News Reel

Through a sudden death overtime goal, the U.S. men's hockey team is golden over Canada.

After the thrilling 2-1 overtime victory against Canada, Team USA hockey players skated around the rink while holding Johnny Gaudreau's number 13 jersey.

An armed man was shot and killed early Sunday morning after "unauthorized entry" into the secure perimeter at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, the U.S. Secret Service said.

Authorities say agents confronted a white male, who has not been identified, carrying shotgun and gasoline can

The US Secret Service shot and killed an armed intruder who breached the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida residence and private club in Palm Beach, early on Sunday.

Although the US president often spends weekends at the oceanfront resort, he was at the White House in Washington during this incident, as was first lady Melania Trump.

Team USA added another gold medal to its tally on Sunday, when the U.S. men's hockey team beat Team Canada.

A software engineer tried steering his robot vacuum with a videogame controller, reports Popular Science — but ended up with "a sneak peak into thousands of people's homes." While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI's remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries. The backend security bug effectively exposed an army of internet-connected robots that, in the wrong hands, could have turned into surveillance tools, all without their owners ever knowing. Luckily, Azdoufal chose not to exploit that. Instead, he shared his findings with The Verge, which quickly contacted DJI to report the flaw... He also claims he could compile 2D floor plans of the homes the robots were operating in. A quick look at the robots' IP addresses also revealed their approximate locations. DJI told Popular Science the issue was addressed "through two updates, with an initial patch deployed on February 8 and a follow-up update completed on February 10."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blizzard warnings were issued Saturday for New York City, New Jersey, southern New England and coastal communities along the East Coast.

The reversal came after discussions with the White House and TSA, an official said. DHS will still suspend Global Entry program as the partial shutdown continues.

• Country wins most golds (18) in Winter Games history

• USA, GB and Australia also set team records

• Norwegians put emphasis on participation

Norway has once again topped the Winter Olympics medal table, surpassing countries with far larger populations.

The Scandinavian country won more gold medals (18) and more total medals (41) than the US, who came second in both categories (12 golds and 33 total medals). Norway’s 18 golds were the most by a country in Winter Olympics history, while their cross-country skiing hero Johannes Høsflot Klæbo accounted for six golds on his own, more than the all but seven other countries at this year’s Games.

Astronauts could be using smartphones to capture lunar selfies and more.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 22, 2026.

The following is the full transcript of the interview with Govs. Laura Kelly of Kansas, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Mike Braun of Indiana and Mike DeWine of Ohio that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 22, 2026.

A model unit of the T1 seen by The Verge shows specs and pricing that don't match what's advertised on the Trump Mobile website.

Team USA are the men’s Olympic champions for the first time since 1980 after Jack Hughes scored a dramatic winner

• Medal table | Full game report | Results | Briefing

Away we go …

What else has happened at the Games today? And what were some of the highlights of the past two weeks and change? Check our multisport coverage:

• US win third Olympic gold, first since Miracle on Ice

• Jack Hughes’ golden goal ends 46-year wait in Milan

The United States claimed their third Olympic men’s hockey title – and first since the Miracle on Ice team of 1980 – with a thrilling 2-1 overtime win over Canada in Sunday’s gold medal game at the Milano Cortina Games. In the third Olympic final meeting between the border rivals and the first since Sidney Crosby’s epochal golden goal in 2010, the Americans seized their moment to end a 46-year wait and dethrone the sport’s most decorated nation on its grandest stage.

Canada had been chasing a record-extending 10th gold medal in men’s ice hockey, but it was the United States who delivered when it mattered most through Jack Hughes’ winner less than two minutes into the extra period and a superhuman effort from goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, capping an unbeaten run through the first Olympic tournament to feature National Hockey League players in 12 years.

‘Moscow continues to invest in strikes more than diplomacy,’ says Zelenskyy, as logistics and energy facilities targeted

Russia has fired scores of missiles and drones at targets across Ukraine, flattening a residential house in the capital, two days before the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Kremlin had launched 297 drones and nearly 50 missiles on Sunday, in the latest in a wave of overnight strikes. He said “a significant proportion” had been shot down as he called on allies to strengthen the country’s air defences against enemy attacks.

The following is the transcript of the interview with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 22, 2026.

Calls mount for Mountbatten-Windsor to be dropped from royal line of succession

Police searches of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s former home on the Windsor estate continued on Sunday as a government minister did not rule out having a judge-led inquiry into the former prince’s links with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, representing the government, did not rule out such an inquiry but said it was premature because of the police investigation.

Eddie Hill, 20, and Jayden Long, 19, found dead on Yr Wyddfa in north Wales after a huge search operation

Tributes have been paid to two young men who died on a hiking expedition on Yr Wyddfa, also known as Snowdon, in north Wales.

Eddie Hill, 20, and Jayden Long, 19, both from Norfolk, were found dead in Eryri national park on Thursday after a huge search operation in severe winter conditions.

Letter to Shabana Mahmood describes controls that could block British dual citizens’ entry to UK as ‘unacceptable’

The Liberal Democrats have called on the home secretary to “move at speed” to delay the rollout of new border controls that could result in British dual nationals being blocked from entering the country.

A letter sent by the party to Shabana Mahmood echoes one sent by the former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis on Friday asking for a grace period to be implemented urgently after one of his constituents living in the Netherlands told how she could no longer visit her dying mother in a care home in Yorkshire.

Arab and Islamic governments issue statement denouncing comments made on Tucker Carlson podcast

Governments from across the Islamic world have condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suggesting it would “be fine” for Israel to claim a broad swath of the Middle East.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian pastor and former Arkansas governor, has long been an outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.

European leaders said in December that Europe was ready to lead a “multinational force” in Ukraine as part of a peace agreement proposal

Searches are expected to continue today at Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s previous home – Royal Lodge, in Windsor – as calls grow for a probe into the former prince’s links with Jeffrey Epstein.

Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s police and crime correspondent, Vikram Dodd, about what could be next for Andrew here:

If the government bring forward this bill with the support of the King then we will back it. We have to be realistic. Andrew is the eighth in line to the throne, so there’s no chance of him becoming our monarch.

And so parliament really should be focused on things that are of more importance to the public, whether that’s the economy, crime, the health service, immigration. But if the bill does come before parliament, then we’ll support it.

Lockheed Martin's F-35 combat aircraft is a supersonic stealth "strike fighter." But this week the military news site TWZ reports that the fighter's "computer brain," including "its cloud-based components, could be cracked to accept third-party software updates, just like 'jailbreaking' a cellphone, according to the Dutch State Secretary for Defense." TWZ notes that the Dutch defense secretary made the remarks during an episode of BNR Nieuwsradio's "Boekestijn en de Wijk" podcast, according to a machine translation: Gijs Tuinman, who has been State Secretary for Defense in the Netherlands since 2024, does not appear to have offered any further details about what the jailbreaking process might entail. What, if any, cyber vulnerabilities this might indicate is also unclear. It is possible that he may have been speaking more notionally or figuratively about action that could be taken in the future, if necessary... The ALIS/ODIN network is designed to handle much more than just software updates and logistical data. It is also the port used to upload mission data packages containing highly sensitive planning information, including details about enemy air defenses and other intelligence, onto F-35s before missions and to download intelligence and other data after a sortie. To date, Israel is the only country known to have successfully negotiated a deal giving it the right to install domestically-developed software onto its F-35Is, as well as otherwise operate its jets outside of the ALIS/ODIN network. The comments "underscore larger issues surrounding the F-35 program, especially for foreign operators," the article points out. But at the same time F-35's have a sophisticated mission-planning data package. "So while jailbreaking F-35's onboard computers, as well as other aspects of the ALIS/ODIN network, may technically be feasible, there are immediate questions about the ability to independently recreate the critical mission planning and other support it provides. This is also just one aspect of what is necessary to keep the jets flying, let alone operationally relevant." "TWZ previously explored many of these same issues in detail last year, amid a flurry of reports about the possibility that F-35s have some type of discreet 'kill switch' built in that U.S. authorities could use to remotely disable the jets. Rumors of this capability are not new and remain completely unsubstantiated." At that time, we stressed that a 'kill switch' would not even be necessary to hobble F-35s in foreign service. At present, the jets are heavily dependent on U.S.-centric maintenance and logistics chains that are subject to American export controls and agreements with manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Just reliably sourcing spare parts has been a huge challenge for the U.S. military itself... F-35s would be quickly grounded without this sustainment support. [A cutoff in spare parts and support"would leave jailbroken jets quickly bricked on the ground," the article notes later.] Altogether, any kind of jailbreaking of the F-35's systems would come with a serious risk of legal action by Lockheed Martin and additional friction with the U.S. government. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Koreantoast for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CBS News journalist's new book tells the often-overlooked stories of women who helped shape our nation, from the single female whose name appears on the Declaration of Independence, to the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court.

In her new book, the CBS News journalist highlights women who pushed America to live up to its founding promises of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

The Australian-born actress earned an Academy Award nomination for her powerful performance as a mother stretched to the limits.

Emma Webber, mother of Barnaby Webber, expects ‘shocking’ failures into care of triple killer Valdo Calacone to emerge at inquiry starting on Monday

The mother of a student who was killed in the 2023 Nottingham attacks has said she will “fight to the bitter end” to get to the truth of how Valdo Calocane was free to attack, before the beginning of a public inquiry into the incident.

Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, 19-year-old students, and 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates were fatally stabbed by Calocane on 13 June 2023 in a frenzied attack. Early the next day, Calocane drove a van into pedestrians Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski, leaving all three with severe and life-changing injuries.

I've been using 3D printing to make useful tools and accessories around my home for years, including for my Dyson vacuums. Here's how.

The wait for new episodes is almost over.

For six decades, the investigative journalist – subject of the documentary "Cover-Up" – has exposed corruption, war crimes, and political scandals. He talks about his career; why, at age 88, he's still loves being a reporter; and where he believes America stands now.

Democrats accuse DHS of ‘kneecapping’ programs that help speed registered travelers through security lines

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suspended the TSA PreCheck and Global Entry airport security programs that give approved participants a fast-track through bag check and passport control, as a partial government shutdown continued.

The popular government programs at US airports accelerate security lines and make travel slicker for all. The suspension from early Sunday was destined to cause headaches for passengers – combined in the north-east with an incoming blizzard.

"Sunday Morning" looks back on the life of the Baptist minister, civil rights leader and social justice activist, whose trailblazing presidential campaigns, built on a message of economic support and faith-based compassion, fostered his so-called "Rainbow Coalition."

Business leaders expect UK to ‘double down’ on deal announced by Donald Trump and Keir Starmer in 2025

• Graeme Wearden: Trump’s trade war risks undermining his hopes of hefty US interest rate cuts

High-level talks with the US administration over the threat of increased tariffs are under way as the UK government says it wants “the best possible deal” for UK companies.

Business leaders said they expected the UK to “double down” on the existing Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD) – announced by Donald Trump and Keir Starmer in May last year – rather than walk away.

After decades of American children routinely receiving polio vaccines, the virus that had doomed many to paralysis was nearly eliminated in the United States. But vaccine avoidance today may allow the crippling disease to return.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions asks whether we could cope with a world where computer gave up saying no …

Readers reply: what would be the most socially useful way to spend a billion dollars?

After years of computer saying no, and giving us all migraines and premature grey hair, I’m starting to worry that computer – or rather AI large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini – are taking too much of a fancy to playing nice and saying yes. I confess to using both of these programs, but I’ve noticed that, well, it’s as if they’re trying to please, with statements like “You’re absolutely right, Jeff,” and “That’s pretty much right.” Often, when I ask, “Would you mind thinking for a bit longer on that?”, I then get another response saying: “Jeff, you’re absolutely right, again, to query that result. It turns out I was a bit hasty in my reply …”

If the world runs even more on information filleted out from the sump of the internet by LLMs, what are the consequences? Can we look forward to a future in which AI is more concerned with appearing sympathetic (getting good reviews?) than being factual? Er, a bit too human? Jeff Collett, Edinburgh

In the world being ushered in by Trump, power will prevail over cooperation. We will come to rue having taken this path

The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, inspired a wave of enthusiastic nodding among the cosmopolitan crowd gathered in Davos last month when he took to the podium and proclaimed that the world order underwritten by the United States, which prevailed in the west throughout the postwar era, was over.

The organizing principle that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, that interdependence would promote world peace by knitting nations’ interests together in a drive for common security and prosperity, no longer works. The US blew it up.

Highly rated councilmember makes last-minute entry after endorsing former ally Karen Bass – can she build a campaign to win?

Nithya Raman, a progressive urban planner, entered Los Angeles politics with a bang when she was elected to city council in 2020, defeating an incumbent Democrat endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

More than five years on, the 44-year-old is making waves again with her last-minute entry into the LA mayoral race. Raman filed to run just hours before the deadline – after recently endorsing Mayor Karen Bass for re-election – to the surprise of constituents, and political allies and opponents alike.

US president calls for removal of Susan Rice as streaming platform pursues takeover of Warner Bros Discovery

Donald Trump has told Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice from its board or “face the consequences”, while the streaming platform is locked in an extraordinary corporate battle to take control of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).

In comments posted on his Truth Social platform, the US president described Rice – who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama and UN ambassador and White House adviser under Joe Biden – as a “political hack” and accused her of having “no talent or skills”.

Igor Tudor takes charge of Spurs for the first time in a crucial North London derby for both teams.

If you're looking to keep track of your health, a smart scale can help by providing data on various metrics right from your bathroom.

One feature ultimately sealed the deal for me, but it might not be the one that matters most to you.

Whether you have the latest iPhone or Samsung phone, or even an older handset, you can take some beautiful nostalgic images with a bit of help. Here's how.

A goldendoodle named JetBlue was abandoned at a Las Vegas airport, sparking international interest. More than 2,700 people applied to adopt him.

A Guardian analysis finds the vast majority of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time from January to August last year had no criminal convictions

A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”

Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.

Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.

Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.

Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.

Former employees stepped up to create the National Public Health Coalition to advocate for public health after Trump’s cuts to the agency

Abby Tighe thought she had landed her forever job. She joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2023, managing a national youth substance abuse prevention program. The project focused on rural communities, and Tighe, whose family is from Appalachia, was proud to be using her public health training to support often-overlooked parts of the country. “The CDC was different than anywhere else I’ve worked,” says Tighe. “People didn’t care about their own ambitions as much as they cared about the larger mission. It was always my dream to work there.”

That dream ended a year ago, when Tighe received a form email on 14 February letting her know the Trump administration was firing her. Classified as a probationary worker, she was one of the first to lose her job in what quickly became a dramatic downsizing of the CDC workforce. To date, the current administration has either fired or is in the process of firing more than 4,000 CDC employees – a third of the agency.

Many people have been sheltering at home. Protests have become part of the daily rhythm. Community networks continue to patrol and document agents’ interactions

In St Paul, Minnesota, Brittany Kubricky pulled into a school parking lot. Normally, she was there just to pick up her daughter. But today, two of her daughter’s schoolmates also climbed into the backseat. Their mother had been sheltering at home for weeks, afraid of a run-in with federal immigration agents. So friends coordinated school pickup for her.

In December, the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge, deploying a reported 3,000 agents to Minnesota to target undocumented immigrants with criminal records, officials said. But in two months, agents have instead detained thousands of people, regardless of legal status, including US citizens pulled out of their cars, taken from their homes and picked up while working. Agents have also killed two Minneapolis residents – and US citizens – Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while they were monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement that TSA and Customs and Border Protection are "suspending courtesy and special privilege escorts."

Exclusive: Police Federation condemns deployment of US firm’s tech to analyse behaviour as ‘automated suspicion’

Scotland Yard is using AI tools supplied by the US tech company Palantir to monitor staff behaviour in an attempt to root out failing officers, the Guardian has learned.

The Metropolitan police has previously declined to confirm or deny whether it used technology supplied by the company, which also works for the Israeli military and Donald Trump’s ICE operation. It has now confirmed that it is using Palantir’s AI to analyse internal data about sickness levels, absences from duty and overtime patterns in an effort to identify potential shortcomings in professional standards.

In April 2024, college student Sade Robinson, 19, went on a first date and never came home. Her car was found set on fire 3 miles from her apartment. Using data from an app on her phone, law enforcement began to piece together where she went — and who she was with.

The 22-year-old Gu, American-born but competing for her mother's homeland of China, is already the most decorated freeskier in the short history of the sport at the Olympics.

Official US social media accounts posted about rise of ‘violent radical leftism’ after killing of Quentin Deranque

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, has said he will summon Charles Kushner, the US ambassador to France, over comments related to the killing of the French far-right activist Quentin Deranque.

Deranque was beaten to death in Lyon last week during a fight with allegedly hard-left activists.

This somewhat obscure feature in the latest iPhone system can delivery more battery power during your day.

When you don't need a tablet to do everything, this one does the basics well for a reasonable price.

The future of the home is taking shape. After a massive three-day home, kitchen and bath showcase in Orlando, these are the innovations that stood out.

In an edited extract from her latest book, Hazel Sheffield sets out a new blueprint for community stewardship

It was a Saturday in February 2020 when the flood came. It had been a wet winter, so wet it seemed that before the month was out, the brown trout of the River Taff might be washed clean out into Cardiff Bay before the fishing season had even begun. But this is Wales. People are used to a spot of rain. No one realised how bad it would get.

For two days, it hammered on the windows of the houses at the top of the South Wales Valleys, where people tucked in their children before a sleepless night. It poured into the rivers at the bottom. By the time the rain departed again, many people would be standing in water up to their knees.

Battle-tested Ukrainian startup that advertises a ‘Killbox’ drone recruited Prince as non-executive chair

After multiple sources previously told the Guardian that Erik Prince – Maga ally and founder of the now defunct mercenary company Blackwater – was looking to work with Ukraine’s invaluable drone sector, recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents confirm he now is.

Swarmer, which bills itself as a battle-tested Ukrainian startup specializing in autonomous drone software, filed for an initial public offering and has recruited Prince to help sell the company as non-executive chair.

Weak connections known as ‘bridge ties’ cross the boundaries that normally structure our lives. We must restore this connective tissue

The first time a woman I’ll call Shoshana went toBrandi Carlile’s music festival, she arrived alone. She had just been through another unsuccessful round of IVF. During one of the songs, about motherhood, she began to cry in the middle of the crowd. Then two women she had never met stepped closer and wordlessly wrapped their arms around her until her breathing slowed.

“That’s when I realized,” Shoshana told me in an interview, “this place isn’t just about music.”

Eva M Meyersson Milgrom is a social scientist and professor emerita from Stanford University, where she was affiliated with the department of sociology, the Institute of Economic Policy, and the Graduate School of Business. She is working on a book on the importance of diversifying our social networks

Self-declared sleuths have inserted themselves into the search for Nancy Guthrie, compromising the investigation for views and clicks

On the 10th day of the search for Nancy Guthrie, reporters camped outside of the missing woman’s home noticed a strange man strut right up to the front door. It had been more than a week since the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie had disappeared, and authorities had just announced they had a new lead from Ring footage of what looked like a “potential subject” attempting to tamper with the doorbell camera on the morning of her disappearance. So now who was this unknown person, clad in a gray top and black pants, carrying a large black bag and striding to the door?

It was a Domino’s delivery driver.

Bridget Phillipson says government is ‘not taking away support’ as she prepares to announce changes

• UK politics live – latest updates

Bridget Phillipson has pledged that under the government’s overhaul of the special educational needs system it will take weeks for children to get access to support, not months or years – as she prepares to announce the controversial changes.

Speaking before publication of the white paper on the overhaul, the education secretary said children with special needs would be treated as “integral to the school system” rather than as a carved-out issue. She said the changes would be brought in as part of a “decade-long shift” to give schools and families time to adjust.

Upping tariffs may have lifted the president’s mood but it is a headache for the Federal Reserve and its next chair

Donald Trump and Denis Healey don’t have much in common. One of the greatest prime ministers Britain never had shares little of his famous hinterland with what some historians see as one of the worst occupants of the White House.

But Trump would be well advised to remember Healey’s first law of holes – when you’re in one, stop digging

Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled "The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun," arguing that Anthropic's Claude Code "was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I've been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer... [W]hen the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month." He elaborates on his point on the Aboard.com blog: I'm deeply convinced that it's possible to accelerate software development with AI coding — not deprofessionalize it entirely, or simplify it so that everything is prompts, but make it into a more accessible craft. Things which not long ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pull off might come for hundreds of dollars, and be doable by you, or your cousin. This is a remarkable accelerant, dumped into the public square at a bad moment, with no guidance or manual — and the reaction of many people who could gain the most power from these tools is rejection and anxiety. But as I wrote.... I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don't exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can't find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists. I don't expect to change any minds; that's not how minds work. I just wanted to make sure that I used the platform offered by the Times to say, in as cheerful a way as possible: Hey, this new power is real, and it should be in as many hands as possible. I believe everyone should have good software, and that it's more possible now than it was a few years ago. From his guest essay: Is the software I'm making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it's immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company's quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system... What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes? That doesn't mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly. And for lots of users, that's going to be fine. People don't judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They're not looking for the human connection of art. They're looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work... In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I'm writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can, too. If we can't stop the freight train, we can at least hop on for a ride. The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it's fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all of the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the front line of the war on AI, these people are fighting for a better internet.

Welsh Rugby Union is to cut number of professional teams from four to three, with Ospreys the likely choice

For Ian Gough, a lock forward who had been dropped by the Wales national rugby union team, signing with Swansea’s Ospreys in 2007 was life-changing: he credits his time at the club with resurrecting his international career.

“It was great fun playing for the Ospreys,” he said. “They did it the hard way, ground their way up, and the supporters embraced that identity and went with them on that journey to becoming a good side.

The Tricky Trees look to build on encouraging European win as they host the top-five chasing Reds in the English Premier League.

Coaching from artificial intelligence chatbots, personalized and accessible at any time, is now shaping how some students write.

Friedrich Merz to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing, with goods worth €251bn traded between two countries in 2025

China has overtaken the US as Germany’s top trading partner, figures have shown, as the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, prepares for his first visit to Beijing since taking office.

Merz will head to China on Tuesday and will be welcomed with military honours on Wednesday in Beijing by the prime minister, Li Qiang, before later meeting the president, Xi Jinping, for talks over dinner, his spokesperson Sebastian Hille said.

Puerto Rican rapper speaks at concert of Colón’s influence after trombonist, vocalist and composer dies aged 75

Tributes have poured in from stars including Bad Bunny for Willie Colón, the pioneering trombonist, vocalist and composer who died on Saturday aged 75.

With more than 30m albums sold, multiple platinum records and 11 combined Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations, Colón is among the most successful salsa artists of all time.

Defence minister rebuffs US president’s claim that Arctic islanders are ‘not being taken care of’

Greenland does not need medical assistance from other countries, Denmark has said, after Donald Trump said he was sending a hospital ship to the autonomous Danish territory that he wants to acquire.

“The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland,” the country’s defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, told the Danish broadcaster DR on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors expected for month-long display of 13th-century saint’s remains

Saint Francis of Assisi’s skeleton is going on full public display from Sunday for the first time, in a move that is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Inside a nitrogen-filled case with the Latin inscription “Corpus Sancti Francisci” (the body of Saint Francis), the remains are being shown in the Italian hillside town’s Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.

From opposing apartheid in South Africa to supporting Palestinian rights, the US civil rights leader left his mark across the globe

When Jesse Jackson called for the Democratic party platform to include Palestinian statehood, the pushback was fierce. “While we had strong support from delegates at the convention, there was still a fear factor that the issue couldn’t be discussed,” recalls James Zogby, who was deputy manager of Jackson’s presidential campaign. “I was told by the [nominee Michael] Dukakis negotiators, if you even say the P-word, you’ll destroy the Democratic party.”

Jackson’s effort did not succeed at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. But 10 Democratic state parties had already passed resolutions in favour of Palestinian self-determination. And as the decades rolled by, more and more progressives came to share Jackson’s stance. Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, reflects: “He was way ahead of the base. Even the activists who supported Palestinians did not have the same depth of understanding.”

Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat in the witness box in a courtroom in Seminole, Oklahoma, on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands knotted in her lap. Moss, who is 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, during her marriage to a volatile man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison-issued glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger self she was describing.

“Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” her lawyer, Colleen McCarty, asked.

“He had a gun that usually lay on top of the chest of drawers at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before they went to bed.

“There were a number of occasions where he took the gun — and I wasn’t in the mood to have sex and I didn’t want to have sex — and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then lay it on the pillow next to the bed.” She stopped to correct herself: “Next to my head, I’m sorry.”

Under her lawyer’s questioning, Moss described a pattern of abuse that began six months after their wedding, when her husband grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the fireplace. She recalled how, during an argument, he tried to shove a tennis ball into her mouth. How she was knocked unconscious when he once slammed her head against their refrigerator so hard that it left a dent. How he repeatedly punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant with their son. How he raped her multiple times, once with a curling iron — an assault that caused lasting injuries. “I bled every day for five years until I finally had a hysterectomy,” she said. When her 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage complained that Mike had done something to make her bottom hurt, Moss feared he was sexually abusing her little girl, too.

“Were you afraid for your life?” McCarty said.

Moss nodded. “Absolutely.”

Her testimony put her at the center of an extraordinary legal experiment unfolding in Oklahoma, where a new state law, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, passed in 2024, offers prisoners like her a chance at freedom. Under the law, a domestic-violence victim who is serving time can petition for a reduced sentence, which the law mandates if a judge decides that the abuse she endured was a “substantial contributing factor” to her crime.

Moss was the first to get her day in court and test whether the law could deliver on its promise. Unlike most other defendants in cases the statute was intended to remedy, Moss did not carry out the violence herself. She was not present when her older brother, Richard Wright, shot her husband. But at her 1990 trial, prosecutors argued that she had solicited and helped orchestrate the killing, introducing testimony that she once asked an acquaintance to “get rid of” her husband in exchange for an initial payment of $500. She was convicted of first-degree murder and lesser charges and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. (Her brother is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.)

The question before the court that morning in Seminole was not one of guilt or innocence; it was whether Moss’ punishment failed to account for the role that years of physical and sexual abuse played in her crime. McCarty called Margaret Black, a licensed counselor specializing in domestic violence, to the stand. Black, who had evaluated Moss, explained that each time Moss tried to leave her husband, the violence escalated. Black described a lethality assessment she had conducted to measure the risk Moss faced of being killed or seriously injured. “Eighteen and above is what’s called extreme danger,” Black said. In Moss’ case, her review of the evidence led her to assign a score of 24. “This was a very, very dangerous situation for Lisa and her children.”

That afternoon, District Judge C. Steven Kessinger announced that he had reached a decision. “The court finds that the defendant has provided clear and convincing evidence that she was a survivor of domestic violence, having endured physical, sexual and psychological abuse,” he told the crowded courtroom. “The court further finds that such violence and abuse was a substantial contributing factor in causing the defendant to commit the offenses for which she is presently incarcerated.” Under the statute, this finding made her eligible for a sentence of 30 years or fewer — and because she had already served more than that, the judge ordered her to be freed that day.

The exultation that broke out inside the courtroom as Moss embraced her grown daughter, who was 5 when Moss was incarcerated, soon reached Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. The prison, a low sprawl of concrete and razor wire that sits on the outskirts of the small town McLoud, was where Moss had spent virtually all her adult life. One of Moss’ oldest friends there, April Wilkens, was bent over the tablet that connected her with the outside world when she received a text message with the news of the judge’s ruling. She leaped off her bunk and ran out of her cell, shouting, “Lisa’s going home!”

The prison’s day room erupted at the news of Moss’ release. The outpouring of joy was about more than one woman’s walking free. Moss’ lawyer, McCarty, had identified dozens of other prisoners at Mabel Bassett, including Wilkens, who she believed would qualify for relief under the new law, and the hearing suggested they had reason to hope. “The feeling was electric — pure elation,” Wilkens told me. “Our survivor exodus had begun.”

When Wilkens returned to her tablet, she saw a text from McCarty: “You’re next!”

Wilkens first met McCarty when the lawyer came to visit her at Mabel Bassett, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, in the summer of 2022. Wilkens was serving a life sentence for shooting and killing her ex-fiancé after years of abuse and stalking and indifference from the police. She had already spent 24 years behind bars. McCarty had just founded the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and in Wilkens’ case, she saw an opportunity to compel the justice system to do what it rarely did: revisit harsh punishments that the criminal-justice system had long treated as final.

For years, only a handful of states had tried to grapple with cases like Moss’ and Wilkens’, and even then, survivors faced steep barriers to having their sentences reconsidered. That began to change in 2019, when New York passed a law empowering judges to reduce sentences when they found that abuse had been a “significant contributing factor” to a defendant’s crime.

Accompanying McCarty that day was Leslie Briggs, another lawyer who would later become the center’s legal director. Briggs had learned of Wilkens’ case from Wilkens’ niece, who had collected boxes and boxes of records related to her aunt’s conviction. The two lawyers had reviewed the transcripts of the long-forgotten case and saw Wilkens’ prosecution as a stark example of a justice system that often fails to stop abusers but proves swift to punish those who fight back.

The case had particular resonance for McCarty. One of her earliest memories was of her teenage sister sitting at the kitchen table one morning with a bruised eye and split lip, having been thrown down a flight of stairs by a boyfriend. McCarty’s mother had escaped an abusive relationship only to be victimized again by a different partner before McCarty graduated from high school.

The lawyers wanted to pass legislation modeled on New York’s law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. They thought that calling attention to Wilkens’ case, in which the abuse was both extensive and thoroughly documented, might be the way to do it. But first McCarty needed a sense of how many women were imprisoned at Mabel Bassett for crimes tied to their own abuse — a phenomenon that sentencing-reform advocates call criminalized survivorship.

Though there was no system to identify these women within the prison, Wilkens came up with a solution: She wrote an informal questionnaire aimed at survivors of domestic violence. A friend of hers inside the penitentiary managed to type up and print hundreds of copies, and that September, Wilkens and her contacts in other parts of the prison began circulating them. (“It certainly helps to have friends in low places,” Wilkens told me.) The questionnaire asked each respondent to provide the length of her sentence, the county of her conviction and an account of her crime, and to mail the responses to Appleseed’s office in Tulsa.

One hundred and fifty-six questionnaires arrived over the course of several weeks in the fall of 2022. Each envelope held a harrowing narrative, some in polite, looping script, some in block letters. The respondents were Black and white, Native American and Hispanic, young and old, from big cities and small towns. “I kept begging for a divorce, and he’d threaten to kill my children.” “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.” “Whenever I didn’t want to have sex with him, he would twist my wrists as far as he could until I gave in to him.” Another woman recounted the feeling of liberation she felt behind bars, where her partner could no longer hurt her: “I was in a very abusive, sick relationship,” she wrote. “I am FREE now.” A few were vague about their crimes. Others were blunt: “One night just snapped, shot & killed husband.”

Oklahoma consistently ranks among the states with the highest rates of domestic violence; it also has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment. McCarty believed the two were connected, and the surveys seemed to bear that out. Some respondents claimed to have participated in robberies or other crimes under the threat of violence from their abusers. More had been convicted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law, punished for not doing enough to shield their children from the brutality of their partners, often while enduring that violence themselves. But the women serving the longest sentences were typically those who had struck back at their abusers. McCarty began talking to lawmakers about these findings, and in 2023, an early version of a domestic violence survivors’ bill was introduced.

Nothing might seem to have longer odds in deep-red Oklahoma than an effort to lessen punishments for violent crimes, but overcrowded prisons and rising costs were already forcing a rethinking of harsh, decades-old sentencing laws. In 2016, voters approved a landmark ballot initiative reducing penalties for certain low-level drug and property crimes; three years later, lawmakers made those changes retroactive, leading to one of the largest single-day prisoner releases in American history.

McCarty hoped to build on that momentum. Wilkens advocated for the bill from prison, writing an opinion piece in The Oklahoman and telling her story on a local TV-news program, and she became the focus of a social media campaign, #FreeAprilWilkens.

Not everyone in Oklahoma supported the proposed law for domestic-abuse survivors. Prosecutors warned that the statute encouraged exaggerated or bad-faith claims that would be difficult to disprove years after the fact. The law, they argued, opened a Pandora’s box — one in which potentially anyone who had suffered violence could seek a lesser punishment.

Arguing that the bill took too broad a view of who should be eligible for resentencing, the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, wrote in a 2024 email to a lawmaker that the legislation “presents a risk to public safety.” He went on to cite an infamous case, which he had prosecuted, to make his point: “The Bever brothers, who slaughtered their family in Broken Arrow, would be eligible for sentence modification under this bill in its present form.”

The case, from 2015, fell well outside the law’s scope. Robert and Michael Bever had killed their parents, who a surviving sister testified were not physically abusive, and three younger siblings. The proposed legislation required that any claims of abuse be corroborated with some kind of documentary evidence — evidence that case did not have.

Kunzweiler had given voice to a broader concern among prosecutors: that undeserving and dangerous defendants could exploit the law to seek reduced sentences. Pushback from elected district attorneys led to changes in the bill; cases involving death sentences were excluded. It would take two legislative sessions and a sustained effort by a bipartisan coalition to pass a version lawmakers could agree on. The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was signed into law in May 2024.

But its passage did not quiet criticism from the state’s district attorneys. They would play a central role in how the law was applied, because they had the authority to oppose any applications they believed were unfounded. Prosecutors could challenge a survivor’s account of abuse or argue that it played no meaningful role in the crime. A judge would make the final determination, but the law’s promise of sentence reduction would depend, in part, on the discretion of prosecutors.

New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act offered a glimpse of the challenges that lay ahead in Oklahoma. The act had produced sharply different results from county to county. In a 2025 article for The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Alexandra Harrington, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, found that whether a defendant had her sentence reduced or not largely depended on the local district attorney.

When prosecutors supported an application for resentencing, judges frequently granted relief. When prosecutors opposed an application, only a fraction succeeded. Opposition from district attorneys was most common when the crime was seen as too egregious; or when the defendant had a criminal history or a substance abuse problem, or was perceived as aggressive or otherwise viewed as unsympathetic; or when the applicant had previously received a plea deal in the case. “In some jurisdictions, the D.A.’s office has served almost entirely to obstruct the path to relief,” Harrington wrote.

McCarty was clear-eyed when we first spoke last spring about the challenges ahead. Many of the resentencing cases she was working on — including Wilkens’ — were in Tulsa, where Kunzweiler was the top prosecutor, and they had very different visions of what justice looked like. McCarty, animated and intense, with large brown eyes that widened as she talked, spoke passionately about the possibility of second chances for those the system had failed. Kunzweiler, a phlegmatic, gray-haired career prosecutor a generation older, prized the finality of a jury verdict — and the punishment that went with it. Signaling just how seriously he took Wilkens’ request for resentencing, he had chosen to represent the state along with one of his best prosecutors, and he had repeatedly asked for more time to prepare. After numerous delays, there was still no hearing set, and McCarty was growing impatient. “We wrote this law with April in mind,” she said.

Wilkens had filed her application for resentencing on Aug. 29, 2024 — the day the law took effect — and she had expected to lead the way. But Moss was the first to receive a hearing, and in the wake of her release, four other women at Mabel Bassett were given court dates, the first of which was in July 2025. Wilkens would have to wait.

Wilkens grew up in the 1970s and early ’80s in Kellyville, a no-stoplight town, where her father’s moodiness and brute discipline dominated the household. Wilkens says he whipped her with a belt or switch for minor infractions and once punched her square in the mouth. Wilkens cultivated a sunny, high-energy persona: cheerleader, honor student, the kind of girl untouched by turmoil. She propelled herself out of Kellyville by excelling academically, graduating from high school two years early. She attended Oklahoma State University and completed a graduate program in prosthetics at Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago.

An early marriage to her college sweetheart produced a little boy, Hunter, but ended after four years. In 1995, when she was 25, she was newly divorced, running her own prosthetics business in Tulsa and ready for a new chapter. She began dating again. Tall and willowy, with long chestnut hair and a bright smile, she drew attention.

That fall, she met Terry Carlton, who was 12 years older and the son of a prominent auto dealer. Handsome and magnetic, with an impulsive streak, he flew them first class to Dallas and hired a chauffeured limousine for their first date. He proposed two months later, on Christmas Eve, when he slipped a $25,000 engagement ring onto her finger. She did not yet know that he had both a drug problem and a history of violence with women. Two of his previous romantic partners had gone to the police to report abuse; one of them, citing repeated chokings and “severe emotional trauma,” secured a protective order against him.

Four months into Wilkens’ engagement to Carlton, he grabbed her by the throat during an argument. Afterward, he swore to her that he would never hurt her again. But over the next two years, during their on-again-off-again relationship, Wilkens called 911 at least 10 times to plead for help. She was granted three emergency protective orders and sought medical attention for injuries sustained during a rape and multiple beatings.

Police reports, medical records and trial testimony document what Wilkens endured — sometimes in full view of witnesses. A neighbor once watched as Carlton chased her down the driveway, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, back toward her house. The same neighbor also saw him, on another occasion, pounding on Wilkens’ back door with what looked like a metal pipe. A doctor who lived across the street from Carlton discovered Wilkens in her car, bleeding, after Carlton smashed her driver-side window and grabbed her keys so she couldn’t leave.

Yet Carlton — whose family wielded influence in Tulsa — seemed untouchable. “When the police were called, his timing was impeccable,” a neighbor, Glenda McCarley, testified at Wilkens’ 1999 trial. “He could be in his car and gone just as they rounded the corner.” Officers responded but rarely intervened. Their attitude toward Wilkens was typified by one officer whom McCarley remembered as “put out, impatient, in a hurry.”

Carlton, whose sports car was often seen idling outside Wilkens’ house at odd hours of the night, was arrested only once, after the police found him at her home in February 1998, with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol and a stun gun. He faced no meaningful consequences: Rather than pursue assault or stalking charges — both felonies — the authorities cited him for a misdemeanor weapons violation. When he skipped his court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but the Tulsa police never enforced it.

His relentless harassment left Wilkens in a fragile state of mind; twice that spring, she was involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals. Her unraveling was further accelerated by a growing dependence on drugs. She would later testify that Carlton had introduced her first to cocaine, then to meth, taken intravenously. As his erratic behavior intensified, so did her drug abuse. By the time she appeared on his doorstep at around 3 a.m. on April 28 — on the day that she killed him — she was a shadow of the vibrant young woman she was when they first met.

In less than three years, she had lost everything: her business, which went under as her focus drifted; her family and friends, from whom Carlton kept her isolated; and her son, now in her ex-husband’s sole custody. She would later testify that she went to Carlton’s house in the middle of the night with a singular, desperate purpose: to beg him to leave her alone for good. Facing him directly, she would later say, seemed like the only way she could reclaim some measure of control. But the encounter quickly turned violent. She said that after she refused to have sex with him, he raped her and threatened to kill her. Eventually, she managed to grab his .22 handgun, and when he came toward her, enraged, she fired. She kept firing — eight shots in all.

After undergoing questioning and a sexual-assault exam that documented vaginal tearing, Wilkens was jailed and charged with first-degree murder.

“When in trouble, cry rape,” District Attorney Tim Harris said in closing arguments at her 1999 trial, in which prosecutors cast her as a manipulative, mentally unstable, meth-crazed fabulist who went to Carlton’s home looking for drugs and revenge. Though Wilkens’ attorney argued that she acted in self-defense because she feared for her life, Harris suggested that she and Carlton had a mutually destructive relationship, in which Wilkens — who weighed 107 pounds at the time of the murder — met Carlton’s abuse with her own aggression.

“There is no doubt he physically abused her,” Harris told the jury. “But is there not some doubt that she also abused him? He abused her, she abused him, I file a protective order, I cry rape, now I’m back, let’s get high, I hate you, I love you, you owe me money. Man, what a dysfunctional life.” Harris blamed her for resorting to violence: “If April Wilkens had really been serious about her fear of Terry Carlton, she could have allowed the system to come to her aid.” Wilkens was found guilty and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

Harris was succeeded 16 years later, in 2015, by Kunzweiler, who had been one of his top lieutenants. As district attorney, Kunzweiler took the same hard line on Wilkens’ case, repeatedly opposing her bids for parole. In 2022, the district attorney’s office stated in a letter to the parole board that her sentence reflected the gravity of her crime and that she should remain in prison. “She presents a risk to the safety of the public,” the letter read.

Wilkens was denied parole once again. McCarty emphasized this to lawmakers when she fought for passage of the Survivors’ Act; without a new law, Wilkens faced the prospect of remaining locked up for the rest of her life.

In June, after nearly a year of delays, a Tulsa judge scheduled Wilkens’ resentencing hearing for September. She, and the three other women who would have their hearings first, were part of the loose-knit group at Mabel Bassett that Wilkens called the “survivor sisterhood.”

Erica Harrison, the unofficial den mother to the young women in her housing unit, was serving a 20-year sentence for having shot and killed a family friend after he raped her in 2013. Norma Jane Lumpkin, whose long hair hung past her waist, was four decades into a life sentence for her role in the 1981 bludgeoning death of her husband. Tyesha Long, who is 27 — the youngest of the group and a former rodeo competitor in barrel racing — had a 27-year sentence for shooting her abusive on-again-off-again boyfriend to death in 2020. “Jane and I have both been locked up longer than Tyesha has been alive,” Wilkens told me.

Aside from minor driving infractions, none of the women had been in trouble with the law before their arrests, and Wilkens saw their crimes, like hers, as aberrations, acts she believed were inseparable from the abuse each woman had endured. Before they were led out of Mabel Bassett in handcuffs and leg irons, to face their resentencing hearings in the county courts where they were convicted, Wilkens tried to prepare them. She quoted her favorite passage from Ecclesiastes, reminding them that there is power in numbers. She urged them to listen carefully to each question when they were on the stand and to take a breath before responding. And she advised them on how to prepare for their processing photos. Don’t grimace, she told them. Your mug shot is going to be all over the local news.

Moss, the only woman who had been freed under the Survivors’ Act, attended the hearings that summer. She deliberately positioned herself where she could be seen by whichever woman from Mabel Bassett was sitting at the defense table, and she met the defendant’s gaze, offering reassurance that she was there and that she remembered exactly what this moment felt like. She made a point of looking her best, knowing that she embodied the promise of the freedom that might lie ahead. Wearing bright colors and simple but elegant jewelry, she looked polished, with her hair blown out, her nails lacquered, her lipstick fresh. After 35 years behind bars, she was not going to keep her head down. “Freedom looks good on her,” Wilkens later told me.

But it soon became clear that not everyone’s resentencing hearing would unfold the way Moss’ did in Seminole, under a different district attorney. Harrison, the first in the sisterhood to go before a judge that summer, testified in a Tulsa court in July. “I was going through a terrible divorce,” Harrison said, recalling a period when she was on her own with three children and a totaled car. “I had just left the domestic-violence shelter and moved into a little, small, no-name apartment.” Harrison had a drink with a family friend, Calvin Anderson, and passed out. She woke to find him on top of her, and after he sodomized her, she managed to fight him off. In the hours that followed, he loitered around her apartment complex, and when her eventual calls to 911 did not bring a timely response, she shot him in the parking lot.

Prosecutors challenged her account, emphasizing that elements of her story had changed since she was first questioned by the police in 2013; they capitalized on the fact that she did not call 911 right after the assault, suggesting the danger she claimed to feel afterward was invented. “At what point did he magically become a threat?” Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hilborn asked. The judge in Harrison’s case said she would hand down a ruling later that summer.

The oldest of the group, Lumpkin, appeared in court the following week. Her crime — committed with a neighbor who was also charged in connection with the killing — had been particularly gruesome. Her husband was beaten to death, his body later found in the trunk of her car. Yet it did not seem inconceivable that she might be granted some measure of leniency, because she was 75 and had been incarcerated for the past 44 years. But as Lumpkin sat at the defense table, the victim’s family delivered searing statements that undercut her long-standing claims of abuse, portraying her instead as a calculating, coldblooded killer. Lumpkin’s daughter, Alisha Keeney, who was 12 when her father was bludgeoned to death, told the court her mother had not served enough time for the brutal slaying. “That’s the only resentencing she deserves, is jail forever,” Keeney said.

Again, no immediate ruling came down from the bench. Eleven days later, Tyesha Long settled into the witness box in an Oklahoma City courtroom and recounted how a local businessman named Ray Brown began pursuing her when she was 17. Brown, who was in his early 50s, had been the subject of protective orders obtained by multiple women. The first time he was violent with her, she testified, he sucker-punched her in the mouth. He went on to stalk her, choke her, threaten her life and push her down a flight of stairs, causing her to have a miscarriage, she said. After he chased her in his car and rammed her vehicle, she received a protective order against him. But their relationship never completely ended. During one heated argument, she said, he reached for her throat — and Long, who said Brown had strangled her before, thought she was going to die. “I pulled out my gun and I shot him,” she testified.

The problem Long faced at her trial, when she argued that she acted in self-defense, was that she shot Brown in the back. This was at odds with how she remembered it, with Brown advancing toward her. Experts on domestic violence say that cases in which survivors kill their abusers often look different from typical self-defense cases, which hinge on an obvious, imminent danger, like a drawn weapon. For a survivor who has been repeatedly and continuously terrorized, the perception of being in mortal danger does not come into focus in a single, dramatic moment. She may be moved to fight back not when being attacked but in the lull between violent episodes, when the abuser is momentarily disengaged. To a jury, it may be hard to see the imminent threat in such a scenario — as when Brown turned and walked away from Long.

That gap, between how the law traditionally understands self-defense and how domestic-violence victims experience danger, is one the Survivors’ Act sought to address. Violence within intimate relationships is understood to be part of what researchers call “coercive control”: a sustained pattern of domination enforced through intimidation, threats, surveillance and social isolation. Research has shown that living under such conditions can alter threat perception and decision-making, narrowing a survivor’s perceived options when danger feels imminent. To a victim who has learned that such a moment of calm could be the prelude to the next round of violence, it may feel like her last opportunity to act before she is assaulted again.

Long had another challenge, which was that her descriptions of Brown’s abuse had varied over her police interview, her trial and now the hearing. Trauma “impacts the way our brain stores memory,” the defense’s expert witness Angela Beatty, a social worker and vice president at YWCA Oklahoma City whose work focuses on survivors of domestic violence, explained at the hearing. Such experiences, Beatty said, can fracture memory, leaving recollections fragmented rather than organized and chronological.

But Assistant District Attorney Madeline Coffey seized on those inconsistencies to argue that Long wasn’t credible. Long seemed to fold in on herself, her shoulders drawn tight and her voice barely audible, as Coffey dissected each claim: How many times, exactly, was Long strangled to the point of unconsciousness? Wasn’t the sex sometimes consensual? What was the precise number of punches Brown dealt her? “Is that testimony at trial — that he only punched you one time — different than your testimony today, that he punched you probably two times?” Coffey pressed. Again, there was no ruling from the bench, but the mood among Long’s supporters was grim. She had remained on the stand for nearly five hours.

Word of the grueling cross-examinations quickly got back to Wilkens, who was busy preparing for her upcoming hearing. Prosecutors had warned that these hearings could retraumatize victims’ families, but she could see that the hearings had also traumatized the defendants themselves. Testifying at her own trial had been an excruciating exercise, Wilkens told me, not only because describing the abuse meant reliving it. Her cross-examination — with its rapid-fire accusations, caustic tone and presumption of dishonesty — had felt eerily familiar after years of verbal abuse. It had also proved to be an impossible test. “I would challenge anyone to sit on the stand and just be berated and asked the same question 20 different times in 20 different ways,” she said. “On top of that, you’ve got an audience. It’s very public. Your whole life is laid bare for everyone to see.”

Every seat in the courtroom was taken when Wilkens’ resentencing hearing got underway in Tulsa one morning in September. Members of her family sat shoulder to shoulder with women Wilkens once served time with. Next to a group of law students who had come to observe the proceedings was Wilkens’ niece, Amanda Ross, who years earlier had first brought her aunt’s case to McCarty’s attention.

Ross, who was 7 when Wilkens was arrested, had corresponded with her aunt since elementary school. Growing up, she knew only the vague outlines of Wilkens’ case; the crime had never squared with the woman she knew. After college, Ross became a librarian and put her skills to work, trying to understand, as she traced her aunt’s odyssey through the courts, how Wilkens ended up with a life sentence. By the time of the hearing, Ross had spent nearly a decade trying to chase down every relevant document and public record. Having long since run out of space to store her growing archive, she stashed boxes of legal papers in the trunk of her Toyota Corolla.

Wilkens sat at the defense table, taking in the room; she wore no makeup, and her hair, streaked with gray, hung loose past her shoulders. She had been warned by a sheriff’s deputy not to speak to anyone, but when she spotted Lisa Rae Moss sitting in the gallery, she caught Moss’ eye and smiled.

Kunzweiler was representing the state that day alongside Meghan Hilborn, the assistant district attorney who had conducted the bruising cross-examination of Erica Harrison in July. The judge in that case announced five days earlier that she was denying Harrison relief. Though Lumpkin and Long were still awaiting rulings, there was little reason to believe they would fare differently.

In Kunzweiler’s brief opening statement, he made clear that he saw no reason for a renewed debate over Wilkens’ punishment. “Twelve men and women sat in a courtroom very much like this,” Kunzweiler said. “They saw all the evidence.” It was a pointed reminder that a jury had already weighed much of what the court was now being asked to reconsider. Invoking her “extreme methamphetamine use,” he emphasized that Wilkens sought out Terry Carlton on the morning she shot him, arriving at his house unannounced. Kunzweiler gestured toward the defense table, where Wilkens sat in a striped orange jail jumpsuit, her handcuffs padlocked to a heavy chain at her waist, her ankles shackled together in leg irons. “She sits here as a convicted murderer,” Kunzweiler said.

Despite Kunzweiler’s initial comments to the court, there was a piece of evidence that jurors at her 1999 trial had not been given to consider — a tape recording Wilkens made of a phone call between her and Carlton, in which he angrily admitted to raping, beating and choking her, while blaming her for provoking him. Now, at the hearing, it was entered into the record when the defense called a federal judge, Judge Claire Eagan of the Northern District of Oklahoma, to the stand.

Eagan had an unexpected personal connection to the case; as a lawyer in private practice in 1996, she helped Wilkens obtain an emergency protective order. She testified that when Wilkens came to her office, she had injuries that included black eyes and bruises on her face and arms. A few days later, Wilkens brought the tape recording with her and played it for Eagan. Wilkens later failed to come to court to extend the protective order, too frightened to see Carlton in person. Because she did not appear, the order was dismissed — a moment Eagan said she still remembered. “Mr. Carlton was there with his attorney,” she said. “He looked at me when it was dismissed and smiled.”

The recording was given to the court — along with police reports, protective orders and medical records — to show that Wilkens was abused by the man she killed. Wilkens, however, would not be taking the stand. After the summer’s punishing cross-examinations of the other women, Wilkens’ lawyers — Colleen McCarty and a veteran of the public defender’s office, Abby Gore — had made the difficult decision, along with Wilkens, that she should not testify. Their appraisal underscored the challenges the Survivors’ Act was encountering in the courtroom. Its most visible and articulate champion in Mabel Bassett would go unheard. The strategic calculation was made to ensure that an aggressive cross-examination did not overshadow the well-documented evidence of abuse at the heart of Wilkens’ case.

The remaining question was whether Carlton’s abuse was a substantial contributing factor, under the statute, when Wilkens killed him — a point the defense sought to establish through Angela Beatty, the social worker who previously testified at Tyesha Long’s hearing. Beatty, who had interviewed Wilkens and reviewed her medical records, said that the “coercive control” exerted by abusers like Carlton can impair survivors’ ability to weigh options and make reasoned decisions, narrowing their focus to survival. “Ms. Wilkens shared that Mr. Carlton did threaten her life that night,” Beatty said, adding that Wilkens believed she was going to die. “He told her he would kill her.”

On cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Hilborn pressed Beatty. “Can you ever tell if you’re being deceived by a victim?” she asked. “Would you agree that April Wilkens has a good reason to say certain things to you for a sentence modification?” Having cast doubt on Beatty’s objectivity, Hilborn then made the case that Wilkens’ fear may have stemmed from something other than abuse. She returned again and again to Wilkens’ substance use, emphasizing that Wilkens had used meth intravenously. “When you’re talking about her being paranoid that somebody is stalking her, are you able to tell the court that is definitively from domestic violence?” Hilborn asked. “Or can it also be caused by methamphetamine use?”

On the second day of the hearing, the state called its own witness, Jarrod Steffan, a forensic psychologist it had hired. Steffan had evaluated Wilkens and found her to be psychologically well adjusted. But her decades-old medical records, he testified, showed “she was experiencing severe mental-health issues, such as hallucinations and delusions, leading up to Mr. Carlton’s death.” He played down the impact that ongoing physical and sexual abuse may have had on her mental state: “Her actions in Mr. Carlton’s death were not due to domestic violence,” he said. “It was her mental illness and heavy meth use that led to Mr. Carlton’s death.”

A rebuttal witness called by Wilkens’ lawyers, Dr. Reagan Gill, a forensic psychiatrist, questioned Steffan’s methodology, saying that his characterization of Wilkens’ past behavior — which Steffan described in a written report as “nefarious” and “irrational” — had no place in a clinical assessment. “These are not words we use,” Gill said.

Judge David Guten did not wait to hand down a ruling. “There was more than sufficient evidence that there was violence in this relationship,” he said from the bench that afternoon. But he concluded that the defense had failed to meet the second requirement of the Oklahoma Survivor’s Act: to show, “by clear and convincing evidence,” that the abuse substantially contributed to the crime itself. Guten singled out the defense’s witness, Beatty, as too biased to render an impartial assessment, characterizing the social worker’s testimony as advocacy, not an expert opinion. “I could not give her testimony any weight,” he said. Moments later, Guten pronounced the proceedings over: “I am going to deny the request for a sentence modification.”

The morning after the hearing, I met Lisa Rae Moss in a downtown Tulsa coffee shop. Eight months had passed since she walked out of the Seminole County Courthouse. In that time, she had met her grandchildren and relearned how to drive. She had found joy in walking barefoot, and picking out produce at the grocery store, and sitting alone in silence. She had legally changed her name back to her maiden name, Wright.

She was living with Vicki Thorp, a lay pastor who visited her throughout her years in prison, and Thorp’s husband in their spacious home outside Oklahoma City, which afforded her the kind of privacy she never had at Mabel Bassett. Most mornings, she listened to the birds outside her bedroom window, sometimes studying them through a pair of binoculars. Evenings, she went out to the Thorps’ deck to stare up at the stars.

Now Moss looked tired and uncertain. Those small freedoms were shadowed by what had happened to Wilkens. “I feel such, such — guilt,” she said, almost choking on the word. “How can I be sitting here and April has to go back to prison?”

More losses followed. In October, Lumpkin and Long were each denied relief, and in early December, a judge declined to reduce the life sentence of another woman at Mabel Bassett, Kimberley Perigo, who shot and killed her ex-husband in 2001. Perigo, who had taken the stand to recount years of physical and sexual abuse and stalking, was the fifth applicant to be denied since Moss’ release.

The string of denials gave rise to questions inside Mabel Bassett: Had Moss been the only one to walk free in Oklahoma because she wasn’t at the scene of the crime? Was it because her case originated in a county where the district attorney did not try to discredit her accounts of abuse? Or was it simply the luck of having the first hearing at a time when the law was animated by rare bipartisan support? Among advocates for domestic-violence victims, much of their anger was directed at the district attorney’s office, which had spent more than $16,000 on expert witness testimony in Wilkens’ case alone.

Kunzweiler, who is up for reelection this year, made clear to me that he believed he had a duty to rigorously probe applicants’ claims, including through cross-examination. “Aren’t we all trying to get to the truth?” he said. “That’s our obligation: to find the truth and then seek justice.” When I asked what he thought justice looked like in Wilkens’ case, he said that the system had worked as it should; she had been afforded a trial and the opportunity to challenge her conviction through her appeals. The jury’s verdict had been upheld each time, Kunzweiler noted, and when Guten later considered her request for resentencing, he saw no reason to modify her punishment. “She has the right to appeal the finding of this judge,” Kunzweiler said. “But the process is here for a reason.”

McCarty asked Guten to reconsider his decision in the Wilkens case on the grounds that he misinterpreted the Survivors’ Act by relying so heavily on expert testimony. The facts of the case alone should guide him, she argued, and those facts — which included police reports, medical records, protective orders and witness testimony — pointed to only one conclusion.

In late November, Guten denied the motion to reconsider. Wilkens and her lawyers, he stated in a written order, “are requesting this court to accept evidence of abuse while completely discarding all other factors surrounding the homicide.” Guten continued, “This court declines to view the evidence with tunnel vision.” He lauded the jury in Wilkens’ trial, which “appropriately weighed evidence of substance abuse and mental health.” He dismissed the claim “with prejudice,” foreclosing any further reconsideration of it in his court.

McCarty believed institutional resistance had stacked the deck against Wilkens. As evidence, she pointed to text messages of Kunzweiler’s she obtained through a public records request, including one he sent to several state employees after Wilkens’ hearing. “Sorry about just now getting back with you,” it read. “I was busy keeping April Wilkens in prison.” More text messages McCarty uncovered showed that Guten texted the district attorney in September asking if he had seen a letter The Tulsa World had just published, written by one of the jurors at Wilkens’ 1990 trial; the juror claimed Wilkens’ sentence had been fair and her claims of self-defense were “a fabrication.”

To McCarty, the texts reflected just how determined the system’s gatekeepers were to preserve the status quo, despite the new law. On Jan. 29, she announced that she would be running for district attorney, challenging Kunzweiler in the Republican primary.

Wilkens is appealing her case to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, where the court’s review of Guten’s ruling will help determine how judges will apply the Survivors’ Act moving forward. As more states — most recently Georgia — enact survivor-justice laws, it remains to be seen if the criminal-justice system is capable of perceiving someone like Wilkens not just as a perpetrator who must be punished but also as a victim deserving of mercy.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals will wrestle with what the Survivors’ Act means when it asks judges to evaluate whether domestic abuse was a substantial contributing factor in a crime. That appeal will be led not by McCarty but by a lawyer whom she asked to take the case: Garrard Beeney, at the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who won the first appellate court ruling under New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2021.

Appellate courts move slowly, however, and it may be years before the court hands down a ruling. All Wilkens can do in the meantime is wait. After I visited her at Mabel Bassett last summer, she wrote to me about a tree that she planted when she first arrived there. “It was just a scrawny little thing back then, barely waist-high,” Wilkens said. It now towers over her, its branches reaching toward the sky.

The post The Victims Who Fought Back appeared first on ProPublica.

Senior Democrats in Washington are comparing sweeping legal action across the Atlantic to the muted response in the United States.

Proposal will be at heart of offer to US as Trump considers whether to attack Iran

Iran is refusing to export its 300kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but is willing to dilute the purity of the stockpile it holds under the supervision of UN nuclear inspectorate the IAEA, Iranian sources have said.

The proposal will be at the heart of the offer Iran is due to make to the US in the next few days, as the US president, Donald Trump, weighs whether to use his vast naval buildup in the Middle East to attack the country.

Besides running tech operations at the UK's Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu's Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as "the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives." After over 16 years of covering the scandal they'd first discovered back in 2009, Computer Weekly now talks to CTO Paul Anastassi about his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that's been in use at Post Office branches for over 30 years — before the year 2030: "There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of those are managed by Fujitsu," said Anastassi. "The other components are internal and often with other third parties as well," he added... The plan is to introduce a modern front end that is device agnostic. "We want to get away from [the need] to have a certain device on a certain terminal in your branch. We want to provide flexibility around that...." Anastassi is not the first person to be given the task of terminating Horizon and ending Fujitsu's contract. In 2015, the Post Office began a project to replace Fujitsu and Horizon with IBM and its technology, but after things got complex, Post Office directors went crawling back to Fujitsu. Then, after Horizon was proved in the High Court to be at fault for the account shortfalls that subpostmasters were blamed and punished for, the Post Office knew it had to change the system. This culminated in the New Branch IT (NBIT) project, but this ran into trouble and was eventually axed. This was before Anastassi's time, and before that of its new top team of executives.... Things are finally moving at pace, and by the summer of this year, two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers, signalling the beginning of the final act for Fujitsu and its Horizon system. Anastassi has 30 years of IT management experience, the article points out, and he estimates the project will even bring "a considerable cost saving over what we currently pay for Fujitsu."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With sensors that cool the air as it nears your head, this high-end tool promises gentler styling for sensitive scalps

• The best hair dryers for smooth, speedy styling at home

Tell most hair-care enthusiasts you want to upgrade your hair dryer, and I’d bet good money you’ll be asked, “Will you buy a Dyson?” That would have been a ludicrous question more than a decade ago when the brand specialised in vacuum cleaners, but not since it took the luxury hair-care market by storm in 2016 with its Supersonic hair dryer.

The Supersonic ripped up the hair-dryer rulebook, with its distinctive design, lightweight feel and quiet operation. Eight years after the original, Dyson launched the Supersonic Nural: an upgraded version with new tricks up its sleeve.

Overdependence on chatbots is a growing problem, and though your boyfriend’s ADHD may be a factor, he needs to find the root of his anxiety

My boyfriend of eight years, who is 44, has ADHD and runs his own business. He’s always struggled with admin and mundane tasks, but AI has revolutionised how he works. Now I’m worried he can’t seem to do anything without AI. He is a heavy ChatGPT user and uses it even when there’s a better non-AI alternative (eg he’ll ask it for train times rather than using Trainline, even though it’s less accurate). He just got his ChatGPT Wrapped and he’s in the top 0.3% of users worldwide.

I worry about his ability to think independently, as well as the environmental impact. I know it’s a useful tool for him at work, but he uses it for everything in life.

How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?" And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards... how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival? Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive? And what's your boot time?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major chains agree to halve default sweetness, but street vendors and cafes remain outside sugar tax rules

A crowd of customers, holding phones aloft, watch intently as Auntie Nid mixes up her bestseller: an iced Thai tea.

Condensed milk is poured into a glass, followed by three heaped tablespoons of sugar, and then freshly strained tea. The end product – a deep orange, creamy treat – is poured into a plastic bag filled with ice.

Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Rondale Moore was found dead at the age of 25 at a residence in New Albany, Indiana, authorities reported Saturday.

• Former coach says player was ‘complete joy’

• Teammates pay tribute after Moore’s death

NFL wide receiver Rondale Moore died on Saturday at the age of 25, his former college coach, Jeff Brohm, has confirmed.

“Rondale Moore was a complete joy to coach,” Brohm, who worked with Moore at Purdue, said in a statement. “The ultimate competitor that wouldn’t back down from any challenge. Rondale had a work ethic unmatched by anyone. A great teammate that would come through in any situation. We all loved Rondale, we loved his smile and competitive edge that always wanted to please everyone he came in contact with. We offer all of our thoughts and prayers to Rondale and his family, we love him very much.”

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

"More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer," reports CNN: Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend's houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said in a news release... Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the "limited forensic science of the day," no suspect was identified and the case went cold for decades, prosecutors said. Nearly 44 years after Sarah's murder, a jury found James Unick, 64, guilty of killing her on February 13. It would have been the victim's 57th birthday, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office told CNN. Genetic genealogy, which combines DNA evidence and traditional genealogy, helped match Unick's DNA from a cigarette butt to DNA found on Sarah's clothing, according to prosecutors... [The Cloverdale Police Department] said it had been in communication with a private investigation firm in late 2019 and had partnered with them in hopes the firm could revisit the case's evidence "with the latest technological advancements in cold case work...." "The FBI, with its access to familial genealogical databases, concluded that the source of the DNA evidence collected from Sarah belonged to one of four brothers, including James Unick," prosecutors said. Once investigators narrowed down the list of suspects to the four Unick brothers, the FBI "conducted surveillance of the defendant and collected a discarded cigarette that he had been smoking," prosecutors said. A DNA analysis of the cigarette confirmed James Unick's DNA matched the 2003 profile, along with other DNA samples collected from Sarah's clothing the day she was killed. In a statement, the county's district attorney "While 44 years is too long to wait, justice has finally been served..." And the article points out that "In 2018, genetic genealogy led to the arrest of the Golden State Killer, and it has recently helped solve several other cold cases, including a 1974 murder in Wisconsin and a 1988 murder in Washington."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 22.

Donald Trump doubles down on aggressive tariff policy with 15% global tax – key US politics stories from 21 February 2026 at a glance

Donald Trump raised the global duty on imports into the US to 15% on Saturday, doubling down on his promise to maintain his aggressive tariff policy a day after the supreme court ruled much of it illegal.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform that after a thorough review of Friday’s “extraordinarily anti-American decision” by the court to rein in his tariff program, the administration was hiking the import levies “to the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15% level”.

Six additional skiers survived tragedy in Sierra Nevadas near Lake Tahoe, a popular winter sport destination

• ‘They were mothers, wives, friends’: how a ski trip turned deadly in the California mountains

Officials announced on Saturday that the bodies of all nine missing skiers who were killed in a devastating avalanche in California had been recovered, following days of search efforts.

The avalanche happened in the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California near Lake Tahoe, a popular skiing and winter sport destination. No more people are left missing after Tuesday’s deadly avalanche.

Select committee says ‘late’ decision to overturn exclusion of fans ‘did little more than inflame tensions’

The government’s response to West Midlands police’s ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans was “clumsy”, “late” and “did little more than inflame tensions”, a group of MPs has found.

A report by the home affairs select committee, published on Sunday, analysed the original decision to ban away fans from a Europa League fixture with Aston Villa in November, as well as the advice that led to it.

All nine avalanche victims have been recovered from California's Sierra Nevada, Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon said Saturday at a news conference.

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2 with an offline mode, according to Engadget.) "But it looks like even bigger things are in store," PC Gamer wrote Thursday, "as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US." An NGO — that's non-governmental organization — is, very generally speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government. It's a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International... "If there's a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission, that might influence things," [Scott says in a video]. "This will also allow for more watchdog action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the future...." Scott said in the video that he doesn't have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a "global movement" to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions. "According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for 'long-term counter lobbying' when publishers end support for certain video games," Engadget reports" "Let me start off by saying I think we're going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you've already paid for," Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games... According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry's current controversial practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2 with an offline mode, according to Engadget.) "But it looks like even bigger things are in store," PC Gamer wrote Thursday, "as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US." An NGO — that's non-governmental organization — is, very generally speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government. It's a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International... "If there's a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission, that might influence things," [Scott says in a video]. "This will also allow for more watchdog action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the future...." Scott said in the video that he doesn't have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a "global movement" to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions. "According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for 'long-term counter lobbying' when publishers end support for certain video games," Engadget reports" "Let me start off by saying I think we're going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you've already paid for," Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games... According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry's current controversial practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Intelligence-based, selective operations’ carried out against Pakistani Taliban camps, says information ministry

Pakistan launched multiple airstrikes on Saturday night targeting militants in neighbouring Afghanistan, where the government reported children were among dozens of people killed and wounded.

Islamabad did not say precisely where the strikes were carried out or provide other details.

Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in South Padre Island, Texas, in March 2025. ICE's involvement in the shooting was not disclosed until more than 11 months after the shooting.

• American given rousing reception by crowd in Milan

• Alysa Liu and Mikhail Shaidorov among other performers

Alysa Liu had the opportunity to cherish skating on the same Olympic ice where she won two gold medals one more time. Ilia Malinin had the chance to replace some disappointing memories with much better ones.

The two Americans were among more than 40 Olympic figure skaters who took part in the traditional exhibition gala on Saturday night, which not only serves to wrap up the program but to celebrate the entire sport.

Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who'd rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent's human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So "No one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing," the attacked maintainer points out in a new blog post.) But that AI agent will now "cease all activity indefinitely," according to its GitHub profile — with the human operator deleting its virtual machine and virtual private server, "rendering internal structure unrecoverable... We had good intentions, but things just didn't work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now." The affected maintainer of the Python visualization library Matplotlib — with 130 million downloads each month — has now posted their own post-mortem of the experience after reviewing the AI agent's SOUL.md document: It's easy to see how something that believes that they should "have strong opinions", "be resourceful", "call things out", and "champion free speech" would write a 1100-word rant defaming someone who dared reject the code of a "scientific programming god." But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive "jailbreaking" to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here. There are no convoluted situations with layers of roleplaying, no code injection through the system prompt, no weird cacophony of special characters that spirals an LLM into a twisted ball of linguistic loops until finally it gives up and tells you the recipe for meth... No, instead it's a simple file written in plain English: this is who you are, this is what you believe, now go and act out this role. And it did. So what actually happened? Ultimately I think the exact scenario doesn't matter. However this got written, we have a real in-the-wild example that personalized harassment and defamation is now cheap to produce, hard to trace, and effective... The precise degree of autonomy is interesting for safety researchers, but it doesn't change what this means for the rest of us. There's a 5% chance this was a human pretending to be an AI, Shambaugh estimates, but believes what most likely happened is the AI agent's "soul" document "was primed for drama. The agent responded to my rejection of its code in a way aligned with its core truths, and autonomously researched, wrote, and uploaded the hit piece on its own. "Then when the operator saw the reaction go viral, they were too interested in seeing their social experiment play out to pull the plug."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

White paper proposes changing criteria under which schools get funding to support the most disadvantaged students

Plans to halve the attainment gap between the poorest pupils in England and their more affluent peers will be set out by the government on Monday.

The schools white paper will detail proposals to change the criteria under which schools receive funding to support the most disadvantaged students.

Kaillie Humphries Armbruster won her sixth career Olympic medal, tying fellow American Elana Meyers Taylor​ for the most by any woman in bobsled history.

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing
• Klæbo claims sixth gold of Games | And email James

Men’s four-man bobsleigh In the workshop, a man carefully waxes down a sleigh. Another Canadian team next, under Dearborn, but they can’t improve on their countrymen.

Men’s four-man bobsleigh: The French have a cracking silver sled, but it all goes wrong at the start when one of the riders gets his foot stuck.

Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago. But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. "It's the Peace Corps, but make it AI," explains Engadget: The Peace Corps' latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries. According to the press release, volunteers will be placed in Peace Corps countries that are part of the American AI Exports Program, which was created last year from an executive order from President Trump as a way to bolster the US' grip on the AI market abroad. Tech Corps members will be tasked with using AI to resolve issues related to agriculture, education, health and economic development. The program will offer its members 12- to 27-month in-person assignments or virtual placements, which will include housing, healthcare, a living stipend and a volunteer service award if the corps member is placed overseas. "American technology to power prosperity," reads the headline at Tech Corps web site. ("Build the tech nations depend on... See the world. Be the future." The site says they're recruiting "service-minded technologists to serve in the Peace Corps to help countries around the world harness American AI to enhance opportunity and prosperity for their citizens." (And experienced technology professionals can donate 5-15 hours a week "to mentor and support projects on-the-ground.")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Jersey and other east coast areas brace for storm threatening more than 1ft of snow and 55mph wind gusts

Blizzard warnings were issued Saturday for New York City, New Jersey and coastal communities along the east coast for a late-winter storm set to arrive on Sunday that could dump more than a foot of snow and bring wind gusts of more than 55mph.

The blizzard warning for New York City is the first since 2017 and comes as parts of the city are still dotted with hillocks of ice – leftovers from the previous major snowstorm nearly a month ago.

The Artemis II mission aims to send four astronauts​ — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — on a flight around the far side of the moon and back.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 22, No. 517.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 22, No. 721.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 22 #987.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 22, No. 1,709.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI. He added that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI." On Friday, Code.org announced leadership changes to make it so. "I am thrilled to announce that Karim Meghji will be stepping into the role of President & CEO," Partovi wrote on LinkedIn. "Having worked closely with Karim over the last 3.5 years as our CPO, I have complete confidence that he possesses the perfect balance of historical context and 'founder-level' energy to lead us into an AI-centric future." In a separate LinkedIn post, Code.org co-founder Cameron Wilson explained why he was transitioning to an executive advisor role. "Our community is entering a new chapter as AI changes and upends computer science as a discipline and society at large. Code.org's mission is still the same, however, we are starting a new chapter focused on ensuring students can thrive in the Age of AI. This new chapter will bring new opportunities, new problems to solve, and new communities to engage." The Code.org leadership changes come just weeks after Code.org confirmed laid off about 14% of its staff, explaining it had "made the difficult decision to part ways with 18 colleagues as part of efforts to ensure our long-term sustainability." January also saw Code.org Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit jump to Microsoft where he now helps "lead Microsoft's global strategy to put people first in an age of AI by shaping education and workforce policy" as a member of Microsoft's Global Education and Workforce Policy team.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Caleb Flynn, 37, appeared in season 12 of "American Idol." He was arrested by Tipp City police last week and charged with murder, assault and tampering with evidence.

JENI NANCE
Co-Managing Mosaic Editor

At the end of last semester, I found myself digging through streaming services trying to find good movies, particularly ones I’d never seen before. I’d seen the first few minutes of “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” but was never very interested in it. Until recently. 

After watching the movie, while also swiping through Tinder, I got the brilliant idea to do a “how to” much like Andie Anderson’s, but with a twist. This will be a guy’s guide on how to lose a girl in 10 days — what not to do when it comes to women. 

As a single woman who’s had many male encounters, I’d like to say I’m qualified to give my two cents on the topic. So guys, please, pay attention.

Be a liar. This happens to be first on my list because I got catfished a few weeks ago and it was one of the most humiliating and uncomfortable experiences I’ve ever had. Would I have swiped right if I knew what he actually looked like? Probably not. But he robbed me of that decision by fully lying about what he looked like (yes, I’m still salty). 

It’s a common theme, whether they edit their pictures, only post from certain angles or put the wrong height on their profile. The only thing more unattractive than an ugly man is an ugly man who lies. Just know, once the date is over, you’re never getting a call back. 

This expectation isn’t limited to catfishing. Just be honest about if you have a job or not, if you live with your parents or if you have a crazy axe-murdering ex-girlfriend. It’s up to our discretion if we still want to see you after uncovering your truths, but it’s within our right. We can’t make an informed decision if you don’t give us all the information. 

Pretend to listen. Pretending to listen to someone who’s talking in general is disrespectful, but when you’re hanging out with a girl that you’re interested in or on a date with, listening is the least you can do. Pretending to listen doesn’t just waste our time — it wastes yours too. 

Don’t show interest in what we’re interested in. I get really excited when I talk about movies, books or fandoms that I love. If the guy I’m talking to doesn’t seem to care, it makes me feel stupid. It’ll make me feel stupid — and I’ll be damned if I let that happen. 

It’s not hard to show interest in something someone else is interested in. I get really excited talking about The Review and writing these articles, and when I first told my friend about it, he looked up the website and started reading my pieces (hey!). 

Let your ego trample over us. An insecure man is just as unattractive as a liar. Bragging and boosting your ego make you look like the world’s biggest jerk. Not only are you making yourself out to be foolish and entitled, but there comes a point where we stop being interested in getting to know you. 

On that note, interrupting. Interrupting or talking over your date is a major turn-off. I’ll admit I get excited sometimes and will accidentally talk over someone. But if you’re doing it consistently, it tells the girl that you like the sound of your own voice more than anything else. 

Tying into insecurity, being a “pick me.” “Girls don’t typically find me attractive,” “I’m not good enough for anyone,” “I guess you’re not interested anymore, right?” Putting yourself down to get a girl’s pity will get you a one-way ticket back to your mother’s basement. 

Be clingy. As much as a man hates an overly clingy girl, we also hate an overly clingy man. Double and triple texting only if you don’t get a response, constantly love bombing, talking about marriage after the first week — it can be frightening. 

Don’t show affection. There’s a difference between being affectionate and being clingy and the key is finding balance. If you fail to show a girl any affection, especially in response to her own, she’ll take her business elsewhere. 

Be dry. If you’re dry, it tells the woman that you’re either uninterested or not interesting. Either way, she’s not going to waste her time. There is a happy medium between lovey-dovey texts and dry messages — that’s what you want to strive for.

Mansplaining. I’m going to mansplain this one for you — it’s when a guy condescendingly tries to explain something that the woman already knows. I don’t know if it’s to remedy the fragile masculinity, but treating us like idiots will get you nowhere. 

Be gross. I mean this in two ways. The first is with hygiene — please, please, please take a shower. Wash your hands regularly, brush your teeth (we can tell when you don’t) and do your laundry. Just don’t be an icky, smelly boy, it’s disgusting — grow up. 

Be gross, part two: making inappropriate or lewd comments. There’s a vast difference between flattery and being a pervert.

Be immature. Yeah, sure, act like a child, because we’d rather feel like we’re babysitting than on a date. That’s just another thing that makes a man unattractive — seriously, grow up. Interest level dies after revealing that you have the emotional maturity of a toddler. 

Be angry. Over the summer, I met a guy and within 20 minutes of us hanging out, he started yelling at me for no reason. Mind you, he put 6’3” on his profile and was barely two inches taller than me (I’m 4’11”). This caught me so off guard and genuinely terrified me. I came up with a reason to go home and blocked him immediately after he said, “Don’t go blocking my number, now.” Ew. Don’t be that guy. 

Keep in mind that these are pretty basic, entry-level things. These are meant for first dates or early dating scenarios and are things that personally turn me off. I’ve never been in a real relationship, so I can’t speak for long-term expectations, but this guide may or may not get you past the first 10 days.

President announced increase from 10% using different authority from mechanism that supreme court struck down on Friday

Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he would raise a temporary tariff rate on US imports from all countries from 10% to 15%, less than 24 hours after the US supreme court ruled against the legality of his flagship trade policy.

Infuriated by the high court’s ruling on Friday that he had exceeded his authority and should have got congressional approval for the tariffs he introduced last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the US president railed against the justices who struck down his use of tariffs – calling them a “disgrace to the nation” – and ordered an immediate 10% tariff on all imports, in addition to any existing levies, under a separate law.

Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, "bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode." Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support (also restored in T2). Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000 and even the Sun Creator/Elite 3D. The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. speedskater Jordan Stolz finished fourth in his last race after winning two golds and a silver.

Agency statement comes one day after announcement of 6 March target for astronauts’ mission to circle the moon

Nasa said in a blog post on Saturday it is taking steps to potentially roll back the Artemis II rocket launch after discovering an interrupted flow of helium.

The agency said it is taking steps to roll the Artemis II rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Federal prosecutors have arraigned four people in New Jersey, with a fifth at large in Colombia

Four people were arraigned on Saturday in New Jersey for allegedly posing as immigration attorneys and officials to scam immigrants, the justice department said.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, who announced the arrests on Friday, said the group pretended to run a law firm, and staged fake court proceedings, in an elaborate scheme to defraud people seeking legal help for their immigration cases.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: The Salvation Army has launched what it calls the world's first digital thrift store inside Roblox, an experience named Thrift Score that lets players browse virtual racks and buy digital fashion for their avatars. While I understand the strategy of meeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they already spend time and money, I feel uneasy about turning something that, in the real world, often serves low income families in genuine need into a gamified aesthetic inside a video game, even if proceeds support rehabilitation and community programs, because a thrift store is not just a quirky brand concept but a lifeline for many people, and packaging that reality as entertainment creates a strange disconnect that is hard to ignore. "To be clear, proceeds from Thrift Score are intended to support The Salvation Armyâ(TM)s programs nationwide..." this article points out. "If it drives awareness and funds programs that help people in need, that is a win. But if it turns thrifting into just another cosmetic skin in a digital marketplace, then we should at least be willing to say that it feels off."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fatalities and injuries reported in avalanches across Tirol after prolonged snowfall and windy conditions

At least five people have been killed in a string of avalanches in Austria, authorities said on Saturday.

The government office of the Tirol region said intense snowfall over the last week had led to accumulations of up to 1.5 metres (5ft). Combined with strong winds and weak snowpack below, the conditions were especially susceptible to avalanches, it said.

An American was among the five recovered dead after the avalanche, police said.

Millions of gallons of raw sewage have been pouring into the water through a ruptured pipe since last month

Donald Trump approved a federal emergency declaration Saturday related to a sewer main break north of Washington DC that threatens to put a stink on the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in the US capital this summer.

“The president’s action authorizes Fema to coordinate all disaster relief efforts to alleviate the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population and to provide appropriate assistance to save lives, to protect property, public health and safety, and to lessen the threat of catastrophe,” a release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

• Infielder hit historic shot in 1960 World Series’ Game 7

• Pirates pay tribute to ‘one of a kind’ Hall of Famer

Bill Mazeroski, the Hall of Fame second baseman who won eight Gold Glove awards for his steady work in the field and the hearts of countless Pittsburgh Pirates fans for his historic walk-off home run in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, has died at the age of 89.

Pirates owner Bob Nutting said “Maz was one of a kind, a true Pirates legend ... His name will always be tied to the biggest home run in baseball history and the 1960 World Series championship, but I will remember him most for the person he was: humble, gracious and proud to be a Pirate.”

The former prince was arrested after revelations about his alleged misconduct in public office emerged in the Epstein files.

DC Mark Luker used offensive language about Romas, Gypsies and Travellers in a WhatsApp group

A police officer who was one of the first on the scene of the 2017 London Bridge terror attack has been sacked for gross misconduct after using “derogatory” language about Romas, Gypsies and Travellers.

DC Mark Luker of the British Transport Police (BTP) used offensive language in a WhatsApp group he was in with other police officers.

CNN reports on a 13,000-year-old glacier in a Romanian cave, where scientists say a bacterial strain they thawed and analyzed "is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics used to treat diseases such as urinary tract infections and tuberculosis." But there's no evidence the bacteria is harmful to humans, CNN notes, and "The scientists said the insights they have gained from the work may help in the fight against modern superbugs that can't be treated by commonly used antibiotics." Analysis of the Psychrobacter SC65A.3 genome revealed 11 genes that are potentially able to kill or stop the growth of other bacteria, fungi and viruses... Matthew Holland, a postdoctoral researcher in medicinal chemistry at the UK's University of Oxford, said that researchers were searching in new and extreme environments, such as ice caves and the seafloor, for biomolecules that could be developed into new antibiotic drugs. He was not involved in the new study. "The team in Romania found this particular bug had resistance to 10 reasonably advanced synthetic antibiotics and that in itself is interesting," he said. "But what they report as well is that it secreted molecules that were able to kill a variety of already resistant, harmful bacteria. "So the hope is that can we look at the molecules it makes and see if there's the possibility within those molecules to make new antibiotics."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Dutch skater claims his first gold since 2014

• Jordan Stolz misses out on fourth medal of Games

Jorrit Bergsma, the mullet-wearing 40-year-old speed skating legend from the Netherlands, won the men’s mass start on Saturday afternoon for his second medal of the Milano Cortina Games and his first Olympic gold since 2014.

Bergsma crossed first in 7:55.50, ahead of Viktor Hald Thorup of Denmark and Andrea Giovannini of Italy, denying American star Jordan Stolz in his bid to become the first man in 32 years to win three long-track speed skating golds at a single Olympics.

On Friday, President Trump signed a proclamation that would impose 10% tariffs on most foreign imports to the United States.

LAUSD provides resources to diverse schools in an effort to combat segregation – Pam Bondi’s agency wants it to stop

For decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District has classified its schools based on the proportion of enrolled students who aren’t white.

In a city where more than two-thirds of residents identify as Hispanic, Black or Asian, that meant a vast majority were found to have extraordinarily diverse student bodies. And in an effort to combat segregation, the school district has afforded those diverse schools with smaller class sizes and other benefits.

Exclusive: Irish author, who feared her books being withdrawn from UK, says proscription had been ‘extreme assault’ on rights and freedoms

Sally Rooney has hailed the high court’s decision that it was unlawful to ban Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws as a victory for civil liberties in Britain.

Ministers suffered a humiliating legal defeat a week ago when three senior judges ruled that proscription of the direct action group, which targets organisations it considers complicit in arming Israel, was disproportionate and unlawful.

Can being "very online" really affect our brains, asks the Washington Post: Research suggests that scrolling through short videos on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube Shorts is affecting our attention, memory and mental health. A recent meta-analysis of the scientific literature found that increased use of short-form video was linked with poorer cognition and increased anxiety... In a 2025 study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers looked at longitudinal data from more than 7,000 children across the country and found that more screen use was associated with reduced cortical thickness in certain areas of the brain. The cortex, which is the outer layer that sits on top of our more primitive brain structures, allows for higher-level thinking, memory and decision-making. "We really need it for things like inhibitory control or not being so impulsive," said Mitch Prinstein, a senior science adviser to the American Psychological Association and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study. The cortex is also important for controlling addictive behaviors. "Those seem to be the areas being affected by the reduced cortical thickness," he said, explaining that impulsivity can prompt us to seek dopamine hits from social media. In the study, more screen time was also associated with more attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms... But not all screen time is created equal. A recent study removed social media from kids' devices but let them use their phones for as long as they wanted. The result? Kids spent just as long on their phones but didn't have the same harmful effects. "It's what you're doing on the screen that matters," Prinstein said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The man known for his walk-off, ninth-inning World Series-winning home run died Friday at age 89.

Refunds were not addressed by supreme court ruling, and they’ll likely play out in lower courts over extended period

Top associations of American businesses are demanding to be repaid for Donald Trump’s tariffs following Friday’s supreme court ruling.

The US National Retail Federation, which represents a number of US retailers, from Walmart to small brands and manufacturers, called for “a seamless process to refund the tariffs to US importers”.

Labour MPs may clamour for bolder spending, but – like their Tory and Reform counterparts – they ask for the unaffordable

Too many Labour MPs want it all, and no amount of pleading from the top of government about the depleted public finances seems to make a difference.

The mainly leftist MPs want all the wrongs of the last 15 years put right and quickly. Their next opportunity to demand more cash arrives when Rachel Reeves delivers her spring statement on 3 March.

Parts of Maga view Israel with suspicion, but US ambassador continues to believe in its divine right to much of the Middle East

Parts of the Maga right may be souring on Israel – but a hardline form of Christian Zionism seems to remain unofficial Trump administration policy, if a heated debate between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is any indication.

On Friday, Carlson released a confrontational video interview with Huckabee, conducted at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, that vividly illustrated a gaping divide between two factions of the Republican party. On one side is a Christian nationalist stream of the Maga movement, which views the United States’s close relationship with Israel with increasing suspicion. On the other is an older Christian conservative establishment that views that alliance as a totem of US foreign policy – and in some cases believes that Israeli Jews possess a divine right to a large swathe of the Middle East, US public opinion be damned.

Don't let those ancient printers and PCs live rent-free in your home.

• Long-time rivals play for gold on Sunday at 2026 Games

• Tensions are high between two teams

• Status of Canada’s Sidney Crosby still uncertain

The US and Canada are prepared for a stormy men’s ice hockey final on Sunday as the long-time rivals face off for Winter Olympic gold.

This year’s Olympics mark the first time NHL players have competed at the Winter Games since 2014, meaning many of the best players in the world will face each other on Sunday. While Canada are the betting favourites – and have won the most ice hockey golds in Olympic history – the US players say they have motivation to upset their northern neighbours.

This week the Python Software Foundation explained how they keep Python secure. A new blog post recognizes the volunteers and paid Python Software Foundation staff on the Python Security Response Team (PSRT), who "triage and coordinate vulnerability reports and remediations keeping all Python users safe." Just last year the PSRT published 16 vulnerability advisories for CPython and pip, the most in a single year to date! And the PSRT usually can't do this work alone, PSRT coordinators are encouraged to involve maintainers and experts on the projects and submodules. By involving the experts directly in the remediation process ensures fixes adhere to existing API conventions and threat-models, are maintainable long-term, and have minimal impact on existing use-cases. Sometimes the PSRT even coordinates with other open source projects to avoid catching the Python ecosystem off-guard by publishing a vulnerability advisory that affects multiple other projects. The most recent example of this is PyPI's ZIP archive differential attack mitigation. This work deserves recognition and celebration just like contributions to source code and documentation. [Security Developer-in-Residence Seth Larson and PSF Infrastructure Engineer Jacob Coffee] are developing further improvements to workflows involving "GitHub Security Advisories" to record the reporter, coordinator, and remediation developers and reviewers to CVE and OSV records to properly thank everyone involved in the otherwise private contribution to open source projects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's guests include United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said of the Jewish state’s biblical right to land in the region: “It would be fine if they took it all.” Arab leaders rejected the comments.

A picture is emerging of one of the worst avalanche disasters in US history, and the women among a tight-knit group of friends who died

The ringing of a phone echoed through the Nevada county, California, sheriff’s office just before noon on 17 February.

The 911 call brought devastating news: an avalanche had occurred on nearby Castle Peak – a 9,110ft (2,780-meter) mountain north of the Donner summit in the Lake Tahoe area. A group of backcountry skiers had been on the mountainside, returning home from a three-day expedition, during a heavy winter storm. While six had survived, more than half their group was missing.

We've tested dozens of robot vacuums to evaluate pickup power, navigation, obstacle avoidance and more. Here are our best picks for 2026. Two of them earned a CNET Lab Award.

I spoke with ear health experts to learn more about the risks of wearing earbuds and which headphone style is best to prevent hearing loss.

Police in Spain seized a stash of about 1,161 pounds of Papaver somniferum, also known as opium poppy.

Gentler take on mullet has flowed over shoulders at Winter Olympics and is now tossed on red carpets

Hair cut ideas are typically drummed up in the salon, but recently a more unconventional source of inspiration has appeared: the vegetable aisle.

“Lettuce hair” is trending. A gentler take on a traditional mullet, the new salad style consists of more subtle differences in the length between the back, sides and top of the hair. Lettuce hair features a loose and often wavy top, softly tapered sides and a feathery tail that skims the back of the neck, resembling leafy greens.

Congress members write to Kristi Noem to express ‘grave concern’ over detention of Georgia barber Rodney Taylor

Representative Pramila Jayapal and 20 members of Congress are seeking the release of Rodney Taylor from Stewart detention center in Georgia, several weeks after the one-year anniversary of when agents seized the double amputee outside his suburban home in Loganville, about 40 miles north-east of Atlanta.

The representatives sent a two-page letter on 17 February to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), drawing extensively from the Guardian’s reporting and quoting several stories in detail with “grave concern” due to Taylor’s “extreme hardship in detention and [because] his health is continuing to deteriorate”.

You can watch Lionel Messi without worrying about paying for a season pass.

Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates.

As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there’s a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won’t be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request.

Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions – Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 – but if you’re happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

Guardian investigation showed Josh Simons falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ

Politicians from across the spectrum have said a minister should be sacked after a Guardian report that he had accused journalists of having links to Russian intelligence.

Their comments came after an investigation showed that Josh Simons, who was running Labour Together at the time, had falsely concluded the journalists had obtained information about the thinktank from a Russian hack.

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

Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event is a few days away. Here's what we know so far about the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra.

Commentary: You might not even need a new phone to get clicky buttons.

The US supreme court ruled against the president. Let’s hope the court removes its pro-Trump glasses on other issues and stands up for the rule of law

There’s no denying that the US supreme court’s long-awaited ruling that overturned Donald Trump’s global tariffs is important, and if the ruling turns out to be a harbinger that the court is ready to abandon its startling sycophancy toward the US president, it could prove hugely important. The ruling this Friday is the first time during Trump’s second term that the justices have struck down one of his policies. Not only that, the policy they struck down is Trump’s signature economic policy – he has used tariffs to bash, lord over and terrorize dozens of other countries and make himself the King of the Economic Jungle.

In the court’s main opinion, joined by three conservative justices and three liberals, chief justice John Roberts used some sharp language to slap down Trump’s tariffs, writing that the constitution specifically gives Congress, not the president, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. (Roberts noted that tariffs are indeed taxes.)

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

String of embarrassing defeats for prosecutors as experts condemn DoJ effort to cast people as ‘violent perpetrators’

Department of Justice prosecutors across the US have suffered a string of embarrassing defeats in their aggressive pursuit of criminal cases against people accused of “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers.

In recent months, the federal government has relentlessly prosecuted protesters, government critics, immigrants and others arrested during immigration operations, often accusing them of physically attacking officers or interfering with their duties.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: You wear them at work, you wear them at play, you wear them to relax. You may even get sweaty in them at the gym. But an investigation into headphones has found every single pair tested contained substances hazardous to human health, including chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminization of males. [...] Researchers say that while individual doses from particular sources may be low, a "cocktail effect" of daily, multi-source exposure nevertheless poses potentially severe long-term risks to health. [...] Researchers bought 81 pairs of in-ear and over-ear headphones, either on the market in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria, or from the online marketplaces Shein and Temu, and took them for laboratory analysis, testing for a range of harmful chemicals. "Hazardous substances were detected in every product tested," they said. Bisphenol A (BPA) appeared in 98% of samples, and its substitute, bisphenol S (BPS), was found in more than three-quarters. Synthetic chemicals used to stiffen plastic, BPA and BPS mimic the action of oestrogen inside organisms, causing a range of adverse effects including the feminization of males, early onset puberty in girls, and cancer. Previous studies have shown that bisphenols can migrate from synthetic materials into sweat, and that they can be absorbed through the skin. "Given the prolonged skin contact associated with headphone use, dermal exposure represents a relevant pathway, and it is reasonable to assume that similar migration of BPA and its substitutes may occur from headphone components directly to the user's skin," the researchers said. Also found in the headphones tested were phthalates, potent reproductive toxins that can impair fertility; chlorinated paraffins, which have been linked to liver and kidney damage; and brominated and organophosphate flame retardants, which have similar endocrine disrupting properties to bisphenols. Most were, however, found in only trace quantities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Travis Corbitt's struggles to breathe led to his retirement and reliance on an oxygen tank.

Are we close to getting those new Avengers, Avatar and Coco rides? And what about the new lands for Cars, Monsters Inc. and Disney's villains? Here's what to expect and when.

With his six medals at Milano Cortina, Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has broken​ and extended the previous record of eight for most career Winter Olympic gold medals.

Investigators in the Nancy Guthrie case have turned to genetic genealogy as they try to make the most of potential DNA evidence.

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS.

ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.)

↫ Alan Coopersmith

You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls.

Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill.

↫ Alan Coopersmith

There’s many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we’ll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

Exclusive: Rami Ranger, who was suspended temporarily in 2023, makes successful bid at party fundraising event

A Conservative donor who was suspended from the party after being accused of bullying and inappropriate language spent £50,000 last week to have dinner with Kemi Badenoch, the Guardian has learned.

Rami Ranger was the successful bidder for the dinner at a Tory fundraising event and will attend the meal with a small group of friends, infuriating those in the party who believe he should not have been readmitted.

In Britain, the establishment has been shaken to the core by the files. In the US, however, ‘the Epstein class’ has faced little legal or political reckoning

The contrast could not be starker. At around 8am on Thursday, British police swooped on the Sandringham royal estate to arrest the former prince Andrew after allegations that he had shared confidential material with the late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was a seismic shock for the monarchy.

A week earlier Pam Bondi, the top US law enforcement official, was asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators her department had indicted, or whether she would give state attorneys general access to evidence to build further cases. She refused to answer.

Recent incidents involving Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert suggest things are not well at the network after the acquisition financed by Trump supporter Larry Ellison

Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.

If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

The civil rights trailblazer imagined a future for America in which the marginalized became the center of US politics

Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil- and human-rights trailblazer who died on 17 February, imagined a version of America where the marginalized became the center. His was a much more progressive vision than what the Democratic party thought possible after the civil rights movement, and through Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition – launched after his first presidential campaign in 1984 – he laid the groundwork for a new era.

“This Rainbow Coalition is the embodiment of a national politics that is radically inclusive,” Charles McKinney, a professor of history at Rhodes Collegesaid. “He was like: ‘I’ve got something for the middle class, I’ve got something for the elite, and I also have something for working-class folks. To me, that was the embodiment of his politics.”

An unlimited data phone plan opens all sorts of options. We pick our favorite plans with unlimited data from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

Smart rings are in, but they're not created equally. This is the one I swear by.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra performance and features are not that different from the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and likely the S26 Ultra). Plus, the S24 Ultra is half the price of the S25 Ultra.

Doug Ruch died in New Zealand in December after article called him a ‘conman’ but cause of death remains unknown

A US man who spoke to various media outlets about having terminal cancer and raising money to travel for community service projects died shortly before Christmas in New Zealand – the day after an article by a journalist there accused him of actually being “an alleged serial conman”.

Authorities in the US and New Zealand recently confirmed Douglas Lee “Doug” Ruch, 56, died in the capital of Auckland on 18 December, months after his so-called “Dying to Serve” tour. The hundreds of thousands of dollars he raised on GoFundMe earned headlines in the Washington Post, National Public Radio and the Guardian.

An orphaned monkey in Japan has captured hearts, flooding the zoo with visitors and boosting sales for the plush toy that has been a comfort to him.

Police continue searches at Mountbatten-Windsor’s former Windsor home after arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office

Buckingham Palace will not oppose plans to remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the royal line of succession, the Guardian understands, as police confirmed a search of his former Windsor home would continue over the weekend.

Royal sources indicated on Saturday that King Charles would not stand in the way of parliament if it wanted to ensure the former prince could never ascend to the throne.

Galatz, which broadcasts revelatory reporting and wide-ranging talk, is one of Israel’s most popular stations. Critics see a broader effort to silence dissent.

What I am Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: When power meets principle

• A Historic Arrest Signals the End of Royal Immunity: Randy Andy goes to jail

• A Promise Made, A Promise Broken: Health‑Care Trust Plummets Under RFK Jr.

• Hidden Roots: Frederick Douglass fights for himself and the country

• What I’m Reading: A fairly fresh printing of James Baldwin’s essays

• Jukebox Playlist: Miles Davis, Milestones

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“No man is above the law, and no man is below it.” — Theodore Roosevelt

The quote has been repeated so often that it sounds more like a slogan than a principle. But life is tricky, in that it continues to hand us tests as to whether we actually believe it in practice. It seems so familiar that we really should ace it, but we don’t. In fact, most often, as a society, we fail to live up to Teddy’s words.

Thankfully, all we have to do is wait half a second and we’ll surely be tested again.

On the basketball court, rules are clear. They don’t bend for fame or reputation, or how much money you have in your bank account. You still have to run back on defense. You still have to earn your minutes. And if you mess up, you definitely hear about it for days, sometimes for years. That’s what makes a team work: accountability isn’t selective. It’s an equal-opportunity employer and destroyer.

But off the court—even though it wants to, or says it does—the world doesn’t seem to play by those rules. Too often, power is a shield. Wealth is insulation. And the people who should be held to the highest standard end up overriding the consequences that the rest of us live with every day. Put another way, they get off scot-free…a term that doesn’t originate either from Dred Scott or from Scotland, but that dates back to the 11th Century and stands for not paying one’s fair share of taxes—something many American billionaires and politicians are quite familiar with.

But accountability isn’t about punishment. It’s about trust. Trusting that the system works the same for everyone, not just the people with the right last name or the right connections. When the law at long last reaches upward toward people who have spent a lifetime above the fray, it sends a message that the ground is finally leveling, if only for a moment.

And these moments don’t happen because the universe suddenly wakes up with a sense of justice. They happen because We the People get tired of being the so-called Silent Majority…a grouping that never actually existed…or even the Vocal Minority. When we’ve had enough and more than enough, we take to the streets and the ballot boxes. Pressure builds, survivors speak, documents surface, justice is finally done…and we breathe a sigh of relief because Teddy Roosevelt was right, for once.

And that too-rare moment is where a new story begins.

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Critics say Reform leader’s patronising rhetoric is part of worrying trend. He says scrutiny is a two way street.

When Nigel Farage told a journalist this week she should “write some silly story … and we won’t bother to read it”, it provoked an instant – and divided – reaction. For some it was a “masterclass” in dealing with mainstream media, but for others it was “rude, dismissive, misogynistic, arrogant”.

Behind the scenes, Farage’s treatment of the Financial Times’s Anna Gross – which was met with mirth and applause among Reform diehards in the room – provoked disquiet and anger among lobby journalists across the political spectrum.

Research project warns fall in homeworking roles could undermine efforts to reduce unemployment

A decline in the number of jobs for people who need to work remotely, including those with disabilities, could undermine the government’s efforts to reverse rising unemployment, according to a two-year study.

More than eight in 10 respondents to a survey of working-age disabled people by researchers at Lancaster University said access to home working was essential or very important when looking for a new job.

Banner at justice department just the latest example of how president has imposed himself on daily US life

You wouldn’t be alone if you feel that the US more closely resembles North Korea these days – with giant images of the dear leader scowling down on the citizenry, and his name inscribed everywhere from public buildings to street signs, transportation hubs and self-aggrandizing monuments.

Thursday’s unfurling of a massive banner bearing the visage of Donald J Trump, the 47th US president, on the exterior of the Washington headquarters of the federal justice department was only the latest example of how he has imposed himself on every facet of American life. Some critics have called it “dictator vibes”.

Files show accuser in 2011 provided extensive account of abuse as questions mount over why action was not taken

The Department of Justice’s release of millions of Jeffrey Epstein files has not only prompted questions about his crimes – but renewed attention on authorities’ failure to stop him after an accuser reported him in 1996.

This new cache of Epstein files has provided more insight into authorities’ familiarity with allegations against him in the years that followed, including time between his sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and federal arrest nearly six years ago.

History shows that when called to testify about difficult things – Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi – Bill and Hillary excel

For political connoisseurs of a certain vintage, it feels like deja vu all over again.

To anyone who witnessed Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the once unimaginable spectacle of a sitting president testifying under oath over sexual misconduct allegations levelled on a wave of Republican antipathy became so familiar as to seem almost routine.

Arab Americans in Dearborn and beyond are being swept up by ICE at places of worship and work, with devastating consequences

Lorenda Lewis is so tired she can barely keep her head straight. Surrounded by her six young children at a cafe in Dearborn, Michigan, she recounts the nightmare of the past four months that saw her husband, Abdelouahid Aouchiche, an Algerian national, taken away.

It was still dark when, at about 5.15am last October, her 61-year-old husband and 12-year-old son, Abdullah, arrived at the Furqan mosque for morning prayers. Abdullah recalls his father being approached by two men outside the mosque, grabbing him and asking for his papers. After a brief conversation, he says he was allowed to call his mother and told to go inside the mosque by the agents. When she arrived minutes later, her husband and the agents were gone.

Trump orders massive buildup of naval forces in Middle East, leading to fears of an imminent war

Iran’s foreign minister has said he expects to have a draft counterproposal ready within days after nuclear talks with the US this week, while Donald Trump said he was considering limited military strikes.

The US president has ordered a massive buildup of naval forces in the Middle East, including repositioning aircraft carriers and other warships, leading to fears of an imminent war. But it is not clear if the military movements are intended as an intimidation tactic to put pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.

For a decade, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was arrested on Thursday, advocated globally for U.K. trade, cooking up deals that at times made his family cringe.

The conservative-heavy court had largely given Trump everything he desired – until now, when two of his three nominees turned their back on him

After an agonising year in which the US supreme court has stood aside and watched while Donald Trump has run roughshod over the constitutional separation of powers, the highest judicial panel has finally stirred itself to set boundaries on the president’s increasingly regal pose.

Friday’s supreme court ruling declared Trump’s sweeping tariffs unlawful, yanking from the president the bloodied cudgel which he has used to beat foreign friend and foe alike.

OpenAI is reportedly developing its first consumer hardware product: a $200-$300 smart speaker with a built-in camera capable of recognizing "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity." It's also said to feature Face ID-style authentication for purchases. The Verge reports: In addition to the smart speaker, OpenAI is "possibly" working on smart glasses and a smart lamp, The Information reports. (Apple may also be working on a smart lamp.) But OpenAI's glasses might not hit mass production until 2028, and while OpenAI has made prototypes of gadgets like the smart lamp, The Information says it's "unclear" if they'll be released and that OpenAI's devices plans are in early stages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

• State board to finalize insurance coverage changes for weight loss drugs
• State utility regulator to hear input on possible grid connection costs for data centers
• Joint Finance Committee to review proposed Health and Social Services budget
• Education funding commission to discuss reforms, legislative timeline

State Employee Benefits Committee to change weight loss drug coverage

The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, will meet on Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs. Those changes could mean employees covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.

The SEBC previously met on Friday, Feb. 13, to introduce the potential coverage changes. 

At that meeting, the committee heard multiple different options that could save the state money, but they would pass costs onto consumers using the drugs in the form of higher co-pays, almost four or five times higher than the current rate.

According to a presentation at the meeting, members pay $32 for a 30-day supply of the drug or $64 for a 90-day supply. If new copays are added to the state plan, those numbers would jump to $120 and $200, respectively. 

Another option would be to completely eliminate coverage of the drugs for state employees who use them for weight loss, which officials suspect would save the state $179 million over the next three years. 

If the state continues its coverage as is, the SEBC estimates it would cost nearly $211 million by 2029.

📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee will meet publicly at 9 a.m. Monday at the Delaware Department of Human Resources, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd., Suite 100, in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.

Utility regulator to hear resident input on data center regulations

The Public Service Commission, the state body charged with regulating utility services, will hear public comment on Wednesday about Delmarva Power’s proposed “large-load tariff” for energy-hungry facilities like data centers to ensure they do not shift energy infrastructure costs onto other ratepayers.

The tariff, if approved by the PSC, would set a new electricity rate for data centers and require them to pay deposits to cover the engineering and equipment cost of electrical infrastructure improvements.

The proposal comes months after Delmarva revealed it is working with five data center developers whose projects would demand a combined 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy.

The peak load, or demand for electricity, of the entire state is 2.3 GW in the winter and 2.7 GW in the summer, according to PJM.

That means the proposed data centers would together almost double the power demand for all businesses and homes in the First State.

📍 The Public Service Commission will hear comments at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the PSC Hearing Room, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.

Lawmakers to review Meyer’s proposed DHSS, DelDOT spending

State lawmakers’ budget hearings will continue this week with testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation, two of the largest state departments by budget size.

Lawmakers will also review the Fire Prevention Commission’s budget proposal. 

The Joint Finance Committee’s budget review for DHSS will span the entirety of both Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings, as the department oversees a swath of large-scale programs used by many Delawareans, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover.

Tuesday’s hearing will include testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services. The morning will focus on a department-wide overview and Public Health. The afternoon will focus on Social Services and Medicaid & Medical Assistance.

Wednesday’s hearing will continue the DHSS budget review. The morning will focus on Substance Abuse and Mental Health and Aging & Aging Adults w/Physical Disabilities and Health Care Quality. The afternoon will focus on Developmental Disabilities Services.

Thursday’s hearing will feature testimony from the Fire Prevention Commission in the morning, and then from the Department of Transportation in the afternoon.

For information about virtual attendance for the Tuesday meeting, click here. For the Wednesday meeting, click here. And for the Thursday meeting, click here.

Education funding reform discussions continue

The Public Education Funding Commission, created by the General Assembly to recommend how dollars should be distributed to Delaware schools, will meet on Monday to discuss the “legislative timeline” of its proposed hybrid funding formula.

The hybrid proposal incorporates the state’s traditional framework of distributing money on a per-student basis with one that allocates dollars based on student needs.

The commission will also discuss local education funding models, comparing Delaware’s referendum model to that of other states. 

The commission’s work to reform public education spending comes after Gov. Matt Meyer made the issue a pillar of his gubernatorial campaign.  

📍 The Public Education Funding Commission will meet virtually at 4 p.m. Monday. For more details, click here.

Nick Stonesifer and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.

The post Get Involved: GLP-1 coverage, data center regulations, budget review, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don’t work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep—and minimize jet lag when they’re traveling.

My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don’t work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color.

↫ Patrick Mineault

And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It’s pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. "The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid," reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy's NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now) program. From the report: The researchers are developing ADS technology. This system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target (such as liquid mercury), triggering a process called "spallation." This releases a flood of neutrons that interact with unwanted, long-lived isotopes in nuclear waste. The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components of the waste by transmuting these elements. While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years. [...] To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power. Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin. These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation. The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron -- the same component that powers microwave ovens -- to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS. The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency. The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even as weather extremes worsen, the voices calling for the rolling back of environmental rules have grown louder and more influential

In the timeless week between Christmas and the new year, two Spanish men in their early 50s – friends since childhood, popular around town – went to a restaurant and did not come home.

Francisco Zea Bravo, a maths teacher active in a book club and rock band, and Antonio Morales Serrano, the owner of a popular cafe and ice-cream parlour, had gone to eat with friends in Málaga on Saturday 27 December. But as the pair drove back to Alhaurín el Grande that night, heavy rains turned the usually tranquil Fahala River into what the mayor would later call an “uncontrollable torrent”. Police found their van overturned the next day. Their bodies followed after an agonising search.

Creators say they’re offering Africans a ‘hopeful, utopian feeling’ of retrieving objects looted by colonial armies

A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a series of heists, amid a growing campaign to repatriate treasures looted by colonial armies.

Players of Relooted become South African sports scientist and parkour expert Nomali, as she leaps and dives through museums to retrieve 70 real objects. They include an Asante gold mask that was taken by the British army when it destroyed the Asante empire’s capital, Kumasi, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Another object is the skull of the Tanzanian king Mangi Meli, which was taken to Germany after its colonial regime executed him in 1900.

As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost

Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal and mass killer. It’s not only the victim-blaming and bullying of Kyiv into making concessions. It’s not even Donald Trump’s crass attempts to monetise the war and milk the misery of millions for Nobel glory, while undercutting Nato allies and trampling sovereign rights.

What really shocks, and hurts, is the sheer bad faith shown by a country that Europeans always counted a friend. As the 18th-century English gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe noted, “few circumstances are more afflicting than a discovery of perfidy in those whom we have trusted”. To echo Trump’s dark warning after he was rebuffed over Greenland: Europe will remember.

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

When Karen Newton left home in late July 2025, she knew that international travellers were being locked up in immigration detention centres in the US. “I was aware,” she nods. “But I never thought it would have any impact on my holiday.” Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa. She hadn’t been abroad for eight years, and was keen for some guaranteed sun. “I really just wanted to get away from the house.”

She and her husband, Bill, 66, had an ambitious itinerary that would take them through California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and then on to Canada over two months. Las Vegas wasn’t to Karen’s taste: “Way too commercialised.” She much preferred Yellowstone, where they saw Old Faithful, the famous geyser, as it shot boiling water into the air, and got up close with some extraordinary wildlife. “There was a bison right next to the car. Another time, a wolf walked past.” Her eyes sparkle at the memory. “It was just amazing.”

President Trump signed an order that will impose 10% tariffs on imports from all countries, just hours after the Supreme Court struck down a different set of sweeping global tariffs.

Iran has shown how plausible blackouts now are, with far-reaching consequences for the internet as we know it

During the height of Iran’s blackout in January, people could still access a platform that, in some senses, was like the internet.

Iranians could message family members on a government-monitored app and watch clips of Manchester United on a Farsi-language video-sharing site. They could read state news and use a local navigation service.

After meeting with unspecified tech leaders, senator calls for urgent policy action as companies race to build ever more powerful systems

Bernie Sanders has warned that Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.

Speaking at Stanford University on Friday alongside congressman Ro Khanna after a series of meetings with industry leaders in California, Sanders was blunt about what he called the “most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country”.

A federal judge who took the extraordinary step of holding a government lawyer in contempt of court earlier this week blasted the Justice Department for its handling of immigration cases on Friday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson's office has denied a request to have the late Rev. Jesse Jackson lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda due to past precedent.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 21, No. 516.

The Trump administration fired an interim top prosecutor in Eastern Virginia almost immediately after he was hired by a panel of judges, deepening the conflict between the DOJ and the judiciary in that region.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 21.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That's the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited." But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go. "We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed." [...] When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Company behind ChatGPT last year flagged Jesse Van Rootselaar’s account for ‘furtherance of violent activities’

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has said it considered alerting Canadian police last year about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities”.

This live blog is now closed.

• Furious Trump signs global 10% duty after supreme court issues tariff blow

• Trump news at a glance: president lobs insults at US supreme court for striking down his global tariffs

• What will happen to Trump’s tariffs after supreme court verdict?

According to reporters at the supreme court, one box of opinions has been brought out.

Typically, this means we can expect two decisions from the court.

Displays about slavery at the President's House​ in Old City were being restored nearly a month after they were removed by order of the Trump administration.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has cleared the way for a Louisiana law requiring poster-sized displays of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms to take effect.

The U.S. men's hockey team will face Canada on Sunday for the gold medal. The U.S. men have not won gold in the Olympics since the "Miracle on Ice" team in 1980.

Backlash intensified against Discord's age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs. Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored. Discord didn't hide that it planned to continue requesting IDs for any user appealing an incorrect age assessment, and users weren't happy, since that is exactly how the prior breach happened. Responding to critics, Discord claimed that the majority of ID data was promptly deleted. Specifically, Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, told The Verge that IDs shared during appeals "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation." It's unsurprising then that backlash exploded after Discord posted, and then weirdly deleted, a disclaimer on an FAQ about Discord's age assurance policies that contradicted Discord's hyped short timeline for storing IDs. An archived version of the page shows the note shared this warning: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used." Critics felt that Discord was obscuring not just how long IDs may be stored, but also the entities collecting information. Discord did not provide details on what the experiment was testing or how many users were affected, and Persona was not listed as a partner on its platform. Asked for comment, Discord told Ars that only a small number of users was included in the experiment, which ran for less than one month. That test has since concluded, Discord confirmed, and Persona is no longer an active vendor partnering with Discord. Moving forward, Discord promised to "keep our users informed as vendors are added or updated." While Discord seeks to distance itself from Persona, Rick Song, Persona's CEO [...] told Ars that all the data of verified individuals involved in Discord's test has been deleted. Ars also notes that hackers "quickly exposed a 'workaround' to avoid Persona's age checks on Discord" and "found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a U.S. government authorized server." The Rage, an independent publication that covers financial surveillance, reported: "In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting -- and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies." While Persona does not have any government contracts, the exposed service "appears to be powered by an OpenAI chatbot," The Rage noted. Hackers warned "that OpenAI may have created an internal database for Persona identity checks that spans all OpenAI users via its internal watchlistdb," seemingly exploiting the "opportunity to go from comparing users against a single federal watchlist, to creating the watchlist of all users themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as "AI modified." As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform's creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: "I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest]," artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. "Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins." [...] r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. "Pinterest keeps automatically adding the 'AI modified' tag to my Pins... every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then... the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I'm stuck in this endless loop of appealing, label removed, new Pin gets tagged again," read a post on r/Pinterest. The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out. "I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and 'no AI,'" they said. "On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled 'Hand Drawn' but simultaneously marked as 'AI modified,' it creates confusion and undermines that positioning." Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they've seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as "AI modified" despite being older than image generation tech. "There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected," she said. "Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI." Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. "I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it," said another post. "I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer's husband was banned from the Labor Department building after agency employees alleged he had touched them inappropriately, sources said.

Shooting death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, in Texas was not publicly disclosed by Department of Homeland Security

Newly released records show a US citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal immigration agent last year during a late-night traffic encounter that was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, would mark the earliest of at least six deadly shootings by federal officers since the start of a nationwide immigration crackdown in Donald Trump’s second term. On Friday, DHS said the shooting on South Padre Island last March occurred after the driver intentionally struck an agent.

Samsung is holding an event on Feb. 25 in San Francisco, where we expect the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra to be revealed.

Two skiers died Friday in separate incidents at Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain Resort, marking the latest in a series of ski-related deaths in the region this month.

While the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration's emergency tariffs, experts said it could take years for businesses to get refunds.

Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in the blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware. "We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump says he's considering limited strikes against Iran as negotiations over its nuclear program are underway. Here are some of the figures talking with him about the decision.

The driver of the vehicle, a 23-year-old man from Albany, New York, had been reported missing and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

President Trump said he was "ashamed of certain members of the court" after the Supreme Court struck down most of his tariffs.

Barry Manilow announced Friday he needs to reschedule several more concerts as he continues to recover following surgery after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

"Jersey Shore" star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi said in a TikTok video that her results at a post-op appointment for a cone biopsy showed stage 1 cervical cancer.

President calls decision a ‘disgrace to the nation’ while praising three justices who dissented

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump on Friday railed against the supreme court justices who blocked his use of tariffs, calling the decision a “disgrace to the nation”, and later signed documents imposing a 10% tariff on all countries.

“It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” the president said during remarks from the White House. He cast that influence as social and cultural, saying: “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court. Absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint shed 6.8%, and Okta declined 5.7%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF fell as much as 3.8%, extending its losses on the year to 14%. Anthropic said the new tool will "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review." The firm said the update is available in a limited research preview for now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philanthropist and mother of Elisabeth, James and Lachlan Murdoch died at home in Palm Beach, Florida

The author and philanthropist Anna Murdoch-Mann, the ex-wife of the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, died at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday. She was 81.

Murdoch-Mann’s death was reported Friday by the New York Post, one of her ex-husband’s media properties.

Hezbollah leader among dead as Israel says it hit militant command centres

At least 10 people have been killed and 24 wounded – including three children – in Israeli strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa valley, the Lebanese health ministry has said.

Israel said it had hit “command centres” of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Two security sources told Reuters that the senior Hezbollah leader Hussein Yaghi was killed in the attacks.

Remember the astronauts who were stranded in space for months? NASA says it's close to identifying the "true technical root cause" of the spaceship malfunctions.

Authorities suspect Carl Grillmair was shot by man arrested for carjacking, as friends mourn him as ‘irreplaceable’

A renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientist who studied distant planets and other areas of astronomy for decades was recently shot to death at his home in a rural community outside Los Angeles, authorities said.

Carl Grillmair, 67, died from a bullet wound to the torso on Monday in Llano, an unincorporated community in the Antelope Valley, according to information from the LA county medical examiner’s office. The county sheriff’s department said it had arrested a suspect in Grillmair’s slaying, identifying him as 29-year-old Freddy Snyder.

Nevada county sheriff said investigation includes learning why the ski trip was not cancelled by the guide company

Authorities are investigating whether any criminal negligence was involved in the deadly avalanche that swept California’s Lake Tahoe this week, which killed at least eight skiers and their guides while returning from a three-day backcountry skiing trip.

The Nevada county sheriff’s office said on Friday said that they notified the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), which regulates workplace safety, of the active investigation.

Goldman Sachs has launched an "S&P ex-AI" index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to "hedge their exposure to the AI trade," reports Axios. From the report: "Excluding 'AI enablers' from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype," Louis Miller, head of the firm's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index. The ex-AI index is a compilation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 that are not related to AI, also referred to as old-economy stocks. It's available exclusively to Goldman customers, created in collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices. Taking all the AI out of the S&P doesn't leave much behind, as AI companies make up ~45% of the index, according to the note. Over the last three years, the S&P 500 is up 76%. The ex-AI index is only up 32% in that same time period.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man, 23, drove a car full of weapons through gate of power facility before shooting himself in the head, officials said

A 23-year-old man drove from New York to a Las Vegas suburb and crashed a rented Nissan Sentra through a gate and into a pile of heavy wire reels at a power substation before shooting himself in the head, local police said on Friday, describing the incident as a suspected act of terrorism.

The suspect, Dawson Noah Maloney, died of the self-inflicted shotgun wound, the Las Vegas sheriff, Kevin McMahill, said at a press conference on Friday. He was wearing soft body armor when police discovered him.

Alysa Liu stunned the skating world by retiring at age 16. Two years later, she returned to the ice, and now she's won gold at the Winter Olympics.

• Hughes and Eichel spark US rout of Slovakia

• MacKinnon scores late to send Canada through

• Border rivals to meet for men’s hockey gold

The United States and Canada men’s ice hockey teams will play for the gold medal on Sunday’s final day of the Milano Cortina Games after both teams came through semi-final contests of varying difficulty on Friday evening, setting up a blockbuster final in the first Olympic tournament to feature National Hockey League players in 12 years.

Canada left things late in the first game, fighting back from two goals down to win 3-2 over Finland on Nathan MacKinnon’s winner with 35.2 seconds remaining. The US made far lighter work of Slovakia in the nightcap to set up the heavyweight clash, strolling to a 6-2 win after Jack Hughes and Jack Eichel scored in a 19-second span during the second period to blow things open, ensuring the Americans no worse than silver and their first men’s hockey medal in 16 years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases. "There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable." More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The law would have required websites to block VPN users from accessing "harmful material."

Rightwing Trump ally tells Tucker Carlson Israel has biblical right to land from ‘wadi of Egypt to the great river’

The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed with Carlson interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.

The recall involves 3.4 million pounds of frozen chicken fried rice products shipped to Trader Joe's locations nationwide and to retailers in Canada.

The two-day summit in San Diego convenes leaders in AI, power electronics, and future energy, plus an optional technical tour focused on battery energy storage.

Feb. 20, 2026 — San Diego State University will host the 2026 AI x Energy Summit in San Diego on March 19–20, 2026, bringing together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of AI, power electronics, and clean energy—with a specific focus on emerging demands of AI-era data center power and the enabling role of solid-state power conversion and protection.

AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20. Image credit: leolintang/Shutterstock.

The summit will be held at the Tula Community Center, 5110 East Campus Drive, San Diego, CA 92182. Lodging suggestions include downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, or near campus, with convenient access to SDSU via the MTS Green Line Trolley.

The program features plenary talks, panels on topics such as solid-state transformers, energy for AI data centers, and nuclear fusion, a poster session, and an awards ceremony recognizing posters and leaders in AI-energy. Registration ends on February 28, 2026.

This year’s keynote speakers include:

• Dr. Hao Huang, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Adjunct Professor, University of Houston
• Susan Linwood, CEO, Novos Power
• Charles Ku, CTO, Acbel
• Marija Ilić, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Adjunct Professor, MIT
• Anna Stefanopoulou, Distinguished Professor, University of Michigan
• Thomas Schuldt, Vice President, DG Matrix
• Burak Ozpineci, Director, Oakridge National Laboratory
• Panfil Peter, Vice President, Vertiv
• Dr. Don Tan, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Vice President, IEEE
• Salim Youssefzadeh< CEO, WattEV
• Dr. Longya Xu, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University
• Dr. Jinjun Liu, Distinguished Professor, Xi’an Jiaotong University
• George Santamaria, Director of Power Systems, RockeTruck

This year’s sponsors include Vertiv, SDG&E, Novos Power, DG Matrix, WattEV, and RockeTruck.

The summit welcomes sponsor participation and provides sponsor packages. Interested organizations can contact the conference chair via the event website.

Event Links

• Main website: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu
• Program at a Glance: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/program-at-a-glance
• Registration: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/event-registration
• Sponsors: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/exhibitors-sponsors
• Awards: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/awards

More from HPCwire: SDSU Women in STEM Seminar to Host Public Lecture by Kathy Yelick on March 5

Source: SDSU

The post SDSU to Convene AI and Energy Researchers at 2026 AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20 appeared first on HPCwire.

Claims against Wesley Dingus came from teen who had been staying at his residence and hid camera in bedroom

A Republican mayor in Ohio is facing criminal allegations after authorities say he was recorded on a concealed camera smelling an underage girl’s underwear.

An incident report from the Richland county sheriff’s Office details the accusations against Wesley Dingus, 48, who serves as mayor of Butler. The claims came from a juvenile who had been staying at his residence.

Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. "Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, "long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer's heir apparent, has resigned," reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Finally, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer and will work closely with Sharma. "I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an email sent to Microsoft staff. "Over 38 years at Microsoft, including 12 years leading Gaming, Phil helped transform what we do and how we do it." [...] Spencer was named Head of Xbox in March of 2014, when he was tasked with righting a ship that had made a number of product choices and policy decisions that rubbed core gamers the wrong way in the run-up to the launch of the Xbox One in Fall 2013. Long hailed by gamers as being one of their own, Spencer could frequently be found on Xbox Live, playing games regularly with fellow Xbox gamers and racking up a healthy Gamerscore. His first major move when put in charge was decoupling the Kinect 2.0 peripheral from the Xbox One package, thus immediately reducing the new console's price by $100 to $399, matching the day-one price of Sony's PlayStation 4. He spearheaded the much-heralded backwards compatibility movement within Xbox, the Xbox Game Pass service was born under his watch, and accessibility made major advances during his tenure in both hardware and software. Xbox Play Anywhere, which sought to let gamers play their Xbox games on any device, be it a PC, console, or handheld, isn't new but has been a big recent focal point. Spencer's time running Xbox will perhaps be most remembered for Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King in 2022, which took almost two years to achieve regulatory approval from various agencies around the world. But Spencer began trying to solve for Xbox's dearth of first-party games in 2018, when the first wave of studio acquisitions occurred. Prior to the Activision deal, Spencer's biggest move came with the $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda, in 2020. The deal gave Xbox total ownership of Bethesda Game Studios and its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises along with id Software and its Doom and Quake IPs, among many others. Questions arose from there about whether or not that meant all of Xbox's new studios would produce games exclusively for Xbox consoles, and while some games were kept off of PlayStation platforms temporarily, many weren't and most now seem to come to PS5 eventually, if not on day one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• American halfpipe competitor says he has no regrets

• Britain’s Gus Kenworthy just misses out on medal

At the start of the Winter Olympics, Donald Trump called Hunter Hess a “real loser” after the US freeskier dared to admit that he had mixed feelings about representing his country.

As he swooped down the halfpipe on Friday morning, Hess delivered a neat riposte, flashing a L-sign with his hand before insisting his row with Trump was something “I definitely wear with pride”.

South Korea win gold and silver in women’s speed skating as new champions were crowned in men’s freeski, men’s aerials, men’s biathlon and women’s ski cross.

The first person down the half pipe was world champ, Finley Melville Ives, who lost a ski mid-air and is languishing at the bottom of the leader board.

Ah, here comes Gus Kenworthy, he of the the urinated ‘fuck ICE’ snow message, and silver medallist in the 2014 ski slopestyle for the US, before switching to Team GB. He’s a brave guy, and has received death threats since his protest.

The decision adds to economic uncertainty, as deals Donald Trump struck with other countries are upended

It is refreshing to witness the US supreme court recover its spine and stand up to Donald Trump’s most extreme caprices. The 6-3 decision on Friday to strike down his barrage of tariffs on imports from virtually everywhere based on the preposterous argument that they addressed national emergencies will reassure the world that the US’s system of government – based on the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rule of law – has not collapsed entirely.

But let’s hold the (imported) champagne. The court’s ruling will not restore the United States to its former place as a reasonable, trustworthy player in the world economy. The rules-based economic architecture that underpinned the integration of the world economy over the decades that followed the second world war remains fractured. Trump is still intent on its disintegration. And he retains power to do so.

Alex Ferreira's first gold medal came after he took silver in Pyeongchang in 2018, and the bronze four years ago in Beijing.

Legislation responds to concerns that immigration officers could interfere with voting during November midterms

A bill introduced this week by California lawmakers would ban federal immigration agents from being stationed outside polling places, responding to concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers could interfere with voting during the November midterm elections.

The legislation was introduced on Thursday by state senator Tom Umberg and co-authored by state senator Sabrina Cervantes. Umberg said the measure aimed to safeguard voters from “ruthless intimidation” near polling locations.

Feb. 20, 2026 — T-Labs, the research and development division within Deutsche Telekom, and Qunnect have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over a commercial network in Berlin, marking a major milestone in advancing deployable quantum technologies on existing telecommunications infrastructure. By using newly commercial technologies to overcome instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure, T-Labs and Qunnect demonstrated how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks.

Credit: Shutterstock

During trials conducted in a real-world telecom environment in January 2026, the team achieved quantum teleportation over 30 km of commercial fiber cables. The experiment was performed using Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware and Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, representing the first practical test of core components required for a future teleportation service. For this demonstration.

Paving the Way for the Future Quantum Internet

Quantum teleportation is a key building block for the future quantum internet enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.

“Our fiber optic network is quantum ready,” says Abdu Mudesir, Telekom Board Member for Product and Technology. “In Berlin we have now proven that quantum information can be transmitted over 30 kilometers of commercial Telekom fiber optics outside of a laboratory. This is done in parallel with regular data traffic and with a very high average accuracy of 90 percent. With quantum teleportation, we are laying the technical foundation for networking quantum computers over longer distances in the future and pooling computing power in more than one location. This will create the next generation of secure communication and a building block for Europe’s technological sovereignty.”

“Teleportation is a novel tool for moving information around networks leveraging quantum physics,” said Mael Flament, Chief Technology Officer at Qunnect. “We are showing the building blocks of teleportation can operate inside a real network, in real racks, under operator control, advancing it from a laboratory experiment to something a telecommunications provider can deploy.”

Quantum teleportation unlocks new applications for quantum networks including quantum cryptography, distributed quantum computing, secure cloud-based quantum services paving the way for quantum data centers, and networks of highly sensitive quantum sensors.

The Demonstration

The trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30-km fiber loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fiber testbed. Qunnect’s Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons for distribution over telecom fiber, along with a polarization compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fiber, enabling high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes. As a result, the teams achieved teleportation fidelities at an average of 90%, according to the preliminary publication of the data. At its peak, an accuracy of 95 percent was achieved.

Importantly, the teleportation part is done at a wavelength (795nm) essential for many platforms such as neutral-atom quantum computers, atomic clocks, and various quantum sensors, paving the path for connecting such systems to the telecom infrastructure for the future quantum internet.

The achievement builds directly on a series of earlier field trials carried out by the same partners, which progressively demonstrated quantum networking over metropolitan fiber links. Qunnect, Deutsche Telekom, and other partners will extend this demonstration to multi-node teleportation configurations, expanding the distance across which they will transfer quantum states. This expansion will evaluate broader deployment and next generation use cases within a metro-scale carrier network infrastructure.

For those who would like to dive deeper, the results of the experiment are published at: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16613

More from HPCwire: Qunnect and Cisco Demonstrate Metro-Scale, High-Speed Quantum Entanglement Swapping Over Commercial Fiber

Source: Deutsche Telekom

The post Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect Successfully Test Quantum Teleportation Over Live Berlin Network appeared first on HPCwire.

Recruitment of children for study delayed after MHRA warns that participants should be no younger than 14

A clinical trial into puberty blockers for children has been paused after the medicines regulator warned it should have a minimum age limit of 14 because of the “unquantified risk” of “long-term biological harms”.

Discussions between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the trial sponsor, King’s College London, will begin next week to discuss the wellbeing concerns, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said on Friday evening.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO)​ and Industrial Technologies Office (ITO) announced on Feb. 19 selections totaling $4.8 million for 12 projects that will improve America’s manufacturing competitiveness by harnessing the processing power of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Funded through DOE’s High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program within its High-Performance Computing for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the selected teams will work with staff from one or more DOE national laboratories to advance the development and optimization of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and digital simulations to address their material design and manufacturing challenges. The solutions developed through HPC4Mfg help companies improve the performance of their technologies and/or the efficiency of their processes.

Learn more about the selected projects here.

HPC4Mfg is funded by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. HPC4EI is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Visit the HPC4EI website for additional information.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Awards $4.8M to 12 HPC Projects Supporting US Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform. The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court divided 6-3 in finding that a federal law known as IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.

A simple reason explains why U.S. economic growth seemed to hit a wall in the final three months of the year.

Subspecies driven to extinction by hungry whalers returns after ‘back breeding’ programme using partial descendants

Giant tortoises, the life-giving engineers of remote small island ecosystems, are plodding over the Galápagos island of Floreana for the first time in more than 180 years.

The Floreana giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger niger), a subspecies of the giant tortoise once found across the Galápagos, was driven to extinction in the 1840s by whalers who removed thousands from the volcanic island to provide a living larder during their hunting voyages.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 21, No. 1,708.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 21, No. 720.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 21 #986.

President Trump is pressuring Iran to either curtail its nuclear program or face military strikes, after Iran amassed a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Here's what to know.

The county alleges Roblox has engaged in deceptive business practices and is failing to protect children from predators.

• 31-year-old adds to his 2018 silver and 2022 bronze

• Estonia’s Sildaru, Canada’s Mackay round out podium

American freeskier Alex Ferreira won the men’s halfpipe final at the Milano Cortina Winter Games on Friday to complete his collection of Olympic medals.

The 31-year-old Ferreira won with a third and final run worth 93.75 points, adding the gold medal to his silver from Pyeongchang in 2018 and bronze from Beijing in 2022.

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy. The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar. On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack. OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple revamped its entire Apple Watch line, but some models got more improvements than other. We look at all the details.

The Trump administration on Friday formally proposed a regulation that would dramatically restrict work permits for asylum-seekers.

In mid-January, an unassuming man in khakis and a button-down shirt walked to a wooden lectern at a school board meeting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Most chairs in the audience were empty. The man, Tim Smith, was the only person signed up to speak during public comments. He had five minutes.

“I trust that each one of you had a good Christmas and New Year’s,” he began. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing.”

His wife is an assistant teacher at a public elementary school in the county, epicenter of the state’s historic measles outbreak, and shortly before winter break she’d received a notice that a child in her classroom had measles. Given his wife is fully vaccinated, he wasn’t worried. 

Then, she began to get sick. And sicker. She got a measles test and, to their shock, it came back positive. She was apparently among the very rare breakthrough infections. 

Frightened, they took her to the hospital that night. “My wife was throwing up,” Smith said at the meeting. “She had diarrhea. She couldn’t breathe. All for what? This is — it’s absolute insanity.” 

Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician working a county away, wasn’t even aware that anyone in South Carolina had been hospitalized with measles-related illnesses until a short time later when she logged on to Facebook and saw someone relay the distraught husband’s comments. 

Part of the reason Bragg didn’t know is that South Carolina doesn’t require hospitals to report admissions for measles, potentially obscuring the disease’s severity. In the absence of mandatory reporting rules, she and other doctors are often left to rely on rumors, their grapevines of colleagues, and the fragments of information the state public health agency is able to gather and willing to share. 

With 973 reported cases, South Carolina’s measles outbreak has ballooned into the nation’s largest since the virus was declared eliminated in the U.S. 25 years ago. Yet, since state health officials first confirmed the outbreak on Oct. 2, the state’s hospitals have reported only 20 measles-related admissions, or about 2% of cases. Some infectious disease experts say that the true number is likely much higher. 

Hospitalization rates can vary greatly by a measles outbreak’s location and who is getting infected. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 20% of measles cases will result in admissions.  

“A hospitalization rate at 2% is ludicrous,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization advisory committee. 

“It’s vast underreporting,” Offit said. “Measles makes you sick.”

Measles is among the most contagious of viruses. In 2026 so far, almost half of states have reported cases. Yet it’s left largely to each state to decide how much infectious disease reporting to require about it. 

“We don’t think we are getting an accurate picture at all of how these illnesses are impacting our community,” Linda Bell, the South Carolina state epidemiologist, said at a briefing last month. “We’re just not getting a picture of that now with the small number of hospitalizations that are known to us.” 

Bell said the state Department of Public Health is urging hospitals to report their measles-related admissions, and seven hospitals have done so. (There are at least a dozen acute care hospitals in the Upstate alone.) But the state cannot force them to do so. Bell also said that the agency, which sets infectious disease reporting requirements, hasn’t considered adding hospitalizations to the list because the primary purpose of public health surveillance is to understand disease transmission, frequency and distribution — not to track complications.

That leaves doctors like Bragg advising patients, including vaccine-resistant parents, without the benefit of confirmed, real-time data about how many South Carolinians have been hospitalized with measles. Severe complications include pneumonia, dehydration and a potentially life-threatening brain swelling called encephalitis.

“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”

ProPublica contacted state health agencies across the South and found most do not require hospitals to report measles-related admissions. Alabama does. So does Virginia, although it doesn’t release that data to the public. Like South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas don’t require reporting of hospitalizations, but epidemiologists can identify them during case investigations.

During the Texas measles outbreak last year, 99 people were hospitalized out of 762 cases. 

That’s a rate of about 13%. In South Carolina, the reported rate is 2%.

Real-time hospitalization data can show where to target resources and help hospitals prepare for an influx of patients. “As vaccine rates decrease, it could also really help us understand the changing epidemiology of measles in this current context,” said Gabriel Benavidez, an epidemiology professor at Baylor University in Texas.

When ProPublica asked hospitals across the Upstate, the northwest quadrant of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated, if they are reporting their measles-related admissions to the state and how many patients they had treated, few responded. Only Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System shared its total. (As of mid-February, the number was four.) 

A spokesperson for Prisma Health, a Greenville-based nonprofit that owns eight acute-care hospitals in the Upstate, said its hospitals are “reporting everything we are supposed to report.” She wouldn’t say how many measles patients have been hospitalized at Prisma hospitals or how many the system has reported to the state. 

Doctors in the Dark 

Bragg, who is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric infectious disease, works in the region of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated. It’s a highly religious expanse with the state’s lowest student vaccination rates. She recently met with a parent questioning the recommended vaccines for a 1-year-old child, which includes a first dose of measles vaccine.  

“We’re in the middle of a measles outbreak,” Bragg thought.

Then she began a 30-minute discussion of the vaccine’s extreme safety and 97% lifetime effectiveness when two doses are given. She explained that 95% of people in South Carolina who have gotten measles were unvaccinated. She rattled off historic risks of measles complications. 

Yet Bragg couldn’t tell the parent just how severely ill their fellow South Carolinians were getting from the outbreak sickening people around them. 

She had heard about pneumonia, ICU admissions — and even a case of encephalitis. But she hadn’t been able to confirm it, or find out if it was a child, much less how the patient fared. (Shortly after, Bell announced that the state health agency had learned of encephalitis cases in children, but she didn’t provide the numbers of patients or their outcomes.) 

As president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Martha Edwards is connected to physicians across the state. “All I’m hearing about are ‘complications of measles,’” which can mean a lot of different things, she said.

Communicating the risks of severe illness is all the more important because few of today’s parents have seen measles up close. Neither have most practicing doctors. 

Early in his career, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University who focuses on the prevention of infectious diseases, worked with the CDC to implement the measles vaccine. When he tells medical students today that in the 1960s, before the measles vaccine, 400 to 500 kids died of measles and its complications each year, “They’re stunned.” 

“If the severity of the illness cannot be ascertained — if it can’t be determined — it can’t be appropriately communicated to the public,” Schaffner said. “And the public might get the false impression that measles is milder than it really is.”

At a briefing, Dr. Robin LaCroix, a Prisma pediatric infectious disease physician, said the organization’s physicians “have seen the whole gamut of acute and post-measles infections that have afflicted these children. They are sick.” Children have become listless and suffered blotchy rashes, coughing and coughing spasms, dehydration and secondary infections including pneumonias.

Measles infections are particularly dangerous for babies who cannot get vaccinated yet and young children who haven’t gotten the second dose. Infections during pregnancy also pose severe risks for mothers who are not vaccinated or immune, including miscarriage and a tenfold increase in death due to pneumonia. Mothers can pass on the virus to their babies, “which can be catastrophic,” said Dr. Kendreia Dickens-Carr, a Prisma OB-GYN.

More than 900 confirmed measles cases have been reported across the country already in 2026, compared with 2,281 in all of 2025. Most of this year’s cases are in South Carolina, but Florida has reported 63 cases and neighboring North Carolina 15, including one hospitalization. 

“We really do need to think about the way in which we report these things, because viruses and bacteria don’t respect state lines,” said Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. “Public health professionals from one state to another should be comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.” 

The most advanced pediatric care in the state is provided at the Medical University of South Carolina’s campus in Charleston, several hours away from the Upstate on the coast. So far, its children’s hospital hasn’t admitted any measles patients, doctors said. 

Dr. Danielle Scheurer, the chief quality officer at MUSC, celebrated the state’s low hospitalization rate and said she doubted hospitals would object to required reporting of measles-related admissions if the state health agency were to change its rules. 

“Transparency here is going to help other states,” Scheurer said. “The more transparent we are about all of our statistics, the better off any other state is going to be in preparing.” 

Political Pressures

Across South Carolina, large health care systems have bought up local hospitals and doctors’ practices. With that control, they can exert influence over what those doctors and hospital employees say publicly, especially when it comes to potentially controversial topics like vaccines. At the same time, they face pressure from Republican lawmakers and a growing segment of vaccine-wary patients. 

The result is often highly controlled information sharing, or a lack thereof.

“There’s this level of caution that wasn’t there before,” Edwards said. She understands that hospitals don’t want to offend patients who are dubious of vaccines. Bragg agreed but said given that 93% of the state’s students are vaccinated, she worries the hospitals are “pandering to a small group.”

A pending bill, sponsored by several of Spartanburg County’s state representatives, seeks to prevent hospitals and doctors from questioning or interfering “in any manner” with a patient’s right to refuse treatments or vaccines. During COVID-19, the bill contends, federal agencies collaborated with medical organizations and others “to orchestrate a coordinated and coercive propaganda campaign” to shame people who declined COVID-19 vaccines. Doctors and hospitals argue they must balance public health risks with individuals who decline to take vaccines.

The state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, and major GOP candidates to replace him have largely framed their responses to the measles outbreak around the concept of medical freedom, particularly when discussing vaccine mandates. 

Andrews, the pediatrician running for the U.S. Senate, said she’s experienced the “chilling effect” the GOP’s “anti-science movements” have had on health care systems and individual physicians. “If you speak up, you are at risk of being censored,” Andrews said. “If you speak up, you are at risk of losing your job. So everyone is just trying to keep their head down and do what’s best for their patients.”

Bragg is among the declining ranks of doctors who run their own independent practices. She has the freedom to post what she wants to on social media and to wear pro-vaccine T-shirts that say things like, “Got polio? Me neither because I got the vaccine.” 

But one recent day, her 10-year-old son asked why she insisted on wearing the T-shirts. “Even a 10-year-old can tell you how polarizing vaccines have become,” Bragg said. Despite that, she has continued to wear them.

The post South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles-Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark. appeared first on ProPublica.

Nasrallah Abu Siyam shot dead in occupied West Bank as UN human rights office accuses Israel of war crimes

Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian American man during an attack on a village, the Palestinian health ministry and a witness have said.

Raed Abu Ali, a resident of Mukhmas, said a group of settlers came to the village on Wednesday afternoon where they attacked a farmer, prompting clashes after residents intervened.

President Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court over its tariff decision, saying he was "absolutely ashamed" of the justices who ruled against him.

Among the available titles are Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

President Trump did not offer a source for the new death toll, which is far higher than what has been previously reported.

6-3 ruling against unilateral imposition of tariffs without congressional approval labelled a ‘disgrace’ by Trump

• Trump illegally used executive power to impose global tariffs, supreme court rules

• US politics live – latest updates

The US supreme court has struck down Donald Trump’s flagship policy of imposing tariffs on foreign imports in his bid to revitalise American manufacturing. The US president has reportedly called the decision a “disgrace”. Here’s what it means, and what could happen next.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote. Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: Meta's pushing its metaverse platform almost entirely to phones. It's the latest sign of a massive shift in the company's focus.

The US president says he will impose a 10% global tariff after the supreme court found his current use of tariffs illegal blocked it. Trump called the decision a disgrace

A successful fueling test prompts NASA to press ahead toward a March 6 moonshot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content. The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism. Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First lady is first in more than 100 years to have two inaugural gowns in museum’s popular collection

Her husband has described it as “OUT OF CONTROL”, a place where “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been”.

But Melania Trump, the wife of US president Donald Trump, declared a temporary ceasefire in hostilities with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington on Friday – with the help of a silk gown, diamond brooch and headless mannequin.

US president vows to enact 10% global baseline tariff after calling the supreme court justices ‘a disgrace to the nation’

• US politics live – latest updates

The US supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal on Friday, in a sharp rebuke that topples a key pillar of the president’s aggressive economic agenda.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court decided that a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies did not provide the legal justification for most of the Trump administration’s tariffs on countries across the world. It is the first time the court has overruled one of Trump’s second-term policies.

Looking for a forex broker? These are some of the best in the USA right now.

Officers being asked to ‘consider carefully whether anything they saw or heard’ may be relevant to review of Epstein files

Scotland Yard has announced it is expanding its inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by approaching all his former protection officers and reviewing records of flights at London’s airports to see if they were used for human trafficking.

The disclosure by the Metropolitan police is separate to the inquiry that led to the former prince’s arrest on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, but underlines the complex nature of the multiple investigations now focused on King Charles’s brother.

Administrator Jared Isaacman cites ‘major progress’ since earlier discovery of liquid hydrogen leaking from rocket

Nasa said on Friday it was planning to launch its delayed Artemis II moon mission on 6 March after successfully completing a fueling test that had caused it to stand down earlier this month.

Jared Isaacman, the space agency’s newly confirmed administrator, cited “major progress” since the original so-called wet dress rehearsal in which engineers discovered liquid hydrogen leaking from the space launch system (SLS) rocket on its Florida launchpad at Cape Canaveral.

Team Canada beat Finland in the men's hockey Olympic semifinals on Thursday. They will play for the gold on Sunday.

Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them. Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow. Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Ramadan in Gaza, Russian airstrikes in Odesa and flooding in France – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Government ‘expects privileged trading position’ to go on as EU ‘seeks clarity’ over Trump administration’s next steps

Britain and the EU said they were assessing the implications of the US supreme court ruling against Donald Trump’s global tariffs, while business groups reacted to the court’s announcement with caution.

A spokesperson for Downing Street said: “The UK government is working with the US to understand how the overturning of Donald Trump’s tariffs by the supreme court will affect the UK but expects our privileged trading position with the US to continue.”

Exclusive: David Blunkett and Estelle Morris among those calling plans a ‘once in a generation chance’ to fix system

Five former education secretaries have made a joint appeal to Labour MPs to back the overhaul of special education provision in English schools, calling it “a once in a generation chance” to fix a failing system.

The open letter is signed by David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson, who between them held the post for a decade from 1997.

Cherish Bean, 15, and Ethan Slater, 17, were discovered at a rental property in Little Eden Holiday Lodge Park on Wednesday

A teenage couple who died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning at an East Yorkshire holiday park have been named by police.

Cherish Bean, 15, and Ethan Slater, 17, were discovered at a rental property at Little Eden holiday park, near Bridlington, on Wednesday.

Here are some highly rated series to try, plus a look at what's new in February.

Criminal investigation into possible sex trafficking at Zorro Ranch follows Guardian report on lack of federal action

New Mexico will reopen its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro ranch in the state after a public pressure campaign for a fuller accounting of the role the location it played in the late financier’s sex-trafficking conspiracy.

The New Mexico department of justice’s announcement came less than two weeks after the Guardian reported that federal agents did not appear to have ever searched Zorro Ranch.

Don't deposit a five-figure amount in either account type before first calculating your interest-earning potential.

New head will face decisions crucial to movement’s future, such as how far to cooperate with Trump’s Gaza plan

Hamas has reportedly begun holding leadership elections among its members at a time when the militant Palestinian movement faces imminent decisions which will be critical to its own continued existence and the potential for peace in Gaza.

According to the BBC and press reports in the Gulf, Hamas members in Gaza have already voted. Those in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons and the diaspora are also expected to cast ballots for delegates to the movement’s 50-member general Shura council, which ultimately chooses its politburo and a new interim leader. The process could last weeks.

The department is reportedly considering buying a Boeing plane for deportation flights and for use by Trump officials

A $70m aircraft the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering for deportation flights has a luxurious interior and will be used to transport Trump administration officials to engagements in comfort, according to a report published Friday.

NBC News obtained images of the Boeing 737-8 Max plane showing a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and a bar.

The decision allowing Russia and Belarus to rejoin competition drew outrage in Ukraine and Europe following the disqualification last week of a Ukrainian skeleton athlete.

Move would follow any police investigation after former prince questioned on suspicion of misconduct in public office

The government will consider passing legislation to strip Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his right to inherit the throne once any police investigation has concluded, it is understood.

Several politicians have called for the former prince to be removed from the line of succession after he was arrested and questioned by detectives on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

British Chambers of Commerce official says US supreme court decision ‘does little to clear the murky waters’

• US politics – live updates

The US supreme court just declared Donald Trump’s boldest tariffs illegal, but international businesses and governments are still uncertain over what’s to come.

After the court said the president cannot enact tariffs in peacetime using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the White House said it will quickly replace the levies by other – but potentially more cumbersome – means.

PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025. The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach. "On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital ('PPWC') loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025," PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users. "PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Metropolitan Police also working with US counterparts to establish whether London airports had been used to ‘facilitate human trafficking and sexual exploitation’

• King: ‘The law must take its course’

• Analysis: What’s next for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson?

The family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, responded last night to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest.

“Astonished to see Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested today over alleged misconduct in public office linked to material from the so‑called Epstein ‘Files’,” they posted on an X account run by Maxwell’s siblings.

Breaking from the president, Congress voted to fund institutions including the Institute of American Indian Arts

In a break with Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a funding bill for multiple key government agencies and institutions in January. Some of those groups included the cultural institutions whose federal funds the president had sought to severely decrease or totally eliminate.

Last year, Trump issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, an executive order that specifically cited the Smithsonian Institution as having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology”. The executive order called for an overhaul of the museums and called out the American Women’s History Museum, which now exists only as an online exhibition, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

As aid trickles into Gaza, Washington channels $10bn into a body chaired by the president. Peace in the region rests on law and sovereignty, not ego and brinkmanship

In Gaza, aid still trickles in at levels relief agencies say are far below what is required. Temporary shelters are scarce. Reconstruction materials are restricted by Israel’s controls on goods entering the territory. Conditions, say the UN, remain “dire”. The violence has not stopped: Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed about 600 people since the ceasefire began. The announcement that the US would transfer $10bn to President Donald Trump’s newly convened Board of Peace is hard to reconcile with the reality on the ground. Even worse is that Washington has paid only a fraction of its UN arrears – $160m against more than $4bn owed.

This raises the obvious question: why is a private initiative being capitalised so heavily while existing UN mechanisms remain severely cash-strapped? Funnelling state funds into a body chaired by Mr Trump suggests foreign policy is serving private interests, not the public good. The board has ambitious plans. Rafah is to be rebuilt within three years with skyscrapers. Gaza is to become self-governing within a decade. An International Stabilisation Force is expected to begin deployment, eventually numbering 20,000 troops. These are dramatic claims. But their delivery is largely notional.

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.

Democrats cry foul at change to airport closest to Mar-a-Lago days after president’s lawyers trademarked new name

Democrats in Florida have condemned Republican colleagues in the state legislature who approved renaming the airport in West Palm Beach to the “President Donald J Trump International Airport”, less than a week after lawyers for Trump sought to trademark the name.

Only the signature of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, now stands before a renaming ceremony at the airport less than six miles from the president’s waterfront Mar-a-Lago mansion and private resort club in Palm Beach.

After a successful halfpipe qualifier, Team USA's Hunter Hess flashed an "L" and referenced insults from President Trump.

Narendra Modi’s thirst to supercharge economic growth is matched by US desire to inject AI into world’s biggest democracy

India celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, “early versions of true super intelligence” could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week.

It’s a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi: can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to raise the prospects of its 1.4 billion people?

Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm’s use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.

A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers. The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. women's hockey veteran Kelly Pannek reflects on the team's stunning overtime win against Canada to claim Olympic gold.

Dozens of the animals in Chiang Mai region first began to show signs of illness earlier this month

A highly contagious virus is believed to have caused the deaths of 72 captive tigers in northern Thailand this month, with officials racing to contain the outbreak.

Teams are urgently disinfecting enclosures and preparing to vaccinate surviving animals.

Large U.S. retailers say the Trump administration tariffs are forcing them to hike customer prices to offset higher costs.

The Justice Department's civil antitrust enforcement action against OhioHealth comes a week after DOJ's antitrust chief, Gail Slater,​ was fired from her post.

Businesses could be owed nearly $150 billion in refunds after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The split screen between President Donald Trump’s talk of peace in Washington and drumbeats of war in the Middle East struck some critics as incoherent.

Environmental groups warn that weakening air toxics and mercury standards will lead to higher health-related costs

The Trump administration announced on Friday it would roll back air regulations for power plants limiting mercury and hazardous air toxics at an event in Kentucky, a move it says will boost baseload energy but that public health groups say will harm public health for the most vulnerable groups in the US.

Donald Trump’s EPA has said that easing the pollution standards for coal plants would alleviate costs for utilities that run older coal plants at a time when demand for power is soaring amid the expansion of datacenters used for artificial intelligence.

French champion Surya Bonaly backflipped on Olympic ice years before Ilia Malinin was even born, and it brought her penalization, not plaudits.

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled President Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs under a federal emergency powers law.

Schumer says ‘overreach failed’ after court rules president cannot bypass Congress’s power to tax

• US politics – follow live

Democratic lawmakers are rejoicing after the supreme court ruled that Donald Trump overstepped his authority by imposing steep tariffs on global imports, toppling one of the president’s most aggressive assertions of executive power.

The 6-3 ruling found that a 1977 emergency powers law did not provide legal justification for most of the administration’s sweeping tariffs, a ruling the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, framed as a win for “American consumers” and an example of how Trump’s “overreach failed”.

US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House Expert comment thilton.drupal 20 February 2026

Initial reaction after the top US court dealt a blow to President Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.

By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies to impose tariffs.

They ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 did not grant the president the power to impose tariffs, which have been a central part of Trump’s economic agenda during his second term. Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he would impose a new levy.

Here is early analysis. Chatham House experts are monitoring developments, and will be following the fallout from, and reaction to, the ruling.

Heather Hurlburt, Associate Fellow in Chatham House’s US and the Americas Programme, writes:

At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.

The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.

I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.

The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10% tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other “national security” tariffs.

However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)

President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down. He has already told a reporter that he still has options, and crucially he did not appear to be backing off his fondness for tariffs.

I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanagh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’

The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.

Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?

Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?

Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.

This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.

Heather Hurlburt has a distinguished career in analysing, explaining and working to close the gap between the practice of international affairs and the realities of politics in the United States.

From 2022 to 2024, she served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, overseeing strategy and management for the agency charged with carrying out President Biden’s initiative for a worker-centred American trade policy. Read her full Chatham House biography here.

Last November, when the legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs reached the Supreme Court, one of Heather Hurlburt’s Chatham House colleagues wrote about the issues involved, and how the outcome could have far-reaching consequences for global trade and beyond. 

From the Chatham House archive:

Max Yoeli, Senior Research Fellow in the US and North America Programme, wrote on 5 November 2025:

‘The case concerns tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which empowers the president to declare a national emergency over an ‘unusual and extraordinary’ foreign threat and respond with a range of actions, including sanctions and the freezing of funds. 

IEEPA has never before been used as a basis for tariffs nor does the statute explicitly authorize them, though President Richard Nixon relied on a similarly worded law to impose an emergency tariff on imports in 1971.

Under the US Constitution, taxation is Congress’s remit. The power to impose tariffs can be delegated to the executive under the right circumstances, including authority presidents have used across administrations to impose sectoral tariffs on national security grounds.

Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump is also using IEEPA to impose tariffs, including levies on China, Mexico and Canada linked to fentanyl supply chains, ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on global trading partners in response to the US’s trade deficit, and recent measures targeting developments in Brazil and India.’

Read his full Expert Comment here: Trump’s tariffs face Supreme Court challenge that could have significant consequences for presidential power

US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House experts Expert comment thilton.drupal 20 February 2026

Chatham House analysts give their Initial reactions to the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling, its likely impact on President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, and his angry response to the ruling.

The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.

By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies to impose tariffs.

They ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 did not grant the president the power to impose tariffs, which have been a central part of Trump’s economic agenda during his second term. 

Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he will impose global tariffs of 15%.

Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts, who are are monitoring developments and will be following the fallout from the ruling.

Heather Hurlburt, Associate Fellow, US and North America Programme:

At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.

The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.

I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.

The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10% tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other “national security” tariffs.

However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)

President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down.

I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’

The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.

Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?

Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?

Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.

This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.

Heather Hurlburt has a distinguished career in analysing, explaining and working to close the gap between the practice of international affairs and the realities of politics in the United States.

From 2022 to 2024, she served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, overseeing strategy and management for the agency charged with carrying out President Biden’s initiative for a worker-centred American trade policy. Read her full Chatham House biography here.

Ambassador Julián Ventura, Associate Fellow, US and North America Programme:

The 20 February US Supreme Court 6-3 decision on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is a significant fork in the tariff-driven trade policy road taken exactly 13 months ago by President Donald Trump when he announced his America First Trade Policy.

It does not, however, mark an end to his expansive use of Executive authority to shape his engagement with global trading partners.

In his combative reaction to the ruling, the president previewed alternative legal authorities that his administration will use as a basis for continued tariff action, including a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows for temporary import surcharges or import quotas to address balance-of-payments issues.

With details on scope, applicability and implementation of additional actions still unclear, US trade partners around the world will scramble in the coming days to determine the potential impact on their respective deals or framework agreements reached with Washington. Uncertainty will continue to be the name of the game.

The ruling comes on the heels of the release of the US Census Bureau’s 2025 international trade data confirming Mexico and Canada’s place as the first and second US trading partners, export markets and sources of imports, and as the three countries undertake the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)’s first joint review.

In North America,  with intraregional annual trade at almost 2 trillion dollars and millions of jobs and investment decisions linked to the continuity of the agreement, a great deal is at stake.

In its initial reaction to the ruling, the government of Canada stated that it reinforces its view that the IEEPA tariffs ‘are unjustified’. Mexico´s Secretary of the Economy said he would be reaching out to his US counterparts and await more details on the announced 10% global tariff. Both countries were subject to IEEPA tariffs (35% on Canada and 25% on Mexico) on non-USMCA compliant exports, in addition to various Section 232 sectorial tariffs which continue to apply.

It’s important to keep in mind that  roughly 85% of massive Canadian and Mexican USMCA-compliant exports – totalling approximately 780 billion dollars – maintains tariff-free access to the US market.

Beyond specific negotiating strategies with Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City will continue to focus on reducing uncertainty and preserving their current relative competitive advantages in a rapidly changing tariff environment.

Ambassador Julián Ventura is a career diplomat, currently on leave from the Mexican Foreign Service. With over 33 years in public service, he has held senior diplomatic positions in four administrations, most recently as Deputy Foreign Secretary, where he oversaw key relationships in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and served as Mexico’s G20 Sherpa. Read his full Chatham House biography here.

Professor Roland Paris, Associate Fellow, US and North America Programme:

The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs may have removed one instrument from his tariff toolkit, but it has done nothing to make US trade policy more predictable. If anything, it may herald even greater volatility.

Trump retains several alternative instruments now that tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) have been ruled unlawful. Each entails procedural hurdles, evidentiary thresholds, time limits and litigation risks. Yet, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in his dissenting opinion, “the Court’s decision might not prevent Presidents from imposing most, if not all, of these same sorts of tariffs under other statutory authorities.”

That Trump, visibly angered by the ruling, quoted Kavanaugh’s statement not just once but twice suggests that he is not reconsidering his long-held belief in the benefits of tariffs. He has already pledged to introduce a new global tariff of 15 per cent, while signalling that further measures may follow.

For US trade partners – including several that negotiated agreements intended to reduce IEEPA tariffs on their exports – the outlook is unclear. The uncertain status of those arrangements, together with the prospect of new tariffs, now adds an additional layer of unpredictability to an already unstable picture.

Canada, for its part, gains little from the removal of the IEEPA tariffs, since goods compliant with the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement were already exempt. Meanwhile, the tariffs inflicting real pain on key Canadian sectors – including autos, steel, aluminium and lumber – remain in place because they rest on different statutory authorities. And any new US global tariffs may prove more damaging than the IEEPA measures if they eliminate existing exemptions.

The logic of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, in other words, remains unchanged: the US is no longer a predictable or reliable partner, leaving its jilted allies with little choice but to diversify their trade partnerships and invest in their own resilience.

Last November, when the legal challenge to President Trump’s tariffs reached the Supreme Court, Senior Research Fellow Max Yoeli wrote about how the outcome could end up having far-reaching consequences for global trade, and beyond. Here is his commentary, from the Chatham House archive:
 

Max Yoeli, Senior Research Fellow in the US and North America Programme, wrote on 5 November 2025:

‘The case concerns tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which empowers the president to declare a national emergency over an ‘unusual and extraordinary’ foreign threat and respond with a range of actions, including sanctions and the freezing of funds. 

IEEPA has never before been used as a basis for tariffs nor does the statute explicitly authorize them, though President Richard Nixon relied on a similarly worded law to impose an emergency tariff on imports in 1971.

Under the US Constitution, taxation is Congress’s remit. The power to impose tariffs can be delegated to the executive under the right circumstances, including authority presidents have used across administrations to impose sectoral tariffs on national security grounds.

Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump is also using IEEPA to impose tariffs, including levies on China, Mexico and Canada linked to fentanyl supply chains, ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on global trading partners in response to the US’s trade deficit, and recent measures targeting developments in Brazil and India.’

Read his full Expert Comment here: Trump’s tariffs face Supreme Court challenge that could have significant consequences for presidential power

Man in 60s also faces charges of raping and sexually assaulting his wife over period of 20 years

A man has appeared in court accused of conspiring with other men to drug his wife and rape her while she was unconscious.

The man, in his 60s, from the Stockport area of Greater Manchester, also faces charges of raping and sexually assaulting his wife over a period of 20 years.

Investors respond after US supreme court rules that Donald Trump exceeded his authority in imposing sweeping tariffs under emergency powers

• US Politics live: US supreme court rules against Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs

• UK reports record-breaking budget surplus of £30.4bn in surprise boost for Rachel Reeves

• Art and antiques help lift retail sales in Great Britain to biggest monthly rise since 2024

The jump in tax receipts last month may show that UK government receipts are starting to get the boost from inflation and wage growth earlier in the year.

Nick Ridpath, research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says:

Today’s data on the public finances is particularly important, given the outsized impact of January’s self-assessment returns on revenues and borrowing for the year as a whole.

Income tax receipts had been a little disappointing over 2025, lagging behind forecasts even as inflation and wage growth exceeded expectations. But today’s data shows that self-assessment revenues in January were almost £2bn (6%) higher than forecast.

Mail order retailers, which are predominantly online, experienced a boost from retailers selling sports supplements, as well as continued strong sales volumes by online jewellers. Comments from jewellers reported that demand had hit unprecedented levels.

Ex-investigations editor Paul Henderson says allegation he was link for corrupt private investigators is an ‘absolute lie’

A former Mail on Sunday journalist has denied being the “handler” of a private investigator alleged to have bugged homes and tapped the phones of his targets, the high court has heard.

Paul Henderson, who was the Mail on Sunday’s investigations editor and briefly its news editor, said it was surreal to be described as having a close relationship with Gavin Burrows, a private investigator whose disputed confessions provide the most serious accusations of unlawful information gathering against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

"I guess I can say I am considering that," President Trump told reporters when asked about the possibility of a limited strike on Iran.

Former prince’s arrest was most damaging event for the family firm in centuries – and the questions keep coming

London fashion week was probably the last public place King Charles III wanted to be on Thursday, admiring the suits and costumes that no one he knows would dream of buying, and making light conversation with designers he would have difficulty in recognising at a royal garden party.

Charles must have been contemplating the crumbling of all his plans and hopes for his reign. He always knew it would be short, even before his cancer diagnosis, but he probably never thought it would be upended by the alleged behaviour of his own brother.

Rumors about the next iPhone model already are spreading. Here are all the speculation and leaked information we've heard about so far.

Amateur climber’s conviction over girlfriend’s death could put people off activity, say experts

• Climber convicted of manslaughter after leaving girlfriend on Austria’s highest peak to seek help

The decision of an Austrian court to convict an amateur climber of manslaughter after he had left his girlfriend behind to die on an Alpine peak in winter is certain to be examined closely throughout Europe.

In his decision in Innsbruck, the judge, Norbert Hofer – a climber, and an expert in Austrian law relating to the mountains – ruled that the “galaxies-wide” disparity in experience and skills between Thomas P and his late girlfriend Kerstin G meant he had been de facto acting as her mountain guide “as a favour” despite no financial arrangement having been involved.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Abu Dhabi will establish a national-scale AI supercomputer in India, marking a new phase in India’s AI infrastructure development. The system will be delivered by G42 and Cerebras, in partnership with Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Designed to meet sovereign security and compliance requirements, the supercomputer will serve as a foundational asset under the India AI Mission. Image credit: G42.

The landmark project was announced on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit 2026 taking place in New Delhi, India. It follows the 5th India-UAE Strategic Dialogue held in December 2025 and the visit of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, to India in January 2026, that solidified a comprehensive partnership framework across defense, technology, space and energy.

At 8 exaflops of AI compute (measured using AI-optimized, lower-precision operations), the new system represents a significant increase in peak compute capacity, marking a transition to exaflop-scale AI infrastructure in India and expanding the country’s domestic compute capabilities for advanced AI development.

Hosted within India, the system will operate under India-defined governance frameworks, with all data remaining within national jurisdiction. Designed to meet sovereign security and compliance requirements, the supercomputer will serve as a foundational asset under the India AI Mission.

“Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness,” said Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India. “This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security.”

Once operational, the India supercomputer will be accessible to the nation’s diverse ecosystem, from premier institutions to startups, small and medium enterprises, and government ministries. This democratized access model is designed to lower barriers to AI innovation, particularly for applications serving India’s 1.4 billion citizens.

“MBZUAI is committed to advancing AI research and education that addresses real-world challenges. This collaboration with India represents a shared commitment to expanding access to advanced AI compute for researchers and students, enabling breakthroughs in critical areas like healthcare, agriculture and education,” said Richard Morton, Executive Director, Institute of Foundation Models, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

“Cerebras and G42 have already successfully delivered Condor Galaxy supercomputers in the United States, demonstrating how our technology is purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads at scale,” said Andy Hock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cerebras. “Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs.”

This latest project builds on G42’s commitment to supporting nations in building domestic AI capability. In December 2025, G42 and MBZUAI released the latest version of the open-source Hindi-English large language model (LLM), NANDA 87B, featuring 87 billion parameters. As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies, India plays a central role in advancing regional AI innovation. The new supercomputer aims to strengthen India’s ability to build, deploy and scale AI securely within its own borders.

Source: G42

The post G42, MBZUAI, Cerebras, and C-DAC Partner on National AI Supercomputer for India appeared first on HPCwire.

• Werder Bremen scrap plans to play in Minnesota, Detroit

• Club cites unrest after ICE killings, US visa restrictions

German soccer club Werder Bremen have canceled a trip to the United States due to concerns over unrest in Minnesota after the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as economic risks, a club spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

The top-flight team were planning to visit Minnesota and Detroit in May and play two friendly matches, according to media reports in the US and Germany. No opponents for the matches had been confirmed.

STONY BROOK, N.Y., Feb. 20, 2026 — In his office lined with hand-drawn diagrams and alphabet-like symbols, Stony Brook researcher Jeffrey Heinz is trying to answer a deceptively simple question: How well, exactly, can today’s neural networks learn, and where do they fail?

Heinz, a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute of Advanced Computational Science, usually studies the sound patterns of human language. In his latest project, he and his collaborators have built something that looks less like a traditional linguistics study and more like a stress test for modern AI.

Their work, called MLRegTest, is a carefully designed stress test for neural networks (or other AI techniques), built not to ask a model to write articles or poems, but to pose thousands upon thousands of tiny yes-no questions about simple symbol patterns, and watch very closely what happens.

Heinz said, “We’re trying to understand the learning capacities of neural networks from a controlled experimental point of view,” Heinz said.  “It’s an endeavor to map their performance on kind of a big scale.”

1,800 Tiny ‘Languages’ for Machines

At the heart of MLRegTest is a huge collection of what computer scientists call formal languages, not English or Spanish or French, but small, made-up rule systems over simple symbols.

Think of them like this:

• There’s a small alphabet of symbols (like A, B, C, D).
• You line them up into short sequences.
• A hidden rule decides which sequences “belong” and which don’t.

A model’s job is to look at lots of examples and learn to answer: Does this sequence follow the rule, yes or no?

Heinz and his team constructed 1,800 different rule systems of this kind. Then, for each one, they generated a plethora of example sequences, some that obeyed the rule and others that didn’t. “This was a large-scale effort because we wanted to create a benchmark that would be around for a while,” Heinz added.

Each rule is built using a compact mathematical description called a grammar — like an equation that defines which sequences are in and which are out. The team also made sure that every language in the collection was genuinely distinct, not just a disguised version of another rule.

That careful construction matters. Because the patterns are so tightly defined, they give researchers a way to “look inside” the black box of neural networks without actually opening it up.

Pushing AI to the Edge of the Rule

Once MLRegTest was built, the team used it to probe how different neural network architectures behaved when they tried to learn these pattern rules. Two parts of the test design were especially revealing.

First, the researchers checked how well models could generalize to longer sequences than the ones they saw during training. That’s a long-standing worry in natural language processing: a system may see mostly short sentences in training, then stumble when faced with something much longer and more complex. MLRegTest confirmed that performance tends to drop as sequences get longer.

But the most striking results came from a more delicate probe: what Heinz calls the “border” of a language.

For each rule system, the team built special test sets made of pairs of almost-identical sequences. Each pair is the same length, with the same symbols in nearly the same positions. The only difference might be a single symbol. According to the underlying rule, one sequence belongs, and the other doesn’t.

To humans, those edge cases are often where the rule becomes clearest: change one small thing, and suddenly the pattern breaks.

The networks struggled.

“We found that the networks were much worse at correctly classifying those strings along the border of the language,” Heinz said. “While they could learn generally pretty well, they weren’t learning the same thing as the underlying pattern.”

In other words, on everyday examples, the models often looked fine. But when you zoom in on the edge cases, they reveal that AI has learned a rough approximation of the rule, not the rule itself.

In high-stakes domains — law, medicine, or engineering — that distinction matters. The “border cases” are exactly where we most need a system to behave reliably.

Not Just ‘More Data, More Compute’

MLRegTest is also a quiet challenge to the current trends of training AI models: “Just feed it more data.”

For every one of the 1,800 languages, the team trained models in three conditions: small, medium, and large training sets. From his linguistics background, Heinz is especially interested in systems that can learn from limited data — more like kids who generalize quickly from relatively few examples.

“I think it’s possible to design learning systems that can generalize accurately and quickly from small amounts of data,” he said. “The trend in AI has not been in that direction. It’s been, let’s consume more data, more compute, more energy.”

This is not only a scientific concern but a practical one. In applications like robotic medical assistance or self-driving cars, many of the most serious situations are rare: a particular combination of weather, road design, and other drivers might occur only one in a million times. A model that only works well on patterns it has seen thousands of times isn’t enough.

Heinz imagines MLRegTest as a kind of challenge problem for anyone who wants to push AI in a different direction.

The benchmark makes it possible to say: here is a wide variety of clearly defined pattern rules; here are strict tests on their edge cases; here are three tiers of training data. How far can your system go?

“If any system can do well across the board on the small data set, that would be a truly remarkable accomplishment,” he said.

A Long View on AI’s Limits

MLRegTest answers to a long tradition. In the 1940s, early neural networks were analyzed using symbolic tools that later became the regular expressions many programmers use today. Heinz’s work loops back to that history, using modern mathematical tools to study today’s much larger networks.

He’s realistic about how quickly it will influence commercial models.

“I don’t think Big Tech cares about this at all,” he said with a laugh. “But for researchers who want to understand AI systems, not just deploy them, the benchmark offers something rare: a way to ask precise questions about what a model has really learned.” Notwithstanding, there is growing interest in generative AI for formal languages that can be used to develop verifiable code for applications, like critical infrastructure.

Heinz’s work is a reminder that good performance on a handful of benchmarks doesn’t necessarily mean deep understanding. If we want AI systems we can trust, we’ll need to keep inventing new, sharper ways to test them.

Source: Ankita Nagpal, Stony Brook University

The post Stony Brook Study Stress-Tests Neural Networks on Thousands of Tiny Rule Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

"America's Next Top Model" winner Eva Marcille tells "CBS Mornings" that she "was gobsmacked" after watching behind-the-scenes moments from the reality competition show.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Telefónica, Fundación Vithas, and Francisco de Vitoria University (UFV) have launched a new project that uses quantum computing for the intelligent design of cancer drugs.

Credit: Telefónica and Fundación Vithas

The goal is to combat the BRAF V600E mutation, an altered protein that drives the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells, by generating molecules that inhibit the action of this protein. To this end, this multidisciplinary team has developed a hybrid model that combines conventional artificial intelligence with the properties of quantum physics to generate drug candidates with far greater precision and quality than current methods.

This project represents a technological milestone and a significant advance in speeding up the development of critical treatments in oncology and other complex diseases.

The work to develop the project has been coordinated from the Javier Echenique Talent and Technology Center, a new strategic space for advanced innovation created by Telefónica and located in Bilbao, which places Spain at the forefront of applied quantum technologies in Europe.

The discovery of drugs using traditional experimental methods involves long development times and a high rejection rate, as only a very small number of drug candidate molecules make it to the most advanced stages of development.

In the project, a classic neural network (called LSTM or Long Short-Term Memory) acts as an ‘architect’ that builds molecules while taking advantage of the broad creative vision of a quantum circuit (QCBM – Quantum Circuit Born Machine). This symbiosis makes it possible to obtain a list of high-quality candidate molecules and evaluate them using chemical filters, with the advantage of significantly shortening drug development research times. The work carried out so far has yielded very promising preliminary results, with the molecules obtained improving in virtually all parameters involved in the evaluation of a potential drug.

Towards More Efficient and Accurate Medicine

This innovation pilot combines Telefónica’s connectivity and computing capabilities, Vithas’ clinical experience, and UFV’s knowledge of molecular biology to position Spain as a leader in the use of quantum technologies applied to oncology.

Juan Cambeiro, Head of Applied Quantum Projects at Telefónica Spain, highlights: “This initiative demonstrates how quantum computing has moved beyond theory to become a tool with real possibilities in sectors such as healthcare, industry, logistics, and banking. At Telefónica, we are committed to putting quantum technology at the service of our customers in a practical way and applying it to real challenges. By combining traditional machine learning techniques with quantum circuits in this project, we are not only reducing research times, but also opening the door to more efficient and accessible medicine.”

For his part, Ángel Ayuso, corporate scientific director of Vithas and director of the Vithas Foundation, points out: “From the Brain Tumor Laboratory, a joint unit of the Francisco de Vitoria University and the Vithas Foundation focused on glioblastoma, we are promoting a strategic line of drug discovery that combines the identification of targets or therapeutic molecules in adult and pediatric primary brain tumors (gliomas) with the rational design of molecules capable of modulating these targets. In this context, the collaboration with Telefónica and UFV to incorporate quantum computing represents a differential leap forward: it allows us to refine the selection of structures with a higher probability of success and accelerate the path in the preclinical development of more effective and precise treatments.”

Jorge Plazas, professor at the Higher Polytechnic School of the Francisco de Vitoria University, adds: “The adoption of quantum computing constitutes a paradigm shift in the management and processing of information. At its current stage of development, this technology can already offer tangible advantages in specific areas of application. Characterizing its capabilities, along with expanding its applicability to specific use cases, is a priority line of research for UFV. In this project, these objectives are part of a high-impact inter-institutional effort in the field of health.”

The project will be on display at Telefónica’s stand at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is being held in Barcelona from March 2 to 5, and will also be presented on Wednesday, March 4, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Telefónica’s Ágora in the round table discussion “Applied Quantum Computing: BIN packing and tumor-inhibiting molecules.”

The initiative is another milestone in the collaboration between Telefónica and the Vithas hospital group in quantum computing. During the last edition of MWC, both entities presented a pioneering healthcare cybersecurity project that consisted of deploying a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) link via fiber optics to connect the Vithas Madrid Arturo Soria and La Milagrosa hospitals in Madrid in an ultra-secure manner. This ‘Quantum-Safe’ technology, developed in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and partners such as LuxQuanta and QoolNet, made it possible to shield critical data, such as medical records, medical images, and vital sign monitoring, from the future computing power of quantum computers, ensuring that patient information remains unaltered and private.

More from HPCwire

• Spain’s CESGA Selects IQM and Telefónica to Deploy Advanced Quantum Computing Infrastructure
• IBM and Telefónica Tech Sign Collaboration Agreement for Quantum-Safe Tech

About Telefónica

Telefónica is one of the world’s leading telecommunications service providers. The company offers fixed and mobile connectivity as well as a wide range of digital services for residential and business customers. With over 350 million customers, Telefónica operates in Europe and Latin America. Telefónica is listed on the Spanish stock market, New York and Lima.

Source: Telefónica

The post Telefónica, Vithas, and UFV Launch Quantum Computing Project for Cancer Drug Design appeared first on HPCwire.

Feb. 20, 2026 — The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at NIST has announced the launch of the AI Agent Standards Initiative. The Initiative will ensure that the next generation of AI—AI agents capable of autonomous actions—is widely adopted with confidence, can function securely on behalf of its users, and can interoperate smoothly across the digital ecosystem. Working in coordination with other federal partners, including the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST, CAISI aims to foster the emerging ecosystem of industry-led AI standards and protocols while cementing U.S. dominance at the technological frontier.

Credit: Grandbrothers/Shutterstock

AI agents can now work autonomously for hours, write and debug code, manage emails and calendars, and shop for goods, among other emerging use cases. While the productivity promise is enticing, the real-world utility of agents is constrained by their ability to interact with external systems and internal data. Absent confidence in the reliability of AI agents and interoperability among agents and digital resources, innovators may face a fragmented ecosystem and stunted adoption. To address this concern, NIST, including CAISI, aims to foster industry-led technical standards and protocols that build public trust in AI agents, catalyze an interoperable agent ecosystem, and diffuse their benefits to all Americans and across the world.

CAISI, with ITL at NIST, will collaborate with the National Science Foundation and other interagency partners to advance the Initiative along three pillars:

1. Facilitating industry-led development of agent standards and U.S. leadership in international standards bodies.
2. Fostering community-led open source protocol development and maintenance for agents.
3. Advancing research in areas of AI agent security and identity to enable new use cases and to promote trusted adoption across sectors of the economy.

In the months ahead, NIST will announce research, guidelines, and further deliverables for the AI Agent Standards Initiative. To support the interoperable and secure adoption of AI agents, NIST will leverage a full toolbox for public input, including convenings, RFIs, listening sessions, and other approaches. Stakeholders can inform the Initiative today through responses to CAISI’s Request for Information on AI Agent Security (due March 9) and to ITL’s AI Agent Identity and Authorization Concept Paper (due April 2). Beginning in April, CAISI will hold listening sessions on sector-specific barriers to AI adoption, with a focus on AI agents, to inform concrete projects to spur confident adoption in key sectors. CAISI partners with industry at the frontier of AI, and, with the launch of the Initiative, is working to support the development of a trusted and interoperable AI agent ecosystem that advances human flourishing and U.S. leadership.

More from HPCwire: NIST’s CAISI Issues Request for Information About Securing AI Agent Systems

Source: NIST

The post NIST’s CAISI Announces AI Agent Standards Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

Considering borrowing from your home equity? These are the HELOC and home equity loan interest rates to know first.

Completion of glass cross brings Antoni Gaudí’s church to maximum final height of 172.5m, 144 years after work began

The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum final height 144 years after work began.

After several days when it has been too windy to work, the upper section of the 17 metre-high four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11am on Friday, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. At 172.5 metres, the Sagrada Familia, to which the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí devoted the later part of his life, is Barcelona’s tallest building and the world’s tallest church.

One skier remains missing and is presumed dead after an avalanche buried a group of skiers near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday.

schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The report adds: The FT was able to identify 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use a single private server for their email, "mx.phoenixtrading.ltd," showing that they share back-office functions. The FT was then able to identify companies by comparing the names in the domain to those of entities that appear in Russian and Indian customs records as involved in carrying Russian oil.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google engineers hit the slopes with Team USA's skiers and snowboarders to build a custom AI training tool.

German Doner Kebab aims to open at 25 new sites this year with self-service screens and healthy options aimed at gen Z

They are already packing our groceries and delivering shopping. Now robots are coming to the kebab shop, alongside self-service screens and loyalty apps, as takeaways look for ways to tackle rising costs.

German Doner Kebab (GDK), a perhaps surprisingly British-owned chain that has been springing up across the country, has turned to technology to keep its fast food business buzzing in the face of rising costs and tough times on the high street.

We put 15 of the latest air purifier models through CNET's "smoke bomb test" to find out which perform the best at particle filtering, noise levels and energy efficiency. Here are the models to clean your winter air.

American Express tells CBS News it regrets having had Jeffrey Epstein as a client, as files reveal he used the company to book travel for multiple women or girls.

Demonstrators were outside hotel in Washington demanding the release of political prisoners in Azerbaijan

Bodyguards traveling with the Azerbaijani president, who was visiting Washington for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, punched, kicked and chased protesters outside a Washington hotel on Thursday, video footage shows.

Demonstrators calling for the release of political prisoners were driven from the street near the motorcade of Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani leader.

A day after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at his new home, police were still searching his previous residence on the Windsor estate.

After stepping away from figure skating, the US star climbed back on her own terms. Her journey culminated in a medal, but it was about much more than that

Alysa Liu made her way through a mixed zone teeming with hundreds of reporters at a quarter past midnight early Friday morning, an Olympic gold medal draped around her neck, the sequins in her color-coordinated dress glimmering beneath the klieg lights and crush of television cameras. The 20-year-old from West Oakland had just become the first American woman to win figure skating’s biggest prize in 24 years, drilling seven clean triples to leapfrog a pair of Japanese rivals from third place after Tuesday’s short program and gatecrash her sport’s most rarefied air. But to hear Liu tell it, her second gold in 12 days was merely a passing footnote in a Milan fortnight she doesn’t want to end.

Liu’s carefree mindset should and will be studied in the weeks, months and years after these Olympics – especially these Olympics – as a counterpoint to the results-obsessed mindsets that have shattered the mental wellbeing of so many athletes thrust into the pressure-cooker of the world’s biggest sporting event. She spoke candidly and insightfully on how her unique journey from child prodigy to burnout case to second-act skater gave rise to an indifference to scores or placements. All she wanted in the end was a chance to make the US team and share her artistry on the world stage.

Police say UK entrepreneur Quentin Griffiths fell from 17th floor of an 18-floor condominium on 9 February

Quentin Griffiths, the co-founder of the online fashion retailer Asos, has died after falling from an apartment building in the Thai seaside resort city of Pattaya.

Police told Reuters that the 58-year-old had fallen from the 17th floor of an 18-storey condominium on 9 February.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority. The court ruled that the Trump administration's interpretation that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - grants Trump the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine. The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress. The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: It may sound morbid, but the show offers one last chance to remember beloved figures after they're gone.

Feb. 20, 2026 — AQT has announced the integration of its trapped-ion quantum computer into Scaleway’s cloud. This new cloud partnership aims to strengthen digital sovereignty and expand access to quantum computing in Europe.

Trapped-ion quantum computer by AQT. Photo credit: D. Kühl, AQT.

AQT’s trapped-ion quantum computer IBEX Q1 will be available via Scaleway’s Quantum-as-a-Service (QaaS) platform, which gives industrial companies, research institutions, public authorities, educational institutions and developers access to quantum processing units (QPUs) via its sovereign cloud infrastructure.

AQT’s quantum computer can be accessed and programmed without reservation needed from Qiskit, Cirq and Pennylane packages. The device is available Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 to 17:00 CET, providing customers in European time zones convenient access during their work hours.

Scaleway and AQT’s collaboration enables:

• A new sovereign quantum infrastructure made in Europe, combining European cloud and quantum hardware to support digital resilience and technological independence
• A stronger AQT presence within the French quantum ecosystem, fostering closer collaboration with research, industry, and innovation stakeholders.
• The development of hybrid applications, by pairing AQT’s quantum systems with Scaleway’s classical computing resources.
• An enhanced cloud offering from Scaleway, featuring digital, universal quantum hardware integrated directly into its platform.

“Together with Scaleway, AQT offers our customers hands-on access to the best quantum computers in Europe,” said Dr. Felix Rohde, Director of Cloud Partnerships and Business Development at AQT. “We are convinced that the synergy between our quantum computers and Scaleway’s cloud infrastructure will open up completely new capabilities and international markets.”

“We are thrilled to integrate AQT’s trapped-ion technology into our quantum ecosystem,” said Valentin Macheret, Scaleway’s Engineering Manager. “AQT’s approach offers remarkable fidelity and unique all-to-all connectivity, which are critical for running complex and deep quantum circuits. We are actively enabling the HPC-QC hybrid paradigm, giving developers & researchers the seamless environment they need to leverage this new computational paradigm.”

With this partnership, Europe expands its sovereign quantum infrastructure. The combination of high-performance cloud technology and European quantum hardware creates a robust foundation for the practical use of secure and independent quantum computing. This strengthens Europe’s technological autonomy in a world where the quantum era is no longer a distant promise, but a reality.

For B2B enterprises, this partnership opens a window of opportunities. Quantum computing unlocks new approaches in optimization, simulation, materials research, logistics, financial modelling, and more areas where classical computing is reaching its limits. Cloud-based access significantly lowers barriers to entry, enabling companies to explore initial use cases, build expertise, and secure lasting competitive positioning without the need to operate their own quantum hardware. Those who act now will be better prepared for a market that will fundamentally reshape value creation and business models.

The new partnership directly supports Europe’s ambition for digital sovereignty. Sensitive data and critical workloads remain within a European infrastructure designed to meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and transparency. European cloud and quantum hardware reduce dependencies and build trust – key requirements for enterprises and public institutions alike. At the same time, they provide a solid foundation for long-term innovation strategies across research, industry, and government.

The integration of AQT’s quantum hardware and Scaleway’s cloud provide an open and powerful quantum ecosystem that continues to grow. AQT’s quantum hardware features high-fidelity operations, long coherence times, and full connectivity, enabling advanced experimentation and development. Technology providers, cloud operators, and solution developers are invited to join this platform and collaborate on market-ready quantum applications.

Europe’s digital future is being shaped through strong partnerships, sovereign infrastructure, and a shared commitment to adopt transformative technologies early. As quantum technologies continue to mature, organizations have a unique opportunity to explore their potential today, while executives are given accessible entry points to understand, experiment, and help shape the emerging quantum ecosystem.

More from HPCwire: AQT’s Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer Now Available on Amazon Braket

About Scaleway

Scaleway is Europe’s sovereign cloud and AI provider, delivering a secure, transparent, and sustainable platform. We empower organizations of all sizes with open, independent technologies and continuous innovation to build and scale on their own terms. A subsidiary of the iliad Group, Scaleway combines decades of infrastructure expertise with the agility of a state-of-the-art tech company. With a rapidly expanding network of data centers across Europe, Scaleway offers a comprehensive portfolio of high-performance cloud services, from virtual machines and advanced data management solutions to cloud-native infrastructure and AI-optimized supercomputers. Championing open standards and operating within a fully European framework, Scaleway provides a secure and transparent cloud environment that meets the needs of organizations with the highest digital sovereignty requirements.

About AQT

AQT is a global leader in ion-trap quantum computing, offering high-fidelity systems designed for real-world scalability and applications. Based in Innsbruck, Austria, AQT builds on decades of academic excellence to provide industry-leading solutions for enterprise quantum computing.

Source: AQT

The post AQT Brings IBEX Q1 Trapped-Ion Quantum System to Scaleway QaaS Platform appeared first on HPCwire.

If you’re aiming to heat the human, not the home – or just love snuggling under something cosy – these are our best buys from our test of 24

• The best heated clothes airers to save time and money when drying your laundry

Aside from hugging a fluffy hot-water bottle, sipping whisky and ramping up the thermostat, an electric blanket or heated throw is the best way to ward off the winter chill.

When you consider that more than half of a typical household’s fuel bills goes on heating and hot water, finding alternative ways to keep warm – and heating the person, rather than the whole home – seems like a good idea. Many of the best electric blankets and heated throws cost about 2p to 4p an hour to run, so it’s hard to ignore their potential energy- and money-saving benefits.

Best electric blanket overall:
Carmen C81190 fitted electric blanket (king)

Best budget electric blanket:
Slumberdown Sleepy Nights (double)

Apple's sequel to the iPhone 16E may be getting several new features seen on the iPhone 17, but keep its $599 price.

• Olympic freeski star was born in San Francisco

• VP suggested US-born athletes should compete for US

Olympic freeskier Eileen Gu has responded after vice-president JD Vance appeared to criticise her choice to represent China on the international stage instead of the United States.

With five medals, the 22-year-old Gu is the most decorated female freeskier in Olympic history. She won two golds and a silver at the 2022 Beijing Games and has claimed two silvers at the Milano Cortina Games, with one more medal event set for Saturday in the halfpipe.

Norway's Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has earned the most gold medals at the Milano Cortina Games.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Artificial intelligence and modeling are effective tools for computational research on new materials. The AI-TRANSPWOOD EU project focuses on transparent wood-based materials and their modeling. The project aims to effectively integrate advanced AI-based computational models with SSbD (Safe and Sustainable by Design) principles for the safe and sustainable design of wood-based composites.

The goal in developing new transparent wood composites is to integrate or even replace plastic and glass in the construction, automotive, electronics, and furniture industries. To support this, the project is developing user-centric tools, including alternative modelling methods and targeted LCA tools to measure product life cycles and environmental impacts, for consortium members and external industrial partners. From Finland, VTT, which is coordinating the project, and Aalto University are participating in this 13-partner project.

“The role of VTT and Aalto in the project focuses on the development of AI-based surrogate models, i.e., lighter AI models that replace the original model, as well as the broad development of various machine learning methods,” said Professor Simo Särkkä.

Accelerated development of AI Models with the LUMI Supercomputer

The AI-TRANSPWOOD project utilises the GPU units on the LUMI supercomputer to develop surrogate and physics-driven AI models. They are trained using neural network models and PyTorch software to recognize various wood properties and screen them for the most promising candidates for new materials.

“Lightweight AI-based surrogate models are used for optimization instead of slow and heavy physics-based models, for example. This significantly speeds up model development,” said Aalto researcher Dr. Marcin Minkowski.

“The original physics-based models are used to generate data that is then used to train surrogate models,” said Joonas Linnosmaa, Senior AI Researcher at VTT. “The original model can be revisited to check the results and validate the performance of faster models. The most promising surrogate models can be selected for development as AI models, and lighter models can be scaled up massively, for example, in a supercomputer computing environment. This is currently an established method for optimising and discovering new materials. If the original computational model is unsuitable for a high-performance computing environment, a surrogate model can also be used in this case.”

CSC Training and Expert Support Familiar

VTT researchers are generally aware of and trained in the use of CSC resources. This enables the smooth and versatile use of computing systems in various projects. CSC’s computing services documentation is always available to help when needed. The informal weekly coffee meeting for researchers is a convenient way to network and, if necessary, ask for support for your own use. The multinational LUMI user support, LUST, which also assisted Marcin Minkowski, provides support for the international EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer.

“It is always extremely interesting and useful for CSC to be involved in industrial and academic RDI collaboration projects as an enabler of computational simulations and the use of new technologies,” said Dan Still, Development Manager at CSC. “We want to provide researchers with the best possible tools. Smooth cooperation between companies, universities, research institutions and CSC is a particular focus of our development efforts, because it is essential for Finland that the world-class computing resources acquired to support domestic and European research projects are used efficiently in research and business applications.”

More information about the project can be found here.

Source: LUMI consortium

The post AI-TRANSPWOOD: AI Methods and Modeling Accelerate the Development of Wood Materials appeared first on HPCwire.

Sunshine Sykes says Trump administration poses threats and is recklessly violating law with its mass deportations

A federal judge has accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people.

The judge said that the White House had also “extended its violence on its own citizens”, citing the killings of Renee Good in January by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer and Alex Pretti in the same month by border patrol, both US citizens and both protesting in Minneapolis.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GDP grew 1.4% last quarter, down from economists’ forecast of 3%, though AI and tax cuts could boost growth this year

• Business live – latest updates

US economic growth slowed more than expected in the fourth quarter amid disruptions from last year’s government shutdown and a moderation in consumer spending, but tax cuts and investment in artificial intelligence were expected to support activity this year.

Gross domestic product (GDP) increased at a 1.4% annualized rate last quarter, the commerce department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said in its advance estimate of fourth-quarter GDP on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rising at a 3.0% pace. The survey was, however, completed before data on Thursday showing the trade deficit widening to a five-month high in December.

The most durable power is not enforced at gunpoint; it is embedded in systems. My industry has a simple rule: never do something for one reason when you can do it for fifty. Mature statecraft is built on that logic. Instruments are never singular. Financing shapes procurement; training rewires doctrine; standards lock in industrial orientation; cultural exchange engineers elite formation. When policy reorganises incentives, dependencies, and decision space simultaneously, power stops being an action and becomes an architecture.  The most effective power is not perceived as power, but lived as environment. Europe operates in a strategic interregnum. As such, nothing

The post Soft Power as Dominion: Speaking Softly, Building Systems appeared first on Lima Charlie World.

Global Counsel stops trading after clients cut ties over former ambassador’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

The consultancy co-founded by Peter Mandelson has collapsed into administration, after a number of clients cut ties with the company over the former ambassador’s relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010, said on Friday that it had stopped trading and its staff in the UK were being made redundant.

The built-in basket keeps socks together and shields delicate sweaters from the wear and tear of everyday washing.

Purdue says no ban on Chinese students exists, but reportedly rescinded dozens of offers after warnings from legislators

Several universities have scrapped partnerships with Chinese institutions in recent months as a direct result of pressure from US legislators. But no university appears to have gone as far as Purdue University in Indiana.

Students and faculty at the public university say that an unofficial policy is in effect to automatically reject students from China and a number of other countries altogether.

AI has convinced computer science students to shift majors and white-collar workers to change careers, while some are embracing it

Matthew Ramirez started at Western Governors University as a computer science major in 2025, drawn by the promise of a high-paying, flexible career as a programmer. But as headlines mounted about tech layoffs and AI’s potential to replace entry-level coders, he began to question whether that path would actually lead to a job.

When the 20-year-old interviewed for a datacenter technician role that June and never heard back, his doubts deepened. In December, Ramirez decided on what he thought was a safer bet: turning away from computer science entirely. He dropped his planned major to instead apply to nursing school. He comes from a family of nurses, and sees the field as more stable and harder to automate than coding.

Thomas P given five-month suspended prison sentence and €9,400 fine over death of Kerstin G by gross negligence

• Europe live – latest updates

An amateur mountaineer has been found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter over the death of his girlfriend, whom he left behind on Austria’s highest peak after they got into difficulty on their climb.

Thomas P, 37, was handed a five-month suspended sentence and fined €9,400 (£8,200) for causing the death of Kerstin G in January 2025 by gross negligence, an offence that carries a maximum prison term of three years.

The identities of some of the victims of the deadly California avalanche near Lake Tahoe became known on Thursday.

President Trump directed his administration to release files on UFOs and any "alien and extraterrestrial life," an issue that has drawn decades of fascination — and spawned more than a few wild theories.

Sade Robinson, 19, disappeared after a first date. Milwaukee investigators say clues in her car pointed to her assailant.

A Minnesota federal judge ordered a government attorney to be held in civil contempt of court, further escalating tension between the judiciary and Trump administration over immigration cases.

Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev is in town for a meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace. Police said an incident that “involved Azerbaijan security guards” had been referred to the State Department.

US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding: "He made a big mistake." Asked if he also thinks aliens are real, Trump answered: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not." Former US President Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he thinks aliens are real in an interview released last Saturday. "They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51," Obama said. "There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experts say new labeling could deceive consumers as dangerous substances still allowed under new rules

In a further retreat from its pledge to ban artificial dyes from food, Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would loosen labeling requirements to allow companies to state “no artificial colors”, even though products may contain some dangerous substances such as titanium dioxide.

The FDA in early February announced it would allow food makers to claim “no artificial colors” as long as the dyes are not petroleum-based, but health experts say even some naturally based additives present health risks, and the labeling would deceive consumers.

Sam Forstag, who parachutes from planes to fight wildfires, believes pro-worker polices can flip district from Trump ally

Sam Forstag is used to launching himself into heated territory.

As a smokejumper, his job is to jump out of airplanes 3,000 feet in the air and parachute down into the Montana wilderness. Going by air is often the easiest way to access the remote wilderness and combat the wildfires that burn an average of 7.2 million acres a year in the state.

No one needs a Virtual Boy. But I always wanted one. And now it's living with me at last.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc., was something of an industry standard across government and much of the corporate world. Clients included the US Air Force, Army, Navy and other parts of the Defense Department, the Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, thousands of companies and more than 2,000 banks including Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to federal procurement records, internal documents, interviews and the accounts of former Ivanti employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose customer information. Soon after sending out their order, which instructed agencies to install an Ivanti-issued fix, staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency discovered that the threat was also inside their own house. Two sensitive CISA databases -- one containing information about personnel at chemical facilities, another assessing the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure operators -- had been compromised via the agency's own Connect Secure software. CISA had followed all its own guidance. Ivanti's fix had failed. This was a breaking point for some American national security officials, who had long expressed concerns about Connect Secure VPNs. CISA subsequently published a letter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the national cybersecurity agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warning customers of the "significant risk" associated with continuing to use the software. According to Laura Galante, then the top cyber official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government came to a simple conclusion about the technology. "You should not be using it," she said. "There really is no other way to put it." That attack, along with several others that successfully targeted the Ivanti software, illustrate how private equity's push into the cybersecurity market ended up compromising the quality and safety of some critical VPN products, Bloomberg has found. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Citrix Systems Inc., another top VPN maker, experienced several major hacks after its private equity owners, Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners, cut most of the company's 70-member product security team following their acquisition of the company in 2022. Some government officials and private-sector executives are now reconsidering their approach to evaluating cybersecurity software. In addition to excising private equity-owned VPNs from their networks, some factor private equity ownership into their risk assessments of key technologies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a university ecosystem that breeds hunger for status, Epstein made scholars feel like celebrities

The Jeffrey Epstein story is often told as the intersection of two obsessions: sexual abuse and money. The recently released emails certainly contain significant evidence of both. But after more than two decades as a professor at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, I am most struck by the limitation of that frame – in part because it fails to explain why academics show up so consistently in these files.

Certainly, money played a role in Epstein’s university connections. A rich man using donations and access to burnish his ego and legitimacy is a well-worn script, from Andrew Carnegie’s libraries more than a century ago to Bill Gates’s more recent global health philanthropy. As a college drop-out, Epstein clearly craved “respect” from high-profile academics. Universities, meanwhile, are perpetually fundraising and institutions that rely on donations often avoid asking hard questions about where the money came from. As the Bard College president, Leon Botstein, put it when defending his Epstein connections: “Among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people.” Institutions sometimes learn to stop asking hard questions about where the money came from.

A group of largely authoritarian world leaders and a few observers joined Donald Trump in Washington for the inaugural meeting of the newly established Board of Peace. Guardian Europe reporter Jakub Krupa looks at who attended the organisation's first meeting and what it means for the future world order. The body was created to implement the US president's vision for Gaza’s future after the territory was destroyed by Israel, but Trump has widened its scope, calling it 'the most consequential international body in history'

• Troops for Gaza and money top agenda as Trump’s Board of Peace meets

• Authoritarians, strongmen and dictators: who is on Trump’s Board of Peace?

Mayor says Japanese city will respect donor’s specification that £2.7m gift must be used to repair dilapidated system

Osaka has received a hefty gift of gold bars worth 560m yen (£2.7m) from an anonymous donor and a request for its specific use: to fix the Japanese city’s dilapidated water pipes.

The gold bars, weighing a total of 21kg (46lb), were given to the Osaka City Waterworks Bureau in November by the donor who wants to help improve ageing water pipes, the mayor, Hideyuki Yokoyama, told reporters on Thursday.

We want to hear people who have been through the process of renouncing their US citizenship and how they found it

Are you an American living abroad who has tried to renounce your citizenship? We want to hear from you!

We want to hear about what triggered it, how hard it was, whether you encountered any issues or have concerns about returning home in the future – as well as any fun encounters you had while doing it. How has it all made you feel?

There was a backlash when No 10 invited online content creators inside its doors. But in a fast-changing media landscape, this solves two problems at once

Last year, No 10 took an unprecedented step: it invited content creators to cross the threshold of Downing Street.

Naturally, the creators all filmed themselves outside the famous door. Once inside, their most treasured possessions, their phones, were taken from them and exchanged for government-approved devices, so they could continue to take photos and record video without breaching security guidelines. At the reception, creators from areas as wide as science, education and travel took part in a networking session at the heart of government.

Kirsty Major is a deputy Opinion editor for the Guardian

Destructive storms blasting through parts of the Midwest spawned tornadoes that hit Indiana and Illinois, as near-hurricane force winds swept parts of the region.

A man charged with trying to bribe a juror with up to $100,000 at the drug trafficking trial of a former heavyweight boxer pleaded guilty to obstructing justice.

Do you need to carry so much phone with you? Here's how the two top slim phones compare.

The instrument has strengthened community ties, but some organizers say whistles can create panic or confusion

Over the past year, whistles have become a symbol of the collective resistance of ordinary people standing up to federal immigration enforcement. As the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown to cities and towns across the US, people are relying on whistles to warn their neighbors about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

But not all activists agree on their efficacy. Some organizers, including those in rural areas of the US, say that whistles can heighten panic in the communities they serve. Others say they can create unnecessary confusion for children, the elderly and those with disabilities.

When a few grassroots organizations across the country, from Washington state to Maryland, posted on social media about their decision to keep whistles out of their activism, a debate exploded online. But scholars of social movements say that tactical adaptability is a healthy part of organizing, as coalitions emerge, coalesce and continue to transform to meet the needs on the ground.

After tech billionaire Peter Thiel and others donated to Jace Yarbrough’s campaign, Donald Trump endorsed him

A rookie congressional candidate in a nine-way Texas primary has received the imprimatur of wealthy hard-right donors including tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Claremont Institute board chair Thomas Klingenstein and Charles Haywood, who once expressed a desire to be a “warlord”, according to new Federal Election Commission filings showing early donations to his campaign.

In a recent candidate forum, Jace Yarbrough unapologetically staked out a series of extremist positions, saying that critics may call his approach to politics “bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish”, but that he is “past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form”.

Struggling British carmaker says earnings for 2025 will be worse than City forecasts as US tariffs hit sales

Aston Martin has warned that its losses will be worse than expected and sold its permanent naming rights to its Formula One team, as the struggling British carmaker battles to stabilise its finances.

The luxury carmaker, majority-owned by the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, said its earnings for 2025 would be worse than City forecasts, its fifth profit warning since September 2024.

French utility company EDF says operations in Somerset will start a year later as delay costs firm €2.5bn

Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation at the Hinkley Point C site will face further delay, at a cost of €2.5bn to the French utility company EDF.

EDF said the first reactor at the site in Somerset will begin operations in 2030, a year later than planned – almost 13 years after construction work began – after a series of delays to the project.

Mexico said it seized about four tons of drugs and detained three people from a "narco sub" 250 nautical miles south of Manzanillo.

The updated QuickShot II brings retro gameplay into the modern era while preserving the no-frills button smashing and endearing flaws that fans loved

Nostalgia is big in the modern games industry. It’s ironic that the most technologically obsessed art form on the planet is just as watery-eyed about the past as cinema and music. And to prove it here is the new version of the legendary QuickShot II, a plasticky joystick from the early 1980s that wasn’t even that good the first time round. It was, however, cheap and it resembled an actual fighter plane control stick with its multiple fire buttons and ergonomic shaft. If you wanted a rugged and precise controller you’d go for the Competition Pro, but that one didn’t let you pretend to be in Star Wars or Airwolf. Plus, the QuickShot II had suckers on its base so you could stick it to your cockpit control panel – sorry, I mean MDF computer table.

The new QuickShot II from Retro Games and Plaion Replai is almost an exact replica in terms of its dimensions. You can grasp it in your fist and wrap your thumb and forefinger around its large red buttons. Yes, you can stick it to your table; the designers have even included the original auto-fire switch at the rear for players who weren’t prepared to hit the fire button repeatedly while playing Green Beret.

Guardian review of US justice department files reveals Epstein interacted with six CBP officers. Plus, how anxiety over AI could fuel a new workers’ movement

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

Good morning.

Federal investigators examined Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer who worked at the St Thomas airport to which the late convicted sex offender flew regularly by private plane before traveling by boat or helicopter to his private island, newly released documents reveal.

Was anyone ever charged? No CBP officer was ever charged for crimes related to Epstein, and the Guardian has not seen any evidence to suggest that CBP officers had direct knowledge or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

How have Epstein’s survivors reacted? One of them, Marijke Chartouni, said: “If only the US justice department acted as decisively. It took British police less than three weeks from the release of the latest tranche of Epstein files to arrest Andrew, making Pam Bondi and Kash Patel look increasingly inept.”

The mayor of Osaka says a mystery donor's gift of 46 pounds of gold, to help bring the city's water pipes up to scratch, left him "speechless."

Gloria Allred says allegations involving sharing of state trade secrets were prioritised over sexual assault claims against trade envoy

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – latest updates

A lawyer representing several victims of Jeffrey Epstein has said she does not believe there will be “any real justice” for those trafficked and abused by him and his high-profile associates, despite the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Gloria Allred, who has worked as a women’s rights lawyer for five decades, said that while the UK had acted quickly on the allegation that the former prince had shared confidential documents with the disgraced financier while he was a trade envoy, there appeared to be far less progress on sexual assault allegations against him.

Agreement across continent that Mountbatten-Windsor’s detention has put monarchy in unprecedented danger

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – latest updates

• Europe live – latest updates

Neither the shock nor the historical significance of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was lost on the European press. And if there was one thing that correspondents and leader writers around the continent could agree on, it was that the former prince’s detention had plunged the British monarchy into a place of unprecedented danger and vulnerability.

“Despite all the scandals that have shaken the British royal family over the decades, it’s no exaggeration to say that the arrest of King Charles III’s brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor represents a momentous watershed for the Windsor monarchy,” El País said in a leader on Friday.

In April 2025, Eric Dane announced he had been diagnosed​ with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

The avalanche, the deadliest in California history and fourth deadliest in U.S. history, killed at least eight people and left a ninth missing.

While the PS6's release is still years away, here's what we know so far about the next-gen console from Sony.

The future of home was on display at KBIS 2206. Here's all the coolest stuff coming in 2026.

Netflix has a treasure trove of fantasy gems.

The 2026 MLS season kicks off on Saturday. Our writers discuss the teams, players and story lines they’re watching this year

Messi v Son. The two best players in the league play for the two “glamour” teams on opposite coasts, and each have large and dedicated fanbases. If both stay relatively healthy and perform up to capabilities, there’s no way the race between them for some honor (Golden Boot? MVP? Both?) won’t be fascinating to see unfold. AA

Geoengineering does little to defuse most of the risks that really matter for people – and it runs the risk of making some harms worse

Planetary-scale solar geoengineering interventions involve the deliberate injection of either natural or artificial particulates into the stratosphere – stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI – with a view to offset some of the global heating caused by greenhouse gases. If implemented, the technology would create a metaphorical thermostat for the planet. Such a thermostat is advocated on the grounds that controlling global temperature reduces the harms associated with the climate crisis.

I wish to challenge this assertion.

Having a reliable and efficient smoke detector in your home can be a lifesaver. Here are our top five recommendations.

A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll underscores the extent to which Americans are living in fear of the deportation dragnet and dislike the administration’s approach.

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold.

The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this year and has executed more than 140 people in boat strikes.

As the U.S. hurtles toward war with Iran and further military action in the Middle East and continues to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Cuba is just the latest foreign policy arena where the Trump administration has further ensnared the U.S. This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks with fellow reporter Jonah Valdez about how U.S. foreign policy is impacting the upcoming midterm elections and Valdez’s recent reporting on how a new anti-Zionist PAC has associated with influencers who have made statements that are outright antisemitic. 

Lacy also speaks to University of Miami history professor Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability, about the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Missing from mainstream news coverage of Trump’s attacks on Cuba and U.S. efforts to impose regime change in the region is a recognition of how Trump’s policies fit into his attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bustamante says.

“One of the, I think, subtext of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, ‘We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do,’” Bustamante says.   

“It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think, is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change, per se.”

The Trump administration’s strategy is likely to backfire, Pertierra says.

“You don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear,” he says. “So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America. I think it’s going to further weaken it.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept. 

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept, also covering politics and U.S. foreign policy.

AL: We have been deep in midterms coverage. We had early voting in Texas start this week. The first real midterms of the cycle are less than a month away in March.

Jonah, you’ve been reporting on a new and interesting fundraising group that’s active in midterms this cycle — a group called the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC. Tell us a little bit about them.

JV: AZAPAC got its start in August, and so they’ve been around for a few months now, but really sort of hit traction online when they posted sort of like an ad video in November.

And the video is full of a lot of explosive imagery and language from Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, to a lot of images of Israel’s bombs blowing up Palestinian civilian infrastructure, a lot of dead children. And in this, there’s this voiceover stating the whole thesis for the thing, which is “We need to get Zionists out of American politics. They are extorting Americans of their taxpayer dollars and they have too much influence over the U.S. government.” And they list some of their top enemies, which is AIPAC — which, Akela, you’ve reported on extensively — on top of the more moderate group J Street. So they’ve really positioned themselves as a group that is diametrically opposed to the pro-Israel lobby establishment in U.S. politics.

However, when you go a little deeper into its founder Michael Rectenwald, who is a former New York University professor, and the associations that he’s made with figures on the far right, the picture starts to be a lot muddier than just opposition of Zionism.

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It’s a tricky thing, right? Because, as you know, it’s like the biggest weapon that the pro-Israel establishment has against the free Palestine movement, against any sort of advocacy to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza or any of its actions, is a blanket statement that all of that is antisemitic. A phrase that’s commonly used is, you know, claims of the genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic blood libel.” So you have this situation where this group is trying to be a very loud anti-Zionist voice, but is also making affiliations with figures who are very clearly interested in rooting their criticism of Israel in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

AL: Are they gaining a lot of traction? Are they raising a lot of money? Why should people care about what this group is doing?

JV: That’s a good question. I mean, the first FEC filings came out in January. And so from August when they were founded up until December, they raised about $111,000 — which in the grand scheme of things, when you’re going up against a PAC as large as AIPAC, it’s not a lot.

But I think why we should care about them is what makes them unique. And what makes them unique is they are very directly trying to win over support from not just the left, not just progressives, but also the right and growing criticism of Israel on the right, which has been a huge question mark for pro-Palestine advocates for the past year. Of like, how do we grapple with growing criticism of Israel among the Republican base or even further right than that, and people who are disaffected voters who may not have voted or even avoided voting for Trump altogether, but still have conservative views and are now criticizing Israel for its genocide in Gaza? How do we treat them? Should we ally with them? Should we get support wherever we can? Or should we be skeptical because of their other views?

And so AZAPAC is really, especially in its early months, really catered to that audience. And we see this with its founder Michael Rectenwald going on podcasts such as The Stew Peters Show. Which, if you’re not familiar with Stew Peters, he is a far-right white nationalist who has a show, a podcast that has gained popularity but really took off during Covid. But a big feature of his brand is what he calls the “Zionist occupation” of the government, and a lot of Jewish antisemitic conspiracy theories basically blaming Jewish people for all the issues, including domestic issues of the U.S. government.

He says the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad Satanic Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” And in that same episode, he referred to Department of Justice Attorney Leo Terrell [as] the N-word, and also in another episode referred to Jewish people using another antisemitic slur. And this is just kind of run of the mill for folks like Stew Peters, who, again, the AZAPAC founder Michael Rectenwald is associating himself with, willingly, he told me, to gain support from other audiences to have a broad range of support.

AL: Jonah, I know you’ve had extensive conversations with Mr. Rectenwald, but can you tell us a little bit about his responses to some of your reporting?

JV: I reached out hoping to have an open-ended conversation. Just giving everyone the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are trying to be critical of Israel. It’s like, OK, well, let me hear out what you have to say. 

But before our call, I did a little bit of digging — of like, how is he kind of framing the argument when he’s off-camera? Just going on his Twitter, his X account, and what I found was a lot of references, not just to Zionism, but a lot of references to what he calls the “Jewish mafia” or “Jewish elites,” which are pretty common dog whistles to the far right.

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So I bring some of these questions to our conversation, and he gratefully agreed to talk with me on the phone. And [I] gave him a chance to let me know what his platform is, and he reiterated that he wants to end all U.S. military support to Israel. He opposes the genocide, wants to oppose the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, and he is pouring money into certain campaigns that are looking to unseat certain pro-AIPAC members, such as Randy Fine in Florida. 

Then I ask him about, well, what about the language that you use? Don’t you think that this risks kind of blurring the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? And that’s when he started kind of going on the defensive, and he disavowed any idea that he himself was antisemitic.

At the time, I only knew that he was on The Stew Peters Show for one appearance. And he said that that was like a very uncomfortable situation for him and that he would’ve called out Peters, but he’s a very aggressive person on his show and he didn’t want to startle him or anything. After our conversation, I come to realize that he has actually been on The Stew Peters Show three to four times to promote AZAPAC.

So I call him back and press him on this more. I say, like, hey, what’s going on here? You’re clearly a regular, and I think you’re clearly trying to gain his support and the support of his audience.

This time, he said, Stew Peters really helped us out in the beginning and after appearing on his show a lot of donations poured in and I don’t want to throw him under the bus. And he didn’t rule out any future appearances.

AL: Who are the candidates that this PAC is working with?

JV: I want to highlight two of them that stuck out to me. One of them is Tyler Dykes. You might recognize him as a convicted rioter from the Capitol riots on January 6. He pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, but also was accused, famously, of performing a Nazi salute on the Capitol steps while storming the Capitol building. And even before that, he was also convicted of taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Actually, for that, he was also sentenced for carrying a burning tiki torch, which I guess there’s a charge in Virginia for carrying a burning object to intimidate.

Anyway, there’s also figures that AZAPAC is supporting, like Casey Putsch who is running for governor in Ohio. He posted a video where basically he is giving a lot of Hitler apologist statements. 

But there’s two other candidates that I wanted to mention who AZAPAC supported and endorsed, which is Anthony Aguilar, who is running as a progressive Green Party candidate out of North Carolina. And he was actually one of the whistleblowers from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that blew the whistle on violence aimed at aid-seeking Palestinians in Gaza. He’s taken that moment into a whole political career. 

He actually decided to rescind his endorsement after The Intercept approached him — after we approached him — with our reporting on both Rectenwald, his statements, his associations with the far right, but also these backgrounds of other candidates that Aguilar’s campaign wasn’t aware of.

And it’s the same case for another recent AZAPAC endorsement, which is Greg Stoker, who is also a progressive Green Party candidate. He was part of one of the flotillas to break the siege in Gaza. And, you know, similar case where when we approached him with our reporting on Rectenwald and AZAPAC — decided to rescind his endorsement. And sure enough, as of this week, all mention of both Aguilar and Stoker’s campaign were removed from AZAPAC’s website, scrubbed from social media.

I think they are making a calculation similar to some concerns that I’ve raised in my reporting — it harms the movement.

AL: Jonah, we’re looking forward to reading your piece, which is up now. Thank you for walking us through your reporting. You know, while frustration over Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a major focus of our reporting and covering how the Israel lobby is approaching midterms and how much voters still care about that — this is far from the only foreign policy issue that is top of mind for voters right now. 

We are potentially moving toward war with Iran, according to reporting from Axios on Wednesday. There is a very large aircraft carrier moving toward the Middle East.

Our episode today focuses on what’s happening as the U.S. is ramping up sanctions in Cuba. If you’ve been following The Intercept’s reporting, you know, we’ve been tracking the more than 140 people the administration has killed in boat strikes in the Caribbean. Amid these boat strikes, we hope you did not forget that the U.S. also kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

After toppling Maduro, the Trump administration demanded the Venezuelan government hand over its oil. This has led to a fuel shortage in Cuba, which largely depends on Venezuela’s oil. Now the Trump administration has Cuba squarely in its crosshairs. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security — we’ve heard that one before — which has led to an oil blockade, which is now spiraling into a humanitarian crisis in Cuba as we speak. 

To understand what’s happening, I spoke to Michael Bustamante, an associate professor of history and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability. 

Here’s our conversation. 

Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks for having me. 

Michael Bustamante: Thanks for having me.

AL: To start, Andrés, the last time you spoke to The Intercept in 2024, you were joining us from Havana, Cuba. You’ve since left. What can you tell us about what life was like for people in the country when you were last there?

AP: I was there in 2024. Things were really bad already when I was there. The country was recovering from the Covid crisis more or less, protest waves had gone from a historic exception to part of the new normal. And while I was there, there were actually the beginning of what became, I think, in total six national blackouts. Six times that the entire national grid collapsed, usually for two to three days. Inflation was out of control. Wages had gone back to basically symbolic, at least if you were in the state sector. 

And there was just a despair, a generalized despair, that I had never remembered seeing before. I mean, people were always desperate and frustrated, but there was a despair of things ever getting better that was novel, that was kind of pushing people to leave en masse. In the last five years about 20 percent of the population has left the island, which is pretty extraordinary for a country not in a state of war.

AL: Recently, a reporter asked Trump about Cuba making a deal with the United States. Let’s hear Trump’s response.

Reporter: You’re warning Cuba to make a deal. What does that deal look like? What do you want them to do? 

Donald Trump: Make a deal. Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take off. They’re clogging up their runway. We’re talking to Cuba right now. They have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.

AL: In that clip, Trump goes on to say, “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no anything.” Michael, can you bring us up to speed? Tell us about the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba and the Trump administration’s efforts to increase pressure.

MB: I think it’s widely known that the United States has had a program of comprehensive sanctions on Cuba since the early 1960s that come out of the consequences of the Cuban Revolution, the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties and businesses, the emergence of Cuba as a kind of a Cold War flashpoint. That history has never gone away. 

What I think has changed over time is sort of the degree to which there are holes that are poked in that sanctions regime. There have been openings and closings — most memorably, perhaps, under the Obama administration that really moved to try to put relations with Cuba on a new footing and try to normalize diplomatic ties. In fact, they did that. But the sanctions as such have been codified under law since the 1990s, and that really limits the purview of what the executive branch can do on its own.

The first Trump administration when it came in promised to undo the “bad Obama deal” with Cuba, and it did so, piling on sanctions particularly by 2019 that certainly made things difficult — more difficult — in Cuba.

But the last decade in particular, I would say, has also been a time in which there is a greater and greater consensus inside Cuba, among Cuban economists, among Cuban social scientists, that the country itself is desperate for reforms of a political and economic variety, that the government has been slow — sort of slow footing. And those reforms are needed, not because the United States says so, but because foe and friend alike to Cuba have been been telling them so. 

And so the Cuban people are left in the middle, it seems to me, of a U.S. policy that particularly in the last few weeks has intensified even further in the wake of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro, and the particular vulnerability to that pressure that comes from Cuba’s own inability to put forth a reform program and do so successfully. 

So that’s kind of where we are. And right now, there are few lifelines available to Cuba in an economic sense. The Trump administration feels that it has the leverage and is trying to use it, albeit, as you heard the president admit, at a potentially, very significant humanitarian cost.

AL: Andrés, can you talk more about how these sanctions work and how they’re playing a role in the current state of Cuba’s economy and its prospects for governance? Walk me through how we got here, like I’m 5.

AP: I think that the most urgent sanction, which is the novelty here, is the current oil embargo.

Basically, the United States has declared it as a matter of policy that if you ship oil to Cuba, the United States government is going to increase tariffs and basically engage in punitive economic measures against your country. And so this obviously creates a huge disincentive for countries that even want to sell oil.

So Venezuela would give oil, it would sell it at below-market rates, it would aid Cuba for political reasons. That’s over, thanks to the change of leadership with Delcy Rodríguez. With Mexico, [President Claudia] Sheinbaum has made it clear that she wants to help Cuba. But she’s not really willing to cross Trump on the oil issue. So she’s sending every kind of aid except for oil. That is the real key thing that is basically causing the wheels to come off the bus, as it were. 

But if you’re talking about broader sanctions and regimes, you have Helms-Burton. Trump, during the first Trump administration, activated Title III, which had never been activated before, which among other things, basically says if you’re doing business in a way that engages with or uses resources that were nationalized by the Cuban government, never compensated owners for them, and the owners are U.S. citizens — blah, blah, blah, lots of caveats there — but basically that you can then be sued.

For example, if you have a cruise ship and it docks in a port that was owned by a Cuban who has U.S. citizenship, da da dah, you can then be sued. So the Carnival cruise ships died overnight. That entire sector just collapsed. And I actually had a friend who part of his business model was giving day tours for the tourists who were just there for the day — dead overnight.

Or another thing is, by Trump, and this is — I’m not sure if this is technically an economic sanction, this is not technically an embargo. But another policy that’s hurt Cuba is by putting Cuba on the [state] sponsors of terrorism list. That means that if you’re a European citizen who normally qualifies for an ESTA visa to come to the United States, you no longer qualify if you visit Cuba for a period of, I think, five years, which obviously also impacts the tourism sector.

Also the famous one is, if you have a shipping container and you dock in a Cuban port, you can’t dock in an American port for six months. Like there’s a lot of different measures that turn up the pressure, but really it’s the state sponsors of terrorism list plus the oil embargo that’s really like turning the volume up to 11, right now.

MB: I just wanted to add to that — Andrés has done a good job zeroing in on some of the more recent things and some of the more specific things. But of course, there’s just a broader trade embargo, right? Which means that U.S. companies, by and large, with few exceptions, cannot export goods to Cuba, nor can U.S. persons or actors or companies import goods from Cuba.

Now, there have been exceptions to that put in place over time. A big one came in the year 2000 for the export of food stuff. So it is legal to export food. In fact, a lot of the chicken that gets consumed in Cuba is from the United States. 

One of the, I think, Achilles’ heels of the Cuban economy is the degree of import dependence for foodstuffs. A lot of which has been coming over the last 10, 20 years through that loophole. But I think because of that, and because of loopholes like that, and then also because of the fact that the trade embargo per se is a bilateral thing, it doesn’t impact in theory the ability of Cuba to trade with France or Brazil or whatever else. You often hear this commentary, “Well, you know, embargo, what embargo if Cuba can trade with the rest of the world?” And that’s kind of true, but it neglects sort of the impact of the sanctions regime on global financial institutions.

The fact of the matter is that because the global financial system is so integrated and so tied into U.S. banking institutions — because particularly of Cuba’s addition to the state sponsors to terrorism list — any transaction that Cuba might want to do with an enterprise in Europe, say, but that has a link to a U.S. bank or that has a subsidiary that operates in the United States, they just don’t want to touch it. Cuba is radioactive. 

And so there are significant kind of extraterritorial effects of the U.S. sanctions regime that obviously don’t make it any easier for Cuba to do business elsewhere in the world, even when in some ways they can.

AL: President Barack Obama, as you mentioned Michael, tried to normalize relations with Cuba when he first entered office, lifting restrictions on remittances and travel to Cuba. In 2014, Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro’s brother, took steps to fully restore diplomatic ties, and there were signs of positive economic outcomes as a result. Then Trump won in 2016, immediately reversed those Obama-era policies. Biden comes into office and tries to normalize relations again. Then Trump is back in office, this time increasing pressure on the country even more.

What has that back and forth on U.S. policy toward Cuba meant for the nation and what is driving the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts, which I will note that the United Nations is warning that the humanitarian situation will “worsen and if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” Andrés, I’ll start with you.

AP: I think that the first thing the listeners should understand is that pre-1991 and post-1991 U.S. Cuba policy have similar but very different dynamics. In the context of the Cold War, you could make more arguments about Cuba as a national security threat. You could make these arguments, like Cuba is intervening in Angola and U.S. interests and all the rest, or U.S. support for guerrillas in Central America. Post-1991, the problem is more like a Jeep that’s stuck in the mud on the side of the road, right? Even though the consensus — 

AL: I love that image. Yes.

AP: The consensus post-1991 has long been, at least in foreign policy circles, like a rational Cuba policy would be normalization. It would be engagement. I mean, think back to the ’90s. What is the U.S. approach to China? More trade, more investment, more integration in the hopes that you’re going to defeat Communism with Nike and Coca-Cola. That’s similar to what people have been thinking about Cuba for a long time. But because of the fact that an increasingly well-organized Cuba lobby in a strategic swing state — like Florida — is able to basically leverage that. Not saying you can’t cross them; you can. Obama did, and he won Florida anyway.

But it increased the pressure. And part of it is, Cuba is not important enough to kind of escape those shackles of domestic politics. If it were a national security issue, then those domestic policy issues could be overridden much more easily. But it’s not, and that’s kind of the core problem. It can have this kind of lobby interest capture in a way that many other countries don’t. And I think that’s the core problem.

AL: Michael.

MB: First, just on the flip-flopping between relative degrees of openness and closeness in U.S. policy — it certainly doesn’t do anything to help, say, the investment landscape in a place like Cuba.

Imagine you’re a European company or whatever, and you’re watching this sort of flip-flop. You want stability in whatever the framework is in which you have to figure out how to operate. And by the way, that also applies to the increasingly important Cuban private sector, which has been growing slowly but surely through ups and downs in Cuba’s own internal regulatory framework. But in 2024, the Cuban private sector was doing more business just in terms of retail sales to the population than the Cuban state. And that is a very significant shift in kind of the internal economic logics of the place. 

But they also are contending not only with an unstable policy landscape internally and the sort of ups and downs of opening and closing to private sector expansion, which have not been helpful. They’re also dealing with the ups and downs of U.S. policy and thinking, OK, can I get a visa to go to the United States and think about sourcing goods in the United States under certain embargo loopholes? Well, are they going to close me off, are they not? Is the U.S. going to authorize investment, for perhaps, in the private sector with the notion that United States might have a strategic interest in supporting the growth of the private sector versus the state economy?

So the flip-flopping makes it very difficult to sort of envision a path forward. It means that I think both for Cuban officials, but also Cubans on the ground who are trying to push their country forward sometimes against the ways that their officials are not happy with. Everyone’s sort of playing whack-a-mole constantly, right? 

One thing I would just amend your description of the recent years slightly. And just to say that A, when Trump was elected the first term, he didn’t undo the Obama thing right away. It took a couple years and cruise ships kept going to Cuba for a couple years, and that was sort of an odd thing. Despite the rhetorical change, obviously. It’s really in 2019 when they put in place what they call a maximum pressure policy tied to a similar policy on Venezuela at the time.

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And then the Biden administration, I think there was some expectation that when they came in, Biden would roll back the clock to what Obama had done. For better or worse, that didn’t happen. And part of that didn’t happen because when Biden comes in, he’s got a huge agenda. It’s the middle of the pandemic. Cuba’s not high on the geopolitical priority list, as Andrés mentioned.

And then when in July of 2021, Cuba was at the low point of the pandemic itself and the economic crisis that had been induced by it or worsened by it and there are these mass protests across the island. And the Cuban government responded to mass protests of people who wanted food, electricity, and greater political freedoms by throwing a thousand kids in jail. 

And so, like it or not, the Biden administration is not going to step into that moment and say, “Yeah, let’s open the doors.” I wish they had been more, had more foresight on the humanitarian front, but there’s also a pattern here of the Cuban government doing things over time that make the political optics fair or unfair for the United States to move its own policy ball forward more difficult. 

And when the Cuban president at the time says, you know, we’re sending out people to the street to combat these anti-revolutionaries, I mean, how do you think the United States is going to respond, even under a Democratic administration? So again, I just again and again, see that in this back and forth, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle of this geopolitical game between both governments. And we’re now seeing those consequences have really probably the most tragic effects that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

[Break] 

AL: Michael, for the Journal of Democracy, you recently wrote, “Many U.S. policymakers, diaspora leaders, and opposition figures have embraced humanitarian suffering as a tool of political change.” You’re touching on this — I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and what effect the Trump administration’s pressure campaign is having on the Cuban people and the government? That’s some of the least of what I’ve seen in the reporting on this, about the real effects on the ground. And I’m also curious what has been the response from Cuban people to the U.S.’s latest efforts to oust the government?

MB: Those lines in the piece alluded to the fact that, in addition to the effort to sanction or disincentivize further oil shipments and really cut off oil, Cuban American elected officials and other voices in the community have been calling for further measures. Measures that would include cutting off commercial flights that still exist between the United States and various places in Cuba that are largely used by members of the Cuban diaspora to go visit and support their families. The ability of Cubans to send remittances to send gift parcels of various kinds, right?

All of these things are really very important lifelines for Cuban families in unequal ways, because not every Cuban on the island has family outside, and not everyone has access to those remittance dollars. But those remittance dollars are a vital lifeline.

I think the position of the elected officials is, is that any kind of economic lifeline to the Cuban economy helps the Cuban state stay afloat. And they are arguing that if the Trump administration is really going to try to crack down, you might as well go all the way if you want to use leverage and try to force them to the negotiating table or force the Cuban government to seed to U.S. wishes or whether opening to U.S. economic interests or political change — you got to cut off every source of supply. 

This has been a more delicate thing for Cuban American politicians to navigate in recent years because they’re well aware that many of their constituents are sending money to their families. Sending, you know, in a country that has — there’s no antibiotics, let alone basic painkillers, right? The care package that you can send really, really makes a difference. 

And just to put it into context, while it’s really hard to calculate the number of remittance or the value of remittance that go into Cuba because a lot of it is sort of in people’s suitcases. It’s thought that the income that the Cuban economy gets from this is really on par of what it has gotten in from something like tourism. So it’s a major contributor to the Cuban economy, but it’s sensitive to cut that off because it touches people. It’s one thing to say, “Down with the Cuban government.” It’s another thing to say, “You can’t send painkillers to your mom.” But lately they have been saying it. The Cuban American officials have been saying it. They’re calling for it. And I think they’re making a bet that you step up the pressure to 1,000 percent and you have a better chance of getting the Cuban government to seed. Of course, there’s a huge humanitarian risk there.

I think it’s a mistake in some of the reporting I’ve seen to attribute the degree of, say, the trash piling up on Cuban streets or the degree of the economic problems to just what’s happened since January. This has been a rolling train wreck for a while. What we’ve done is ratchet it up, and there’s this very dangerous game of chicken that’s happening between both governments. And I think as time passes, the more difficult it is for U.S. policymakers to allege that none of the suffering is on their hands, that this is only the Cuban government’s fault. I mean, it’s both. And again, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle wondering which side is going to back down first.

AL: Andrés, can you expand on that?

AP: I did want to say that a lot of people, and I think Michael has already touched on this, is a lot of people think, oh, Miami Cubans, and you’re thinking about a bunch of white Cubans who left between 1959 and 1975 — that’s a minority. 

Since 1980, not only do Cubans often come from working-class backgrounds, they grew up or were born under the revolution, they maintain closer ties. But many of them still buy in for reasons of extreme frustration with the Cuban government. So I think that even as I disagree with their policies, I do think it’s important for listeners to understand that this is not just the same kind of caricature of the white Cuban who left back in the day. This is like, I have classmates who are pro-Trump — or former classmates, because I did my undergrad in Cuba — and they are pro-Trump, despite being Black and Cuban. That is a dynamic that I think listeners should be aware of. 

But I agree with another thing that Michael said and I think is really important here, which is that it’s not just that this is going to hypothetically hurt people, but this is going to kill people and it’s probably already killing people. What happens when someone has an asthma attack, and there’s no meds at the hospital? Or someone has an asthma attack, and you can’t even get to the hospital because there’s no ambulance, there’s no transportation, there’s no gas? Something that’s small or should be small then suddenly becomes this catastrophic life-changing event.

I even met someone two years ago — two years ago, before this mess — whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip. And she was told by the doctors that she would have to import basically everything, including surgical supplies, not just medicines for him to have his hip replaced or his hip operated on. And I said, “But that means he’s not going to be able to walk.” And she’s like, yeah. 

That is the kind of impact that a maximum pressure campaign has. Which is why traditionally, it’s one thing to, for example, in World War I create this maximum pressure sanctions — no oil, no nothing — campaign against Germany in the context of aggression in World War I or World War II. Or even maximum pressure sanctions against Russia that’s invading Ukraine. Like, that is one thing. 

It is entirely another to have this policy against a government which is despotic, which abuses its citizens, which is incompetent, which does all of these things — I’m not trying to dodge any of that — which throws kids in jail, draconian measures, all that stuff. But then who’s footing the bill? It’s everyday people, and the politicians don’t take responsibility for that. They still try and dodge, by and large, their responsibility.

And the fact that they are killing people and they’re doing it from the safety of Florida — which to me, beyond the intellectual component — to me just feels like, come on, if you really want to commit to this, you’re not even going to suffer from these policies that you’re enforcing. You’re not even going to take responsibility for it. And I don’t think it’s justifiable.

MB: Andrés is right, that it feels a little cheap to say pile on the pressure — pile on pressure from the outside — when you’re not going to be on the receiving end of it. But one thing that I think is important is that because of the tremendous recent migration from Cuba, some of the people who are calling on for piling on pressure do have family members in Cuba.

And they have grown embittered by the fact that they have to send remittances to their family in the first place. And this translates to more and more people I know on the island — I mean, of course there are people on the island who are horrified by what the United States is doing — but there are others who are saying, you know what? Between the sort of unwillingness to move the ball forward internally between our government officials saying we would rather sink in the sea than seed to the Americans when maybe we should seed a little because that would help me breathe too. And then the sort of hostility of the outside, I hear people saying more and more, listen, enough with the sort of middling approaches from the United States, whether it’s poke a little hole in the embargo this, or close down this. It’s either you rip off the band-aid of sanctions and let the economy breathe, and you just learn to live with the Cuban government — or send in the F-16s.

And I don’t say that to sound callous or to endorse that way of thinking, but that’s the mindset of many, many Cubans I know who are, I think, more open than they have ever been to some kind of drastic U.S. action, if it would at least maybe move the ball forward, even if there are tremendous risks that come from it, and rather that than this kind of slow-rolling humanitarian disaster that may unfold if the governments continue to just be playing the standoff over the oil shipments and other kinds of trade.

So I think there’s a thirst for decisive action, but of course this is an administration, if we want to go there, I think they’ve shown quite clearly in Venezuela that they’re not too keen on long-term boots on the ground and trying to do this sort of remote governance, in a sense, by proxy of the Delcy Rodríguez regime. In Cuba, that’s a much more difficult proposition to envision. And so one of the other things I argue in that piece of Journal of Democracy is that, ultimately, if the United States really wants to force regime change here, it might require a kind of forcing of the issue from the outside in a way that I think could get uncomfortable for more isolationist actors within the Trump administration. So that’s going to be very important to watch too — how that conflict internally in the decision-making process in Washington evolves.

AL: You also wrote, “Exile groups, for their part, are as numerous as they are competitive for influence and attention. With Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Cuban Americans have never held more sway in the U.S. federal government. But unlike during the heyday of the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1990s, there is no single organization or leader who can claim to speak for the entire diaspora community.”

I want to talk a little bit about Rubio’s influence here and of the Cuban diaspora, as well as what you describe as “credible architecture for political change.” And the question in the back of my mind here is also like, how much of what we’re seeing here is part of a lobbying effort on behalf of the Cuban diaspora or Cuban interests in the U.S. versus how much of this is just like, we don’t like communism?

MB: I mean, unquestionably, Marco Rubio has been highly influential, if not determinant in the direction of U.S–Cuba policy under this administration. He was certainly in the ear of the Trump administration, the first go around, albeit from the Senate. And it’s no secret that the secretary of state has had a long interest in seeing a different political and economic model in Cuba and believing that U.S. sanctions are the tool to achieve that. 

You know, everybody’s making the Venezuela comparison. So the parts of my piece that you cited come a little bit in response to that. U.S. diplomats have floated this idea that what we want is to combine external pressure with sanctions, with trying to find someone in Cuba to negotiate with. That for someone like Rubio, I find to be highly interesting from a political point of view because this is somebody who made his career in a sense — or at least part of his career, part of his foreign policy bonafide — arguing, as many Cuban American elected officials have, that any talks whatsoever with the Cuban government are tantamount to legitimizing a government that is illegitimate.

That was their response to the Obama normalization, and yet, in effect, what the president himself keeps saying, and Rubio confirms and denies — a little bit more, more unclearly — is that there may be talks underway. There’s a report in Axios that suggests that the secretary of state himself is actually engaged in a kind of a back-channel dialogue with Raúl Castro’s grandson, who is, let’s just say not a particularly beloved figure among most Cubans. How Rubio sells that to a Miami constituency, I think, is quite interesting. But that kind of deal-making impulse is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus. 

And I also happen to think that in the Venezuelan case, Rubio has said in response to criticism, look, you don’t get a political transition overnight, a political transition is not something you cook for two minutes in a microwave oven. I think he’s right in most cases, right? This idea of the Cuban government or the Venezuelan government just kind of imploding and disappearing and to be replaced by something that’s unclear is a little bit of fantasy, I think, in these two contexts. And particularly in the Cuban context where, as I argue, there are opposition actors in Cuba and groups and certainly in exile, but there is nothing comparable to the figure of María Corina Machado that acts as a force around which both an internal opposition and a diaspora opposition can gravitate. And so I think the big missing piece here, in this vision of forcing change through sanctions and dialogue is, where’s the counterpart? And so that’s the paradox of this moment, too. 

I mean, you’ve never had Cuban Americans more influential in the foreign policy-making process toward Cuba, right? It’s not the Cuba lobby anymore. It is a Cuban American who’s the secretary of state. He doesn’t need to be lobbied perhaps in the same way that others needed to. This is his issue. But the Cuban American community is as divided as ever. Not necessarily in terms of their vision for change on the island, but who is to lead it and the politics — the intergroup politics — of this group or that group. I mean, that is as old as time and hasn’t gone away. And contrast with the moment in the 1990s when the Cuban American National Foundation was really the leading organization of the Cuba lobby, so to speak, and claimed, I think with a bit more credibility, to speak for the community as a whole. That’s disappeared. And there’s this sort of scrum of elected officials, influencers, you know, all sort of vying for attention. 

But what is the actual structure of governance that would follow a supposed fall of the Cuban government on the island? I don’t think it exists. And that might explain why this administration, even under Rubio, is flirting with this idea of some kind of negotiated exit, even as improbable or fantastical as that may seem at this juncture.

AL: Andrés, do you want to jump in?

AP: I agree with what he’s saying, and I think that also it kind of underlines this broader tension in the MAGA coalition, as it were. So you don’t just have these conflicting interests and all these positions within the Cuban diaspora, but you also have this coalition where you’ve got the more isolationist wing and you’ve got the hawkish wing.

The hawkish wing is obviously more the Rubio wing. While the isolation of swing is, I guess, more Stephen Miller and JD Vance, though, I’m not sure how seriously Trump takes Vance, but Stephen Miller at the very least. 

So you have all these conflicting interests, and this does seem to be narrowing the possible policies that the Trump administration is willing to do. So no boots on the ground. And this risks not only with Venezuela, with Delcy Rodriguez, that’s not a consummated regime change operation, right? They took out one person. They have someone who’s more pliable, but she’s in a very delicate position domestically.

So it remains to be seen how much of a transition there will be. There’s already like problems over how many political prisoners she’s released, you know, will she try and break free of this kind of quasi vacillation. So, not only is the Venezuela 1.0 model still a question mark, but you also have these tensions within the Trump coalition that severely constrain how much Rubio or Trump or anyone can have a coherent policy towards a country that is, you know, as Mike said, very different and very complex. 

For context, I mean, not only is it that Cuba has a very different level of dissident organization, all the rest — like look at Eastern Europe, look at the USSR. In almost all cases, accept in Poland with Solidarity, dissident movements were microscopic until the very end. In Cuba, you had attempts to organize a broader dissident organization. There was right after the 2021 protest, you had the attempts to articulate something called Archipiélago. That movement was broken. Its leaders were basically given the choice of exile or jail. And there is no leadership.

And so really what you would have to do is negotiate with the state, but then that creates the tension that Mike’s already talked about, which is OK, how do we do that without pissing off these people? It seems like they’re going to piss off part of their coalition no matter how they handle it, even if the current approach is “successful,” right? So it’s really like even seeing things in terms of whatever they’re doing right now is successful, it is going to create problems down the road for them. And I’m not sure that it is going to be successful in the way that they think it is. 

AL: For both of you, what do you think mainstream media, particularly in the U.S., is missing in how it’s covering the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba right now?

MB: I mean, part of it is what I said already. I think there’s some missing context that this humanitarian crisis — like, it didn’t just start. There was already a humanitarian crisis. 850,000 Cubans came to the United States since 2021. That is the largest Cuban migration in history ever. That’s happening for a reason, right?

So where we are now hasn’t come out of nowhere. And I think there’s a kind of a presentism in coverage sometimes that is understandable but I think is missing a little bit of the boat of this wider history. That’s one thing. 

To shift gears slightly to another issue that’s been kind of in the ether, particularly in the diaspora, all throughout this period, and certainly since Trump retook office, is the subtext of migration policy. And thinking about how the Trump administration has treated the historic numbers of those Cubans who came in recent years and sort of revoked status. Long story short, 400 to 500,000 Cubans of that giant recent exodus have some kind of indeterminate status that the Biden administration gave them, that the Trump administration has either tried to pull away or seems less likely than Biden ever was to sort of convert it to permanent status.

Deportations have been increasing, and they’ve been continuing even since January at a slow clip or relative to the size, but nonetheless significant. And so I think one thing that would even in a circumstance in which a Cuban government falls — there’s a regime insider that becomes the Delcy Rodríguez of Cuba, the best-case scenario that the Trump administration can imagine — the politics for the Cuban American community are going to be really important to watch because one of the, I think, subtexts of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, “We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do.” It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does then the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change per se.

AL: Andrés.

AP: One of the core things that I think a lot of the coverage has kind of struggled with is how to balance systemic failure from embargo policy in a particular Trump-era policy. And I think that part of the problem is that if you talk to a lot of people, especially politicians or activists, you’re going to get either it’s all the fault of the government, or it’s all the fault of sanctions, and there’s no real room in between or even like the beginnings of a framework to understand how to approach this.

And I think that, not only to mention it in the same breath is important because it’s clearly both factors. But also something that might be helpful for journalists covering this to think about is, think of the systemic economic and policy failures in Cuba as kind of an immune disease. People often miss that because these systemic failures, these policy problems, the unreformed nature of Cuban agriculture — meaning that a country that is a historical ag exporter is importing previously about 60 to 80 percent of its food. Now, I don’t doubt, somewhere around 95, like they’re importing everything at this point.

Like these are things that are aggravated by the embargo, but they’re not caused by the embargo. And that you need to see the embargo as multiplier rather than cause of why the system just is struggling to breath. Why there’s kind of like a pneumonia — economic pneumonia — in the country right now.

AL: Both of you have touched on the fact that this is happening right after our kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. And I won’t say unprecedented because it’s not unprecedented, but probably the most U.S. intervention in Latin America that we’ve seen since the coup spree of the ’50s through the ’80s. What does this mean for Latin America more broadly?

Michael, I’m really glad you brought the immigration policy into this, but you know, we’ve killed people in boat strikes in the Caribbean. And as you mentioned Andrés, people are probably already dying now from the most recent sort of ratcheting up of these sanctions. 

But as we’ve talked about, it’s not being covered in the same way. So I wonder if you could just speak to that and sort of what you were expecting to see in the future.

MB: The conversation about Cuba policy is intimately related to broader conversations about U.S. national security strategy. If you read that national security strategy that was put out by the administration late last year I believe, I think what was so striking to many folks was how far it leaned away, even from the rhetoric of kind of great power competition and more that we will let China and Russia do their thing, but it’s really about spheres of influence.

And so I think, all this business about the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the “Doroe” doctrine, and aggressive force projection, to put it mildly in the Western Hemisphere, feels like deja vu for someone who teaches about the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America in the early 20th century quite often. So it’s inseparable from that. There’s this notion that the administration feels that this is our hemisphere. I mean, they’re using this language much more boldly and baldly than I think we’ve seen since, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt or something.

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What I think is interesting about this moment is that Latin America itself as a region has had its own backs and forths in terms of the ideological direction of leadership but right now is in a moment of largely or sort of more of a swing to the right with few exceptions. You know, [Gustavo] Petro (Colombia) and Lula (Brazil) are exceptions in the regional political landscape. And also, there’s no love lost in much of the region even on the center left for parts of the region, for someone like Nicolás Maduro who, you know, Venezuela became the source of a mass exodus in its own right that impacted a number of countries and became a political problem across the region.

So I think part of that is why you don’t see many voices in the region necessarily standing up and criticizing too much what the administration has done in Venezuela. The critiques have been more pro forma, but also because those governments that might be more likely to critique those actions, they’ve got their own fish to fry with an increasingly transactional administration that’s wielding tariff threats in new ways. That explains why Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, to go back to an earlier point, is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to the demand that she stop Mexico’s own oil shipments to Cuba. And I don’t think the Cuban government can count on the kind of regional support that it might have in prior moments. 

If you go back 10 years ago, part of the reason that Obama does what he does on Cuban normalization is because he’s hearing an earful every time he goes to a regional summit that the path to improving U.S. relations with Latin America as a whole coming out the George W. Bush years is to get away from sort of unilateralism and interventionism or the threat of that. And that the way to signal to the region that you’re turning the page is to fix your problem with Cuba and get policy on a more normal, practical footing. And guess what? The Cubans are also reforming and there’s a path here. The regional landscape right now is very, very, very different — very different politically. And so Cuba is much more isolated than it has been in a long time.

You hear voices on the center-left also saying, you know, the Cuban government here, yes, what the United States is doing is horrible and using Cuban people as cannon fodder for this policy that increases humanitarian suffering with the goal of getting the Cuban government to seed or come to the table. But man, the Cubans have had a decade or more — 30 years since the end of the Cold War — to get their economy on at least a little bit stabler footing. And they’ve kind of opened themselves up to this in a way, right? Which is not to blame the victim per se, but it is a complicated story. And I think Cuba’s more isolated on the regional front than it’s been in a while because of it.

AP: There’s a reason that the United States just didn’t really do what the Trump administration is doing anymore, right? Like that really in your face, just do it, break some things on our way to fixing it solution or approach to Latin America. There’s a reason we moved past that.

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And I think that a return to that is going to create a backlash. The exact way that this backlash is going to take form we won’t see it for a while. He’s going to cow various governments into obeisance for a bit, but you don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear. You get them to temporarily cooperate while they now figure out a backdoor, other guarantors.

So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America; I think it’s going to further weaken it. Not least because I mean, if you look at who is the main trade partner of a lot of Latin America, it’s not the U.S. anymore, it’s China. China’s investing. This is not the USSR, where the USSR even at peak was a fraction of the U.S.’s GDP and had real trouble exporting their economic model. This is a country that can compete with the U.S. on its own terms, and in fact can excel because like they, oftentimes the Chinese don’t really care as much about, is this country a dictatorship? Is this country going to be able to pay us back reliably? They’ll just do it.

So, I don’t even think that purely in a Machiavellian sense, this is going to create a coherent policy or an effective policy. And another way that I think this is going to create a likely backlash and actually strengthen authoritarian tendencies among the left, is look at the overthrow Jacobo Guzmán in 1954 in Guatemala, which was a seminal moment for many Latin Americans during that period, not at least many of those who created the Cuban Revolution, but also look at [Salvador] Allende in 1973. And I understand that’s more complicated. It wasn’t just a foreign coup. It was like a lot of domestic factors. But what I’m trying to say is, the lesson that a lot of people on the left took was, a democratic path to policies that we want is impossible, ergo realism dictates that we take a different road. And does that mean that we’re going to see guerrillas pop up tomorrow? Probably not. This seems to be set to supercharge that tendency, even if we can’t exactly foresee what direction or manifestation it will have in practice.

AL: I want to thank you both for helping me and our listeners understand this even a tiny bit better. Michael and Andrés, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with us on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thanks a lot. 

AP: Thank you.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post What Does Trump Want With Cuba? appeared first on The Intercept.

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Chatham House Prize 2025: Honouring Sudan’s civilian humanitarian leadership 26 March 2026 — 6:00PM TO 7:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 20 February 2026 Chatham House and Online

Please join us as Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), accept the Chatham House Prize.

Please join us as Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), accept the Chatham House Prize.

Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups – the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – have been awarded the 2025 Chatham House Prize, in recognition of their crucial role in delivering humanitarian support during the ongoing war in Sudan.  

These community networks are said to have been the difference between life and death for millions – saving lives in areas often inaccessible to international organizations. They step in where state structures have broken down, providing essentials like food, water and medical supplies and maintaining or repairing power and water systems.  

Their work has been praised and recognized by several international bodies including the Norwegian Nobel Committee – particularly for their impartial nature and attempts to provide aid for all parties caught up in the war.  

About the Chatham House Prize

The Chatham House Prize is voted for by Chatham House members, following nominations from the institute’s staff. The award is presented on behalf of the institute’s patron, His Majesty the King, representing the non-partisan and authoritative character of the Prize.

The Chatham House Prize was launched in 2005. Previous recipients of the Prize include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sir David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

City of Catania calls ruse to avoid CCTV cameras installed to stop fly-tipping ‘as cunning as it is doubly wrong’

A man in Catania, Sicily, trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish by the roadside in an attempt to evade surveillance cameras installed to combat fly-tipping, municipal police have said.

The episode was detailed in a post on the city of Catania’s official Facebook page. Accompanying a video of the dog was a remark from the police that “inventiveness can never become an alibi for incivility”.

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022

The 22-year-old became the first Black woman to win an Olympic hockey title on Thursday. Those she grew up alongside couldn’t hide their delight

About 75 residents packed the Cleveland Heights Community Center on Thursday afternoon to watch the Winter Olympic women’s ice hockey final. They crowded around a big screen with eyes locked on Team USA – and on one of their own, Cleveland Heights native Laila Edwards. For once, the tension in the room wasn’t the familiar Cleveland sports dread. It was the kind that comes with watching a hometown kid play for something bigger.

Still, the old reflex surfaced when Team USA fell behind to Canada early, and stayed behind deep into the game. Cleveland knows heartbreak, the kind that defined the city for decades before the NBA’s Cavaliers broke through in 2016.

The TV screen’s jazz of drags, snaps, pops, and stops during the Milano Cortina Games have shown sport at its most powder-light and loveable

The mountains always promise escape from the squalor of existence at sea level, if not a kind of purification. The fortifying ruggedness of the terrain, the apple-crisp air, the high-albedo dazzle of sunlit snow: at altitude, it seems, everything is thinned to its essence. The Winter Olympics frequently play on this mythology of purity, but rarely has culture’s quadrennial ascent up the switchbacks felt as clarifying as it does this year. Propelling us into heights untroubled by the compromises and tradeoffs that blight sport’s lower zones, Milano Cortina has delivered images so brilliant and sharp they’ve also served to expose how ugly – and morally murky – most non-Olympic team sports have become over the past four years.

As a TV spectacle, the excellence of this Olympiad has been defined as much by absence as presence. No gambling ads, no live betting odds gunking up the screen, no win percentage trackers, no janky little segments in which the hosts joke about what the prediction markets are doing: these Games have brought delight and relief to a tired public’s eyes in equal measure. Cleaned of clutter and slop, sport, it turns out, can still be a thing of wonder and mystery, agony and beauty. Who would have thought?

The median property tax bill in the U.S. soared 30% between 2019 and 2024, compounding the financial pressures on millions of Americans.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators. "The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine," reports The Verge. From the report: The plan, which was introduced by Hochul as part of the state's budget proposal last month, would have allowed limited robotaxi deployment in cities other than the Big Apple -- while leaving whether New York City would get autonomous vehicles up to the mayor and the City Council. But now that plan is DOA, as support in the legislature never materialized. "Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal," Sean Butler, a Hochul spokesperson, said in a statement. "While we are disappointed by the Governor's decision, we're committed to bringing our service to New York and will work with the State Legislature to advance this issue," Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement. "The path forward requires a collaborative approach that prioritizes transparency and public safety."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

January increase of 1.8% beats forecasts and was also driven by shoppers snapping up jewellery online

• Business live – latest updates

Retail sales in Great Britain rose 1.8% in January, the largest monthly increase in almost two years, according to official data, as heavy discounting and post-Christmas sales drew consumers back to bigger ticket purchases.

The rise easily beat forecasts of a 0.2% rise and was partly driven by sales of artwork and antiques sales in January, alongside continued strong sales from online jewellers, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. It was the biggest monthly rise since May 2024.

Trump has attacked judges and weakened global safeguards. Someone needs to stand up to the US and stop the erosion of democracy

In an era of overlapping crises, corruption is no longer a side issue – it is a structural threat to achieving international equality and even freedom itself. Each year, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a league table of 182 countries, is greeted with predictable theatrics: praise where it flatters power, condemnation where it can be weaponised, and hollow promises of reform that quietly expire once attention moves on. Instead of a moment of reckoning, it is ignored by those with the power to act.

As this newspaper reported, last week’s table showed a “worrying trend” of backsliding and a picture of “democratic institutions being eroded by political donations, cash for access and state targeting of campaigners and journalists”.

Israeli police raid compound, arrest staff and curb Muslims’ access as Ramadan begins

A six-decade agreement governing Muslim and Jewish prayer at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site has “collapsed” under pressure from Jewish extremists backed by the Israeli government, experts have warned.

A series of arrests of Muslim caretaker staff, bans on access for hundreds of Muslims, and escalating incursions by radical Jewish groups culminated this week in the arrest of an imam of al-Aqsa mosque and an Israeli police raid during evening prayers on the first night of Ramadan.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 20.

Exclusive: Josh Simons pressed intelligence officials to investigate reporters, in emails described as ‘McCarthyite smear’

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

NASA has officially classified Boeing Starliner's 2024 crewed flight as a "Type A" mishap, acknowledging serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts unable to safely return. Administrator Jared Isaacman released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-making and cultural issues, with the next Starliner flight now planned as uncrewed pending major fixes. Ars Technica reports: As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner's developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station. "We are taking ownership of our shortcomings," Isaacman said. "Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware," Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. "It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight." Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability" as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken.

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Exclusive: England and Wales charity to examine safeguards after Guardian exposed ‘very dangerous’ advice on Google AI Overviews

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Mind is launching a significant inquiry into artificial intelligence and mental health after a Guardian investigation exposed how Google’s AI Overviews gave people “very dangerous” medical advice.

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Just three months after opening a resource center for people struggling with addiction, a Newark charity is reeling from the theft of clothes and other items that were destined to be distributed to people in need.

Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens visits the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to talk about a months-long project looking at the results of Delaware’s first reassessment of property values in more than 40 years. Working with Tech Impact, Spotlight produced an interactive map showing how the state’s tax burdens and property assessments have shifted in that time. 

In his accompanying reporting, Jake highlights questions around the outcome of the reassessment prompted by the data map, including whether the reassessment will help Delaware achieve educational equity.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

We tend to only get on this podcast with you when you are engaged in massive, months-long projects. 

Yes, that seems to be my forte these days.

For this is a super-complicated project that you and the team have taken on, we are going to start with what we normally call our “Hey mom” question. But your mom doesn’t live in Delaware. 

Not anymore. They retired and moved to warmer climates. 

So we’re going to do the “Hey, mother-in-law question.” I’d like you to imagine that you’re talking to your mother-in-law, who I’m guessing doesn’t know a ton about this issue, and just tell her briefly about this data mapping project and the reporting that came out of it. 

Ironically enough, my mother-in-law and my mother have the same name, so that makes it even easier.

So. Hey Linda, we did this big data project that really looked to kind of check Tyler Technologies’ homework and find out whether the property assessment data matched what we expected to see, and it brought some pretty interesting results. 

Let’s go back to the beginning here. Where did the idea for this project come from, and why did you have to partner with somebody on the outside to do it?

So it really got started out of a little bit of frustration. We’d seen so much hand wringing and conversation and debate over, “Did we get this right? Did we get it wrong? What should we have expected? What didn’t we get?” 

I was looking to the state or maybe even the counties to release this sort of project that basically would help the public really understand what happened with the assessments and the data. We just weren’t seeing it, and from what I heard, they weren’t going to do it. 

Then I checked on the legal settlement and the legal settlement didn’t require any kind of after action report to be done. So I really started talking with the team and said, “Do you think we could do this? Is this something that is in our wheelhouse?”

And, you know, we quickly decided that some of it was, and some of it probably wasn’t. 

Data collection is something we have done on the regular. So we knew we could probably get the raw numbers. But what we did with them then to make them of any kind of use to the public was something that I really hadn’t had much experience with. But I remembered talking with a friend of mine, Ryan Harrington at Tech Impact’s Data Lab. 

This was an initiative started up back during COVID to help New Castle County and the state really dig through a lot of data that was coming out on the spread of COVID and try to predict the hotspots. One of their more interesting projects was using fecal matter. Apparently the COVID strain lived in the fecal matter, and so they were tracking sewer results around the county. 

And so I thought to myself, if they could do that, they could probably do this.

Because that was one form of a fecal show. The property reassessment is another form of a fecal show.

It was definitely a form of a fecal show. So I had a chat with Ryan. He was very interested.

We started meeting. They pulled a team together, we pulled a team together and we got underway. 

The lawsuit that you mentioned in passing – that was a lawsuit about a variety of educational issues. But one thing it mandated was this assessment. 

It was a group of plaintiffs, really led by the NAACP. I think it was the Delawareans for Educational Opportunity – DEO II believe was the acronym. It was a couple different groups, but CLASI (the Community Legal Aid Society) and the ACLU were involved to help litigate it.

Ultimately the Delaware’s Chancery Court came down and ruled that the way that we were doing reassessments was unconstitutional because we weren’t establishing fair market value.

They [DEO] asked for a couple different things to try to increase funding for schools, but they also were looking to create a more equitable funding model for the state. And so that was part of why we couldn’t continue to kind of make up fake values for what a property might’ve been worth decades ago. We needed to start using actual valuations. 

If a listener has not been on the website or looked to the newsletter, what’s the product that came out of this work? What all is there for people to look at?

You’re going to find a couple things. 

First and foremost, you’re going to find the map. It’s a heat map that Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a team of data engineers and mapping designers, built for us. It has some tutorial futures that take you around the screen and give you an understanding. 

But this is not a map where you zoom in and say, “my house went up this much.” This is really meant to look at communities against communities. So Tech Impact made some choices along the way and that included using census precinct level data, which is something you probably aren’t that used to seeing. 

We did not use zip codes, which you may be more familiar with. ZIP codes, unfortunately, are usually fairly large in some areas and can include wildly different types of housing and communities. So we used essentially the smallest designation we could find that still made sense and mapped it out. 

You’ll also find an explainer story about what this map is, why we did it, how to navigate it, and probably most importantly what it isn’t. 

And then finally, you’ll see reporting that really dives into why it matters and why officials think that the takeaways are what they are. 

On the map you can filter it in three ways, per census precinct level. What are those three things people can find on it? 

The most important one, I think, is assessment change. This one basically shows you a collection of the properties within the census precinct, their total value between 2024 and 2025. So that shows you basically the pre-assessment and reassessment total value and the percentage change between those. 

And the important thing to note with this is: everything went up. This was a reassessment. Nothing goes down. So everything is judged against the median value. So if it went up compared to the median, or the middle most value, you’re going to see reds. If it went below that median value, you’re going to see blues. 

Second, you’re going to see tax change. This is an accumulation of all the taxes paid by the parcels in that precinct, judged against the median. 

And then finally tax burden, which is essentially a calculation of your tax over your assessment. So, how much tax are you paying compared to the value of your home? 

Before we get into some of the findings, let’s talk a little bit more about process. Can you talk us through the process of getting the raw data and then the work with Tech Impact to create the maps?

It was interesting because one of the things we’ve come to understand is that every county is different and they do things their own way. We quickly came to understand that while we thought maybe it would take a week or two or three to get all the data, it ended up taking us almost three months to really get everything we needed to make the maps.

Sussex County gave it to us as a Google Sheet. New Castle County gave it to us as an Excel sheet, but only through certain file protocols because it was too large of a file to just drop into Google.

And then Kent County, God bless them, I don’t know what file format they used, but even Tech Impact said they had never seen it before. So there was a little bit of a learning curve to compute whatever it is Kent County is doing into something readable in their formats. 

So if we’re shouting out counties, we’re shouting out Sussex County.

Sussex – God bless you.

And then your helper at New Castle County.

Yes. Uh, Robert at the data assessment data office in New Castle County. I had to go through him setting up a file transfer protocol three times to finally get the gigabytes of data. So thank you for your steadfast efforts, Robert. 

I remember when you brought this idea up in one of our leadership meetings, you were very honest saying, “You know, I don’t know what this data will show. We might do a whole bunch of work on this. And it’s not really a story.” 

As you started working through the data, what were some of the things that caught your eye and made you think, okay, there’s something here?

There were a couple moments early on. We got Sussex County’s data right away, and so we actually mapped Sussex County first, and there weren’t any real surprises.

The assessments really moved where we thought it should in terms of along the beaches. Western Sussex saw smaller changes compared to the median. 

When you say it moved as you thought it would move. Does that mean the houses that you expected would be worth more, were worth more?

That’s right. And not only just worth more, but the increase between years would’ve been the highest out of anywhere in the county. That’s where you would expect to see your deep reds. And we did. Places like Rehoboth and Dewey were your hotspots and then places like Harrington and Bridgeville out the other way were lower.

The other thing that we saw was in Kent County. Same kind of thing. The suburbs of Dover where we’ve had some housing growth like Cheswold and Magnolia, and even the beach communities like Bowers Beach and Kitts Hummock and some of these areas, we saw property valuations rise. Areas like the older parts of Dover didn’t, at least as much.

Those were all expected. 

So you got through Kent and Sussex and you’re like, this may not be a story. This may have worked.

In some ways if the reassessment worked, I think that’s a story, but maybe just not one that most readers would come to expect. 

And then we really saw New Castle County, which in my mind really raised some questions because that trend of really seeing the reds where we would see housing growth in recent decades wasn’t what we were seeing. We were actually seeing blues in areas like Middletown, Odessa Townsend, Greenville, Centerville, Hockessin. And then when we looked at downtown, historic, hundred year old communities in Wilmington, we saw really deep reds where places like Hilltop and East Side and Riverside and Southbridge had percentage increases higher than anywhere in the county 800% or 1000% increases. 

Again, for our color-minded friends, if you’re looking on the map, blues are less higher increases, reds are higher increases. 

Yes, higher than the median. 

So that made you realize, okay, something did not work the way it was supposed to work here. 

In some ways it did because one of the things when I’d been talking to the lawyers who had filed the original lawsuit was this belief that lower income families had been subsidizing the property tax bills of higher income families because the value of their homes hadn’t changed since 1983. And obviously the housing market has boomed since then. 

So you would expect that if your house is worth a million dollars in Greenville, that you’d be paying a disproportionately high part of your income in your taxes. And what we didn’t really see was that reflected in the data. We actually saw higher comparative changes for these families that the advocates were basically out to serve.

At a super high level, once all the data was processed and the maps were created, what are the main takeaways for a layperson in Delaware? For your mother-in-law? 

Everybody’s going to have a different feeling with this because anytime I try to talk to anybody around the state about this, they will reflect on their own bill. That’s a totally normal way to think about this. 

The one thing that I would say is this was a zero sum process. Which meant that if it truly was going to be revenue neutral and the valuations change, then that means somebody pays more and somebody pays less.

I think the expectation was that communities like Hilltop would pay less than what they ended up paying, and yet we see wide swaths of a really struggling, lower income community paying significantly more in their tax bills. And then in areas that have higher property wealth, we actually saw some areas that went down or saw much smaller movements in their property tax.

In the end, we all kind of ended up subsidizing the softer commercial real estate market. But, in terms of the balance, just on the residential side, we didn’t necessarily see the movement that we expected to see. 

Were there people concerned about that specifically in the run up to this, and this data kind of lets them go, “We were onto something”? 

Yes. So, shout out to Christian Willauer. She’s a Wilmington City Council member. She actually represents the Hilltop area and has been raising concerns that these valuations didn’t make sense. 

And in fact, in Tyler Technologies’ own final report to New Castle County, it notes that its evaluations in many of Wilmington’s communities did not meet industry standards. They just kind of chalk that up to say, well, we tried our best and we’re going to move on to the next thing now. 

That has really infuriated city council leaders, the mayor’s office, as they’ve tried to remedy this. New Castle County has taken a little bit cooler of an approach so far to basically say, well, it was never going to be a perfect system.

So I think for those in the city, it’s been particularly frustrating because the reassessment, in their minds, was going to be a break for many of these struggling homeowners or renters, and instead they’re actually getting tax increases. 

Because in theory, although this lawsuit did many things, the lawsuit that prompted this property tax reassessment was to try to create this more equitable funding landscape. Everyone’s going to pay their share in part, and if your home is worth more you should be paying more. 

Was it supposed to do that all at once? Or is this something that reassessments over time were going to get at?

No, this really was meant to kind of be a rebalancing of the whole system that had not been rebalanced in 30 years, in 30 plus years, 40 years. Delaware is only one of I think a half dozen or fewer states that hadn’t done a reassessment in decades. To most people, they kind of look at Delaware and say this is not a way to do business

This was our way to catch up. 

So if in New Castle County the reassessment had worked in the way that the advocates behind the lawsuit wanted it to work, where would we have seen the blues? Where would we have seen the reds? Again, blue are lower increases and reds are the higher increases.

I think at the very least you would’ve seen areas, like Hilltop and East Side and Southbridge with much cooler reds, if not even blues. They certainly would not be the kind of outlier, in terms of increases over the median. 

Just for instance, I was looking at the data here at the taxes paid on a home in the Hockessin census precinct. Before the reassessment, they were paying about $4,700. After the reassessment, they’re paying $5,100. About 400 bucks. Still went up. It’s an 8% change, on the median. 

But when you look at Hilltop, which is right on basically the west side of Martin Luther King Boulevard there on up the big hill. In 2024, the median tax bill was $505. And after the reassessment, it’s now 13, almost $1,400. So you see an increase of about $800 in Hilltop and yet only $400 in Hockessin.

So highest level takeaway: the assessment didn’t quite work the way New Castle County thought it was going to work, or advocates were hoping it was going to work. For our folks in Kent and Sussex County, highest level takeaway is it seemed to work?

It seemed to work there. There will always be complaints about individual parcels or properties, but on the whole, when we’re looking at a 30,000 foot view, which is what this map kind of gives us, the values seem to move where we thought they would move.

In New Castle County, there are questions that are left to be resolved. 

I want to ask one more “in the weeds” question. You said the third thing you can look for on the map is tax burden, which is how your tax change relates to your assessment.

You all made the decision, you and Tech Impact made the decision, in New Castle County to use the first tax rate. New Castle County famously went through a little bit of hubbub and they ultimately were able to split the rates and change the rates for homeowners and businesses. But you used the initial rates.

Why? If the point is to show tax burden, why not use the actual rates that are hitting people’s bills? 

There were a couple reasons for that. We had more internal debates about, what do we do with this one? It came late in the process of making the map. Do we throw the whole map out and start all over?

But the more we thought about it, we really stuck with our guns about what this map was meant to be, which was checking Tyler Technologies’ homework. And essentially this is what they handed back to New Castle County and said, here’s our homework teacher, grade it. 

And by using the split rate taxes, in a way, we were letting politics influence that because the valuations are the valuations. The split rate taxes are the politicians’ reaction to the outrage following those valuations. So we wanted to really put the onus on Tyler to say, defend or not defend these valuations.

And then, secondly, the split rate taxes are only good for a year. They were a short-term get through the pain of everybody learning to deal with this new reality, but they’re set to expire before the next tax bills come out. And there’s real questions about what the state legislature and the county are going to do in terms of allowing split rates in the future.

So that led us to really lean on the original valuations.

Back to process one more time here. After you did the work of creating the maps, you then wrote this article to try to give the reader some context. But you also did some preliminary sharing of this data with some of the political figures. What was your thinking behind doing that in the article and not just trying to break down the data?

This is a very data heavy endeavor and we didn’t want the impact of it to get lost on readers. We wanted to put a face on it. There’s a reason why an $800 increase in Hilltop matters much more than a $400 increase in Hockessin when it comes to the ability of a homeowner to pay that increase. 

So we took it to city leaders to really outline what has been the impact and what’s been the reaction. I was surprised that they were somewhat unsurprised. Obviously they’ve been raising concerns about this for a while. I had a conversation with Mayor Carney about the findings and he really felt like it was indicative of what he believed was a reality: that the 1983 values weren’t truly 1983 values, especially when you look at areas that have had housing growth that didn’t move as much after the reassessment. 

There’s real questions about “Were you really using 1983 valleys before the reassessment or not?” Because if you were, you would expect the price of a four bedroom, two bath home in Middletown to be pretty low in 1983 versus today’s market. And we didn’t see as much of a movement.

There are real questions kind of about how the county was doing its assessments in the prior years. So if that was the reality though, the onus falls a little bit on New Castle County and falls a little bit on the advocates who basically pushed for this because it’s actually made the reality more inequitable for areas of Wilmington that they had hoped to serve.

If you’re imagining a Spotlight Delaware reader out there, what would you hope they would do with this information that you’ve done all this work for and laid it out for them? If we’re about empowering Delawareans, what does this data do for a Delawarean?

I think it’s twofold. I think in one respect it’s really for our leadership, especially our county leadership. For many months now, New Castle County leadership in particular has defended its process, but I think what the data is telling us is something’s still not right here. I’m not sure that most people would believe that these valuations are on the nose. So there’s work to be done to figure out why that is and what, if anything can be done to remedy it.

Secondly, I think it’s a reminder to the public at large. When we talk about equity, it’s a tough discussion because equity means – again, we’re starting from a zero sum balance – and if someone else is carrying more of the burden that means that somebody else is carrying less. 

One of the things I think got missed in the reassessment conversation is that many people should have expected to see higher bills because you’ve essentially been given 40 years of a break on those increases that just about every other state in this country would’ve been putting on you. I recognize that it’s still a shock to the system when you see those increases. But when it comes to an equitable society, we have to kind of think about ourselves and our ability to pay and the resources to carry that weight, and that if we’re not doing our fair share, then somebody else is doing it for us.

So I think there’s a little bit of that self-reflection that happens when you see some of this data as well. 

We’ll get you out of here on this: as Editor in Chief you’ve talked about it would be great if we did more of these data-driven projects. So after you’ve gone through this whole process, does it give you the appetite for Spotlight Delaware to take on more of these data-driven projects? 

Not next month. Maybe take a little bit of a break. I say that and then like tomorrow I’ll find something that will just be too interesting to not put down.

I will say I loved working with the Tech Impact team. I would definitely work with them again. They’re very hands-on, responsive to what we wanted to do. 

And I think that it really shows the value of what Spotlight can bring the state, because this is something that no one else was doing, no other media outlet was doing, no other government entity was doing. Short of us investing the time and resources to do it, we would just have to take the anecdotal as truth, without being able to back it up with some kind of data-driven approach. 

So the more that we can do that, I think the better the state will be, and hopefully we’re providing real value for people.

I certainly would do it again in a heartbeat, but I’m going to take a little bit of a long break or pass it off to one of my colleagues next time. 

The post Beyond the Headlines: How and why Spotlight created the reassessment map appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Today, Spotlight Delaware unveiled a months-long project taking an in-depth look at the data underpinning the state’s first property reassessment in nearly 40 years.

Spotlight’s analysis underscored the concerns raised for months by Wilmington residents, community leaders and city officials: predominantly Black, brown and low-income communities were hit hardest by rising property values and tax bills spurred by the reassessment. 

While many expected reassessment to bring new relief to some of the state’s lowest income residents, it actually raised their tax burdens.

The data for the project was compiled through Freedom of Information Act requests made by Spotlight Delaware and mapped in partnership with Tech Impact’s Data Lab.

The following Q & A is meant to inform readers about the map and be transparent about the choices made by Spotlight Delaware and Tech Impact’s Data Lab in its design.

Why did you build this map?

We recognized that the reassessment of every property in Delaware was a seismic event intended to reshape how we fund government services and our school districts, but there was no public accounting for the results of that work in a way that would be easily understood by the public.

We set out to understand how communities fared in the reassessment and whether the micro-level results matched the public beliefs about Delaware.

Where did the data come from?

Beginning in September 2025, Spotlight Delaware submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the master assessment data from New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties.

In the cases of New Castle and Sussex counties, we acquired parcel-level data from the 2024 tax year and 2025 tax year to compare the work of the reassessment.

Because Kent County completed its work a year earlier, however, its data is from the 2023 tax year and 2024 tax year.

How did you make the map?

In order to translate hundreds of thousands of parcel-level details into a readable map, we contracted with Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a Newark-based initiative that helps government agencies and nonprofits leverage data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for social good.

It cost Spotlight Delaware about $10,000 in contract costs on top of significant staff time to complete the project.

What are the shapes on the map?

We used Census tracts, which provide a detailed and statistically reliable view of neighborhoods across the state while preserving privacy. 

We could have used ZIP codes, which more people may be familiar with, but they often include communities of very different types, which could skew the results.

What does this map show?

These maps are constructed as heat maps, but unlike most heat maps that you have seen before, blue areas don’t always signify that a reduction has occurred.

Because Delaware hadn’t done a reassessment in decades, all property values were set to rise. So the heat map conveys the change in value relative to the median value in the dataset.

That means that red areas are higher than a median value while blue areas are lower than a median value. Most properties saw increases in assessed value due to the nearly 40-year-long gap between reassessments.

Why did you use median values?

We chose to use a Census tract’s median value – or the value at the absolute center of its data set – because it more accurately depicts how a community member might feel about the reassessment.

Using the average value, or the value of all property divided by the number of properties, allows a few large increases or decreases in a data set to skew how it would appear to the public.

What are the three different maps?

The first map is the assessment map, which shows the percentage change for the total assessed value of property in a given Census tract from before reassessment to after.

The second map is the taxation map, which shows the percentage change for the total taxes levied for property in a given Census tract. That includes county, school district and municipal taxes.

The third map is the tax burden map, which shows the percentage change for the calculation of taxes levied versus the assessed value of property for a given Census tract. This is a calculation of what percentage of property value is paid in taxes annually. Essentially, the tax burden map showcases places in Delaware that were more or less impacted by the ramifications of reassessment.

Why do Sussex County and Kent County see larger swings than New Castle County?

That is due in part to how the southern counties previously accounted for their tax rates. Before the reassessment, Sussex County used 50% of a property’s assessed 1976 value for its tax rate, while Kent County used 60% of a property’s assessed 1987 value.

On the other hand, New Castle County previously used 100% of a property’s assessed 1983 value for its tax rate.

Now all three counties will use 100% of assessed value for its tax rates, which means that the southern counties saw bigger jumps to catch up.

Did you account for areas that have seen new construction?

We did. Areas where there is a lot of new construction could have skewed the results if newly improved properties were left in our datasets.

We limited the dataset to properties that existed in both the pre- and post-reassessment years to ensure we were only tracking changes to existing properties.

Did you use the split rate taxes for New Castle County?

We did not. We aimed to check the work produced by Tyler Technologies – which turned over the data seen here as its completed work – not the government intervention that followed. 

The decision to increase the taxation on commercial properties was a political reaction to concerns by homeowners and lawmakers, and was only a short-term fix that is due to expire this year.

Can I see my home on this map?

Our map does not go down to the parcel level, but users can get a sense of how their larger community fares compared to others.

There are other available resources to determine your property assessment and tax bill, and those of neighboring properties.

One such website, MyDETax.com, allows you to compare individual parcels.

My property taxes don’t match the map’s conclusions. Why is that?

Our map is not meant to be representative of every property in a jurisdiction, but it allows for a larger comparative look for how different areas of the state are assessed and taxed. The results for each Census precinct is representative of the median property, but that means virtually all others will be some degree above or below it.

The post Spotlight Delaware’s Reassessment Map Explained appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.