunities with the strongest case for investment. Enterprises can then identify and develop applications without betting on a single quantum modality or provider, and reassess application readiness or change their approach as hardware capabilities and algorithms evolve.
“The critical on-ramp to quantum application development is the efficient and rigorous mapping of use cases to quantum computational solutions,” said Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum. “We built Quantum Pilot to make that on-ramp more accessible to enterprise leaders and ensure that quantum activity becomes a capability that compounds—with each experiment and development effort informing and accelerating the next.”
Delivering Quantum Application Intelligence
Drawing on Zapata’s experience developing quantum algorithms and applications across industries and hardware architectures, Quantum Pilot combines a proprietary knowledge framework with advanced computational tools, including capabilities developed through its collaboration with NVIDIA to apply agentic AI to quantum resource estimation. The platform also builds on Zapata’s collaboration with the University of Maryland on formal methods for quantum software verification.
Together, these capabilities enable Quantum Pilot to deliver Quantum Application Intelligence (QAI)—helping enterprises identify, evaluate and develop quantum applications with scientific rigor and a clear focus on business value. The platform also continuously tracks and updates the global quantum ecosystem’s research, hardware roadmaps and software developments so that application roadmaps are current as the field advances and users are making application decisions based on the latest data.
“Most conversations about quantum readiness focus on the hardware roadmap. That is not where the real risk sits. It sits one layer up, in the applications and software that decide whether the hardware ever produces business value,” said Mark Hill, Chief Digital Information Officer at CSL Behring, a multibillion-dollar global biotech leader, and Advisor to the Company. “Quantum Pilot matters because it forces the harder question enterprises keep avoiding: which applications are worth building now, not just which processor is fastest.”
Quantum Pilot is powered by three complementary systems:
Quantum Graph, a proprietary knowledge layer that connects quantum applications, algorithms, research, and hardware roadmaps, providing structured context for the platform and its AI agents as the field advances.
Quantum Engine, a suite of computational tools and agents that supports algorithm selection, resource estimation, experiment design and hardware benchmarking, helping enterprises assess technical feasibility and guide application development.
Quantum Assurance, a framework that combines formal verification methods with expert review to assess technical results and guide the development process, with Zapata’s scientists helping enterprises interpret evidence and determine next steps.
“Among the things that make Quantum Pilot’s approach to application development distinct is its use of formal verification, rather than after-the-fact validation alone,” said Runzhou Tao, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, and Fellow, Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS). “That’s the same principle we apply in our research with Zapata on verified quantum software, and it addresses a discipline quantum computing has largely developed without.”
Early Access
Quantum Pilot is initially available through an early access program for select enterprise and government customers. Organizations interested in participating can request a demo and learn more at zapataquantum.com/quantumpilot.
About Zapata Quantum
Zapata Quantum 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. Spun out of Harvard’s quantum lab in 2017, 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. The Company’s study demonstrating the potential of quantum-enabled drug discovery was recognized as one of Nature Biotechnology’s Top 10 Papers of 2025.
(The Center Square) – Three percent of Ohioans on Medicaid were not eligible because they have more resources than allowed, including several millionaires, according to Ohio Auditor Keith Faber.
(The Center Square) — New York is leading a coalition of Northeast states in suing the Trump administration to block agreements with two energy companies that would scrap several offshore wind projects, claiming taxpayer money is being used to pay…
US president may have upstaged the ghost of Soviet leader Khrushchev by musing destruction of fellow member state
Donald Trump has a habit of discomfiting delegates to the United Nations general assembly. But this year, he may have upstaged the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev by openly contemplating the annihilation of a fellow UN member state.
Eleven minutes into a 40-minute address, the US president announced he had “a big decision to make” over Iran, which has staged a much more determined resistance than Trump anticipated when he decided to go to war against the country in February.
Wells, an 18-year-old Black man, died during a boat trip in July. The case sparked concern that Mississippi authorities did not do enough to investigate the case.
A former maximum-security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, is now a critical hub in the Trump administration’s immigration detention machine, transforming in just a few months from a facility shuttered for its inhospitable conditions to a privately run jail holding hundreds of immigrants.
This is the story of how — and why — it happened.
The deal had been in motion for more than a year before the Leavenworth City Commission conceded to the controversial project, one that would allow the private-prison operator CoreCivic to reopen its notorious prison and fill it with immigrants. They did so after a protracted battle with the company, one that made them cogs in a vast deportation machine.
“I don’t want them to be in jail,” Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said of the more than 500 immigrants held at the facility as of August, the last publicly available count. “I think it’s horrendous. My moral objection to this is very strong.”
“They just bought their permit.”
But as the Trump administration and CoreCivic carried out an aggressive campaign to expand the federal detention network, city officials said they concluded they couldn’t afford to fight it. They tried to sue to stop the project, but instead spent more than a quarter-million dollars fighting it in court, draining city funds, before CoreCivic offered a $1.5 million impact payment to reimburse the city’s legal costs and pledged $400,000 a year to the local government.
The Leavenworth facility, for years marred by an ugly history of overcrowding and understaffing, is now the Midwest hub for the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Under this hub-and-spoke model, which has gone little noticed by the public even now, ICE moves detainees and staff between smaller facilities — the “spokes,” which include facilities such as regional jails — and a larger facility as a center of operations — the so-called “hub.” Using this model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights out of the country.
“Leavenworth’s capacity is going to be that hub in the Midwest, to draw down from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, to house all that detention,” Sharma-Crawford said. Two other immigration attorneys who represent clients in the region corroborated the operational pattern through their own clients’ transfers and named additional “spoke” facilities feeding the pipeline.
Using a hub-and-spoke model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights.
The Midwest Regional Reception Center, as it’s now known, in Leavenworth is a critical site for the Trump administration, whose promises of 100,000 beds for immigrant detention stalled out at around 66,000 in July and had run into multiple obstacles across the Midwest. In Illinois, a 2021 state law ended immigration detention statewide. Minnesota remained a possible location for a hub, but the process moved slowly; CoreCivic’s shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton had long sat idle before its recent sale, and ICE needed to get a Midwest hub up and running immediately. Proposed sites were contested one after another: A potential warehouse for up to 10,000 detainees in south Kansas City was killed by community opposition, and facilities were either blocked or contested in Shakopee, Minnesota; Romulus, Michigan; Hudson, Colorado; and McCook, Nebraska. The Midwest’s largest operational ICE detention center, GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, is geographically isolated, hours from any major airport, and has been mired in controversy over a hunger strike, a death in custody, and hundreds of unlawful detention rulings.
Leavenworth, a town with a corrections history stretching back over a century, seemed to offer the path of least resistance.
“Aggressive and Unlawful”
The City of Leavenworth fought the facility in court for months. CoreCivic countersued, and the Department of Justice intervened on CoreCivic’s side, accusing Leavenworth of “aggressive and unlawful” interference.
In the meantime, the fight threatened to bankrupt the city. Records obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act show the city paid roughly $820,000 in legal fees to Spencer Fane LLP over 12 months, about 6 percent of its general fund. The bill was a drain, but not a death blow. The city’s foremost concern was the takings clause, which allows the government to seize private property for public use, City Manager Scott Peterson said. A state judge had directed CoreCivic to follow the permit process, and if Leavenworth denied the permit, CoreCivic could argue bad faith, claim the city had effectively seized its property, and sue for damages, Peterson said, leaving Leavenworth to choose between greenlighting a facility it opposed or gambling on a lawsuit it might not survive. The alternative, Bauder, the mayor, said, was the federal government acquiring the building, which would eliminate local oversight entirely.
Both the city and county rejected the facility early on, local officials said. Residents protested its reopening and offered impassioned testimony against it at public hearings.
CoreCivic structured the $1.5 million impact payment in part to reimburse the city’s legal costs from the company’s lawsuit. When asked about the arrangement, CoreCivic instead reiterated its promised $1 million one-time impact fee, $250,000 a year to the city, and $150,000 a year to the police department.
Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Hollister, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the 4-to-1 decision, explained her objection was procedural and understood it had no bearing on the outcome: “It was an inevitability.”
The Hub
On January 14, two months before the vote, CoreCivic detention officer Brittany Williams reached out to city leadership to voice her support of the facility, an unusual move for a rank-and-file corrections officer with no role in the municipal permitting fight. In the email to Assistant City Manager Penny Holler, Williams said the company transferred her to Oklahoma to help open Diamondback, a sister CoreCivic facility. She wrote that she was currently assigned to TransCor America, a private transportation company that contracts with ICE to move detainees around the country, in her case from ICE’s Kansas City, Missouri, field office “to where they are needed to go.” The email, which was entered into the public record before the February 2 hearing on the special use permit, or SUP, to allow the facility to house immigrants, inadvertently revealed ICE’s hub-and-spoke detention model was already in motion in the region, shuffling detainees and staff between facilities and states.
The Leavenworth facility was in a strategically advantageous position to become a new hub for ICE, and Sharma-Crawford, the immigration attorney, said ICE had been eyeing the location since it closed as a federal prison. It sits just 10 miles from Kansas City International Airport, where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office is a six-minute drive away. It also allows ICE to hold detainees at Leavenworth then move them through KCI to staging areas for deportation flights in Louisiana or Texas.
“They want it short, quick,” Sharma-Crawford said. It allows ICE to claim “‘I gave them due process,’” he said, “and they’re out the door.”
“They’re doing this in smaller areas because no one’s paying attention.”
On March 25, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a bond decision holding that anyone who entered the United States without authorization is ineligible for bond, a ruling that covers Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, and Minnesota, the states Sharma-Crawford said he expects to feed into Leavenworth. Mandatory detention across those seven states meant the government needed greater capacity from the region’s jails. Genevra Alberti, former chair of the local AILA chapter, whose attorneys represent clients throughout the area, named additional “spokes” in the system: Chase County in Kansas, and Greene, Ste. Genevieve, Phelps, and Ozark counties in Missouri. Enough local jails plus a CoreCivic facility, she said, can hold and process as many people as a mega-detention center.
“It makes sense that they’re doing this in smaller areas, because no one’s paying attention,” Alberti said. “There’s definitely a method to this. They know if they do this in the massive cities, there’s going to be more light shed on what they’re doing.”
A March 3, 2025, photo shows CoreCivic’s Midwest Regional Reception Center, a former federal prison, in Leavenworth, Kansas.Photo: Emily Curiel/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
In Leavenworth County, the CoreCivic-run ICE detention center is one of five major correctional facilities, which provide a total of roughly 6,000 beds. Up the road, FCI Leavenworth, a federal Bureau of Prisons facility, held ICE detainees in what Alberti called a “black hole” for a full year before the SUP was approved. Last May, the ACLU wrote to the warden documenting limited time outside and no exercise for detainees. Peterson, the city manager, confirmed the federal prison doesn’t answer to the city, and there have been no community relations meetings for more than a year.
The SUP the city approved authorizes “jail or prison” use at the Leavenworth site without restricting it to ICE detention. The concentration of prisons meant the workforce, the infrastructure, and the institutional muscle were already there. Reopening one more facility for ICE required little more than a single municipal approval.
The Immigration Courts
Once their clients are fed into one of the deportation regime’s hubs, immigration attorneys say it’s become an increasingly byzantine process to find them, plan their defenses, and get them out of detention.
Working with clients imprisoned at Leavenworth is chaotic and difficult from the moment they arrive, the attorneys said. To schedule a televideo call the lawyers must email their state bar cards and licenses, and they are subject to automatic, one-hour cutoffs. CoreCivic has repeatedly demanded attorneys file formal representation paperwork before they’ve even met the detainee or agreed to take on the case, Alberti said.
Valerie Sprout, a Kansas City immigration attorney with 15 years of experience, said she wasn’t even able to locate the facility in ICE’s call-scheduling portal.
“We didn’t know how to contact that client,” Sprout said. “We were on our listserv, frantically sharing information, because you have people there that you have no access to.”
Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, rejected these characterizations, saying video visitation calls run in 30- and 60-minute sessions, calls are not automatically cut off, and staff accommodate requests for more time. He said the forms identifying a detainee’s lawyer are standard and a pre-representational visit can occur without one, adding that legal representatives may visit their clients seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Some of the details of the internal dysfunction detainees face only come to light after they’re released. According to Alberti, a former client took over running the laundry for roughly a week because no one was washing detainees’ clothes. She was promised token pay, either a dollar an hour or a dollar a day, but was never paid.
The obstacles extend into the courtroom. Detainees are increasingly given remote, on-camera hearings, never physically appearing before a judge. The Kansas City Immigration Court, part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, holds jurisdiction over Leavenworth’s detainee docket. Just six judges, working across three courtrooms and a small pro bono room, carry more than 1,000 cases.
“So far, I haven’t seen any of them in person,” Alberti said of the judges, which she said makes it more difficult to tell how they’re weighing cases.
Sprout, who is also a board member of Asylum Clinic Kansas City, has witnessed the shift to teleconferenced hearings firsthand.
“All detained cases are over video. No detained cases are in-person, which I feel is just an incredible violation of due process, especially in asylum cases, because the threshold issue in every asylum case is to determine whether the respondent is credible,” she said.
Aracely Mendoza protests against deportations outside federal Immigration Court in Kansas City, Mo., on May 27, 2025.Photo: Eric Adler/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Former prosecutors and military lawyers preside over the hearings. Allan F. John-Baptiste, a former Bureau of Prisons lawyer, was appointed during the first Trump administration. Jared Grimmer, a former Air Force judge advocate general, accepted a temporary appointment in October 2025. Katherine Estes ran military personnel law at the Pentagon. Scott Ison is a local-level Missouri prosecutor. After the Trump administration fired or pushed out more than 100 judges last year, none of the newly appointed Kansas City judges have a background in immigration law, according to the official bios provided in a DOJ press release announcing their appointments.
Created in the wake of 9/11 and historically invoked only sparingly, the EOIR-43 automatic stay allows the government to override an immigration judge’s bond order without review or appeal. Records obtained by Documented through a records request show the Department of Homeland Security used it 877 times over a three-month period in mid-2025. Faced with these stays, Alberti has filed two federal habeas corpus petitions for clients at CoreCivic Leavenworth. The first was for a young woman with a pending petition for legal status as a victim of crime and no criminal history who entered the country as a baby; she was released after roughly two weeks. As of this spring, the second remained in detention.
Another recent petition put the conditions themselves before a federal judge. Katsiaryna Bartko, a Belarusian asylum-seeker detained at Leavenworth, filed a pro se petition in August over her medical care. In an order appointing her counsel, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree found she brought “a viable deprivation-of-medical-care” claim and noted it was undisputed that her recent test results showed worsening thyroid levels. Bartko, who depends on hormone medication after surgery for thyroid cancer, had not seen a specialist since her transfer, according to court filings. CoreCivic and ICE dispute she was denied appropriate medical care. After a fourth hospitalization and 106 days in ICE in custody, she was released on recognizance on September 16.
One of Alberti’s clients, who was detained at Leavenworth but has now been released, told her that guards and ICE officers sometimes asked her to act as an interpreter for other detainees without pay. No one on staff spoke Spanish, the client told Alberti, and when officers needed to communicate, they relied on a translation app rather than a live interpreter.
Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept that “any claim that a detainee is required to translate for staff communication is false” and that the facility uses a contracted translation service with a live translator reached through devices, computers, and phones.
About six weeks after the facility began accepting detainees in May, Sharma-Crawford reported at the first community oversight committee meeting that detainees did not have access to their own charging documents. Without them, he said, the lawyers weren’t able to formulate a defense for their clients.
When asked about that allegation by The Intercept, Gustin said that concern involved a single detainee whose documents were provided upon request. He also said detainees keep their charging documents with them from the time they arrive and any suggestion to the contrary was “false.”
But for those who’ve been made party to the system, the situation has begun to feel intractable.
“We cannot stop the federal government from incarcerating these people,” Bauder, the mayor, had said. “We can’t stop them, but we can try to make it better for them here.”
The community’s only check on CoreCivic was the CoreCivic Community Relations Advisory Board, required as a condition of the special use permit. But while the board streamed their meetings publicly, it existed in a purely advisory capacity, Peterson, the city manager, said. Enforcement power lay with the city, not the board, and to act on any issues it flagged, the city of Leavenworth would have to sue.
On the city’s working relationship with CoreCivic in the first weeks, Peterson said, “For now, things are great,” before adding, “How long is this sustainable? How long does it go?”
Foreclosing on the Future
With the hub-and-spoke model, the Trump administration planned for mega-detention centers with 7,500 to 10,000 beds as the hubs, but the 1,033-bed Leavenworth facility became a hub at a fraction of the size, inviting far less scrutiny than a mega-center would. Its reopening spurred community mobilization, but not the same national level of fanfare or resistance — as was the case with “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered detention center in the Florida Everglades — which has worked in the Trump administration’s favor.
“DHS has taken a two-pronged approach to this,” Peterson said. “They are both contracting with private organizations like CoreCivic and GEO Group to manage their detention population, but then they are also just directly acquiring properties to manage themselves.”
The administration’s mass deportation agenda has remained paramount despite its growing unpopularity with the American public. The Leavenworth location had been a federal priority from the start, identified in ACLU Freedom of Information Act disclosures alongside other proposed reopenings. It was named in ICE’s emergency justification as one of three publicly identified among nine no-bid detention contracts. It was selected for its central location within ICE’s Chicago area of operations. With warehouse acquisitions stalled, Leavenworth, the Midwest regional hub, may represent the Trump administration’s new default model when ambitious, public-facing expansions become too politically or financially costly to defend.
In July, CoreCivic’s sold two of its largest California facilities, Otay Mesa and California City, to DHS for $1.5 billion. The company will continue operating both and plans to sell off more jails. Under this hybrid arrangement, federal ownership can put facilities beyond the reach of many state and local regulations, limiting outside scrutiny even as courts test its limits.
In August, CoreCivic sold Leavenworth’s Midwest Regional Reception Center to the U.S. government for $238 million.
Last month, the pattern played out again. On August 4, CoreCivic announced the sale of the shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota. The following day, in a second press release, it announced the $238 million sale of Leavenworth’s Midwest Regional Reception Center, recasting both as a single $734 million deal. Under the arrangement, the company expects to keep operating both facilities through their existing ICE contracts.
At Leavenworth, the contract expires in September 2027. City officials learned of the sale the morning the news broke and were notified by CoreCivic rather than the federal government, raising questions as to whether its permit and oversight conditions would survive federal ownership. Even as these sales closed, CoreCivic said it had opened preliminary discussions with ICE about selling still other facilities.
Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat who toured the facility on September 9 to meet with two detained constituents, said it was under active construction to add capacity, telling reporters “everywhere we went, they were building.” A DHS spokesperson confirmed the agency acquired Leavenworth and the Appleton facility to create additional detention space.
Alberti sees these actions as the administration waging a “war of attrition” on immigrants, their families, and their advocates.
Leavenworth fought this outcome through every channel available to a local government — in the courts, at the commission, through public protests, and in open hearings packed with residents. Nevertheless, CoreCivic and DHS jammed the approval through. Once the facility was operational, the federal government purchased the building outright, severing the meager leverage the city extracted as the price of its consent. In May, DHS quietly disbanded its own internal detention oversight office after a funding lapse, leaving no federal watchdog to fill the void. Rebranded as an expansion of ICE’s immigration capacity, this series of federal acquisitions represents the quiet desecration of the public trust. More troubling still is the notion that across America, other Leavenworths may still be unaccounted for and effectively shielded from the public’s knowledge or scrutiny. Without the tools to meaningfully oppose the expansion of Trump’s anti-immigrant regime, communities are left without recourse, making them nodes of a vast, and violent, machine.
This story is part 2 in a two-part series. Read the first part here.
(The Center Square) – Fraud concerns rank among the top issues for Minnesota voters in a new poll, trailing only inflation and the cost of living as the midterm elections draw near.
US president says Burnham will be ‘a great PM’ in friendly first meeting on the sidelines of UN General Assembly but makes jibe at Starmer
If Andy Burnham wanted to inject some edge into his meeting with Donald Trump later (which he doesn’t), he could bring along a copy of today’s Financial Times. This front page headline speaks for itself.
Mortgages ‘on the front line’ as Iran war deals £840 blow to homeowners
British homeowners are paying an average of £840 a year more when they refinance their mortgages, as the rising borrowing costs triggered by the Iran war start to impact consumers’ spending power.
Approximately 1m households have rolled off fixed-rate mortgage deals since February, according to Bank of England data.
Lian Yunzhi solves 3x3 puzzle on several occasions in average time of under 4.5 seconds, according to state media
A six-year-old Chinese girl has set a new women’s world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in just over four seconds, state media reported.
“Speedcuber” Lian Yunzhi broke the women’s 3x3 average world record twice this month at two World Cube Association certified competitions in Wuhan and Guangzhou, according to state broadcaster CCTV on Monday.
US president says British PM has a ‘lot of assets on his side’ as pair meet at UN in New York
Donald Trump has praised Andy Burnham as a “natural businessperson” and said the UK was “more up” than under Keir Starmer. But he berated the UK for its decision to give up the Chagos Islands.
In their first face-to-face meeting, Trump gave a warm assessment of the relationship, saying he thought Burnham had a “lot of assets on his side” and would be a “great prime minister”, adding: “We talked about everything from Rolls-Royce to energy to immigration – we covered a lot.”
Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman delisted in what Ireland’s EU presidency calls ‘a difficult compromise’ for the bloc
The EU has agreed to remove two Russian billionaires, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, from its sanctions list, while extending restrictions on nearly 3,000 individuals and companies accused of supporting the war on Ukraine for the next three years.
With an end-of-Tuesday deadline looming to preserve the Russia blacklist, the EU’s 27 member states found a compromise that meant delisting the two oligarchs in spite of very few countries wanting this outcome. EU sanctions have to be approved unanimously.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has formally appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as national security adviser, making permanent a dual role Rubio has held on an acting basis since May 2025.
A White House official confirmed Tuesday that Trump signed a commission making Rubio the permanent national security adviser. Rubio becomes the first person since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as secretary of state and national security adviser, concentrating two of the administration’s most influential foreign-policy positions under one official.
Rubio assumed the national security adviser duties after Mike Waltz left the White House position in May 2025. Trump subsequently nominated Waltz to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations following controversy over a Signal group chat in which senior officials discussed military operations against Houthi militants in Yemen.
Rubio has since reshaped parts of the National Security Council while continuing to run the State Department. Associated Press reporting this summer noted that several of Rubio’s former State Department aides moved into senior NSC positions, giving him substantial influence over the administration’s foreign-policy structure.
Trump has repeatedly praised Rubio’s ability to handle multiple responsibilities, saying last year that when problems arise, “I call up Marco. He gets it solved.” Rubio has said he remains focused on his current responsibilities rather than a possible 2028 presidential campaign.
Flickering got me frustrated and I’m hoping you can help. It doesn’t look like the booster is sold anymore. Can you post a picture of it so I can see the components? TiA!
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.' $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. "You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!" distributor Ketchup Entertainment posted on social media (adding "Thank you to the fans for making this a massive hit!")
With a break-even number of $120 million, the movie "will probably make up any theatrical deficit (should there be any) with its impending releases on video on demand and streaming," writes ScreenRant. Almost three years after the completed film was initially shelved for a $30 million write-off, its
cumulative domestic box office has apparently even beat Warner Bros. dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street:
In addition to officially joining the chart of the Top 30 movies of the year so far at the domestic box office, by surpassing The End of Oak Street, Coyote vs. Acme has outgrossed five of the eight movies that Warner Bros. has put out in domestic theaters this year.... [It's just $17.6 million behind Supergirl, and within $30 million of Mortal Kombat II and Wuthering Heights.] Their anticipated sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Three also seems guaranteed to land higher than 2026's Coyote vs. Acme on the chart (2021's Dune earned $108.9 million in domestic theaters, while Dune: Part Two earned $282.1 million).
With its a small marketing budget of just $10 million, the movie seems to be relying on
oddball marketing stunts like their AMA on Reddit's r/movies. And commemorating the spirit of the movie, Crayon-maker Crayola even released a special "Coyote Secret Plan" web page for children to print and color — and partnered with the film's stars for a video on the importance of creativity:
Lana Condor: Crayola is all about encouraging kids and grown-ups to turn imagination into action.
Will Forte: Which is exactly what Coyote does in Coyote versus Acme. He sees a problem and thinks, "Could this be solved with a rocket, a catapult, or a suspiciously affordable mail order anvil?"
Lana Condor: Usually no.
Will Forte: Usually very no.
In 2015, while an engineering group leader at STMicroelectronics, Philippe Notton grew enthusiastic about reviving European efforts to develop homegrown CPUs. In 2017 he joined Atos and led efforts to found the European Processor Initiative (EPI), then in 2019 spun off new company SiPearl with EU support and an ARM-based strategy. Fast forward to today: Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER at the German national HPC center in Juelich, will feature SiPearl’s Rhea1 CPUs alongside NVIDIA and AMD accelerators (general availability of Rhea1 is scheduled for the end of 2026). Europe’s second exascale system, named Alice Recoque, will be hosted by CEA/DAM south of Paris and will include CPUs based on the company’s Rhea2 ARM architecture.
We asked Philippe Notton to comment on SiPearl’s strategy and plans, an important element of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty.
HPCwire: First, congratulations on SiPearl’s role in Europe’s first exascale supercomputers.
Philippe Notton: Thank you very much. The vision that led to the creation of the European Processor Initiative consortium became a reality last May when we received the first Rhea1 units in our laboratories.
Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl
HPCwire: SiPearl spun out from the European Processor Initiative, an important element of the EU’s ongoing sovereignty initiative for advanced computing that now includes AI and quantum computing along with HPC modeling and simulation. What is the long-term strategy for SiPearl, and where does the company stand along that trajectory today?
Philippe Notton: SiPearl’s strategy is to be a leading player wherever there is a need for sovereign advanced computing—whether in HPC, our original focus, or AI, defense and data centers—by offering a high-performance, energy-efficient alternative to the current market leaders, all of whom are non-European.
Last May, we reached a major milestone in this strategy. First, we fulfilled the mission entrusted to us by Europe: the return of high-end CPU technologies to our continent. This is a first for Europe. We have built the most complex server CPU ever designed in Europe. Furthermore, we are now competing with the market leaders, while also helping to ensure Europe’s digital sovereignty.
Our product is a good one, and it has come at just the right time, both in geopolitical terms and in terms of market demand with the come-back of CPUs.
HPCwire: Today, SiPearl is participating in European procurements with non-European processor vendors such as Nvidia and AMD. But you’re working on a complete hardware solution that combines your CPUs with Axelera’s AI processors, and with Semidynamics to exploit their RISC-V-based ASIC for AI inference. Do you aim to compete on merit at some point with major non-European processor vendors for the leading processor role in European procurements?
Philippe Notton: Absolutely. Sovereignty is a plus, but it is certainly not everything. Our ambition is to be in the running when it comes to computing power and energy efficiency.
HPCwire: Will you eventually compete outside of Europe, where European vendors often face trade barriers?
Philippe Notton: Yes. We are seeing a great deal of interest from outside Europe, in countries that are also looking for an alternative to non-European CPUs.
HPCwire: SiPearl also participates in the AETHER Consortium. What is that about?
Philippe Notton: The AETHER consortium was set-up by 2CRSi, a French specialist in high-performance servers, alongside European semiconductor actors Axelera AI and SiPearl, but also European real estate, construction, services, energy providers and infrastructure operators, to demonstrate that Europe possesses all the expertise required to build, power, operate and scale AI infrastructure. In July, the AETHER consortium announced its application for the European Commission’s forthcoming AI Gigafactory call for proposals.
HPCwire: The sharp rise of frontier AI has elevated the role of CPUs, especially for inferencing. Can you describe this change and what it may mean for SiPearl?
Philippe Notton: The rapid rise of agentic AI, combined with the rising price of GPUs, has reinforced the role of central processing units. This came as a surprise to the market, but it is now a proven fact. In a trend starting just a few months ago, the CPU:GPU ratio is now approaching 1:1 in AI servers. The result: after several years of stagnation, the CPU market is experiencing impressive growth, with longer delivery times and rising prices for the big players.
Thanks to the sharp rise of agentic AI which is set to continue, this is a long-term market trend which will, of course, be very favorable for SiPearl. We arrived at just the right time.
HPCwire: What about additional important roles for CPUs, for example in conjunction with cloud computing, quantum and edge?
Philippe Notton: SiPearl also addresses these markets. As we discussed earlier, agentic AI is a new market, driving new demand for CPUs. But the traditional markets still exist. CPUs are the base engines for HPC, cloud, and enterprise computing. They run workloads directly and orchestrate accelerators and quantum computers.
HPCwire: Rhea2 will be based on chiplets. What are the advantages of that?
Philippe Notton: Later this year we will disclose more information about Rhea2.
HPCwire: What about other emerging trends, such as optical processors and optical I/O?
Philippe Notton: We regularly scout new technologies. Co-packaged optics are maturing quickly and should be in the market by 2030. Our strategy for this will not be to lead the market, but to be a fast follower.
Optical compute needs clarification. Replacing CPUs with optical compute engines will require engineering breakthroughs that we do not envision in the short to midterm. However, matrix multiplication in the optical domain, which could translate to inference acceleration, is expected to be production capable in the next five years.
Our go-to-market today is to partner with accelerators, so we would provide the orchestration layer for companies doing optical inference acceleration.
HPCwire: Talk about plans for the Athena1 dual-use processor?
Philippe Notton: Our new product Athena1 is a customized version of Rhea1 from which we have, in particular, removed the four high bandwidth memory stacks, as these are not required for defense and aerospace, and removing them helps to reduce the cost and size of our product. Discussions are currently under way with major players in the European defense sector. We will keep you posted.
Steve Conway is an HPCwire contributor
HPCwire: Europe seems to want eventually to migrate from ARM to RISC-V. In Recoque you’ll have RISC-V vector accelerators, and as mentioned earlier SiPearl plans to exploit Semidynamics’ RISC-V-based ASIC. How do you see the future of ARM and RISC-V in advanced computing?
Philippe Notton: SiPearl is a server CPU company. Today, for server CPU ISAs there are essentially two choices: x86 (Intel, AMD) or Arm (SiPearl, Nvidia, Fujitsu, Ampere, hyperscalers—the majority of newer server CPU solutions. The choice of ISA is governed by the software ecosystem. There are many software elements, both open source and private, that must be ported to an ISA in order for the ISA to be viable as a server CPU.
RISC-V is a popular, relatively new ISA that is rapidly gaining market share in IOT and embedded CPU markets. Many of the AI accelerator companies build on RISC-V. SiPearl builds ARM-based CPUs and we interface to partner companies building accelerators, many of which are built on the RISC-V ISA.
Most folks in the industry agree that RISC-V will become viable for server CPUs, although the timeframe is in debate. We keep a technology watch on RISC-V solutions, and from our perspective it is unlikely that we will see mainstream adoption of RISC-V server CPUs by 2030.
HPCwire: Thank you for this update and congratulations on SiPearl’s momentum.
Reza Valizadeh, a U.S.-Iranian dual citizen and former journalist for U.S.-funded broadcaster Radio Farda, has been imprisoned in Iran since September 2024.
President chided Kaitlan Collins for asking him question at UN after White House ban on CNN, MS Now and Politico
Donald Trump has scolded a CNN anchor for covering him at the UN in New York after banning the network and two other media outlets from the White House.
Kaitlan Collins asked the US president on Tuesday when the Iran war would end, citing a poll that claims two-thirds of Americans don’t think the US is winning.
Donald Trump has called on nations to unite to isolate Tehran and bring down global energy prices, as he gave a bellicose defence of his administration’s foreign policy and decision to strike Iran.
“I call on all nations to help to enforce the complete economic isolation of Iran,” Trump said in a speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday. “If we stand united, we will soon see a world free of the last 51-year menace of Iranian terror … and oil prices will come plummeting down even lower than they were at the start of the conflict.”
Patrick Clancy sat down with 60 Minutes in New York City for a lengthy conversation about his ex-wife Lindsay Clancy's struggles with mental health, his grief and the social media frenzy surrounding him.
Agreement signed at the UN general assembly in New York
Nordic correspondent
Emotions among Greenlanders are a mixture of hope, scepticism and fear ahead of the signing of a new much vaunted deal on Arctic security between the US, Greenland and Denmark.
“There have been many different reactions in Greenland because they are talking about a deal but no one can see the deal, we don’t know what it is all about, and what’s in it for us or what’s in it. Also, because we have been terrorised as a people for the last 1.5 years by the American president, so many people feel no trust at all.”
Officials say one pilot safely ejected as F-16 believed to have crashed on approach to Spangdahlem after training drill
An F-16 fighter jet assigned to the US air base Spangdahlem in western Germany crashed on Tuesday, the US military said, adding that one pilot had ejected safely and was receiving medical treatment.
The cause of the incident is under investigation, the military said in a statement, with emergency response personnel at the scene of the crash.
An autopsy by the Greenville County Coroner's Office determined Hayden Panettiere's death was due to an accidental overdose of several drugs, including fentanyl.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to force them to hand over their unredacted voter rolls containing voters' sensitive information.
Combination of Miuccia Prada with Belgian designer Raf Simons once again spins gold for fashion house
Miuccia Prada’s style formula is simple: begin with a great skirt. Her personal uniform is a knee-length skirt, A-line or pleated, most often with a plain sweater and kitten heels.
The Prada collection that opened Milan fashion week made a compelling case for her favourite outfit, with a skirt the star of every one of the 63 looks – no dresses, no trousers. It won the room over, so expect to see the personality skirt on a high street near you soon.
The US president spoke about the war with Iran during the UN general assembly on Tuesday, threatening to 'annihilate' the country and 'drive them into hell' if the regime didn’t agree to a deal with the United States
Disclosure: this is BEGODE’s manufacturer account. This is a writing suggestion, not a board recommendation.
For a single-wheel-board review, three short sections can make an impression easier to interpret:
Context: what kind of riding you actually did, and your previous experience.
Observation: what you noticed during that ride, without guessing at the internal cause.
Preference: what you liked or disliked, clearly marked as your experience.
For example, “I felt less comfortable on this section” reports an experience. “This design is unsafe” is a much broader conclusion that the sentence has not established. Neither a positive nor a negative impression needs to be presented as a laboratory result.
This format leaves room for honest opinions while showing readers what the review does—and does not—support.
Disclosure: this is BEGODE’s manufacturer account, not Future Motion support.
Future Motion’s explanation of Pushback/Haptic Buzz lists several relevant variables, including rider weight, tire pressure, terrain and grade, and battery percentage. Speed alone is therefore an incomplete description of the situation.
For a support request, record the board model, the warning experienced and the conditions already known. Do not ride again just to find the warning threshold. Follow the instructions for your model and contact the manufacturer if the behavior is unexpected.
This does not diagnose an individual board or establish that it is safe to keep riding.
GOP Sen. John Curtis of Utah asked a Senate panel to subpoena Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden for testimony as part of a probe into the "use of presidential family relationships" for private financial benefit.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah is calling for a Senate investigation into Donald Trump Jr.’s foreign relationships and gifts after reporting that a Russian oligarch helped finance celebrations surrounding his May wedding.
Curtis asked Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dick Durbin to subpoena both Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden as part of a broader inquiry into whether presidential relatives have benefited financially from their family connections.
The request follows a ProPublica investigation reporting that Umar Kremlev, a Russian boxing official with ties to President Vladimir Putin, helped pay for a private-island venue and fireworks connected to Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. President Donald Trump has said his son told him the money would be reimbursed.
Curtis argued that Republicans should apply the same scrutiny to Trump Jr. that they previously applied to Hunter Biden. “A toaster is a wedding gift,” Curtis wrote on social media. “A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else.”
Curtis is seeking testimony about business dealings, foreign relationships, gifts and any instances in which access to a president was understood to provide value. He has not alleged that Trump Jr. committed a crime.
ICE watchers across the country who watched federal agents shoot people in the streets and fought to drive ICE from their cities are turning their new skills against the next authoritarian threat from the Trump administration: election interference.
Volunteers who showed up a few months ago asking, “Where do I buy a whistle?” are now trained and committed members of an “ICE Watch” movement, said Zach Mueller, whose anti-authoritarian group States at the Core started hosting trainings earlier this year. “They’re not in the normal cast of characters that have been showing up to rallies over the last several decades,” said Mueller. Now, they’re planning to fan out to their local polling places and defend their neighbors’ rights to vote.
The ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst despite a temporary win the voting rights movement secured last week, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to block a Trump administration rule that would have let the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t share their voter rolls with the federal government, among other new constraints, which advocates warned would lead to chaos and uncounted votes. While that plan was foiled for the midterms, other electoral threats abound.
“There are 100 different scenarios that you can run through,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible. “Could be ICE at the polls, could be Trump getting every Republican to swear to sabotage the results … Could be something after the fact, seizing ballot boxes or refusing to acknowledge the results. Who knows?”
What is clear, Levin said, is, “If you think that some Democratic politician is going to have some neat trick in the back pocket that they going to pull when it happens, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Federal interference at the polls is illegal. Despite lawsuits seeking to block federal immigration officers from poll sites, administration officials have continued to threaten their presence anyway. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration agents could be deployed at polling places if there is a “threat” or if they’re serving a warrant. And President Donald Trump has previously said that federal agents and the National Guard could be sent to polling locations.
Levin’s organization, which co-sponsors the No Kings protests, has launched “election protection” training programs to help people prepare to mobilize for different election sabotage scenarios, including federal immigration agents at the polls, and Mueller’s group has expanded its trainings to include election protection trainings known as “Beyond ICE Watch.”
“Ultimately this is going to come down to: Do you have a sufficient number of people organized and prepared to push back when shit hits the fan, or don’t you?” said Levin.
“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit.”
In the past two years, Levin said, an elite class composed of “media and business and law firms and universities” and parts of the Democratic establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have capitulated to the authoritarian whims of the Trump administration.
“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit,” said Levin. “They organized, they reached out, they formed communities, and they pushed back.”
Last year, the Save America Movement, a nonprofit political and pro-democracy organization that rose up in opposition to Trump, launched “liberty vans” in Los Angeles.
The vehicles are staffed with organizers trained in documenting and deescalating violence from federal law enforcement agents. “Our perspective was that if everybody in America knew what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during that summer, nobody would be OK with this,” said Mary Corcoran, who serves as the group’s executive director.
The project later expanded to other cities including Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.
“ICE is a new X factor in this election.”
Now, Corcoran plans to deploy a similar strategy in battleground states. The group is working with major civil and labor rights figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to send volunteers — including trusted community leaders like clergy members — trained in deescalation, documentation, and local voting laws to precincts with large Black, Latino, and Asian populations in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.
Corcoran said the precincts they chose are all electoral power centers with large minority and immigrant populations. “If they were successful in intimidating even 10 percent of those voters from coming back this midterm cycle, it could easily swing the outcome statewide,” she said.
Corcoran is hopeful that people knowing they will not be alone at the polls will help them feel safer, but she acknowledges that this election cycle will be a new test. “Voter intimidation has always been around,” she said. “But ICE is a new X factor in this election.”
For the NAACP, voter intimidation is a familiar threat, even if the players have changed, explained Dominik Whitehead, the group’s head of membership. “Much of this we’ve seen before,” said Whitehead. In Georgia and other battleground states in 2024, there were at least 227 bomb threats targeting polling locations and election-related offices, many of them in Black precincts.
The NAACP is “going to defend democracy and ensure voters have access to the ballot box, as we have done for the last 117 years,” said Whitehead. But like Corcoran, he acknowledges that these are “different times.”
ICE has “no jurisdiction” to prevent anyone from voting, something the NAACP has been including in their messaging to voters, he said. However, Whitehead said that they’re still anticipating the agency’s presence. He said the NAACP is “working closely with immigrant organizations” and focusing their election monitoring efforts in places like Michigan, Florida, and Texas, where they expect threats against Muslim, Latino, and Black Caribbean immigrant communities.
Voting by mail has already begun in several key states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. For Mueller and States at the Core, the real test will come after Election Day.
“There is a real question mark in my mind about what is the reaction from the authoritarian movement to this election,” said Mueller. “And it’s worth thinking more about how folks are planning, not just for the lead-up version to this, but what happens on November 4th and afterwards.”
The Trump administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, for example, will likely become an issue again. Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the new rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that his issue with the new rule was its timing.
The US president remarked on CNN's presence at the UN general assembly on Tuesday, telling reporters he was 'surprised' the news network was covering him and that it 'shouldn't be here' after he banned the outlet along with MS Now and Politico from the White House last week
Hayden Panettiere, the former child actress who starred in TV shows “Heroes” and “Nashville,” died from an accidental fentanyl overdose, according to a South Carolina coroner’s office.
The rising cost of servicing the UK national debt pushed up borrowing last month, while oil is dropping, and M&G holds Bond Vigilantes Forum in London
How much ‘headroom’ might John Healey still have to keep within the government’s fiscal rules?
That’s the question dogging Westminster and the City.
“The chancellor has probably lost about half the headroom he inherited, leaving it between £10bn to £15bn. As long as the headroom is in double figures, he will probably be able to avoid topping it up, but the drop in headroom means any additional day-to-day spending, such as on defence or cost of living, will have to be paid for by higher taxes.
“What’s more, if the recent rise in energy prices is sustained through the next few months, household energy bills could rise by another 25% in January, which would take them above the level that the previous government capped them at. That would only further increase the pressure to act on cost of living by temporarily subsiding energy bills.
“The PM and chancellor will be feeling quite claustrophobic today as the walls close in around them. Borrowing costs keep climbing, while borrowing itself is outpacing the teeny rise in tax receipts.
Everyone can diagnose the problem, but it’s far from clear that a PM who swept to power promising good things for all is capable of holding a fractious Labour party together to carry out the tough work needed.”
Jake and Logan Paul were invited to give a motivational speech. Just don’t let them get involved with military policy
We’re now approaching month seven of a war against Iran that Donald Trump repeatedly assured us would be over in a matter of weeks. Prices are rising, troop morale is plummeting, and there is little evidence things will improve.
The situation is so desperate that the decision makers at the Pentagon have decided to bring out the big guns. I’m not talking about nuclear weapons, although Trump recently threatened to “blow the entire nation [of Iran] up”. No, I’m talking about influencers Jake and Logan Paul, who are famous for doing idiotic stunts on YouTube and getting hit in the face during boxing matches. Last Thursday, Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense or whatever they’re calling it these days (the Department of War Crimes?) welcomed the Paul brothers to Washington DC “to meet with our warriors” and deliver a motivational speech.In response, former Republican congressman and air force officer Adam Kinzinger wrote, “We aren’t a serious country at the moment.” That about sums it up.
Exclusive: Nearly half of survey respondents aged 16-24 have experienced violence on the internet, with many saying their complaints were not taken seriously
When Jane* learned that intimate photos of her had been posted on a website without her consent, she expected the police would help her. Instead, she was warned that researching where her photos had been shared might put her at risk of breaking the law.
After she was handed a leaflet on internet safety and told to go to tech companies for help, but to expect little from them, the case was closed.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman, has refused to rule out a potential run against the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer amid mounting speculation around her political ambitions.
When asked by the New York Times whether she would challenge Schumer in 2028, when his current term is up, Ocasio-Cortez declined to exclude the possibility – even if Democrats win back the Senate majority.
Tribal leaders and organizers return to reservation 10 years after demonstrations against Dakota Access pipeline
Ten years after major demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline, tribal leaders and Native American organizers returned to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation this week to honor the movement and its lasting impacts.
In the rural reservation area of Fort Yates, a four-day encampment that centered on the phrase “mní wičóni” – “water is life” – brought together about 150 tribal members and allies for meals, drum circles, sacred ceremonies and memorials.
A Republican senator has accused Donald Trump Jr of corruption and demanded a Senate investigation into revelations that a Russian oligarch bankrolled part of his recent wedding in the Bahamas.
John Curtis, of Utah, wrote to the leaders of the US Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, urging them to subpoena Trump Jr over his business dealings, his relationships with foreign individuals, gifts he has received – and any occasions where his connection to his father, Donald Trump, “was invoked or understood to provide value”.
Brother-in-law went to check on Nicholas Brandram at his home and found him unresponsive, coroner says
The man who was arrested on suspicion of being the so-called “Putney pusher” was found dead at his home after missing a family meal, an inquest has heard.
Nicholas Brandram, 44, was arrested in June in connection with an incident on Putney Bridge on 5 May 2017 in which a jogger shoved a woman headfirst into the path of an oncoming bus.
Brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, says ‘accuracy is important’ as he responds to broadcaster’s threat to sue over claims made in memoir
Earl Spencer has apologised to Piers Morgan for incorrectly claiming in his new book about Diana, Princess of Wales, that the former tabloid editor was behind the publication of intrusive photos of the late royal in the mid-1990s.
Morgan had earlier threatened to sue Spencer over “fabricated inaccuracies” and “examples of brazen falsity” in the book, which was published today.
Some of continent’s biggest pharma firms write to national leaders calling for action to safeguard their futures
Some of Europe’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have said the continent is “losing ground” to rivals including the US and China in developing new drugs and attracting investment.
The chairs of nine companies, including Britain’s AstraZeneca, GSK and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, wrote to Andy Burnham and the national leaders of other European countries on Tuesday to call for action to “safeguard our companies’ future”.
(The Center Square) – Republican Illinois attorney general candidate Bob Fioretti said the U.S. Postal Service should have authority to establish uniform requirements for handling mail-in ballots, while Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul has challenged the federal rule in court.
Alongside warnings about its ability to destroy humanity, artificial intelligence is also hailed for its potential to revolutionise health treatment. Just how far can it take us?
Her name was June. June would be the last month she ever knew.
I remember the way her bed made her so small, swallowed her up in the middle of the room, turned as it was to face the window. With her liver failing, her skin was a ghostly apricot. June – I called her Nan – had been stalked by the king of terrors, the emperor of all maladies: cancer. That son of a bitch.
The former UK deputy prime minister is a board member of the UK-based company and owns 917,000 shares
Nick Clegg could make approximately $40m (£30m) from the planned float of Nscale as the UK-based datacentre company prepares for a US stock market listing.
The former UK deputy prime minister owns more than 917,000 shares in the startup, which is reportedly seeking a valuation of up to $35bn in a flotation. Based on Clegg’s stake of 0.12%, that could yield a valuation of about $42m for the ex-Liberal Democrat party leader.
Jury report says ‘no credible evidence’ points to criminal conduct related to death of Mississippi teen after boat outing with friends on 4 July
A grand jury made a unanimous decision late Monday night to not bring criminal charges against anyone in the mysterious death of Nolan Wells, a Mississippi teen who died after a boat outing with friends on 4 July.
The Jackson county, Mississippi grand jury, which met from 14 September to 18 September, issued 132 subpoenas during its investigation, considered evidence from 43 witnesses and investigators, and reviewed an independent investigation by Wells’ family. They also considered physical and digital evidence, including mobile phone data and forensic reports, photographs, videos and GPS data.
The hoard, buried south of Cologne in the second century AD, is the biggest coin treasure ever found in Germany from the time of Hadrian
An amateur archaeologist who discovered several Roman silver coins in a field in western Germany realised he had stumbled upon something much bigger when his metal detector kept beeping.
Oliver Riedl called the authorities for help and a group of experts who began digging immediately discovered a total of 934 Roman silver denarii. It is the biggest coin treasure ever found in Germany from the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian, the local office in charge of archaeological monuments said on Tuesday.
South Carolina medical examiner says ‘no signs of trauma’ and ‘the manner of death has been ruled accident’
Hayden Panettiere died from a fentanyl overdose, according to the Greenville county coroner’s office.
Medical examiners in South Carolina confirmed the 36-year old actor’s cause of death on Tuesday, saying: “The cause of death has been ruled as toxic effects of fentanyl, 4-ANPP, Alprazolam, Methocarbamol and Quetiapine.”
Sept. 22, 2026 — SiPearl, the fabless designer of European high-performance energy-efficient CPUs built for sovereign supercomputing, AI and data center, has delivered the first samples of Rhea1 to Bull, a leader in advanced computing and AI. This turning point marks a major milestone. It illustrates Europe’s success in asserting its technological sovereignty in advanced computing and AI, as Rhea1 will become the first European-designed CPU deployed in a European-built platform.
Credit: Bull and SiPearl
Bull has begun integration of Rhea 1 onto its BullSequana XH3000 platform for JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. Procured by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, JUPITER is hosted at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. This milestone will contribute to the development of JUPITER’s CPU blade, complementary to the GPU partition, paving the way for the full modular integration of the machine.
Most complex server CPU ever designed in Europe, Rhea1 includes in a single package 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores – each with 2 x 256-bit Scalable Vector Extension, 4 stacks of HBM and 4 DDR5 interfaces. Thanks to these key features, Rhea1 is ideally suited to the most demanding HPC workloads whilst offering back-door free and kill switch free security, energy-efficiency and flexibility. During the ongoing benchmarking phases at SiPearl’s laboratories, Rhea1 is delivering very encouraging performance: the early data is strong, and in some cases, performance is exceeding expectations. The performance figures, which are still to be consolidated, will be published this autumn. The equipment supplied for JUPITER represents SiPearl’s first order for Rhea1 and therefore constitutes its first significant revenue.
From dramatically improving extreme weather forecasts to accelerating breakthroughs in climate science, sustainable energy, AI, quantum research, and structural biology, JUPITER will empower researchers, industries, public organizations across Europe to drive innovation at an unprecedented scale.
“The delivery of the first Rhea1 CPUs marks an important milestone for Europe’s supercomputing sovereignty. Through the European Processor Initiative, EuroHPC JU has supported the development of a European processor that is now moving from innovation to deployment in JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. This achievement demonstrates what Europe can accomplish by bringing together research, industry and world-class infrastructure to build a stronger European HPC ecosystem,” said Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of EuroHPC JU.
“Rhea1 plays an important role in JUPITER’s Cluster Module, complementing the GPU-based Booster with a CPU-based architecture designed for a broad range of complex and data-intensive workloads. Its high memory bandwidth is particularly well suited to applications that benefit from efficient access to large amounts of data. Bringing this European processor technology into JUPITER is an important step in making these capabilities available to the scientific community,” noted Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
“This key milestone is the result of a long-term and strategic collaboration between two European tech players, federating a stronger HPC and AI ecosystem. With the arrival of the first Rhea1 CPUs and their integration into our BullSequana XH supercomputing platform, our ambition is becoming reality. Integrating a European processor onto a European platform for Europe’s flagship exascale system is a milestone we can all be proud of, and a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve together when vision is matched with execution. Thank you EuroHPC JU and Forschungszentrum Jülich for trusting us,” highlighted Bruno Lecointe, Head of HPC, AI and Quantum at Bull
“Together with Bull, our long-standing partner, we are taking a major step towards Europe’s digital sovereignty by equipping the CPU cluster of the European exascale supercomputer JUPITER with European hardware. This will be a first in Europe. I am very proud of this, as it is also a wonderful human endeavor in which teams from SiPearl, Bull, Forschungszentrum Jülich and all our European partners have worked together to ensure the success of this ambitious project, with the unwavering support of EuroHPC JU and the European authorities,” concluded Philippe Notton, CEO and Founder of SiPearl.
SiPearl is the European fabless designer of secure high-performance energy-efficient CPUs built for sovereign HPC, AI and data centre. These CPUs will help address strategic challenges in the fields of security, defense, medical research, energy, climate and engineering with a reduced environmental footprint.
Featuring 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores with 61 billion transistors, SiPearl’s first-generation CPU, Rhea1, will be released end of 2026. Sipearl’s CPUs will equip the two first European exascale supercomputers: Rhea1 will be integrated into the JUPITER machine based in Germany and Rhea2 will be part of Alice Recoque in France.
Supported by the European Union and France, SiPearl employs 200 people in France, Spain, and Italy.
About Bull
Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.
Mark Rutte has the right idea – go beyond Washington and make the case for the transatlantic alliance to the public. They may well have a willing ear
At a moment when Europe is focused on persuading Donald Trump to remain committed to Nato, it needs to convince Americans, too. So the presence this evening of the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, in front of a public audience in Des Moines, Iowa, is significant. This is the home town of Trump’s ambassador to Nato, Matthew Whitaker, and the visit brings the debate over Nato’s future directly to a midwestern audience in a red state that operates far from elite foreign-policy circles in Washington. Rutte’s appearance is long overdue.
Russia’s war in Ukraine and uncertainty over the US commitment to European security have forced European leaders to confront their dependence on Washington. While some are pressing for building European capabilities as a means to separate from the US, others see greater European defence spending as essential to keeping the US engaged. Either way, European governments can’t rely solely on meetings with Trump to secure the alliance’s future.
Seasonal eating in America was built on real limits, and for most of the country’s history, the food calendar was simply accurate. Then refrigeration and ... Read moreThe post The foods everyone thinks are seasonal but really aren’t appeared first…
White House press coverage row continues while anchor-less channel of the administration’s ‘latest and greatest’ streams propaganda for the Maga faithful
Donald Trump’s previous television career centred on his role on The Apprentice, but the US president’s latest media venture is a rather lower-budget affair: the launch of Trump TV in the wake of his ban on several outlets from covering the White House.
With major US networks agreeing to not cover the president while the dispute continues, on Monday the White House announced the new 24/7 YouTube live stream, which it promised would feature “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place”.
The Massachusetts case is the latest in a series of legal woes for the influencer whose real name is Braden Eric Peters
The online influencer known as Clavicular – who helped fuel the rise of the extreme male appearance-improvement trend of “looksmaxxing” – has been charged with rape and drug offenses in Massachusetts.
The 20-year-old, whose real name is Braden Eric Peters, has been scheduled for a 14 October arraignment on Cape Cod, according to legal documents seen by the Guardian.
By Dean Murray NASA is making progress towards its mission to land astronauts on the Moon. Booster segments are being fitted this month to provide thrust for a crewed Artemis III mission in 2027. Technicians integrated the left forward booster…
Technicians integrate the left forward booster segment for NASA's Artemis III SLS (Space Launch System) rocket onto the left booster segments atop the mobile launcher in High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in…
QuEra and HPE will enable organization access to quantum computing capabilities on-premises by integrating neutral-atom fault-tolerant systems with the HPE Cray supercomputing platform.
BOSTON, Sept. 22, 2026 — QuEra Computing today announced a collaboration with HPE to integrate neutral-atom, fault-tolerant quantum computing with on-premise high-performance computing (HPC) environments powered by the HPE Cray supercomputing platform. The collaboration gives HPC centers, national laboratories, and enterprises a path to bring QuEra’s frontier systems into new supercomputing infrastructure.
Useful fault-tolerant quantum computing will run alongside classical supercomputing in hybrid workflows where HPC handles large-scale classical computation and the quantum system tackles selected subproblems that are impractical or impossible to solve classically.
Organizations that already operate large classical resources have new choices in how they bring quantum computing into their workflows — through the cloud, on-premise, or a combination of the two. The combined approach aligns with US national priorities, such as Genesis Mission, a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
QuEra and HPE are pursuing integrated testbeds, hybrid algorithm co-design, software interoperability, and system-level performance benchmarking, targeting deployment alongside the HPE Cray supercomputing platform. HPE Cray supercomputing provides an industry-leading HPC foundation for hybrid quantum-classical workflows, enabling QuEra’s fault-tolerant systems to be tightly integrated with a customer’s most demanding workloads.
QuEra has worked with HPE since 2025. At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026, HPE showcased magic-state, featuring QuEra to demonstrate the company’s vision for hybrid quantum-classical computing.
“Bringing neutral-atom, fault-tolerant systems into an HPC environment introduces a different engineering problem than delivering quantum computing over the cloud,” said Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer at QuEra Computing. “HPE’s deep experience in supercomputing gives organizations the benefit of working with a partner who can solve that problem at the scale they need.” “Organizations running the world’s most demanding workloads need quantum and classical computing to work together seamlessly,” said Dr. Masoud Mohseni, Senior Distinguished Technologist and Director of HPE Quantum. “Our partnership with QuEra aims to bring fault-tolerant quantum capabilities into HPC environments, creating a clear path from today’s supercomputers to tomorrow’s hybrid quantum-classical systems.”
Two Complementary Paths to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing
With this announcement, QuEra now offers two synergistic routes to its fault-tolerant systems, offering organizations a choice to take one or both. For example, organizations will be able to deploying on-premises for sovereign or tightly coupled workloads while drawing on the cloud for elastic simulation and burst capacity.
On-premises deployment, through HPE: For organizations that need a system inside their own environment, whether for sovereignty or data residency needs, or to tightly couple into existing workflows, the HPE collaboration provides a path to integrate QuEra’s systems with the HPE Cray supercomputing platform, including plans for a potential gigaquop system.
Cloud access, through a major Cloud provider: Libra, QuEra’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer, is an over 256 logical qubit, megaquop-class system designed to perform on the order of one million reliable logical operations, targeted for availability on the cloud in 2028, with the gigaquop system to follow.
In practice, the two paths form a single journey. An organization might begin in the cloud to build applications and expertise today, then have HPE build an on-premises system to safeguard data and sovereignty. Equally, a customer committing to an on-premises deployment can run production workloads on the cloud in the interim until its own system is installed and continue drawing on cloud capacity afterward whenever demand exceeds what sits in its data center.
“Cloud access and on-premises deployment are complementary paths. They are different answers to the question of where a system resides,” said Boger. “We are delighted to partner with a company such as HPE. Through our partnership with HPE and our previously-announced partnerships, we can provide a great solution whether a customer application requires cloud access, on-premises deployment or both.”
About QuEra Computing
QuEra is putting quantum to work. As the scientific and commercial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, we help enterprise innovators leverage quantum to gain competitive advantage, support HPC centers as their users tackle classically intractable problems, and enable government programs to build national and sovereign capabilities. We do this by combining our quantum systems, available on-premises and via the cloud, with application co-design and collaborative research. Born at Harvard and MIT and still advancing together, QuEra builds neutral-atom systems on a public, peer-reviewed path to fault tolerance, and operates globally from Boston, New Mexico, Tokyo, Zurich, and the United Kingdom. As quantum computing moves from “one day” to “Day One,” QuEra delivers practical impact today while leading the path toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems. See what’s possible at www.quera.com.
As many as 169 people have been reportedly killed in Yemen in the last three days as Iran-aligned Houthis battle Saudi-backed government forces for control of strategic heights on the Red Sea coast, while thousands flee the violence.
Houthi military officials said at least 118 people had been killed in clashes as well as Saudi air and artillery strikes on Taiz, al-Jawf, Marib and Saada provinces since Sunday, Agence France-Presse reported. Yemeni government sources have said at least 36 people have been killed on their side of the conflict.
The September 28 session will provide attendees with an opportunity to discuss pNFS Lattice, share ideas for future development and explore opportunities for community participation. The BoF is intended to encourage collaboration among developers, storage architects and organizations interested in advancing open and scalable parallel file systems.
The presentation marks the first public technical discussion of pNFS Lattice since the open-source project was introduced earlier this year. Developed through a long-term engineering collaboration between PEAK:AIO and Los Alamos National Laboratory and released under the Linux Foundation, pNFS Lattice is designed to advance parallel file system architecture by introducing an elastic, distributed approach to metadata services for AI and HPC environments.
In addition, John Harechmak, WW Vice President of Field Engineering at PEAK:AIO, will join Brian Atkinson of Los Alamos National Laboratory to present “pNFS Lattice: Decoupling Metadata, State and Control in Parallel Filesystems” at 5:10 PM also on September 28. This session will move the conversation beyond Lattice’s initial launch and examine its central breakthrough: transforming metadata from a fixed infrastructure bottleneck into an elastic, independently scalable service.
As AI and HPC infrastructure continues to scale, storage architectures are under pressure to deliver data to thousands of GPUs and CPUs simultaneously. Parallel file systems have become increasingly effective at moving data across large numbers of storage servers. However, the metadata services responsible for locating, organizing and coordinating that data frequently remain tied to static servers, dedicated metadata infrastructure or tightly coupled failover pairs. As AI clusters expand to thousands of GPUs and generate increasingly metadata-intensive workloads, those fixed architectures can constrain the performance and resilience of the entire storage environment. pNFS Lattice was developed to address these challenges through a modular architecture that enables metadata services to scale independently of the underlying storage infrastructure.
The SNIA Developer Conference brings together storage architects, developers, engineers and researchers to explore emerging technologies shaping the future of storage. With technical sessions focused on AI infrastructure, computational storage, memory technologies and cloud storage, the conference provides an ideal forum for continued discussion around open, standards-based innovations such as pNFS Lattice.
PEAK:AIO is a Manchester, UK-based software-defined AI storage company. Its platform delivers high-performance AI storage from a single server to exabytes on any industry-standard hardware. PEAK:AIO is deployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Liverpool, the University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub and the Zoological Society of London. Learn more at https://peakaio.com.
SHANGHAI, Sept. 22, 2026 — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei hosted the AI DC Innovation Summit themed “Leading AI DC Innovation, Shaping the Agentic World,” convening over 600 industry leaders and researchers. During the event, Huawei unveiled its upgraded Stellar AI Fabric Solution to deliver continuous uptime and maximum compute utilization for production AI clusters.
Credit: Huawei
Keynote: Engineering the Network Fabric for Agentic AI
Erick Zhang, President of Data Center Network Domain at Huawei Data Communication Product Line, noted that AI is turning traditional data centers into compute factories. In this agentic era, the underlying network fabric directly dictates token throughput and overall compute yield.
To address this demand, the upgraded Stellar AI Fabric integrates Rock-Solid Architecture 2.0, StarryWing Digital Map 2.0, Hyper-Converged Fabric (HCF), and Network Packet Load Balancing (NPLB). The upgraded NetMaster network AI agent automates root-cause analysis for 95% of network faults within minutes, maintaining consistent production uptime.
High-Throughput Hardware Platforms
Huawei launched two switch families built for high-density computing:
CloudEngine SF9300 (UBG switch): Uses a two-layer multi-plane architecture that cuts buildout costs by 30%. Simplified UB forwarding lowers end-to-end latency by 40%. For link reliability, Link-Layer Retransmission (LLR) executes microsecond-level recovery, eliminating packet loss during link flapping.
CloudEngine XH9300 (NPO switch): Delivers proprietary 100T and 51.2T. A centralized light source and proprietary 3.2T Optical Engine (OE) lower interconnect power draw by 40%. By eliminating the optical DSP (oDSP) stage, the architecture cuts forwarding latency by 26%, while snap-in pluggable optical engines speed up maintenance tenfold.
Financial Industry Standard and Research Deployment
The Beijing FinTech Industry Alliance, Huawei, and 17 partners released the Technical Specification for Network High Availability of Financial Data Center. The standard defines technical baselines and testing methods across two categories and five network types for both intra-DC and cross-DC environments, evaluating architectural redundancy, fault recovery, and proactive prevention.
In scientific research, Qi Fazhi, Computing Center Director at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported that deploying the Stellar AI Fabric lifted computing efficiency by over 10%. Network-wide load balancing resolved training traffic imbalances, providing unhindered throughput for massive telemetry data and accelerating deep-space signal analysis.
Moving forward, Huawei continues to invest in intelligent data center networking with global partners to advance next-generation compute infrastructure.
MPs send out letter as Israeli government seeks bids for construction of large E1 settlement in West Bank
British banks and financial institutions are receiving written warnings from MPs that they should not invest in Israel’s E1 settlement project even though new UK laws banning trade with illegal settlements are unlikely to be in place for months.
A letter was sent to banks on Tuesday by the all-party Britain-Palestine group of MPs saying the onus was now on banks to review their obligations not to cooperate with new settlements.
António Guterres says humanity faces unprecedented convergence of threats but mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain
The world’s fault lines have turned from cracks into canyons as superpowers show that they alone do not have the military, economic and technological power to guarantee security or solve the world’s problems, the outgoing secretary general of the United Nations has said in his final address to the general assembly.
In a speech laced with despair but also glimpses of defiant hope, António Guterres said that over the last decade, largely spanning his 10-year period in office, “wars erupted with devastating consequences and dragged on with despicable cruelty. Civilians were targeted. Human rights trampled. Hunger weaponised. Humanitarians killed. International law cast aside.”
Aaron Donald celebrates return to NFL with victory
Davante Adams has eight catches for 195 yards
Davante Adams made eight catches for 195 yards and hauled in two of Matthew Stafford’s four touchdown passes, and the Los Angeles Rams welcomed Aaron Donald back to the NFL with a 28-6 victory over the New York Giants on Monday night.
Stafford passed for 327 yards for the Rams (1-1), who capitalized after the Giants (1-1) lost Jaxson Dart to a knee injury on their first offensive series.
Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir."
According to the officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some personnel inside U.S. Central Command leaned too hard on the AI inside the Maven Smart System, an AI-powered data integration and targeting platform developed by Palantir to accelerate intelligence analysis and decision-making. The Defense Department has reportedly made the software tool a cornerstone of military operations over the past year... Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that. The Minab [elementary school] site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.
A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault. Two people familiar with Palantir's Pentagon contracts said the government keeps primary responsibility for the quality of the information that's fed into Maven. After the strike, Palantir added features that "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed," a person familiar with the work said. That new functionality is said to have already caught some anomalies...
More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit in the first 24 hours, and according to Bloomberg's sources, that pace compressed the time available for additional confirmations. Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. The U.S. Central Command's group shrank from 10 people to one. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the missiles were up in the air.
A separate inquiry by the United Nations' Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran this week reached the conclusion that there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack.
Sept. 22, 2026 — A team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed a powerful new approach that enabled them to directly observe how electrons interact with defects in advanced semiconductor devices with an unprecedented level of detail. Their methodology included an innovative simulation tool that enabled accurate theoretical interpretations of their experimental observations.
The study, published in Nature, focuses on cutting-edge, ultrathin devices known as two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors that have very unusual electron states.
The experimental image on the left is a scanning tunnelling microscope image of the research team’s 2D semiconductor device. The distinct elliptical, bright orange regions are electrons in the Wigner solid state while the more elongated structures in the lower right are electrons beginning to “melt” into a Fermi liquid state. The clusters of tiny red circles in the black regions indicate the locations of defects. The theoretical image on the right is a Quantum Monte Carlo simulation that shows nearly identical features as the experimental image. The close agreement between the two images helps confirm that the experimental images are showing genuine electron behavior rather than artifacts of the microscope, while also validating the accuracy of the simulation technique. Credit: Berkeley Lab.
“Our study yielded valuable insights into why electrons in 2D semiconductors behave the way they do,” said Mike Crommie, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and one of the study’s authors. “Our methods open the door to the discovery of never-seen-before electron behaviors that can be used for new semiconductor capabilities. This will be important for the future development of semiconductor devices at the ultimate limits of miniaturization.”
Other research team members include Feng Wang, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics, and scientists from the University of California, the Flatiron Institute, the University of New Mexico, Hofstra University, Arizona State University, and the National Institute for Materials Science (Japan).
An Investigation of Ultrathin Semiconductors Containing Strongly Interacting Electrons
Conventional silicon-based semiconductor devices, such as transistors, computer chips, and sensors, are made of materials in which atoms are arranged in three-dimensional structures. In recent years, device developers have increasingly explored the possibility of using 2D semiconductors, which are materials made of just a single layer — or a few layers — of atoms. Their ultrathin structure changes how electrons behave, potentially enabling new capabilities in future semiconductor devices.
The Berkeley Lab–led research team investigated 2D materials in which the electrons are in an unusual state known as a Wigner solid. In ordinary semiconductor devices, electrons typically behave like independent particles moving through the material. Their interactions with one another have a relatively minor influence on their behavior — and on the overall operation of the device.
“Physicists call this conventional state a Fermi liquid because the electrons move around like waves in the ocean,” said Crommie.
Under certain conditions, electrons can enter a Wigner solid state in which they separate from one another and become immobile. Physicists describe such a system as “strongly interacting” because the electrons’ mutual repulsion becomes the dominant factor shaping their behavior. Rather than moving independently, electrons in Wigner solids organize themselves into a relatively orderly pattern and behave collectively as a group.
Defects Have An Outsized Influence on Electron Behavior
Historically, it has not been possible for scientists to directly image how electrons and defects interact in strongly interacting 2D semiconductor systems. It is extremely difficult to design semiconductor devices so that they can be imaged with enough resolution to see features on the scale of individual atoms. As a result, researchers have often resorted to a less direct approach to understanding electron-defect interactions: connecting wires to semiconductor devices and measuring how easily electricity flows through them.
“Some of the conclusions in these previous experiments were ambiguous because the researchers could not actually see the electrons and the defects at the same time,” said Crommie. “They were inferring the behavior based on electrical conductivity.”
To address the imaging challenge, the team used a tool known as a scanning tunnelling microscope. This instrument hovers a tiny metal tip just above a material’s surface and extracts electrical current as the tip scans across the surface. To achieve the highest possible structural and electronic resolution, the research team spent years carefully developing a device that sandwiches the 2D semiconductor material of interest — in this case, molybdenum diselenide — in between a graphite layer on top and a silicon wafer and boron nitride layer on the bottom. The metal tip scans the molybdenum diselenide through tiny holes cut into the graphite.
The team used this set-up to image semiconductor samples with different defect densities. After each image was taken, they changed the density of electrons in their 2D device to visualize the material’s transition from Wigner solid to Fermi liquid.
The images the researchers obtained revealed that electron behavior in their devices varied dramatically based on the number of defects in the 2D semiconductor material. When many defects were present, the electrons became locked into an unexpectedly stable Wigner solid state exhibiting highly irregular, disordered patterns. With fewer defects present, the electrons arranged themselves into much more orderly, triangular, crystal-like patterns that transitioned more readily to the Fermi liquid state.
Crommie described the moment when he first viewed the images and realized he was seeing something fundamentally new. “It was exciting to see the Wigner solid melt into liquid-like waves splashing up against defects,” he said. “We could see how electrons respond to defects in very different ways. Some defects acted like large potholes while others acted like tiny speed bumps.”
Images Agree with Theory
To explain the defect-electron interactions observed in these images and confirm that the images were not showing artifacts due to the microscope’s operation, the team needed to compare their images to a theoretical model. The challenge was that there was no existing theory in the scientific literature for accurately simulating images of 2D semiconductor systems with strongly interacting electrons and random defects. It is difficult to perform the complex calculations needed to predict the behavior of large collections of electrons under these conditions.
The team used a sophisticated computer simulation technique called Quantum Monte Carlo to calculate how strongly electrons in a 2D semiconductor material interact with defects based on the laws of quantum mechanics. The simulated electron behavior closely matched the patterns observed in the microscope images.
“This remarkable agreement confirmed the accuracy of both our theoretical simulation tool and our imaging technique,” said Crommie. “It also helped us better understand the physics underlying the behaviors we observed in our images.”
Crommie added that the results suggest that controlling both placement and types of defects will likely become a much more important consideration as device developers push digital electronics, sensors, and other semiconductor devices to ever smaller dimensions.
Other researchers and device developers can apply the team’s methodology — an integrated combination of imaging and theoretical simulations — to understand the electronic behavior of other 2D semiconductors, particularly those with strongly interacting electrons.
“The semiconductors in today’s smartphones and computers don’t contain Wigner solids, but they may in the future as devices become more advanced,” said Crommie. “Our methods can help researchers and manufacturers understand what electrons will do under these conditions, informing the design of increasingly miniaturized devices with advanced capabilities.”
The team is extending its results by exploring how electron behavior is affected when electrons are confined to tiny channels in semiconductor devices. Another goal is to investigate how electrons behave in 2D semiconductors with fewer defects.
This research was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences; the Department of Defense’s Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship; the National Science Foundation; and the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute.
Independent outlets are leaning on social media, chat and other nontraditional methods to fight disinformation
When Allan Marrero, an asylum seeker from the Cayman Islands, was released after five months in immigration detention, his family made sure to invite one journalist to his celebration: Eileen Grench, a reporter with the independent, non-profit news outlet Documented.
Grench had previously reported on Marrero, who was detained after interviewing with federal officials for a marriage-based green card. But beyond covering his detention struggles, she humanized him, emphasizing his and his husband’s love story.
I’m guessing my board is just fucked. What sucks is the motherfucker who hit me he doesn’t have insurance. I don’t know what to do or why it’s suddenly giving haptic buzz at 9 mph
President Donald Trump is due to sign off on a new security arrangement with Denmark and Greenland, as well as meet leaders from Ukraine and Persian Gulf nations.
As animal behaviorists increasingly use AI in their research, they grapple with how to wield the technology responsibly
I’m sitting in a small boat in Shark Bay, Australia, eavesdropping on a conversation between some of Earth’s most intelligent beings. The motor is off, the turquoise sea is glassy, and Stephanie King and I are motionless, transfixed by the whistles, clicks and squeezy, whirring noises made by the dolphins swimming below us.
If anyone could tell me what these big-brained social mammals are saying, it would be her. Based at the University of Bristol, she co-leads Shark Bay Dolphin Research, one of the longest-running wild dolphin research projects in the world. She has spent thousands of hours watching and listening to this population.
Days before Xi Jinping’s summit with Donald Trump, new study shows trade deficit ran at more than €1bn daily in July
Consumers and businesses in the EU are spending three times more on Chinese imports than their counterparts in China are buying from the bloc, a study has shown.
Customs data showed the gap between the EU’s imports from China and exports to China, the trade deficit, ran at more than €1bn (£860m) a day in July.
Datacentre nimbys are holding Britain back, George Osborne has said in reaction to nationwide protests about the giant water- and energy-guzzling structures.
The former Tory chancellor is now the head of AI for countries at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. His job is to represent the company to governments around the world and he also has a role in enabling the building of datacentres and other infrastructure.
Broadcaster refutes memoir claim that he was behind alleged hidden-camera gym photos of Diana, Princess of Wales
Piers Morgan has said he will sue Earl Spencer over “fabricated inaccuracies” and “examples of brazen falsity” in his book about the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
The earl has made a series of claims in Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – including that King Charles said “we’ll forget her soon enough” after she died, which has prompted a war of words between him and Buckingham Palace.
Why Should Delaware Care? For nearly a decade, Delaware schools have been struggling with poor test scores from students. Many critics have sought greater accountability measures for school districts that aren’t showing progress fast enough, and now the Department of Education has put forward such a draft plan.
As Delaware continues to grapple with concerningly low average test scores from students, the state Department of Education has drafted a plan that could see it take over low-performing schools or even hold back third-graders who are far behind grade-level reading and writing.
According to annual proficiency scores released by the state last month, less than half of Delaware’s third through eighth graders read and do math at a proficient level. And just 18% of 11th graders were proficient in math.
But Education Secretary Cindy Marten told state board of education members that Delaware must have a clearer, more-defined answer for what happens when a school, or its students, consistently do not show test score improvements.
“We can’t just say, ‘Well, they didn’t get it. Oh well, move on next year,’” she said during last week’s state board meeting.
To address those concerns, Marten unveiled a draft framework that consists of five tiers, ranging in support and accountability measures for district schools and charter schools. The universal expectation is for schools to be in Tier 1, which has the lowest level of intervention.
While additional supports are introduced at Tiers 2 and 3, state intervention begins at Tier 4 and is carried into Tier 5.
Schools with little to no progress that are placed in Tier 4 would see “state-directed instructional and operational actions, leadership or staffing supports, and decisions need to be made when they’re needed,” Marten said.
Those schools would also participate in monthly implementation and performance review meetings with the Department of Education.
If none of the state-implemented supports work, the school would be placed in Tier 5 — resulting in receivership, where the Delaware Department of Education would take over operation of the school and appoint leadership, until conditions improved.
Marten told board members that the goal of Tier 5 is not to close schools. Instead, a state-approved “receiver” would address school conditions with a local school board, superintendent and principal while working on a “public recovery plan,” she said.
A return of full authority to local leadership and the school board would be phased in after sustained progress.
Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten has sought to find ways to provide greater accountability on school districts that are not making academic progress with students. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Marten also announced the possibility of holding third-graders back, a tactic that Mississippi has used to dramatically increase proficiency scores, but has also come under criticism from some as a manipulation of its test scores. Such a tactic would be a last-resort option, she said.
Delaware must first focus on early intervention screenings to address learning disabilities earlier and monitor students’ progress over time, Marten said. If students are not improving after receiving individualized support, then whether a student should begin fourth grade will be evaluated based on the student’s data.
“This is not a third-grade retention plan with a literacy plan wrapped around it,” she said during the meeting. “The whole point is prevention.”
The announcement came just one month after Marten told Spotlight Delaware that there will be “real action” taken if a school continues to underperform “for so many numbers of days, weeks, months, years.”
Marten did not specify what those actions may look like at the time.
Further determinations to be made
Marten reiterated throughout the meeting that the framework is only a draft, and more specifications still have to be made.
Marten said “some” of the framework would require legislative action before it is implemented, and plans to have legislation ready for the start of the new session in January.
The department will also have to determine how long a school can remain in a specific tier and establish criteria for where schools should be placed if the framework is implemented, among other details.
Marten also said the Delaware Department of Education will be holding more stakeholder engagement opportunities in the coming months.
Still, she noted that “nobody’s saying we don’t need this [framework,] everybody’s saying we do need this.”
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Lake Forest Superintendent Steven Lucas, who is also the president of the Delaware Chief School Officer’s Association, said his organization looks forward to working with Marten’s department to ensure the accountability framework “accurately assesses the needs and output of the public school districts, supports the work of our public school teachers, and helps to increase the college and career readiness of our graduates.”
Still, some education leaders have expressed concern with Marten’s draft framework.
Delaware State Education Association President Tameka Mays wrote in a statement to Spotlight Delaware that the state’s educators’ union is committed to having conversations with Marten, Gov. Matt Meyer, and legislators about plans for improving student academic performance.
But in her statement, Mays said she and her organization have mixed feelings about Marten’s plan.
“There are aspects we favor, such as additional instructional support for struggling students, and aspects that raise serious concern for our members and our communities, including the process leading up to a possible state takeover of our local schools and the potential for 8- and 9-year-olds to be held back a grade,” Mays said in her statement.
She said the union will also be gathering feedback from its members throughout the state in the coming weeks.
Correction: This story originally reported that receivership for poor performance would fall to school districts, but this option would actually be designated for an individual school and not the district as a whole.
President’s decision to ban three news organisations from White House prompts backlash. Plus, a new resource to help trace the history of enslaved people in the 19th century
Good morning. The row over media access to the presidency has deepened, with major US television news outlets agreeing to suspend their video coverage of Donald Trump after the administration banned journalists from several outlets from entering the White House grounds.
The president had abruptly announced his ban against CNN, MS Now and Politico, saying he had had enough of “purposely negative stories” about him. On Monday the ban against CNN meant no broadcaster was covering Trump’s midday ribbon-cutting for a new White House helipad. The White House provided its own livestream but the president’s remarks were inaudible over the sound of a helicopter’s engine.
How have CNN, MS Now and Politico responded to the ban? A lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order that would immediately lift the ban. In a statement, the organizations said: “We are filing a lawsuit today to protect our first amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes.”
What other significant media developments have there been? Paramount has reached a settlement with California and several other states that sued over its proposed $81bn merger with Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), the California attorney general announced, clearing the way to consolidate some of Hollywood’s most recognizable TV networks and studios under one owner.
What else is Trump expected to say at the UN? The US ambassador to the UN said Trump would speak about how he had “confronted complex problems head-on around the world”. Our writer Robert Tait notes in this analysis, however, that thanks to Trump’s recent social media blitz and self-proclaimed “25 top achievements”, the chances of an uplifting speech appear slim.
Scientists found unequal impact of the climate crisis would not be reversed even if implicit goal of the 2015 Paris agreement is achieved
The unequal impact of the climate crisis on the world’s poorest people, including those in tropical areas, has been highlighted by new research that finds they will be among the last to feel the benefits if global greenhouse gas emissions are cut to net zero.
Temperatures have risen more significantly in tropical areas relative to their historic range than at higher latitudes, including in wealthier countries in Europe and North America.
Lian Yunzhi, who practices 2 to 3 hours daily, has become the first female speedcuber to average under 4.5 seconds in competition, according to Chinese state media.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuses to count four measles deaths in the state though doctors are ‘seeing new forms’ of disease
The US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its measles dashboard on Friday – but it’s still not counting four measles deaths in Pennsylvania, where the outbreak appears to be accelerating and cases are appearing in ways providers have never seen before.
Members of Congress on Monday requested an “immediate briefing” on the decision to change how measles deaths are reported as cases continue to rise throughout the United States, reaching levels not seen in decades. A possible measles exposure was reported in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia last week.
Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin, who were forced to move abroad in 2021, tell of president capable of ‘limitless cruelty’
At 6am on 29 June 2021, the Russian journalist Roman Badanin was woken by a knock on the door of his family’s Moscow apartment. “Come quickly, someone has scratched your car in the courtyard,” a voice shouted from outside. As he opened the door, masked men pushed their way in.
Across the city, a similar raid was happening at the home of Badanin’s colleague Mikhail Rubin. The masked men were officers of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, instruments of the “climate of fear and violence” that the journalists say Vladimir Putin has imposed on Russia in their forensically detailed biography of the Russian president.
Trump–Xi summit: Why the US and China should not underestimate each otherExpert commentLToremark
The US and China both face serious domestic strains. As Trump and Xi meet this week to discuss trade, AI and Taiwan, neither side should mistake the other’s weaknesses for strategic decline.
A superpower summit is a big deal. As US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping meet in Washington this week, they have a lot to cover. They will try to extend a trade truce that expires in November, including China’s pause on rare earth export controls and America’s delay on chip restrictions. The leaders will also tackle Taiwan, where Beijing wants Washington to halt a $14 billion arms package, as well as China’s purchases of Iranian oil and a proposed dialogue on the national security risks of artificial intelligence (AI).
In their negotiations, each side may be tempted to focus on the other’s weaknesses. But underestimating the other’s power would be unwise.
China has many weaknesses – but should not be underestimated
Many observers argue that China’s economic vulnerabilities will limit its international ambitions. Its growth model is faltering; its households still are not spending, so Beijing continues to push surplus production overseas. This has provoked a backlash of trade barriers from the US, EU and beyond. The property sector – once a quarter of the economy – is in its fifth year of slump, while a mountain of hidden local government debt threatens to drag down China’s growth for years to come.
Meanwhile Xi’s government has become steadily more restrictive: tightening political control (such as the new travel restrictions) and placing national security at the centre of economic life.
But Washington should not misjudge Chinese power. China possesses formidable industrial might, with dominance in areas such as electric vehicles, batteries, solar power, drones and telecommunications equipment. China also rivals the US in AI: its models now match leading American systems at a fraction of the cost and are used by developers worldwide (including many in the US). Although gaps in Chinese technology remain – notably in advanced semiconductors – there, too, Chinese firms are likely to grow increasingly competitive.
Many observers will again be tempted to predict that Xi’s tightening grip will choke Chinese innovation. But it is time to bin the argument that authoritarian China can only copy and cheaply produce what other countries invent. Indeed, many of China’s recent innovations have come amid tightening control. The AI sector took off only after Xi came to power and flourished despite his regulatory crackdown on technology firms and entrepreneurs.
China’s innovation model is simply different. The state picks strategic sectors and drenches them in cheap capital, subsidies and guaranteed demand. Fierce competition among firms, a vast domestic market and the world’s deepest manufacturing base bring research into mass production faster than anywhere else.
This approach has its problems; not least that it is wasteful and prone to overcapacity. As an autocracy, Chinese innovation may never outpace that of the United States. But even in second place, China is a daunting technological competitor. The US should thus adopt policies to support domestic innovation and help US firms keep their lead for as long as possible.
China’s economic weaknesses also do not imply strategic weakness. When Trump escalated the trade war last year, Beijing targeted US dependence on Chinese rare earths. The threat of Chinese export controls forced Washington into a truce, agreed when Trump and Xi met in Busan last October. Extending that truce will be high on this summit’s agenda.
China has also spent decades developing considerable military capabilities that have shifted the balance of power in Asia. Beijing has made clear its long-term intentions to control Taiwan – and economic costs are unlikely to deter it from pursuing this goal. Indeed, before China cracked down on Hong Kong, many observers argued this move was unlikely because it would be economically unwise for China.
Military costs, however, are a different matter and likely have already deterred Beijing from the overt use of force. The strength of Taiwan’s defences – such as through US arms sales – will continue to influence Beijing’s calculations. Continuing US arms sales are vital, not a bargaining chip that might be traded away for something else (as Trump has suggested).
American dysfunction does not equal decline
Just as Washington should not mistake China’s problems for strategic weakness, Beijing should not mistake US dysfunction for decline.
Xi will see a weakened superpower: with historically unprecedented deficit spending and a burgeoning debt of $40 trillion. Washington now spends more on interest on its debt than on its military. Its dire finances are raising its borrowing costs and jeopardizing the future of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. By 2032, social security will be underfunded and Medicare will soon follow. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to cut benefits or raise taxes but the money will have to come from somewhere. As the largest item in the US discretionary budget, defence may be the obvious place.
The US ability to address this and other problems is hindered by domestic political polarization. Xi – like any visitor to Washington – will see a profoundly divided city. Nationally, Trump’s approval rating is at its lowest point in his second term. But Democrats are ill-poised to lead: the party is divided by the fault line of Israel. With its fiscal pressures and disunity, the US hardly seems poised to embark on a costly containment – or war fighting – adventure against a rising superpower.
Indeed, the US has shown itself unable to focus on China’s rise. For decades it has vowed to ‘pivot’ to Asia, but not even an administration that campaigned on ending wars in the Middle East could avoid starting one.
Xi may therefore be tempted to conclude that America is a mess – and that Asia is China’s for the taking. But underestimating the US would be foolhardy for China too.
The US economy is performing well, and the country remains the global innovation leader dominating emerging technologies. Its alliances and partnerships are built on shared interests and seem to be enduring despite recent upheaval.
The US also remains the world’s military superpower. It has longstanding ties to Taiwan, and its foreign policy establishment favours US intervention if China invades Taiwan. US alliances in Asia enjoy robust popular support, and American foreign policy leaders would not want to see a China-led Asia, given a perceived threat to US prosperity and security. Xi should remember that the US has historically paid high costs to prevent a country from dominating either Asia or Europe.
Trump and Xi would thus be wise to sit down at the table with a great deal of respect for the power and influence of the country represented by the man on the other side. Only then can they address what is perhaps the most important issue of all – making progress towards a US–China modus vivendi.
US–China relations – and the world as a whole – would benefit from an arrangement that acknowledges each country’s core security needs, prevents war and encourages cooperation on shared interests: rebuilding the global trading system, managing the risks of AI and tackling climate change. They will never get there by underestimating each other.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — Mayor Zohran Mamdani renewed his criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling him a “war criminal” and an “architect of a horrific genocide” as the Israeli leader prepares to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Mamdani said the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu should be respected, although he acknowledged New York City lacks legal authority to execute it. The ICC issued warrants in 2024 accusing Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the Gaza conflict. Israel rejects the allegations and disputes the court’s jurisdiction.
Netanyahu is expected to arrive Thursday for a brief visit and deliver his UN address on Sept. 24. The Associated Press reported that his trip is expected to last roughly 24 hours amid anticipated demonstrations in New York.
Mamdani previously campaigned on arresting Netanyahu if he visited the city, but later said municipal authorities do not have the power to enforce the ICC warrant. He has instead called on the federal government to act.
The United States and Israel are not members of the ICC, and the Trump administration has opposed the court’s actions against Israeli officials while preparing broader sanctions against the institution.
Trump Bans CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House: An old-fashioned attack on the First Amendment to try to cover Trump’s failures.
CNN Reports U.S. Almost Started War With China: An AI chatbot nearly turns bad intelligence into a military confrontation.
Singing the Palestine Blues: Ed Sheeran’s response to a painful controversy offers the rarest commodity in public life.
Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror: Soldiers, survivors, and Afghan civilians tell the connected story of September 11 and the long war that followed.
Miles Davis, “Israel” (1949): In hardly two minutes, Davis and John Carisi’s piece still sounds startlingly alive, though its connection to Israel remains obscure.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” ―attributed toWilliam Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), media tycoon
(Bettmann/Getty Images)
The term “fake news” first came into popular usage during the 2016 election campaign. It was used to call out viral stories circulating on Facebook and Twitter that were blatantly false, many created by shady content farms and intended to exploit users’ preexisting biases to win clicks. Before Donald Trump latched onto it, Hillary Clinton even used the phrase to attack stories directed at her, like the outrageous Pizzagate hoax that claimed she and other liberal elites were trafficking young women through a Washington pizza place.
But it was Trump who made the term ubiquitous, seemingly working it into every speech to dismiss stories that were not yet proven, like the reporting on his campaign’s Russia ties. That story held up: campaign chairman Paul Manafort had secretly been paid millions by a Russian oligarch years earlier for work he said would “greatly benefit the Putin government,” and during the campaign he shared internal polling data with a business associate the U.S. government believed had ties to Russian intelligence. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, meanwhile, had taken a paid trip to Moscow funded by Russia’s state television network shortly before joining the campaign, and later lied to the FBI and Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. None of this was the “fake news” Trump claimed it was — it was exactly the kind of undisclosed foreign entanglement voters had the right to know about. Both men were later convicted of crimes related to their Russian dealings, though both were ultimately pardoned by Trump.
By the time he took office, Trump had pivoted to using the term to describe any news story he didn’t like, of which there were many. Always thin-skinned, Trump seemed unable to tolerate any negative coverage. True stories about him paying off a porn star and a Playboy centerfold to keep their affairs private, his orders to fire FBI director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller, pressuring Ukrainian leaders to investigate the Bidens, and the fact that he was given early warnings about a potential Covid pandemic were all declared “fake news” by the president and later shown to be true. He used the term so often that it was named “word of the year” by Collins Dictionary in 2017.
He eventually started calling networks and newspapers themselves “fake news,” taking particular glee in attaching the term to many of our media’s most reliable sources like CNN and The New York Times, a practice he has only increased in his second term. I don’t know if he really expects to convince anyone, or if he’s just trying to sow chaos and doubt, but it’s the most cynical use of the presidential bully pulpit I’ve seen in my lifetime.
William Randolph Hearst (who was the basis for the character Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s movie Citizen Kane) knew more than a little about “fake news.” The most powerful media magnate in the country during the first half of the century, he used his nationwide string of newspapers, magazines, and radio stations to spread false stories both to gin up circulation and to shape U.S. and world politics. He was a master of “yellow journalism,” the practice of publishing sensational, exaggerated, and scandalous stories without concern for their accuracy.
The idea that “news is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising,” which is generally attributed to Hearst, is a bit exaggerated, but it points to a truth about Donald Trump and his attitude toward the press. For Trump, “fake news” is something he doesn’t want printed, and all else is a mixture of White House press releases, right-wing spin, and flattery from sources that have signed over their souls to Trump. In our current life here in Trump’s Bizarro World, you can tell the news is real if Trump calls it fake, and you can tell it’s fake if he reposts it on Truth [sic] Social.
The Department of Defence is examining how F-35 fighter jet parts bound for the US from Australia were unexpectedly diverted to Hong Kong, the acting prime minister, Richard Marles, has said.
Marles said “very much everything that has occurred at the Australian end” would be reviewed, but claimed the technology parts were not “sensitive”, as first reported by Politico over the weekend.
Veronica Escobar tells Guardian she was prevented from speaking to detainees at much-criticized Texas facility
Federal immigration officials in Texas prevented US representative Veronica Escobar from fully conducting her congressional oversight duties at a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, the lawmaker said in an interview with the Guardian.
Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso and surrounding areas on the US-Mexico border in west Texas, conducted an oversight visit last month at the Camp East Montana ICE tent facility housed in the Fort Bliss military base, after two separate “disturbances” had been reported there in recent weeks.
Carr was a member of the group in his teens and 20s. There is no evidence Trump’s powerful FCC chair participated in any inappropriate conduct
Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was for about a decade a member of a rogue Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group when he was in his late teens and 20s that some former members compared to a “cult”, according to a Guardian investigation.
The Midtown group, which was based in the Washington DC area, attracted young people who were seeking help with addiction, sometimes at the urging of their parents.
“Everyone has a Walt’s story,” as Larry Fletcher, owner of Walt’s Flavor Crisp Chicken Express on Lincoln Street, likes to put it.
For example, Wilmington City Councilor Alex Hackett has been a patron since childhood. Every day he attended the H. Fletcher Brown Boys & Girls Club, a counselor would give him a golden dollar for playing a chess match before running off to play sports. Hackett would spend that allowance at Walt’s.
“As a young teen growing up in the city, it got me through. I didn’t have to worry about dinner because I could go get that golden dollar, and I could go get that thigh sandwich,” he said. “My family, I mean, we basically lived through Walt’s Chicken. My dad, I don’t even know, he might have been a chicken (with) as much Walt’s Chicken as he ate.”
Get Involved Wilmington Black Restaurant Week features free events like a block party at Skratch Bar + Kitchen on Friday, Sept. 25, 5-9 p.m., a car show and community workout at Rodney Square on Saturday, Sept. 26, 7-10 p.m., and a food tasting festival at The Queen on Sunday, Sept. 27, noon to 5 p.m. There are also educational events for restaurateurs throughout the week.
Hackett recently got a look behind the scenes at Walt’s — and even served a few customers — in celebration of Wilmington Black Restaurant Week, which takes place through Sept. 27.
The week features specials at participating restaurants, culminating in a car show and community workout in Rodney Square on Saturday and a food festival at The Queen on Sunday.
Skratch Bar + Kitchen in Trolley Square will also be hosting a block party with a live DJ and food specials on Friday, 5-9 p.m — but co-owner Newton “Newdy” Felton intends to keep the party going until the pub closes at 1 a.m.
“I think representation matters. It’s important (for members of) my community to see someone who looks like them, to see what’s possible,” Felton said. “There’s a lot of restaurants (that) don’t get the exposure. Some of them don’t have the money (for advertising). … Some of them aren’t in ideal locations. So, for Wilmington to highlight Black Restaurant Week, (it gives) them visibility and that foot traffic they probably wouldn’t have gotten.”
Skratch Bar + Kitchen co-owner Newton “Newdy” Felton believes Wilmington Black Restaurant Week is important for the exposure it gives to local restaurants. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
That’s exactly why City Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo came up with the idea for Black Restaurant Week four years ago.
“A lot of times, especially in the Black community … we’re just not exposed to different lanes where we can have access to capital, have access to meeting the right people who can take our businesses to another level,” he said. “Food is like the carrot that we’re waving in front of everybody. But we really want this to be a week of exposure.”
Despite being a Wilmington staple for 51 years, even Walt’s has had its struggles, according to Symanthia Sheppard, wife of the late co-founder, Harry Sheppard, and owner of the Miller Road location.
“In the city of Wilmington, we have a lot of transient people that have come in, and came in as a result of us being a banking capital. So, people don’t know that we’re here. (Black Restaurant Week) is another avenue that we can utilize to say, ‘Hey, we’re still here,’” she said.
Symanthia joined her husband’s operation in 1982. Harry had founded the restaurant with Walter Samuels in 1975, moving to Vandever Ave. as the sole owner three years later.
According to Symanthia, Harry started running the restaurant before the building’s front facade was fully constructed.
The recipe for Walt’s Chicken is a trade secret, but Larry Fletcher, owner of the Lincoln Street location, says a key ingredient is “love.” | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“For two weeks, he sat in front of the restaurant 24 hours a day, slept in a chair in front of the restaurant until he could gain enough money to put a door, walls, on the building,” she said. “When you have that kind of tenacity, it is a privilege and an honor that today, we’re still here.”
Fletcher joined Walt’s in 1989. He had been working at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC since he was 14, and by 17, he’d realized he wanted to be a restaurateur.
“I advanced to management and so on, but the ceiling was always blocked for me with ownership. Mr. Sheppard provided a chance for ownership,” he said.
In 2003, Harry allowed Fletcher to open his own Walt’s location under the same name on Lincoln Street.
Fletcher described Harry as modest, hardworking and always willing to provide second chances for those who needed them.
Larry Fletcher and Symanthia Sheppard sit outside Walt’s Flavor Crisp Chicken Express on Lincoln Street. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“If you came out of the Plummer (Community Corrections) Center (or) you were transitioning from hard times, he provided the opportunity to get back out and become a productive citizen,” he said.
That legacy of giving back to the community has continued beyond Harry’s death. For example, Symanthia still runs Walt’s summer internship program.
“They learn all of the skills of (working in a restaurant), but they also learn life skills,” she said. “(We’re) constantly trying to invest in them, teach them, train them about integrity, about being a person of your word … how important it is to have that tenacity, follow through on everything that you do, no matter what it is.”
It’s not just the interns that Symanthia has watched grow up at Walt’s, but generations of customers and family members like her niece, Essence Sheppard. Symanthia plans to retire in the near future and pass the torch to Essence. Fletcher hopes to find a successor and do the same.
Symanthia’s advice to budding restaurateurs is to “stick it out.”
“Every negative word that you hear, everything that seems like an obstacle or a struggle, use it as a stepping stone,” she said. “Then, have the tenacity to continue — especially if you’re doing it because you want to build a legacy.”
Why Should Delaware Care? One of Delaware’s largest companies sold its offices less than two years after moving to Wilmington, abandoning a project that was expected to reenergize the city’s downtown and was heavily backed by taxpayer dollars. Now, returned incentives are being redirected to other initiatives aimed at supporting housing and economic development.
Seven months after Incyte scaled back plans to build its headquarters in Wilmington, the city is putting $1.15 million in returned incentive money from the pharmaceutical giant toward creating housing and businesses.
On Thursday, Mayor John Carney’s office announced the city used the funds, rescinded from the company, to purchase four pieces of land along West 7th Street in Wilmington’s Quaker Hill neighborhood.
The city released a request for proposals (RFP), inviting developers to submit plans to build housing and commercial properties on the sites.
The money used to purchase the land came from a $10 million grant Wilmington officials quietly awarded to Incyte for its headquarters expansion back in 2024. The grant was not previously known to the public until the Delaware Business Times broke the story in April.
As part of an amended agreement with the city, Incyte returned $5 million, but it may retain the other half if the company employs an annual average of 200 full-time employees at the downtown Bracebridge building for a decade, a city spokesperson told Spotlight Delaware in July.
“This work is about stabilizing neighborhoods, creating opportunity, and making sure Wilmington remains a city where people can afford to live and build a future,” said Mayor John Carney in a Thursday statement.
City officials are ensuring affordable housing units are also built on the properties, though the total number of affordable housing units has not yet been confirmed, according to Caroline Klinger, Carney’s spokeswoman.
“At this time, we’re awaiting proposals and will have more clarity on specific plans for these units as those come in,” Klinger said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
The Quaker Hill project would help push more redevelopment west from Market Street. The recently completed Press apartments are visible to the east here. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
New housing in Quaker Hill
Wilmington’s new land use investment comes as affordable housing has become a growing priority in the city. In August, Carney opened applications for developers seeking a share of the $8.4 million in affordable housing subsidies approved as part of this year’s budget. City Council members have also worked to direct funding toward short-term housing assistance.
Klinger noted that the city is seeking mixed-use developments. The properties are zoned for central retail (C-3) under city regulations — a designation that covers residential, commercial, and retail use and allows for a “wide variety of retail and display services,” according to the requests for proposals (RFP) on the project.
The city is looking for a developer to build a mix of at least three affordable housing units and market-rate housing, according to the RFP application. Klinger added that the total number of housing units will be up to the developer.
Developers awarded the Quaker Hill properties will receive city funding to build a select number of affordable housing units, set at 80% of the area median income (AMI) for a 10-year period.
For a family of four, that translates to a maximum annual household income of $98,150 according to HUD’s most recent income limits for Wilmington.
It’s also unclear whether the city will approve more than one developer, but Klinger noted that developers would be more likely to apply for all parcels rather than just a select few.
The city document also calls for redevelopment that benefits the surrounding community, boosts the city’s tax base and job opportunities, and improves neighborhood infrastructure.
The proposals and process are being overseen by the Wilmington Urban Development Action Grant Corporation (UDAG), which the city defines as “a quasi-governmental nonprofit development corporation, wholly owned by the city of Wilmington.”
UDAG had previously contributed $1.5 million of the $10 million city incentive to Incyte, Klinger told Spotlight back in April.
The sites, which city officials called “blighted and underutilized,” are owned by UDAG. They include three mixed-use buildings and one vacant lot, which the city purchased from private owners back in April, according to New Castle County’s parcel records.
The sites, located just west of downtown Wilmington’s central business district, encompass 301, 305, 307, and 309 West 7th Street. The properties are currently mixed-use buildings, with bodegas on the ground floor and apartments above them.
Developers’ proposals are due October 16.
The scuttling of the project to bring Incyte’s headquarters downtown has led local leaders to reallocate incentive funds to programs around housing and entrepreneurship. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY ELSA KEGELMAN
In July, the state reallocated $4.5 million of the $14.7 million it had awarded to Incyte to an economic development initiative to expand business districts around the state, while the rest of the money was returned to the state’s Strategic Fund, which broadly supports business expansion in Delaware.
That state funding, in addition to the $10 million Wilmington allocated, was part of a package of incentives the city and state put together to bring Incyte’s headquarters to Wilmington in the first place.
Incyte has been headquartered just outside Wilmington’s city limits, in the Alapocas community, for more than a decade. Fueled by strong sales of its cancer treatments, the company had pushed in recent years to expand its existing campus there, but ran into pushback from nearby residents.
That opposition pushed state and city officials toward a different plan to court Incyte to bring its expansion downtown.
In spring 2024, Incyte purchased the twin Bracebridge office buildings, formerly home to credit card company MBNA, with plans to turn them into its global headquarters. The nearly $50 million purchase was widely seen as a win for the city, since the largely vacant buildings had sat as a drag on Wilmington’s office market.
Soon after, the state kicked in close to $15 million to help finance Incyte’s move downtown. During a meeting of the state committee that approves such subsidies, Kurt Foreman, then the head of Delaware’s public-private economic development organization, said the deal could lead to the creation of 866 new jobs in Wilmington’s downtown core.
Then in December 2024, Wilmington officials followed with a $10 million commitment of their own, which wasn’t publicly disclosed at the time.
Incyte poured nearly $29 million into renovating the properties during the remainder of 2024 and through 2025, according to the company’s own earnings reports. Then, last winter, construction activity appeared to stop.
The timing lined up with a leadership shakeup, as Incyte had recently named Bill Meury — a pharmaceutical executive with roots in Boston-area startups — as its new CEO. He succeeded Hervé Hoppenot, longtime leader, who had been the one to sign off on the Delaware deal.
Weeks after taking over, Meury said the company would be taking “a fresh look” at its operations, including its capital allocations, according to a report from Reuters.
By February, Incyte publicly announced its scaled-back expansion plans through a series of media interviews in which officials said the company would sell the Bracebridge buildings to Buccini Pollin Group, then lease back some of the space.
State officials previously told Spotlight that no new state dollars would be flowing to BPG for the project.
Why Should Delaware Care? Southern Delaware is a gathering hotspot for the Hispanic community, with many working at the area’s poultry farms, or setting up successful businesses. Georgetown held its annual Festival Hispano on Sunday, where families spent their afternoon shopping, dancing and dining together.
Georgetown’s main street is lined up with back-to-back Latino-owned businesses offering a multitude of services. There’s tax services, artisanal shops and restaurants. Last weekend the street was also home to the annual Festival Hispano, or Hispanic Festival.
Families, groups of friends, advocates and elected officials poured in to feast on sizzling pupusas, or Salvadorean meat pies; play a round of balloon darts; and spin around to the sounds of salsa music.
The street’s businesses are a testament to Georgetown’s established Hispanic community, such as La Esperanza, which has offered social services for three decades.
The family event was organized by First State Community Action and The Voice Radio Network, which hosts multiple Spanish-language talk shows.
Spotlight Delaware captured both vendors and community members on Sunday who came together amid Hispanic Heritage Month.
Festival Hispano’s main stage featured multiple headliners ranging from salsa music to regional Mexican music. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Isabella Ayala tries one of the many beverage offerings at Georgetown’s Festival Hispano. She came to the festival representing her mother’s home country, Mexico. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NATHALY SUQUINAGUA
Indumentaria Maya is a clothing shop that sells traditional wear and caters to soccer fanatics in Southern Delaware. Normally both women are found at the Laurel Junction Flea Market where they hold a small post. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Eiser Milian, Roberto Milian, and Carlos Izaguirre said they look forward to attending Georgetown’s Festival Hispano each year. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NATHALY SUQUINAGUA
Ava’s mother brougher to Festival Hispano to enjoy the activities geared toward for younger attendees, such as the costumed characters walking around and the small train driving children around. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Naydeline Lopez, who owns Nassi’s Face Painting, set up her paint palettes in preparation for any designs attendees requested, such as flags or butterflies. Here, she’s painting Milagros Pacheco’s cheek. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Towards the end of Festival Hispano, Charlie Cruz and his percussion players are seen playing salsa rhythms to the crowd listening in. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NATHALY SUQUINAGUA
Las Cuatro Hermanas is a Salvadorean pupuseria from Millsboro that handmakes savory meat and cheese pies. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Festival Hispano featured two stages for live performances by Latin artists. Three women formed a circle and danced to the music’s rhythm. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Brittney and Jose attended Festival Hispano to enjoy the cultural food, such as chopped up fruit with spicy tajin and chamoy, as well as aguas frescas made from hibiscus. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
Agencies in at least 15 states have reported increased calls this year, as drought and population growth drive the animals closer to people in search of food.
Starting with package version 42-1, the mkinitcpio systemd hook now includes systemd-pcrosseparator.service (as intended by systemd v261).
This affects the measurements of PCR values 0-7, 9 and 12-14.
If you configured the systemd hook and unlock LUKS partitions, that depend on these values, you need to re-enroll the TPM2 in use.
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Immigration detentions involving Haitian residents have increased sharply in Ohio since Temporary Protected Status for Haitians ended July 27, according to a new report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.
Springfield ICE Watch documented 74 Haitian detainees from Aug. 7 through Sept. 17, representing a 142.3% increase compared with bookings before TPS expired. The report reviewed rosters from four Ohio facilities that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two other detention centers were excluded because they do not publicly release rosters.
The increase follows a June Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to terminate TPS protections for roughly 330,000 Haitians nationwide. TPS had allowed eligible Haitians to live and work legally in the United States while conditions in Haiti remained unsafe.
About 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield under a mix of immigration statuses. Local advocates say ICE has increasingly conducted traffic stops and enforcement actions near apartment complexes, stores and workplaces. Springfield ICE Watch said only 8% of detained Haitians it tracked had existing removal orders.
ICE has also expanded electronic monitoring in the community through ankle monitors and the SmartLINK phone application. DHS says those supervision decisions are made individually based on immigration status, criminal history and compliance considerations.
PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC; Remedy A surprisingly conventional game from a famously weird developer, this sequel to 2019’s Control is accomplished but safe
This is an arthouse action game from Finnish developer Remedy, masters of exactly this type of thing. It’s a sequel, however, so not only must it clear the high bar that its strikingly distinctive predecessor has set – it must also ideally arrive with a bushel of new ideas. There are clear and valuable strengths here in character progression and the lustrous presentation of its paranormal world, but Resonant doesn’t feel as enjoyably recondite or expansive in its influences as 2019’s Control did. As you wander New York brandishing supernatural abilities against glowing orange foes, the sad sense creeps in that you might be playing any number of games.
As paranormal event survivor Jesse Faden, your journey through the original Control was like a sequence of playable Twilight Zone episodes, battling prosaic household objects with supernatural properties that teased and twisted reality inside an endlessly fascinating supernatural government bureau called the Oldest House. You’d navigate architecturally impossible spaces bridging the subconscious and the bricks-and-mortar world, in order to defeat a malevolent fridge. That’s broadly true again in Resonant, albeit with diminishing returns. This time you’re playing as Jesse’s brother Dylan, waking up after years of containment in the Oldest House to find its contents have escaped into downtown Manhattan. So you head out of the interesting place, and into a setting you’ve explored before in Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Division, Max Payne, and others ad infinitum.
Jenn Lichter’s childhood followed a difficult path. The resilience she gained helped her achieve an unbreakable ultrarunning feat this summer
On 27 June, Jenn Lichter lined up for her first 100-mile race, the Western States 100. The oldest and most prestigious 100-miler in the world, Western States attracts a highly competitive field from around the globe – the athletes run across the Sierra Nevada from Olympic Valley to Auburn, California. Despite 18,000ft of climbing and daytime temperatures often flirting with triple digits, Lichter went in confident. “I wanted to win, there was no secret to that,” she says. “That’s just who I am.”
The race remained close for the first half, until the 30-year-old made a move on the climb to Devil’s Thumb. The gap grew and at the final aid station, Lichter had a sizable lead over the athlete in second place. A mile from the finish, Nick Cornell, Lichter’s fiance, told her she was just ahead of the course record. “That was the first I had heard about it,” Lichter says. “He knew my competitive side would jump at the challenge.”
If anything, the ongoing war is uniting a divided country against the foreign invaders. Washington seems a long way from grasping this point
The US president, Donald Trump, asked recently on one of his Truth Social rants: “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” So frenetic and all-over-the-place are Trump’s statements that one does not know which are actual policies and which are simply noise. But if counting on the “Iranian people” to rise up and fight is indeed US policy then, as far as I can tell from within Iran, it is a failed one. And miserably so. At least for now.
There is no reliable nationwide polling that can tell us what Iranians think about the war in real time. So this is an observation, not a poll. It comes from conversations I have had with many people.
Hossein Hamdieh holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King’s College London. He is currently based in Tehran, where he works as a social researcher
Beatrice Caciotti for ProPublica. Source images: U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ official Facebook page.
In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.
For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.
Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.
Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.
But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives thatCollins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.
Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.
What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.
Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.
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Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.
Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.
Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.
Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.
Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.
The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.
Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.
The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.
ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.
Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins walks in the annual Moxie Day Parade in July in Lisbon, Maine.Scott Eisen/Getty Images
Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.
Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.
“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”
Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”
She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.
“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”
In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.
Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.
Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”
But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.
Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
Martin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019.U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook
The Navatek Method
Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.
The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.
In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.
Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.
Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.
Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”
Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.
Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.
Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment orbespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.
Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.
Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.
Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.
“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.
While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.
Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.
Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.
Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.
“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”
In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.
Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.
Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.
The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”
But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”
In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.
“Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale.”
Eric Schiff, former Navatek executive
Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.
In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”
Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”
The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.
“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.
Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”
Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.
Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.
While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.
The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.
In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.
“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”
Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”
The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.
Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.
Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.
To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.
In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.
In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.
“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.
FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.
The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it shouldsend the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.
The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.
“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”
Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.
Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”
“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”
Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.
The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had clearedit with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.
The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.
The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get to know you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.
A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.
“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.
Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.
Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.
Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.
“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”
Downfall, Cover-up
In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”
This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.
A check for $150,000 to the Collins super PAC 1820 from the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers — a shell company that obscured the actual donor.PacMar Technologies LLC, fka Martin Defense Group, LLC v. Kao
The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.
Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”
Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”
Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.
Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.
But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.
“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.
Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”
“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”
On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.
Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.
The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.
They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.
Collins christens a Navatek-designed boat at a University of Maine engineering lab in October 2019.U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook
The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.
He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.
Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”
Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.
Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.
For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.
Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.
Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.
Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.
By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.
Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.
Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.
Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.
Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.
Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.
Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Do You Have Information About Political Dealmaking in Washington?
We’re still reporting on pay-for-play arrangements between powerful companies and elected officials.
When the pop singer Pink took to social media to decry rapper Macklemore’s comments on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians — a slaughter that has taken the lives of more than 20,000 kids — she brought up her decadelong role as a UNICEF ambassador to show that she cares about children.
Now, a new petition signed by more than 160,000 people, including the backing of actor Javier Bardem, is calling for Pink’s removal from her UNICEF USA role. The petition organizers, Swifties Against Genocide, named for fans of the pop singer Taylor Swift, said that Pink’s remarks sidelined concern for Palestinian children and “fueled ongoing conflict and struggles for visibility and empathy.”
“As individuals who care deeply about the welfare of children around the world, we must hold UNICEF Ambassadors to the highest standards of neutrality and compassion,” the organizers wrote. “Palestinian children, like all children affected by genocide, deserve ambassadors who unequivocally extend support and empathy towards their plight.”
The petition is the latest example of the type of public pressure supporters of Palestine are seeking to exert amid a tidal shift of sentiment in the U.S. on Palestine and Israel over the past three years. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has dramatically soured U.S. opinion on Israel, with a majority viewing Israel unfavorably and more Americans taking a sympathetic view of Palestinians.
“UNICEF itself has called Gaza a graveyard for children. Its ambassadors are supposed to speak for those children, not attack the people who do.”
The transformations have played out in the current midterm election cycle, with candidates pushing to sever military ties with Israel winning in primaries across the country. In the past several weeks, the subject has upended mainstream popular culture, with battle lines being drawn over a stadium concert tour by pop icon Ed Sheeran.
The pressure on UNICEF to part ways with Pink is tied up with a strategy among Palestine solidarity activists to extract a price from Israel for its continued occupation and genocide of Palestinians.
For Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow with Al-Shabaka U.S., the petition is “a clear attempt to draw a new line in the sand and make the point that choosing to take the moderate lane is unacceptable.”
“These past couple days have proven that being shamelessly pro-Israel, or even refusing to take sides in the face of a genocide, is no longer the safe route,” he said, citing a shift of the “cultural hegemony” in the West.
Though Sheeran himself — who said at his latest concert that he was listening to both sides — is not a target of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, the cultural backlash to his move to take Macklemore off the tour reinforced the logic of the growing movement, Natasha Lennard recently wrote in The Intercept.
Representatives for Pink, UNICEF, and Change.org did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other advocates for Palestinian rights reaffirmed the petitioners’ aims.
“Pink should step down. UNICEF itself has called Gaza a graveyard for children. Its ambassadors are supposed to speak for those children, not attack the people who do,” said Raed Jarrar, the advocacy director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “Whether UNICEF removes her or not, it’s time for her to step down.”
Attacking Pro-Palestine Speech
The controversy involving Pink kicked off during Sheeran’s show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4.
Macklemore, one of the opening acts, spoke out against Israeli apartheid and the genocide of Palestinians, addressing Jewish people in the crowd to say that criticism of genocide and the Israeli government “is in no way a criticism of you.”
After backlash from pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League — and perhaps more critically, pressure from billionaire Robert Kraft, the deeply pro-Israel owner of the New England Patriots and Massachusetts’s Gillette Stadium — Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his tour. Then came the backlash to the backlash, with other opening acts on the tour and even Sheeran’s backing band dropping out in solidarity with Macklemore.
Pink, the pop star who rose to fame with a string of hits in the early 2000s, waded into the controversy early on. After attending the September 4 show, Pink reshared a social media post from the group Stop Antisemitism that said Macklemore’s claims of a genocide were “false” and that concertgoers were owed apologies and refunds.
“I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund,” she later wrote on Instagram, explaining why she reshared the post. “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘That scared me, and it scared people I love’ — without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”
She added that the protest slogan “From river to the sea” and the use of the term “Zionist” have become “a slur.”
Pink said that “nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child.” She mentioned her experience as a UNICEF ambassador visiting children born in war zones. She “grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence,” she wrote.
Yet Pink’s grief, or any celebrity’s, has done little to change conditions on the ground for Palestinian children. Just on Monday, an 11-year-old boy was shot to death by the Israeli military in one of Gaza’s apparent “safe zones.”
UNICEF, which operates in Gaza, itself reported that Israeli attacks have killed at least 300 children in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire agreement last October. Food insecurity and lack of access to clean water also remain issues due to Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid from entering the Strip.
In her social media post, Pink said she does not speak for Israel but reiterated her stance that “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations.” She said she was not “going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.”
Over the weekend, the petition calling out Pink also drew the support from Javier Bardem, an outspoken advocate for Palestine and major funder of the Palestinian film “All That’s Left of You,” who shared the petition on his Instagram profile.
“She can not defend children’s rights,” Bardem said, “while not condemning the genocide in Gaza.”
I have this XR that was left in a storage for some time and last night I decided to see if its still alive. This is the sequence that followed:
When I first connected it, the charger light turned red and the board's power button started blinking 16 times. I understand that this is expected after not being charged for a long time. I opened the app, while still plugged in and the board connected to it via bluetooth and performed a firmware update.
After the firmware update it kept flashing 16 times. I checked the diagnostics and the battery was showing 32F temperature. I understand that this was also to be expected. When I opened the Diagnostics it also prompted me to reboot the unit.
I left it connected and after 2 hours or so, the charger light changed to green. I unplugged it and power cycled the board. The front and back lights turned on, it seemed to be working fine. The Diagnostics was showing the correct battery temperature and I was no longer receiving the error 16, asking me to reboot.
I left the unit to charge over night in order to balance the battery (as suggested by AI) considering it hasn't been charged in such a long time.
In the morning, the charger light was green, the board power button blue led was blinking slowly.
I unplugged it and tried to turn it on but nothing happens when I press the power button. I short-pressed it, I also tried log-press for 3, 5 and 10 seconds - still nothing.
When I connect it to the charger, the unit connects to the app via bluetooth, it shows battery level at 98%-100%, the power button blue led blinks slows but as soon as I disconnect the charger, the unit dies.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how should I approach this?
I am assuming that the battery is dead but considering that the unit was alive last night, I was hopeful that I will still be able to save it.
Jacinda Ardern and her husband, Clarke Gayford, have bought a $5.3m home in Sydney’s northern beaches, according to a source with knowledge of the sale.
The former New Zealand prime minister settled on a home in Dee Why after looking at properties in the area including in nearby Curl Curl.
The Reserve Bank governor said AI could be a bubble and there was no evidence it is making the economy more efficient, as the Albanese government claims the technology will solve Australia’s economic malaise.
Ahead of an expected interest rate rise next week Michele Bullock also said the slump in house prices was deeper than others in Australia’s recent history.
Monday Google opened preorders for its "Googlebook" laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google's blog post added that "At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors" (paired with NPUs to power AI features).
"Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia," TechCrunch points out. But "the real pull for the new devices is that they'll prominently feature Gemini's latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop."
Google is trying to offer a laptop with unique features like an AI-powered cursor, vibe-coded widgets, and support for AI-enhanced dictation. The latter is a feature called Rambler, which cleans up messy, rambling brain dumps into readable text. The move is a bet that AI, specifically Google's Gemini, could be enough of a draw to get people to buy a new laptop that bakes in AI instead of running them via desktop apps you install or access through the browser... On the Googlebook, Google is trying to reinvent the "point-and-click" experience of desktop computing to now include an AI element: The cursor serves as a conduit to Gemini. The company suggests various ways this could be used, like highlighting content on a web page for Gemini to work with, asking Gemini to see if an email you've hovered your cursor over is suspicious, or selecting images and then asking Gemini to visualize them together...
What's more interesting about the Googlebook is how it's seemingly part of Google's longer-term plan to capture a large part of the K-12 market that currently relies on Chromebooks and push them toward the company's Gemini AI. There are somewhere around 50 million Chromebooks in schools, used by students and educators, Google has said. In May, the company told TechCrunch that its current Chromebooks would continue to be supported, though many would become eligible to transition to the new Googlebook experience in the future...
Flagship devices in the new range are being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, with materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber... Google says the device will offer up to 14 hours of battery life.
Googlebooks will be decorated with an exterior Glowbar "which dances when you boot up, sweeps to show battery level, and supports other playful patterns," according to Google's blog post. "We're also opening Glowbar access to developers to build custom, interactive animations."
After testing actual Googlebooks, The Verge's reviewer first acknowledges that "it might be just another Trojan horse for Gemini." Still, "The hardware is polished (since it's based on current laptops). The OS is familiar (if you've ever used a Chromebook). But most impressive, it integrates your Android phone with your PC so they feel more like one device. It's the culmination of a series of new ideas that blur the two devices together.
"After my first look, I went from doubtful to excited by the prospect of Google pulling it all off..."
The Asus was incredibly lightweight; the Lenovo has plenty of ports and an optional mouse with a matching Glowbar light; the Acer's convertible form factor allows some tablet-like use (and it's pretty affordable for a Panther Lake laptop). The HP had a great-looking screen and a latticeless keyboard I surprisingly didn't hate, and the Dell is basically a gold XPS 13 (which is excellent) but with a different chip...
But everything really special about Googlebooks comes down to software... You can cast apps from an Android phone directly to a Googlebook, even without touching your phone. Googlebooks essentially have two app drawers: a G-logo start menu for installed Googlebook apps and a second one beside it that pulls up mobile apps from your phone. Click a phone app and you can fully use that app with the mouse and keyboard or the Googlebook's touchscreen. It's a bit like iPhone Mirroring on macOS, but the apps are individually extracted to the desktop OS instead of showing your whole phone interface.
Googlebooks also have a nifty feature called Continue On where the icons of apps you're currently using on your phone appear in the bottom bar — allowing you to click it on the laptop and hand it off to the Googlebook. These app handoffs can transition to a native app or a web app, depending on how developers have programmed it... The other big way Googlebooks interact with an Android phone is Quick Access, allowing you to see and access all the files stored on your phone right in the desktop Files app... If you have an iPhone then you're limited to a Link to iOS app that just does some message syncing and replying... [W]hen it comes to mainline gaming, Nvidia's GeForce Now service is also coming to Googlebooks, and the first year is free with one of Google's new laptops.
"It's not every day we get a new player in the desktop operating system and laptop spaces," the reviewer points out. "There seems to be a higher ceiling of potential with Googlebooks than there was with Chromebooks, along with some cool features, but Google has a lot to prove at higher prices than people are used to paying for its laptops."
Party strategists say careful targeting of seats has paid off and should continue, but some say a wider vision is needed
One of the more dramatic moments in a Liberal Democrat conference otherwise short of them came late on Sunday, when the party frontbencher Lisa Smart told the polling veteran John Curtice that, in effect, he no longer understood modern politics.
Curtice had warned the Lib Dems they risked being left behind, with the lack of a coherent national message seeing them all but ignored outside a few electoral strongholds. Smart’s response? In the new era of five- or six-party politics, and mass tactical voting, this does not matter.
PM says immediate focus is on rebuilding bridges with EU as he prepares for first meeting with Ursula von der Leyen
Andy Burnham has opened the door to fighting the next election on the UK rejoining the EU, but said his immediate priority was continuing to rebuild bridges with European allies.
The prime minister, who will hold his first meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Tuesday, did not rule out including reversing Brexit in Labour’s next manifesto – but suggested the country should focus on securing closer trading ties first.
The rights of overseas voters are protected by US federal law. It’s not hard – but Americans should start planning now
The UK hosts the second largest population of voting-age US citizens outside the United States, but Americans living in the UK vote at very low levels in US elections.
The US government’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimated that there were 298,268 voting-age US citizens in the UK in 2022, second only to Canada. But FVAP also estimated that only 3.8% of these US citizens in Britain voted in that year’s midterm elections. Why do hundreds of thousands of eligible US voters in the UK not exercise their right to vote, even though US rules for voting abroad are relatively welcoming compared to many other countries?
Constantly deactivates on me and the grip tape has a bubble that keeps popping up. Should I replace the grip tape and see what happens? Should I replace the whole sensor and just be done with it? I like the foot pad it just constantly turns off while ridding and doesn’t always activate.
The UK government borrowed a higher-than-expected £18.3bn last month, increasing the pressure on John Healey as he attempts to calm jittery bond markets before next month’s budget.
Official figures released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday said public sector net borrowing – the difference between government spending and income – was £2.9bn higher last month than in August 2025.
Dog collars, guitars and self-portraits among 285 objects, with money going to her animal welfare foundation and son
An auction of the French film star turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot’s personal items has fetched nearly €1m (£858,000, US$1.15m, A$1.61m) in Paris, almost 20 times the estimate, according to the auction house Millon.
A total of 285 objects were auctioned, ranging from straw hats, sunglasses and nightgowns to tableware and furniture from Bardot’s homes in Paris and Saint-Tropez, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Generations of artisans from Mumbai to Lucknow have shaped the world’s most coveted designs. Plus, the gen Z memes giving classic Bollywood a new life
The zardozi embroidery on a Dior dress, the T-strap leather sandals at a Prada show, the mirror-work technique used on a Fendi bag – for decades, the skill of Indian artisans has been an invisible force behind some of the world’s most coveted fashion.
Now, that work is beginning to claim its own place in the spotlight, and the Mumbai-based textile and embroidery atelier Chanakya International is at the forefront.
President has been posting on Washington arch, AI and his ‘25 top achievements’ – the chances of an uplifting speech appear slim
The annual gathering of the United Nations general assembly has historically been a platform for US presidents to display their most serious face and a positive vision to the world.
From Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to John F Kennedy and Barack Obama, over eight decades US leaders have used the setting to expound on grand themes before a global audience at pivotal moments in international affairs.
In today’s newsletter: Intelligence chiefs warn that Russia’s appetite for risk is growing, as sabotage and other covert attacks target countries supporting Ukraine
Good morning. As the UN general assembly kicks off in New York later today, we anticipate a heavy focus on the ongoing conflicts in Iran, Ukraine and the Gulf – as well as the inevitable body language analysis of Andy Burnham’s first in-person meeting with Donald Trump.
But another related conflict is likely to dominate informal discussions: the intensifying acts of sabotage on European states that are believed to trace back to Russia but deliberately fall below the threshold for military response – a so-called hybrid or “shadow war” with the singular purpose of disrupting support for Ukraine.
Yemen | The UK has agreed to provide defensive air support to Saudi Arabia to help counter Houthi fighters and restore stability in the Middle East while driving down the cost of living at home, Andy Burnham has said, ahead of his first meeting with Donald Trump.
Environment | The “jaw-dropping” El Niño currently heating up the planet has burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon, several months before its expected peak.
Gaza | Israeli and UK military commanders could be requested to give evidence to an inquest concerning three British aid workers killed in Gaza when aid vehicles they were travelling in were hit by an airstrike.
US | After President Trump’s snap decision to ban CNN from the White House, the four other networks that comprise the White House’s TV pool decided they would cease their pooled coverage of the president.
Slavery | Bones of the enslaver Edward Colston are likely to remain interred in a church in Bristol if and when the currently unused building is given a new lease of life as a community resource, it has emerged.
(StatePoint) People from all over the world come to Kentucky to take part in celebrations of music, culture and heritage. These events range from small-town cultural celebrations to massive annual festivals.
Rescuers search for missing in collapsed homes after storm causes landslides, travel chaos and power outages
Typhoon Dujuan has killed at least four people and injured 22 in Japan, while tens of thousands of houses near Tokyo remained without power after the storm swept through the region, authorities said on Tuesday.
Dujuan – which brought violent winds of 144km/h (89mph) – was moving away from Japan on Tuesday morning, allowing authorities to downgrade most heavy rain and landslide warnings.
Canadian province alleges deadly attack could have been prevented if company had warned police of shooter’s ChatGPT use
British Columbia has sued OpenAI, saying a mass shooting at a school in the Canadian province could have been prevented if the company had warned local law enforcement that the shooter had used ChatGPT to plan the attack.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court on Monday, names OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, as defendants. It is seeking damages to fund recovery efforts in the province after the February attack, as well as an order directing changes to the way the company handles ChatGPT conversations that could lead to violence.
Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night.
Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower...
[Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-parent's own Meta AI app... Meta pitched the app as a way for consumers to manage and direct supercharged digital assistants that can perform a number of tasks across the web, like filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes... "I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC in a "Squawk on the Street" interview on Monday. "Now you've got Meta's Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption." The buzz around Meta was also reflected in the stock, which surged more than 11% on Monday.
Amazon is already blocking Muse, reports GeekWire. Amazon first tried to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon, but they were unsuccessful:
The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed..."
Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. [Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, the article poitns out, "then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on Sept. 10."]
On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment. The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Muse also appears to scrape account data, reports CNBC. But Shopify, however, "is working with Meta on Muse access. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announced Monday that the e-commerce site was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in its online stores."
People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that cost up to £600. Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisis
A December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many people would be giving as Christmas presents: the electric toothbrush. For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end. The difference is that an electric one moves the brush head for you”. Progress indeed.
Nearly six decades on, electric toothbrushes can do a lot more than merely jiggle, offering multiple speeds and movement sensors for real-time tracking of where you’ve brushed – some even promise gum-massage or tongue-cleaning modes. Prices range from about £25 for a basic Oral B model to £599.99 for a Philips Sonicare model that gives “smart coverage feedback”.The latest super-toothbrush – a mere £419.99 – features a camera and a built-in water jet to clean between teeth, using AI to identify gaps. Created by Dyson, it’s still, essentially, a stick with a brush on the end (although there is another toothbrush on the market that’s shaped like a mouthguard, with individual brushes, that claims to clean your teeth in 20 seconds).
Trump’s announcement on Russia ally comes as he steps up his trade war with Canada, a long-term US ally and top supplier of potash
President Donald Trump has said he is working on a “massive” deal to buy fertiliser from Belarus, pivoting away from main supplier Canada amid an escalating trade dispute, and moving instead toward an ally of Russia.
“The United States is working on a massive deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” Trump said on his Truth Social network. “The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our farmers and ranchers.”
SUZHOU, China, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Boomray Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. ("BoomRay"), a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering innovative radioligand therapies (RLTs) for precision oncology diagnostics and therapeutics, today announced that it has entered into an exclusive global license agreement with…
In humanity’s quest to constrain the dangers from fast-advancing artificial intelligence, many have looked to the most revolutionary technology that preceded it: nuclear weapons. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence “far more dangerous than nukes.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who assigns The Making of the Atomic Bomb to employees and has likened himself to the Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, describes the most powerful AI models as “weaponizable nuclear materials.” When asked how a technology such as AI can be regulated, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman often references the world’s nuclear materials watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has made the same comparison.
CaskX once again ranked as one of the fastest growing financial services company on the Inc 5000 this year. CaskX specializes in bourbon whiskey barrel investment and scotch whisky cask investment. The company helps individual investors acquire portfolios of bourbon…
Bregman was standing in the on-deck circle preparing for his at-bat when his teammate Michael Busch checked his swing and fouled off a pitch from the Cincinnati Reds’ Luis Mey. The ball struck Bregman in the face, and he immediately jogged toward the Cubs’ dugout with his hand covering the left side of his face. He was taken to hospital for X-rays and CT scans.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — President Donald Trump’s unexpectedly cordial meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani drew backlash from some of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, including political activist Laura Loomer.
Trump met with Mamdani at Gracie Mansion on Monday ahead of events surrounding the United Nations General Assembly. Despite months of political attacks between the two, Trump publicly praised Mamdani afterward and said the mayor has the “potential” to be “a great mayor.” Associated Press reported that the meeting focused in part on housing affordability and other New York City issues.
Loomer responded angrily on X, writing that she was “pissed off” and complaining that people she described as “anti-American Islamic jihadists” were being “rewarded.” She did not name Mamdani directly in the post, but Mediaite reported the comments were in response to Trump’s meeting with him.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and New York’s first Muslim mayor, has sharply criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. There is no evidence supporting Loomer’s characterization of him as an “Islamic jihadist.”
Loomer was not alone in objecting. New York radio host Sid Rosenberg also criticized Trump for meeting Mamdani and argued the appearance could hurt Republicans politically.
The three news outlets President Trump banned from the White House last Friday have filed their anticipated lawsuit against his administration to restore their access.
In the new complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday, CNN, MS Now and Politico alleged that Trump had violated the First Amendment and due process by stripping the outlets of their White House access in a blatant act of retaliation for coverage he disliked.
SACRAMENTO, California — Support for California’s proposed billionaire tax has fallen below 50% as voters prepare to decide Proposition 40 in November, according to a new UC Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll.
The survey found 45% support the measure, 43% oppose it and 12% remain undecided. That represents a decline from a February survey in which 50% supported Proposition 40 and 28% opposed it. The Sept. 8-14 poll included 2,418 respondents and has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.
Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of Californians with assets exceeding $1 billion. State election officials have qualified the measure for the Nov. 3 ballot.
Democrats remain substantially more supportive, while Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes the proposal and has instead advocated a national approach to taxing billionaires. Labor unions, including SEIU-UHW, support Proposition 40, arguing the revenue would help finance health care and other programs.
The campaign is attracting substantial spending. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has contributed more than $100 million to groups opposing the measure.
Polling remains mixed. A separate September Public Policy Institute of California survey found 52% of likely voters supporting Proposition 40 and 46% opposing it after respondents were read the official ballot description.
In the first interview since his ex-wife's trial, Patrick Clancy describes what happened at home before his children were killed and how he handled his grief.
Lindsay Clancy's lawyers asked a judge to question the holdout juror about his alleged use of a cellphone during deliberations and his answers on a questionnaire.
White House promoted its own ‘Trump TV’ feed online after ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC decline to participate
The major US television news outlets agreed to suspend their video coverage of Donald Trump after the administration banned journalists from several outlets from entering the White House grounds.
The collective decision came after the barred outlets – CNN, MS Now and Politico – sued the administration on Monday, saying the president’s actions were a violation of their first amendment rights.
Republican president said he hoped the democratic socialist would be a ‘great mayor’ for New York City
Donald Trump said on Monday that he hoped Zohran Mamdani would be a “great mayor” for New York, an unusually warm assessment of the democratic socialist leader whom the president and his Republican allies have spent months holding up as a symbol of the Democratic party’s alleged embrace of “communism” ahead of the November midterms.
At a news conference following their closed-door meeting at Gracie Mansion, Trump and Mamdani appeared friendly as they have in previous meetings. Mamdani said he and Trump held a “wide-ranging” discussion, which touched on affordable housing and immigration, but did not offer extensive details regarding any disagreements between them.
In my search for anything out of the ordinary that could be causing my board to not function correctly I opened up the controller housing and noticed this weird looking stuff on the circuit board. I’ll try and post a video of the problem in the comments, any advice is greatly appreciated.
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, the 28-year-old Venezuelan national shot by an ICE officer on Sunday, said in a phone call on Monday that he's "not doing well."
Environmental groups vow to continue opposition to deal that would expand site for Elon Musk rocket company
A federal judge on Monday refused to block the Trump administration from giving SpaceX more than 700 acres of wildlife refuge as part of a land swap in Texas, while environmental groups vowed to continue their legal challenge.
US district judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr declined the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the parcel exchange, saying they failed to prove it would worsen ecological risks to a Gulf coast region already transformed by billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket operations.
One neocloud traversing the AI inference landscape that you might want to keep an eye on is Gimlet Labs. The company, which just completed a $300 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $3 billion valuation, is taking a different approach to building out its data centers than the typical cloud.
As the AI boom continues to grow, it’s becoming more important to match AI workloads to the most efficient and effective hardware. With a plethora of new chip types hitting the market and trillions of dollars fueling an epic data center buildout, that decision matrix is becoming both very interesting and very consequential.
This is the guiding force behind Gimlet Labs, which was founded in 2023 based on Zain Asgar’s Stanford University research project. CEO Asgar and his colleagues were convinced they could use software to route AI workloads to the optimal hardware as a means to optimize AI inference workloads.
“Our North Star from the beginning has been, we think we can push the efficiency of inference orders of magnitude better,” Gimlet Labs Co-founder Natalie Serrino told HPCwire in a recent interview. “We wanted to really rethink what that stack looks like from the ground up, because if it’s going to be the dominant software workload, we should organize our infrastructure and our software around that to make it as efficient as possible.”
The company developed a software-based orchestration layer that sits atop a variety of different hardware and essentially slices and dices the AI workloads to execute on various chips. For instance, the prefill stage of AI inference could be well-served using the computational horsepower of big GPUs, while the decode stage would be better handled by the extreme memory bandwidth offered by SRAM-optimized chips.
Gimlet addressed various challenges with various software projects, including Gimlet Cloud, the core platform that handles scheduling, orchestration, and optimization, and kforge, which generates optimized low-level kernels directly from PyTorch. The company has developed various other pieces of software, such as a universal AI compiler, workload partitioning, SLA-aware scheduling, headless hardware architectures; predictive optimization, and such as kernel fusion.
At some point, it became apparent to Gimlet Labs that the software-only approach could only take them so far. To fully solve the problem, the company would need to design and manage the entire data center, Serrino said.
Gimlet Labs Co-founder Natalie Serrino
“Everyone’s so power constrained today that pushing out all of the performance and all the efficiency you can out of the limited power footprint that you have available becomes more critical,” she said. “And doing that with a fully optimized stack from the ground up is the best way to do that.”
We’re in a unique period when it comes to semiconductor designs. Nvidia is pushing the refresh cycle of its GPUs to 12 months, AMD is hot on its heals with its own Helios stack, while other companies are carving out specific niches with their own chips. With trillions of dollars at stake, the investments in chips have never been bigger, nor more consequential.
But Gimlet Labs didn’t want just any old chips in its data centers. Instead, it sought to standardize on a handful of chips with strengths in certain areas. It also sought chips that pair well together.
“We don’t want to build data centers that have like 20 different chip types in there because that’s a nightmare from an operational standpoint,” Serrino said. “We want to have somewhere between like two to four [chip types] per DC and kind of repeatable stamps that are basically leveraging different strengths.”
Gimlet puts chips into four broad categories: GPUs, CPUs, SRAM chips, and data flow accelerators and TPUs. The chip providers that Gimlet Labs uses in its data centers are Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Arm, d-Matrix, and Cerebras.
When it comes to deploying chips in its data centers, Gimlet Labs takes a pair-based approach. A GPU usually forms the base of the pair, and Gimlet Labs picks another chip to pair with it.
“We find [GPU-centric chip pairings] works really, really well for getting significant speed ups for similar efficiency compared to a GPU-only deployment,” Serrino said. “We don’t want every chip to be perfect at everything, because we recognize every chip has its strengths. So what we look for more is, where is that spike that it’s really strong?”
Every chip also brings its own set of tradeoffs. When choosing pairs, it looks at that trade-off curve and selects the chip combinations that best match the workload to get the best performance at the optimal energy level.
Gimlet Labs supports different disaggregation techniques (Image courtesy Gimlet Labs)
“So you use one in the case where you need lots of memory bandwidth, and then the other one where you need lots of compute to crunch through,” Serrino said. “That’s where the GPU-SRAM-centric chip pairing works really, really well.”
Nvidia has been building pairwise superchips for the past few years. It started with its Grace Hopper superchip, which paired two Hopper GPUs with one Arm-based Grace chip, and it’s continuing that approach today with its Vera Rubin chips. The difference is Gimlet Labs is doing this at the data center level, and it’s doing it for specific AI workloads.
Getting the chips integrated at the physical level is not always easy. They may have very different network connections and cooling needs, Serrino said. For instance, different chips may expect different liquid cooling temperatures. Figuring out how to cool them both in the same data center has required Gimlet Labs to invest in hardware engineering.
The manner of disaggregation, and whether it’s done across multiple data centers, also impacts the network. For instance, a recent paper by the Chinese AI company Moonshot AI demonstrated the potential for data center-level disaggregation with its Kimi K3 model, which is something that Gimlet Labs may be recreating.
“They were actually able to disaggregate prefill-decode across different DCs for the SLAs that they were trying to hit,” Serrino said. “It’s important to have fast connections between these [systems], but it’s one hop” for the KV cache.
Gimlet Labs has adopted various disaggregation architectures, including disaggregating prefill and decode stages (P-D Disagg), which has become the industry norm. More complex techniques include a speculative disaggregation, where a smaller version of a model running on an SRAM-focused chip like d-Matrix Corsairs is used to generate its best guess for a given AI request, and then the full model verifies a batch of guesses at once.
Different hardware combinations and disaggregation techniques yield different performance and efficiency results (Image courtesy Gimlet Labs)
“What we can do is we can take that draft model and we can actually put it entirely in the SRAM chips, and then that’s incredibly fast and it makes drafting super cheap,” Serrino said. “This is one where you need to go back and forth a little bit more often than the first one.”
Other disaggregation methods Gimlet Labs is using include Attention-Feed Forward Network (Attn-FFN) dissertation, where the transformer model’s attention layers and FFN layers are split into independent, separately scaled hardware pools. In this case, the attention mechanism of transformer networks runs really well on GPUs, while the mixture of experts (MO) component is a great fit for SRAM-centric chips, she said.
“We can run prefill on GPUs but then split attention and MO across GPUs and SRAM-centric chips and actually ping pong back and forth,” she said. “This option requires more connectivity, because within each layer of the model, you’re going back and forth. And so that makes the network design of our DCs especially important because we need to enable this type of communication. But the result is really strong. And you can get such better performance for the same efficiency for all of these methods that it’s worth it because of the scale of the workload.”
Gimlet Labs doesn’t want the typical customer to worry about the nitty-gritty details of how the AI actually works under the hood–although it does have sophisticated customers too, including one of the top three frontier labs and one of the top three hyperscalers as customers. Preferably, customers should just be concerned about hitting a certain performance number, like generating 1,000 tokens per second per watt for a given model, and leave the running of the AI inference workload to Gimlet Labs.
That approach seems to be resonating, as the company continues to grow. Over the past year, monthly token generation has increased 6x, and it’s expecting token generation to increase another 20x over the three years. The company, which has secured billions of dollars’ worth of cloud contracts, is currently in the planning stages to bring gigawatts of data center power online in the coming years, and expects to have hundreds of megawatts installed by the end of 2027.
Gimlet offers the potential to have not just more AI infrastructure but better AI infrastructure, said Raghu Raghuram, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Gimlet Labs board member
“Gimlet has built a new kind of inference cloud, heterogeneous by design, that matches each workload to the right silicon,” Raghuram stated. “By making GPUs and purpose-built accelerators work as one system, Gimlet delivers dramatically more throughput, more interactivity and more intelligence from every watt. We believe this is where inference infrastructure is headed.”
Paramount Skydance just "emerged victorious" reports Reuters, "from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery" that will "dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood's film, TV, streaming and news businesses."
The victory comes "after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history."
Paramount agreed to abide by temporary film quotas and a news oversight committee, avoiding a forced sale of cable assets such as CNN or any of its lucrative film franchises... The Writers Guild of America settled its parallel case against Paramount, while saying it still believes the deal will damage the industry. The states' settlement forced the union to "contend with the reality of forging ahead alone, with no backing from government enforcers" in a complex case that would have cost millions of dollars...
Paramount promised in the state settlement to bring more film production to the US — spending at least $300 million more each year in domestic production — and adhere to US theatrical release quotas for five years. The company will produce 30 movies in each of the first two years of the deal, and 32 movies in each of the following three years, Bonta said. Each year, at least four of those films must be independent films and at least 20% must be blockbusters. If it falls below that threshold, it will pay $30 million per film, most of it into funds to support workers. Paramount also promised not to raise rates on theater operators for three years.
The article notes that California attorney general Rob Bonta still said "I don't think these two companies should merge" at a press conference announcing the settlement, "but that's not something that we are focused on with our resolution here." He call their agreement "a strong antitrust outcome."
And Politico notes that Bonta acknowledged at the press conference that "Some of you who may be watching this may have wanted a different outcome. I understand that."
But he argued he'd reached a settlement capable of "providing more film production that protects Hollywood workers and their livelihoods, that places guardrails allowing for robust cable negotiations, that protects competition and creates more choice for consumers about what this merger could mean for the industry." It "resolves the antitrust concerns at the heart of our lawsuit against the company and Warner Brothers," he said...
The agreement came as a disappointment to opponents of the transaction, including the Block the Merger Coalition, which cast the settlement as a sweetheart deal for Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison and his father, Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison, who is financially backstopping the acquisition. "This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country," the coalition said in a statement. "We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires....."
The $111 billion deal allows Paramount to combine its namesake streaming service with HBO Max, creating a new offering with about 200 million subscribers. That would help Paramount compete against companies such as Netflix, which boasts more than 325 million subscribers worldwide.
Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is sending fundraising emails pledging to “stand with America” and “reject the extremes” — using email lists for Republican candidates and committees.
An email first sent over the weekend sent by Fetterman’s campaign came from the address “info@gopsquad.com” and vowed: “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the Anti-American way of life.” Other recent appeals sent from the same address encourage readers to help President Donald Trump pass new voting restrictions, to read an “urgent memo” from House Speaker Mike Johnson on fighting the left, and to back Republican Mike Rogers for Senate in Michigan over Abdul El-Sayed, whom the email compared to a terrorist and a “threat to our way of life.”
The email from Fetterman’s campaign comes as the senator has moved closer to the Republican caucus, rankling his Democratic colleagues and spurring rumors that he might switch parties. He received the maximum allowed contribution from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, as The Intercept reported in July. But the use of Republican fundraising infrastructure represents a new step in Fetterman’s confounding electoral strategy.
The Fetterman campaign also sent copies of the fundraising email from alternate GOP domains including “unshakeableconservatives.com” and “freedomfaction.net.” It’s possible that Fetterman for PA rented or bought a GOP email list, something campaigns commonly do for targeted outreach, but the campaign’s specific arrangement is unclear. The text retreads major talking points that the Democratic senator delivered in a controversial video appearance at the Republican party’s midterm convention earlier this month, where he railed against “extremes” and promised to “stand with America.”
Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Former Fetterman staffers, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, condemned their old boss’s pivot and suggested he’d betrayed his previous supporters.
“It’s no surprise that he has to resort to GOP donors to prop up his dismal fundraising numbers.”
“After taking contributions from millions of small-dollar donors who wanted a Democratic Senate, John Fetterman turned around and became Donald Trump’s useful idiot,” said one former staffer. “Now, it’s no surprise that he has to resort to GOP donors to prop up his dismal fundraising numbers.”
With two years left in his first term, Fetterman has made himself the subject of a series of political upheavals and dramatic reversals. The image he was heralded for upon his 2022 election — a gritty, heterodox, and unpredictable model for the future of the Democratic Party — has all but crumbled.
Staffers, donors, previous supporters, and his Democratic colleagues have fled from Fetterman’s orbit in droves as he’s aligned himself with Republicans on Trump’s war with Iran, U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, and funding the Department of Homeland Security amid a slew of killings, shootings, and misconduct by federal immigration agents.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on his resistance to carrying out his daily responsibilities as a senator — which marked a stark contrast from his energy for showing up on Fox News, where he made more than 50 appearances in the first six months of this year. The senator has particularly alienated former supporters on the left with his hardline support for the Israeli government, which he has offered unconditional support throughout its genocide in Gaza.
Fetterman’s critics are looking for a candidate to primary him in 2028 as he fields questions about whether he plans to join the GOP — or run for reelection at all, given his sinking popularity among his own party and outrage from former supporters over his rightward turn.
“John Fetterman turned around and became Donald Trump’s useful idiot.”
Fetterman’s coziness with — and popularity among — Republicans doesn’t necessarily mean he’s likely to join the GOP conference, said several former Fetterman staffers who spoke to The Intercept. They predicted that Fetterman might follow in the footsteps of former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who consistently blocked their party’s more progressive measures and then became independent. That, according to one former staffer, would let him maintain the wildcard he’s curated over four erratic years in office.
“He loves being the enigma,” another former staffer told The Intercept. “He loves the, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to see what happens.’”
As Fetterman’s staffers struggled in recent months to get him to do basic parts of his job — including fundraising — his office reached out to staffers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask him to talk to Fetterman in an attempt to right what they saw as a sinking ship, according to a former staffer. The staffer said that Schumer agreed, but Fetterman refused to talk to him. Schumer’s office has said the two are in communication and met for dinner in August.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from Fetterman’s explosion onto the national stage and the trail of disgruntled staffers, organizers, and small-dollar donors left in its wake, it has little to do with political ideology and more to do with psychology, former staffers told The Intercept. Fetterman views himself as a renegade and an outsider above all else, according to his former staff. He has long struggled with depression, and while campaigning in 2022, he suffered a stroke whose effects led him to use assistive technology in the Senate and continue to be felt in other ways.
Notwithstanding any decision he might make about switching parties, the conservative world has welcomed Fetterman with open arms. In July, Fetterman attended a retreat in Montana hosted by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media scion behind Fox News, at the network’s invitation, according to two former Fetterman staffers. At the retreat, Fetterman spoke on a panel alongside Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. Fetterman’s attendance at Murdoch’s event came several days after he launched an unusual bipartisan fundraising committee with his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick.
While Fetterman’s campaign has previously used the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue for communications, including in a recent text for a joint fundraiser with McCormick, his campaign sent recent fundraising texts using another platform, including a link with the name “Save America 26.”
Fetterman’s campaign also recently redesigned its website to use his antagonistic persona in its favor. The website boasts that Fetterman “thinks for himself. You should too.”
Fetterman isn’t an average Democrat, his new website reads. “John doesn’t look like a typical politician, and more importantly, he doesn’t act like one.”
Lawyers say Black employees at Tesla experienced ‘rampant racism’ that was left unchecked for years at their flagship factory in California
Dozens of Black employees at Tesla’s flagship plant in California said they were subject to racist slurs, unequal pay and promotions, and bullying by supervisors on a daily basis, a situation management did little to nothing to fix.
Their complaints form the basis of a lawsuit brought against the Elon Musk-owned electric car company by the state of California, which began trial with opening statements on Monday.
Shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez comes months after increased federal immigration enforcement in Austin
The Venezuelan man who was shot by a federal immigration officer in Texas on Sunday spoke out from detention on Monday afternoon when he was able to call his lawyer, in the middle of a press conference, and plead for better medical care.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was taken from a hospital in Austin into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, even though he apparently still has a bullet lodged near his spine and is in much discomfort.
Changes could save £33bn and result in average of four extra years of good health for people, report says
The NHS in England could prevent 20,000 deaths and save £33bn a year by cutting red tape and boosting productivity, a report says.
Research by the Health Foundation found the health service has been held back for decades by excessive regulation, short-term planning and insufficient capability to deliver major change.
Experts say trend across England probably reflects swifter access to diagnoses as wealthier families go private
Some of the most affluent areas of England have had the sharpest rises in the proportion of young people claiming disability benefits for ADHD and autism since the pandemic, according to new research.
Claims for the personal independence payment (Pip) benefit for these health conditions were typically proportionally far higher in deprived areas with higher rates of poverty, low educational outcomes and insecure employment.
Deployment will bring the first IonQ Superion 256 system and first silicon-vacancy quantum memory module to South Korea
SEOUL, South Korea and COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 21, 2026 — IonQ today announced a strategic partnership with Korea-based quantum technology and software company SDT, Inc. Under this multi-year collaboration IonQ will supply SDT with a Superion 256 quantum computer as well as IonQ’s silicon-vacancy (SiV) quantum memory module.
“Demand for our new Superion 256 system is growing globally, and this agreement in Asia Pacific is yet another example of our clients combining IonQ’s leading quantum computers with our quantum networking and quantum memory solutions,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “IonQ is very proud to be expanding our commercial footprint in South Korea as well as continuing to trailblaze quantum cancer and biomedical research. This purchase equips SDT with the building blocks for both high-performance quantum computing and quantum data centers of the future.”
The partnership expands the two companies’ ongoing collaboration from cloud-based software integration to physical hardware production, assembly, and regional resale partnership. The Superion 256 system is planned for deployment with an SDT customer in South Korea, where IonQ and SDT intend to collaborate on a hybrid quantum-classical data center. SDT also plans to establish a dedicated quantum manufacturing and system-integration facility in Gumi, South Korea. That will be the site for IonQ’s SiV quantum memory packaging and manufacturing, quantum system assembly, integration and commissioning.
“IonQ leads the global quantum industry in both technology and manufacturing innovation,” said Jiwon Yune, CEO of SDT. “Our objective is to make our new Gumi facility a key operational hub for IonQ’s global supply chain and regional deployment by hosting manufacturing operations and assembling world-class quantum systems. Alongside this manufacturing partnership, SDT will participate in the assembly and operation of IonQ quantum systems and actively pursue opportunities to manufacture more quantum components. Our role will also extend to a separate in-country cancer center project where we intend to develop hybrid quantum-classical infrastructure for medical and biomedical research with IonQ. Together, these initiatives put SDT’s quantum design and manufacturing strategy into practice through assembly, operations and system integration, while opening opportunities in manufacturing and regional commercialization.”
This announcement reinforces IonQ’s regional commitment as evidenced through its collaborations with other partnerships in Korea including: KISTI, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Company, and leading academic institutions such as Seoul National University and Sungkyunkwan University.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions 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 SDT Inc.
SDT Inc. is a South Korea-based quantum technology company providing full-stack hardware, software, and system integration across the quantum value chain. Named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2026, SDT supports quantum system assembly, integration, and hybrid quantum-classical data center development in the Asia-Pacific region.
Wilber Garcés Pérez said he was rushed out of a hospital and forced to sleep on the floor of an ICE detention center within hours of being shot in Texas.
Supreme court, which has twice blocked maps from being used in November, likely to have final say in legal fight
A long-running legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map took another turn Monday when a federal appeals panel ruled in favor of new districts backed by Donald Trump, even though the US supreme court has blocked those districts from being used in the November election.
A three-judge panel of the 8th US circuit court of appeals said Missouri should use the new Republican-drawn US House districts in the November election, just as the state did in its August primary. To revert to its prior districts for the general election would violate the US constitution, the appeals judges said.
New Horizon Europe project develops AI-based climate models for use on European HPC and AI infrastructures
Sept. 21, 2026 — With its kick-off on Sept. 14, 2026, the four-year Horizon Europe project CLAIMA (Climate Artificial Intelligence Managed Access), led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, has officially started. Together with European research institutions and other partners, the project aims to transition AI-based climate models and climate emulators from research into pre-operational use. During the kick-off, the joint working structures and an agile, sprint-based workflow for the various work packages were established. The German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) is contributing in particular to the development of the data and infrastructure components required for this work.
The kick-off meeting for the Horizon Europe project CLAIMA took place online on September 14, 2026. Photo credit: AWI.
DKRZ Contributes Expertise in Data Management and HPC Infrastructure
High-quality, standardized, and sustainably usable data are a key prerequisite for the use of AI in climate research. Within CLAIMA, DKRZ will take responsibility for the essential data lifecycle: building robust data pipelines that harmonize heterogeneous input sources such as reanalyses, simulations, and observational datasets, while developing FAIR-compliant SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) catalogs. These are intended to provide standardised, machine-readable access to the climate and environmental data used in the project, thereby improving the reusability of the data beyond individual applications and project phases.
Enabling AI for Climate Research and Applications
Combining AI modeling, high-performance computing, and modern data management, CLAIMA creates new opportunities for the use of climate information. The technologies developed are intended to support applications in Earth system research, climate-resilient shipping, the planning of energy infrastructure, and the assessment of climate-related health risks.
The planned European AI platform is designed to run on European HPC and AI Factory infrastructures. The goal is to enable scalable and interoperable use of AI-based climate information and models across different research and application areas. In doing so, CLAIMA will also contribute to European initiatives such as Destination Earth.
(The Center Square) – Looking to improve the quality of life of military families who face unique challenges, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addressed a group of military spouses Monday to kick off the President’s Military Spouse Commission.
Accra Reset’s report states countries in the region and global south should take greater control of their health development after USAID debacle
The United States’ withdrawal from key aid programs has put healthcare in Africa and the global south “under growing strain” a new report warns.
The report says the Trump administration’s cuts to programs such as US Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and rising costs of living globally have brought “new urgency” for the need to reform healthcare in the region.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has fallen to 32%, the lowest level recorded across his first and second presidencies in Reuters/Ipsos polling, as dissatisfaction over living costs and the economy grows.
The Reuters/Ipsos survey, conducted Sept. 17-20 among 1,277 U.S. adults, found Trump’s overall approval down from 47% when he began his second term. Among Republicans, approval fell to 73%, compared with 86% in January. The poll has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.
Economic concerns were particularly damaging. Only 17% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the cost of living. Among Republicans, 44% approved of his performance on that issue while 51% disapproved, marking a significant deterioration within his own party.
The poll also found registered voters preferred Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans, 43% to 35%, ahead of November’s midterm elections. That represents the largest Democratic advantage measured by Reuters/Ipsos this year.
Trump performed better among Republicans on immigration, while his handling of the Iran war and rising fuel costs drew broader dissatisfaction.
The company, once a file-sharing app and then a streaming service, is teaming up with an educational organization in the Middle East to create virtual replicas of teachers.
Holdout juror in Clancy’s case, Michael Desronvil, sided with the prosecutors, arguing that Clancy knew what she was doing when she killed her three young children
Lawyers for Lindsay Clancy have asked a judge to investigate the conduct of the lone juror who wanted to convict the mother from Massachusetts of murder in the deaths of her three children.
In a motion filed Friday but made public Monday, Clancy’s lawyers asked the court to question the juror about his alleged use of a cellphone during deliberations, his truthfulness on a questionnaire that prospective jurors filled out before the trial began and his truthfulness when jurors were questioned by the judge a day before the trial ended.
After President Donald Trump announced Sept. 18 on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House because they write “fake news,” many of his supporters defended the move by pointing to actions by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
A TikTok video with 72,000 views said, “Biden changed the White House press pool and CUT OFF 440 reporters’ credentials, yet got ZERO outrage from the fake news media.”
Other social media posts shared a 2025 Fox News headline that read, “FLASHBACK: Biden also changed White House press pool, cutting off more than 440 reporters’ credentials.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., also compared Trump’s ban with a press policy change by Biden in 2023.
“Go look at Joe Biden,” Scalise told ABC’s “This Week” host Jonathan Karl on Sept. 20. “Joe Biden removed the press credentials from over 400 different agencies. You know, what President Trump’s done has brought a lot of those back in.”
Karl pushed back. “They were not banned from the White House,” he said.
The White House doubled down on its ban the next day. “White House access is a privilege, not a right,” a Sept. 21 press release said, citing instances in which it said Biden or former President Barack Obama targeted journalists, including 440 reporters having their credentials “restricted” by Biden in 2023.
More than 400 reporters did see changes to White House access under Biden in 2023, but Biden did not remove their ability to be in the White House to cover the president, which is what Trump has ordered for three news outlets.
Tim Zick, a constitutional law professor at William & Mary Law School, said the Biden rules were changed in part to address concerns about maintaining press briefing decorum and to reduce the number of unused press passes, which the administration considered a national security risk.
“The Biden policy was a far cry from President Trump’s abrupt and process-free announcement of a ban on targeted media with whom he frequently clashes,” Zick said, calling it “a blatant and clear violation of the First Amendment.”
What Biden did in 2023
In May 2023, the White House changed policies for journalists to receive a “hard pass,” which allows them unaccompanied access to the White House’s press areas. The yearly passes expired in July that year, and journalists were told they had to reapply under a new set of criteria.
Then, as now, reporters without hard pass access were required to apply for day passes, which mandate they be escorted to those press areas.
Among the Biden administration’s new rules for a hard pass, according to a court filing, a journalist seeking one:
must be employed by a news organization.
must be accredited for a press gallery in the U.S. House or Senate, or U.S. Supreme Court.
must have a physical address (personal or professional) in the greater Washington, D.C. area, and
must have accessed the White House for work at least once in the past six months.
After the changes, about 500 fewer journalists had hard passes, the court filing said. A Politico report in August 2023 said there were 442 fewer hard passes, which matches the numbers used in some social media posts defending Trump.
Former Biden White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a Sept. 21 TikTok video that “there were a lot of people with hard passes out there that had not used it in several years.”
Simon Ateba, a journalist with Today News Africa who lost his hard pass after the change, filed the lawsuit against the White House in 2023, but a court ruled the new policy did not violate his First Amendment rights, a decision upheld in April 2025 by the D.C. United States Court of Appeals.
The court ruling found Biden’s new hard pass policy both “reasonable and viewpoint neutral” and said it did not violate the First Amendment.
Psaki said journalists from right-leaning news outlets such as Breitbart, Fox News and Newsmax all got hard passes “because the criteria had nothing to do with how you were covering the administration.”
Andrew Bates, former deputy press secretary for Biden, said no reporters were banned as a result of Biden’s policy.
“Most of the reporters Trump’s aides are trying to exploit by citing that number had stopped covering the White House and didn’t even apply for a new hard pass,” Bates said. “And all of those reporters were eligible to apply for day passes whenever they wanted. No one was ‘banned,’ regardless of how negative or friendly their coverage was.”
Anytime a government seeks to impose standards for journalists, Zick said, there are concerns that those standards could be used to exclude or sanction reporters based on their coverage: “Free speech and press advocates raised such concerns, suggesting that the Biden standards were not clear enough.”
Some reporters did lose the hard pass credentials and some may have decided not to apply, Zick said, but that’s not the same as what Trump is doing.
Our ruling
A TikTok video said Biden “CUT OFF 440 reporters’ credentials.”
In 2023, the Biden administration changed its policy on how reporters can qualify for a hard pass, which lets them move more freely around White House press areas without an escort. About 500 fewer reporters had hard passes after the change, but they weren’t “cut off.” They could still apply for a day pass, a more cumbersome process, but they weren’t banned from the White House.
I was testing the Apple Watch’s ECG feature on video for CNET and as a healthy, active 30-year-old, the last thing I expected was to become part of the story.
Voters rejected many establishment choices this year in favor of candidates pushing accountability for Gaza, writes Akbar Shahid Ahmed
The last time she gathered with fellow Democrats for a pre-election national convention, Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman got an unspoken message from the party establishment: on their biggest stage, she said, “There’s room for an anti-choice Republican but not for Palestinians”. Democratic officials gave speaking slots to an architect of Georgia’s strict abortion ban and other conservatives critical of Donald Trump, but they denied a speech from Romman or other Palestinian Americans.
In Democratic primaries this year, voters rejected many of the party establishment’s choices, including a 15-term congresswoman in Colorado and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The unlikely winners in all those races emphasized empathy and accountability for Palestinian losses in Gaza; Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s Senate primary, made opposition to the ardently pro-Israel group Aipac central to his candidacy. With 60% of potential Democratic voters in a May poll sympathizing more with Palestinians than Israelis and 48% saying the party has been too supportive of Israel, the base is eager for Democratic leaders to rethink unfettered US-Israel solidarity.
Andy Burnham seeks stability in Middle East to bring down prices at home as first meeting with Trump looms
The UK has agreed to provide defensive air support to Saudi Arabia to help counter Houthi fighters and restore stability in the Middle East while driving down the cost of living at home, Andy Burnham has said, ahead of his first meeting with Donald Trump.
The prime minister said he had agreed to a request for air-to-air refuelling of Saudi jets to defend energy infrastructure against the Iran-backed rebels and help keep oil flowing from the Gulf to ease global economic turmoil.
Textile designer brings florals, vines and smiley doodles to brand’s luxury checks for one-off paired collection
Burberry and Celia Birtwell are both national treasures of sorts. One is Britain’s grandest luxury name, the other the textile designer who dressed bohemian 1960s London in her prints and has a place in art history as David Hockney’s favourite muse.
Burberry’s designer, Daniel Lee, has always loved Birtwell’s prints. When the two met this spring, he fell for “her energy, and her zest for life”, and a one-off Burberry meets Birtwell collection that closed London fashion week was born.
At Lib Dems’ conference in Brighton, leader will accuse Andy Burnham of relying on Donald Trump and ‘tech bros’ to solve problem
Ed Davey is to call for a global nuclear-style non-proliferation treaty to halt the development of super-intelligent AI when he makes his keynote speech at the Liberal Democrat conference, accusing Andy Burnham of relying on Donald Trump and “tech bros” to solve the problem.
When he addresses the faithful on the final day of the gathering in Brighton, the party leader will call for a global pause on super-intelligent AI, comparing it to a nuclear arms race that could result in technology that could “destroy us all”.
Prime ministers of Australia and Iceland discuss effects on their countries even as some shy away in face of war and inflation
World political leaders are descending on New York for the UN general assembly and some of them are putting the climate crisis on the agenda as they spoke on Monday at the start of the city’s annual Climate Week.
This year’s Climate Week – which runs alongside UNGA – comes after months of extreme heat in large parts of the world including Europe and the US, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.
Trump Media & Technology recently launched a Truth Social API data feed, charging $100,000 for "real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts."
Senator Ron Wyden calls for swift action after GAO report finds systems guiding US aircraft vulnerable to interference
A congressional watchdog has warned the systems guiding US aircraft are open to interference and deception as flights into several busy airports in the country’s north-east US were halted by a radio equipment problem.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a ground stop at about 10am on Monday for Newark Liberty international, Philadelphia international and Teterboro airports, saying some radio frequencies at the Philadelphia terminal radar approach control (Tracon) were affected until the early afternoon. On Monday, John F Kennedy international airport in New York cautioned that “due to an FAA equipment outage, arrivals and departures are currently experiencing delays”.
A helicopter assisting in fighting the Dome fire in Yosemite national park crashed on Sunday afternoon
Two helicopter pilots died while fighting a fire in Yosemite national park on Sunday afternoon.
The pilots were conducting water drops over the Dome fire, which had burned more than 3,000 acres since it ignited last week, when their helicopter crashed around 3pm, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Nats says fault at Prestwick has been ‘fixed’ after airports in Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland are hit
Airlines have called for “action and accountability” over the UK’s air traffic control services after a technical issue led to flights being disrupted for the second time in a fortnight.
Dozens were cancelled and others severely delayed after a fault on Monday morning at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), this time at its second control centre at Prestwick in South Ayrshire.
(The Center Square) – Medicare Part D sponsors made $587.7 million in ineligible payments to pharmacies for five drugs carrying obsolete prescription-only labeling more than a year after the corresponding brand-name drugs switched to over-the-counter status, a federal watchdog found.
(The Center Square) — Republican candidates in redrawn congressional districts across the country have appeared to distance themselves from President Donald Trump in recent weeks.
(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., has offered his support for Sean Parnell as chatter continues that he could be a candidate to lead the U.S. Army.
Some network employees and media-watchers have questions and concerns about how arrangement will work
Leading media figures and insiders dismissed plans to create an editorial oversight board to protect CNN’s independence as “utter garbage” – in one staffer’s words – after a settlement was reached to resolve a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 12 states to block Paramount’s $110bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, during a press conference to announce the settlement, said that Paramount “must establish a news editorial independence board to support CBS News and CNN’s continued editorial independence to ensure independent, objective, fact-based reporting at CBS News and at CNN”.
MINNEAPOLIS, Sept. 21, 2026 — Flexible Circuit Technologies Inc. (FCT), a Minnesota-based flexible circuit and advanced electronics manufacturer, is pleased to announce the development of its Liquid Leak Detection Flex Assembly, a custom-engineered sensing solution designed for liquid-cooled AI servers, high-performance computing (HPC) systems, cold plates, manifolds, quick disconnects, coolant distribution units (CDUs), and other mission-critical electronics.
As AI and HPC platforms continue to move toward direct-to-chip liquid cooling, early detection of coolant leaks is becoming increasingly important. FCT’s flexible sensing assembly is designed to fit around the geometry of the cooling system, enabling leak detection close to potential failure points while maintaining a thin, lightweight profile in space-constrained server and rack environments.
The Liquid Leak Detection Flex Assembly can be customized for the application, including sensing patterns, circuit geometry, connector interfaces, and multiple detection zones. Potential monitoring locations include supply and return quick disconnects, GPU and CPU cold plates, manifolds, coolant lines, CDUs, and server trays. The flex-based architecture is intended to help OEMs and cooling-system manufacturers integrate leak sensing directly into their equipment rather than relying solely on facility-level leak detection.
“The rapid growth of liquid-cooled AI infrastructure is creating a new need for thin, compact, highly customized leak-detection solutions,” said Ray Cottrell, EVP of Flexible Circuit Technologies. “FCT’s strength is designing flexible circuits around the customer’s mechanical and electrical requirements. This concept allows us to bring that capability directly to cold plates, manifolds, quick disconnects, and server-level cooling assemblies where early detection can help protect high-value electronics.”
FCT plans to work with server OEMs and ODMs, liquid-cooling companies, cold-plate manufacturers, thermal-management suppliers, and data-center infrastructure providers to tailor the assembly to specific cooling architectures. FCT’s engineering team can support concept development, rapid prototyping, design-for-manufacturing, flex circuit fabrication, assembly, and scalable production.
About FCT
Flexible Circuit Technologies, Inc. (FCT), and inTFlex (EMS division), offer specialty interconnects, including flexible circuits, catheters, rigid flex, flexible heaters, printed electronics/membrane switches, plastic moldings, and advanced EMS, from FPCA/PCBA to complete product box builds. We partner with customers to design innovative flexible circuits and manufacture solution. Celebrating over 25 years in business, FCT has an internationally recognized design team, with advanced manufacturing to support fast NPI and cost-effective manufacturing solutions in Asia.
(The Center Square) – Paramount Skydance has settled an antitrust lawsuit brought by Democratic state attorneys general including California’s Rob Bonta. The deal appears to clear the way for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion.
Four amendments involve voting rules, while others address marriage, the death penalty and vacancies in the lieutenant governor’s office
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s next General Assembly will inherit eight proposed amendments to the state Constitution, including four that could change voting rights and election procedures.
Vil Ramunno, a public policy researcher and Delaware LIVE contributing journalist, outlined the proposals during an appearance on “A Better Discussion,” hosted by former Delaware Attorney General Jane Brady for A Better Delaware.
The amendments already received the required approval from two-thirds of the members elected to each chamber of the 153rd General Assembly. However, none is part of the Constitution yet.
Under Delaware’s amendment process, the same proposed changes must receive two-thirds support in the House and Senate again after a general election. Unlike most states, Delaware does not routinely place individual constitutional amendments before voters for ratification. The governor also has no power to sign or veto them.
That means the lawmakers elected in November will decide whether the eight proposals become part of Delaware’s foundational legal document.
Four voting amendments
Ramunno said four of the pending amendments involve elections or voting rights:
• Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 2 would authorize 10 days of early, in-person voting before general, primary and certain special elections.
• Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 3 would create a constitutional right to vote by absentee ballot without providing an excuse. Voters generally would still have to request a ballot for each election cycle unless they qualify for permanent absentee status.
• House Bill 180 would generally restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies after they are released from incarceration. It would prohibit making restoration contingent upon restitution or another monetary payment and remove obsolete residency and literacy provisions.
• House Bill 430 would specify that only natural persons may vote in Delaware elections, preventing corporations and other artificial entities from being granted voting rights.
Ramunno said her initial impression was that the four voting measures weren’t a major concern, though she offered a clarification after the interview.
Brady disagreed with that initial assessment, raising concerns about the details lawmakers could later establish through statute. She particularly questioned the no-excuse absentee proposal.
Ramunno said she wanted to clarify her position on the felon voting rights amendment: on reflection, she agreed with Brady’s concern that restitution should be addressed before voting rights are restored, since the amendment as written would prevent the state from ever requiring that.
Their exchange demonstrated why the second round of legislative consideration could produce significant debate, even though each proposal secured the supermajority needed to clear its first constitutional hurdle.
Marriage, death penalty and state offices
The four remaining amendments would address other parts of the Constitution:
• Senate Substitute 2 for Senate Bill 100 would establish marriage as a fundamental right that cannot be denied based on gender or another characteristic protected by the Constitution. It also contains language protecting religious freedom.
• House Substitute 1 for House Bill 35 would constitutionally prohibit the death penalty. Delaware currently has no enforceable death penalty statute, but the amendment would prevent a future General Assembly from restoring capital punishment without another constitutional change.
• Senate Bill 264 would establish a special-election process for filling most vacancies in the lieutenant governor’s office.
• House Substitute 1 for House Bill 320 would make a series of technical corrections to the Constitution, including removing duplicated words, correcting punctuation and clarifying several provisions.
Brady cautioned against treating the Constitution like ordinary legislation, saying it should remain a foundational document that is changed carefully and infrequently.
Making legislation easier to follow: CivicDelaware.com
Ramunno’s analysis is informed by nearly a decade in public policy. She previously served as a senior editor at the Caesar Rodney Institute, where she worked to make policy reports clear and accessible to general readers.
She now covers government and politics for Delaware LIVE and also works as a public policy researcher.
Ramunno also created Civic Delaware, an informational platform designed to help residents follow bills moving through Legislative Hall. Its primary tool, Dover Dash, tracks legislation from introduction through committee hearings, floor consideration and final action.
She said she developed the platform after watching complex bills move from introduction to passage in a matter of days during the final weeks of a legislative session.
Dover Dash uses automated updates from the General Assembly’s website and organizes bills according to the people most likely to be affected. Users can select profiles such as homeowner, parent, young professional, retiree, senior or veteran.
Instead of displaying only bill numbers, the platform gives proposals descriptive names, plain-language summaries, their official legislative synopses and current status. Users can also browse bills by subjects such as taxes, energy, alcohol and cannabis, and the state Constitution.
“You want to only know the ones that affect you, and it helps you to be more engaged,” Ramunno said. “And it makes it a little personal, too.”
She said Civic Delaware will archive legislation from the outgoing General Assembly when the new session begins in January. The eight proposed constitutional amendments will remain active because they must be considered again by the incoming lawmakers.
Ramunno said the goal is to help residents learn about proposals before they become law, ask informed questions and engage directly with their elected representatives.
TO GO: Track legislation with Civic Delaware
• What: Civic Delaware’s Dover Dash tracks legislation moving through the Delaware General Assembly.
• How it works: Choose a profile, homeowner, parent, young professional, retiree, senior or veteran, to surface bills that affect you, or browse by subject instead.
• What you’ll find: Plain-English summaries, official legislative synopses and real-time status for every bill in the pipeline.
• Why it matters: Bills can move from introduction to passage in days, especially late in a session. Dover Dash gives residents time to catch a proposal and ask their legislator about it before the vote.
CNN was set to provide pool coverage on Monday and accompany President Trump on a trip to New York City, but there will not be a network TV pool team traveling with him.
New research connects two of the Wilmington museum’s most important collections and offers fresh insight into the development of American illustration
WILMINGTON — A new Delaware Art Museum exhibition is challenging the long-held view that two of the institution’s most important collections tell separate stories.
“Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites,” which opened Sept. 5, brings together works by Wilmington illustrator Howard Pyle and British Pre-Raphaelite artists whose detailed, romantic style helped influence his approach to visual storytelling.
The exhibition’s larger significance lies in new research showing that Pyle and Wilmington textile manufacturer and art collector Samuel Bancroft were more closely connected than historians previously understood.
Bancroft assembled what became one of the museum’s signature collections of British Pre-Raphaelite art. Pyle’s work formed the foundation of another.
Although the two men were related by marriage, questions remained about whether Pyle influenced Bancroft’s collecting, whether Bancroft introduced Pyle to the British artists or whether their interests developed independently.
The museum’s research indicates that Pyle was already studying and drawing inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites before Bancroft began acquiring their work in 1890.
Two collections become one story
The Pre-Raphaelite movement began in England during the 19th century. Its artists rejected some conventional academic approaches to painting in favor of vivid colors, close attention to detail, symbolism and stories drawn from literature, medieval history and Arthurian legend.
Those qualities are also visible in many of Pyle’s best-known illustrations.
The exhibition places Pyle’s medieval and Early Renaissance scenes beside works by Pre-Raphaelite artists and their followers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.
Among the works displayed are Pyle’s illustrations for stories about the Knights of the Round Table and Rossetti’s “Water Willow,” Burne-Jones’ “Cupid’s Hunting Fields” and a Rossetti study depicting Lancelot and the Lady of Shalott.
The side-by-side presentation allows visitors to compare the artists’ compositions, subjects and storytelling techniques instead of simply being told that a connection existed.
A Delaware link to American illustration
The exhibit matters locally because Howard Pyle’s legacy is closely tied to Wilmington and the Brandywine Valley. His illustrations appeared in prominent books and magazines, and his teaching influenced a generation of artists who helped establish American illustration as a distinct art form.
The Delaware Art Museum itself traces its origins to the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, founded in 1912 to preserve Pyle’s work following his death.
By demonstrating that Pyle encountered Pre-Raphaelite ideas early in his career, the exhibition adds a new chapter to the story of how American illustration developed. It suggests that the dramatic, story-driven images associated with Pyle and his students had meaningful roots in an earlier British art movement.
The result is more than a comparison of artistic styles. It is an examination of how artistic ideas crossed the Atlantic, took hold in Wilmington and helped shape images seen by American readers across the country.
The exhibition also gives the museum an opportunity to connect two collections central to its identity: its founding collection of Pyle’s work and the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art.
“Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites” was curated by Katherine Feldkamp, the museum’s curatorial associate. It will remain on view in Galleries 11 and 12 through Jan. 24, 2027.
Feldkamp will lead a gallery talk from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, examining how Pyle incorporated Pre-Raphaelite art into his teaching and how his students also found inspiration in the movement. The program is free for museum members and included with general admission for other visitors.
To Go Box
What: “Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites”
Where: Delaware Art Museum, Galleries 11 and 12, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington
When: On view through Jan. 24, 2027
Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The museum remains open until 8 p.m. Thursdays from April through December.
Admission: $18 for adults, $16 for seniors, $7 for students with identification and $6 for youth ages 7 to 18. Admission is free for members and children 6 and younger. General admission is free from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursdays through December.
Special program: Curator Katherine Feldkamp will lead a gallery talk from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25.
Parking: Free on-site parking is available behind the museum.
SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 — In a keynote speech on computing architecture innovation at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Yang Chaobin, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and CEO of the ICT Business Group, unveiled new details about the UnifiedBus interconnect architecture, announced a series of computing products based on this architecture, and explained how the company has collaborated with open-source communities to enable application innovation by customers, partners, and developers.
Yang Chaobin delivering a keynote at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026
In a traditional computing architecture, resource utilization declines as a cluster scales. As little as 20% of a 100,000-NPU cluster’s computing capacity is actually utilized by models, with a vast amount of compute sitting idle during data communications. A 10 trillion-parameter model, which requires massive amounts of intermediate data to train, far exceeds the capacity of the memory on a single accelerator under traditional architectures. Interconnection and communications between components within a cluster have become a key performance bottleneck for computing systems.
According to Yang, Huawei’s solution to this bottleneck is its new computing architecture, powered by the interconnect technology called UnifiedBus, which facilitates collaboration between clusters and SuperPoDs. This architecture has been designed to support the boom in compute demand that is emerging as new agentic applications hit the market. UnifiedBus-powered computing systems have four key features:
Unified protocol and memory semantics: More than ten interconnect protocols have been combined under the UnifiedBus protocol, which increases interconnect bandwidth from 100 GB/s level to TB/s level and reduces round-trip time (RTT) latency from 7 microseconds to 2 microseconds. This protocol also enables unified global memory addressing within SuperPoDs.
Heterogeneous compute collaboration: UnifiedBus directly interconnects CPUs, NPUs, memory, and solid-state drives (SSDs) to enable decentralized, peer-to-peer access between them and flexible CPU-NPU mixing. In addition, tiered hardware acceleration for Transformer enables Attention-FFN disaggregation (AFD).
Tiered storage with global pooling: UnifiedBus uses hybrid-media resource pooling to support the caching of activations. Double Data Rate (DDR) memory serves as the alternative memory for NPUs, reducing latency for search, recommendation, and advertising services, and doubling the performance of vector retrieval for 100 billion-level data items with thousands of dimensions. This also reduces the per-NPU HBM capacity requirements for the training of 10 trillion-parameter models, and improves cluster model FLOPs utilization (MFU).
Optoelectronic interconnect and flexible networking: UnifiedBus serves as a global ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency “data highway”, enabling flexible scaling of compute.
Yang then moved on to unveil Huawei’s newest UnifiedBus interconnect products that cover interconnection within cabinets, between cabinets, and across clusters. This enables elastic scaling from a single cabinet to a million-NPU cluster.
Within cabinets, the UnifiedBus LinkBlade eliminates circuit losses with a cable-free design, which reduces copper cabling within a 4,096-NPU SuperPoD by about 196 kilometers.
Between cabinets, the UnifiedBus LinkDevice supports 176 ports, with 1.6 Tbit/s bandwidth per port, delivering 280 Tbit/s all-optical interconnection. This is the industry’s highest-bandwidth, highest-port-count high-speed bus-protocol interconnect device, with an RTT latency as low as 2 microseconds.
Across clusters, the UnifiedBus UBG switch provides a massive radix fan-out capacity of up to 1,024, meaning it can support a million-NPU SuperCluster and evolution towards supporting tens of trillions of model parameters.
Yang also launched Huawei’s UnifiedBus-powered agentic AI SuperCluster, which is comprised of TaiShan 950 and Atlas 960 SuperPoDs, OceanStor M900 memory storage, and a Xinghe UBG switch. This cluster enables diverse compute collaboration and tiered resource pooling.
Beyond SuperPoDs, Huawei has also applied the UnifiedBus technology to its compute appliances. The company has developed a new series of UnifiedBus-based appliances (supporting one to eight NPUs) and Kunpeng and Ascend modules, which enable small and medium-sized enterprises to run trillion-parameter models locally.
On the ecosystem front, Yang said that Ascend is collaborating with open-source frameworks like DeepSeek Harness, OpenCode, and openJiuwen to develop fully open-source intelligent management, inference acceleration, and security framework agent plugins.
Yang promised, “Huawei is committed to innovating at the system level, building a computing-foundation product portfolio, and going open source and open system. We will continue working with customers, partners, and developers to help this ecosystem thrive and offer the world a new option for compute.”
Students faced prison terms and thousands of dollars in restitution over campus protest against Israel’s war on Gaza
Five Stanford University students who faced prison sentences and thousands of dollars in restitution in connection to a campus protest against Israel’s war on Gaza had all charges dropped on Monday.
The students also had their restitution severely reduced, ending a two-year legal saga that also saw the lead prosecutor in the case removed by the court.
Sept. 21, 2026 — On Sept. 18, 2026, the Access Resource Committee (ARC) Bureau of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking met for the first time, marking the start of its work as a formally established committee supporting the implementation of the EuroHPC JU Access Policy.
Credit: EuroHPC JU
The first ARC Bureau meeting follows the formal appointment of a total of 91 ARC members by the EuroHPC JU Executive Director on 25 August 2026. The members have been appointed for a two-year mandate, renewable once. The ARC members are responsible for assessing the scientific peer review of all access proposals requesting access time on the EuroHPC infrastructure.
To support the internal running of the committee, the ARC Bureau has been appointed. It is composed of a maximum of 22 ARC representatives from the active scientific domains, as well as industry and public sector experts.
The ARC Bureau is responsible for coordinating the internal work of the ARC, liaising directly with the EuroHPC JU, supporting outreach to user communities, and helping to identify flagship projects and scientific trends relevant to EuroHPC activities.
At this inaugural meeting, the ARC Bureau adopted the ARC Rules of Procedure establishing the framework for its work. The meeting was chaired by Luigi Del Debbio (ARC Chair) and Marc Baaden (ARC Vice-Chair).
The ARC is a group of highly qualified experts in high-performance computing who act in a personal capacity and independently of their employer organisation or Participating State. It has been established to support the EuroHPC JU in the preparation of the planning and scope of EuroHPC access calls, the allocation of experts to applications, the prioritisation of applications, and the allocation of access time to EuroHPC supercomputing, AI and quantum infrastructure.
More Details
Chair
Luigi Del Debbio
Vice-Chair
Marc Baaden
Artificial Intelligence
Anália Garcia Lourenço
Edouard Oyallon
Biochemistry, Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Physiology and Medicine
Carmen Domene Nunez
Stefano Vanni
Chemical Sciences and Materials, Solid State Physics
Carlo Adamo
Maria Veronica Ganduglia-Pirovano
Computational Physics: Universe Sciences, Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Citizens Advice says providers of essential services such as energy, banking, phone and internet should guarantee the ‘right to talk to a human’
Stop relying on AI chatbots for customer care and guarantee the “right to talk to a human”, Citizens Advice has urged essential service providers, as research found they wasted time, caused stress and delayed problem solving for more than half of users.
The spread of the AI-powered systems to provide help about the provision of vital services such as energy, banking, phones and internet, is making it harder for millions of already digitally excluded people to handle snags, according to the frontline charity that last year provided more than 2.7 million people with one-on-one help in England and Wales.
Delaware State Police are asking for the public’s help locating a Wilmington man, Jarvis Sturgis wanted in connection with a strong-arm robbery that left one person injured.
Police say Jarvis Sturgis is wanted in connection with an attack and robbery at a bus stop on New Castle Avenue
NEW CASTLE, Del. — Delaware State Police are asking for the public’s help locating a Wilmington man wanted in connection with a strong-arm robbery that left one person injured.
Police identified the suspect as Jarvis Sturgis. Detectives obtained a warrant for his arrest following an investigation into the Sept. 15 robbery.
Troopers responded at approximately 9:20 p.m. to a bus stop in the 3000 block of New Castle Avenue.
According to police, the victim was waiting for a bus when a man approached and demanded the victim’s personal property. The man then allegedly struck the victim and forcibly took the property before fleeing.
The victim was taken to a local hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
The Delaware State Police Criminal Investigations Unit identified Sturgis as the suspect through its investigative efforts, police said. He is expected to be charged with second-degree robbery, a felony, if taken into custody.
Sturgis has not been convicted of the charge and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The investigation remains active. Police did not provide a description of Sturgis or information about where he might be located.
To Go Box
What: Delaware State Police are seeking information about the location of Jarvis Sturgis, who is wanted in connection with a New Castle robbery.
Contact: Detective D. Patterson at 302-365-8471.
Anonymous tips: Contact Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333 or submit information through delawarecrimestoppers.org.
Online: Information may also be sent through a private message to the Delaware State Police Facebook page.
Victim assistance: The Delaware State Police Victim Services Unit and Delaware Victim Center provide support 24 hours a day at 1-800-VICTIM-1, or 1-800-842-8461.
My XR used to switch off at around 10% battery. Today i wanted to ride a longer tour after work but didn’t make it because the board switched off at 22% with 9km remaining. It currently has 1900km
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly says he will not debate Republican Byron Donalds before Florida’s Nov. 3 election after the campaigns failed to agree on a shared debate.
Jolly announced the decision Sunday, accusing Donalds of “repeated lies and bad faith” and arguing that debates under those circumstances would increase division rather than provide voters with a constructive discussion. He said his campaign previously accepted invitations from Tampa Bay Tiger Bay and CBS Miami.
Donalds separately accepted three proposed debates involving Telemundo and NBC 6, Spectrum News and News4Jax. Because the candidates accepted different events, none produced an agreement for both candidates to appear. Earlier this month, the campaigns were publicly blaming each other for the scheduling impasse.
Donalds criticized Jolly’s decision Sunday, pointing to the Democrat’s earlier statements that he was willing to debate repeatedly. Jolly responded by noting Donalds declined requests to debate several Republican primary opponents before winning the GOP nomination in August.
Jolly, a former Republican congressman who later became a Democrat, is seeking to succeed term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis. Donalds, currently a Republican congressman representing Southwest Florida, won his party’s August primary. If no agreement is reached, the Tampa Bay Times reports this would be Florida’s first gubernatorial election without a debate since 1974.
First State Educate’s School Board Roundup, published monthly, brings together discussions from Delaware’s 16 traditional public school districts… and it’s free!
First State Educate’s August School Board Roundup brings local meetings together to show the issues taking shape across Delaware.
DOVER, Del. — Decisions about student progress, district budgets, school buildings, and student support appeared across Delaware school board meetings in August. The details differed by district, but the discussions raised a shared question: How will boards know whether their plans are meeting students’ needs?
First State Educate’s August School Board Roundup brings together discussions from Delaware’s 16 traditional public school districts. It gives residents a way to follow their own board while seeing how issues in one district connect to those facing others.
FSE publishes the School Board Roundup monthly. Readers can find the latest edition in the Knowledge Hub.
The August meetings raised questions about measuring student progress, explaining financial choices, addressing building needs, and reporting back to the public. Some boards made decisions; others reviewed plans that will return for further discussion.
Turning priorities into measurable goals
Some boards adopted measurable academic goals, while others outlined how they plan to review progress during the school year. Their discussions covered reading, mathematics, attendance, and school climate.
Setting a long-term target is one step. Boards also need information during the year to see whether students are progressing toward it. The superintendent and district staff develop and carry out strategies; boards establish the outcomes they expect and monitor progress.
The August discussions show why progress and continuing gaps belong in the same conversation. An improvement in one measure may be encouraging while results in another grade or subject still call for attention. Families and community members need both to understand the full picture.
Asking what spending should accomplish
School boards discussed how targeted funding can respond to student needs. Some considered plans or greater flexibility for resources supporting multilingual learners, students from low-income households, mental health services, and other needs.
Approving a spending plan does not yet show what students gained from it. Future reports can help residents understand which students the spending is meant to help, what result the district expects, and how progress will be measured.
Those questions help boards connect proposed investments to district goals while leaving the development and implementation of strategies to district leaders and staff.
Making district finances easier to understand
Financial discussions varied across districts in August. Some reported enough cash to cover near-term obligations. Others discussed projected deficits, use of reserves, delayed revenue, or the possibility of a future referendum.
A district may have enough money to pay immediate bills while budgeting to spend more over the year than it expects to receive. Several boards asked for clearer reports to help them and the public understand the difference between available cash and longer-term financial pressures.
Clear information matters when a district considers reducing spending or asking residents for additional revenue. People need to understand what is driving the need, how current funds are being used, and what choices the board is weighing.
Following building needs and state funding requests
Facilities were a recurring subject at August meetings. Boards discussed overcrowding, aging buildings, renovations, new construction, and how to finance proposed work.
Several districts are resubmitting projects that have not received state funding. Board members also raised questions about how the state prioritizes requests and how long documented building needs may wait.
Submitting a construction request does not mean a project or referendum has been approved. Knowing where a proposal stands helps residents understand what their district is seeking, what need it would address, and what decisions may come next.
Connecting student supports with learning
Attendance, behavior, mental health, special education, and academic support appeared in discussions across multiple districts.
Some districts described efforts to make services more consistent across schools. Others discussed wellness centers, family outreach, or ways to identify why students are missing class. Together, the discussions show how access to support can affect a student’s ability to participate in learning.
The meetings describe services being developed or put into place; they do not yet establish their effects. As districts continue this work, boards can ask whether services reach the intended students, whether they are delivered consistently, and whether attendance, engagement, or other outcomes improve.
Watching safety and technology policies take shape
School safety remained on board agendas in August. Discussions covered equipment and building procedures, staff training, emergency planning, student discipline, and communication with families.
Districts also addressed personal electronic devices, artificial intelligence, and the role of technology in classrooms. Some adopted policies; others began reviewing proposals or changing how existing rules will be carried out.
Boards discussed device distractions, expectations for AI use, and how technology supports instruction. Safety discussions likewise extended beyond equipment to training, procedures, and communication. Future reports can show how these decisions were implemented and whether they served their intended purposes.
Staffing and student pathways
Districts entered the school year with different staffing needs. Some reported relatively few general vacancies but continued to have difficulty filling specialized positions, including roles in special education and student services. Others discussed how vacancies and compensation decisions affect their budgets.
Boards also heard about opportunities intended to connect students with college and careers, including internships and career and technical education. These discussions raise questions about access: which students can participate, what they learn or earn, and how programs connect to opportunities after graduation.
Making board decisions visible to the public
Several boards discussed how residents can better understand decisions before and after they are made. Topics included clearer financial reports, publication of board priorities and calendars, public access to committee meetings, and opportunities for community input.
A proposed policy, a state funding request, and an approved district plan are different steps. Explaining what has happened—and what remains undecided—helps residents know when and how they can participate.
What is happening in your district?
The statewide themes are shared, but the decisions remain local. One board may be reviewing student goals while another is considering a building request, changing a technology policy, or seeking a clearer financial report.
By bringing the meetings together, the August Roundup helps residents see both their district’s decisions and the questions other Delaware boards are facing. Readers can use that context to follow what happens at the next public meeting.
TO GO BOX: Follow Your School Board’s Decisions
The August School Board Roundup covers discussions across Delaware’s 16 traditional public school districts. Create a free Knowledge Hub account to find the report and learn:
What your district’s board discussed as the school year began
Which student goals, policies, and spending plans are moving forward
What financial and building needs could affect your community
Which plans still need measures or follow-up reports
Can Gulf Arab countries help break the deadlock over Trump’s Gaza peace plan?Expert commentLToremark
Gulf Arab states increasingly view Israel as the main obstacle to progress on the peace plan – and may hope for an opening after Israel’s October elections.
Almost a year after US President Donald Trump unveiled his 20-point peace plan for Gaza, which was adopted by both Israel and Hamas and paved the way for the release of all Israeli hostages, the peace process appears to have hit a wall.
The two sides remain fundamentally divided over the sequencing of demilitarization and Israeli withdrawal. So far, Hamas has refused to give up its heavy weapons unless Israel halts all military operations and withdraws its forces from the parts of Gaza it currently controls – approximately 60 per cent of the strip – while Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms.
Although President Trump continues to argue that the situation in Gaza is under control, his envoy Jared Kushner, who recently visited Israel, and the director-general of his Board of Peace, Nikolay Mladenov, have so far been unable to launch the second phase of the process.
In September, Kushner acknowledged that the task of demilitarizing Gaza was proving far more difficult than initially expected: ‘We are starting to understand the scope of the militarization of Gaza. It is beyond your comprehension’. In August, he had told Fox News that he expected Hamas to begin handing over its weapons in ‘as few as 30 days’.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains critical according to an August report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – and there is little hope for reconstruction given the current stalemate. According to the OCHA report, 58 per cent of Gaza’s population is facing ‘severe deficiencies in shelter conditions or access to essential services and non-food items’, while a severely strained health system and lack of medical supplies could put lifesaving services at risk.
Arab Gulf countries like UAE (which is also a member of the Board of Peace) are key providers of humanitarian aid to Gaza. In fact, UAE aid accounts for 46 per cent of global assistance. But what is their position on the current stalemate in Gaza and could they help find a way to break the deadlock?
In August, eight Arab and Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and Qatar – condemned Israel’s unwillingness to proceed with the implementation of Trump’s plan for Gaza, saying its stance threatens international efforts to end the war.
In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of these countries denounced Israel’s stated opposition to a roadmap for completing Trump’s broader Gaza plan, which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803. The group also called for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups to disarm; an Israeli military withdrawal; the deployment of an international stabilization force; the transfer of administrative authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza; and the reconstruction of Gaza.
In May, it was reported that the UAE had contributed $100 million for training of new Gaza police force – an important feature that will help provide security in post-war Gaza. However, Israeli officials reportedly barred the already vetted new recruits from leaving the strip for training in Cairo, and for now it is unclear when permission to leave and return to Gaza will be granted – if at all.
Although the UAE and other Arab members of the Board of Peace did not comment on this report, it is clear that their frustration with the Israeli government over Gaza and the West Bank is mounting. In August, the inaugural ‘Emirates loves Palestine’ event was held in Dubai, celebrating the connection between the UAE and the Palestinian people, while a delegation from a UAE future leaders programme were sent to Egypt to learn about – and take part in – UAE efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Indeed, the UAE is particularly important in this context as it is one of the signatories of the Abraham Accords and one of Israel’s closest partners in the Gulf and the Arab world. But other Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have also sharpened their condemnation of recent radical statements by Israeli officials on the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, as well as increasing settler violence in the West Bank. Trump, meanwhile, has insisted that a controversial nuclear deal signed with Saudi Arabia this summer hinges on Saudi normalization with Israel. But despite US pressure, it seems the Saudis will not divert significantly from their demand to establish a clear path for Palestinian statehood.
Due to the Iran war and its fallout, Gulf Arab states are more preoccupied with their own domestic security and economic challenges than at any point in recent memory. And with only weeks to go until Israel’s pivotal October elections, they also retain a measure of hope that a change of government could open the way to more constructive engagement.
Leading opposition candidates in Israel have been critical of Netanyahu’s policies on both Gaza and the West Bank. Many of them believe that Israel needs to involve the Arab states, and in particular Saudi Arabia, in future dealings with the Palestinians. A new Israeli government could also prove significantly tougher on settler violence in the West Bank and more flexible on alternative Palestinian governance in Gaza to unseat Hamas.
However, if the current governing coalition remains in power, more drastic and radical steps might follow. This could include construction in the E1 strategic perimeter, which would drive a wedge through the West Bank and undermine prospects of a future Palestinian state, as well as a possible escalation in Gaza.
For now, Gulf states are focusing on two key diplomatic instruments in their response to the ongoing stalemate in Gaza. One is humanitarian assistance, the other is pointed condemnations of Israel, which is increasingly perceived in Arab capitals as the primary obstacle to the implementation of Trump’s peace plan.
At present, it seems unlikely that Gulf states will change tactics. Even less likely that they will withdraw support for Trump’s peace plan and the Board of Peace, or press for urgent, extraordinary measures, such as sanctions on Israel or an intervention by Trump himself. But this calculus may well be revised in the aftermath of the Israeli elections, depending on the outcome. It will also remain contingent on the broader strategic environment in the Gulf, not least the risk of renewed hostilities.
Until something breaks the stalemate, the population of Gaza will continue to be caught between Hamas and the Israeli government – both waiting for the other to make the first move.
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Gov. Joe Lombardo’s office has declined, for now, to meet with certified firearms instructors who say Nevada’s regulatory system for armed security guards has serious public-safety and oversight problems.
The Nevada Association of Certified Firearms Instructors says it has sought a meeting with Lombardo since March. Association President Andrew Cowie has raised concerns about the Private Investigators Licensing Board, whose members are appointed by the governor. Lombardo’s office said it would review the material but would not schedule a personal meeting in the short term.
Former PILB member Rick Brown resigned in June, saying the board was not adequately addressing alleged violations involving firearms instructor Stephanie Costello. The board later fined Costello $5,000 and temporarily suspended her instructor certification after determining she violated training regulations.
Separate concerns emerged this summer when Nevada lawmakers learned that security guards had been carrying rifles and shotguns even though state law contains no provision authorizing the practice. Lawmakers subsequently questioned the board’s oversight and training requirements.
Nevada’s Department of Business and Industry has publicly supported an independent review of PILB operations, saying questions involving public safety and statutory authority should be fully examined.
Jensen Huang dismisses warnings from former Anthropic researcher and others as ‘doomsday narratives’
The boss of the chipmaker Nvidia has said AI will not develop to a point that will lead to the extinction of the human race within a few years, rejecting such assertions as overblown “doomsday narratives”.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of the $5tn AI chipmaker, said the claims made on social media by the former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that AI could become “superhuman” and kill off humanity within the decade were “irresponsible”.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States has deported more than 25,000 migrants to countries other than their own since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a multinational investigation examining the administration’s expanding third-country deportation program.
Forbidden Stories reported that the administration has reached agreements with 35 countries, including nations in Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, to accept migrants who often have no previous connection to those destinations. The State Department’s Office of Remigration, created in 2025, has played a central role in negotiating the arrangements.
Internal records reviewed by investigators show at least $410 million was planned for governments and humanitarian organizations connected to the program. About $81 million was designated for participating governments, while more than $178 million was directed toward the International Organization for Migration and $123 million toward UNHCR.
The findings come days after a federal appeals court rejected a Trump administration policy allowing rapid third-country deportations without giving migrants a meaningful opportunity to raise concerns about persecution or torture. Reuters reported that more than 25,000 migrants have been affected, with removals involving countries including Mexico, Uganda, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea.
The administration argues third-country removals help execute valid deportation orders when migrants cannot be returned to their home countries.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is preparing sanctions against the International Criminal Court that could sharply restrict the Hague-based tribunal’s access to the U.S. financial system and American companies.
The proposed measures would prohibit most U.S. citizens and businesses from providing funds, goods or services to the ICC without a Treasury Department license, according to officials familiar with the plans. The Wall Street Journal reported that the restrictions would take effect after a six- to seven-month grace period and could be finalized around this week’s United Nations General Assembly.
Washington has already sanctioned more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including court President Tomoko Akane. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that the court improperly asserts jurisdiction over officials from countries that never joined it, including the United States and Israel.
The dispute intensified after the ICC issued 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel rejects the allegations and the court’s jurisdiction.
Organization-wide sanctions could affect the ICC’s banking, information technology, insurance, investigations and employee payments. European governments have discussed measures intended to shield companies from U.S. restrictions.
Why Should Delaware Care? Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
General Assembly property tax working group convenes
Public weighs in on ChristianaCare’s proposed southern expansions
State lawmakers are set to convene the first meeting of a new property tax working group Monday morning to discuss reforms to the state’s property tax system in the wake of last year’s controversial reassessment saga.
The group, led by Rep. Frank Burns (D-Pike Creek) and Sen. Russ Huxtable (D-Lewes), will investigate potential policy levers the state or its three counties could employ to ease the property tax burden on residents.
The legislature’s joint property tax committee discussed some of these policy levers, such as homestead exemptions and circuit breaker programs, during hearings last fall.
📍 The General Assembly’s Property Tax Relief and Modernization Working Group will meet at 10 a.m. Monday inside Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Mall in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Public comment on proposed ChristianaCare expansions
Residents will have the chance to weigh in Thursday morning on ChristianaCare’s proposed expansions into Camden and Georgetown during a public hearing held by the Delaware Health Care Commission.
The proposed expansions have already drawn criticism from downstate hospital systems, but it remains to be seen how residents feel about the possibility of the state’s healthcare giant expanding its footprint in Kent and Sussex County.
📍 The ChristianaCare Camden and Georgetown Health Campus Public Hearing will take place at 9 a.m. Thursday, inside the Department of Health and Social Services Chapel Building, located at 1901 N. DuPont Highway in New Castle. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Dover planners consider downtown revitalization
Dover planners will consider proposals Monday night that could help further city leaders’ plans of revitalizing the capitol city’s downtown core.
Dover’s former post office is in a prime location on Loockerman Street, but it has sat empty since 2020. Now, a developer is hoping to turn the property into a mixed-used development with apartments and first floor commercial space.
Though not tied directly to the city’s “Capitol City 2030” plan, the development would mark another step toward the vision of breathing new life into downtown Dover.
📍 The Dover Planning Commission will meet at 7 p.m. Monday inside City Council Chambers, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Why Should Delaware Care? A proposed data center near Newark drew criticism from local residents about the facility’s potential to raise electric bills and damage the environment. It now appears that part of the site will instead host the Christina School District’s Networks Schools for Employable Skills.
For months, Newark-area residents have voiced concerns about a proposed data center near the town border, saying it would use too much water and energy and be too noisy.
Two months after New Castle County Councilman Tim Sheldon brokered a handshake deal to pause the project, it appears the property’s management company may be moving forward with different plans for at least some of the site.
Earlier this month, New York-based developer Shelbourne submitted plans to the county to convert half of an existing building in the White Clay Center, a Newark-area industrial and office park, into a 10-classroom vocational technical school.
If the application is approved, the building would be part of Christina School District’s Networks Schools for Employable Skills, according to letters submitted to the county as part of the application. The Networks School focuses on teaching students with individualized education plans (IEPs) “real-world job skills.”
Norma Brister, the principal of the Networks School for Employable Skills, told Spotlight Delaware the space would not mark an expansion of the school.
Instead, it would allow the school to be housed at one location.
Brister said the school is currently located at 30 Blue Hen Drive and also has four “enterprise areas” roughly 4 miles away at the Shue-Medill Middle School.
Those plans were previously wrapped into a larger community backlash in Delaware against the growth of the data center industry, which is booming across the country because of the promises of artificial intelligence technology.
According to an email exchange between Sheldon and land use attorney Shawn Tucker, the deal depended on the county planning department’s all-but-guaranteed approval of an exploratory plan application from the developer, which would grandfather the land into zoning rules that existed prior to this year.
That means the developer would not have to follow the county’s recently-passed data center regulations if the developer ultimately decides to build a data center there.
But the data center plan has not yet been approved by the county.
The county’s planning department submitted additional comments about the plan last month, including asking the developer to confirm there is enough energy supply to serve the site.
Tucker, an attorney representing Shelbourne, said his client is still trying to get the data center plan approved, but remains open to other tenants for the vacant buildings in the business park.
“They’re not pushing it, but they’ve gotta keep their options open,” Sheldon said.
Chatham House fellow gives evidence at UK parliament committee on global AI governance and risksNews releasethilton.drupal
Senior Research Fellow Isabella Wilkinson spoke to the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee at a time when many are calling for greater regulation of AI in the light of emerging risks.
Isabella Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow with Chatham House’s Digital Society Programme, gave evidence on the global governance of AI to the UK House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee on 16 September.
Wilkinson outlined the main types of risk from AI: malicious risks, loss-of-control risks and systemic risks. Addressing the governance challenge posed by these risks, she said:
‘We’re facing a governance challenge because all of these risks are interlinked, so we have to be very strategic about how we design governance at multiple different levels. This is a multilateral challenge.’
Wilkinson said that interlinked governance challenges, including a dearth of trusted information about AI and ‘the lack of a crisis toolbox’ to deploy in the event of a crisis, had led to ‘quite a severe state of gridlock in multilateral AI governance.’
The committee was meeting in a week in which debates over the risks associated with AI featured prominently in public debate, following calls by tech leaders to slow the pace of the technology’s development.
‘We are in a moment of intense crisis and turbulence in multilateral AI governance. But as we’ve learned [from other areas of governance] … these conditions create a window of opportunity for dealing with the gridlock,’ said Wilkinson.
The Supreme Court continues to make consequential rulings in the shadows. I analyzed tens of thousands of case files from the court’s online archives, parsing through filings to separate simple requests for deadline extensions from challenges to long-established constitutional rights. I discovered that in the term that ended in 2025, the justices issued more substantive decisions on their emergency docket than in cases argued in open court. Experts told me this was likely the first time this has happened in the court’s modern history.
Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to my questions.
Since I reported that story in July, more major rulings have been made on the emergency docket, often called the “shadow docket,” where justices rarely hear arguments and often issue unsigned orders that don’t explain how they arrived at their decisions or even how they voted.
These decisions are continuing to come down even after the court began its summer recess. For example:
On Aug. 31, the court allowed construction to continue on a ballroom at the White House. Requests like this one from the president are a big reason why the number of cases being handled on the court’s shadow docket has been so high.
On Sept. 10, a decision blocked Missouri from using a redrawn congressional map crafted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. The legislature had redrawn the maps at President Donald Trump’s request — part of a string of middecade redistricting efforts that could determine control of Congress. Like most shadow docket decisions, no opinion was issued and there is no record of how the justices voted.
Though experts told me rulings on the shadow docket have generally enabled Trump, he has not won them all. The USPS ruling, for one, has not pleased the president. Last week, in a post on Truth Social, the social media website he owns, Trump criticized the justices he nominated, writing that they “are not the people I interviewed to serve.”
“It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” Trump wrote.
Every decision the court has made since July has been on its shadow docket. That will remain the case until the court starts its new term on Oct. 5.
Watch our explainer to learn more about what I uncovered and how the shadow docket works.
AUSTIN, Texas — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and seriously wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man Sunday during an immigration enforcement operation, prompting demands from Austin officials for an independent investigation.
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot in the torso following what Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis described as a brief foot pursuit. He was taken to a hospital in serious but stable condition before being transferred to federal custody. ICE says Garces Perez has a final removal order, while an attorney representing his family disputes parts of the government’s account and says he entered the United States legally.
Accounts of the encounter remain disputed. Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel said the ICE agent rammed Garces Perez’s Toyota Corolla before opening fire. Photographs from the scene showed bullet damage to the vehicle, but federal authorities have not publicly released a detailed account establishing exactly what preceded the shooting.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar called for Austin police and the Texas Rangers to participate in the investigation. Homeland Security Investigations is leading the federal inquiry with FBI assistance.
The shooting comes amid increased ICE activity nationwide, with the agency recording nearly 51,000 arrests in August.
JACKSON, Wisconsin — A Texas man hired by a political consulting firm conducting canvassing work supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany faces multiple felony charges after authorities say he struck a bicyclist while intoxicated and fled from police.
Duane Maiden, 32, was working for Phoenix-based Echo Canyon Consulting, which received $2.5 million from Restoration of America PAC for canvassing operations supporting Tiffany, according to reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The PAC is heavily funded by Wisconsin billionaire Richard Uihlein.
Authorities say the Sept. 3 crash occurred in Washington County after Maiden’s vehicle ran a stop sign and struck a bicyclist, leaving the victim with fractures to his leg, pelvis and spine. A coworker told investigators Maiden had purchased vodka earlier and had been drinking while the two were between canvassing assignments.
The coworker asked to leave the vehicle after the collision and called 911 and his supervisor. Deputies later spotted Maiden’s car and pursued him into neighboring Ozaukee County, where he was arrested. Maiden reportedly told investigators he had been drinking while waiting between assignments but denied realizing he struck the bicyclist.
Maiden faces felony charges including hit-and-run causing great bodily harm, intoxicated use of a vehicle and fleeing an officer. Tiffany’s campaign denied having any connection to Maiden.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana — Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said Sunday that Donald Trump Jr. should provide proof that he repaid Russian businessman Umar Kremlev after reports that Kremlev covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses tied to Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations in the Bahamas.
Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Cassidy said repayment would matter but added that accepting the gift in the first place created serious appearance concerns because Trump Jr. is the president’s son. “Anytime someone gives a $250,000 gift and they have strong ties to the Kremlin, that’s wrong,” Cassidy said. He added that it “would be nice to have that kind of verified.”
ProPublica reported that Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association, paid for major wedding-related expenses, including use of a private island and other festivities. The outlet described Kremlev as having close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and noted the boxing association’s past financial ties to Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy company.
President Donald Trump said Friday that his son had told him he would repay Kremlev. Reuters separately reported that a source familiar with the matter confirmed plans for reimbursement. Public documentation proving that the repayment has actually occurred has not been released.
The issue has also drawn congressional scrutiny. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, opened an investigation into Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev and requested financial records related to the wedding arrangements.
Cassidy’s comments are notable because criticism has come from within Trump’s own party as well as from Democrats. His focus Sunday was narrower: whether the reported reimbursement can be independently verified and whether accepting such a large gift from a Kremlin-linked figure was appropriate given Trump Jr.’s proximity to presidential power.
Pierre, South Dakota — South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, has endorsed Democrat Terrence Davis to succeed her, an unusual cross-party move from the state’s top elections official.
Johnson announced Saturday that she was backing Davis over Republican nominee Heather Baxter, saying her experience running the office changed her views about what the job requires. “I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others,” she wrote.
Johnson first won office in 2022 with support from activists who questioned voting machines and pushed for hand-counting ballots after Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Once in office, however, Johnson oversaw statewide post-election audits and came to publicly support “secure, tested ballot tabulators.”
That shift contributed to her losing the Republican nomination in June to Baxter, who has advocated expanded hand-counting and other election-integrity measures. Johnson did not name Baxter in her endorsement statement but said South Dakota needs a secretary of state who will “strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation.”
Davis, a former state trooper, supports policies including automatic voter registration at age 18. Baxter has emphasized voter identification, paper ballots and proof-of-citizenship requirements, although South Dakota already requires several of those safeguards. Libertarian Tamara Lesnar is also running.
Absentee voting began Sept. 18, and South Dakota’s general election is Nov. 3. The voter registration deadline is Oct. 19.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Sunday that his planned 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery will also serve as a military facility capable of storing drones, sniper ammunition and other equipment.
Trump said on Truth Social that the change came at the “strong request” of the U.S. military and was necessary for national security. He did not identify which military officials or branches made the request, and no formal Pentagon documentation supporting the claim had been released publicly as of Sunday morning.
The arch was originally presented as a monumental gateway and visitor attraction near the Arlington Memorial Bridge, with galleries and an observation area. Trump now says the structure would also include space for drones and sniper teams, significantly expanding its stated purpose.
The project was already controversial before the military proposal. The Federal Aviation Administration determined Friday that the 250-foot structure would not pose a hazard to aircraft near Reagan National Airport if it includes an “eternal flame” and additional lighting to make it visible to pilots.
The National Park Service has also acknowledged that the arch could have “adverse effects” on nearby historic properties, including the visual alignment between the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery.
The project has not yet received final approval. Trump administration officials have said they expect to submit the final design to the National Capital Planning Commission in November, while a federal judge has required the government to provide advance notice before beginning most work at the site.
"Please feel free to share this with anyone who was there or witnessed the accident:
Our family is incredibly grateful to everyone who stopped and helped Neftaly after the accident. Knowing that people stayed with him, held his head and hand, and reassured him until EMS arrived means more to us than you can imagine.
Neftaly has recently woken up and was able to say a few words. He is still dealing with serious injuries and recovering from surgery to his mouth and tongue, but we are very thankful that he is awake.
If anyone witnessed the accident and has any additional information about what happened, please feel free to contact me at Joan.v0508@gmail.com.
Thank you all for being there for him.
Thanks, Joan" ‐-------------------
I thought maybe someone in this sub/community might know of the person or event. It was hard to see and i hope they pull through. Please ride safe.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump returned to the White House Saturday evening, cutting his weekend stay at Camp David short by one day as the State Department warned Americans about rapidly escalating security risks in the Middle East.
Trump landed near the White House shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday. The administration did not publicly explain why his schedule changed, and there is no confirmed evidence that the early return was directly connected to the deteriorating security situation.
The State Department has advised Americans in the Middle East to remain highly vigilant and prepare for flight cancellations, airspace closures and other travel disruptions. Americans outside the region have also been urged to reconsider travel through the Middle East because of the possibility of further escalation.
The warnings followed another escalation involving Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement. Saudi Arabia said Saturday that it intercepted a ballistic missile aimed at Riyadh, the first such attack on the capital since renewed fighting intensified. No casualties were reported from the missile strike.
The Houthis separately claimed they launched ballistic and cruise missiles and drones at targets including Saudi oil facilities in Yanbu. Saudi officials confirmed the attempted attack on Riyadh, but several of the Houthis’ additional claims had not been independently verified.
Regional tensions have increased in recent days as Houthi attacks threaten Saudi infrastructure and major shipping routes. Saudi Arabia has also sought additional air-defense support from allies as its interceptor supplies have come under strain.
Amarillo, Texas — A federal judge has paused a lawsuit by the Republican Party of Texas seeking to restrict participation in GOP primaries to registered party members, leaving the state’s current primary system unchanged for now.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk said Friday that the case should wait because the Texas Legislature may address the issue during its 2027 session. “Prominent Texas politicians support similar legislative action,” he wrote, adding that lawmakers could amend the law currently being challenged.
The Texas Republican Party sued last year, arguing that the state’s primary system violates its First Amendment right of association by allowing voters who may oppose the party’s candidates or principles to help choose Republican nominees. Under current Texas law, voters do not formally register by party before an election, although participating in a party primary creates a temporary affiliation for that election cycle.
Republican leaders have pushed for closed primaries for years. The issue gained additional attention after former House Speaker Dade Phelan and Rep. Gary VanDeaver narrowly survived 2024 primary challenges, with some Republicans alleging that Democratic-leaning and independent voters helped them win. Those claims remain disputed.
Gov. Greg Abbott has publicly supported changing the law so that “only Republicans vote in Republican primaries.” But Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden has said he intends to defend the state’s existing system in court.
Kacsmaryk did not rule on whether the GOP’s constitutional argument is valid. Instead, he put the case on hold until after the Legislature completes its next regular session. The state’s next primary election is scheduled for 2028.
Los Angeles, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 13-bill election package Saturday that expands criminal penalties, cybersecurity protections and notification requirements ahead of California’s November elections.
Among the most significant provisions, AB 282 makes it a felony to seize ballots, election records or certified voting technology before results are certified, including when a supervisor directs someone else to do so. SB 259 similarly creates felony penalties for supervisors who order interference with the delivery or return of mail ballots.
Another measure, AB 1664, requires local election officials to notify the California secretary of state and attorney general within one day of learning about a warrant, subpoena or law-enforcement investigation involving election records or voting technology. AB 2281 directs the state to assess whether it needs additional cybersecurity resources to replace federal support.
The package also extends restrictions on deceptive AI-generated election content, requires disclaimers for certain paid online political content and expands language-access requirements for voters. Other bills modify vote-by-mail procedures and polling-place protections.
Newsom framed the legislation as protection against possible federal interference, specifically citing President Donald Trump. That characterization reflects the governor’s stated rationale; the laws themselves apply more broadly to unauthorized interference by federal officials or others.
The measures build on SB 73, signed earlier this year, which restricts unauthorized law-enforcement access to voter rolls, election technology and voting areas without a court order or an investigation tied to state election law.
The legislation comes days after the U.S. Supreme Court left in place an injunction blocking new federal mail-ballot requirements from taking effect before the midterms.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he will create a new “AI Force” and appoint an artificial intelligence czar, while reiterating his opposition to regulations that he says could slow the industry’s growth.
Trump announced the plan on social media but offered few details about how the new organization would operate, what authority it would have or when it would be established. He said a new AI czar would be named soon and wrote that “only High I.Q. individuals need apply.”
The announcement comes days after Trump dismissed warnings about potentially dangerous artificial intelligence systems as a “hoax” and argued that the industry should not be slowed by new government restrictions. He has said existing criminal and civil laws should generally be sufficient to address harmful uses of AI.
Trump predicted that artificial intelligence could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product and compared its potential economic impact to the Industrial Revolution. He also framed AI development as a strategic competition with China, saying the United States currently leads and must maintain that advantage.
The administration has already taken steps to accelerate AI adoption in national security, including a June directive calling for advanced commercial and open-source systems to be deployed across the military and intelligence community while maintaining human accountability.
The announcement comes amid increasingly public warnings from AI researchers and industry leaders about autonomous systems, cybersecurity threats and models behaving in unexpected ways. Major technology companies remain divided over how much government oversight is appropriate and whether development should be slowed while stronger safeguards are created.
Archmere football lines up on offense at the start of its game against the St. Mark’s Spartans, September 18. Photo Credit: Ryan Colasanti
The Archmere Auks (2-0) defeated the St. Mark’s Spartans (0-3), 8-0, on September 18, earning their first Class 2A win of the season and second shutout in as many games.
WILMINGTON, DE — Archmere’s junior quarterback, Shane Harding, stood in the shotgun formation with fellow junior, Wyatt Beekley, standing beside him for the third straight play. Beekly ran the ball out of the same formation the past two plays, helping the Auks earn a first and goal opportunity from the St. Mark’s three-yard line with a little less than 10 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.
On first and goal, Archmere turned to its trusted running back one more time.
Beekly ran from the right hip of Harding and took the handoff to the left of the center. Beekly looked for a running lane inside, but quickly bounced the run wide of the guard and between the tackle, finding enough room to barrel into the endzone for the first touchdown of the game.
Beekly’s touchdown was the only score in Archmere’s 8-0 win over the St. Mark’s Spartans, Friday night, in the first Class 2A game of the season for either squad.
Beekly finished the game with 58 rushing yards and the one touchdown as part of an Archmere rushing attack that gained over 200 yards throughout the game. Harding led all rushers with 126 yards on the ground and fellow junior, Nathan Blessington, ran for just under 70.
“We just have so many plays that work off each other, like, our plays are all built to like confuse the defense,” Beekly said about what makes Archmere’s running attack so effective. “We have so many weapons outside, inside. Shane’s willing to run anyone over so, I mean, we just have so many weapons that I believe in our offense and we can go as far as we want.”
The Archmere running game played well throughout the night, but it was the two defenses that made big plays to keep the game close throughout.
The Auks started the game by receiving the kick-off and drove the ball into Spartan territory on the game’s opening possession. Archmere got as far as the Spartan 22-yard line before the St. Mark’s defense earned a sack and forced the Auks into a turnover on downs. Archmere’s next offensive possession was thwarted deep in Spartan territory as were a couple others in the first half.
Archmere’s defense held the Spartans to their side of the field through the first half. St. Mark’s crossed midfield for the first time on their opening possession of the third quarter — driving to the Archmere 23-yard-line — before the Auks defense halted the drive. A couple possessions later Archmere scored the game’s only touchdown on a six play drive, all of which were runs.
“The word of the week we had in practice was finish and at halftime coach was not happy with how we had been finishing the drives, but we finished it at the end so that’s all that matters,” Harding said.
The Spartans followed Archmere’s scoring drive with a strong drive of their own working their way to Archmere’s 36-yard line. The Auks defense held firm there, stopping St. Mark’s on fourth down and returning the ball to their offense. The Spartans defense did the same on the Auks’ next offensive possession and the Spartans’ offense took over at their own 35-yard line with a little over two and half minutes to play and a chance to tie the game.
St. Mark’s senior quarterback, Kyle Iudica, connected with fellow senior Ta’Son Wallace for 23 yards on the drive’s first play, but the Archmere defense stopped the Spartan offense on the next set of downs. The Auks defense allowed the offense to gain just two more yards during the drive, successfully keeping the Spartans out of the endzone each time they encroached into Archmere territory.
“I think we got a lot of dogs on the other side of the ball, a lot of guys stepping up, a lot of young guys,” Archmere senior Francis Morda said postgame describing the Auks’ defensive unit. “We have a lot of grit and you can’t teach that, that’s all heart. That’s all it is.”
The Auks defense finished the game with two sacks and their first shutout against the Spartans since the DIAA quarterfinals in 2021.
“We look forward to this game every year, we circle it on the calendar, but we got to build off this,” Morda said. “We’re 2-0, but we have a lot of things to fix. We just gotta move forward to DMA and just focus one game at a time.”
Archmere’s next game will be on September 25, against another Class 2A opponent, Delaware Military Academy. The game will start at 7:00 p.m. and take place at Delaware Military Academy.
The Spartans will play the second game of their two-game home stand against William Penn on September 25. That game will start at 7:00 p.m.
Photo collage by ProPublica. Source images: Laura Gordon Photography, Telegram.
My colleagues and I had been digging for days. We’d heard a rumor that a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin named Umar Kremlev had attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding this past May in the Bahamas. But to confirm that, we needed visual proof.
First, we scoured everything the Trumps had released from the event, held on a pair of private islands. On social media and in the pages of tabloids such as Page Six and Hello! magazine, official photos from the weekend showed an intimate chapel ceremony alongside lavish beach parties. Several photos depicted guests, including Jared Kushner and Eric Trump, and we scanned them all for signs of Kremlev. Still, nothing had turned up yet.
We then turned to Kremlev’s social media profiles on the off chance that he’d posted about the wedding. Incredibly, on Telegram, Kremlev had posted videos over the same weekend as Trump Jr.’s wedding that appeared to be from someplace tropical. In one, a single detail caught our attention: As Kremlev speaks in Russian to the camera, the frame gives a partial view of an outdoor patio setting. It wasn’t palm trees or crystal water we noticed, but the wicker furniture.
The wicker patio furniture in the background of a video posted by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev the same weekend as Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding provided a clue as to his whereabouts.Via Umar Kremlev’s Telegram account
The chair and its affixed cushion in Kremlev’s post matched what we’d seen in photos of the private islands elsewhere online, such as the promotional image below:
A promotional photo taken at one of the islands that was the site of Trump Jr.’s wedding events depicted the same wicker patio furniture as seen in Kremlev’s video background.
But of course, we couldn’t hang such a big claim — that this Russian oligarch had attended the president’s son’s intimate wedding weekend — on a wicker chair analysis. The Trump family appeared to be curating the wedding’s visual footprint, and not much seemed to exist outside of its control.
So when my colleagues Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and I finally found a photo that confirmed what we’d been looking for, we were floored. The proof had been hiding in an Instagram gallery posted months earlier by a swimsuit model and friend of the bride, nestled among glamour shots and lifestyle photos.
The sunset group shot on a white sand beach shows wedding guests, barefoot and smiling against a backdrop of palms. One guest throws up a shaka. Front and center is the president’s eldest son and his bride, Bettina Trump, surrounded by close friends and family.
A group photo posted on Instagram by a swimsuit model and friend of the bride shows wedding guests.Instagram
But in the back row, just behind the newlyweds, the top half of a man’s shaved head is visible.
We recognized him instantly: Kremlev.
That photo was at the center of our story this week, in which we revealed that Kremlev secretly bankrolled much of Trump Jr.’s wedding weekend, paying to rent out a private island, among other big-ticket items, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the events. The photo also showed two others associated with Kremlev, part of a larger group of Russians whose presence puzzled some attendees. That made their absence from all other official wedding photos all the more noteworthy — especially for a gathering of only 50 or so guests.
Kremlev is visible in the back of a group photo from the wedding weekend.Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram
The story spread quickly. Within hours of publication, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev, asking for communications between the two and records of “all purchases made for your wedding by foreign nationals.” (Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment on the investigation.) It also prompted Bettina Trump to post a joint statement with Trump Jr. on her Instagram, which included even more photos from the wedding weekend.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesperson said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with.” In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship,” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”
Other than the photo we’ve shared, the images from that weekend remain tightly curated and don’t seem to tell the full story. So we thought we’d share a few examples with the added context from our findings. Sometimes, what — or, in this case, who — isn’t pictured is just as important as what is.
The Setting
The island where the reception party was held can rent for about $100,000 per night. Kremlev paid for multiple nights.Little Pipe Cay/Lux Hospitality Bahamas
The weekend festivities were spread across two ultra-exclusive private islands in the Exumas, a chain of storybook Caribbean destinations with white sand beaches and brilliant turquoise water. Islands there have been owned by the likes of Johnny Depp, David Copperfield and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault. People arrived by helicopter and seaplanes to infinity pools and oceanfront villas.
The island where Trump Jr. and his bride exchanged vows on Friday was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Casino Royale.” (Kremlev was not present for the Friday ceremony, which involved an even smaller group.)
On a second nearby island, about 10 minutes by boat from where the ceremony took place, a reception party was held. This island can rent for around $100,000 per night, and Kremlev paid for multiple nights.
The Caribbean-Themed Party
The magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride.Laura Gordon Photography via Hello!
On the second night, more guests arrived for a party on the same island where the ceremony took place. The evening was Caribbean themed, with a beachside DJ and a performance by a Junkanoo band. On Instagram, Bettina Trump described the night as “an unforgettable night of pure joy, music, sunset, and dancing barefoot in the sand, surrounded by nothing but love in paradise…It was everything we dreamed of and more… pure magic.”
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
Among the guests was Kremlev, arriving just days after accompanying Putin in China as part of a Russian delegation, according to Chinese state media. (Kremlev’s press office said that he was not part of Putin’s “official delegation” in China.) Kremlev’s ties to Putin and the Russian security services prompted the Ukrainian government to impose sanctions on him personally.
In their joint statement on Instagram, the couple said that Kremlev paid for the parties on both the second and third night of their wedding weekend, but they drew a distinction between the ceremony itself and the rest of the events.
“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful,” the couple wrote.
The First Dance
Kremlev paid for the Sunday night wedding party during which the couple shared their first dance. Kremlev paid for the Saturday night party, too.Laura Gordon Photography via Hello!
On Sunday, the newlyweds shared their first dance to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”Photos published in Hello! magazine showed the couple on the dance floor underneath disco balls strung up among palm trees. They embraced as guests watched. Bettina Trump wore her wedding dress. The night was nautical themed, complete with a seafood boat buffet, an illusionist and scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor outfits.
The Sunday night party that Kremlev paid for featured a seafood boat buffet.Laura Gordon Photography via Hello!Scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor outfits perform for guests at the Sunday night party, which Kremlev paid for.Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram
The wedding payments came from a Dubai entity affiliated with the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that Kremlev heads. The IBA has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. Kremlev picked up the tab for the festivities on Saturday and Sunday.
Kremlev’s press office described him as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. It said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity.
The Fireworks
Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Trump, watch fireworks paid for by Kremlev.Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller Design
At the Sunday reception, Trump Jr. and his new wife stood on the beach, gazing out as a barge launched a spectacular fireworks display over the ocean. It was an extravagant cap off the wedding weekend.
Kremlev picked up the tab for the fireworks display. The company that put it on typically charges around $70,000 for such shows.
There are still lingering questions we didn’t get to the bottom of. Among the most pressing: Why did a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin pay for much of the president’s son’s wedding? What is the nature of Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev, and, importantly, how might it change over time? Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles, put it this way:
“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something.”
Do You Have Information We Should Know About Donald Trump Jr.?
We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.
Why Should Delaware Care? Joe Arminio and Sarah McBride are the candidates that will be running for Delaware’s only seat in the U.S. House in November. Arminio’s misgendering of McBride, a prominent transgender lawmaker, has sparked new Republican Party divisions as it aims to become more competitive in statewide races.
Just days after the primary election, the state Republican Party is in revolt over its two most prominent candidates following one’s dismissal from a forum after repeatedly misgendering U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride.
During a candidate forum held Thursday by the Siegel Jewish Community Center in Wilmington, U.S. House candidate Joe Arminio twice misgendered the incumbent Democratic congresswoman, who is the first openly transgender member of Congress.
He was subsequently forced to leave the forum by organizers, and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mike Katz, who was on stage at the time apologized for Arminio’s conduct, saying he didn’t condone it.
In a statement late that evening, Katz called on Arminio to drop out of his race.
“We can disagree strongly about policy, politics, and the direction of our country. We can debate those differences vigorously. That is part of our democracy,” he said. ”But disagreement is not an excuse for disrespect. When someone seeking public office is given an opportunity to correct his conduct, acknowledges his mistake, receives an explicit warning, and then repeats that conduct, it raises serious concerns about the standards we should expect from those who seek to represent us.”
The state Republican Party, which had hoped that a reformation of leadership, policy platforms and fundraising efforts could resuscitate the party’s chances in the midterm elections after a decade of failures, will now have to contend with a serious division at the top of the ticket.
Arminio and the party, which endorsed the more moderate Katz overwhelmingly this spring but backed an opponent of Arminio’s, has yet to comment on the episode.
Arminio and GOP Party Chair Gene Truono did not respond to requests for comment Friday from Spotlight Delaware.
What happened at the forum?
In a recorded video livestream, Arminio is heard using the terms “his” and “he” to refer to McBride and was corrected by the audience, who loudly booed.
Arminio responded, asking the crowd to show respect to him as the speaker, but then shortly afterward referred to McBride as a man again, and then thanked the crowd for the correction.
After Arminio finished his speech, moderator Ken Grant stepped up to the microphone and said,“ This is your final warning. If you fail to show respect to anyone else on this stage, you’ll be asked to leave.”
During the answer to Arminio’s next question, he was able to acknowledge his error and said: “It’s not the first error I’ve made in this campaign or at any point in my future life.”
But a few minutes later, as Arminio was discussing private healthcare debt, he pointed at U.S. Sen. Chris Coons and McBride, referring to them as “gentlemen.”
“Gentlemen like the two here on this up here with me on the Democratic Party …,” he said.
The crowd began interrupting and yelling at Arminio.
The moderator can also be heard speaking over Arminio, saying to cut his mic and that he had been warned.
Despite all the boos and commotion from the crowd, McBride intervened to allow Arminio to still have a chance to speak despite the slights.
“Listen, I don’t want this gentleman to not be able to have the ability…” McBride said, before Katz stepped in to repeatedly call for Arminio’s removal.
After being kicked out of the panel, the conversations between the candidates continued, with McBride explaining that she has been focused on serving Delaware in Washington and not on politicians who are engaging in “petty stupid things, and in petty personal insults.”
But this was not the first time that Arminio, who was an underdog candidate in the primary race and largely made his campaign about economic issues, has insulted McBride.
Less than a week earlier, during a candidate forum on the popular “Rich Jensen” radio show on WDEL, the host had to correct Arminio’s misgendering there too. Jensen told Arminio that the policy of his program is to refer to McBride as “she” and to continue doing so.
Mike Katz was able to rally Republican support around his campaign in the general election, but new splits with voters over LGBTQ+ issues are emerging that could hurt his candidacy. | PHOTO COURTESY OF KATZ CAMPAIGN
Recoil against Katz
By calling for his colleague’s departure from the party ticket, Katz has perhaps earned a modicum of respect from centrist Democrats and independents, but he has also angered many conservatives.
The comment section of his statement on Facebook was flooded by commenters who expressed disappointment in the Senate candidate and said he has lost their vote.
It exposed the new face of the Republican Party to the new level of fractiousness of the modern GOP in Delaware.
John Shulli, the retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel who ran against Katz in the Senate primary this week and had lambasted Katz’s former affiliation with the state Democratic and Independent parties before recently becoming a Republican, jumped on the criticisms, calling his former opponent “the Benedict Arnold of Republicans” in a Friday video.
“Katz is a Democrat, and a coward, and a traitor to the Republican Party of Delaware. He should either withdraw from the race or change his affiliation to Democrat,” he said.
What impact the division over LGBTQ+ issues may have on Katz’s electoral chances remains to be seen, but he already faced a Herculean challenge.
Coons held nearly $4.8 million in campaign cash as of Aug. 26, while Katz had less than $100,000, according to federal campaign finance records.
The senior Democratic senator just captured 78% of the primary election vote in a year when Congressional incumbents are frequently being challenged by progressive challengers. He has never captured less than 55% of the vote in a Senate election and Republicans’ best finish yet against him was 42% of the vote.
Those issues only come atop the fact that Democrats have a roughly 130,000-voter advantage over Republicans as of Sept. 1.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Friday that CNN, MS NOW and Politico are banned from the White House “effective immediately,” explicitly citing what he described as false and unfavorable coverage. He also suggested additional news organizations could face similar restrictions.
“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Speaking later in the Oval Office, he said the outlets “purposely write negative news” because they want to hurt Republicans and his administration. He did not identify specific reports he said were false.
Exactly how the ban will operate remains unclear. Reporters from the affected organizations were still working at the White House Friday afternoon, and Trump acknowledged he did not know when their credentials might be revoked.
CNN called the threatened ban an “illegal assault” on constitutionally protected press freedoms, while Politico said it would defend its First Amendment rights. The White House Correspondents’ Association and press-freedom organizations also objected.
The action raises significant constitutional questions because courts have previously limited the government’s ability to revoke White House press access based on unfavorable coverage. During Trump’s first term, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s credential after the White House suspended it.
The announcement follows other disputes between the administration and major news organizations, including the White House’s earlier restrictions on Associated Press access. Trump said Friday that the latest move could eventually extend to additional outlets.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States, Denmark and Greenland have reached an agreement allowing an expanded and permanent U.S. military presence on the strategically important Arctic island while leaving Greenland under Danish sovereignty.
Trump said the deal gives the United States “permanent control over security” in Greenland and allows Washington to expand bases and military operations as needed. U.S. officials said the agreement also bars non-NATO countries from establishing military bases on the island and restricts sensitive investments from potential adversaries.
However, Danish and Greenlandic leaders emphasized Saturday that the agreement does not transfer sovereignty or ownership to the United States. Greenland remains a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and officials said the agreement explicitly recognizes Greenlanders’ right to self-determination.
That distinction is significant because Trump had spent months publicly discussing acquiring Greenland and had declined earlier this year to rule out military force. The new arrangement instead expands existing U.S. security rights dating to a 1951 defense agreement.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the agreement a major national-security achievement, while Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said it would strengthen security for Greenland, Denmark, the United States and NATO.
The agreement is expected to be formally signed during next week’s United Nations General Assembly and will still require approval through Danish and Greenlandic political processes.
The pact gives Washington wider military access to Greenland without accomplishing Trump’s earlier stated goal of acquiring the territory itself.
Headlining a conference for Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit he previously led that regularly spreads vaccine misinformation, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a litany of familiar false and misleading claims, particularly about vaccines.
For a few months earlier this year, Kennedy had largely stopped talking about vaccines, reportedly at the request of the White House. Facing a surge of measles cases not seen in a generation, Kennedy had also at times offered a lukewarm recommendation to vaccinate, frustrating his hardline anti-vaccine supporters.
But in August, Kennedy appearedwith President Donald Trump during thesigning of an executive order that called for splitting up the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Trump inaccurately said the MMR vaccine is “quite lethal,” and Kennedy proceeded to falsely claim on cable television that there was new evidence to support breaking up the combination shot. The secretary also began an ongoing beef with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania over measles-associated deaths in the state.
Then, on Sept. 17, Kennedy gave the keynote speech for the one-day conference of Children’s Health Defense in Washington, D.C. Children’s Health Defense describes itself as working to “restore and protect the health of children by eliminating exposures to environmental toxins.” But the organization is one of the biggest sources of inaccurate vaccine information.
Just three days prior to the conference, the group’s X account falsely said that for every vaccine, “your child is more likely to die from the vaccine than from the disease.” The same day, the group also wrote, “Anyone who still thinks the COVID vaccine wasn’t intentionally designed to cause infertility is the conspiracy theorist.”
Speaking for more than an hour, Kennedy, a former litigator, repeatedly suggested that vaccines were not safe, had not been tested properly, and that they were driving a dramatic rise in chronic conditions, including autism.
“Many of these adverse events include diseases, chronic illnesses, that are part of the chronic disease epidemic. In other words, illnesses that became suddenly epidemic in our kids after 1989,” he said. Looking at all of the different vaccines given to children, he continued, “there are 454 adverse events listed. In total … they include almost all of the injuries, like diabetes, death, sudden infant death syndrome, anorexia, allergic reactions, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases.”
This is misleading. As we’ve explained before, the conditions that appear in package inserts have not necessarily been shown to be caused by vaccines. And in fact, after rigorous study, some of them have specifically been shown not to be due to vaccines.
Kennedy also conveniently left out the package insert’s own caveat, which explains, “Because these reactions are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to a vaccine exposure.”
Screenshot of Kennedy speaking at the CHD conference on Sept. 17
He also pushed a conspiratorial narrative in which he claimed scientists previously “weren’t doing the studies to find out … what the risks were of these products,” referring to vaccines. “And so we don’t know, and we are finding that out now.”
The HHS website itself says, “Every authorized or approved vaccine goes through safety testing,” including testing in clinical trials and continued monitoring after they hit the market.
Later, the secretary said that HHS was supporting new research and clinical trials and for the “first time” researchers were looking into several vaccination topics and “a range of health outcomes,” including autism. It’s unclear what specifically these studies will examine, but researchers have continuously studied vaccination. An extensivebody of research hasn’t found any link between vaccines and autism.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the former British physician who fraudulently proposed a link between autism and vaccines in 1998, and continues to make the false claim, spoke after Kennedy at the conference.
Despite the ongoing measles outbreaks in the U.S., and more deaths from the disease in the last two years than in decades, Kennedy only mentioned measles once.
“You care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines,” he said. “Shouldn’t we, I’d ask you, care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries?”
The secretary also moved to reassure his supporters that he had their backs, while also seemingly asking for patience, because “the government moves slowly.”
“You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he said. “We’ve accomplished in 19 months … things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.”
Indeed, Kennedy, along with the White House, has pushed to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines in the U.S. and reconstituted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory board, filling it with several individuals who have previously spread vaccine misinformation.
Major medical associations — such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians — have spoken out against the changes to vaccine recommendations, issuing theirownguidance. (Many of the changes have been temporarily blocked by a court.)
Kennedy said HHS would be looking into the safety of electromagnetic fields and “chemtrails,” both topics of interest for Children’s Health Defense. The “chemtrails” conspiracy theory alleges that the commonly seen contrails, or the normal condensation trails left behind from airplanes, are actually chemicals that can harm or be used to control a population. There’s no evidence that “chemtrails” exist.
Many of the claims Kennedy made in his address are the very same claims has been making for years — and were ones we first wrote about in 2023 when he was running for president. Others are relatively new.
Here’s a round-up of the ones we’ve covered before.
Autism
Wisconsin study. Kennedy misleadingly juxtaposed data from a 1970 study in Wisconsin showing an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 with the national data showing a prevalence of 1 in 31 today. The data are not comparable. Much of the increase in autism is related to changes in diagnostic criteria, screening, available services and awareness of the condition, researchers have said.
UC Davis research. Kennedy also claimed that research from the UC Davis MIND Institute led by Irva Hertz-Picciotto showed that the autism “epidemic is real,” contrary to assertions that “we’re just noticing it more.” A 2009 study co-authored by the environmental health researcher found that one-third of the increase in autism diagnoses in California could be attributed to changes in diagnostic criteria, but the study did not examine all the factors that could lead to changes in recognition of the condition. The MIND Institute said in a September 2025 statement that the study “did not indicate that autism was an epidemic.”
‘Full-blown’ autism. The HHS secretary went on to claim that “I’ve never in my life seen somebody my age, a 70-year-old man, with full-blown, profound autism.” But researchers have said that while older people are less likely to have an autism diagnosis, many nevertheless meet the criteria for autism. “Many of them would not have been recognized as such but they absolutely do exist,” Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist and autism researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, previously told us.
Reporting of vaccine side effects. Kennedy claimed that a CDC study found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries are reported.” He’s referring to a 2010 report from health insurer Harvard Pilgrim funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which briefly mentioned this figure for adverse events. Reported adverse events are not necessarily vaccine-caused. One of the authors told us that the 1% “takes into account that many adverse effects of vaccines are mild and expected so not worth reporting.”
Otherresearchhas found that the monitoring system Kennedy was referencing — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which accepts voluntary, unverified reports — more completely identifies serious adverse events after vaccination. It’s also not the only way health authorities monitor vaccine safety.
Placebo-controlled studies. Kennedy misleadingly claimed that just one childhood vaccine — against COVID-19 — “was subject to a placebo-controlled trial,” adding that “we have no idea what the risk profile is for these products.” Various childhood vaccines were originally tested against placebos, including the polio, chickenpox and rotavirus vaccines. These claims rely on moving the goal posts on what constitutes a placebo-controlled trial, such as by asserting that placebos can only be saline. It’s also not always ethical or feasible to test a vaccine against a placebo. There are other valid ways of assessing vaccine safety.
Thimerosal in vaccines. Kennedy misrepresented the science on thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that has been phased out of most vaccines, blaming it for “devastating our children’s brains and causing a whole litany, a grim inventory, of physical and brain injuries.”
As we’ve written before, multiple studies have evaluated the safety of thimerosal, and there isn’t evidence it’s harmful to human health in low doses. (It contains a different, less toxic type of mercury than the methylmercury that accumulates in fish.) Nonetheless, it was removed from most vaccines in the U.S. as a precaution more than 20 years ago. Since then, no vaccines for children have used thimerosal, other than flu vaccines that come in multi-dose vials.
Obesity rates. Kennedy pointed to falling obesity as evidence of the administration’s success. “Obesity rates have dropped 7.3% since 2022, most of it in this year — these two years,” he said, citing Gallup polling. Gallup surveys did find that obesity among American adults fell about 3.1 percentage points, or 7.8%, between 2022 and 2026. But three-quarters of the decline came between 2022 and 2024, before Trump took office.
Sales of real food. Kennedy also said, “Real food sales went up by 8% this year.” As we’ve explained before, this likely comes from a financial-industry analysis that reportedly looked at a handful of specific categories, including yogurt, nut butters and frozen foods, and concluded that sales of unprocessed or minimally processed products grew about 7% faster than highly processed products in those same categories. Experts previously told us those findings are too limited to say much about whether Americans are eating healthier overall.
Clarification, Sept. 21: We made clear that Wakefield is a former physician. As we’ve explained before, he lost his medical license.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The NAACP and other civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit Friday seeking to prevent the Trump administration from deploying federal law enforcement officers in ways they say could intimidate voters during November’s midterm elections.
The lawsuit names Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and other administration officials. Plaintiffs argue that public statements about possible federal activity around polling places, combined with expanded voter-roll scrutiny and immigration enforcement, violate Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voter intimidation.
Federal law generally bars armed federal officers and members of the armed forces from being stationed where elections are held. So far, the administration has not deployed armed officers to polling locations, and DHS has said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling places.
Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels rejected the lawsuit’s premise, saying DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations and calling suggestions otherwise “fearmongering.” Mullin has said ICE could respond to a public-safety threat or serve a warrant at a polling site.
The case is the second lawsuit this month seeking to restrict federal law enforcement activity around polling locations.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge has ordered the Kennedy Center to provide at least 30 days’ notice before taking any steps toward demolition after President Donald Trump again suggested the landmark could be torn down if his renovation plans are blocked.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued the order Thursday after attorneys for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty cited Trump’s public comments and a photograph showing him aboard Air Force One examining a placard labeled “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” Trump had told reporters a day earlier that the building could “end up being ripped down” if his administration does not receive recognition for restoring it.
The dispute follows Cooper’s earlier ruling that Congress, not the Kennedy Center board, controls the center’s official name. Cooper also blocked plans to rename the campus “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” or add language crediting Trump with its restoration.
The Kennedy Center board has approved a renovation project backed by roughly $257 million in federal funding. Trump has said the project may not proceed unless appellate courts overturn Cooper’s restrictions.
The center is temporarily closed while officials assess safety concerns and prepare for possible renovations.
Robert Warshaw, left, a court-appointed monitor, and Maricopa Sheriff Jerry Sheridan speak before a legally required community outreach meeting in the Sunnyslope neighborhood of Phoenix in 2025. Ash Ponders for ProPublica
A federal judge has denied efforts to remove oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, saying the agency continues to show racial disparities in traffic arrests of Latinos — and that there is not enough evidence that efforts to improve would stick without legal monitoring.
In his 72-page ruling issued Sept. 10, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow stressed Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s role in the department’s racial profiling since the start of the case more than a decade ago, including fighting court-ordered reforms and stymieing investigations. Sheridan was the No. 2 under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio when the county was found out of compliance with federal law.
“Then Chief Deputy, now Sheriff, Sheridan in particular was found to have abused his authority over MCSO’s internal affairs process by obstructing and manipulating misconduct investigations and disciplinary proceedings — including those involving himself — to shield deputies and Command Staff from accountability and undermine the enforcement of remedies designed to address the constitutional violations against the Plaintiff class,” the judge wrote in an opinion that mentions Sheridan 30 times.
The department declined to comment on Snow’s statements about Sheridan. But the sheriff previously told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he disagreed with Snow. “I was very truthful. To this day, I think he got that wrong about me,” Sheridan said.
In his ruling, Snow said it may no longer be necessary for the court to track some areas originally identified for oversight in the 2013 decision, recognizing the “burdens” that go into monitoring certain elements.
County leaders have repeatedly cited costs as they’ve called for an end of court oversight. Maricopa County filed the motion in December, with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office later joining, arguing the violations were no longer occurring.
The yearslong federal monitorship of Arizona’s largest sheriff’s office dates back to a 2007 class action racial profiling lawsuit that found the department under Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos in the state’s most populous county. Today, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, there are an estimated 1.5 million Latino or Hispanic people living in Maricopa County — all of whose rights are protected under the lawsuit.
In 2013, Snow ordered the department to document all traffic stops to detect any patterns of racial bias and to employ additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct. Snow also appointed a monitor to oversee compliance with the settlement.
In the 13 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct. In denying the recent motion, Snow cited data showing that sheriff’s deputies in Maricopa County continue to search and arrest Latino drivers at a higher rate than white drivers, echoing the racial disparities that first led to court oversight of the department.
“Those disparities remain,” Snow added.
A key part of the judge’s analysis results from traffic reports collected by the sheriff’s office. An analysis of those reports on behalf of the plaintiffs by a professor of computer science from the University of California, Berkeley approximates that Hispanic motorists are 40% more likely to be arrested than white motorists, are stopped 30% longer than white motorists and are 2.5 times more likely to be searched than white motorists.
The responsibility is on the defendants to explain the stark disparities for Latino drivers, Snow said. “They have failed to do so.” To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in full compliance with the reforms continuously for three years.
An investigation by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found that despite the monitor’s annual reviews showing ongoing racial disparities in traffic stops, Sheridan and county leaders continued to press for an end to court oversight.
Arpaio’s wide-ranging, illegal traffic sweeps prompted the lawsuit, known originally as Melendres v. Arpaio, named for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in such a sweep.
The arrests of hundreds of American citizens by immigration authorities since President Donald Trump returned to the White House have prompted widespread accusations of racial profiling. In response, the Department of Homeland Security told ProPublica that agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
The decade-plus of legal oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, criminal justice experts have said, offers insight into the difficulties of reforming law enforcement agencies charged with endemic racial bias.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office holds a town hall at a community center in Gila Bend, Arizona, in 2025.Jesse Rieser for ProPublica
Sheridan, a Republican, was found in civil contempt in 2016 for denying knowledge of Snow’s court order to stop making illegal immigration arrests. Sheridan has said he was always truthful. He inherited the settlement when he took office in January 2025.
A 2025 evaluation by the monitor found the department complied with more than 90% of the requirements but fell short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.
In trying to end federal oversight, Sheridan and county supervisors argued that racially biased Arpaio-era policies were no longer written department policy and there were few complaints of misconduct by deputies against Hispanic drivers.
“MCSO has reformed its policies, improved its workforce, and implemented mechanisms to assure that racial profiling never occurs. This litigation has been a success, and the time has come to allow MCSO to stand on its own two feet, freed of oversight,” the county’s original motion said.
Since joining the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported Snow’s federal oversight and the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, an attorney with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division informed the court in January that the department supported ending oversight.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Kate Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Debbie Lesko, both Republicans, as well as a spokesperson with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said they were disappointed by the judge’s ruling. Steve Gallardo, the county’s lone Democrat on the five-member board, has opposed ending oversight, advocating for continued progress toward eliminating racial bias in policing.
“The court has maintained an unelected and unaccountable federal monitor over MCSO – creating bureaucracy and regulatory burdens that have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That ‘oversight’ comes at the cost of public safety, as the county must pay the monitor and his staff by foregoing other critical services,” said a joint statement from McGee and Lesko.
Following complaints by Sheridan and Republican county supervisors that oversight costs topped $200 million, the court ordered an audit of the sheriff’s office spending. Court findings, shared in 2025, showed that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said.
Officials with the sheriff’s office, however, welcomed parts of the judge’s latest ruling.
“We believe MCSO has implemented durable remedies for violations that occurred 19 years and three administrations ago,” Sgt. Joaquin Enriquez said. “We are encouraged that the Court has provided a framework on eliminating portions of the Order that are no longer necessary and focusing compliance efforts on the remaining issues to be addressed.”
Speaking to a Phoenix-area radio station, Sheridan said he saw positive elements of the judge’s order but wondered whether his office could ever satisfy all parties to the lawsuit.
“We at the sheriff’s office feel we’re in compliance with all the” court’s orders, Sheridan told KTAR News. “But the court-appointed monitor does not believe so. It’s a matter of us making a pitch to the court directly, not through the monitor.”
Raul Piña in Phoenix’s Encanto Park in 2025Jesse Rieser for ProPublica
Notably, the judge’s ruling said, there was no evidence that the department would continue to remedy the violations should oversight to ensure Latinos’ constitutional rights end.
“The record does not support a finding that, absent federal monitoring, Defendants are unlikely to resume the conduct that necessitated the Court’s injunctive Orders,” the ruling stated.
Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated community advisory board tasked with helping the sheriff’s office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the problems at the department went beyond one specific leader, to multiple systems that have allowed biased policing long-term. To change that, Piña said, you need a broader overhaul. “You can paint the house, but if the foundation is broken you will have the same problem,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which originally filed the lawsuit on behalf of citizens and legal residents caught in Arpaio’s sweeps, celebrated the current ruling.
“Any other decision would have had a devastating impact on Maricopa County’s Latino residents,” Christine Wee, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, said in a statement. “The Court’s decision recognizes that any current and future misconduct committed by MCSO will not be tolerated. Simply put, MCSO is not ready for the court-ordered reforms to end.”
Marcia Levering nearly died at work on February 6, 2021. She was working as a prison guard at the former medium-security federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, a facility operated by the private prison company CoreCivic. One of Levering’s overwhelmed colleagues buzzed open the wrong door, releasing a high-risk prisoner directly into Levering’s path. “He kind of gave me this eerie green grin,” she said. Then boiling water hit her face.
The facility, which had long been plagued by overcrowding, chronic understaffing, and deadly violence, closed later that year after a Biden executive order against all private prison profiteering put its century-long run to an end.
Then came the second Trump administration and its plans to supercharge the business of incarceration in the United States.
As of March, the notorious prison is back up and running, and this time it’s being filled with immigrants, the majority of whom have no criminal conviction, as part of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal deportation regime targeting noncitizens.
Last month, CoreCivic sold the facility to the Department of Homeland Security for $238.4 million, although it expects to keep operating the site under its existing ICE arrangement. But local officials tell the story of a massive for-profit prison company steamrolling community opposition as well as the city’s own established processes, and ultimately forcing their hand to participate in a project of mass detention — a system that advocates and former employees say has led to unsafe, violent conditions for both detainees and employees.
Current conditions for detainees held at the Midwest Regional Reception Center are hard to verify from outside. In its reporting on the sale, the Kansas City Star put the facility’s population at 365 men and 112 women, a count shared at a July 28 community advisory board meeting. The paper described two local groups in contact with detainees and their families, among them Northland Neighbors United, which said in a July statement that detainees have reported medical neglect, inadequate food, and prolonged lockdowns. CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin told the Star the allegations do not reflect how the facility operates.
This isn’t “manufacturing notebooks and pens. This is profiting off of people being put in cages.”
For Esmie Tseng, the communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, coverage of these city meetings sanitizes the reality for detainees.
“We’re making a contract out of putting people in cages,” Tseng said. “This isn’t just moving widgets from one place to another, or manufacturing notebooks and pens. This is profiting off of people being put in cages.”
The Pitch
By early 2025, the city of Leavenworth had already said “no” multiple times to deepening its involvement in immigration detention. After Trump’s reelection, CoreCivic tried again, working with city officials for three months before announcing on a Zoom call it would reopen the facility as an immigration jail without waiting for a special use permit, or SUP, to be approved. The city sued to force CoreCivic to go through its permitting process, and the company countersued, arguing its federal contract allows it to bypass local law. In June 2025, a Leavenworth State District Court judge granted a temporary injunction barring CoreCivic from operating without a special use permit.
During that first push on March 25, 2025 — the day the city commission was scheduled to meet in closed session about the ICE contract — John Malloy, CoreCivic’s vice president of federal partnership relations, emailed Leavenworth’s commissioners with what seemed like an attractive financial offer: “300 well-paying jobs at starting salaries of $28.58/hour,” more than $1,000,000 annually in property taxes, a $1 million one-time impact fee, and annual payments to the city and police department. The final permit set CoreCivic’s impact fee at $1.5 million, which City Manager Scott Peterson said covered the city’s legal bills.
Malloy also emphasized the city’s approval process must move quickly to meet growing demand to ramp up the number of available immigration prison beds.
“While ICE’s pressing need for capacity dictates the speed at which we must move to hire and ready the facility … we do not wish this speed to harm what we hope will be a long-term beneficial relationship with the City,” Malloy wrote in the email. He added this expedited timeline would not allow for “a protracted permitting process.”
He also touted that the community response to job postings had already been strong, with more than 500 applicants “in the hiring process” and more coming in every day.
Levering, an Army veteran and Native American, heard a version of that pitch five years earlier in a cold call from a recruiting agency. Back in 2020, when CoreCivic was contracted to run the facility as a federal prison by the U.S. Marshals Service, the recruiting agency offered her 12-hour shifts and only three days a week, she told The Intercept. The schedule sold her. With four kids in school, the promise of four days at home made the job feel like an ideal fit for her busy life. She saw the work as service, an extension of her years in the Army. In hindsight, she said, “Obviously, [that’s] not the case, because it’s a private prison.”
Mike Trapp, co-founder of the Carceral Accountability Council, said CoreCivic hires people the state prison system and Federal Bureau of Prisons might otherwise have turned away over physical and age limitations, because the company has “lower standards of entry.”
But Bill Rogers, a former guard at the facility under the Marshals contract, said there were effectively no hiring standards.
“Think about the people you’re going to get to work at a facility if you really just don’t care.”
“You gotta pass their background check … and you gotta be breathing,” he said. “Think about the people you’re going to get to work at a facility if you really just don’t care.”
One year after Malloy’s email to persuade city officials, the facility already had 150 employees on its payroll, halfway to the 300 jobs Malloy had promised. At a February 2 hearing, the city’s planning commission voted 5-1 to recommend approval of CoreCivic’s special use permit. The City Commission granted final approval on March 10 by a vote of 4 to 1.
The Arithmetic of Danger
Levering’s schedule amounted to a minimum six-day, often seven-day, workweek, with shifts of 12 hours or longer plus mandatory overtime, she said. Levering rarely saw her four children, who were then in middle and high school. The evenings she’d pictured spending time with them at home never came to pass.
After onboarding, officers were promised 40 hours of continuing training annually, Rogers said. He received that training for about his first two years, he said, until staffing ran too thin to pull officers off the floor. Left to teach herself, Levering said she learned more from prisoners than her peers or her supervisors. They told her who to keep an eye on, how to read danger on the floor, and where to set boundaries.
In response to questions from The Intercept, Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said the company’s training “meets or exceeds” the standards of the American Correctional Association.
Levering said that during her time at the facility, shifts that called for 24 to 25 officers often had just five or six. Within months, CoreCivic began eliminating bubble officers, who monitor units from a secure, elevated central control booth known as the “bubble.” These officers are critical for safety, as they control access to different zones of the prison by electronically opening and closing doors. Their elevated position also allows them an eye-in-the-sky perspective, where they can be the first to spot emergencies before they escalate.
In an interview, Shari Rich, who worked at the facility for nearly 13 years and counts Levering as a close friend, traced Levering’s assault to CoreCivic’s decision to eliminate bubble officers.
“It should never have happened,” she said of Levering’s assault. Rich placed the blame squarely on CoreCivic eliminating bubble officers. She said she previously watched a case manager get brutally attacked by an inmate while the bubble ran with one person, a post she understood was supposed to be staffed by two or three.
Rich is still speaking out against the company, she said, because of what happened to Levering.
Officers were increasingly posted alone, sometimes responsible for two 64-person units, Levering said.
“They were hiring kids right out of high school,” Levering said, calling them “sitting ducks.” Without enough officers, downstream everyday functions also collapsed. Recreation stopped when there was no one to run it, Rich and Rogers said. Officers were pulled off their units for weeks at a time, according to Rogers, which left inmates in day rooms with no one to turn to. The locks to the cells were breaking, Levering said, even as CoreCivic refused to put enough people on the units to keep them secure. The ACLU and federal public defenders confirmed that detainees, unable to lock their own cells, built makeshift barricades and armed themselves.
The day an inmate split Rogers’s head open with a food tray, he said he was covering three units alone with no bubble officer watching. He had already emailed the warden about the lack of coverage. He lost his radio in the assault, stranding him and unable to call for backup. The wound took 14 staples to close, he said. Rogers also said he was required to finish his shift before driving himself to the hospital. All the warden had to say to him about the incident was that “the takedown you did was a little rough,” he recounted.
“How do we expect them to act?” Rogers asked. “We have to bear some of that responsibility. … We lost control of that place.”
“We have to bear some of that responsibility. … We lost control of that place.”
Gustin said CoreCivic does not supply specific figures about staffing in any of its prisons for “safety reasons,” but added, “We are appropriately staffed based on the number of individuals in our care.” CoreCivic attributed staffing shortages to Covid, despite the 2017 audit, which found chronic understaffing years before the pandemic. In 2021, ACLU affiliates and federal public defender offices in four states jointly documented an average of nearly 37 violent incidents per month at CoreCivic Leavenworth between May and July of that year, just months after Levering was attacked.
Asked about the 2021 conditions, Gustin said “staffing was the main contributor to the challenges.” He also said incidents from “more than five years ago” do not reflect conditions in the facility today.
What the Machine Produced
On the day of the incident that would leave her permanently disabled, Levering said that she and her co-worker Diana Polanco were the only two officers on the floor. It was Polanco’s second day on the job, and she wasn’t yet OC certified, a prerequisite for carrying pepper spray.
Levering remembers the inmate being released directly into her path but little else about the assault.
“Where the hell is everybody?”
“My eyes were closed, and I was in the fetal position on the ground. I didn’t know he was stabbing me, because your adrenaline’s going,” Levering said. According to the Leavenworth Police Department report, she was stabbed four times in the ear, once in the arm, and twice in the abdomen. Before anyone reached her to help, she remembered wondering, “Where the hell is everybody?”
Polanco tried to step in to help Levering. She suffered a broken jaw, stab wounds to her back and face, fractured ribs, and lasting nerve damage.
The Leavenworth Police Department’s incident report on Levering’s attack, which lists the location as the Midwest Regional Reception Center and a knife or cutting instrument as the weapon used.Document: Leavenworth Police Department
Levering’s injuries were catastrophic. She lost 24 inches of her colon and spleen, according to the incident report. A punctured lung was not disclosed to her for a year, until she says a doctor seemingly mentioned it by accident. She has received 16 facial reconstruction surgeries, and five years later, she is still undergoing medical procedures related to her injuries. She lives with permanent facial paralysis, chronic vertigo, chronic gastrointestinal issues, and walks with a cane. Her PTSD, aggravated by serving in Iraq, is debilitating. After 10 months as a prison guard, she now lives on $825 a month in disability payments.
Warren Richardson, the federal prisoner who attacked Levering and Polanco, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault with a dangerous weapon, and was sentenced to 300 months. The federal record describes the attack as “nearly killing” both women.
Over roughly five years at the facility, Rogers said he was assaulted seven times, and no one from CoreCivic asked if he was OK or offered counseling. Since the injuries were on the job, Rogers said the company was responsible for his medical expenses. But the invoices remained unpaid and were forwarded to a collections agency instead, he said. Trapp, of the Carceral Accountability Council, has watched the job take its toll on Rogers.
“When he gets talking about some of the deaths that he witnessed, he’s re-experiencing it. I can see it in his eyes,” Trapp said. “I’ve worked with a lot of trauma survivors, and I’m not qualified to make a diagnosis in the state of Kansas, but I see it, the hauntedness.”
Rich couldn’t understand why other injured officers were paid settlements while Levering only had her initial medical bills covered, despite suffering from permanent disabilities. With no further support from CoreCivic, the Carceral Accountability Council launched a GoFundMe to help with her continued recovery.
CoreCivic did not respond to detailed questions about the February 6, 2021, attack, the uncertified officer on the floor, or its treatment of Levering afterward, including whether it provided any support for her injuries.
The ICE Escalation in a Town of Prisons
Widely known as one of the nation’s quintessential prison towns, Leavenworth, Kansas, has been in the corrections business for more than 150 years. The Army raised Fort Leavenworth above the Missouri River in 1827, and later established what remains the U.S. military’s only maximum-security prison. Kansas opened its state penitentiary in neighboring Lansing in 1868. By 1903, the federal penitentiary had taken its first prisoners. Convicts built much of it, marching over from the old military prison at Fort Leavenworth each day. For generations, guarding prisoners has been one of Leavenworth’s steadiest livelihoods, work that has employed hundreds across the fort, the state pen, and the federal walls.
In the U.S., the private prison industry is worth somewhere around $6 billion, much of which comes from government contracts. Corrections Corporation of America, which later rebranded as CoreCivic, opened the Leavenworth Detention Center in 1992 as the country’s first for-profit maximum-security prison under direct federal contract. Gustin, the company’s spokesperson, acknowledged “there were challenges as that contract neared expiration” but said the company was otherwise “proud of the operational track record we’ve built.”
CoreCivic, which owns more prisons and jails than any private company in the country, has a documented history of neglect, safety failures, and worker exploitation. In 2021, while still under the U.S. Marshals Service contract, Kansas federal Judge Julie Robinson called the facility “an absolute hell hole.”
“They don’t see us as humans, or the inmates as humans.”
But with the advent of the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation system, the company is looking forward to a bright — and very profitable — future. On a February earnings call, CEO Patrick Swindle called Immigration and Customs Enforcement “our first customer 43 years ago” and “our largest customer for over a decade.” The company’s profits reached $116.5 million in 2025, a nearly 70 percent increase over the previous year, and ICE revenue more than doubled in the final quarter. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, directed roughly $45 billion to expanding ICE detention, nearly quadrupling the agency’s annual spending. On the call, the company said it could supply ICE with nearly https://url13,000 more beds for the Trump administration’s expansion, a figure Swindle said “does not include additional capacity we may be able to provide through other means.”
Of those beds, 1,033 are in Leavenworth. Nine days after the city commission vote on March 10, CoreCivic reopened its doors and began housing ICE detainees. As a condition of approval, the special use permit required the city to establish a community oversight committee.
Behind every understaffed shift and unanswered emergency code at Leavenworth is a facility expected to generate $60 million a year. To Levering, CoreCivic’s profit incentive means “they don’t see us as humans, or the inmates as humans. … We’re all numbers to produce for them.”
Promises Made, Promises Broken
The warning bells about Leavenworth started ringing years ago. The 2017 inspector general report concluded the facility had concealed triple-bunking, where a third bed was installed in several cells meant to house two inmates, from auditors staging full staffing and cleanup on inspection days. Those concerns went unaddressed, Rich said, save for a scramble to paint and clean before each audit. CoreCivic’s own internal investigation concluded the bunks had been removed “intentionally to conceal” the practice, and the company responded to its own finding by instituting ethics training and a non-retaliation policy for employees reporting misconduct.
Among the promises that haven’t come to fruition are good-paying jobs for the community.
Among the promises that haven’t come to fruition are good-paying jobs for the community. Malloy, the CoreCivic vice president, had promised “starting salaries of $28.58/hour.” But CoreCivic’s current Leavenworth listings show multiple positions below his pledge: certified medical assistant at $21.19, medical records Supervisor at $23.92, facility locksmith at $26.08, and treatment counselor at $26.96. The detention officer rate, the most dangerous and high-turnover role, sits at $28.25.
Gustin called any notion of a wage discrepancy “false” and said the figures Malloy offered were “an approximate starting wage for a detention officer position.”
Malloy also pledged to use “area construction contractors and labor.” But a building permit dated March 19, dated six days before Malloy’s email, shows CoreCivic had already hired Texas-based Bass Roofing for $1,145,600. CoreCivic hired the contractor; the contractor employed the workers. Gustin confirmed the company chose an out-of-state contractor that “handled similar work at another one of our federal facilities, which required special clearances for workers,” and said it favors providers who meet “stringent labor requirements.”
Rogers, the former prison guard, had spoken at city commission meetings about the roofing project, alleging that instead of bringing jobs to the community, the project relied on undocumented laborers. On April 17, 2025, CoreCivic’s deputy general counsel sent him a cease-and-desist letter, copied to the Leavenworth Police chief, which sharply disputed those claims.
“To ensure that its contractors’ employees are legally authorized to work in the United States, CoreCivic requires all contractors, including Bass Roofing and Extra Squares Roofing (whose employees are working on MRRC’s roofing restoration) to strictly comply with Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, requirements and participate in E-Verify,” the letter read. “Our review of this confirms that any representation that undocumented or unauthorized workers have worked on the MRRC project is false.”
Document: Courtesy of Bill Rogers
Six days later, outside counsel sent a defamation threat demanding he retract his statements. The letter cited his 2020 termination for “excessive force,” setting an April 25, 2025, deadline for Rogers to publicly detract his allegations.
That date passed; no lawsuit has materialized. To Rogers, the letter was a clear attempt to intimidate him into silence. CoreCivic did not say whether the threatened lawsuit was ever filed, and Gustin dismissed former employees-turned-critics, saying there “have only been a few former employees who have spoken out” about the facility.
The Gap
Rogers said that at first, the schedule was easy: eight-hour training shifts, Monday through Friday. In Tennessee, a 2023 audit by the comptroller found turnover among correctional officers at the four prisons CoreCivic runs for the state averaged 146 percent, a staggering figure compared with 37 percent turnover at the state-run facilities. As of mid-August, Leavenworth reportedly holds more than 500 detainees, still well below the 1,033-bed capacity CoreCivic projected.
There has also been a worrying continuity in top leadership: The warden running the ICE operation, Misty Mackey, was the assistant warden at the same Leavenworth facility in February 2021.
The city commissioners faced an impossible task that stood to devastate Leavenworth no matter which way they voted.
“It’s a lot to ask five part-time citizen-legislators to put their city on the line to be singularly responsible for stopping the mass deportation agenda,” Trapp said.
“It’s a lot to ask five part-time citizen-legislators to put their city on the line to be singularly responsible for stopping the mass deportation agenda.”
Levering, who watched officers treat American inmates “like they’re subhuman,” expects immigrant detainees to fare even worse. “They’re still human beings first, just like you and I,” she said.
The chasm between what CoreCivic promises a community to set up its ICE operations and what it actually delivers may be measured in emergency rooms and disability checks. The same company that has now supercharged the mass detention of immigrants left Marcia Levering living on $825 a month with lasting disabilities and buried Bill Rogers in medical bills as he copes with PTSD.
“If they did to Marcia Levering what they did,” Rogers said. “If that’s how they treated her — then why would they care about a detainee?”
This time, the people on both sides of the door have less protection than before.
This story is part 1 in a two-part series. Read the second part here.
“It’s clear from last night’s results that it’s a new day in Delaware,” Karl Stomberg, Delaware political director for the WFP, said in a statement. “The Working Families Party and our allies have sent an earthquake through state politics, making clear that kowtowing to corporate interests and maintaining the status quo is no longer good enough.” Candidate images from WFP website and image created with AI.
Republican candidates warn new mandates could increase costs for working families and jeopardize revenue supporting state services
WILMINGTON — The Working Families Party’s sweeping success in Delaware’s Democratic primaries has given the progressive organization unprecedented influence over the party’s legislative agenda, setting up a broader debate about what its policies could mean for working families, taxpayers and the state’s business climate.
WFP-backed candidates won six of eight state House races, a state Senate contest and a New Castle County Council race. The organization said the victories could nearly double its legislative caucus and help advance universal free school meals, mandatory earned sick time, rent stabilization and community workforce agreements.
“It’s clear from last night’s results that it’s a new day in Delaware,” Karl Stomberg, Delaware political director for the WFP, said in a statement. “The Working Families Party and our allies have sent an earthquake through state politics, making clear that kowtowing to corporate interests and maintaining the status quo is no longer good enough.”
Although the WFP has not formally assumed control of the Democratic Party or its legislative leadership, its candidates have captured the party’s political momentum. In several races, they defeated longtime incumbents supported by Delaware’s Democratic and corporate-law establishments.
The victories could give WFP-aligned lawmakers significant leverage when Democrats select their leaders and negotiate legislation, committee assignments and the state budget.
“We defended our incumbents, won open seats and defeated longtime establishment representatives,” Stomberg said. “We look forward to nearly doubling our caucus and fighting for policies that will benefit working people, like universal free school meals, earned sick time and rent stabilization.”
Republican candidates say the WFP agenda deserves closer scrutiny from Delawareans who work, pay taxes and depend on state government for schools, public safety, health care and other essential services.
Brent Burdge, the Republican candidate for the 5th Senate District, said the agenda should be judged according to its complete economic effect—not simply by the benefits its supporters promise.
“Working families need dependable jobs, affordable housing, reasonable taxes and a state government that delivers essential services effectively,” Burdge said. “Mandates such as rent stabilization and expanded employer requirements may sound compassionate, but the costs do not disappear. They can return to families through higher prices, fewer jobs, reduced housing investment and increased taxes.”
Burdge is running against WFP-backed Democratic nominee Shay Frisby, who defeated incumbent Sen. Ray Seigfried in the Democratic primary.
Policies carry costs and trade-offs
The WFP argues that its platform would give working Delawareans greater economic security. Its election-night statement promised to support policies that benefit working people rather than large corporations.
Universal school meals could ensure that children are fed without requiring families to complete income-verification paperwork. A universal program, however, would also subsidize meals for families capable of paying and require lawmakers to identify a continuing source of state or federal funding.
Mandatory earned sick time would give additional protection to workers who cannot afford to lose income when they or a family member becomes ill. Employers, particularly small businesses with limited staffs and narrow profit margins, could face higher labor costs and more complicated scheduling requirements.
Rent stabilization could protect existing tenants from sudden increases, but it could also discourage the construction or preservation of rental housing. A widely cited study of rent control in San Francisco found that affected landlords reduced rental supply by 15%, contributing to higher rents elsewhere in the market. Delaware’s results would depend on the provisions of any legislation lawmakers introduced.
Community workforce agreements can establish wages, benefits, training requirements and working conditions before construction begins. Critics contend that government-mandated agreements can favor unionized contractors and make it more difficult for smaller or nonunion companies to compete for taxpayer-funded work.
Burdge said state government must preserve assistance for vulnerable residents without imposing costs that make it harder for families and businesses to remain in Delaware.
“Government has an obligation to help vulnerable Delawareans, but it also has an obligation to the families working every day, paying their bills and financing state government,” Burdge said. “We should strengthen the safety net without turning every economic decision into another government mandate.”
Corporate franchise targeted
The WFP also used its victory statement to attack Delaware’s corporate-law establishment, accusing Democratic incumbents of “kowtowing to corporate interests.”
The organization identified Senate Bill 21, the 2025 corporate-law overhaul, as a central issue in the primary. Critics argued that the law weakened the rights of minority shareholders. Supporters said it restored predictability to Delaware corporate law and responded to concerns that companies were considering reincorporating in competing states.
Steve Pickering, the Republican candidate for the 12th Representative District, said the WFP’s criticism overlooks the relationship between Delaware’s Court of Chancery, the state’s corporate franchise and the services residents receive.
“Delaware’s Court of Chancery and corporate-law system have helped make our state the nation’s leading home for businesses,” Pickering said. “The taxes and fees generated by that system help pay for essential services that everyday Delawareans rely on, like our schools, public safety, health programs, and other critical services. We need to continue to demand ethical conduct and accountability, but we also must recognize the consequences of undermining this economic foundation that benefits every Delaware resident”.
Corporate franchise taxes and fees provide more than 20% of state revenue. Although the Court of Chancery does not directly generate most of that money, its expertise, efficiency and national reputation are important reasons businesses choose Delaware as their legal home.
A significant loss of corporate registrations or franchise revenue could force lawmakers to reduce spending, raise other taxes or find a new source of revenue.
“Attacking Delaware businesses and law firms may generate campaign applause, but driving companies and revenue out of the state would leave ordinary families with the bill,” Pickering said. “If that revenue disappears, Delaware will eventually have to reduce services, raise taxes, or do both. That means Delawareans could end up paying more while receiving less in return.”
Pickering is challenging Democratic Rep. Krista Griffith in the 12th District. His campaign priorities include lowering energy costs, controlling property taxes, increasing the senior property tax credit and reducing the cost of homeownership.
Musk claim leaves out legal context
The WFP statement claimed that SB 21 “led directly” to the reinstatement of Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation package, which was originally valued at $56 billion.
“This election was driven by backlash to SB 21, a controversial bill passed last year that rolled back shareholder protections and led directly to a $56 billion payout to Elon Musk,” the WFP said.
The Musk case contributed to the political debate that produced SB 21, but the Delaware Supreme Court restored the compensation package after concluding that complete rescission was an improper and inequitable remedy. The court’s ruling—not an automatic provision of SB 21—returned the stock options to Musk. The package was worth approximately $139 billion by the time of the December 2025 decision.
That distinction illustrates the broader divide over SB 21. WFP officials view the law as evidence that corporate interests hold too much power in Dover. Supporters view it as an effort to preserve Delaware’s position in an increasingly competitive market for corporate registrations.
Political spending cuts both ways
The WFP criticized corporate-financed political committees for spending heavily to defend incumbent Democrats who supported SB 21. Corporate law firms provided substantial financing to First State Future PAC, which mounted an advertising campaign supporting incumbents.
The WFP operated its own coordinated and independent campaign efforts. Its political committee reported spending approximately $125,000 on mail and $85,000 on digital advertising. Its coordinated operation also supplied candidates with phone banks, door-to-door canvassing, communications and political assistance.
The sources, amounts and objectives of the spending differed, but both sides relied on organized political money and professional campaign operations to influence Democratic primary voters.
Influence will be tested in Dover
The primary victories demonstrate that the WFP can recruit candidates, organize voters and overcome substantial spending by its opponents. But the election involved only a small portion of Delaware’s electorate and did not constitute a statewide vote on the organization’s entire platform.
The larger test will come after the general election, when WFP-backed lawmakers must translate campaign promises into legislation and explain how their programs will be financed.
For working families, the central question will be whether the emerging agenda produces greater economic security—or whether its mandates increase the cost of housing, employment and government while placing Delaware’s corporate revenue at risk.
To Go Box
What happened: WFP-backed candidates won eight Delaware Democratic primaries.
What the WFP says: Voters rejected the political status quo and excessive corporate influence.
What the WFP wants: Universal school meals, earned sick time, rent stabilization and community workforce agreements.
Republican concern: New mandates could increase costs for employers, taxpayers, renters and homeowners.
Why it matters: WFP-aligned lawmakers could gain greater influence over Democratic leadership, legislation and state spending.
What comes next: The parties will take their competing economic messages to voters in the Nov. 3 general election.
Who is the physician assistant, the nurse, the nurse practitioner, and the doctor? Image created by Delaware LIVE using AI on 9/18/26
Policy group seeks support for legislation requiring medical professionals to clearly disclose their licenses and qualifications
DOVER, Del. — The Caesar Rodney Institute is asking Delaware residents to sign an online petition supporting legislation that would require health care professionals to clearly identify their credentials before diagnosing or treating patients.
The petition calls on the General Assembly to revive and strengthen the Healthcare Professional Transparency Act, a 2024 proposal that did not advance to a vote.
CRI hopes signatures from patients, families and other community members will demonstrate public support for introducing the legislation again in 2027.
Michelle Parsons, M.D., director of CRI’s Center for Health Policy, said patients may not always understand whether the person providing their care is a physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant or another licensed professional.
“Patients shouldn’t have to ask whether their doctor is actually a physician,” Parsons said. “They should already know.”
Petition calls for clearer identification
House Bill 447 would have required practitioners using the title “Doctor” to identify their educational degree and professional license. Most health care practitioners also would have been required to wear visible identification showing their license type.
The legislation also sought to require health care advertisements to accurately identify the professional licenses of the practitioners being promoted.
The bill was pulled before a committee vote in 2024 and was not brought back before the end of the legislative session.
Through its petition, CRI is asking Delaware lawmakers to bring the proposal back and strengthen its disclosure requirements. The institute wants patients to be told before receiving nonemergency care whether the person diagnosing or treating them is a physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant or another licensed professional.
If a nonphysician uses the title “Doctor,” CRI wants that person’s profession disclosed at the same time.
“This isn’t about prohibiting earned academic titles or telling patients whom to choose,” Parsons said. “It’s about giving patients the information to make that choice for themselves.”
Expanded authority prompts questions
The petition follows Delaware’s expansion of the authority granted to several types of nonphysician health care professionals.
House Bill 141, enacted in 2021, eliminated the state’s previous collaborative-practice requirement for advanced practice registered nurses, including nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioners may independently evaluate patients, diagnose illnesses, order and interpret tests, prescribe medications and manage treatment.
Delaware has also expanded the role of pharmacists. Legislation approved in 2022 allowed pharmacists working under statewide protocols to test, screen and treat certain conditions. Additional legislation approved in 2026 broadened pharmacists’ authority to evaluate patients, identify certain health conditions, order laboratory tests and prescribe specified drugs and medical devices.
CRI said those changes make it more important for patients to understand the education, license and professional role of the person providing their care.
Some nurse practitioners earn a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree and may use the title “Doctor.” Parsons said that academic title is legitimate but does not mean the practitioner received the same education and clinical training as a physician.
An American Medical Association survey cited by CRI found that 39% of respondents identified someone with a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree as a physician. The survey also found that 19% believed a nurse practitioner was a physician and 17% believed a physician assistant was a physician.
CRI connects effort to AI protections
CRI is connecting its petition drive to House Bill 191, signed into law April 23. That law prohibits artificial intelligence and other nonhuman entities from being licensed as physicians, nurses, advanced practice registered nurses or physician assistants.
It also prohibits AI systems from using protected professional titles such as “Doctor” or “Dr.”
Parsons said the same principle — ensuring patients understand who or what is delivering their care — should apply to human health care professionals.
“If Delaware believes patients have a right to know when their ‘doctor’ is AI, surely they have a right to know when their ‘doctor’ isn’t a physician,” Parsons said.
Delaware law already requires a person using “Doctor” in connection with medicine or health care to specify the type of doctorate held. CRI contends, however, that existing law primarily regulates professional titles and does not require patients to be affirmatively told the license or professional classification of the person treating them.
CRI is asking Delawareans who agree with the proposal to add their names to the online petition and share it with friends, relatives and neighbors. The organization says broader community participation will strengthen its message to lawmakers ahead of the 2027 legislative session.
To Go Box
What: Caesar Rodney Institute Healthcare Professional Transparency Petition
What CRI is asking: Delawareans are encouraged to sign the petition urging lawmakers to revive and strengthen the Healthcare Professional Transparency Act.
Who may participate: Delaware patients, families, health care consumers and other supporters
The halls of Mountain View Academy in Dandridge, Tennessee. ProPublica and WPLN reporting found that Wayne Halfway House, which operates Mountain View, failed to report multiple abuse incidents to the state as required. Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica
Four Democratic Tennessee state lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Children’s Services demanding answers about safety and oversight in the state’s juvenile justice facilities.
The letter cites a recent WPLN and ProPublica investigation that found that juvenile justice facilities run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews repeatedly failed to report abuse of children and other serious incidents to the state as required. The reporting involved interviews with dozens of former staff and youth, along with a review of emergency call logs, company records and state documents. Crews and his company Wayne Halfway House run all three of the state’s highest-security youth prisons.
“The allegations that serious physical and sexual abuse, dangerous restraints, injuries, and other critical incidents have gone unreported by WHH demand an urgent, transparent, and independently verifiable response from the Department of Children’s Services,” lawmakers wrote.
After WPLN and ProPublica sent a copy of the letter to the company, a spokesperson said that Wayne Halfway House “continues to meet or exceed performance standards set by Tennessee,” citing state audits. The spokesperson also said that Wayne Halfway House has helped more than 200 youth earn a high school diploma or equivalent in the last three years.
In emailed statements to WPLN and ProPublica about the previous reporting, the company said it follows state policy and law and “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state. It described former employees who spoke with us as “untrustworthy sources” with a “clear bias” against the company and called their allegations “substantially flawed.”
Lawmakers are asking for answers to several questions raised by this investigation, including what steps the department is taking to address the allegations, how much money the state spends to place youth in Wayne Halfway House facilities, and who is being considered to operate new juvenile facilities the department is building.
“We also request an opportunity to meet with Department leadership to discuss these issues, review the Department’s response, and identify the legislative and administrative actions necessary to ensure that no child’s safety depends on abuse first becoming a news story,” lawmakers wrote.
In response to the news organizations’ initial investigation, DCS said it is looking into incidents that were uncovered by the reporting. DCS did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Lawmakers noted that the latest investigation joins a “long and deeply troubling record of reports” on juvenile justice facilities across the state. They referenced previous reporting from WPLN and ProPublica that found a county-run East Tennessee juvenile detention center was locking kids in solitary confinement in violation of state law. The department said it would take steps to address the findings from the 2023 investigation, and the superintendent of the facility, Richard Bean, later stepped down.
State Sen. Heidi Campbell, who signed onto the letter, also pushed for independent oversight of juvenile justice facilities in 2024, after WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting from East Tennessee. Campbell and others working on that bill said a lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House asked them to exempt privately run facilities from oversight. The oversight bill eventually failed. A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House told the news organizations at the time that the company was concerned about giving regulatory power to an outside agency “without more extensive consideration.”
Lawmakers are also worried about the state’s increased spending on juvenile justice, especially as Tennessee plans to spend more than $400 million to build more facilities. The cost to hold 31 youth at a Wayne Halfway House facility for a year is roughly the same amount it would take the state to expand grocery benefits for 700,000 school-aged children during the summer, lawmakers wrote.
“Given the amount of money Tennessee is currently spending, and plans to invest, in juvenile justice and residential facilities, we have serious concerns about repeated findings and allegations of lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability in these facilities,” lawmakers wrote.
Photo: Classroom at the Sussex Academy, a charter school in Georgetown.
Five-year federal grant will support new and expanding programs while adding oversight and accountability measures
DOVER, Del. — Delaware has secured a five-year, $16 million federal grant to expand access to public charter schools while strengthening the oversight, financial monitoring and support intended to ensure those schools deliver results for students.
Grant could add about 1,900 seats
The Charter Schools Program grant begins Oct. 1. At least 90% of the money — approximately $14.4 million — will be distributed through competitive subgrants supporting the planning, opening, replication and expansion of charter schools.
Proposals will be evaluated based on educational quality, demonstrated community need, organizational readiness, financial sustainability and evidence of demand. If enough proposals meet those standards, the initiative has a five-year goal of increasing Delaware’s charter school enrollment capacity by approximately 10%.
About 19,000 students currently attend Delaware’s 23 charter schools. A 10% capacity increase could create room for approximately 1,900 additional students, although actual growth will depend on the proposals received and approved.
“Expanding opportunities for students cannot be about adding seats for the sake of adding seats,” Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said. “We have to start with what students and communities need and be equally focused on quality, strong implementation and accountability.”
Grant targets unmet educational needs
The Delaware Department of Education said the grant will target educational needs that are not being fully met by existing programs. Potential areas include alternative and therapeutic education, career and workforce pathways, rural education, dual-language instruction, literacy programs and flexible options for students who are older than their classmates or have not earned enough credits to graduate on schedule.
The initiative also seeks to improve charter school access for economically and educationally disadvantaged students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities and other groups that have faced barriers to educational opportunities.
“Charter schools are one part of Delaware’s public education system,” Marten said. “This investment gives us an opportunity to support strong educational models where there is documented need, learn from what is working, and use those lessons to expand opportunity across public education.”
Priority for underserved students and communities
Existing charter schools applying for replication or expansion funding will be judged partly on their academic performance and operational track records.
Proposals serving underserved communities, addressing transportation barriers or expanding opportunities for multilingual learners and students with disabilities may receive priority consideration. Programs offering workforce-connected education or replicating successful school models also may receive additional consideration.
State officials emphasized, however, that priority status will not allow an applicant to bypass the program’s quality, readiness or financial requirements.
Investment extends beyond individual schools
A portion of the federal award will be used to provide charter schools with technical assistance in governance, board development, fiscal management, regulatory compliance, leadership development and program implementation. The state also plans to establish peer-learning programs and professional communities where educators and school leaders can share successful practices.
The grant also calls for stronger charter-authorizing practices, including annual reviews of each participating school’s academic, financial and organizational performance.
“We are grateful for the partnership between the Delaware Department of Education and the Delaware Charter Schools Network,” said Kendall Massett, the network’s executive director. “We are equally grateful for this investment in our education system, and for what it makes possible for students across our state.”
Massett said the grant reflects “a shared vision for collaboration, flexibility, and support for the people and strategies best positioned to make a difference for students statewide.”
Schools will face continuing monitoring
Schools receiving subgrants will undergo continuing fiscal, program and performance monitoring. That process will include progress reports, budget reviews, site visits, performance evaluations and reviews of implementation milestones.
The Department of Education said it will use those findings to identify risks, direct additional assistance to struggling programs and take corrective action when necessary. An independent outside evaluator also will assess the initiative throughout the five-year grant period.
Lessons and successful practices identified through the program will be shared with both charter and traditional public schools through professional development, peer networks and other cross-sector programs.
First competition planned during opening year
The Community Funding Accelerator assisted Delaware with identifying the federal funding opportunity, determining the state’s eligibility and preparing the application.
During the grant’s first year, the Department of Education plans to establish its management and accountability systems, consult with education stakeholders and provide technical assistance to prospective applicants. It also will release the first competitive funding opportunity, train application reviewers and select the first group of grant recipients.
Details about eligibility, application requirements, available award amounts and deadlines will be announced as the first competition is developed.
To Go Box
What: Federal Charter Schools Program grant
Award: $16 million over five years
Start date: Oct. 1, 2026
School funding: At least 90%, or approximately $14.4 million, will support competitive charter school subgrants
Potential uses: Planning and opening new charter schools and replicating or expanding successful schools
Statewide goal: Increase charter enrollment capacity by approximately 10%, subject to qualified proposals
Current charter enrollment: About 19,000 students attending 23 schools
How to apply: The Delaware Department of Education will release eligibility requirements, application instructions and deadlines as the first funding competition is developed
Learn more: Visit the Delaware Department of Education website at education.delaware.gov
RICHMOND, Virginia — Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security after a whistleblower alleged federal employees improperly accessed state voter lookup systems while searching for noncitizen voters.
Jones said Thursday that the activity could violate several Virginia election laws, including rules limiting access to voter information. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Jones said Virginia’s voter lookup tools require users to attest under penalty of law that they are accessing their own records. He also directed DHS to preserve access logs, training materials and related communications.
The whistleblower report, released by Democratic Senate leaders, alleges U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees were given less than two hours of training and instructed to review lists supplied by DHS for possible “unlawful voters.” Employees were reportedly expected to examine about 40 people per day.
DHS has defended its broader effort to identify noncitizen voting, while the Trump administration has argued that citizenship checks are necessary to protect election integrity. Federal officials have also sought detailed voter information from numerous states, though several related efforts have faced court setbacks.
Jones asked DHS to stop any unauthorized access while Virginia reviews whether state law was violated.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican campaign groups are directing significant money and high-profile surrogates into states that President Donald Trump comfortably carried, as several 2026 races remain competitive less than seven weeks before the midterm elections.
Vice President JD Vance campaigned in Kansas this week for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who faces Democrat Adam Hamilton. A recent Co/efficient poll showed Marshall leading 49% to 44%, despite Trump carrying Kansas by more than 16 percentage points in 2024. The Washington Examiner reported that MAGA Inc. helped organize the event.
Vance is also campaigning in Iowa, where Republican gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn faces Democratic State Auditor Rob Sand and Republican Ashley Hinson is running against Democrat Josh Turek for Senate. The Associated Press described both contests as closely contested.
Outside spending is substantial elsewhere. Senate Leadership Fund has committed tens of millions across Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, while Republican groups are also spending offensively in Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire.
Trump-aligned groups have committed more than $130 million nationwide, while Axios reported roughly $390 million in Senate advertising has been allocated for the post-Labor Day period.
Landmark legislation designed to alert consumers to where their drugs were made is headed for a full Senate vote, but safety experts say the transparency bill has been stripped of two of its most critical provisions.
Medications made at these facilities were linked to thousands of reported adverse reactions in patients.
The bill aims to allow doctors and patients to see on the label exactly where a medication was made — details that had largely been withheld until now, even from Congress. Current generic drug labels often include only the location of the packager or distributor, which can be thousands of miles away from the actual manufacturer.
One provision made the law particularly strong, experts said: The label was supposed to include a unique code that the Food and Drug Administration uses to identify factories. That code would have made it easier for researchers and the public to track the regulatory histories of specific facilities.
The requirements also were supposed to take effect as early as a year after the bill’s passage.
Senators have now struck both of those provisions. People familiar with the deliberations said lawmakers worried the requirements would raise drug prices and weaken national security by revealing the precise locations where lifesaving medications are made.
The unique identifier requirement has been removed from the bill, and the timeline for companies to come into compliance was extended to five years.
“It’s just a clear watering down of the original bill,” said retired Army Col. Vic Suarez, a former medical supply-chain commander who has been leading a push for more domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing.
He and others also questioned why drug companies need multiple years to comply.
“Five years after it passes might as well be a lifetime,” said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University who has researched the economic pressures that lead to poor-quality generic drugs. “Why is it that the supply chain, the medical distributors and the retailers don’t want to make sure that they supply the highest-quality product?”
In a joint press release, Scott and Gillibrand praised the bill’s progress in the Senate, calling it a “massive win for consumer safety and transparency,” but did not address the changes.
A representative from Gillibrand’s office said the five-year delay is meant to give the FDA time for rulemaking, which is a complicated, often yearslong process used to introduce new regulations. The delay would also give manufacturers time to come into compliance and redesign their labels, the representative said.
But Peter Baker, a former FDA inspector whose work involved the very companies impacted by the bill, said that amount of time is unnecessary.
“If they wanted to do it in one year, they could,” Baker said. “I would love to hear their justification on why they need five years to develop some rules and guidance on transparency. … I mean, it’s a simple label change.”
The new version of the legislation also removes the key requirement to include a unique facility identification number on labels, called a DUNS number, which would have allowed the public to more easily trace a generic drug and its active ingredients to the factories where they were made. In some cases, that identifier could also be used to find FDA inspection reports that describe contamination and other safety breakdowns on factory floors.
ProPublica used that ID number to collect data for Rx Inspector, a first-of-its-kind tool that allows consumers and doctors to look up where more than 40,000 generic drugs are made. Pharmacists and patients are already using the tool to learn more about the drugs they take and prescribe.
Under the bill’s updated language, drug labels will only be required to include factory addresses, which can be inconsistent and hard to trace to a manufacturing facility. A single address in India, for example, can house multiple factories, each producing its own drugs, or each with a slight variation on the same address.
ProPublica reporters ran into this issue when collecting data for the Rx Inspector tool. In 69% of prescription drug labels, reporters found a generic drug manufacturer’s DUNS number and were able to directly connect it to a specific facility. However, when only a manufacturer’s address was available, linking a drug to a particular facility became much harder, requiring a complicated process of automated address verification, geolocation and extensive manual review.
Experts also worried about certain language in the legislation that could allow manufacturers to avoid identifying where their factories are at all. Representatives for the bill’s sponsors have said that manufacturers are required to identify the factory where drugs were made, but the legislation only mentions a “place of business.” Drugmakers could potentially list the address for their headquarters or a subsidiary location in the United States rather than a factory overseas.
“If, in fact, ‘place of business’ can be interpreted as the location of the importer or the headquarters or something like that, it would be no different than what we have today,” said Ohio State University professor John Gray, who testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, led by Scott and Gillibrand.
“Then we’ll be right back to where we are,” Gray said. “It’ll say ‘Manufactured for So-and-So in New York City,’ but it’s actually made somewhere else around the world.”
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
People familiar with negotiations over the bill’s language said they are confident that manufacturers won’t have a loophole. The changes to the bill were primarily made as a compromise between committee offices and stakeholders, they said, and the FDA will have final say in what counts as an acceptable address.
The Association for Accessible Medicines, the generic drug lobbying group, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the association previously spoke out against the bill to ProPublica, saying the additional requirements would cause “significant costs in exchange for limited return.”
The lobbying group spent over $1 million between January and July on healthcare and generics-related bills, including the Clear Labels Act, according to its public filings.
The trade group for brand-name manufacturers did not respond to a request for comment. Previously, a spokesperson for the brand-name trade group said the industry would “welcome conversations about how to strengthen the biopharmaceutical supply chain.”
The bill faced pushback from some lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H, raised the national security concerns, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-K.Y., said he worried about creating an additional hurdle to drug production.
Ultimately, the revised bill passed the committee in July, with only Paul dissenting. The full Senate is set to take up the measure; a date has not yet been scheduled.
Congress will work with the FDA to make sure the law is properly interpreted and enforced, according to those familiar with the negotiations.
Baker said the burden of ensuring compliance will fall to already-overworked inspectors, who will be forced to determine whether manufacturers are skirting the address requirement. It would be easier to require the unique identifier, he said, because inspectors could more easily verify the information.
“The more flexibility they allow, the more complex it is to enforce it,” Baker said.
Baker also pushed back against concerns about a potential national security threat. He said data about where U.S. drugs come from is already well known, so including factory information on labels wouldn’t pose a significant risk.
“It’s a public health concern over a national security concern,” he said. “I would say that those risks outweigh the national security concerns.”
The Rafael Baez Baseball Academy practices in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Christopher Gregory-Rivera for ProPublica
If you have seen the headlines of the major investigation we recently published, “The Dominican Baseball Factory,” you may have wondered: Why is ProPublica, with its serious-sounding mission of accountability and its focus on abuses of power, reporting on baseball?
The answer would be: Exactly.
Baseball fans have long marveled at how the Dominican Republic, a tiny island nation with a population akin to Ohio, has produced so many brilliant players — roughly 10% of the major league. Major League Baseball and the owners of its 30 teams have regularly harvested bumper crops of sluggers to build their rosters and their fanbase, including most recently the Toronto Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr., whose playing contracts total more than $1.6 billion.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
But as with many such tales of extraordinary success, the origin story is much darker.
When we hired reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts from The Washington Post as our first reporter dedicated to sports, he arrived with an idea: He’d long heard that the Dominican Republic system that had churned out so many stars was deeply problematic. Garcia-Roberts wanted to dig into that world, not just to explain how it operated but to identify the individuals who were taking advantage of the young players and those who were allowing it to happen. What if he was afforded the time to track a promising young player — a potential superstar — as he was plucked from obscurity by a major league team?
Even prepped, Garcia-Roberts was surprised by what he found: For generations, poor parents in the Dominican Republic have shunted their children into an unforgiving juggernaut of baseball academies praying for a chance at a life-altering signing bonus from an MLB team. Since the bonus could not be delivered until age 16, teams had begun locking up talent younger and younger with verbal IOUs. As for the kids who don’t make the cut, well, they paid with their childhoods, and sometimes with their health.
Garcia-Roberts also detailed the rapacious industry that had sprung up around these young players and their parents: Trainers and moneylenders, he found, were siphoning away those signing bonuses with predatory, high-interest loans and other, often questionable, claims before they even arrived.
Significantly, Garcia-Roberts found, MLB itself has long known about the often brutal world surrounding its youngest prospects. The players union has as well; Dominican players, led by former Boston Red Sox star David “Big Papi” Ortiz, have argued against efforts to establish an international draft — a move that would end early bonuses, cutting off a revenue stream for moneylenders. Ortiz told players, according to an audio message, that an international draft would be “trouble” for people in the Dominican Republic. In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz told Garcia-Roberts that his opposition to the proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.”
There’s big money in sports, and with it lots of reasons to explore how it is being wielded and who is paying the cost. And that is why ProPublica is diving in.
These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a slice of society untouched by the Big Money tentacles of the sports industry — and the lack of accountability that often goes along with them. Got a gleaming new stadium in town? Your tax dollars likely paid for much or all of it, despite its billionaire owners (while you may not be able to afford a ticket — unless it’s to a Mets game). Got a kid in youth sports? You may have experienced the boggling cost of travel teams or noted that private equity is buying up leagues and tournaments. Watch sports on TV? The ads for online gambling can seem as ubiquitous as the score, luring legions into a new scourge of addiction. And the Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion! With a B, amid, of course, a scandal about how the previous owner financed his purchase.
All of that big money is ramping up just as the landscape of sports journalism has contracted along with the larger media industry.
What ProPublica brings to sports is the time, the skill set and the resources to go beyond the games and the individual stories. Our approach to investigative reporting required Garcia-Roberts to get inside the system, to find out how it works and who is being harmed, and then reveal who is responsible and who is preventing the problems from being fixed.
Without the expectation to cover games or daily sports news, reporters like Garcia-Roberts won’t be hamstrung by what one of my colleagues called “the conundrum of access.” You dig out the unsightly bits and suddenly your sources dry up and with them your scoops. And we haven’t covered a topic so long that we have become blind to its flaws.
This isn’t ProPublica’s first dive into sports investigations. In 2021, reporters Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Ellis Simani were scrutinizing a trove of federal tax data and noticed that the billionaire owners of the nation’s sports teams were taking fat write-offs on team assets, from media deals to player contracts.
You can expect to see more of ProPublica’s reporting on sports in coming months, and like the box scores, they will be spelling out who is winning and who is losing. That’ll just likely mean something different to us. If you’d like to read those stories, we’d love to send our Big Story newsletter right to your inbox. In the meantime, if you have a story tip for a terrific sports investigation, or just something sports-related you think we should know, we’d love to hear it. Please get in touch with reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts or contact ProPublica via any of these secure methods.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “needs to go,” backing either impeachment or removal by President Donald Trump as criticism of the Pentagon chief expands within the GOP.
Tillis made the comments Thursday after Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced eight articles of impeachment accusing Hegseth of constitutional and legal violations involving U.S. military operations in Iran, Venezuela and Yemen. Massie also accused Hegseth of defying congressional war-powers restrictions and retaliating against critics.
“I’ll let the House do what the House is gonna do,” Tillis told reporters. “We’ve got a management problem here. He needs to go.” Tillis added that having Trump replace Hegseth would be the “most expedient route.”
The North Carolina senator voted to confirm Hegseth but has become an increasingly vocal critic. Earlier this month, Tillis said he had “never witnessed more inept management” at the Pentagon and urged Trump to install new leadership.
House Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers into an early recess Wednesday rather than hold the anticipated impeachment vote. Massie said Republican leaders were concerned that additional GOP members could support his effort.
The House would have to approve impeachment before any Senate trial could occur.
BOISE, Idaho — A Boise minister convicted of misdemeanor trespassing after refusing to leave Gov. Brad Little’s office during a protest over transgender-related legislation will not serve additional jail time.
Idaho 4th District Judge Adam Kimball sentenced the Rev. Sara LaWall on Thursday to fines and court costs, while crediting her for the day she already spent in jail following her April arrest. LaWall, minister of the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, was among nine protesters arrested after remaining inside the governor’s office after it closed.
A jury convicted LaWall earlier this month after viewing body-camera footage showing an Idaho State Police trooper repeatedly instructing protesters to leave. LaWall acknowledged remaining after those warnings but described her actions as civil disobedience intended to draw attention to legislation affecting transgender Idahoans.
The April protest followed Little’s signing of legislation restricting transgender people’s bathroom use. Protesters were also opposing another measure requiring teachers and health professionals in certain circumstances to notify parents about a minor’s transgender identity. Little later signed that measure as well.
Kimball described LaWall’s conduct as “peaceful” and “considerate” but said protesters should not violate the law when their concerns go unheard. Three other trespassing cases stemming from the demonstration are also headed to trial.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told members of Children’s Health Defense that they have a “strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” appearing Thursday at the organization he led before entering government.
Kennedy delivered the remarks as the United States experiences its worst measles outbreak in decades. Pennsylvania has reported more than 690 cases and four measles-associated deaths this year, all involving unvaccinated people, according to state officials. Kennedy has disputed how some deaths are being classified, while Pennsylvania has requested emergency CDC assistance.
During his roughly 90-minute speech, Kennedy said changes to federal vaccine policy must proceed within legal limits but assured attendees that his administration allies were continuing their efforts. “We are doing this one day at a time,” he said. The conference also featured longtime vaccine opponents, including Andrew Wakefield, whose research claiming a vaccine-autism connection was discredited.
Kennedy briefly addressed measles deaths while emphasizing what he described as vaccine injuries. Extensive scientific research has found no causal connection between vaccines and autism.
The appearance comes as confidence in childhood vaccines has declined. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 76% of Americans considered measles vaccines safe, down from 84% in 2020.
Caption: Nobody should be bored this weekend… there is a festival, events, outing, sale or musical for everyone! Enjoy Delaware!
Our “Gotta Love the Weekend” Report: More than 500 classic vehicles headline a weekend filled with college football, festivals, living history, theater, outdoor programs, and fall family activities.
WILMINGTON, Del. — From classic automobiles and college football to fireworks, German food and Revolutionary War history, Delaware and the surrounding region offer a full schedule of activities this weekend.
Hagley Car Show
More than 500 antique and restored vehicles from the early 1900s through the early 2000s will fill the grounds of Hagley Museum and Library during the annual Hagley Car Show from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20.
This year’s special feature, “American Independent Automakers,” celebrates companies that competed outside Detroit’s traditional Big Three. Three feature fields will highlight vehicles connected to those manufacturers.
The rain-or-shine show also includes a vehicle parade, motoring music, food trucks and access to “Du Ponts Down the Road,” an exhibition of vehicles once owned and used by members of the du Pont family. Featured pieces include a horse-drawn carriage, an early electric car, a 1918 Cadillac, a 1928 DuPont Motors Model G Phaeton and a World War II-era Indian motorcycle.
Advance admission is required and sold by the carload for up to eight people. Passes cost $30 for the general public and $25 for Hagley members. Dogs are not permitted. Passes will be sold until 11:59 p.m. Saturday or until the event sells out. Details are available on the Hagley Car Show website.
Blue Hens Host Coastal Carolina
The University of Delaware football team returns to Delaware Stadium at 11:30 a.m. Saturday to face Coastal Carolina in a nationally televised game on CBS Sports Network.
The Blue Hens enter the game with a 1-1 record after opening the season with a 42-7 victory over Merrimack and losing 35-26 at Vanderbilt. Saturday’s game is also Band Day at Delaware Stadium.
The game gives families and football fans an early Saturday option before visiting one of the afternoon or evening festivals. Tickets and game-day information are available from University of Delaware Athletics.
Riverwalk Freedom Festival
Downtown Milford will host the 26th annual Riverwalk Freedom Festival from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday along the Mispillion Riverwalk and throughout the downtown area.
The free event will feature more than 150 vendors, food trucks, live music, a car show, children’s games, a pet park and a brew garden. The Mispillion River Duck Dash begins at 3:30 p.m., with numbered ducks available for $5 and cash prizes of $500, $250 and $100.
The festival concludes with Milford’s only public fireworks display of the season at 8:30 p.m. Families should arrive early and bring blankets or folding chairs. Popular viewing locations include the Riverwalk and Memorial Park.
The Chadds Ford Historical Society will bring the American Revolution to life Saturday during the Battle at Chadds Ford and Historic Chadds Ford Days.
The daytime program runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and features Revolutionary War skirmishes, military encampments, artillery demonstrations, colonial trades, music, food and family activities. Visitors can watch blacksmithing, woodworking, candle making and other demonstrations showing what life was like during the Revolutionary era.
Tavern Night in the Grove follows from 6 to 10 p.m., offering period music, costumed entertainment, traditional food and beverages, cannon fire and fireworks. The event takes place at the historical society’s Barn Visitors Center, 1736 Creek Road in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
The Delaware Sängerbund Oktoberfest brings German food, music, dancing and family entertainment to 49 Salem Church Road near Newark from Friday through Sunday.
The long-running festival recreates the atmosphere of a traditional Bavarian celebration with live bands, German beer, folk dancing and foods prepared by Sängerbund members. The menu typically includes bratwurst, potato pancakes, schnitzel, sauerkraut, potato salad and German desserts.
Amusement rides are available for children, while the large festival tent offers music and dancing throughout the weekend. Admission is $10, with children 16 and younger admitted free when accompanied by an adult. Visit the Delaware Sängerbund for hours, parking and event details.
“Fiddler on the Roof” Opens at Candlelight
The Candlelight Theatre opens “Fiddler on the Roof” on Friday at its historic dinner theater at 2208 Millers Road in Wilmington.
The Tony Award-winning musical follows Tevye, a Jewish dairyman struggling to preserve his family’s traditions amid cultural and political upheaval in early 20th-century Russia. Its familiar score includes “Tradition,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker” and “Sunrise, Sunset.”
The production runs through Oct. 25. Candlelight tickets include a meal served before the performance, and a full-service cash bar is available. Performance times vary. Tickets and show information are available from The Candlelight Theatre.
Delaware Nature Society Native Plant Sale at Coverdale Farm
The Delaware Nature Society is offering several outdoor programs for people interested in native plants, birds, wildlife and hiking.
Saturday’s activities include the Fall Native Plant Sale at Coverdale Farm Preserve in Greenville and Hawk Watch at Ashland Nature Center in Hockessin. Other programs include farm activities, nature art, marsh exploration and monarch butterfly programs at locations around the state.
Sunday opportunities include guided bird walks, another day of Hawk Watch and a hike through Flint Woods Preserve, which is not ordinarily open to the public. Times, fees and registration requirements vary by program. The complete schedule is available through the Delaware Nature Society events calendar.
More Weekend Options
The Delaware Seafood Festival will bring crabs, oysters, shrimp, lobster, crab cakes, live music and cooking demonstrations to Schellville near Rehoboth Beach on Saturday. Ticket and scheduling information is available through Visit Delaware.
Fifer Orchards near Wyoming is also opening its fall festival season with a corn maze, outdoor play areas, seasonal food and apple picking when available. Festival information and tickets are available from Fifer Orchards.
Meals on Wheels Delaware will hold its Hats & Heels fundraiser Saturday evening at Bally’s Dover Casino Resort. The event features food, music, fashion and contests while raising money to support homebound older Delawareans. Information is available from Meals on Wheels Delaware.
To Go Box
What: Major weekend events across Delaware and the Brandywine Valley
When: Friday through Sunday, Sept. 18-20
Top attraction: Hagley Car Show, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday
Sports: Delaware vs. Coastal Carolina, 11:30 a.m. Saturday
Walks in southern Delaware and Wilmington will raise money for Alzheimer’s care, support and research
WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware residents are being invited to join the fight against Alzheimer’s disease during two Walk to End Alzheimer’s events this fall.
The Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter will hold its Southern Delaware walk Saturday, Sept. 26, followed by the Wilmington walk Saturday, Oct. 31.
“Alzheimer’s is a growing crisis in Delaware. As our population ages, more individuals and families are confronting this devastating disease,” said Glen Gray, chair of the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter. “Early detection and decades of research have improved outcomes for heart disease and many cancers, including breast cancer. But no one survives Alzheimer’s. That is why this walk — and the research, care and support it funds — is so important to our community.”
The annual walks bring together people living with Alzheimer’s, caregivers, families and supporters while raising money for research and the association’s care and support programs.
A central part of each event will be the Promise Garden ceremony, during which participants carry flowers representing their personal connections to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
Each flower color has a different meaning. Participants may walk in honor of someone living with Alzheimer’s, in memory of someone who died from the disease, as a caregiver or as a supporter of the association’s goal of ending Alzheimer’s.
More than 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Nearly 13 million relatives and friends provide care for people living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
In Delaware, more than 22,300 people are living with Alzheimer’s, and more than 37,000 people serve as caregivers, according to the association.
The Walk to End Alzheimer’s is described by the Alzheimer’s Association as the world’s largest event dedicated to raising awareness and funding for Alzheimer’s care, support and research. Its roots date to 1989, when the organization began holding Memory Walk events across the country.
Participation is open to individuals, families, businesses and community organizations. Walkers may register individually or create or join a team.
Funds raised support the Alzheimer’s Association’s work to accelerate research, encourage early detection and risk reduction, and provide care and support services for families affected by dementia.
To Go Box
What: Alzheimer’s Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s
Southern Delaware walk: Saturday, Sept. 26
Wilmington walk: Saturday, Oct. 31
Registration: Participants may register, form a team, join an existing team or donate at alz.org/walk.
Event information: Visit the individual registration pages for the Southern Delaware or Wilmington walks for locations, schedules and fundraising updates.
Learn more: Visit alz.org or call the Alzheimer’s Association’s 24-hour helpline at 800-272-3900.
MIAMI, Florida — Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is publicly challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, using a new campaign ad to warn that Hispanic voters who supported him in 2024 now feel “betrayed.”
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in the ad, filmed outside the White House. She pointed to July detention figures and urged Trump to “be careful” about advice he receives on immigration. CBS News and Reuters independently reported the remarks Thursday.
Salazar, whose South Florida district includes a large Hispanic population, endorsed Trump in 2024 and has generally supported his presidency. However, she has long advocated an immigration approach combining stronger border enforcement with legal protections for some undocumented immigrants already living in the United States.
Her criticism comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests have increased sharply. Reuters reported that ICE took nearly 51,000 people into custody in August, setting another monthly high, while more than three-quarters of recent arrests involved people without criminal records.
Salazar is seeking another House term against Democratic nominee Eliott Rodriguez. Her ad argues that Trump can pursue immigration enforcement without granting amnesty while providing undocumented residents what she called “a dignified life.”
Free Sept. 26 festival at Hudson Fields will feature live music, children’s activities and more than 30 recovery organizations and vendors
MILTON, Del. — People in recovery, their families and community supporters will gather at Hudson Fields on Saturday, Sept. 26, for atTAcK addiction’s third annual Sober Fest.
The free festival, scheduled from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is designed to celebrate recovery while connecting Sussex County residents with treatment information, support services and others who understand the challenges posed by substance use disorders.
“The festival is not only a place where people can come together in an alcohol- and drug-free environment, but it is meant to foster community connection and care, so that people don’t feel isolated in their recovery,” said Dawn Hess-Fischer, president of atTAcK addiction and chair of Sober Fest.
The event will include more than 30 organizations and vendors offering resources for people in recovery and their families. Activities will include food, arts and crafts, bounce houses, free reiki services, an ice cream truck and appearances by characters from “Bluey” and “Super Mario Bros.”
The Oxford Houses of Delaware will sponsor a cornhole tournament.
Nick Kashmanian will perform from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., followed by Girls Room from 1 to 3 p.m.
“We created Sober Fest as a way for the Sussex County community to unite, celebrate recovery, learn about local resources and see that there is hope in recovery,” Hess-Fischer said.
Building support beyond treatment
Organizers say treatment programs, counselors and recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Nar-Anon provide important help, but people affected by addiction also need supportive relationships within their communities.
Sober Fest seeks to create those connections in an informal, family-friendly setting while making conversations about substance use and recovery easier.
“Our goal is to continue celebrating recovery while educating the public about this disease,” Hess-Fischer said. “At atTAcK addiction, we work every day to erase the stigma surrounding addiction, including here in Sussex County.”
According to figures provided by atTAcK addiction, Delaware recorded 314 overdose deaths in 2025, a 41% decline from the state’s 2022 peak. Organizers said the decrease represents meaningful progress but does not diminish the continuing demand for treatment, recovery services and housing assistance.
atTAcK addiction, founded in 2013, is a statewide nonprofit that raises awareness about addiction, assists individuals and families and supports people in recovery.
The organization owns three recovery residences, provides recovery housing scholarships, offers free naloxone training and educational programs, advocates for legislation and conducts community outreach. It also operates a resource center at 210 Peoples Plaza in Newark.
Activities: Live music, food, children’s activities, arts and crafts, reiki services, a cornhole tournament and recovery resources from more than 30 organizations and vendors
Need help: Call atTAcK addiction at 302-365-5221 or Delaware’s Hope Line at 833-9-HOPEDE (833-946-7333). Free, 24-hour support and state-vetted treatment resources are also available at HelpIsHereDE.com.
SACRAMENTO, California — California lawmakers have sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a bill that would establish 18 as the minimum age for marriage, ending the state’s current system that allows minors to wed with parental consent and court approval.
Assembly Bill 1267, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, passed the Legislature with near-unanimous support and was presented to Newsom on Sept. 3. He has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it. California is one of three states, along with New Mexico and Mississippi, that currently has no statutory minimum marriage age.
The ACLU opposes the measure, arguing that an absolute ban could limit minors’ autonomy, including decisions tied to emancipation and reproductive health. Planned Parenthood, which opposed earlier efforts to restrict child marriage, remained neutral this year.
Supporters say the existing law leaves minors vulnerable to coercion and abuse. Survivor advocacy group Unchained at Last says most child marriages involve girls marrying adult men. Pellerin said lawmakers should recognize that minors “are children” even when they may appear mature.
Previous California efforts to impose a minimum marriage age failed amid objections from civil-liberties and reproductive-rights groups. If Newsom signs AB 1267, the new minimum age would take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Minneapolis, Minnesota — Federal immigration officer Christian Castro was arrested Wednesday in Minneapolis, ending a months-long interstate dispute over state assault charges stemming from the January shooting of a Venezuelan man during a major immigration enforcement operation.
Castro, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, is accused of firing through the door of an apartment and shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg while children were inside. Minnesota prosecutors also charged Castro with falsely reporting a crime after he allegedly told federal supervisors that Sosa-Celis and others attacked officers with a snow shovel and broom. Prosecutors say video evidence contradicted that account.
Castro had returned to Texas following the shooting, where authorities arrested him in May on Minnesota’s warrant. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott later declined to sign extradition papers, questioning whether Castro qualified as a fugitive because the Department of Homeland Security had reassigned him to Texas. A federal judge subsequently declined Minnesota’s request to compel his extradition.
Castro spent roughly 90 days in a Texas jail before his August release. He was later federally indicted on charges of making false statements to investigators about the shooting and arrested again. DHS has suspended him from ICE, and authorities have opened a separate civil rights investigation.
His attorneys say Castro always intended to answer the Minnesota charges and denies that he attempted to flee. Under an arrangement with Minnesota authorities, he drove from Texas intending to surrender at his lawyer’s office but was arrested shortly before arriving.
Castro is expected to make his first Minnesota court appearance Thursday. The charges remain allegations, and he has not been convicted.
Illustration by Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Records obtained by ProPublica, iStock.
Two Oregon lawmakers want to end an unusual exemption in the state’s records law that has kept the public from learning how hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money is spent on subsidized housing — and the effort has already landed key industry support.
The southern Oregon Democrat said she didn’t realize the documents were being kept secret until reading about it in a ProPublica story. She said previous leaders of her committee told her they were also unaware.
“I think this is an issue that will have very broad interest,” Marsh said.
State Sen. Khanh Pham, a Portland Democrat and chair of the Senate Committee on Housing and Development, said she also wants the Legislature to tackle the issue in its next session.
Meanwhile, a lobbying group for low-income housing developers, lenders and related businesses, Housing Oregon, said it strongly supports repealing the secrecy provision; the organization has asked the state to disclose more about projects that it funds in the meantime.
“Oregon’s affordable housing providers share the public’s interest in ensuring that public investments in housing are used effectively, responsibly, and with visibility,” said Kevin Cronin, a spokesperson for the group. “The questions raised in your recent ProPublica article regarding development costs deserve serious attention.”
Cronin said Oregon can increase transparency around development costs “while still protecting genuinely proprietary or competitively sensitive information.”
“More consistent reporting of costs and outcomes will help policymakers, providers, researchers, and the public understand where the system is working and where it needs improvement,” Cronin said.
ProPublica highlighted Oregon’s secrecy around low-income housing in August. Since 2021, our story noted, Oregon has given developers an unprecedented $1.4 billion, and the cost of developing each low-income apartment has nearly doubled, to $540,000. Dozens of projects are lined up for another $850 million in future state funding, and costs are expected to continue rising.
“We are spending, as you said, a lot of money on the development of affordable housing,” Marsh said. “We really need to understand what it is that we’re funding, how much it costs, why it costs that much, and be able to justify the investments that we’re making.”
In other states, researchers and journalists have used the financial records from subsidized housing projects to investigate their spiraling costs and the drivers behind the growing price tag.
Marsh said after reading the ProPublica story that she “pretty much immediately” looked up the provision in Oregon public records law that officials cite for keeping cost details secret. She said financial documents that show where a project’s money is coming from and what it’s going to should be public and easily accessed. She said she would like to see them posted online as part of the public materials that Oregon’s Housing Stability Council receives for each project before awarding subsidies.
Pham, in a written statement, said: “It’s imperative that Oregonians can trust that our state government is investing in affordable housing as cost-effectively as possible. I appreciated ProPublica’s reporting on Oregon’s inadequate public records law that hinders our ability to monitor how affordable housing funds are being spent, and I’m hopeful legislators can address this next year.”
Oregon’s Sunshine Committee, which reviews public records exemptions and recommends ones that could be rolled back, is also examining the exemption for housing financials as a result of ProPublica’s coverage, co-chair Charlie Fisher said.
It’s not clear where opposition to repeal efforts, if any, might arise. Officials in Washington and California, where the details of state spending on subsidized housing are available to the public, have said it hasn’t interfered with low-income housing efforts.
Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state housing agency that persuaded lawmakers to create the records exemption in 1997, cited the law in redacting major sections of developers’ cost reports that ProPublica requested in May.
The agency’s current executive director, Andrea Bell, told ProPublica in July that she is committed to transparency but that the agency is following the law as it stands today.
Asked to comment this week about whether the agency would support efforts to change the law, a spokesperson said by email that state agencies don’t take positions on bills. “OHCS appreciates the opportunity to review the legislation” that’s introduced in 2027, the spokesperson wrote.
Atlanta, Georgia — A hacker collective dismantled a Flock Safety camera, copied much of its internal software and storage, and shared the files with journalists, revealing that the company’s surveillance devices collect far more information than license plates alone.
The group, calling itself stegan0gram, provided the data to 404 Media and WIRED. Their analysis found that one camera generated about 1.6 million images from roughly 50,000 vehicles over 21 days, sometimes capturing dozens of images of the same vehicle. The software also explicitly detected people and bicycles, not just cars and license plates.
The files showed the system could isolate details such as bumper stickers, vehicle characteristics and objects carried by people. Analysts also found that one storage partition was not encrypted and contained a key that unlocked additional recorded media, raising questions about Flock’s previous claims regarding on-device protections.
Flock said the unauthorized removal and tampering of its hardware is illegal and noted that the hackers did not report the findings through its official vulnerability-disclosure process.
The disclosure comes amid growing scrutiny of Flock’s expanding national network. WIRED reported that data from some systems can be accessed by more than 2,000 agencies, while several communities have recently suspended or abandoned the technology over privacy and oversight concerns.
Boston recently said it will no longer use Flock after discovering that data from a 2025 pilot had been shared nationally despite a contractual requirement that such sharing be disabled.
The hacked camera adds a new dimension to the debate: the issue is no longer limited to who can search license plates, but also how much information the devices actually collect and how securely that data is stored.
New York, New York — A Florida academic pleaded guilty Monday to falsifying records and fraudulently obtaining $750,000 from a compensation fund established for victims of Jeffrey Epstein, federal prosecutors said.
Jennifer Percival, 46, director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, admitted that she fabricated documents after an earlier claim to the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program was rejected in 2020.
According to prosecutors, Percival applied in 2024 to a separate $290 million compensation fund created as part of JPMorgan Chase’s settlement with Epstein victims. To qualify, she falsely claimed that Epstein’s estate had previously approved her for $500,000 and altered the rejection letter to support that assertion.
Percival also fabricated emails and other records to reinforce the claim. Based on the false documentation, the JPMorgan fund awarded her $750,000. When the FBI began investigating in 2025, authorities said Percival continued the deception by providing additional false emails to a federal prosecutor.
At Monday’s plea hearing, Percival acknowledged that the goal of her actions was to obtain money, which she said provided “a sense of validation.” She brought a check for $776,031 to court to cover restitution and related costs.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Percival faces an estimated three to four years in prison, although the judge is not required to follow that recommendation. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
Her attorney is expected to seek leniency based partly on Percival’s academic career and work in disability research.
Gastonia, North Carolina — President Donald Trump used a campaign rally Wednesday to describe North Carolina as “one of the worst in the whole nation” while repeating multiple claims about former Gov. Roy Cooper that conflict with state records.
Trump, campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley, called Democratic opponent Cooper a “murderer-protector” and again blamed him for the release of DeCarlos Brown Jr., the man accused of killing 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska aboard a Charlotte light-rail train in 2025.
That accusation is false. The North Carolina Department of Adult Correction says Brown was not released early. He served 100% of his minimum sentence, including credit for time already served, and left prison in September 2020, five months before a February 2021 COVID-era prison settlement Republicans have attempted to connect to his release. The department has said neither that settlement nor Cooper caused Brown to leave prison.
Trump also claimed North Carolina had become “one of the most violent” states and said the decline “all started with Cooper.” The latest complete statewide figures from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation provide no support for that narrative. Violent crime fell 4.3% in 2024, including a 9.2% decline in the murder rate. Statewide violent crime totaled 40,875 offenses, or about 390 per 100,000 residents.
Trump then accused Cooper of doing “nothing” after Hurricane Helene. Public records also contradict that characterization. Cooper declared a state of emergency before the storm, mobilized National Guard soldiers and rescue teams, requested an expedited federal disaster declaration and later sought more than $25 billion in federal recovery aid. By October 2024, thousands of state and federal responders were working throughout western North Carolina.
Trump’s remarks came during a rally intended to boost Whatley in his Senate contest against Cooper. While criticism of an opponent’s crime or disaster record is standard campaign politics, the specific claims tying Cooper to Brown’s release and portraying the Helene response as nonexistent are contradicted by official records.
Washington, D.C. — Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked an effort Wednesday by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., to advance legislation requiring developers of advanced artificial intelligence systems to include an emergency “kill switch” designed to stop models that behave dangerously or outside intended controls.
Kennedy sought to pass the measure by unanimous consent, a Senate procedure that allows legislation to move quickly but also permits any single senator to object. Paul did so, arguing that Congress should not impose broad technical requirements before lawmakers better understand how the technology works and how such mandates could affect innovation.
Kennedy said the proposal was intended as a narrow safeguard rather than a comprehensive AI regulatory framework. “I’m not standing here today suggesting to you I have all the answers,” he said. “What I am suggesting to you is there are risks to artificial intelligence.”
Paul warned the language could have unintended consequences, questioning whether requirements might eventually be interpreted to apply to search engines, medical software or other AI-assisted systems. He proposed creating a bipartisan panel to study potential safeguards instead.
Kennedy rejected that alternative, saying Congress should act on at least a limited safety measure now rather than delay action through another study commission.
The exchange comes amid a broader debate in Washington over whether advanced AI systems should face federal safety requirements. Some technology executives have called for stronger guardrails, while others argue that premature regulation could slow U.S. innovation and weaken its competitive position against China.
The blocked motion does not prevent Kennedy from reintroducing the proposal through the normal committee and legislative process.
Washington, D.C. — Greenland and Antarctica have lost about 12.5 trillion tons of ice since 1979, according to a major satellite analysis showing that ice-sheet losses have accelerated sharply in recent decades.
The study, published in Scientific Data, combined 45 independent surveys using 27 satellite missions. Researchers calculated that the lost ice has added about 1.2 inches to global sea levels since 1979, in addition to increases caused by thermal expansion and other sources.
Most of the loss — roughly five-sixths — came from dynamic processes such as glaciers flowing into warmer ocean water, rather than surface melting caused directly by hotter air. That distinction matters because marine-driven ice loss can accelerate rapidly once glaciers retreat into deeper water.
The researchers found that Greenland and Antarctica were comparatively stable through much of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s before losses increased substantially during the 2010s. A slowdown between 2020 and 2023 was attributed mainly to short-term weather patterns, including unusually heavy snowfall in East Antarctica.
Lead author Ines Otosaka of Northumbria University said the long-term trend remains clear and closely linked to climate change. Scientists warned that ice sheets respond slowly to warming, meaning additional losses are likely to continue for decades even if global temperatures stabilize.
The findings are based on multiple independent measurement techniques, which outside researchers said increases confidence that the observed acceleration is real.
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