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Venezuelans have taken the search for missing loved ones into their own hands, citing a scarcity of government rescuers.

Germany hit a high of 106 degrees on Saturday, according to the country's national weather service.

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Amid all the joy, there’s the treatment of Iran. They were denied permission to stay in Seattle after their draw against Egypt, reports Ben Fisher.

We’ve got to have another look at Cape Verde’s celebrations.

Temperature records broken in Germany, Denmark and Slovakia as Europe remains gripped by heatwave

• After decades of climate warnings, why is Europe so unprepared for rising heat?

Seawater is seeping into Italy’s longest river as the waterway starts to run dry in the heatwave, hitting a farming heartland that produces the milk for Parmesan cheese.

The Po River has never fallen this low so early in the year, raising fears of a devastating drought in July in this corner of northern Italy.

Saturday marked the third day in a row of hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz.

Vice-president appeared on Bill Maher’s show hours before more military strikes were exchanged in strait of Hormuz

JD Vance said on Friday that the US wins “either way” regarding negotiations with Iran, pointing to what he called the destruction of its nuclear program and diminishment as a country.

“If we make the final deal, then great,” the US vice-president told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country, so my attitude is America wins either way.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: For the most powerful voices in AI, it's all about being in the loop. Claude Code creator Boris Cherny recently said he doesn't write his own AI prompts much anymore. Thanks to loops, he doesn't have to. "It's an agent that prompts Claude," Cherny recently told CNBC, adding, "I don't write the prompt anymore. Claude writes the prompt, and now I'm talking to that new Claude that is kind of coordinating." In the same interview, Cherny said that loops and a similar feature were examples of the kind of work he would be proudest of in a decade. Cherny isn't the only one embracing "loop engineering." OpenAI engineer Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral OpenClaw project, wrote a public reminder to users who are still writing out prompts for AI agents. "Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore," Steinberger wrote recently on X. "You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." [...] Steinberger shared an example of a loop he uses: "Tell codex to maintain your repos, wake up every 5 minutes and direct work to threads. That makes it easy to parallelize+steer work as needed." Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD and host of the "How I AI," said, "it's really just reminding people that you don't have to use your human fingers to type in a prompt in order for your agent to do work on your behalf." The days of directly prompting generative AI coding tools are "kind of over, or at least some think it's going to be," Addy Osmani, director of Google Cloud, wrote in his post explaining the concept.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the absence of government help, ordinary Venezuelans dug barehanded through the rubble of the week’s earthquakes for loved ones.

Denmark experiences highest temperature on record on Saturday as weather system spreads eastward

• Europe heatwave – latest updates

Germany ⁠and Italy endured sweltering conditions on Saturday as a heatwave linked to dozens of deaths in western Europe spread eastwards, after temperatures broke records above 40C (104F).

Denmark registered its highest temperature on record on Saturday, according to the Danish meteorological institute. “With 36.6C north of Odense, we have the warmest day ever since measurements began in 1874,” it said in a post on X.

Agreement could also end hopes of ICC jurisdiction in Lebanon, which advocates pushed for to prosecute Israel

A new agreement between Lebanon and Israel could block victims of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon from pursuing accountability and hinder future efforts to give the international criminal court jurisdiction in the country, legal experts warned.

Lebanon and Israel signed a 14-point framework agreement in Washington on Friday designed to work towards an end to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Exclusive: Matthew Torbitt faces two counts of fraud by false representation in relation to travel and expense claims

A prominent political commentator has been charged with fraud in relation to his time as a Labour adviser, the Guardian can reveal.

Matthew Torbitt, a regular guest pundit on GB News, faces two counts of fraud by false representation in relation to his travel and expenses claims while working in parliament.

Dong Guangping landed in Toronto following an Air Canada flight on Friday, his friend said.

As tech firms make huge profits and investors fear losing out, both are doing their best to hold off the day of reckoning

• OpenAI staggers AI model release after White House request

Every couple of decades, investors will ask themselves how long can the stock market keep climbing. Is it safe to buy more shares? Is their pension or equity portfolio vulnerable should financial markets, and especially those in the US, come crashing down to earth?

When stock markets rise to historically high levels – and beyond the level when normal profits can sustain share prices – a few “experts” typically warn of an impending crash.

Candidates who believe Israel has committed genocide won big in New York – will it push the party to move their way?

Regardless of which party wins control of Congress in November, New York City voters have all but ensured that next year a vocal bloc of new House Democrats will arrive on Capitol Hill, elected, in large part, because they believe Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

That is an upshot of the primary elections held Tuesday in New York, where voters ousted two incumbent House Democrats and replaced a third who is retiring with progressives championed by Zohran Mamdani.

Decision leaves in place Biden-era standard on pollution from coal-fired plants, factories and other industrial sources

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to abandon a Biden-era rule that sets tough standards for deadly soot pollution.

The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel is a setback for the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda and its repeated efforts to boost coal, a reliable but polluting energy source.

Cleanup under way after week-long fire at a Boyle Heights facility spoiled tens of millions of pounds of frozen food

Something is rotten in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

For a week, thick black smoke filled the air while a massive warehouse burned near downtown Los Angeles, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation orders in the immediate area as air quality worsened. Firefighters finally extinguished the flames on Wednesday, but not before half the warehouse’s 85m lbs of frozen food were lost in the fire – leaving roughly 40m lbs of food to rot.

Passengers report being stuck on grounded planes in sweltering conditions as severe weather causes travel disruption across Europe

• Europe heatwave: latest updates

Thunderstorms have caused severe delays to hundreds of flights at Heathrow and Gatwick airports, leaving passengers stuck on grounded planes for hours in the scorching heat.

Overnight, downpours and thunderstorms lit up the skies of London after back-to-back days of 30C-plus weather as the UK and much of Europe experienced a record-breaking heatwave.

Mauricio Pochettino’s team won their group after some impressive performances. But they’d probably need to beat some of the world’s best to claim the title

Football Unites the World … in wishing it had paid more attention in applied mathematics class. Or so the Fifa slogan could have been expanded to say, given the mind-warping that arose from the formula for slicing the newly expanded 48-team tournament down to 32 sides for the first knockout round.

After all, why do a random draw when you can build a matrix with 495 possible scenarios in order to assign the fixtures for the eight best third-placers? Anyway, what matters is that Mauricio Pochettino’s team will face Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and no new format is going to stop us from – in time-honored fashion – speculating wildly about what may happen next while we still have the chance, with the potential for American wins rated using one of the mantra-loving manager’s motivational rallying cries of choice.

Prime Day officially ended yesterday, but we're still basking in its afterglow.

Go Cornish Celebration engages younger generation as council finalises strategy to boost everyday use of Kernewek

Seven-year-old Albie, a pupil at Trewirgie infants’ school in Redruth, did not hesitate when asked why he liked learning Kernewek, the Cornish language.

“We used to talk this way in the old days,” he said. “And I like speaking now. I enjoy the songs we sing, the Cornish books we read, all the words. It’s fun.”

The U.S. carried out retaliatory strikes against Iran on Friday after Iranian forces hit a cargo vessel in the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier.

Michelle Williams struggled with high blood pressure and swelling for years before she was finally diagnosed with an unusual condition.

Experts say students from poorer backgrounds increasingly having to limit their options because of money worries

Most days, Mariam spends hours simply waiting.

The 19-year-old University College London student often finishes her lectures by mid-morning but has careers events or society meetings in the evening. The three-hour round trip to her family home means travelling back and forth makes little sense, so she waits on campus instead. More often than not, by the time the event starts, she is too exhausted to stay long.

Clearly, the former first lady should have been flattered by the remark at the White House cage match

Michelle Obama should feel honoured, apparently.

Do you know what the greatest compliment you can give a woman is? It’s not telling her she’s smart or kind or funny. No, it’s calling her a man. After all, what could be better than being a man?

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Court files show how men connected through TikTok and encrypted apps planned attack on White House UFC fight

When Tycen Proper, 19, finished high school, his family gave him at least $3,000 of “graduation money”, according to court documents. Despite the generosity, he seemed content to just live at his parents’ home, in a tiny Ohio town near Amish country, and spend more and more time on the internet.

But Proper did have ambition of a kind, an affidavit says. He quit his job to focus on a special project that he was planning with friends from the internet. His mother saw him studying maps of Washington DC. He also put his graduation money into investments that made his father uneasy: a rifle, a shotgun, body armor, ammunition.

The Camera Assistant is one of the underrated features that can fine-tune your Galaxy S26 Ultra camera experience to your liking.

SpaceX plans to begin building an eight-mile natural gas pipeline called "Starpipe" next month to supply its Starbase launch site with fuel for a much higher cadence of Starship launches. The pipeline is expected to enter service in January 2027. Reuters reports: The pipeline plan, previously reported by Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, signals Musk's intent to accelerate Starship's development and lay the groundwork for a faster flight rate. The 40-story rocket is central to SpaceX's push to expand its Starlink broadband network, deploy orbital AI data center satellites, and eventually carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. Designed to be fully reusable, Starship uses about 630,000 gallons (2.4 million liters) of liquid methane per launch, currently delivered by hundreds of tanker trucks in an hours-long process incompatible with Musk's expansion plans. Starship has completed 12 test launches since 2023, but Musk aims to ramp up to dozens, hundreds and eventually thousands of launches a year. Though it is unusual for a space company to build its own natural gas pipeline for launchpad fuel, Starpipe might only be an initial step in a longer-term plan for SpaceX, which has spent years exploring its own drilling operations near Starbase and throughout Texas, according to a Reuters review of Cameron County land records. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC on June 12, when the company went public, that the company planned to build pipelines and process its own propellant, and was looking into drilling its own natural gas.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Regulators are putting the kibosh on sales of the automaker's upcoming EV models because of its ties to China.

Former Westminster correspondent earned a reputation for uncovering political wrongdoing in the 1990s

The acclaimed journalist David Hencke, whose career at the Guardian spanned more than three decades, has died of liver cancer aged 79.

As Westminster correspondent, Hencke was instrumental in exposing the cash-for-questions scandal that forced the resignations of two Conservative ministers, and the scoop that led to Peter Mandelson’s first resignation from government.

Leader of local authority in Oxfordshire faces backlash over injunction ‘to maintain neutral, safe space for residents’

While Londoners scurried from building to building seeking shade on another baking hot day this week, one man paused in the shadow of the Royal Courts of Justice.

The leader of Oxfordshire county council, Tim Bearder, was not only satisfied in the shade of the court’s gothic towers. He had just won a landmark legal victory.

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a painful metaphor for the state of our union

When you hear the word “pool” in these sun-baked days of summer, you might think of taking a cheeky dip in the water to cool off the skin that is conspicuously peeling off your haggard body. Everyone (except me) loves a pool. Donald Trump really loves a pool, but not the kind you can swim in. Or stand too close to. Or enjoy at all, really.

The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool rehabilitation effort has become the primary crisis affecting the United States. That is, if you ask the current administration. Limiting the right to vote is running a close second in the World Cup of Political Football, but it’s the reflecting pool that is attracting the most fervent attention. As emergencies go, it’s as thrilling as watching a really large body of still water in the middle of a park. The paint is peeling and it’s full of green algae.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Next250’s Declaration of Interdependence, a new art gallery that features Americans’ collective values and hopes for the future, will open in McPherson Square

Thousands are expected to gather a block away from the White House today to unveil their vision for America’s future.

At the Next250 All of US rally, held a week before the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, organizers will launch their Declaration of Interdependence, an art installation featuring the collective values they believe should define the next 250 years of America’s story. The pledge – a take on the Declaration of Independence, the country’s founding text – aims to build a country where everyone can earn a living wage, have access to green spaces and feel safe in their communities, activists said.

After outrageous insults from Donald Trump, Haitians have helped to revive Springfield – now their future is uncertain

The embattled Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio is among many groups reeling after this week’s ruling from the supreme court that strips the legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians living and working in the US – and could be a threat to more than a million.

The Springfield community in particular had worked hard to remain resilient beyond the outrageous besmirching by Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign and further insults about Haiti delivered after he became the US president again.

Editor-in-chief has developed network of UK thinkers she believes reject what she regards as overly ‘woke’ consensus

In the six years since she very publicly resigned from the New York Times, and in her tumultuous eight months as editor-in-chief of one of the US’s most prestigious television networks, Bari Weiss has become renowned as a media disruptor and challenger of what she regards as an overly “woke” journalistic consensus.

As Weiss continues to face bitter internal and external opposition to her leadership of CBS News, she has been turning to figures from UK journalism in her attempts to tackle what she sees as US newsroom “groupthink”.

• Veteran of 2019 champions in first game for Oakland Ballers

• ‘The hitter ​didn’t know what ‌was coming’

The former England cricketer Liam Plunkett swapped his cricket colours for a ⁠baseball glove, playing his first game for the Oakland Ballers and ⁠even claiming a ⁠strikeout.

The 41-year-old was part of England’s 2019 World Cup-winning side – his final international appearance – taking three ⁠wickets in the tied final against New Zealand as England emerged victorious by the narrowest of ⁠margins on boundary count. He moved to the United ​States, where his wife ‌is from, and has played Major League Cricket for the San Francisco Unicorns.

US president says levy would be imposed immediately and supersede pre-existing trade deals with the country

Donald Trump has threatened to place a 100% import tariff on any European country that imposes a tax on digital services from US companies.

Writing on Truth Social on Friday, the US president said that “numerous European countries” had been discussing putting a digital services tax on American companies and that “some of these countries are close to actually doing this”.

Louisianans are voting Saturday in the state's Republican Senate runoff, as two candidates vie to replace Sen. Bill Cassidy, who did not receive enough votes in the primary to advance.

Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in a decade, has resigned. Even allowing for the weariness of repetition, this should theoretically be a big deal.

Within that benighted kingdom, it will be for some — the John Fetterman-esque cartoon Andy Burnham, now widely considered Starmer’s all-but-inevitable successor, looks set to grip the poisoned chalice that is leadership of the British Labour Party, for all the good it will do him. The ascendant far-right outfit Reform U.K. will likely regard Starmer’s downfall as another stepping stone to turning Oswald Mosley’s deferred dreams of Anglified fascism into reality.

The Greens, who have enjoyed some recent success with their novel proposal that left-wing people might actually want a left-wing party to vote for, may see this as further proof of the once-verboten idea that — whisper it — maybe the Labour Party doesn’t need to exist. And those constituent nations of the U.K. which are not England but are nevertheless forced to abide by its whims will be reminded that the British state they are bound to has not enjoyed stable government for quite a while.

The question of whether the wider world should take heed of the U.K. and its travails remains open, and for good reason. The centuries long legacy of Britain’s various eccentric neuroses being imposed outside of its island isolation is horrifically grim, and I would not blame anyone for wishing to see it quarantined like patient zero in a zombie outbreak. Yet there are lessons to be learned from Starmer’s short, sad tenure, especially as the international left will continue to face manifestations of the worldview he represented — not least the U.S. Democratic establishment, as New York primary voters will need no reminding this week, who seem stubbornly resistant to learning them.

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Starmer’s rise was not achieved on his own merits. As Labour leader, Starmer’s role was essentially pest control: He was installed as head of a party that has historically, if intermittently, pretended to belong to a species of socialism, and was tasked with disinfecting Labour of any threat it might genuinely embody that ideology. In this mission, he was nominally successful, purging the party of anything associated with his leftist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn (whose specter continues to haunt Britain’s commentariat, despite achieving precisely zilch). Starmer, the best that central casting could produce, was then delivered to Downing Street with a ridiculous majority by an electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Conservative government.

In power, the Tories had alternated between brutality and incompetence, and Starmer did not buck that trend, reaffirming Gore Vidal’s contention that trying to find much difference between Labour and the Tories was like bringing “a measuring rod to Lilliput.” At every turn, Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were, and was somehow shocked and dismayed to find this only made him more despised, while also emboldening and empowering reactionary forces.

Under Starmer’s health secretary and supposed human being Wes Streeting, trans youth in the U.K. were stripped of gender-affirming healthcare, and Britain’s frothingly transphobic “gender-critical” lobby — from which their equally exterminationist American sympathizers have taken much inspiration — fumed that young trans people still existed.

Related

They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway

Starmer’s government saw Palestine solidarity activists criminalized under a dubious interpretation of anti-terrorism law, yet British right-wing media continued to grumble that pro-Palestinian protests were still possible at all. Within a year of Starmer vowing his government would curb legal immigration and “take back control” of the U.K.’s borders, immigrants in Britain were subjected to pogroms and firebombing.

It should not need to be spelled out, but Starmer and his backers have shown time and again that it still does — if the mythic Overton window shifts to the right, and you obligingly follow suit, it will simply move further toward that extreme, and reward only the tip of the spear. Those in the U.S. who saw Kamala Harris struck mute on trans rights and blind in the face of genocide in Gaza know too well the stakes of “moderating” to the right in the interest of “consensus.”

Since his resignation, a small and desperate coterie of British pundits have urged their dwindling readership to focus on the positives of Starmer’s reign by emphasizing those instances in which he stood firm on the rock of not-quite-fascism, particularly in foreign affairs. After all, they point out, he recognized a Palestinian state (while simultaneously offering precious little resistance to killing the people who would otherwise live there). But whether in the United States’ kidding-but-not-really bid to colonize Greenland, its pursuit of regime change in Venezuela via the enactment of a lousy ’80s action movie, or a war with Iran — the sheer sloppy-drunk incompetence of which stunned even its most vociferous critics — the Starmer administration never achieved any greater fortitude than weakly suggesting, “I say, steady on …”

There was never any realistic hope that this erstwhile human rights lawyer was going to seriously confront a sclerotic superpower ruled by a meat-headed fascism which treats human rights as a laughable suggestion. It is appropriate that in his resignation speech, Starmer expressed pride in supposedly protecting Britain’s youth from social media; this feat of Herculean self-aggrandizement was, in its own way, telling of Starmer’s entire premiership. Given the choice between taking on the entrenched power of social media platforms (to which the U.K.’s political class remains unashamedly addicted) or restricting the liberties of a constituency not particularly useful to him, Starmer inevitably chose the latter.

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The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover

Less than a decade ago, the idea that the American progressive left might be in a healthier state than its British equivalent would have drawn hoots of derision from those smugly confident in Corbyn’s brief ascendance. Yet the left in the United States — from the days of Occupy Wall Street through Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, and on-the-ground anti-ICE resistance — has wised up to the idea that it must move in an independent and extra-parliamentary manner. They may take heart in developments such as the rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani, but they seem to understand that real political change requires mass organizing beyond party structures and a willingness to break with the accepted norms and niceties of the political process.

This understanding passed entirely by all those on the British left who invested in Labour, along with those centrists and liberals who warned against the insidious influence of identity politics and “culture wars” that would require giving a shit about the rights, liberation, and lives of embattled and persecuted minorities. Starmer’s premiership, and its ignominious end, are the consequence.

The lesson of Keir Starmer’s undistinguished spell as prime minister is that — in the U.K. or anywhere else — if you throw red meat to a bloodthirsty right, it is only a matter of time before they are devouring your own flesh. You will not defeat fascism, or even delay it — you will simply make sure that when it arrives, much of its work has already been done.

The post Keir Starmer’s Downfall Is the Only Reward for Simpering Centrism appeared first on The Intercept.

As we celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, test your civics knowledge and see how your score compares to others.

Advocates had decried the 38-year-old restrictions as outdated and based on discriminatory policies.

World Cup events, packed festivals and revived public spaces are drawing people back downtown — and giving urban leaders hope that the pandemic slump has faded.

The longtime elected commonwealth’s attorney from Prince William County, Virginia, has died at the age of 88.

World Cup StubHub ticket mess shows how weak consumer protections are in the US, but there are steps fans can take

A growing number of World Cup fans who thought they had bought tickets to matches on the ticket reseller StubHub were notified with just days or hours to spare that their tickets did not exist.

Horror stories about stranded families, ruined once-in-a-lifetime trips, thousands of dollars squandered, and hang-ups on StubHub’s customer service line are flooding social media and local news.

Animal who went missing from private ranch for nearly two weeks had been falsely reported as found earlier in the week

The search for a giraffe who absconded from a private game ranch in rural Texas and effectively went missing for nearly two weeks was found safe on Friday just a few miles away from the homestead, according to authorities.

An aerial search ultimately pinpointed the whereabouts of Gracie “the w[a]ndering giraffe”, said Nathan Johnson, the Real county sheriff, in a Facebook post announcing the success of efforts to find the creature.

Relocation of Action on World Health raises questions over why Reform UK leader is involved in a US pressure group

Nigel Farage’s campaign against the World Health Organization (WHO) is moving to the US with a new board of lobbyists, raising questions over why the Reform UK leader is involved in an American pressure group.

The Action on World Health campaign, co-founded by Farage, is relocating to the US state of Delaware as a charitable foundation and grassroots non-profit.

The 2026 World Cup has become a rebuke to Trump’s homogeneous vision of America, revealing a tournament – and a US team – shaped by migration and diversity

Following the Department of Homeland Security on social media is a bit like wandering through a casino at 4am. Sooner or later, you’ll see something that makes you go: How did we get here?

There was one of those moments earlier this month. Days after the US opened their World Cup campaign with a 4-1 romp over Paraguay, DHS marked the occasion by posting an image of Chris Richards, Sergiño Dest and Folarin Balogun exulting beneath the headline “DEFEND THE HOMELAND” and the caption “OUR SOIL”.

Experts said Vladimir Putin was unlikely to change course despite worsening fuel shortages and a sharp decline in the stock market.

Texas officials told people to stay indoors, but volunteers raced to the scene with their beekeeping gear, risking stings to save as many bees as they could.

Staff at Radio 4 show, which has 5 million listeners, told making content for likes of TikTok will take precedence for correspondents

The task of briefing the nation on Radio 4’s agenda-setting Today programme has been one of the most urgent tasks facing the BBC’s top journalists for decades.

Insiders at the corporation, however, say that duty has effectively been downgraded, after an edict that will result in correspondents prioritising making content for TikTok, Instagram and other digital platforms.

Friday Bitcoin closed at just $59,948 — dropping 19% just for June and more than 50% lower than its record high in October of $124,310. To commemorate the occasion CNBC interviewed long-time bitcoin skeptic Jeremy Grantham, reporting that the 87-year-old cofounder/chief investment strategist of the massive asset-management firm GMO is "predicting it will gradually fade into irrelevance over decades." [The] longtime market commentator known for his calls on asset bubbles said bitcoin is a "useless, speculative" asset without intrinsic value, speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Friday. He also said bitcoin hasn't outperformed during a bull market and questioned its practical use. "[Over] years and years, decades and decades, it will dwindle away, I suspect — not with a bang, but a whimper," he said. "It's not a stable form of value — it just halved ... for no particular reason in a strong economy, so you can't depend on it in that way." He added that gold has still delivered solid gains over the same period, even after pulling back from its highs. Bitcoin not only hasn't proved itself as a useful asset to speculate on, it doesn't provide any real world utility either, Grantham argued. "People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket. ... What it does is allows crooks to move money around," he said. Bitcoin has become notorious over the years for its dramatic bear market crashes, which has taken it down at least 70% from its peak in every cycle. The article adds that "many investors believe the current price slump could drag on for several more months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Critics call platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi online casinos, where insider trading runs rampant.

It’s been quiet for a few days since I’ve been sick, but I’m feeling a bit better since today marks the official end of my one month of using Windows 11 that you people donated for. An article about my experience is definitely upcoming, including whether or not I’ll actually stick with Windows 11 on my laptop or go back to Linux, but before we get there, let’s talk about Microsoft once again capitulating to the reality that a lot of people really don’t want to let go of Windows 10.

In a surprising move, Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it’s extending Windows 10 support until October 12, 2027, which is one full year beyond the October 2026 cutoff that home users had been planning around.

↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

Hundreds of millions of people are still using Windows 10, and with the “AI” techbros buying up all the RAM and other chips for their pachinko machines – making this whole thing a bit of an own goal for prime “AI” booster Microsoft – buying new PCs that are actually compatible with Windows 11 isn’t exactly a fun prospect for the vast majority of us normal folk dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. As such, Microsoft really doesn’t have any other choice but to keep extending support for Windows 10. It ain’t much, but I’ll take any morsel of justice I can get.

While everyone else has to pay for getting access to these Windows 10 updates, users in the European Union get them entirely for free thanks to the Digital Markets Act. This additional year, too, can be partially attributed to the DMA, as the very same consumer rights organisations who pressured Microsoft into giving EU users truly free access to the Extended Security Updates also put pressure on the company to offer these for more than just one year.

Basic consumer protection legislation works.

Proteus, the company's first fully autonomous robot, is a key mover in Amazon's ambitious robotics quest to deliver packages to you more quickly.

Exclusive: Researchers call for urgent investigation of risks to babies of tablets, smartphones and other digital devices

Screen time for babies and toddlers under the age of two has been linked with long-term negative effects on health and quality of life and should be avoided, according to a landmark study.

It warns that using screens during that period may lead to wide-ranging developmental concerns and calls for further urgent investigation of the risks smartphones, tablets and other digital devices pose to infants.

The 46-year-old was stopped at about 9.30pm on Friday while preparing to board a Jetstar flight to Perth, according to police and local media

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An Australian man has been arrested at a Thai airport in connection with the alleged murder of a 17-year-old girl whose naked body was found in a suitcase, according to local police.

The man, 46, was stopped at about 9.30pm on Friday while preparing to travel on a Jetstar flight to Perth, according to local media.

Team Melli must wait for the final group games to decide their fate after a wild finish in Seattle

So that means Cape Verde are through to face Argentina in the round of 32, in what is shaping as a kind bracket for the defending champions.

Tiny Cape Verde are into the round of 32!

Leandro Trossard hit a double as Belgium booked their place in the last 32 with an emphatic victory that sent New Zealand out

New Zealand, meanwhile, will be kicking themselves for not taking more from their ultimate 3-1 loss against Egypt. An excellent headed goal to Finn Surman in the 15th minute epitomised the All Whites’ dominant first-half display, staying compact and disciplined in defence and charging forward with direct long balls and overlaps in attack.

But Egypt, led by their talismanic captain Mohamed Salah, came roaring back in the second half, coming from behind to score three unanswered goals and rocket to the top of the group as a result.

“It’s frustrating,” Bazeley said after the Egypt match. “We played so well in the first half. We scored ‌a great goal, created lots ‌of chances, felt like we were dominating possession a lot of the time in the first half, and ‌we were comfortable. We weren’t really getting hurt.

“We talked well at half-time, looked at some things we can do a little bit better, we went out second half and we just weren’t able to recreate the tempo and quality that we showed in the first half.”

Their record at major tournaments now reads two wins from their past nine matches, one from their past six, against Romania at Euro 2024. They have had a total of 38 shots in their opening two games in the US without scoring themselves, their sole goal coming courtesy of the Egypt defender Mohamed Hany. They missed the energy of Jérémy Doku, who was absent through illness, while Romelu Lukaku, making his first start for club or country for more than 12 months, huffed and puffed in attack.

Sometimes when you have to win, sometimes that’s the best situation. Obviously we had wished to start better. But, just like cyclists, we have to keep pedalling on and on and show we deserve to move on to the round of 32.

Activists aim to repeat disruption of Jeff Bezos’s wedding when billionaire Tilman Fertitta drops anchor

Protesters in Venice are planning to disrupt a visit by the billionaire US ambassador to Italy in his 117-metre superyacht, which they fear he plans to dock in the lagoon city.

“We ruined the party for Jeff Bezos’s wedding last year – this year let’s ruin the ambassador’s tour!” said Stella Faye, a 28-year-old researcher and activist, at a meeting of about 40 demonstrators on Thursday.

As a host of countries move to rein in social media use by children, could this be technology’s big tobacco moment?

Astronomers have discovered two Jupiter-sized exoplanets with densities lower than cotton candy, making them the lightest known worlds of their size. The rare "super-puffs," located about 1,110 light-years away, are likely composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with follow-up observations by the James Webb Space Telescope expected to probe their atmospheres. The Associated Press reports: [University of Oxford's George Dransfield] suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy -- no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA's Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup. Detected by NASA's Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets' orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights. Considered rare in the cosmos, super-puffs are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust. They shed much of the material over time, stripping down even more. NASA's tally of worlds outside our solar system currently stands at nearly 6,300 confirmed. Fewer than 40 are super-puffs, according to Dransfield. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arabic’s rich history of poetry lends itself well to ‘beautiful commentary that … sounds like a love letter to football’

Even before Cristiano Ronaldo’s close-range shot had hit the back of net, the commentator had begun shouting. “Allllllllaaaaaaah!!!!” exclaimed Amer al-Khudhiri, an Omani football announcer for BeIN Sports, as the Portugal star scored his first goal of the 2026 World Cup against Uzbekistan on Tuesday.

He took a deep breath and then began his soliloquy. “I knew you were coming for revenge. I knew you would answer everyone, the world, the World Cup, the doubters, those who have lost their memory,” al-Khudhiri said. “Oh history, put Ronaldo here as Portgual’s all-time top scorer, through all its history. Allah, Allah, Allah!”

Michigan State Police said law enforcement and Child Protective Services confirmed a report against Pete Buttigieg was unsubstantiated and false.

Accumulation on Switzerland’s glaciers from last winter expected to all be gone by Monday amid ‘enormous’ melt rates across Alps

• Europe heatwave: latest updates

Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave battering Europe, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos).

The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 27.

"The US government has allowed Anthropic to release its powerful Mythos AI model to select companies and organizations," reports CNN, "revising license requirements after ordering an export block earlier this month in the wake of national security fears." Since the export ban earlier in June, "Anthropic has worked with the US government to address risks associated with the Covered Models," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to the company in a letter dated Friday. In light of progress in that work, Lutnick wrote, "I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model." The letter does not include permission for Anthropic to release Fable, a less powerful version of Mythos. "We received notice from the US government that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers," Anthropic said in a statement... Conversations between Anthropic and the government are expected to continue into the weekend, with an eye to restoring access to Fable, as well, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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• US says it struck Iran targets after attack on cargo ship on the strait of Hormuz

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Hayes went on:

As national security adviser to the president of the United States, Mr Bolton had access to and was responsible for safeguarding the most sensitive national defense information, including classified material.

Mr Bolton knew how to handle classified information, where it should be stored, how it should be stored, and with whom he could share that information.

Utah is restricting fireworks as the largest wildfire in the nation grows, fueled by dry conditions and gusting winds.

Republican strategists believe rise of Mamdani could present opportunity to tag Democrats with most extreme views of the left – key US politics stories from Friday 26 June

Donald Trump has previewed a Republican strategy for the midterm elections, seizing on a progressive sweep in New York to portray Democrats as “godless communists” who pose an existential threat to the nation.

The US president, who was a child during the “red scare”, seized on wins by democratic socialists backed by the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, to stoke fears that the Democratic party has embraced extremism that could lead to the violent persecution of Christians.

Self-proclaimed prophet Samuel Bateman already serving 50-year prison sentence over child sexual abuse

A polygamous sect leader already serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for orchestrating sex involving children was convicted Friday on state child abuse charges after girls were found in an unventilated trailer he was hauling through Arizona.

Someone alerted authorities about the trailer in 2022 after seeing small fingers reaching through gaps in the doors. Police stopped Samuel Bateman’s vehicle as he was driving through Flagstaff and found three girls inside, who were ages 11 to 14 at the time. The trailer was enclosed with a makeshift toilet, a sofa and camping chairs.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 27, No. 1,834.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 27 No. 1,112.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 27, No. 642.

The U.S. military says it hit Iranian targets over Iran's drone attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, marking the first American strikes on Iran since the two countries formally agreed to extend a ceasefire last week.

Wynola Wayne received a special retirement send-off after 58 years as a nurse. One former patient, Marco Houpe, said, "If it wasn't for her then, I wouldn't be here today."

• Whitehorse winger goes first overall

• Justin Bieber announces Leafs’ top pick

• Penn State star hails from Yukon capital

With most of Yukon watching and a loud presence of Maple Leafs fans in the stands, Toronto selected Penn State forward Gavin McKenna with the first pick in the NHL draft on Friday night.

The 18-year-old McKenna is from Yukon’s capital of Whitehorse and has been a prolific scorer on both sides of the border, with his selection validating the projections of the left winger being his age group’s top prospect more than two years ago.

Data from FlightRadar24 showed the plane was no more than 25 feet above the ground during the low pass as it approached the Horseshoe Bay Resort Jet Center airport.

California governor calls for national tax on super-wealthy and suggests the US should own a stake in AI companies

• US politics live – latest updates

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called for a national “billionaires tax” on Friday as he fights a ballot measure targeting the ultra-wealthy in his home state.

Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, published his proposal the day after California officials certified a ballot measure to levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1bn. The initiative, called the California Billionaire Tax Act, was brought by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) and would fund the state’s healthcare, education and food assistance programs.

Fireworks prohibition comes alongside state of emergency as wildfires prompt evacuations and red-flag warnings

Utah governor Spencer Cox has announced a state of emergency and accompanying temporary prohibition on the use of personal fireworks until 5 July. The announcement comes as the state experiences an unprecedented wildfire season with blazes that have prompted evacuations in Eureka, a small town about 80 miles south of Salt Lake City.

Under the governor’s executive order, the state forester is allowed to ban the use of fireworks anywhere in the state. The order temporarily suspends a 2024 law that disallowed the forester from banning fireworks in cities across the state.

I struggle to wear a smartwatch because of the anxiety it causes. To find out why and what can be done about it, I reached out to doctors and other experts.

President seizes on wins by Mamdani-backed candidates to warn darkly of threat to ‘traditional American way of life’

Donald Trump has previewed a Republican strategy for the midterm elections, seizing on a progressive sweep in New York to portray Democrats as “godless communists” who pose an existential threat to the nation.

The US president, who was a child during the “red scare”, seized on wins by democratic socialists backed by the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, to stoke fears that the Democratic party has embraced extremism that could lead to the violent persecution of Christians.

Authorities say couple failed to take young boy to doctor and did not provide safe environment at home

A Michigan couple has been charged with murder after authorities say their son died weighing more than 250lbs (113kg) despite being just seven years old.

The investigation into the case’s circumstances began on 4 November 2025 after a 911 call reported a young boy in medical distress at a home in Flint township, Michigan. The child, identified as Casper O’Brien, died after being taken to a hospital.

Delcy Rodríguez says foreign rescue teams are arriving as anger grows at official response and limited resources

• Survivors tell of ‘brutal and fast’ Venezuela quake as hunt for survivors goes on

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has vowed to fight to save “as many people as possible” as the official death toll from the country’s worst earthquake in more than a century almost doubled, but frustration was growing at the perceived sluggishness of the government’s response.

Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge, the president of the national assembly, said on Friday that the official number of dead had risen to 920. Delcy Rodríguez had earlier said almost 3,000 people were injured. Speaking during a tour of La Guaira, the most devastated region, she said foreign search and rescue groups were starting to arrive.

Catherine Herridge makes final bid to stave off penalty related to series of stories she wrote in 2017 for Fox News

More than two years ago, a US district court judge took the extraordinary step of holding the veteran investigative journalist Catherine Herridge in civil contempt, ordering her to pay a steep daily fine of $800 per day unless she reveals her sources for a series of stories she wrote in 2017 for Fox News.

Since then, the case has slowly moved through the appeals process, with Herridge dealt a series of defeats. On Tuesday, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit issued a one-sentence ruling denying Herridge’s plea to stay the February 2024 ruling holding her in contempt, an order made by district court judge Christopher R Cooper.

A California appeals court has upheld Harvey Weinstein's 2022 rape and sexual assault conviction.

Strikes against military facilities were in response to drone attack a day earlier on a cargo vessel

The US has struck Iran in a tit-for-tat response to a drone strike on a cargo ship, as the ceasefire between the US and Iran that reopened the strait of Hormuz undergoes its greatest test yet.

The US strikes targeted multiple missile and drone facilities in Iran near the strait of Hormuz and on Qeshm Island on Friday in what appeared to be a limited strike meant to respond to Iran’s attack on a Singapore-flagged cargo ship without escalating the conflict.

This week's guests include Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy and Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.

Police say anonymous tip was unsubstantiated after what Buttigieg calls ‘deeply distressing’ day apart from children

Pete Buttigieg, the former US transportation secretary, said on Friday an anonymous and – police say – meritless accusation led Child Protective Services to investigate his family.

In a Substack post published on Friday, Buttigieg described the incident – which resulted in him being separated from his four-year-old twins – as “among the darkest hours of my life” and likened the accusation to “swatting”, the practice of calling police with a false report of an emergency to trigger a law enforcement response.

President Donald Trump surprised members of both political parties June 24 when he abruptly canceled an event touting the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which had passed the Senate overwhelmingly — a rare bipartisan achievement on the affordability issue that is top of mind for voters.

Trump posted that he would not sign the bill until passage of the SAVE America Act, which would expand requirements for proof of citizenship to vote. Democrats have criticized the SAVE America Act, saying it would disenfranchise legitimate voters, and Senate Republican leaders have said they don’t have the votes to pass it in their chamber.

When Trump was still planning to sign the housing bill, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X that the bill was "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history" and an example of a Trump administration "promise made, promise kept."

But after Trump’s switch, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. — one of the five senators to vote against the measure — reiterated his opposition. He said the bill would primarily fund the Department of Housing and Urban Development and benefit immigrants in the United States illegally.

"This is a bill that might touch a little bit of the middle classes, but it's going to go to a lot of people that are here illegally to build houses for them," Tuberville said in a June 24 interview with Fox News. (Tuberville is running for governor.)

Tuberville’s fellow Alabama senator, Republican Katie Britt, took the opposite position, saying June 25 that the legislation "appropriates zero dollars and maintains that illegal aliens are not eligible for HUD housing assistance."

Who’s right? 

In our analysis of the bill, we found nothing in the legislation that would specifically benefit people in the U.S. illegally, and interviews with housing policy experts backed that up. In addition, people in the U.S. illegally are already denied most forms of HUD housing assistance.

The legislation’s goal is to increase the housing supply and lower its cost. It’s possible people here illegally would benefit — but only because the bill affects anyone in the market for housing, regardless of legal status.

"Adding housing will always affect the entire real estate ecosystem," said Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a Columbia University professor of real estate and finance. Any new housing "will lower the cost of housing for anyone else. That's just general equilibrium in the housing market, or in any market, for that matter. You cannot suspend the laws of economics."

Tuberville’s office did not respond to inquiries for this article.

What’s in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

Provisions of the housing legislation include:

• Expanding access to mortgages under $100,000 through a pilot program backed by the Federal Housing Administration.

• Increasing the maximum loan limits for federal mortgage insurance programs.

• Limiting environmental review processes to accelerate homebuilding. 

• Excluding veterans’ disability benefits from being counted as income for a veterans’ housing program.

• Preventing large corporations and institutional investors from purchasing new single-family homes unless expressly for the rental market.

The bill doesn’t appropriate new funding, though $200 million from HUD’s existing budget would be allocated to an annual competitive grant program for local governments and tribes that "demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply."

Phrases such as "alien," "illegal immigrant" or "undocumented immigrant" — often used politically to refer to immigrants illegally in the U.S. — do not appear in the bill text. 

Under a bill first passed in 1980, federal rental assistance programs may not be used to benefit immigrants in the U.S. illegally and people with temporary legal status.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act would not change this.

How could the newly passed bill affect the housing market?

Because of the restrictions on federal housing assistance, most people in the U.S. illegally are renting through the private market. There is no federal law preventing people in the U.S. illegally from renting from private landlords, and landlords are not at legal risk when renting to someone in the U.S. illegally as long as a reasonable rent is being paid. (Providing free rent, however, could be classified as illegally "harboring" someone who lacks legal status.)

Under federal law, a landlord can take other financial factors into account when considering renting, such as the prospective renter’s ability to pay, but not reject someone who is otherwise qualified purely because of their immigration status. 

For people in the U.S. illegally, "less formal housing arrangements in the private market" are common, said Warren Lowell, a Vanderbilt University professor of human and organizational development. Crowding more people per room tends to be high among this population, so I think ‘affordability’ for this demographic group tends to come by resource pooling."

If the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act increases affordable housing availability, people in the U.S. illegally would benefit just as any U.S. resident would.

The law, "if effective in practice, could impact both the ownership and rental markets," said Donald Haurin, an Ohio State University emeritus professor of economics who has specialized in housing and real estate. "Price reductions should eventually spread to the rest of the private market, yielding a better opportunity for all actors."

Lowell agreed that both low- and middle-income renters, along with first-time homeowners, should benefit from the law. "Increases in supply tend to have rippling effects across neighborhoods and income bands," he said.

Our ruling

Tuberville said benefits of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act are "going to go to a lot of people that are here illegally to build houses for them." 

There is nothing in the bill that would "build houses for" people in the U.S. illegally.

The bill does not say anything about people in the U.S. illegally, and it does not change existing laws that make federal rental assistance programs unavailable to immigrants in the U.S. illegally or people with temporary legal status.

The bill’s goal is to expand the affordable housing supply. People in the U.S. illegally who are renters or homebuyers could benefit from a larger supply of homes — but so would U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

We rate the statement False.

Row between Shabana Mahmood and Mike Tapp broke out after he wrote unauthorised article about immigration

A rift between Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood has deepened after it emerged the home secretary wanted to deny the migration minister, Mike Tapp, access to sensitive documents without her approval as she called for him to be sacked.

Downing Street said Tapp – who has been a loyal supporter of Keir Starmer – remained a minister but that the prime minister was taking advice on whether he broke the ministerial code on collective responsibility.

Judge rebukes Christopher Ballard for talking to media but declines defense’s request to take death penalty off table

A Utah judge held a prosecutor in contempt on Friday for speaking to the media about the murder case against the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, but did not grant the defense attorney’s request to bar the death penalty as punishment in the case.

Defense attorneys for Tyler James Robinson, the Utah man who allegedly shot Kirk, a conservative political activist, last September, argued in a March court filing that deputy Utah county attorney Christopher Ballard had violated a pre-trial media gag order.

The Steam Deck dominates gaming on the go, and the Steam Machine looks to conquer the living room.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 27 No. 846.

June 26, 2026 — On June 25, the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) welcomed a delegation of about 25 people from China. The visitors had previously attended the ISC High Performance Conference in Hamburg and took advantage of their stay to tour leading German high-performance computing centers.

Credit: DKRZ

The delegation consisted of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as well as representatives from the company Sugon. The visit focused on current developments in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as their applications in research and science.

To kick off the visit, Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig presented the DKRZ’s scientific focus and mission, as well as the center’s HPC systems and data archiving infrastructure. Dr. Christopher Kadow then presented application examples from the fields of Earth system sciences, climate modeling, and the use of HPC and AI in climate research. In a subsequent panel discussion, participants exchanged views on current developments in the field of HPC, applications in climate and climate research, and international perspectives on scientific collaboration. In addition, the company Sugon presented its activities in the field of high-performance computing.

The event concluded with a guided tour of the data center. During the tour, guests gained insights into the DKRZ’s supercomputers and data archiving infrastructure. At the Klimaglobus, Michael Böttinger also presented visualizations of kilometer-scale climate simulations that vividly demonstrate the capabilities of modern climate modeling.

About DKRZ

The German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum, DKRZ) is a central service center for German climate and earth system research. Its high performance computers, data storage and services form the central research infrastructure for simulation-based climate science in Germany.

Apart from providing computing power, data storage capacity and technical support for models and simulations in climate research, DKRZ offers its scientific users an extensive portfolio of tailor-made services. It maintains and develops application software relevant to climate research and supports its users in matters of data processing. Finally, DKRZ also participates in national and international joint projects and cooperations with the aim of improving the infrastructure for climate modeling.

DKRZ was founded on November 11, 1987 and took up its services on January 1, 1988. It is a non-profit and non-commercial limited company with four shareholders: The Max Planck Society, The Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, represented by the University of Hamburg, The Alfred Wegener Institute – Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and the Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon.

DKRZ is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.

DKRZ provides its resources (computing time, hard-drive storage and archive capacity, consultancy and visualizations) free of charge. Any scientists conducting research in the field of climate and earth system science in Germany, and requiring HPC resources for their work may apply for resources at DKRZ.

Source: DKRZ

The post Chinese Scientists and Sugon Representatives Visit DKRZ Following ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.

About 100 marchers demand transparency after Kohen Wiley was shot dead in a car outside a Walmart

About 100 people gathered on Friday morning outside of the Walmart in rural Senatobia, Mississippi, to protest about the killing of a one-year-old boy by police earlier this month.

Walmart itself was closed, its doors barricaded. During a protest at the Walmart earlier in the week, officers deployed teargas on those gathered to force the crowds to disperse.

Environmentalists and immigrant-rights advocates seek accounting of damage done by notorious detention center

While they welcome the recent closure of the controversial Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center, leading environmental groups and their allies say they want an independent investigation into the environmental damage the facility inflicted on the surrounding wilderness during its 12 months of operations.

Those groups made that demand alongside immigrant-rights advocates and members of Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe at a news conference on Friday outside the entrance to the shuttered detention center, where the Friends of the Everglades (FOE) executive director, Eve Samples, condemned the camp as a “failure, an obscene waste of taxpayer dollars and an abuse of the Everglades”.

Rumors about Apple's next flagship phones point to a new foldable, a variable-aperture camera, improved battery life and, yes, higher prices.

Experts say move signals greater political interference into public health and will exacerbate opioid overdose crisis

Health programs receiving federal funding must agree within days to new priorities from the Trump administration, including a focus on “parental authority” in education and a move away from proven overdose-prevention methods like harm reduction, suggesting greater political control over public health.

The new priorities will likely affect progress against the opioid crisis, and they could signal an attack on vaccination requirements at schools, which are set at the state and local level. The priorities may also weaponize public health to quash “public disorder.”

The race to build AI data centers is leading to a global shortage of memory chips, driving up the cost of personal electronics.

The twin earthquakes that hit Venezuela killed more than 900 people, and that toll is likely to keep rising as frantic rescue and recovery operations ramp up.

Abdikerm Eidleh, accused of playing a key role in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, was arrested in Somalia after more than four years, federal officials said.

• Pochettino has been in charge of the US since late 2024

• Former Spurs and PSG boss likely to have club interest

Mauricio Pochettino has been offered a contract extension that would keep him in charge of the US men’s national team through the 2030 World Cup, multiple sources familiar with the offer said on Friday. Sources spoke with the Guardian on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Pochettino and the US Soccer Federation have been discussing a new deal for about three months, said one source. Pochettino, along with US Soccer CEO JT Batson, have spoken publicly about the negotiations as recently as late May, around the time that Pochettino was reported to have had talks with Serie A side Milan. Pochettino was coy when pressed about Milan’s interest, but Batson spoke openly about it, saying that the federation had received many inquiries in regards to Pochettino’s services.

Microsoft has quietly extended free Windows 10 security updates for consumers by another year, pushing the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program's end date from October 12, 2026, to October 12, 2027. "The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The prevalence of Windows across so many devices and form factors has given Microsoft a massive customer base for decades, but it has also stymied the company's efforts to roll out new operating systems. Microsoft famously extended the support window for Windows XP numerous times throughout the 2010s as it became apparent that millions of PCs would never be updated. Windows 10 isn't quite as entrenched as XP was, but it has still been a slog getting people to upgrade to Windows 11 even nearly five years after release. Unlike many past Windows updates, Windows 11 required some users to buy new PCs with specific CPU technologies and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Microsoft was widely criticized for excluding perfectly serviceable PCs, and that's turning into a problem in 2026. The AI-driven shortage of storage and memory has made system upgrades vastly more expensive, potentially slowing upgrades. Some have also avoided Windows 11 due to Microsoft's intense focus on AI features. The result is that Windows 10 remains stubbornly popular. According to StatCounter data, Windows 10 is still running on about 26 percent of PCs, while Windows 11 sits at 72 percent. That means there are still hundreds of millions of active Windows 10 installs, but those machines will be up to date for at least an additional year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heat can be very dangerous. Staying hydrated and cool are essential.

Critics say mandating Bible reading for over five million students breaches constitutional separation of church and state

The Texas education board has approved a broad new statewide reading list that, for the first time, will make passages from the Bible required reading for more than 5 million public school students.

Under the new initiative, Bible stories will become mandatory reading for millions of public school students in addition to a more standard collection of books, renewing debate over growing efforts in the US to increase the role of religion in classrooms.

The reading list will take effect starting in 2030.

Weeks of punishing strikes have disrupted water, fuel and electricity supplies across the peninsula, which Ukraine’s president has vowed to reclaim.

US president calls it ‘foolish violation’ of ceasefire agreement after drone damaged ship’s upper deck

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump on Friday blamed Iran for carrying out a drone strike on a cargo ship in the strait of Hormuz, calling it a “foolish violation” of the ceasefire agreement with the US.

One drone damaged the upper deck of the ship but the ship was able to proceed, the US president said. The US shot down three other drones aimed at the ship, he said.

Nicholas Rossi​, 38, was serving at least 10 years in prison in Utah following his convictions in 2025 in two sexual assault cases.

The earthquake in Venezuela, a brutal heatwave in Europe, the resignation of Keir Starmer and the World Cup – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

An investor who employed and was close to Jeffrey Epstein appeared before members of Congress Friday investigating the deceased sexual abuser.

Government asks justices to allow people who have lived in US for years to be held without chance to seek bond

The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to let it detain people arrested in ⁠its immigration crackdown without ⁠a chance to seek ​bond, even if they have lived in the country for years.

The administration made that request in a filing made public on Friday, asking the court to ⁠overturn a May decision by a federal appeals court, which had rejected its reinterpretation of a decades-old immigration law that now underlies its mass detention policy.

The company has quietly extended its Extended Security Update coverage until October 2027.

The need for an emergency fund is strong in today's economy. Here's how to access the safety net you may already own.

Voting where you live in the city, or your place in the countryside?

Can New Yorkers with two homes really choose where to cast their ballot? 

A group called MoveIndigo wants New York Democratic voters who have second homes to vote where their second homes are located if those properties are in swing districts.

"New York State law is clear," the group claims. "Citizens with dual residences have the right to choose where they want to vote. They do not have to vote where they maintain their primary residence."

Is that true? 

The New York State Board of Elections publishes updates on state election law, and its 2026 guidance quotes a key court case from 1983, Ferguson v. McNab. The case found that a person with two residences "may choose one to which she has legitimate, significant and continuing attachments as her residence for purposes of the Election Law."

New Yorkers with more than one residence can vote from one, and only one. According to case law, this residence does not have to be a primary residence, or a "domicile," which is a permanent home, one suitable for year-round use. 

Judges have found that when voters can decide where to vote, it lessens the burdens on elections staff,  "who in most cases need only verify an address," as well as the burden on voters with more than one residence, "who otherwise might be turned down at both places and have to go to court in order to be able to vote anywhere."   

A board of elections spokeswoman confirmed that. 

"New York State Election Law does permit an individual with two residences to choose one or the other to register to vote from," said Kathleen McGrath, director of public information at the board. McGrath said the facts of each situation matter. 

"New Yorkers may have multiple residences but must only claim a right to vote from one," she said. 

We also consulted with election lawyer Jerry Goldfeder, senior counsel at Cozen O’Connor, on whether there are exceptions. 

"The election law in New York is perfectly clear: voters may choose from multiple residences from which to vote, as long as they are bona fide homes," Goldfeder said. 

A 2015 case, Maas v Gaebel, found that if a voter has a position on a political issue, and that issue motivates them "to register to vote in a place where he or she has established a bona fide residence does not render such a residence a ‘sham.’"

These laws of course do not permit voters to lie to a Board of Elections official, or write down a fake address on voter registration forms. 

Some observers have questioned New York’s more permissive approach. There have been few cases of false registration in New York, and "the absence of such guidance gives" people with multiple residences "a greater chance of manipulating the rules," wrote Kevin Frazier, who has taught constitutional law, in the Appalachian Journal of Law. 

MoveIndigo provided relevant evidence from the Board of Elections on its website to support its claim. 

Our ruling 

A group claims that voters with two homes in New York can vote at either one. New York state case law supports this claim, as does the state Board of Elections. 

It remains the case that voters cannot mislead elections officials. But when voters with two or more homes do follow the law, they are permitted to choose where they want to vote, even if that is for a politically motivated reason. 

We rate this claim True. 

A gifted lyric soprano, she also starred in popular 1950s movie musicals opposite Mario Lanza and Howard Keel.

Home secretary speeds up major part of bill governing asylum and refugees as new prime minister set to take over

Shabana Mahmood will seek to shore up support for her controversial immigration bill on the progressive left of Labour, as she sets out plans to speed up the opening of new safe and legal routes that will permit thousands of refugees to come to the UK.

The home secretary, who is the leading contender to stay in her job if Andy Burnham becomes prime minister, will next week introduce the legislation, which will also set new limits on immigration claims on human rights grounds and under modern slavery law.

Removing modern slavery protections for any foreign national who has committed a crime and received a sentence, scrapping the previous 12-month threshold.

Rejecting last-minute modern slavery claims where an objection could have been raised earlier or where there is evidence of false documentation.

Allowing immigration claims to be brought under the right to a family life only if the family member is a parent, spouse or child under 18 except in exceptional circumstances.

A new test to make clear that deporting foreign national offenders is in the public interest and should only be blocked in the most exceptional circumstances.
Applications for family reunion under the right to a family life will in future have to be brought by a UK-based sponsor, not the overseas family member.

Giving every trafficked and exploited child a dedicated independent guardian to support their safeguarding and recovery.

It's Day 4 of Prime Day and we're still here and hunting down the very best deals to shop.

High commissioner for human rights calls for ‘those responsible for violations of the law’ to be held to account

• US politics live – latest updates

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, on Friday raised the alarm internationally about deaths in US government immigration custody and called for “prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations”.

Türk’s call came as the Trump administration faced investigations by watchdogs at its own Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into deaths and use of force against people detained in its expanding immigration detention system across the country.

• Two-time All-Pro running back for Bucs died at 36

• Martin was experiencing mental health crisis, family say

• Lawsuit filed against Oakland police, ambulance unit

A lawsuit filed by Doug Martin’s parents alleges delayed care after ⁠police used excessive force led to the former All-Pro running back’s death last October.

Leslie ⁠and Doug Martin ⁠filed ​the wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against the city of Oakland, California, ⁠multiple police officers and an ambulance company.

Want to deposit a small amount into a CD while rates are high? Here's how much interest you can earn with $800 now.

Our writers reacted to the latest news from the tournament before the blockbuster Group I match between France and Norway

Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland will go head-to-head later on as France take on Norway and they have both scored the same amount of goals so far this tournament with four. They could go top of the Golden Boot standings this evening but who is currently there? Have a look:

Ecuador fans’ nerves will be eased for now but that is not the case for all the nations yet as all of the knockout spots have not been allocated. Here is how the third-place spots are shaking out:

Countries that tax U.S. companies offering digital products and services would immediately face a 100% tariff on their exports to the U.S., President Trump said.

Michael Phillips, who says he has a 0.38in member, wrote that he needed procedure to improve his ability to urinate

The North Carolina man who has made the apparently undisputed claim of having the world’s smallest penis is seeking the public’s support for enlargement surgery.

Michael Phillips said online on Thursday that he needed the procedure to improve his ability to urinate, which is difficult for him given that he is reportedly 0.38in (0.97cm) long when fully erect. Otherwise, he said he must continue to wear diapers for adults with incontinence every day.

June 26, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is contributing AI-enabled payload optimization and advanced modeling and simulation expertise to Aires Tide, a collaborative National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) demonstration exploring new ways to design flight test vehicles.

Developed in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Kansas City National Security Campus, Aires Tide brings together expertise across design, manufacturing and flight testing in a single cross-enterprise effort. The project is also an early example of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission in practice, illustrating how AI can help connect those capabilities in a more integrated engineering workflow for national security applications.

A collaboration of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Kansas City National Security Campus, Aires Tide brings together expertise across design, manufacturing and flight testing in a single cross-enterprise effort. The project is also an early example of the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission in practice, illustrating how AI can help connect those capabilities in a more integrated engineering workflow for national security applications. Photos: Garry McLeod/LLNL (left); Craig Fritz/Sandia (center/right).

The project reached an important milestone with a successful May 19 drop test of a half-scale Aires Tide vehicle at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The test generated flight data that will help the team assess performance, validate modeling and simulation results, and refine future designs.

For LLNL, the project centers on using AI-driven optimization, physics-based modeling and large-scale simulation to evaluate payload configurations and engineering tradeoffs more efficiently. In the project’s design workflow, LLNL researchers applied advanced computational tools to explore complex design spaces and support a co-design approach in which components are developed as part of an integrated system rather than in isolation.

“Aires Tide reflects the kind of mission innovation that Livermore and its nuclear security enterprise partners are advancing for the nation’s security,” said Lab Director Kim Budil. “For LLNL, this effort demonstrates how we can bring our advanced capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, design and engineering to this collaboration to accelerate development cycles and support future national security needs.”

The project moved from concept to multiple prototype builds in about five months, a process that would traditionally take years, according to researchers. Across the collaboration, researchers designed, built and tested several versions of the vehicle, including smaller-scale test articles and a full-scale 11-foot prototype planned for display as part of the Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., later this summer.

The cone-shaped fuselage was printed as nested parts that could be separated and reassembled, an approach that significantly reduced production time and cost. The final display version was manufactured using laser powder bed fusion, an additive manufacturing (3D printing) process suited for producing complex, high-performance metal structures.

LLNL focused on optimizing payloads for various performance characteristics, while Sandia and LANL contributed complementary design and integration expertise. That work helped the team assess how internal payload elements could be arranged and optimized for performance under demanding flight conditions.

“One of the most important aspects of Aires Tide is its potential to accelerate the full engineering cycle for strategic deterrence and stockpile modernization, from initial design work through production and experimental validation,” said LLNL Deputy Director for Strategic Deterrence Brad Wallin. “That ability to connect AI-driven optimization with simulation, fabrication and test data will help us move faster while making better-informed decisions at every stage.”

Researchers and engineers created Aires Tide as a concept demonstrator rather than a production system. For LLNL and its NNSA partners, the project is a tangible exemplar of a broader goal: connecting AI-enabled design, HPC, advanced manufacturing and experimental feedback in a closed-loop process that will accelerate development across the national security enterprise.

More from HPCwire: DOE Unveils AI-Designed Aires Tide Flight Vehicle Built Under Genesis Mission

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Helps Advance AI-Driven Design and Simulation for NNSA Aires Tide Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

Commentary: This split-Siri life is going to be the norm for a lot of people with Apple devices.

The monarch’s declaration does not tell us much, except that his bill is lower than for people with much smaller fortunes

The veil of secrecy that surrounds the royal finances was nudged aside a little on Thursday to allow the release of a new piece of information. We learned for the first time how much the king’s annual tax bill comes to.

This was not a full tax return. It was a two-sentence declaration, stating his tax payable amounted to £12.9m in 2024-25, and a slightly smaller sum the year before. His total tax payable since accession comes to £30m.

New member for Makerfield and expected next prime minister joins other MPs who donate some or all of their pay

Andy Burnham has said he will be donating 15% of his MP’s salary to local causes in his constituency of Makerfield.

An MP’s salary currently stands at £98,599 and a number of MPs donate all or part of their salary to charities and causes in the areas they represent.

U.S. lawmakers recently grilled Jeffrey Epstein's longtime assistant Lesley Groff about Epstein's use of American Express to book travel for multiple women or girls.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here:

• UK June heat record broken for third day in a row

• Fourth child dies in France as brutal heatwave forecast to shift east

Over in the UK, firefighters are still trying to bring a large wildfire in Derbyshire under control.

The blaze, which has burned over 500 square metres of moorland and woodland on Tintwistle Moor, near Glossop, broke out on Wednesday evening, with fire crews from Manchester and Derbyshire deploying a water-dropping helicopter and six fire engines on Thursday.

Despite £369m upgrade, King Charles will never live in palace but aides stress it will remain ‘buzzing hive’ of activity

Not all modern British monarchs have viewed the prospect of moving into Buckingham Palace with unalloyed joy. So in announcing he will never live there, after the completion of its £369m upgrade next year, King Charles has at least grasped that nettle.

Queen Victoria was initially dismayed by the damp, dingy and disorganised building that greeted her and her husband, Prince Albert, in 1837. It was Albert who refashioned it into “Monarchy HQ”. After his death in 1861, Victoria retreated mainly to Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Scientists say hot spell is worst ever, with nearly half of region’s 850 largest cities facing unprecedented heat stress

The number of deaths in France linked to the heatwave has climbed to four toddlers and more than 55 drownings, as the brutally hot conditions sweeping Europe were forecast to shift east, choking 150 million people under 35C (95F) temperatures.

Scientists said the heatwave was the most severe and widespread ever, leaving nearly half of the region’s 850 largest cities grappling with unprecedented heat stress. They said the extreme temperatures had been made possible by the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning.

Jurors in California deliberated for over 13 hours, before announcing that they were deadlocked

A federal judge declared a mistrial in the arson case against the 29-year-old man accused of sparking the deadly 2025 Palisades fire in Los Angeles, after the jury said it could not agree on a verdict.

Jurors deliberated for over 13 hours on Thursday on whether to convict Jonathan Rinderknecht on three federal charges, before announcing that they were deadlocked.

The defense team for Tyler Robinson asked that the death penalty be taken off the table following public comments by prosecutors.

Sarah B Rogers speech at conference in London included far-right memes and conspiracy theories about ‘Da Yookay’

Claims by a senior official in the Trump administration that British police were making thousands of “freedom of speech” arrests have been rejected by the UK government.

Sarah B Rogers, who has become the public face of the US state department’s hostility to European liberal democracies, was accused by MPs of echoing far-right memes and conspiracy theories during a speech at an international rightwing conference in London. She also referenced the death of the British teenager Henry Nowak and a recent incident in which a child was thrown into a zoo’s crocodile pit.

Various issues – including a rodent infestation and mould – have left the historic, sprawling Ottawa estate empty

10 Downing Street has two things: mice and a chief mouser. For more than a decade, an officially recognized feline has kept rodent infestation in the British prime minister’s residence to a minimum.

Over a similar period, the official residence of Canada’s prime minister has seen an unchecked explosion of rodents.

City’s mayor has consistently argued that rising housing costs have made it increasingly unaffordable

A New York City housing board has voted to freeze rent for approximately 1m apartments.

In a major victory for Zohran Mamdani, the mayor who campaigned on a pledge to freeze rent, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 on Thursday to freeze increases on one- and two-year leases. The decision will provide relief to tenants in more than 1m rent-stabilized apartments, representing over 40% of the city’s rental housing.

In "Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe his fundamentally different approach to running the country.

Bolton agreed to pay a $2.25 million fine, pleading guilty to one count of retaining classified national security information.

Jane Pauley hosts a special program celebrating our nation's semiquincentennial, "These United States - America at 250."

Worst incident of its kind in country for more than 125 years leaves many searching for family members – and pleading for international help

• Venezuela death toll doubles as interim president vows to save ‘as many people as possible’

Nearly all of Ligia Level’s family lived in a trio of apartment blocks along Hotel Avenue, a seafront sweep of palm-specked resorts and high-rise condos along Venezuela’s Caribbean coast.

When a powerful “doublet” of earthquakes jolted the region on Wednesday afternoon, those buildings and the lives within them came crashing down.

Led by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a group of Senate Democrats suggested the Justice Department violated its internal policies with the creation of the "anti-weaponization" fund.

Why demining the Strait of Hormuz will be difficult – but also presents an opportunity Expert comment thilton.drupal 26 June 2026

Clearing the busy international waterway of mines is a complex challenge that will take time and international coordination. But it could help to build trust between the US and Iran during negotiations.

Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has begun to increase following the US-Iran deal. Yet for the Strait to fully reopen, it will need to be cleared of sea mines that put ships at risk. 

This will be a difficult and lengthy task that will put the ceasefire to the test. But it also offers an opportunity to for Iran to work with others to demonstrate its commitment to de-escalation. 

Mines in the Strait of Hormuz

Iran has not publicly confirmed how many mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz or their precise location. Estimates suggest there are about 80 mines in the Strait. These are primarily Maham 3 and Maham 7 high-explosive blast mines. Importantly, Maham mines resist detection by deviating sonar waves used by minesweepers, making them extremely difficult to detect and remove. 

Before the war, Iran had an estimated stock of about 5,000-6,000 sea mines, a significant amount of which are produced domestically. Some analysts believe that Tehran has retained 80-90 per cent of its small boats and minelaying vessels, but there is no official confirmation of these numbers. 

Iran previously declared an area that covered the established traffic lanes as a ‘hazardous area.’ There are currently four suspected but unconfirmed minefield areas around these lanes. These are likely around the western entrance to the Strait, the central eastbound shipping lane, the central westbound shipping lane, and the eastern exit toward the Gulf of Oman. 

Why demining will be difficult as shipping restarts

Demining the Strait of Hormuz will be extremely complicated, in part because it will have to take place amid changing shipping traffic patterns and potentially dangerous congestion in the narrow waterway. 

Since the main central route through the Strait became effectively closed by Iranian mines, there are now two passable routes through the Strait. Iran has established a northern route closer to the Iranian coast, putting ships at risk of being seized and potentially enabling Iran to charge tolls or ‘service fees’ in future. Meanwhile, the US has established its own southern route that hugs the Omani coast, which it says ships can ‘freely and safely transit.’ 

Both routes push shipping to the shallow edges of the Strait, increasing the risk of ships running aground. Both are also narrow; in recent days only an average of 25 ships have transited daily, compared to the pre-war daily average of around 125. There are around 500-600 ships still stranded in the Persian Gulf. Traffic cannot be effectively restored to pre-war levels without reopening the main central channel.

Mine clearing will also be difficult to manage safely due to ships turning off their AIS location signals. This has helped ships avoid detection from Iranian forces while traversing the southern route, but also prevents them from communicating their location to other nearby ships, increasing risks of collisions. Turning off AIS signals or ‘going dark’ is also a practice used by ships participating in sanctions evasion and illicit activity at sea, including many Iranian ships and vessels within the shadow fleet. 

Today, ships may be reluctant to use their AIS signals for fear of becoming targets if hostilities restart. Likewise, GPS jamming has also been used widely across the Gulf in missile defences; GPS jamming disrupts AIS signals, making it impossible to navigate effectively and safely. 

Demining and traffic management will be further complicated by Iran’s new claims of sovereignty across the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s recently established Persian Gulf Strait Authority has warned that any ships not using ‘unauthorised routes’ would not be guaranteed safe passage. 

On Thursday, the International Maritime Organization announced it was pausing its efforts to evacuate stranded seafarers from the Persian Gulf after an attack on a cargo ship off the coast of Oman, which the US blamed on Iran. The IMO mission also presents an additional cause of congestion in the Gulf that will need to be managed alongside mine clearing.

Who will clear the Strait of mines?

Point 5 of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding (MoU) seems to place the responsibility on Tehran to demine the Strait of Hormuz: ‘The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the tactical and military obstacles and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days.’

However, while Iran does have some mine clearing capabilities, its forces are optimized for laying mines rather than removing them. Iran alone may also not be able – or trusted – to clear the mines in the Strait by itself. 

But its role cannot be discounted altogether. Given that Iran laid the mines, it could have crucial information about the location of mines, mine types and arming settings. Iran’s participation in demining operations could also provide an opportunity for Tehran to signal its commitment to the peace process and decreases the incentive for it to place more mines in the future. 

While the US has an arsenal of drones, explosive-laden robots and helicopters for mine detection, it also cannot do the job alone. Mine-clearing through deactivation or detonation still requires highly skilled crews and advanced equipment. The US has historically relied on its NATO allies to cover these areas in an implicit division of labour; it currently only has one ship available for mine clearing in the Middle East. As a result, the US will have no choice but to depend on and coordinate with its allies and partners to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Other countries have a willingness to join a Hormuz mine-clearing mission, with some publicly offering forces. The UK-France proposed multinational coalition includes several European navies that have specialist mine countermeasure forces. The UK has offered some of its newer unmanned mine warfare capabilities for mine detection, which would be paired with HMS Dragon for escort and force protection. Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and the European Union’s EUNAVFOR Operation Aspides among others could all contribute too. 

Ultimately, reopening the Strait of Hormuz is a shared global necessity. Mine clearing can only effectively and practically happen through international cooperation and coordination. Iran has not only agreed to play a role as per the MoU, but it must also be stakeholder in the reopening of the Strait if the world is to avoid another chokepoint closure in the future.

The need for a political solution

Mine clearance is often considered a technical challenge, but in the Strait of Hormuz the greater obstacle may be political. Clearing mines is a slow, deliberate and resource-intensive process that requires specialized vessels operating predictably in confined waters. These forces cannot work effectively unless all parties have confidence that they will not become targets.

For that reason, a sustained cessation of hostilities between the US and Iran is a prerequisite for any meaningful demining effort. Both sides would need to commit to not attacking each other, but also to protecting mine-countermeasure vessels, support ships, and civilian traffic transiting through the Strait. At present, the ceasefire and accompanying MoU provide only limited guarantees, while large-scale mine clearance has yet to begin. If demining operations are to succeed, these guarantees will likely need to be extended well beyond the current timeline.

The Second Round Foundation, founded by Sandra and Jalen Brunson, aims to help provide young people with what they need to thrive in the future.

As California Gov. Gavin Newsom eyes a 2028 presidential bid, he's calling for a national tax on billionaires and a public stake in AI, though he opposes a state ballot measure to tax billionaires.

In his time, Patrick Henry achieved great fame for his skills as an orator and for his advocacy for independence from Great Britain. However, Henry’s constitutional legacy is complicated, and Henry was often in conflict with some Founders while respected by others.

Henry led the effort in Virginia to oppose the Stamp Act of 1765, and he served in the First and Second Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, but he was not in Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was signed. In his later years, Henry rejected an appointment to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he soon became a vocal critic of the document, which he called “a resolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain.”

Henry was a prominent anti-Federalist who demanded a Bill of Rights be included in the Constitution during ratification debates in Virginia. Henry also was present at some of the key moments during the founding era, and he also was a slaveholder for his entire adult life. In his later years, Henry declined or failed to act on offers to serve as Chief Justice of the United States, Secretary of State, and a United States Senator from Virginia.

Part of his legacy today comes from a moment in March 1775 when Henry reportedly used the phrase “give me liberty or give me death” in a political speech. Those seven words, and Henry’s own conflicts with them, frame much of the debate about Henry’s importance as a Founder.

Firebrand of the Revolution

Patrick Henry was born on May 29, 1736, in Hanover County, Virginia at Studley plantation. He was reportedly influenced at a young age by Samuel Davies, an evangelical Presbyterian pastor who used fiery rhetoric in his sermons. A self-taught attorney, Henry passed Virginia’s bar exam in 1760. He soon gained a reputation within the colony for his role in the Parsons’ Cause case.

The Virginia legislature passed the Two-Penny Act in 1758, which regulated tobacco prices when the crop was used as a form of currency. The Crown vetoed the law and members of the Anglican Church, which was part of Virginia’s government, sued their vestry for lost wages. After losing in court, the vestry brought in Henry to its sentencing hearing. Henry directly attacked the King, who he claimed, “by annulling or disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being Father of his people degenerated into a Tyrant and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience.” The jury award was just one penny to the clergy.

Within months, Henry was serving in the House of Burgesses and news came that Parliament had passed the Stamp Act of 1765. The act required colonists to pay taxes on every page of printed paper they used. The tax also included fees for playing cards, dice, and newspapers. The measure sparked outrage across the colonies.

Henry introduced five written radical resolutions in the Virginia House of Burgesses, four of which passed. The resolutions were also published in newspapers across the colonies. Henry argued that his majesty’s subjects in Virginia enjoyed “the Priviledges [sic], Franchises & Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, & possessed by the People of Great Britain.” He also claimed that taxation with representation was a distinguishing characteristic of “British Freedom and without which the ancient Constitution cannot subsist,” and only Virginia’s assembly had “the only and sole exclusive Right & Power to lay Taxes & Impositions upon the Inhabitants.”

In March 1773, Henry met with Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and several others in Williamsburg to form a Committee of Correspondence system after the Gaspee affair. In June 1772, the royal revenue schooner HMS Gaspee had run around in Rhode Island and was burned by local residents who believed the Crown lacked the power to regulate trade. The official response was the Dockyards, etc., Protection Act of April 1772, which required the extradition to Britain of anyone suspected of burning its ships.

The act immediately triggered a new committee of correspondence in Boston, and the resolution of response introduced by Henry and others in Virginia became the model for most other colonies. “The minds of his Majesty's faithful subjects in this colony have been much disturbed by various rumors and reports of proceedings tending to deprive them of their ancient, legal, and constitutional rights,” the resolution noted.

Henry’s Rhetoric in Action

In September 1774, Henry, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Peyton Randolph were part of Virginia’s delegation at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In all, 56 delegates from 12 colonies (excluding Georgia) came to the meeting to address the Coercive or Intolerable Acts. The laws were meant as punishment for the activities of the Boston Tea Party. Henry openly lobbied for a united front against the Crown.

In the notes of John Adams, he recorded parts of debate over representation in a new government of the colonies. “We are in a State of Nature, Sir, the Distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American. Slaves are to be thrown out of the Question, and if the freemen can be represented according to their Numbers I am satisfied,” Henry said.

In March 1775, Henry spoke at a Virginia convention to discuss the events in Philadelphia and the need to form armed militias in case British troops attempted to control the area. In later years, biographer William Wirt in 1817 reconstructed Henry’s speech based on the recollections of Thomas Jefferson and others. Wirt’s account ends with the famous lines, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” In recent years, some scholars have questioned Wirt’s account of the speech.

Henry also represented Virginia at the opening of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It was Henry who was first chosen to write a petition to King George III listing colonial grievances. However, the delegates thought Henry’s version was too radical and they settled a more conservative version, John Dickinson’s Olive Branch petition. Henry left Philadelphia in August 1775, never to return to national office.

Life in Virginia and Henry’s Opposition to the Constitution

Henry’s political career in Virginia had national consequences. At the Virginia Convention of 1776, Henry supported the Declaration of Rights written primarily by George Mason, which influenced Jefferson’s work for the Declaration of Independence. Edmund Randolph later noted that Henry contributed to the Virginia Declaration’s final two articles, which required that no free government could exist without “firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue” or without “the free exercise of religion.”

The Virginia Convention of 1776 concluded with the selection of Henry as Virginia’s first governor. He served for three consecutive one-year terms, where he worked closely on war efforts with George Washington. Henry was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1779. In later years, after his reelection to the governorship in 1784, Henry came into conflict with James Madison. Henry supported a tax to support Christian teachers. Madison responded with his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785 which called the bill a “dangerous abuse of power.” Virginia lawmakers sided with Madison over Henry, and a bill written by Jefferson and supported by Madison established the official disconnection between church and state in Virginia.

The dispute became greatly magnified when Virginia considered ratification of the Constitution adopted in Philadelphia in September 1787. Henry, George Mason, James Madison, and Edmund Randolph dominated the proceedings at the Virginia Ratification Convention of June 1788. Henry and Mason led the anti-Federalists, who opposed the Constitution as consolidating federal power at the cost of the states surrendering their sovereignty and as an attack on individual natural rights. In another landmark speech, Henry questioned the motives behind the Constitution. “Have they said, We, the states? Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation. It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government,” he argued.

Henry then attacked the Constitution’s preamble directly as evidence of a new monarchy such as the one he opposed in 1775. “The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing — the expression, We, the people, instead of the states, of America. I need not take much pains to show that the principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous.” He was equally horrified by the lack of a Bill of Rights in the document.

In the end, Madison and the Federalists prevailed when they agreed to add two lists of rights to Virginia’s ratification documents. A year later, Madison introduced a federal Bill of Rights in Congress after he defeated Henry’s hand-picked candidate, James Monroe, for a seat in the first U.S. House of Representatives.

Henry’s Legacy

Henry retired from politics in 1791 and returned to his legal career. In 1796, in Ware v. Hylton, Henry argued along with John Marshall about international treaty rights, and the case made it to the Supreme Court. Although Henry and Marshall did not prevail, the case enhanced their legal reputation. George Washington asked Henry to return to politics in 1799. Although Henry won election to the Virginia House of Delegates, Henry died at his plantation at Red Hill before taking office.

In his last public speech on March 4, 1799, Henry, now a Federalist, explained his support for the Alien and Sedition Acts. According to later accounts, Henry noted that “he had seen with regret the unlimited power over the purse and sword consigned to the General government, but that he had been overruled, and it was now necessary to submit to the constitutional exercise of that Power.”

In his will, Henry declined to free the enslaved people at Red Hill. The will also was accompanied by a sealed envelope containing his handwritten version of the Stamp Act Resolves of 1765 and a personal note for future generations.

Henry told Americans that their independence and future “will depend on the use our people make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable. Righteousness alone can exalt them as a Nation.”

In a conversation with Daniel Webster in 1824, Thomas Jefferson, Henry’s former friend and long-time enemy, acknowledged Henry’s importance. “He was as well suited to the times as any man ever was; and it is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry. He was far before all in maintaining the spirit of the Revolution.”

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

Investigators initially suspected food poisoning, but that was quickly dismissed after Turkish media reported that their hotel was dealing with a bedbug infestation.

Stuck with tens of thousands in credit card debt? The right strategy could dramatically reduce your balance.

German firm reportedly considering doubling previously announced staff reductions amid Chinese competition

• Business live – latest updates

Germany’s Volkswagen is to cut up to 100,000 jobs and reduce and eventually stop production at some plants, according to reports.

The company has refused to comment on reports of a management presentation at a board meeting outlining dramatic cost cutting, but if it goes ahead it would mean Volkswagen doubling previously announced staff reductions.

Long-term CD accounts offer extended financial protection and big returns for those looking to deposit $40,000 now.

Ex-national security adviser turned Trump critic could face prison for sharing classified information with relatives

• US politics live – latest updates

John Bolton, the former US national security adviser who became an arch-enemy of Donald Trump after serving under him and then being fired, pleaded guilty on Friday to a charge of mishandling classified information that could result in him going to prison.

Bolton admitted the charge, as widely anticipated, in an appearance at a federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a plea deal designed to produce a lesser sentence by reducing the seriousness of the accusations against him.

Efforts of campaign groups, supporters and party figures coalesced after May elections as MPs’ views began to change

The third coming of Andy Burnham began in earnest on the dancefloor of the Ministry of Sound. It was the annual conference of the centre-left pressure group Compass on an unusually hot spring weekend in May 2025. Keir Starmer, a year into his premiership, was deep in the trenches of the welfare battle, and the event’s keynote speakers were Burnham and Louise Haigh.

Under the hot pink lights, the mayor of Greater Manchester joked that he was doing the “rally the troops” slot, inappropriate for a pessimistic Evertonian. But he said there was one reason to still be cheerful.

House committee subpoenas billionaire over nondisclosure agreements after he reportedly refused to answer questions

Billionaire financier Leon Black’s testimony before a House committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein ended abruptly on Friday morning after members from both parties said Black refused to answer questions about non-disclosure agreements.

James Comer, the Republican who chairs the committee, told reporters that the committee had already issued two subpoenas to Black on Friday – one demanding he produce any nondisclosure agreements, and another to appear again before the committee next month.

As temperatures soar across Europe, cities are struggling to adapt, further exacerbating socioeconomic divisions

The heatwave afflicting western Europe is the worst ever, with the combination of heat and humidity fuelled by the climate crisis making scores of cities feel unliveable. While for some the adverse impacts amount to disturbed sleep and sticky days in the home office, low-income families are often worse affected by cities’ lack of adequate adaptation measures, with women at the sharp end.

“[It] throws a grenade into every vulnerability you already have,” says Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, pointing out that vulnerable or marginalised groups often bear the brunt of climate crisis-based hardship globally.

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China’s president Xi Jinping said Beijing was ready to provide Venezuela with “disaster relief and reconstruction” assistance.

Xi sent a message of condolence to Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez today, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has ordered (PDF) urgent inspections of 16 Airbus A380 planes operated by Emirates and Qantas, after cracks were found in a wing component on some aircraft (source paywalled; alternative source).. Cracks were found during earlier inspections of the wing spars structure, a key component of the wing, EASA said in a directive effective Wednesday. EASA determined that they "could reduce the structural integrity of the wing." "To address this potential unsafe condition, Airbus determined that an additional special detailed inspection has to be accomplished," EASA said. The first group of five aircraft, operated by Emirates, need to be inspected immediately, while the second group of 11 aircraft can be inspected later but within 25 flight cycles, EASA said in a separate statement. From the second group, 10 are operated by Emirates and one by Qantas, the aviation safety agency said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine will ramp up attacks on Russia in an operation "aimed at compelling it to end the war."

June 26, 2026 — To address the rapidly growing computational demands driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI), Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) under the National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR) officially launched its newest AI supercomputing system, “Nano4” (Chip Innovation 26), on June 1, 2026. The new system provides enhanced AI computing resources for academia, government agencies, and industry users.

NCHC’s Nano4

Nano4 is a key outcome of the “Chip-Driven Industrial Innovation Upgrade: Next-Generation High-Performance Computing and AI Evaluation Environment Project” (Chip Innovation Program). Designed specifically for large-scale generative AI model training, inference, and high-performance computing applications, the system is equipped with the latest NVIDIA H200 GPUs, featuring eight GPUs per server, a 400 Gb/s high-speed network, and 2 TB of memory per node. This advanced architecture significantly improves performance for AI development, scientific simulations, data analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads.

The deployment of Nano4 further strengthens Taiwan’s sovereign computing infrastructure and supports research and innovation in key fields such as AI, semiconductors, biomedical sciences, climate modeling, digital twins, and smart manufacturing. It will help accelerate technology development and real-world applications across academia, government, and industry.

To encourage users to explore the new AI computing platform, NCHC will offer a free trial period throughout June, followed by the start of full commercial operations in July. This phased rollout will allow users to familiarize themselves with the system and optimize their workflows.

Looking ahead, NCHC will continue expanding Taiwan’s national computing capabilities by integrating AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and cloud technologies, providing a robust computing foundation for scientific innovation and industrial transformation.

NCHC welcomes research institutions, government organizations, and enterprises with needs in AI, HPC, and large-scale data analytics to leverage these national computing resources and help drive Taiwan into the next era of intelligent technology.

More from HPCwire: LineShine Debuts at No. 1 as the TOP500 Enters a New Global Exascale Era

Source: NCHC

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NEW YORK, June 26, 2026 — Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Meta have announced a strategic multi-generation collaboration for Qualcomm Technologies to be a supplier for data center CPUs for Meta. Qualcomm Technologies’ data center CPU, the Qualcomm Dragonfly C1000, is planned to power Meta’s next-generation server fleet, underscoring the growing importance of high-performance, power-efficient compute in large-scale scale-out environments.

Qualcomm Technologies’ solutions will be in production starting in the second half of 2028 and future data center capacity expansions. Qualcomm Technologies’ platform approach, spanning advanced compute, high-performance connectivity, and system-level optimization, is designed to deliver substantial performance per watt and help reduce total cost of ownership at scale.

“We designed our data center CPU to deliver leading performance per core and a breakthrough in power efficiency for large scale data center deployments, and this multi-generation agreement with Meta is a significant validation of that approach,” said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated. “We’re thrilled to build on our partnership with Meta, expanding from devices to data center. And this is just the beginning.”

“We’re excited to continue partnering with Qualcomm Technologies as they design the next generation of CPUs for Meta,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta. “Along with our other compute investments, we’re quickly building the infrastructure we need to deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world.”

More from HPCwire

• Qualcomm Unveils Data Center Roadmap for the Agentic AI Era with New Dragonfly Portfolio
• Qualcomm Strengthens Data Center AI Push with Modular Acquisition

About Qualcomm

Qualcomm is a global computing leader at the center of the AI era, enabling intelligence to scale from the most personal devices to large scale infrastructure. Building on more than four decades of innovation, we develop platforms and solutions that bring together advanced AI, high performance, low power computing and industry leading connectivity—powering products and services used around the world. At Qualcomm, we are engineering human progress.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering and research and development functions and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business. Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Qualcomm patents are licensed by Qualcomm Incorporated.

Source: Qualcomm

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CPS says decision to withhold names is due to fears Tate and his brother could identify alleged victims online

Andrew and Tristan Tate’s legal claim to be told the names of their female accusers has been thrown out by a high court judge who ruled that prosecutors had acted reasonably in treating the brothers as “notorious”.

Mr Justice Chamberlain on Friday rejected an attempt to compel the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to inform the Tates of the identities of the women whose allegations have formed the basis for charges against the men of rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking.

• New York are 34-47 and have lost six straight

• Owner Cohen calls season a disappointment

• Team have MLB’s second-highest payroll at $377m

Carlos Mendoza was fired as manager of the underperforming New York Mets on Friday and replaced by Andy Green.

New York are 34-47 following a six-game losing streak, 15 games behind National League East-leading Atlanta and 9.5 games back of the NL’s last wild-card berth.

Technology companies are betting trillions of dollars that consumers will open their wallets for AI services. But what if Big Tech is wrong?

Sam Altman announces limited preview of GPT 5.6 in move that echoes launch of Anthropic’s Mythos

• Business live – latest updates

OpenAI is staggering the release of its latest AI model after a request from the US government, in a move echoing the launch of Anthropic’s Mythos product.

The company behind ChatGPT signalled its dissatisfaction with the move, saying that doing so keeps the best AI tools from “users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them”.

RJ Scaringe says firms focused on selling fossil fuel engines risk being ‘woefully behind’ on technology by end of decade

Carmakers that focus on selling fossil fuel engines are at risk of being “woefully behind” on technology by the end of the decade, according to the boss of Rivian, an Amazon-backed US electric carmaker.

RJ Scaringe, Rivian’s founder and chief executive, said the car industry has reached a “fork in the road” in the choice between short-term profits and the heavy investments, particularly in software, that will be required to survive.

Two of boxing’s ascendant stars have been tabbed for greatness since they were teenagers. On Saturday night at Barclays Center, one will claim the signature win both have been chasing

It is the type of fight boxing routinely claims to want and too rarely delivers. When Jaron “Boots” Ennis and Xander Zayas step into the ring at Barclays Center on Saturday night, they will be putting more on the line than their undefeated records. They will be risking the carefully cultivated aura of inevitability that has surrounded both men since they were teenagers.

In an era when promising fighters are routinely steered around danger rather than toward it, Ennis and Zayas have chosen a different road. The result is one of the year’s most compelling fights: a showdown between two undefeated champions tabbed for stardom since adolescence whose reputations still outpace their résumés.

Those partial to a pint may be relieved to know a modest of amount of weak beer may actually be beneficial

• European heatwave live – latest updates

As Europe endures a record-breaking heatwave, countries are taking steps to keep people safe and prevent health services from becoming overstretched. Parisians face a temporary ban on drinking alcohol in public to reduce the pressure on the hospitals after a four-fold rise in cardiac arrests in a 24-hour period.

We look at why drinking alcohol can be dangerous in a heatwave.

An 18th-century archaeological dig uncovered a library of intact but charred scrolls. Their contents have been unreadable until recently.

The story behind MacPaw's proactive Mac assistant that can solve hundreds of tasks and adapts to how you think and work.

New platform delivers direct-to-chip liquid cooling with end-to-end infrastructure and services, simplifying enterprise deployment of high-density AI compute

AUSTIN, Texas, June 26, 2026 — JetCool, a Flex company and leading provider of advanced cooling for AI and high-density computing, has announced the launch of a liquid-cooled version of the Dell PowerEdge XE7745 server. The solution combines a fully integrated, liquid-cooled system with commissioning, deployment, and ongoing maintenance services, along with unified warranty coverage across the server and cooling environment. Delivered tested and ready to deploy, it reduces risk, variability, and complexity for enterprise customers.

By bringing together server, cooling, and lifecycle services in a single offering, JetCool provides a streamlined path to adopt cost-effective, high-density AI infrastructure through a single, accountable partner.

Liquid-Cooled XE7745 Servers: Performance Without Compromise

The liquid-cooled Dell PowerEdge XE7745 is based on a proven platform recognized for high performance, density, and cost efficiency. Purpose-built for demanding AI, HPC, and GPU-accelerated workloads, it supports dual 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors and up to eight high-density NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs.

To manage these intensive computing demands, JetCool’s SmartPlate direct-to-chip liquid cooling removes heat directly from the silicon, effectively managing sustained loads of up to 8 kW per server. This precision-engineered thermal solution delivers substantial efficiency and performance gains over the air-cooled configuration:

• Superior Thermal Margin: Reduces CPU temperatures by up to 7% and GPU temperatures by up to 11%, helping to maximize performance and prevent thermal throttling under heavy workloads.
• Significant Power Savings: Achieves up to a 30% reduction in total server power consumption by reducing fan speed up to 70% and fan power by up to 50%.
• Dramatically Quieter Operation: Lowers acoustic output by up to 23 dB, an approximately 80% reduction in perceived noise per server.

By optimizing heat transfer at the chip level, the liquid cooling frees up valuable power and cooling capacity at the rack level, allowing enterprises to deploy more compute density into their existing data center footprints.

Designed for rapid, efficient deployment, the system utilizes low-flow operation, allowing enterprises to replace older, less-dense servers without disrupting their existing facility water loops. To simplify the upgrade process, JetCool provides the entire rack-level infrastructure, including the physical racks, mounting hardware, CDUs, manifolds, and fluid distribution equipment, delivering a complete, factory-tested assembly that is ready to install.

Value of an End-to-End Approach

By bringing together the server, cooling, infrastructure, lifecycle services, and warranty into a single, coordinated offering, JetCool simplifies how liquid-cooled systems are procured, deployed, and operated. A single point of support and accountability spans system configuration, delivery, and support, reducing vendor complexity and eliminating gaps in ownership.

Powered by Flex’s global manufacturing footprint, supply chain depth, and service capabilities, the JetCool solution delivers the consistency and execution that enterprises need to deploy and scale confidently across data centers and regions.

“Scaling next-generation AI demands a leap forward in compute density, but the real key to success is bringing that power online quickly, safely, and efficiently,” said Bernie Malouin, Founder of JetCool and Vice President at Flex. “By delivering the Dell PowerEdge XE7745 as a fully integrated, liquid-cooled system backed by end-to-end services, we’re taking the risk out of high-density deployments. We’re giving operators a reliable path to get peak performance out of their hardware while keeping their existing facility running predictably.”

The liquid-cooled Dell PowerEdge XE7745 platform is available directly from JetCool. To learn more, visit https://jetcool.com/Dell.

About Flex

Flex (Reg. No. 199002645H) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps leading brands design, build, and manage products that improve the world. With a global footprint spanning 30 countries, Flex delivers advanced manufacturing and supply chain solutions, innovative products and technology, and lifecycle services that support customers from concept to scale. In the AI era, Flex is helping customers accelerate data center deployment by solving power, heat, and scale challenges through cutting-edge power and cooling technology and scalable IT infrastructure solutions.

About JetCool

JetCool, a Flex company, is a global leader in advanced thermal management for compute-intensive applications. Trusted by top chipmakers, OEMs, and data centers, JetCool delivers a portfolio of liquid cooling solutions that enhance performance, increase energy efficiency, and support sustainability goals. Engineered for the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and next-generation computing, JetCool technologies deliver reliable, scalable performance for data centers around the world.

Source: JetCool

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Prime Day is officially here, and the savings are even better than we hoped for.

Amazon’s annual shopping event ends today. We vetted sales on Our Place’s bestselling pan, Hatch’s sunrise alarm clock, a Ninja Creami ice cream maker and more – our no-junk picks

• The best anti-Prime Day deals for Amazon skeptics

Prime Day is the wild west of online shopping. For every genuinely great deal, there are about seven duds dressed up in “best of” graphics. To prevent you from wasting your money (or time), our editors have cut through the chaos to find Prime Day 2026’s good stuff.

Every item in this roundup has been personally tested, vetted and loved by the Filter team. We’ve also factchecked the price history on each pick to spot “list prices” that never existed and fake markdowns. It may be overkill for a list of deals, but we take your wallet seriously.

Best kitchen deal:
Our Place Titanium Always Pan Pro

Best home deal:
Levoit Tower Fan

Plans to protect people fall ‘far short of what is needed’, government told, as MP warns of heatwave deaths

• UK politics live – latest updates

The UK government is facing increasingly urgent calls for action to protect people against the intensifying effects of the climate crisis, as the highest maximum temperature record for June was broken for the third day in a row.

With the country in the grip of the worst heatwave ever recorded in western Europe – a direct result of global heating – the chair of parliament’s environmental audit committee warned ministers of the urgent threat and said the UK was falling “far short of what is needed”.

Her motivations for returning may be hard to gauge but there is no doubt the returning former champion will steal the early spotlight at SW19

At the southernmost point of the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s vast grounds, Serena Williams was starting another day of training as the clock ticked down to her first singles match after four years of retirement. Her training partner for the morning, Marta Kostyuk, soon joined her on court 10 in Aorangi Park, the quaint practice area reserved only for players.

Kostyuk is one of the more extroverted players on the tour and she is widely known for speaking her mind under all circumstances, but when Williams greeted Kostyuk and thanked her for the training session, for once the Ukrainian looked at a loss for words: “No, thank you for playing with me,” she responded.

Authorities are attempting to reduce the pressure on hospitals as the city swelters under extreme heat.

The Trevor Project non-profit that helped pioneer LGBTQ+ ‘press 3’ option for 988 hotline is being shut out as it restarts

The Trump administration is moving to restart the specialized LGBTQ+ option for youth who contact the 988 crisis intervention hotline – but the group that helped pioneer the idea is being shut out.

The Trevor Project, the New York-based leading non-profit for suicide prevention in LGBTQ+ young people in the US, may not be allowed to offer the service it had helped develop for the 988 Lifeline just a few years ago.

A proposed tax on billionaires has divided the Democratic Party in California, with most of the state's prominent liberals opposing the measure.

Germany’s national climate computing center modernizes critical HPC user environments to support faster development, simpler operations and more resilient scientific workflows.

June 26, 2026 — VAST Data has announced that the German Climate Computing Center, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), has deployed the VAST AI Operating System to modernize a critical part of its high-performance computing environment for climate research.

DKRZ has deployed the VAST AI Operating System to modernize a critical part of its HPC environment for climate research.

DKRZ is Germany’s domain-specific HPC center for climate science, providing computing and data services to researchers across Germany and international climate research projects. The center manages over 250 petabytes of climate data, operates the World Data Center for Climate, and plays an important role in the global climate research ecosystem through initiatives such as the Earth System Grid Federation.

As climate models become more complex and AI begins to reshape scientific workflows, research computing centers are under pressure to support more users, more data and more demanding development environments. For DKRZ, that challenge extended beyond the largest simulation outputs. Researchers also needed reliable access to the everyday workspace where science takes shape: home directories, software stacks, Python environments, shared project spaces, code repositories and visualization scripts.

DKRZ selected VAST to replace and modernize its HPC home and software environment, giving researchers a more reliable foundation for daily work while providing infrastructure teams a simpler and more efficient platform to manage.

“Climate science depends on more than raw compute power. Researchers need reliable access to the environments where they develop models, build software, prepare workflows and analyze results,” said Michael Boettinger, Head Visualization and Outreach at DKRZ. “With VAST, we can provide a modern home and software environment that gives users more capacity, better reliability and fewer technical constraints in their daily work. The home system is central to researchers’ daily work. If it is unavailable, people may still have compute resources, but they cannot easily use the tools, scripts and environments they rely on. Keeping that environment available is a major improvement.”

For DKRZ, the decision to deploy VAST was driven by the complete platform package: snapshots, data reduction, monitoring, ease of administration, non-disruptive upgrades and efficient support for small-file-heavy workflows. These capabilities are especially important in research environments where users often create many similar but not identical software and Python environments, generating large numbers of small files that can become inefficient to manage on traditional systems.

“We were not looking for performance alone. We needed a system fit for the future too, with the right combination of features, reliability and administrative simplicity,” said Anna Fuchs, HPC I/O and Storage Engineer at DKRZ. “Snapshots, monitoring, compression and data reduction were all important, but the real value is that VAST brings these capabilities together in one platform. It allows our users to focus on their work instead of thinking about technical limitations and potential downtime.”

DKRZ has already seen strong results from VAST’s data reduction capabilities. Across production user environments, the center has observed a general reduction factor of approximately 5.5x, with specific software development and build environments achieving reduction factors of approximately 20x or more. This allows DKRZ to provide more usable capacity for researcher workflows without simply adding more hardware.

The platform has also enabled DKRZ to introduce shared environments between individual home directories and global software stacks, allowing project teams to maintain common software and Python environments without duplicating similar files across users.

VAST AI OS enables DKRZ to provide researchers with:

• Uninterrupted Access to Critical Research Environments: Through non-disruptive upgrades and resilient system design, VAST with the VAST DataSpace keeps home directories, scripts and software environments continuously available.
• Faster, More Responsive Development Workflows: VAST’s high-IOPS architecture efficiently handles Python environments, build systems and other small-file-heavy workloads.
• More Usable Capacity: Built-in compression, deduplication and similarity-based reduction increase effective capacity without requiring equivalent physical expansion.
• Fewer Maintenance Disruptions: Rolling software updates allow DKRZ to maintain and upgrade the platform without routinely taking user environments offline.
• A Simpler, Better-Managed Research Platform: Integrated monitoring, snapshots and catalog capabilities give administrators greater visibility and control with less manual effort.

DKRZ is also exploring additional use cases for VAST, including internal services and code-related workflows that require reliable access from researchers and collaborators. The center is evaluating further platform capabilities as it considers how VAST can support future research infrastructure needs.

“Research computing centers are being asked to support more users, more data, more complex software environments and increasingly AI-driven workflows, often with lean teams and finite budgets,” said Christopher Huggins, Managing Director of AI & HPC, EMEA, VAST Data. “DKRZ understands that modern research infrastructure depends on more than just compute, and the data layer is not just a back-end storage concern. It is the foundation that allows researchers to develop, collaborate and turn computation into scientific insight.”

As climate science enters a new era of higher-resolution modelling, larger datasets and AI-assisted research workflows, DKRZ is building a more reliable, efficient and flexible foundation for scientific computing with VAST, and plans to expand the footprint are underway.

More from HPCwire: CSCS Research Highlights VAST Data’s Role in Trusted, High-Performance AI and HPC Infrastructure

About VAST Data

VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.

Source: VAST Data

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Experts say decision presents problem for business owners – and indicates direction court’s conservatives are heading

Experts say a supreme court ruling that struck down a Hawaii law banning people from carrying guns on private property without permission could present problems for business owners – and is a bellwether of what steps the majority-conservative court may take toward undoing policies they see as placing an undue burden on legal gun owners.

The US supreme court handed down the ruling in Wolford v Lopez on Thursday in a 6-3 decision. Second-amendment law centers and advocates praised the ruling as another win and important step toward challenging other restrictions that are out of line with gun laws that existed at the nation’s founding. Gun control and gun violence groups, meanwhile, lambasted the decision as a dangerous one that prioritizes the rights of gun owners over public safety.

DARPA-funded effort will use Medra’s new scientific reasoning layer inside ML001, the company’s flagship autonomous science lab

SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2026 — Medra has launched the AI Experimentalist, the scientific reasoning layer of its Physical AI Scientist Platform, and announced a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As part of this DARPA-funded project, Medra is advancing its platform’s capabilities to translate natural-language scientific goals and human-written protocols into machine-executable experiments that can be measured, learned from, and improved over time. DARPA is an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for breakthrough technologies for national security.

Credit: Medra

Scientists can specify high-level research objectives, and Medra’s AI Experimentalist translates them into executable experimental plans. Unlike AI tools that focus on a single stage of the scientific workflow, the AI Experimentalist spans the full experimental cycle: from reviewing literature and designing experiments to coordinating wet-lab execution, analyzing results, and refining protocols for subsequent runs. By closing the loop between planning, execution, and learning, it enables experiments to be carried out with minimal human intervention while keeping scientists in control of research goals.

The AI Experimentalist works in concert with Medra’s Physical AI Lab, a wet-lab execution layer. Together they form the Physical AI Scientist platform, a closed-loop system that tightly couples scientific reasoning and experimentation. With a model-agnostic agentic harness and a multi-agent architecture, the platform can incorporate frontier AI capabilities alongside scientific agents and prediction models.

Partners can access Medra’s AI Experimentalist through Physical AI Labs deployed on site at customer facilities or operated remotely through Medra Lab 001 (ML001), Medra’s flagship autonomous science laboratory. Built in 77 days and opened in April 2026, select closed-beta projects are now live across academia, biopharma, and government, including DARPA. ML001 is currently running and developing assays in antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing, and cell biology.

“With frontier models becoming increasingly capable of predicting novel molecules and generating scientific hypotheses, the bottleneck in science is shifting toward the ability to validate those predictions,” said Michelle Lee, founder and CEO of Medra. “But running experiments is not just about robotic execution. Assay development and parameter tuning often take months of experimentation and refinement. The AI Experimentalist enables autonomous, end-to-end experimental design with a Physical AI lab in the loop.”

Learn more about the AI Experimentalist and Medra Lab 001 at medra.ai.

About Medra

Medra is building the Physical AI Scientist, a closed-loop system that tightly integrates AI scientific reasoning and experimentation. Founded in 2022, Medra has raised over $60M from investors including Human Capital, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776, and Fusion Fund. Medra launched ML001 in San Francisco as the largest autonomous lab in the U.S.

Source: Medra

The post Medra Launches AI Experimentalist and Announces DARPA Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

The city of Austin agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement to be split among four men — including to the widow and daughter of Maurice Pierce — who were wrongfully accused of murdering four teenage girls in a Texas yogurt shop.

The U.S. men's team had already clinched its spot in the Round of 32, the knockout round, with its 2-0 win over Australia on Friday.

Mangione​ is facing both state and federal charges for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder in December 2024. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

Cape Verdeans in Britain feeling ‘incredibly proud’ after team’s hard-fought draws against Spain and Uruguay

• World Cup live – latest updates

For as long as she can remember, 13-year-old Lauryn struggled to find a map that included Cape Verde. Now, to her great delight, the tiny African island nation is finally centre stage.

“Seeing our country shown across the world at the World Cup makes me feel incredibly proud,” Lauryn says. “After the first match, everyone was talking about Cape Verde. People saw the talent and the skill of our players.”

Apple spent plenty of time talking about Siri AI at WWDC, but some of iOS 27's most useful changes are much smaller.

Spanning a six-lane highway and located in a public park, this crossing is part of a larger restoration of endangered Texas prairie land

The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent

Stores over-stock their shelves, then toss out what they don’t sell. Meanwhile, workers struggle to make ends meet

To most grocery shoppers, rotisserie chickens look like a mouth-watering and easy option for dinner. But whenever I pass by the rotisserie case in a supermarket, I see chicken carcasses piled up in the trash, their once glistening juices congealing into a slimy jelly.

It all started when I was working as a cashier in a chain supermarket. One day, I was chatting with a colleague about the behind-the-scenes secrets that shoppers didn’t see. The deli employee said, “Last night we tossed out about sixteen birds.” He explained that managers wanted the rotisserie chicken case to be full at all times because a full case looked appetizing, while a half empty one looked sad. Keeping the case full was an all-day affair. Workers arrived before dawn to season and roast dozens of birds. (One employee burned his arm while maneuvering chickens into the oven. He quit soon after.)

The seasoning and roasting continued throughout the day. As birds disappeared from the display case, workers replaced them. Finally, the store closed, and the leftover chickens were thrown out.

Ann Larson is the author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register. She is a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Critics say the government is ‘creating a boogeyman’ in its drive to use the ‘antifa’ label to frame protesters as terrorists

The US federal government is sweeping up protesters against Cop City, a police training center outside Atlanta, in its push to prosecute what it calls “antifa” – even as state attempts to prosecute activists over the same incident failed for the second time this week.

The case offers insight into the Trump administration’s drive to link the idea of anti-fascism to terrorism, drawn into focus by the decades-long sentences given to protesters against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Prairieland trial in Texas, also this week.

Research finds immune systems still ‘responding to toxic chemical exposures’ related to East Palestine derailment

In the weeks after the East Palestine train wreck culminated in a towering fireball and chemical release in the small Ohio town, Jessica Boersma was seriously exposed to the stew of compounds emitted from the derailment site.

Boersma lives less than a quarter mile away, and, as a city council member, she had to spend significant time at the site coordinating with first responders.

We've reviewed the whole lineup of Google phones, from the Pixel 10A to the Pixel 10 Pro to the foldable Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Here are the best ones.

Kremlin may attempt to test Nato cohesion as Russia comes under growing pressure from Ukraine, according to sources from two countries

Two countries on Nato’s eastern flank have warned that Russia is preparing a possible “provocation” in the Baltic states or Poland in an effort to test the cohesion of the western military alliance.

Western sources also fear there could be danger on the horizon because the Kremlin is coming under pressure from Ukraine’s campaign of long-range attacks on targets near Moscow and St Petersburg.

Hundreds of graduates and interns at finance firm will now have to work in office at least three days a week

• Business live – latest updates

Revolut will haul hundreds of graduates and interns into the office next year, as the digital bank moves away from its “remote-first” policy that has long been used to lure new recruits.

The London-headquartered fintech company had previously allowed its young trainees to choose whether to work from home or Revolut’s offices, reflecting flexible working arrangements offered to all other staff. That included the option of working abroad for 120 days of the year, with the company saying it trusts employees to “explore new cultures while staying productive and connected”.

Sarah Steele spoke of ‘degrading’ experience under US military justice after assault in England. Plus, why Toy Story 5 is the ultimate millennial girl movie

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Good morning.

A UK justice minister has described the case of a British woman strangled by a US fighter pilot on UK soil as “really serious” and said the Ministry of Justice would examine it.

Why did a US fighter pilot avoid British trial after strangling a woman in England? Technically, the UK authorities should have primary jurisdiction to prosecute crimes allegedly perpetrated by US service members off duty and off base. But the Wulfson case is one of several uncovered by the Guardian in which UK police and prosecutors appear to be ceding responsibility to their US military counterparts.

What is temporary protected status (TPS), and why is it under threat? People with TPS have permission to live and work in the US because the Department of Homeland Security deemed their home countries to be unsafe. The Trump administration has attempted to slash the program for various countries in its anti-immigrant crusade.

In two major immigration rulings on Thursday, a divided Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian and Haitian immigrants. It also ruled that refugees from Mexico need to be within the United States’ physical border to make an asylum claim instead of an adjacent border location in Mexico.

By various estimates, there are 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians living in the United States under the TPS program. The Court’s decision about Mexican asylum seekers could allow U. S. Customs and Border Protection to resume a metering policy that slows asylum admission during peak periods of immigration.

Temporary Protected Status ends for some

In general, the current Trump administration has objected to lengthy TPS designations, and it adopted a new, restricted approach in early 2025. The approach was quickly challenged in courts.

In Mullin v. Doe, Alito wrote for a 6-3 Court that courts cannot review the decision to end TPS status for the two countries—and clear the way for deportations—when the challengers raise only non-constitutional claims.  (The case was consolidated with Trump v. Miot, which came from Haitian nationals contesting the TPS decision.)

Syria received a TPS designation in 2012 after the government and military of former dictator Bashar al-Assad began a brutal campaign of repression against civilians, which spiraled into civil war. In September 2025, Secretary Noem gave public notice that the designation would end in 60 days. The following month, seven Syrian nationals sued in the Southern District of New York, asserting claims under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to stop the termination.

Haiti received a TPS designation in 2010 after a devastating earthquake struck the island nation. Five Haitian nationals sued in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., asserting similar APA claims along with a claim that terminating the TPS designation violated their constitutional right to equal protection because it was motivated by racial animus. Instead of acting on the government’s emergency request to lift those orders, the Court took up the case and decided it in full.

“The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims. It allows ‘no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination’ of a TPS designation,” Alito wrote. The word “determination” applied to an individual decision or the entire process leading to a final decision under the TPS program, he said.

Alito said that the Court’s ruling also applied to the Haitian immigrants in Miot who had made a constitutional equal protection claim. The immigrants contended that remarks by President Donald Trump and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem were racially biased and influenced immigration policy. Alito ruled, however, that the bias claims would fail in court.

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote. “Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago, and the statements cited by Miot respondents—especially those concerning Haiti and Haitian immigrants to this country—exemplify this development. But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that he felt the equal protection claim (from the Haitians) failed “for the additional reason that aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that DHS secretaries have repeatedly determined that conditions are too dangerous to permit safe return to Syria and Haiti. “[The] District Court in the Haiti litigation found as well that the plaintiffs had a likely successful equal protection claim, in part because statements made by the President showed that a racially discriminatory purpose had entered into the TPS termination,” Kagan said.

Kagan pointed to Trump’s statement in a 2024 presidential debate that Haitians were “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” She believed Trump’s numerous statements “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

What happens next for the Syrian and Haitian nationals who built lives in the United States under TPS is unclear. The program grants its beneficiaries work authorization and protection from deportation; once it ends, those who held no other lawful status revert to being deportable.

The ruling also raises questions about the rest of the TPS program. The Trump administration has moved to terminate designations for most of the roughly dozen countries that still hold them, including Burma (Myanmar), El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen—though many of those terminations are tied up in their own court fights. By one estimate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, an estimated 1.3 million foreign-born individuals held TPS in some form as of March 2025 and terminations if determined would affect the majority of TPS holders.

Asylum seekers from Mexico

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Alito held for a 6-3 Court that “an alien standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border.” He cited language from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

The Ninth Circuit had reached a different conclusion. A divided panel held that an asylum seeker “arrives” in the United States the moment she presents herself to an immigration official at a port of entry, even while still standing on the Mexico side of the border.

“The INA thus neither entitles an alien standing in Mexico to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him,” Alito concluded. “A person arrives in a destination when he enters within its area—not before—and that conclusion does not change because someone or something blocks entry.  Everyday examples of how people ordinarily use the phrase “arrives in” confirm this understanding.”

In her 35-page dissent, of which she read partly from the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Congress had established “a mandatory set of procedures” to guide the asylum process. “The Court today holds that the Executive Branch may circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U. S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto U. S. soil,” she wrote. “The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”

“More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. Because this is neither what Congress said nor what its words permit, I respectfully dissent,” she concluded. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

Jackson wrote separately that the Court should never have taken the case at all. Because the government rescinded its metering policy back in 2021, she contended, there was no live dispute left for the justices to resolve,

Together, the two rulings hand the Trump administration broad authority over who may stay in the country and who may ask to enter it while narrowing the role courts can play in checking those decisions. For the hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians whose protections now hang on continued litigation—and for asylum seekers who may again find the border closed before they reach it—the practical consequences will unfold in the months ahead.

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

As temperatures soar across the UK, chill your space – and avoid energy-guzzling aircon – with our pick of the best fans, from tower to desk to bladeless

• The best portable neck and handheld fans
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.

Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.

Best quiet fan for the bedroom and best overall:
AirCraft Lume – preorder now for delivery early July, or consider the cordless version (£179) or table fan (£129) for faster delivery

Best budget fan and best desk fan:
Devola desk fan – currently out of stock

The Modigliani painting "Nu assis au collier" (Seated Nude Wearing a Necklace) sold for $63.9 million, the highest price achieved for a work by the artist sold at auction in Europe, Sotheby's said.

Ministers accused of being more hesitant to respond as Reform has risen in polls, due to fear of ‘saying wrong thing’

During the May local elections in England, a canvasser was out in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham campaigning for her party. At one doorstep, the occupant asked if she was Muslim. When she said yes, he told her she should be hanged.

It is one of dozens of stories that Akeela Ahmed, the head of the British Muslim Trust (BMT), the government’s official partner for monitoring anti-Muslim hatred, has heard in recent weeks.

Co-defendants in case against Stockport man include a paramedic, a football coach and a taxi driver

The identities of 13 men charged alongside a man accused of drugging and raping his wife can be revealed after reporting restrictions were lifted.

The main defendant in the case is due to go on trial in September. He stands accused of drugging and sexually assaulting his wife over a period of 20 years and conspiring with other men to engage in abuse.

Experts worked in ocean midwater off Brazil at near-record speeds thanks to cutting-edge tech

A marine biology expedition in international waters off the coast of Brazil has discovered 31 new species in just two weeks.

The researchers believe the speed at which the species were found and identified may be a record, in part because of the cutting-edge technology designed and built by the science and engineering team. For the first time on board a ship, the researchers were able to observe the living 3D cellular structure of microbial life thanks to a technological breakthrough nicknamed the Squid.

Normal Golf Game takes a tiresomely easy genre and makes it infernally difficult. Which deserves a round of applause

I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept. A leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world.

The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists.

Jennifer Garner leads an all-star cast in Peacock's newest original series.

Ambitious plan to phase out single-use plastic opposed by chemicals industry – while green groups say law too timid

A groundbreaking California law that compels packaging producers to phase out single-use plastics is already sparking anger from the chemicals industry and environmental groups just weeks after going into effect.

The law, which was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 but only took hold in May, requires plastic and packaging companies to use less single-use plastic, and ensure by 2032 that all packaging is either recyclable or compostable. The big idea is to incentivize producers of plastics to consider the end of their products’ life in order to create better, more sustainable bottles, containers and wrappings.

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC will have to be drained again. Donald Trump has blamed vandalism for the failure to keep the water 'American flag blue'. But what if this small body of water is proof that the president can’t outrun the truth?

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Arwa Mahdawi about why this project, which has cost the taxpayer millions of dollars, is proving to be such an embarrassing failure for a man obsessed with image

First amendment groups call 50-to-100-year prison terms chilling as legal experts say sentences unusually long

The decades-long prison sentences for a group of Texas activists convicted of terrorism and other charges in connection to a Fourth of July protest last year has caused widespread alarm, given their unusually punitive length and for the apparent harsh criminalization of protest activity under Donald Trump’s justice department.

Eight people who participated in a protest at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, were sentenced on Tuesday to between 50 and 100 years in prison. A ninth person, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, the husband of one of the demonstrators, did not participate in the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted of moving boxes containing leftwing zines and other materials after a prison phone call from his wife.

House committee seeks records after two agency scientists were charged over undeclared samples

The US House committee on energy and commerce is “examining concerns” about the National Institutes of Health after two NIH scientists were charged with allegedly smuggling mpox into the United States and misleading investigators.

Federal law enforcement alleges that Dr Vincent Munster, 53, a Dutch national and chief of the virus ecology section at the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Montana, and Claude Kwe, 38, a research fellow from Cameroon, transported vials containing monkeypox, now known as mpox, into the country without declaring them to customs and then “lying about it”.

Committee will meet in July to discuss peptides now sold in gray market despite limited evidence of safety and efficacy

Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will soon hold a meeting about whether to ease restrictions on access to some research peptides, a group of drugs with a zealous following and thin evidence to support them.

If restrictions are eased, US compounding pharmacies would be able to produce and fill prescriptions for Americans – a change that would effectively legalize a thriving gray market.

Notion announced that it will shut down its email client on September 22. The company says more than half of users already manage email through Notion's AI agents without opening their inbox, so it is shifting its focus from a traditional email client to agent-run workflows. Engadget reports: It has published an FAQ for users to make sure that they don't lose any messages or data in the transition. Most emails will still exist in a Gmail inbox, but customers will need to manually export their drafts, scheduled emails, snippets and auto label instructions. Notion first began offering Notion Mail after acquiring startup Skiff in 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recent rulings have bolstered president’s pitiless campaign against people of colour fleeing violence and disaster

In the US supreme court, it seems Donald Trump has found loyalists in his crusade against immigration and immigrants.

In a pair of rulings on Thursday, the court allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have granted people from Haiti and Syria the right to live and work legally in the US for more than a decade, and cleared way for the government to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border by physically blocking them from setting foot on US soil. And on Tuesday, the court granted border officials broad discretion to deport lawful permanent residents or green card holders.

Fears over ‘huge community transmission’ as modelling predicts thousands of deaths in DRC by September

The whereabouts of almost 300 people who have tested positive for Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is unknown, according to Africa’s top public health official.

The humanitarian crisis amid the conflict in the affected areas means more than 1 million people are living in camps to which health workers have no access, Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Thursday.

A family mobile phone plan needs to work for every member. We look at plans from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

An Iranian national who is wanted by the U.S. for mass hacking attacks that caused $3.4 billion in damage was arrested in Montenegro, police there say.

BBC presenter, 62, ‘concentrating on getting better, being back to 100% me and getting back behind the mic’

Trevor Nelson has announced he is taking a break from broadcasting because of health issues.

The BBC Radio 2 presenter and DJ, who has not been on air all week, said he was taking time out after being advised to go for medical tests following a routine check-up.

If you've decided to make the switch to T-Mobile, but aren't sure which plan to go for, these are the ones we recommend.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What happens to a democracy when its leader mistakes his reflection for reality?

• Tulsi Gabbard, her guru, and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career: If those memos are what they appear to be, the public wasn’t represented by an independent official so much as managed by an unseen hand.

• In a profanity-filled tirade, Trump threatens to ‘take over’ Iran if Tehran closes the Strait of Hormuz: A ceasefire that collapses into chest-thumping in a matter of days is not peace but instability with better branding.

• Markéta Vondroušová suspended for 4 years after refusing doping test: When a clean athlete in documented distress is punished as though context were irrelevant, the system is protecting procedure more than sport.

• Clive Davis: The Soundtrack Of Our Lives: This documentary is a rich tour through American music history, even if its subject never quite lets anyone else hold the microphone.

• Kareem’s Jukebox: Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” is a reminder that joy can still sound revolutionary when the world feels like it’s coming apart.

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Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist’s need to bolster his or her self-esteem through grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, and feelings of entitlement.”

Dr. Donald W. Black, DSM-5 Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the whole problem fits into one neat fable: a beautiful young man kneeling at a pool, unable to look away from his own reflection, while the woman who loves him fades into nothing but an echo. (Her name, Echo, is the source of the word.) The myth does something the clinical definition cannot quite manage: it shows us the narcissist and, in the same frame, the cost to everyone standing nearby.

Today we have our own Narcissus: a President staring down at a reflecting pool in the nation’s capital and seeing only his own image, not the world around him. There are wars going on in the Middle East and Ukraine, sky-high prices in grocery stores, at gas stations, and in the housing market, a stagnant Congress that can’t get anything done because he insists it do only his bidding, a national intelligence community being led by a series of unqualified bureaucrats, a tech industry falling behind China—and those are just today’s headlines. But the problem Trump is fixated on is algae in the reflecting pool that stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. He claims it was caused by vandals and has pledged to lock them up, presumably alongside all his other enemies.

It’s useful to go back to the DSM and see what it has to say about the narcissist. He is in love with a projection, a controlled image with no room for the messy complications of an actual self. A reflection. And that gap between the image and the actual person is where all the damage lives. Grandiose fantasy, exaggerated ambition, exhibitionism, entitlement: those four tools are deployed to keep the reflection intact, to keep the pool still, to prevent the surface from rippling in any way that might distort the picture. Unfortunately for Trump, he can’t control nature the way he can Congress: those pesky algae pop up wherever they will, Trump’s narcissistic needs be damned.

As someone who spent decades in arenas full of celebrated, accomplished people, I can tell you that genuine confidence gets quieter as the stakes get bigger. Performed confidence works differently, demanding more noise, more confirmation, more audience the higher the pressure climbs. Clinical psychologists have long understood that what demands to be seen as supreme self-assurance most often functions as compensation for a fragile interior. The grandiosity, seen up close, is a frame holding up a building that has no foundation.

Our present culture didn’t invent this, but we have spent considerable resources rewarding it. Reality television has for decades showered the loudest, most outrageous self-promoters with fame and money. Social media functions as a megaphone calibrated for the narcissists already among us. Political life, particularly in recent years, has operated as a selection system that treats grandiosity as strength while systematically penalizing quiet competence. When ambition shifts from what we want to achieve to what we need others to believe we have achieved, we end up building our reward structures around performance rather than production.

Echo, the woman who loves Narcissus, doesn’t get discussed enough in all of this. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid gives her a devastating arc: she tries to reach Narcissus, tries to connect, and winds up capable of nothing but repeating his words back to him, hollowed out, her own voice gone. She becomes the emblem of everyone who gets destroyed by the narcissist’s self-love: they lose their substance along with their voice. In contemporary life, that might apply to a Vice President, a presidential cabinet, Congress, a media ecosystem, or the entire electorate. But how long will we stand by while our Narcissist-in-Chief’s enablers slave away to maintain his illusion of personal glory? In the end, he’s just another politician who came to Washington saying he’d drain the swamp, but he can’t even keep the pool clean.

Read more

Sentencing of 27-year-old Sadia Moalim Ali condemned by former president and prime ministers as well as rights groups

A rickshaw driver in Somalia has been sentenced to three years in prison for comments she made on social media, in a case that has caught the public’s attention and provoked outrage in the country.

Sadia Moalim Ali, a 27-year-old nursing graduate, was originally charged with insulting government institutions and incitement to commit a crime, but convicted only of the former. Her sentence, immediately condemned as “fundamentally unjust”, was handed down on 25 June.

Disillusioned America firsters, like Carson and Greene, are angry at Trump’s foreign interventions, may sit out the midterm elections

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene – once among Donald Trump’s most prominent champions – announced recently that they have left the Republican party.

Both rightwing superstars had feuded with the president throughout his second term, but their split was provoked by Trump’s war with Iran and what they viewed as his elevation of foreign affairs over domestic concerns like inflation and high gas prices. Although both have said that they will not support Democrats, their defection points to serious divisions within the Republican party that could weaken its prospects in the midterm elections and beyond.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party

Why Should Delaware Care?
Thousands of Delawareans rely on SEPTA’s Wilmington/Newark train line to get to Philadelphia. The additional train service will allow riders to stay in Philadelphia later than they would have on both weekdays and weekends. 

Late-night train service from Philadelphia to Wilmington is back — for now. 

SEPTA’s newest schedule, published Monday, extends service on its latest weekday and weekend Wilmington/Newark Line trains to Wilmington, rather than ending at Marcus Hook, Pa.

The new schedule will go into effect on Sunday, July 5. It is separate from SEPTA’s temporary increase of regional rail frequency for the World Cup and the Fourth of July. 

SEPTA riders at the Wilmington station on Thursday said they were surprised and happy that the service will improve.

“That’s what should’ve been done in the first place,” Chester, Pa., resident Elizabeth Richardson said.

She uses the Wilmington/Newark Line to visit family, she said, and the limited night service was difficult to work around. 

Wilmington resident Jasmine Geiger said she sometimes has to take an Uber home from Philadelphia after the trains stop running at night. 

“People need it to be able to get home,” she said. 

While riders said the late-night train service is a welcome change, it might not be here to stay. Catherine Smith, a spokesperson for Delaware’s transit agency, DART, said the agency cut late night train service last fall because of low ridership. 

Often only one or two people would take the late night train from Philadelphia, she said. And DART has to pay the full cost of the train service in Delaware, which has amounted to $10 million annually in recent years.

Smith said DART has heard from riders that there is a demand for late-night service, especially in the summer, but noted the agency will monitor ridership closely over the next few months. 

If ridership stays low, DART may cut the service again, she said. 

The increased service comes after SEPTA threatened to cut the Wilmington/Newark Line entirely due to a major budget shortfall. 

Last year, SEPTA proposed cutting nearly half of its service because of a $213 million budget deficit that, it said, emerged as inflation increased and COVID-era dollars dried up.  

Then, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration reversed the service cuts by authorizing SEPTA to dip into its capital dollars — which it uses for new vehicles and infrastructure — to pay for its daily operations. The agency also instated a 21.5% fare increase.

SEPTA General Manager Scott Sauer said at the time the agency can avoid service cuts until 2027, but that the solution “exacerbated the future need.”

What are the schedule changes?

With the new schedule, Wilmington-bound riders will be able to leave Philadelphia later. 

The latest SEPTA weekday train to Wilmington will leave Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station at 10:40 p.m. — about three hours later than the current latest weekday train. 

Wilmington riders will also be able to leave from 30th Street Station at 11:14 p.m. on weekends. The current latest weekend train to Wilmington leaves two hours earlier. 

The latest trains to Philadelphia from Wilmington will not change. On weekdays, the latest train leaves Wilmington just after 8 p.m., and on weekends, it leaves at 10:30 p.m.

The service change did not increase train frequency, which remains below pre-pandemic levels. Trains depart from Philadelphia every two hours on weekends and at various frequencies on weekdays. 

It also did not extend the late night service to Newark or Churchman’s Crossing, but the trains to Wilmington will stop at the Claymont Transit Station. 

The train ride to Wilmington from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station takes about 45 minutes. The one-way fare is $8.75 on weekdays and $8 on weekends. The fare increases to $11 if riders pay onboard the train.

The post SEPTA to restore Wilmington late-night train service from Philadelphia  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
As lawmakers face their final working day of the year, a slew of significant bills have yet to be considered. Any bill that is not approved by both chambers as of midnight June 30 is officially marked dead, and must be reintroduced in the next General Assembly that begins in January.  

As the final day of the 2026 legislative session approaches on Tuesday, several bills face uncertain futures, including a slate of property tax reforms and legislation that seeks to rein in healthcare costs. 

Also pending is the state’s often-contentious capital budget that would distribute nearly $1.26 billion dollars to state building projects. 

The list of pending legislation remains despite a lively penultimate week in Dover during which lawmakers passed immigration enforcement reform, gun control legislation, and affordable housing requirements for municipalities.

Lawmakers also shockingly failed to advance a proposed amendment to the Delaware Constitution that would enshrine the rights to gay and interracial marriage in the state. Both are currently legal in Delaware, but an amendment would make it considerably harder for lawmakers to remove those protections.

In all, the final days of the 2026 legislative session cap off a generally subdued year of lawmaking – particularly when compared to last year’s fights over the state’s corporate franchise, the Port of Wilmington and control of zoning rules for marijuana shops and a wind-farm substation. 

The session also heads toward a close as several lawmakers prepare for what is expected to be hard-fought campaigns for reelection.  

What passed this week?

Lawmakers passed a slew of significant bills this past week relating to land use, immigration, education funding and part of the state’s 2027 fiscal year budget. 

Those bills now will all advance to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk to be considered for signatures or vetoes.

Senate Bill 23, which generated substantial pushback from local governments across the state, passed the House on Tuesday with an unusual mix of bipartisan support. If signed into law, the bill would require municipalities to increase housing density and incorporate additional affordable housing reforms in their comprehensive plans. 

Lawmakers also passed Senate Bill 13, which would greatly increase the number of patients eligible to receive free or reduced-price treatment – often called charity care – from the state’s nonprofit hospitals.

That bill was introduced months after a Spotlight Delaware investigation called into question the charity care practices at the state’s largest healthcare system, ChristianaCare.

A pair of immigration reform bills passed the Senate on Thursday, following a lengthy debate about the role of local law enforcement in federal immigration policy. 

House Bill 368 would prohibit local and state law enforcement officials from detaining individuals simply because of their immigration status. People accused of serious crimes could still be held for prosecution. House Bill 94 would ban law enforcement from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in specific spaces — schools, churches and healthcare facilities. 

Two bills focused on the funding structure for public schools unanimously passed the House on Wednesday, following up on long-debated changes to how education is funded in Delaware. 

Senate Bill 302 allows the state to begin implementing the new hybrid school funding formula, which allocates more money for schools with more low-income or English-language learning students. Senate Bill 303 charges the Public Education Funding Commission to continue studying education funding in future years.  

Both chambers also passed the fiscal year 2027 operating budget with relatively little fanfare. The budget includes a 6.3% spending increase from last year, above the 5% growth that Gov. Meyer called for in his original budget proposal in January.

What’s left to do?

Several bills are left to be considered during the General Assembly’s final working day on Tuesday, including the state’s billion-dollar capital budget. 

That bill, which requires a three-fourths majority vote in order to pass, presents a rare opportunity for Republicans to exert power over the negotiations. Democrats are currently one seat short of a three-fourths majority in the Senate and four seats short in the House, requiring them to receive at least some Republican buy-in on the final proposal.

There could be a few sticking points in bond bill negotiations, including $35 million earmarked for the expansion of Legislative Hall. It would be the third largest appropriation anywhere in the bond bill.

John Flaherty, a director of the Delaware Coalition for Open Government, decried the lack of public notice or input for such a massive project in the waning days of the legislature.

“The Delaware General Assembly is in full session for just 43 days out of the entire year. Spending $35 million to expand a complex that sits largely empty or underutilized for more than 300 days a year is an indefensible use of state revenues, especially when community-facing infrastructure projects face strict funding limits,” he said in a statement.

Other bills left to be considered include a slate of property tax reforms that were introduced earlier this month in response to the fallout from last year’s first-in-a-generation property reassessments.

Those bills, which were filed following months of committee hearings to investigate what exactly went wrong in the aftermath of reassessment, include a proposal to indefinitely extend New Castle County school districts’ controversial ability to tax commercial and residential properties at different rates.

Another healthcare-focused bill, Senate Bill 1, also remains up for consideration in the House.

A primary care reform bill that also includes price caps for government-regulated insurance plans, SB 1 was scaled back from its original form through months of negotiations with the state’s healthcare lobby. 

Those changes would delay the implementation of price caps on hospital procedures, limit some state oversight in setting those caps, and completely exempt some hospitals from the law altogether.

The bill unanimously passed in the Senate last month, but it has not yet been considered in the House. 

Lawmakers in both the House and Senate are set to reconvene for the final time this year at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, June 30. Those hearings could extend long into the night depending on how readily legislators can strike deals, reach consensus or find compromise on any number of the proposals remaining before them.

The post Major bills loom as Delaware lawmakers face final day of session appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The WuXi STA Pharma campus in Middletown has been hailed as a major economic development win for Delaware and it was backed by the largest taxpayer-backed grant of the Carney administration. Now concerns from the Pentagon over its alleged ties to the Chinese government could essentially prevent it from doing business with American companies in many scenarios.

One of Delaware’s largest economic development projects could be in jeopardy after the Pentagon blacklisted the developer over alleged ties to the Chinese military.

On the southern edge of Middletown, Shanghai-based WuXi STA Pharmaceuticals is nearing completion on a massive, $500 million pharmaceutical manufacturing campus. The company – one of the largest global contract pharmaceutical manufacturers – has eyed the facility as part of its major expansion into the United States. It plans to open it later this year.

But for the plant to survive long-term, it may need to find a way off of the so-called 1260H list, or a list of companies that the U.S. Department of Defense designates as “Chinese military companies.” 

Earlier this month, the company sued the Pentagon in federal court to overturn the designation.

The decision came as a bit of a shock, considering WuXi’s parent company, WuXi AppTec, avoided being included in a 2025 federal bill known as the BIOSECURE Act that would have placed the limitations on its clients last year. The bill extends the same prohibitions to any company that the Pentagon places on its 1260H list.

“We are confident this designation is wrong and not supported by the facts or legal criteria and a full and fair review of the facts will vindicate our position. WuXi AppTec is not a ‘Chinese military company,’ and we are working with our advisors to pursue every available remedy,” a company spokesperson told Spotlight Delaware this week.

What is WuXi accused of?

In 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives established a specially organized bipartisan committee, known as the House Select Committee on the CCP, to examine the economic and national security threats imposed by the Chinese government.

Through its first year, it helped to push a ban or sale of the social media platform TikTok, expose the forced labor concerns in low-cost, e-commerce companies Shein and Temu, and argued for the revoking of tariff breaks on a variety of Chinese products.

In early 2024, the committee’s leaders introduced the BIOSECURE Act, which aimed to prohibit federal contracting with certain biotechnology providers connected to foreign adversaries. The bill expressly named five companies, including WuXi AppTec.

The bill claimed that WuXi AppTec “presents a national security threat to the United States” because it has sponsored events featuring military and civil leaders, received investments from a military-linked fund, and granted awards to military researchers.

U.S. intelligence officials later informed senators that they believed WuXi AppTec had also transferred intellectual property to the Chinese government, according to a Reuters report.

The company has adamantly denied all claims that it compromised technology or data, or has any relationship with the Chinese military.

Through negotiations of much of 2024, WuXi AppTec was eventually removed from the BIOSECURE Act that was approved with the annual National Defense Authorization Act and the company’s future looked bright.

But about a year later, it was back in the Pentagon’s crosshairs.

A disinterested administration

According to WuXi’s lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of D.C., the company met with Biden administration officials at the Pentagon in August 2024 and reportedly presented evidence that it is not connected to the Chinese government, military or academia.

When the 1260H list was published in January 2025 at the tail-end of the Biden era, WuXi was no longer targeted.

Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the company once again sought an audience with the new Pentagon leaders. That meeting was delayed to November 2025 due to the government shutdown, but weeks before that meeting Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg had reportedly already argued to Congressional leaders that WuXi should be added to the 1260H list.

When company leaders read that Bloomberg story, they asked the Pentagon for an explanation and offered to answer any additional questions. The Pentagon told WuXi that it had no comment on the story and never reached out again.

Three months later, WuXi officials were shocked to see the company named on an updated 1260H posted on the Federal Register that was taken down after less than an hour. Nonetheless, the list was spotted and became an international story – one that WuXi argues served an ulterior motive.

The list was posted while Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had been negotiating a trade deal and a first state visit of Trump’s second term.

“The lack of justification and the haphazard posting of the 1260H List illustrate the arbitrary and capricious manner in which the [Department of War] is managing [Chinese military companies] designations amidst political pressure,” the company wrote in its lawsuit. “The slapdash posting demonstrates that the 1260H List is being used as a political pawn during negotiations with China, rather than a legitimate, evidence-based national security determination.”

On June 8, WuXi once again wrote to Feinberg to deny allegations of its ties to the Chinese government and offered to meet. Instead, within hours of that email, the Pentagon posted its final 1260H list naming WuXi among the problematic companies.

U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) told Spotlight Delaware last week that he has not been briefed on what evidence the Pentagon may have to defend the designation, but has asked for a classified update.

“If there is concrete evidence that WuXi is utilizing biological or other sensitive or private data of Americans in the United States, then I will voice my support for this designation. But at the same time, I welcome investment in manufacturing in Delaware so I think we have to be cautious,” he said.

What could happen?

If WuXi cannot convince a judge to reverse course on the designation, it could be significantly damaging to the company’s operations.

As a named 1260H company, WuXi now faces Pentagon contracting restrictions, but its bigger issues lie with parallel clauses in the BIOSECURE Act.

Under the BIOSECURE Act, WuXi would be prohibited from receiving government contracts, grants or loans – and critically extends those prohibitions to clients of WuXi. That means pharmaceutical companies that receive federal dollars for research, development or manufacturing of a drug could not work with WuXi on it.

But, WuXi also received some relief when legislators exempted Medicare and Medicaid agreements from the prohibitions. Simply manufacturing drugs, or ingredients for drugs, that would be purchased by the federal insurance programs would not violate the law.

The company will also have time to launch a legal defense, because the BIOSECURE Act has not been put into force yet. It could be up to three years before it clears the necessary federal compliance regulations, depending on how quickly the Trump administration wants to advance it.

And even at that point, WuXi would be allowed to work with existing clients for up to five years as part of a grandfathering period.

But the reality is switching contractors to work on manufacturing and testing new drugs is a lengthy and expensive process. That’s why the mere threat of future prohibitions has convinced many clients of Chinese-based biotech companies to begin exploring alternatives – a 2024 survey of the industry, taken at the height of BIOSECURE Act concern, found that more than two-thirds of companies were looking.

Congressional leaders are also now threatening companies to advance those searches too.

“This updated list of Chinese military companies is a warning to American businesses, all levels of government, and the American people. These Chinese companies are working with the Chinese military against our national interests,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Michigan), the chair of China Select Committee, said in a statement after WuXi was added to the 1260H list.

Prohibition, or even diminished market share in the U.S., could be particularly damaging for WuXi, which saw two-thirds of global revenue come from America last year.

Indeed, WuXi says as much in its lawsuit, writing, “The limitations of the BIOSECURE Act will likely cause many of [WuXi’s] customers to consider taking their business to companies without the limitations, which would be detrimental for the company.”

Middletown project proceeds

Over the last four years, WuXi has been building a 1.74 million-square-foot campus in Middletown where it plans to employ nearly 500 people.

The state’s economic development team worked for years to land the project at a 190-acre parcel in the fast-growing town. After all, the company is a heavyweight in its field, working on blockbuster drugs like AstraZeneca’s diabetes drug Farxiga or Pfizer’s COVID drug Paxlovid.

To lure WuXi to the First State, officials approved $19 million in taxpayer-backed grants for the project. It was the largest grant approval made during former Gov. John Carney’s term, totaling nearly four times that given to Amazon for its massive Boxwood Road fulfillment center.

Earlier this month, WuXi hosted an open house at the Middletown facility for industry executives, according to a social media post. The company has been hiring for months to launch its drug research facility this winter for clinical and commercial drugs.

Following the initial building, the Middletown site is expected to continue growing next year, adding sterile manufacturing space for vials, cartridges and pre-filled syringes.

A WuXi spokesperson dismissed concerns that a BIOSECURE Act-spurred financial hit could impact the Middletown project, saying, “Our U.S. presence …reflects a long-term strategic commitment to U.S. patients, U.S. jobs, and U.S. innovation. This commitment does not rest on the outcome of this legal proceeding.”

When asked about the situation, Gov. Matt Meyer’s office told Spotlight Delaware only that it was unaware of any developments that would prevent the opening of the facility on schedule.

The post Pentagon blacklists WuXi, putting major Middletown project at risk appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

In this year's World Cup, Scotland’s second favorite team is anyone playing England.

The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. 

Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

Related

Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines

The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)

But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.

We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest. 

What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information. Whatever you may think of former CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no anarchist or extremist, and the content of his broadcasts bears little resemblance to the zines Sanchez was convicted of transporting. And yet, after indicting him and independent journalist Georgia Fort on frivolous charges relating to their livestreaming of a protest at a Minnesota church, the government sought a warrant to obtain the identities of subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Fortunately, a judge rejected that warrant. But it’s a chilling revelation of the administration’s modus operandi. Lemon and Fort’s YouTube subscribers would, of course, have no knowledge of what happened at the church protest beyond what was publicly broadcast. Their identities are as irrelevant to whether Lemon and Fort committed a crime as the box of zines was to Rueda’s case. The only conceivable reason the government might want a list of YouTube subscribers is to keep an eye on people who watch disfavored shows. 

And let’s say someone who’d watched Lemon and Fort’s livestreams and then heard about their arrests had cleared their browser history because they (rightly) feared the administration might target them. Could they then be prosecuted for concealing evidence under the same logic applied to Sanchez? If they’d downloaded the video, could they be accused of possessing contraband? Would forwarding a link equate to trafficking? 

Related

Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us

It all sounds preposterous, but virtually nothing is too absurd for this Department of Justice. In fact, it’s already argued that documents investigative reporters receive from whistleblower sources can constitute contraband. (It’s worth pointing out that Joe Biden’s DOJ used this same logic when it pursued its own ridiculous “transporting” of information case against Project Veritas for moving Ashley Biden’s diary across state lines). 

These frivolous actions create a catch-22 for all Americans. The more people are investigated for engaging with ideas the administration deems dangerously anti-government, the more likely others are to conceal evidence of their own controversial beliefs — not because they are evidence of any real crime but because prosecutors are out of control. But if they do so, they risk incriminating themselves. 

NSPM-7, which was issued last September, tasks federal agencies with dismantling networks of “anti-fascist” actors, a purposely overly broad term since expanded to include those with “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” 

Given that antifa, as a singular, cohesive organization, is a figment of the right’s imagination, agents cannot accomplish that task by uncovering a membership registry. They can only do so by identifying people with viewpoints they consider “extreme,” like anti-ICE protesters officers have told they’re being added to watchlists, or pro-Palestine opinion writers they’ve sought to deport. 

In Chicago and other cities ICE invaded, activists and organizers packaged whistles and zines to distribute to residents. Under the logic of NSPM-7 and Sanchez Estrada’s conviction, that is a network of actors engaged in organized political violence. If you read one of their zines, you could be deemed a member of an illicit enterprise, and if you hide one, you’re covering for criminals.

The government argued that the Prairieland defendants are different. One prosecutor said: “People with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison. They believe violence is justified.” U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in handing down the sentences, reportedly said he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” But lots of people believe political violence is sometimes justified. If someone who believes punching Nazis is justified attends an anti-Nazi protest where someone else punches a Nazi, are they at risk of being convicted of assault alongside the actual assailant, particularly if they have some anti-Nazi literature on their bookshelf? The answer is far less obvious than it used to be.

Related

Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It

The administration has vowed the Prairieland case “will not be the last” of its kind. We must take it at its word. The next one might also involve protesters from the political fringes rather than ordinary Americans reading, say, The Intercept, or watching Don Lemon on YouTube. But what about the one after that? We’re not as far away as you might think. Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” — clearly invoking the language of NSPM-7. Trump has labeled his political opponents “the enemy within” and the press “the enemy of the people.” 

Whoever said slippery slopes are a fallacy never met Donald Trump. If Sanchez Estrada indeed moved the zines because he foresaw their being used to tie his wife to a nonexistent terrorist network and a shooting, he should be commended for his prescience. Maybe more of us should think like Sanchez Estrada.

Or would that be a crime?

The post 30-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

Can Andy Burnham save Labour? Audio sseth.drupal@c… 26 June 2026

In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation and the challenges awaiting the Labour Party’s next leader.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer leaves No.10 a decade since the Brexit referendum that began the UK’s cycle of chaos, and Andy Burnham seems set to take over unopposed. Our experts discuss what the new regime will mean for Britain’s future and its role in the world.

Will attempts to bring the UK closer to Europe without actually rejoining the EU continue? Will Burnham want to increase Britain’s defence budget, or will his priorities lie elsewhere? And why can’t Britain hold on to its prime ministers?

Bronwen Maddox reflects on a historic week with Ben Judah, former adviser to David Lammy and visiting fellow at Chatham House, and Olivia O’Sullivan, director of our UK in the World Programme.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

Spotlight Delaware typically doesn’t cover a lot of breaking news. But on June 16th, our team jumped into action when a shooting occurred at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital around 3:30 in the afternoon.

Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens joins the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to discuss how the team covered this major event in Delaware’s biggest city and the unique considerations around reporting on breaking news. Jake also shares why Spotlight hasn’t done as much breaking news coverage as other media outlets – and whether that might be changing.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

We’re going to be talking in terms of news reporting theory during the episode. It might strike some listeners as being a step removed from the heartbreaking reality of this shooting.

One person did lose their life, another is in critical condition. At the time of this recording, the names of the shooting victims have not been released. We want to start out by sending our care and condolences to the families and the loved ones of those involved. 

Absolutely. 

In the first two-plus years of Spotlight’s operations, readers haven’t seen a lot of breaking news in our coverage. Before we get into the details of this news, can you talk about the philosophy of what Spotlight Delaware has typically covered and why breaking news hasn’t been a major part of that mix?

When we were launched, we really focused on what the industry might call a day two story. This is not necessarily breaking news, not necessarily daily news coverage, but more really trying to dig in and give more in-depth nuanced coverage to some of the debates being had around the state. So we hadn’t necessarily done a lot of breaking news reporting by virtue of that. 

At the same time, we have a number of news outlets still, whether they’re print or digital or radio or TV, that do a pretty good job of getting readers, viewers and listeners to the scene of issues. So we hadn’t really put a lot of time and effort into breaking news.

But I think there are just some of those stories out there that if we don’t cover them, the public might have more questions as to why we’re not covering them. While we internally might have this ethos, I think many of our readers and listeners out there really just see us as an additional news outlet and maybe don’t see that nuance all the time, and might question, “Why didn’t you cover one of the big tragedies in our state in recent years?” 

You’re a news outlet. This is big news.

Basically, yeah. Why didn’t you cover it? And it’s kind of hard to defend at that point, so I think we have to make some qualifications sometimes to that model. 

So specific to this shooting at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital: Why did Spotlight decide to cover this?

When it happened, we weren’t quite sure what it was. We were getting alerts that something was going on. There were gunshots reported. We weren’t quite sure if it was on the street outside of the hospital or in the hospital.

Thankfully, Delaware has never really had to deal with kind of a traditional mass shooting, I guess, in the American sense of the word. We’ve been able to escape some of that violence and bloodshed. So a mass shooting incident within a workplace would be particularly concerning. 

At that time, we weren’t really sure how many people may have been injured or killed. And so it definitely rose to the newsworthiness level of what we need to be taking a look at. And frankly, in these scenarios, the more good, accurate information that’s getting out to the public, the better.

So we felt it was the right time to get over there. We’re already in the city, so it’s happening less than a couple miles from where we sit every day. It would seem almost kind of journalistically irresponsible to not go to the scene. 

This may be a somewhat obvious question, but what are the biggest differences when you’re covering breaking news versus other kinds of reporting?

First and foremost is speed. 

When we’re working on a typical story, we don’t really stress too hard about going to a hearing and getting it out a couple hours later so that people can read about it. Our role is to really kind of absorb, question, dig in further, talk to more sources, compare it to primary sources and see if the arguments that are being had hold their weight.

You don’t really have that luxury in breaking news, obviously. You need to be there. 

What I tell young reporters is, “Really use your five senses.” That’s our role there. We need to be able to convey what does it feel like, what does it look like. How can we provide some level of clarity in a really chaotic, uncertain time to the wider public so that they have some degree of certainty of what’s going on.

Let’s talk through the process of covering this event. June 16th was a Tuesday afternoon. It happened to be a day that several of us were in the Spotlight office, which is at CSC Station, right next to the train station in downtown Wilmington. Late that afternoon, several people in the office started getting push alerts from social media or texts directly from contacts about this shooting.

You and deputy editor Karl Baker stopped what you were doing and just started reporting on this story. Why the two of you? There were other people in the office. 

There were a couple more. We were a bit short-staffed from the start of summer vacation season and it was the end of a long workday in which we had reporters all over the state working on things. Karl and I and maybe one other reporter were still here. 

I think initially it was, “Well, we don’t really know what this is.” And, Karl lives just north of the city, so he’s like, “Well, I’ll stop by on my way home and see if it’s turning out to be something.” And so Karl did go first and maybe ten minutes later he texted me, called me, and he said, “Yeah, this is something serious. There’s a lot of police here.” 

So I said, “Okay, I’ll come up.” 

There’s a little bit of muscle memory that kicks in. I’ve been working in journalism for almost 20 years and covered a lot of shootings and crashes and fires, and there’s kind of a checklist in your mind that you go through when you’re like: Okay, we need laptops, we need cameras, we need the things to be able to report from a scene to be able to really tell the public what’s going on.

We have a young staff, and so I think there was probably a quick mental math of – this might be easier or faster for me to just run up and do. There just is also a comfort level of being in that chaos, of being able to walk up to people that may have just come out of something, being able to talk to police officers who probably really don’t want to have to talk to members of the press in that moment.

So when Karl gets there first, what’s he doing? 

Karl is on scene. Like I say, breaking news is kind of a five senses kind of reporting. He’s taking notes on what he sees, what he doesn’t see. He’s talking to anybody that’s come out of the building about what it is they were told, what they heard, what they saw.

We’re talking to police officers about who’s responded, who hasn’t responded. Do we think the shooter’s still in the building? What’s going on? We’re talking to other journalists about what they’ve heard on the ground.

Can I pause you there? One of the things I’ve learned working in news for two or three years is that journalists are notoriously like, “I want to get this. I don’t want the other journalists to get it.” 

But in breaking news, you purposely are talking to other journalists?

Journalism is a club in many ways. There’s not that many of us doing it. We’ve all kind of been through similar scenarios. We’ve oftentimes had the same bosses through the years. 

We all enjoy being first on a really great story. I don’t think there are too many of us that wouldn’t ask a colleague for their thoughts, their impression, their help on something – especially when it comes to breaking news. We really want to be accurate, and we don’t want inaccurate or misleading information being filtered out to the public. 

So often if we think we’ve heard something, we’ll ask around to other reporters, “Have you guys heard this?” And if nobody else has heard it, it might give you pause about reporting something like that versus, “I’ve kinda heard something like that, too.” Now it gives you a little bit more faith that the, you know, spider network of who’s hearing what is starting to grow a little bit. 

So when Karl shows up, he’s just trying to discern what literally happened. He then calls you and says, “All right, this is something. Get up here.” When you show up, what are you adding to the mix? 

At that point I knew Karl kind of had the text reporting under some wraps. I knew that I could really help provide some of that visual representation. So I really came really focused on taking photos and video, that I knew would help to convey what the scene was like.

I spent the better part of two hours or so kind of roaming in and around the grounds – in the streets around the hospital, climbed up on top of a parking garage at one point (not the ChristianaCare one, but an adjoining one). 

When I got back to the office I had about 525 photos, something like that. So just really trying to convey a sense of chaos, the size of scale of how many police officers were there, the mix of patients and doctors and nurses and SWAT team members, and everybody coming in and out of one of the more well-known public facilities in Wilmington. 

This was not a typical Tuesday, for sure.

There was a press conference later in the evening. Are both you and Karl still there for that press conference? 

It was at that point that Karl looked at me. He said, “I need to go pick up my child from daycare.”

And I said, “Karl, please go take care of the family.” I was somewhat lucky that summer break had already started, and so my kids were away for the week. I didn’t have to worry about going to get mine. So I said, “I will cover the press conference. You take the night, Karl.” 

And so I wandered over to WPD.

As you are covering a press conference at a tragic event like this, are there any ethical considerations on your mind as you’re in that sort of atmosphere? 

It’s an emotionally charged atmosphere. We got the sense that someone may have died. Typically, when you’re immediately calling a press conference after something like this, it’s not good news that they’re sharing. 

You want to be respectful of what these people are going through. The mayor and governor were there. The chief of police was there, and the incoming CEO of ChristianaCare was there. From what we believed at that point, one of her employees had been murdered. 

So, you want to be respectful. You don’t want to kind of pry and push, but at the same time we are there to really represent the public’s interest. And there were many questions about, you know, did they have the shooter? Did they not have the shooter? Should the public be worried? Should they not be worried?  That really hadn’t been answered until that 7:30 p.m. press conference, and we really needed to push those who knew the answers to some of those questions on what they knew. 

You had a line in the article that mentioned a “visibly shaken Mayor John Carney” at this press conference. What is the balance between reporting on the emotions and just, “Here are the facts”? 

I’m a firm believer that your own eyeballs tend to not betray you. Even in our normal reporting, how somebody says something can be newsworthy, and how someone appears can be newsworthy.

I think in this case, you know, I’ve known John Carney for quite some time now, as both governor and mayor. I knew him all through COVID. I’m not sure that I really recall him being this visibly shaken. He really looked distraught, having to talk about this episode in a city that is his hometown city and he clearly loves.

I think putting the reader in the room and really connecting that I think he felt the way that many people in the city felt, was an appropriate thing to do. 

You and Karl published one article early in the evening that basically covered what you all knew. From a literal basis, where did you write that? 

We are always not the most well-prepared group. In this case, I will call it coincidence or kismet or whatever you want to call it, but Karl had his laptop with him and he had a hotspot with him. So he was able to literally sit in the grass outside of ChristianaCare and write the first draft of the story and upload it to the website from there.

Similarly, I don’t normally have my USB adapter to my camera with me, but that day it was in my bag. And so I was able to shoot a couple hundred photos, give some to Karl to add to the story, and then go back to shooting. And, we did those early drafts all from the scene.

You updated the article later in the night. How do you decide what to include in an update like that and what you’re going to collect for future reporting? 

I think it’s really important in these breaking news situations to really say what you’re confident in and what you feel is factually based and properly cited. If we had official information from the police department or the mayor’s office or ChristianaCare about who the shooter was or how they got in the building or what their motivations might’ve been, those are things that we want to report out.

There were lots of other conjecture, rumors going around that we didn’t really get a straight answer to. I don’t think it’s appropriate to continue pushing the things that we’re not confident in. That I think is something that sometimes we file that away and we say, you know, maybe it’s something I heard at the scene, but nobody else is saying it, so we have to follow up and see if other people would confirm that.

In the early goings, your story is likely to be shared on Facebook or texted to employees, like I know in my own family it was. So you don’t want to have “according to rumors” in your reporting. 

One of the key things you added in that update was, “Suspect has been apprehended” – which is probably the big thing on everybody’s mind. Is this person still out here, and do I need to be worried about this? 

Those are the major concerns. Is this person in custody, and if they’re not, should I be concerned? So, we tried to provide as much information that we could to that fact.

Once you left Wilmington Hospital, made the update to the initial article, is your night done, or are you continuing the process? 

I think I got home around 9:00, 9:30 or so that night and I was probably getting ready for bed and laying in bed about 10:30 or so when somebody texted me or I got an email that the shooter had been apprehended in Philadelphia. At that point, I tapped some other team members who I know to be night owls to please jump in and update the coverage so that whoever woke up the next morning or might be reading overnight as well would have the most up-to-date, accurate information available that the public should not be concerned at this point because the alleged shooter had been apprehended.

But I imagine you’re still trying to stay updated as you’re falling asleep. 

I mean, look, you get into that doom scroll mode, and like everybody else, I’m on Facebook and Twitter, and as you’re going along, other people are talking about it and retweeting other news stories about it. So I’m reading everything and it’s like, yeah, I think we all kind of were on the same page. We didn’t miss anything obvious, and we had complete reporting live from the scene, that is free and accessible to everybody. 

So I think we accomplished what we set out to do. 

That doom scrolling did show up in the editorial meeting the next day. You come into that editorial meeting and you’re like, “Hey, guys, there are some additional threads that we need to look into here.” And you spouted off some things that you had heard, weren’t sure if they were true or not. 

Those things actually haven’t turned into other reporting yet for Spotlight Delaware. Is that standard fare with breaking news, that there will be all these other threads that you’re trying to track down but they may not actually play out? 

Absolutely. There’s stories, anecdotes, people saying things, people taking credit for things. There wasn’t a lot of evidence to back some of this chatter up. And so, you know, we verify before we publish, and we haven’t been able to verify some of those things, so they’ve been kind of sitting and dwelling. Maybe one day they will be verified. To date, they haven’t been. 

That’s where I hope we make a difference. There are probably other journalists out there that might tweet something like that and would say, “Unverified,” and, “But this is what’s being said.” I just don’t think it’s right to amplify things that you really have not been able to verify. So that’s why we haven’t done those things.

Last question: Should Spotlight Delaware readers expect to see more breaking news coverage in the future?

I think so. We’ve done some of it over the first two years. We did cover the shooting of Ty Snook, the Delaware State Police trooper, at the DMV. We have live blogged our end of legislative session. We’re actually going to be starting that here this week as well. And some of the major kind of political policy moments, we will do more updated breaking information.

But I think, unfortunately, we’re always going to have a need for good accurate reporting in times of great uncertainty. And so I don’t suspect that this will be the last time we ever head to the scene of something going on.

Thank you and the whole team for doing all you can to get accurate information in times like these. 

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. 

The post ‘Beyond the Headlines’ podcast: Covering breaking news appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

U.S. AI companies seem to be in the lead, but that could be short-lived as Chinese competitors offer cheaper products with more commercial appeal worldwide.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 26, No. 641.

Berhalter was USA’s pass master, McKennie led the side well but back line struggled against Turkish attacks

Matt Turner In a surprise start, Turner was unable to stop the three shots he faced on his net, which will do little for the nearly extinguished case for him to start over Matt Freese. Then again, there were a couple of timely sweeper actions and he is now part of a select group of US goalkeepers to start in multiple World Cups. 4

Ultrarich face backlash as billionaire tax in California makes it to the ballot and Americans organize for higher wages

The day that Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, Gilberto Rubio, a security officer in the San Francisco area, said he was thinking about how to cut back on meals to save money.

Jessica Ordeñana, a bartender in midtown Manhattan, was worrying about air conditioning ahead of a heatwave because she can’t afford her soaring electricity bills.

Chris Casad awakens each day before dawn on the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land. 

At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking. 

The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.

But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users at the expense of others. 

The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.

At the same time, a few miles upstream, state law encouraged landowners to soak some of Oregon’s most expensive real estate and least productive farmland, a ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting analysis of water use has found. These water-rich Oregonians live in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, a quasi-municipal corporation — part public utility, part homeowners association — that manages and distributes the lion’s share of the Deschutes’ water.

Six irrigation districts together take more than 90% of the river in Bend from May to September. COID is, by far, the most powerful. It has rights to more than half of the volume of the river because when the state was carving up the Deschutes, back in the early 1900s, COID was near the front of the line with a plan to use the water. And in Western water law, that place in line — senior rights — guarantees that when drought hits, your share is protected. 

The Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverts More Water Annually From the Deschutes in Bend Than All Other Irrigation Districts Combined

That same law also says COID can keep taking all that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.

But Oregon policymakers have such loose definitions of what’s beneficial and what’s waste that, during the drought, our reporting found, only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the river was absorbed by crops. 

The news organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with both officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. While the state did not dispute the numbers, irrigation district leaders said they didn’t trust the state data, which Oregon lawmakers created to study water availability. COID also said that the drought years were anomalous; however, our analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year. 

Other records from the district and the state describe how most of the water percolated into the ground, evaporated into hot, dry air, or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted. 

And that one gallon that quenched crops? Almost all of it went to grass and pasture. 

“We’re Just Wasting Water” 

Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.

Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water. 

Another long, gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property. 

The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass. 

For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it. 

“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.

“I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.

One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated subdivision of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions whose residents mutually own an equestrian center, a luxury wedding venue, a winery and a nonprofit farm run by “dedicated ranch management and local farmers.” A development manager did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.” 

A similar property listed for $15 million invites its future owners to imagine more than a residence or a cattle ranch, but “a Playground for Ambitions, for Imagination, for Dreamers, and for Doers.”

Our analysis of the most recently available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of every 10 acres in the district were growing grass — pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping. 

Casad started his life as a farmer in the district, but he was not one of those grass growers. He began leasing land near his hometown in 2010, and within a matter of years was turning a profit, annually growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes, pulling them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of farming in a region that once sold 1 of every 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He leased more land, sold out at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with spuds for its fries, and welcomed school field trips, “just to show kids what a working farm is, where their food comes from.”

COID’s water was a boon.

“It was just always on,” Casad said. 

But the glut of water became a problem. He couldn’t just cut off the flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. So he did what others in the district do: figure out a way to use the “overabundance” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.

On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding the fields. Water flows directly from ditches across the land — saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground. 

Water experts are quick to point out that water running off fields or leaking out of canals filters into aquifers or drains back to the river. That is not waste, they say, because it recirculates in the river basin. 

This recycling takes time, while the consequences on the Deschutes are immediate. Farmers are drying up acreage and, for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, fish habitats suffer, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts take their 90% of the river during the growing season, average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said. 

The fact that much of the irrigation water is, in some form or fashion, recycled elsewhere doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease either. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for cattle.

“We’re just wasting water. Really. We are,” remarked the 72-year-old butcher shop owner. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger or one of those people that think that we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there’s got to be a middle of the road.”

Only a Quarter of the Water the Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverted From The Deschutes River Was Consumed by Crops

Most of it leaked from open canals, percolated into the ground or ran off fields before returning to aquifers or to the river downstream.

“Waste Is Like Pornography”  

Both how much water the district uses and what its landowners are growing have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is put to “beneficial use without waste,” no one can take your water rights.

But growing anything is considered a beneficial use as long as it’s planted, irrigated and not a native species or noxious weed. Policymakers and courts have labeled so few uses as waste that one of the most well-known legal precedents was set 90 years ago by a California court, said Colorado-based water law attorney Sarah Klahn. The case forbade the use of irrigation water to drown gophers. 

Water rights are a form of property rights, Oregon-based water law attorney Karen Russell said, and although the law is designed to adapt to changing times, the courts have typically allowed past practices to dictate how much water landowners can use.

In the eyes of Oregon courts, “waste is like pornography,” she said: “You know it when you see it.” 

So it doesn’t matter if landowners are watering the prized crops that decades ago were celebrated by the Deschutes Basin’s annual potato festival, when local women vied to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Playground for Ambitions.”

This is the point COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell, who is in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to drive home at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question asking about incentives that might make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.” 

“We as district managers don’t get to decide whether we like somebody growing carrot seed or somebody having two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he shot back. “If you’re using your water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop, that is what we manage. We don’t have the right to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

The district is vigilant about ensuring one thing — that landowners are growing a non-native crop, which the district checks through field visits and by aerial reviews, COID’s Deputy Director of Water Rights Jessi Talbott said in a recent interview. 

Every summer, a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital city, looking for brown patches. If landowners aren’t using the water exactly where they are supposed to at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none of those were in the COID. 

“Nobody else in the state does what we do to try and encourage use,” Talbott said. 

Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they were in danger of losing water rights. The intent of the letters isn’t to scare people, but to educate them about water stewardship, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using water don’t take action, COID can and will confiscate rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.

Casad’s landlord got a letter from COID in 2016, after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property, district records show. Casad and his wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, had turned one rocky corner into a compost pile and parking area for their equipment.

“In order to satisfy the powers that be seeing that we’re using the water, there was an entire season where we had to water that compost pile and equipment yard,” Havstad-Casad said. 

By the next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a COID warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery raising drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend. 

“We’re supposed to keep some of these areas green that are next to impossible to grow anything on,” Truax said. 

They didn’t want to douse rocky soil and fight back the weeds that immediately sprang up. The irony struck her because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.”

Still, to protect their water rights and property values, they turned on the sprinklers. 

COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles, Talbott said in an interview last year. In a more recent interview, she said OPB and ProPublica’s finding that only about 25% of the district’s diversion was consumed by crops was “infuriating.”

“We do so much to educate our patrons and for them to use the water right and make products out of it, feed the community, feed cows, whatever is in alignment with water law,” Talbott said. 

In the same meeting, Horrell said the district not only doesn’t overdeliver water, but some properties don’t get enough. COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating.

In its water management conservation plan, which covers 2015 to 2020, COID approximated how much water crops required, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pastures — and federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took out of the river annually. That roughly mirrors our own finding of what crops actually drank, based on the state’s study of satellite data. 

Horrell and other district officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan. 

“They Have All the Cards”

State leaders have long wrestled with how to divvy up the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, are facing uncertain future supplies; during the drought of 2022, COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities combined, with their then roughly 132,000 total residents. While farms are, by far, the biggest water users in the nation, the COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties only in horse sales.

Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the district’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “which they do not need, should not have to utilize and should not be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue to look again at how it manages water. 

The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to build up rural economies, and “it’s what allowed some of our communities to prosper.” But now, “you have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing, so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” he said. “So is there something broken? Yeah, there is.”

How, he asked, “do you get the most crop per drop?” 

Rather than mandates, the Legislature has turned to incentives, like authorizing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually did just that with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use those incentives. COID’s board of directors has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible. 

Horrell said the district has to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old delivery system will fail if the canals aren’t brimming full.

The district’s hundreds of miles of open, unlined waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river and propel the water that ends up on fields more than 30 miles away. When COID has reduced the volume of this “carry water” too much in the past, Horrell said, farms at the ends of the system suffered. 

But the district acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with new, pressurized pipes. It’s already gotten more than $65 million for piping since 2015.

Read More

Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard.

“There is no dispute that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities. That’s a given,” Horrell said, “How we get there is what we argue about.”

COID is a business, he emphasized, one that he said does need to become more sustainable as the climate changes.

COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Even so, Horrell pointed out, it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. Thanks to piping, he said, it sends some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to.

But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that it is not ours.” 

The Deschutes, like rivers across the country, is owned by the public, and taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-supported water planning group with districts, cities and state managers.

“We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water. It’s that simple,” he said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.” 

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”

After seven years of leasing land in the COID, Casad headed north to nearby Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He moved because he could afford to buy there and the land was more fertile — it produces more than half the world’s supply of carrot seed. Plus he wanted to live among people like him, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.

The move came with one big tradeoff. Casad went from a district with plentiful water to one that has long had to make do with less. North Unit is the first to be cut off during a drought. Compared to the COID, even in a wet year, North Unit promises half as much water per acre, and it loses an even higher percentage in leaky delivery canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district takes out of the river, our analysis found. 

North Unit’s farmers pride themselves on that efficiency. Drive through Casad’s neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers, and pumps churning to recycle and reapply the runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive,” said one of the district’s longtime farmers, 80-year-old Gary Harris.

Casad knew this, so he calculated that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.

And it was, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm going, he started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Down the road, Poland’s organic cow pastures died. He had to sell half his herd. 

“I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalled. “That threw me in a big depression.” He struggled to get out of bed. Casad started helping him with the dairy, working through the night on his own farm. 

“I remember watching the lights of the tractor out the window,” Cate Havstad-Casad said. She was pregnant with their first child, sitting in the bathtub having contractions, she said, but she waited hours to call her husband inside “because I understood the pressure on his shoulders.”

Casad wept as he dredged up memories of the drought. “Some of this stuff you just bury,” he said. “You bury it down deep.”

During those years, which overlapped with the pandemic, Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said he heard from farmers dealing with falling commodity prices, rising operational costs, “and then the real fact of water availability — I don’t know how you continue.”

As the drought wore on, the suicide rate in Jefferson County nearly doubled. “Our farmers and ranchers face immense pressure,” he told the Legislature in early 2023, successfully urging it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers. 

Two years into the drought, Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back his water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town. 

After she hung up, she sat alone in her hotel room and broke down.

“It doesn’t have to be this way” she said through tears in a video diary she recorded at the time. “It is Oregon water law which will give a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land, …  that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”

Casad no longer grows potatoes. The bins where he once stored them sit empty in the barn. Now he grows mostly hay and grass for cattle — crops that he said need less water. 

But rough years are coming for farmers in the Deschutes Basin. This year Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. That snow takes years to percolate and it’s what feeds the mountain springs powering the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts. 

The Casad farm is still paying down the debts from the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. Now he’s a school bus driver. 

To his two young children, his “whale” of a potato harvester has never been anything other than a slide, their playground for make-believe. 

The post An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price. appeared first on ProPublica.

Aida Kelly jumped out of bed and realized her home was in flames.

The country once rejected U.S. aid after a natural disaster. This time, it’s different.

Every year, about 90% of Central Oregon’s Deschutes River disappears into networks of canals and pipes traversing high desert. Between April and October, what’s left in this major river — one of the largest spring-fed waterways in the U.S. — looks more like a creek trickling out of Bend, Oregon.

Six irrigation districts — quasi-public corporations — divert the water to green up the properties of about 7,500 landowners in one of the state’s driest regions. Of the six, none is as powerful as the Central Oregon Irrigation District. It has rights to use more than half of the Deschutes’ volume — more than all the other districts combined. And under state law, in times of scarcity, most of the others must cut back to protect COID’s share of the river. 

During the last drought, state water law forced commercial farmers downstream to fallow their land while COID diverted four times what its landowners’ crops consumed, an Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis of state data found. 

Our analysis showed similar ratios across both wet and dry years, roughly aligning with estimates of what COID told the state its crops required. While state water managers did not dispute our analysis, the irrigation district said it didn’t trust the satellite-based data we used, which Oregon lawmakers backed to study water availability.

Read More

An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price.

COID landowners are doing exactly what the law encourages them to do, state legislators said. To keep rights to the water, districts have to prove to the state that their customers are consistently using it “beneficially.” In the district, our reporting found, more than 9 out of 10 acres were pasture — grass for grazing or landscaping, or hay for livestock — considered beneficial under the law.

Oregon and other Western states have so far rejected any legislation that restricts what people can grow or how efficient they must be: Opposition to change is strong because water rights are a form of property rights. Water rights also raise property values and can bring agricultural tax breaks.

If lawmakers took on bedrock water law, “we’d get crushed by the powers that be and we might even not be reelected,” said state Rep. Ken Helm, the Democratic co-chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water.

“What should we do? I think we should leave more water in the river. Legally speaking, that doesn’t have to happen,” he said. Helm, a land-use lawyer, grew up in Bend and has watched the region transform. “Affluent people are moving into Central Oregon for reasons that have nothing to do with growing a crop,” he said.

As things stand now, COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell said he “can’t tell people what they can and can’t farm, if it’s allowed.” The district’s job is to distribute water to its customers and to “deliver it much more efficiently and sustainably in the future,” he said.

The question is how.

Oregon has pushed three main solutions: 

1. Pipes

COID delivers most of its water through open canals built 120 years ago. Blasted from porous lava rock, the canals have to be completely full for gravity to push water across the district’s more than 42,000 acres. Nearly half the water evaporates or seeps into the ground under the canals before reaching its destination. COID’s state water rights factor this in.

Replacing the canals with pressurized pipes could save a lot of water. It could also take 50 years and cost more than $700 million. The district is in the final planning stages of what could be a $360 million project to pipe a main artery leading to more than a thousand landowners between Bend and Redmond, Oregon. Few make their living as farmers, our reporting found. In exchange for federal and state funding for piping, COID has pledged to send water downstream to farmers outside the district.

The plan has gotten broad support, especially from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley: “Repeated severe droughts make every drop of irrigation water highly valuable, and the best way to preserve irrigation water is to pipe it,” he told OPB and ProPublica.

The catalyst for focusing on COID, he said, was a threatened species of frog, which lives exactly where irrigation districts have long siphoned water, destroying its habitat. To stave off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, the districts agreed to leave more water in the river over time. 

As it switches from canals to pipes, COID is supposed to send the water it saves to a neighboring district that will have to take less from the river as part of the plan to restore the frog’s home. That district, North Unit, serves a valley famous for commercial farms, but it’s already water-poor. It has rights to far less water from the Deschutes than COID does. Evan Thomas, a fifth-generation farmer and leader of North Unit, put the stakes plainly at a March public meeting in Redmond: “This pipe has to go in the ground by 2028 or North Unit, all of Jefferson County, basically quits farming.”

But even those who acknowledge that piping is a critical solution note that it won’t stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need — or from sending that water to a lot of residential properties growing grass and pasture. Last year, the nonprofit Central Oregon LandWatch pushed for a bill to put limits on overwatering. Helm and Republican state Rep. Mark Owens started drafting legislation, but they never introduced it. Owens, a hay farmer in Eastern Oregon, said irrigation districts weren’t happy with the proposal. “I weakened,” he said. “We weren’t going to get it through the building. We lived to fight another day.” 

2. Sharing

The Deschutes has never had enough water for all the landowners who laid claim to it more than a century ago, said Deschutes River Conservancy Executive Director Kate Fitzpatrick. Leaving water in the river for fish and wildlife wasn’t even considered a legal, beneficial use of the resource until the 1980s. 

“So that’s what we’re working with,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not going to win the game by pointing fingers at who’s doing what with the water.”

With more demand than supply, her nonprofit works with irrigation districts to roll out incentives for landowners to be more efficient or share voluntarily. One program pays landowners to dry up land so COID will leave more water in the river. But the district limits participation, and the program’s efficacy has plateaued for decades, state data shows. 

State lawmakers last year also created a pilot “water bank” program. The concept marks a big change in the law and could allow COID landowners to keep what water they need and rent out the excess to farmers downstream without losing rights to it. 

But since Oregon’s governor signed the bill into law nearly a year ago, COID and other key players haven’t signed anyone up. That’s because the canal system fails if it doesn’t have enough water in it, Horrell, the district’s manager, said. Piping could allow the district to scale up these other solutions in the future, he said.

There’s another problem, too: To rent out part of a water right without completely drying up their property, landowners would need to measure their use precisely — something many don’t want to do.

3. Data

COID said it doesn’t measure or report the volume of water it delivers. This is typical across Oregon, where the vast majority of water goes to agricultural lands. But policymakers and experts have long said the state can’t tackle water shortages unless it knows how much the people with irrigation water rights use on their properties. 

The Legislature’s attempts to require meters on all individual farms and wells have faced fierce public backlash. “At one point my office was getting a call a minute,” Owens, the state representative, recalled of an effort last year. The fear, he said, is that the state will use data to take away water rights or to try to charge by the gallon. 

Owens has given up on trying to force statewide metering for now, he said. 

On his own Eastern Oregon hay farm, he started a pilot project that uses a weather station and satellite data to track how much his fields drink. He can look on his phone and see how many days he should irrigate the following week, he said. He also led the charge for Oregon to invest in a cutting-edge study to apply this technology to statewide water planning. Scientists with the Oregon Water Resources Department co-authored a report with researchers from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. It provides estimates over nearly 40 years of how much water crops consumed on every irrigated field in Oregon. The data, which OPB and ProPublica used in our reporting, was published last year. Horrell said such data has too many variables and is not ready to guide how the district monitors water use.

State managers are not currently using that data to regulate how water is used, but instead to account for where it goes, Oregon Water Resources Department Director Ivan Gall said in a recent interview. He said tight state budgets have so far kept his agency from sharing it “with the public and decision makers in a way that is understandable and meaningful.”

Owens and Helm said they tried and failed to make it easier to learn from critical data about Oregon’s water — how much there is, how clean it is, where it’s coming from and where it’s going — but a pilot project ground to a halt after state funding dried up last year.

The post Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard. appeared first on ProPublica.

Airport has also been ‘engaging closely’ with regulator to discuss cost of plan to build third runway

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Heathrow has said that passenger numbers and profits will fall this year because of the war in the Middle East.

Europe’s busiest airport said it expected a 1.1% decline in the total number of passengers to 83.6 million as the Iran war affects air travel.

Austrian Grand Prix declares heat hazard as dramatic rise in temperatures forecast in central and northern Europe

Temperatures are forecast to rise dramatically in parts of central and northern Europe this weekend as the intense heatwave continues. In Germany and Poland, highs up to or exceeding 40C (104F) are expected on both Saturday and Sunday, days after swathes of France experienced similar extreme temperatures. The Austrian Grand Prix, taking place this weekend in Spielberg, has declared a heat hazard, the first race to do so this season. Temperatures are expected to rise into the low 30s celsius during the race, almost 10C warmer than usual for the venue.

Across Europe, the intense heat has led to severe thunderstorms. In the Sverdlovsk region of central Russia, a strong tornado was reported on the evening of 22 June. Rated a 3 out of 5 on the international Fujita scale, the twister injured 16 people and destroyed or damaged about 100 homes and businesses in the town of Kushva. Emergency services have been working on restoring power to the town. Tornadoes are not unheard of in Russia but are rare. Forecasters say they may become more common in future as the climate breaks down. Storm warnings remained in effect in the southern part of the country on Friday.

The king and Queen Camilla have decided instead to continue living at nearby Clarence House, a smaller, stately home.

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With his million-dollar jewellery collection and his two Rolls-Royces, Mexico’s new ambassador to the UK will fit right in with the Mayfair crowd.

Former attorney general Alejandro Gertz Manero was appointed to the post by President Claudia Sheinbaum last year, but only recently disclosed his financial assets.

The right’s verdict is in: white, heterosexual, Christian men face the most discrimination in the US. The Giants don’t want to push back

On 19 June, the New York Times published an article on the hostility toward minority members of the military at the Department of Defense and the blocking of several promotions of minority, non-male officers despite their decorations and accomplishments. The Times attributed the ideological climate to defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who, according to the newspaper, is waging a “war on diversity”. Four days earlier, California governor Gavin Newsom said that the Department of Justice was investigating him and his wife for alleged financial irregularities, adding to the speculation long held that Donald Trump’s administration would spend its second term weaponizing the government to settle scores.

As Hegseth attacks race, gender and “diversity” through the military with the aim of restoring an unchallenged and unquestioned white, Christian leadership, and the justice department harasses Trump’s political opponents, the DoJ used the San Francisco Giants’ honoring of pride month to open yet another front in what the president sees as a culture war against white men. The Giants incurred additional damage, all of it embarrassingly self-inflicted. Their milky, cowardly response betrayed their own city, a large part of their fanbase and the organization’s history.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.

Fears hard-won gains in reducing child mortality over 20 years are at risk after end of USAID funding for nutrition programmes

Child malnutrition in Nepal has reached “alarming” levels, according to the largest ever survey of under-fives in the country.

The new figures came just over a year after USAID, the former US flagship agency closed by the Trump administration in 2025, stopped funding work on child nutrition in Nepal.

Researchers say they detected the first gravitational-wave "fingerprints" of a black hole's event horizon by analyzing the final moments of the powerful GW250114 merger. The findings support Einstein's general relativity and may eventually help probe frame dragging and quantum fluctuations near black holes. Phys.org reports: For the new research published in Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed data from the strongest gravitational wave ever recorded, known as GW250114, detected by the LIGO observatory in January 2025. By isolating the last burst of waves -- known as "direct waves" -- from this black hole merger, the scientists said they were able to extract information from closer to an event horizon than ever before. "This black hole horizon concept normally appears in science fiction," lead study author Sizheng Ma of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada told AFP. "But now we are really able to touch the region around the horizon with gravitational data," he added. "Sometimes I cannot believe this is really happening." The last stage of two black holes merging is like a spoon stirring a glass of water, Ma explained. The resulting swirl in space creates the ripple of gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light in all directions. If the metaphorical spoon is stirring close enough to the black hole's event horizon, "this offers us a chance to decode the physics around that region," Ma said. By supporting the theory of general relativity, the results "proved that Einstein was correct again," he added. The scientists emphasized that more research was needed to decipher what can be gleaned about event horizons using this method. But they did detect information about how black holes twist space around themselves as they rotate -- a phenomenon known as "frame dragging." "This is similar to pushing a glass into a table and twisting it, so that the tablecloth winds up around it," Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational wave astrophysicist at Columbia University, told AFP. In the future, the scientists hope to find signs of tiny changes known as quantum fluctuations. "In this way, we can really probe this near-horizon region to look for new physics," including searching for a deviation from general relativity, Ma said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julie Elie worked out how zebra finches announce who they are, what they are doing and use individual signatures

A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response.

Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings.

• US manager says his team deserve congratulations

• Plays down talk of momentum and focuses on positives

Mauricio Pochettino criticized questions over his team’s performance in a 3-2 loss to Turkey on Thursday, telling journalists he expected to be congratulated for leading the US to a first-place finish in the group and found their questions about the dead-rubber loss “weird”.

The US had secured top spot in Group D on the back of two historic performances – a 4-1 opening win against Paraguay in which the team scored more goals in a World Cup match than ever before, and a 2-0 victory over Australia that secured a first six-point opening to a World Cup.

All branches of the military will be taught how to use technology that has become a ‘game changer on the battlefield’, says defence minister

All of South Korea’s military forces will be trained as drone operators in a sweeping overhaul of its warfare strategy, the defence minister has said.

“All soldiers should be able to use drones like a second personal firearm,” Ahn Gyu-back, who heads the defence ministry in Seoul, said on Friday.

Plans by Wolfgang Porsche to bore private 500-metre road link through Austrian hill caused anger among locals

Wolfgang Porsche, the Austrian-German automotive magnate, appears to have abandoned plans to build a private 500-metre tunnel for his cars through the Salzburg hills after a public uproar over the “tunnel for one”.

In 2020, Porsche bought a storied 17th-century villa on the outskirts of Salzburg for €8.4m (£7.2m), and last autumn he secured permission from the city authorities for an estimated €10m private access road through the rugged limestone hill.

Apple Macbook 13-inch prices jumps from $1,799 to $2,099 while the cost of iPads surges by 25%

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Australians woke up on Friday to more expensive Macbooks and iPads after Apple hiked prices worldwide, blaming an AI-driven cost-crunch for computer parts.

The iPhone range was unaffected but experts predict Apple will raise prices for its flagship product later this year. Microsoft also lifted its Xbox prices overnight amid a wave of increases for phones and devices.

High temperatures make some workplaces dangerous, with economists warning disruption will dent growth

Monique Mosley is used to sweltering conditions at the food factory in Yorkshire where she works, but June’s record-breaking heatwave has made conditions unbearable. “We make hot filled food products and it’s common that we see temperatures in the high 30s,” she said. “Thanks to our union, our employer is offering extra breaks, but not every workplace is the same.”

The latest heatwave to grip the UK and much of western Europe has presented significant challenges to employers and their employees, from sweltering offices, disrupted commutes and school closures to dangerous construction sites where workers are at risk of dehydration, heatstroke and other injury.

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC will have to be drained again. Donald Trump has blamed vandalism for the failure to keep the water “American flag blue”. But what if this small body of water is proof that the president can’t outrun the truth?

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Arwa Mahdawi about why this project, which has cost the taxpayer millions, is proving to be such an embarrassing failure for a man obsessed with image

Archive: AP, Reuters

Ukraine isn’t the only battlefield shaping autonomous warfare.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Spain will require mobile networks to have backup systems that maintain connectivity when power outages occur. Per a royal decree that will be approved by the end of 2026, mobile network operators (MNOs) and infrastructure companies will need to install batteries or other backups to keep service active for at least four hours during a blackout. The mobile network rules will apply to businesses that serve at least 500,000 users or generate upwards of 50 million euros ($56.9 million) in annual revenue. The decree will stipulate that half of the population will need to be covered by this failsafe within the first year, then 65 percent in the second year and three quarters in the third. [...] The decree will require other key infrastructure elements to remain up and running for a certain period after a power outage. For instance, control centers that could impact all of Spain if they were to go offline will need to remain in service for at least 24 hours. Emergency call centers will also need to have plans in place to maintain operations, as Reuters notes. The move is in response to the widespread blackout across the Iberian peninsula in 2025, which left more than 50 million people without power. Experts called it "the most severe and unprecedented blackout that had occurred in Europe in the past 20 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A trove of emails offers a new look at how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention navigated some of the most controversial decisions of President Trump's second term.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 26.

This live blog is now closed.

• Supreme court lets Trump administration end TPS for Haitians and Syrians

• Trump officials can turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

Here’s my colleague Maanvi Singh’s report on the supreme court’s decision to give the Trump administration a green light to turn back asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a ruling that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system and concludes a battle that has spanned three administrations.

In a major ruling, the supreme court has allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.

David Vander Meer was recently arrested for the death of his wife in national park 20 years ago after new information revealed

A Las Vegas man and former youth pastor died days after he was arrested and charged with murdering his wife, who plummeted thousands of feet to her death while hiking in Utah’s Zion national park in 2006.

At a scheduled extradition hearing on Thursday, a Las Vegas judge announced that David Vander Meer was deceased, according to KSNV.

US among countries sending help to search for survivors on north coast, where dozens of buildings flattened, as official death toll reaches 235

Rescue teams are racing to Venezuela’s shattered northern coast after almost simultaneous earthquakes reduced dozens of buildings to rubble, killing at least 235 people but with thousands more fatalities feared. Officials said at least 4,300 people were injured as rescue missions continue.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the defence department would help search and rescue teams deploy to the affected region after Venezuela’s main gateway, the Simón Bolívar international airport, near the capital, Caracas, was badly damaged by 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes less than 40 seconds apart, late on Wednesday afternoon.

China’s leader wants to promote his alternative to the current world order, and his efforts are being assisted by a capricious US

Xi Jinping meets Bangladesh’s new prime minister on Friday, the latest in a wave of world leaders to visit Beijing this year as the Chinese leader builds his influence and economic ties, and seeks to “shift the balance of power” away from the west.

Xi’s meeting with Tarique Rahman comes less than two weeks after the Chinese leader welcomed Myanmar’s military chief-turned-president, Min Aung Hlaing, in Beijing.

‘It’s all just rendered useless’, Something For Kate’s Paul Dempsey says as AI scrapes millions of songs to learn how to make music

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Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning are among big-name Australian musicians upset that their original songs have been found in datasets used to train artificial intelligence.

A dataset search tool recently created by US publication The Atlantic reveals millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train the disruptive technology.

Supreme court ruling will allow Trump administration to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border – key US politics stories from Thursday 25 June

The US supreme court has given the Trump administration a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system.

The decision allows the Trump administration to revive its so-called turn-back or “metering” policy, allowing federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from physically setting foot on US soil, where federal law guarantees them the right to claim asylum and protection from persecution.

Iran attacked a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, a U.S. official confirmed, leading a United Nations agency to pause an evacuation effort.

Los Angeles building inspectors have launched an investigation into alleged unpermitted construction at a warehouse that erupted in flames last week — its second fire in two years.

The decision caps rent on about 40 percent of the New York’s housing stock for up to two years.

Vice-president declares admiration for 37th president and claims Nixon and Trump are targeted by ‘deep state’ forces

JD Vance does not think the era-defining Watergate scandal would have lasted more than a single news cycle in today’s fragmented, hyper-partisan political environment – and certainly would not have led to a president’s downfall.

Speaking at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California, on Thursday to promote his new book, Communion, Vance discussed his spiritual journey from atheist to Catholic convert before declaring his admiration for the 37th president.

International Maritime Organization says safety guarantees must be confirmed before ships can move again

A United Nations agency has paused the evacuation of ships through the strait of Hormuz after the British military said a vessel was hit by a projectile off the coast of Oman following the passage of several tankers that used a route backed by the UN.

The head of the UN’s International Maritime Organization said on Thursday that the plan to move stranded ships out of the Persian Gulf through the strait would be on hold until the agency could confirm safety guarantees for the ships on the evacuation list and in the region.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 26 No. 1,111.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 26, No. 1,833.

A judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to either release unredacted versions of several files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or explain why it can't do so.

⚽️ Kick-off time: 7pm local/12pm AEST/3am BST/10pm EDT
⚽️ Third-place table, who has qualified and who needs what?
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Jonathan

Let’s start the roundup with the Pod Squad dealing with a bumper six-game matchday, one dominated by Scotland’s hammering by Brazil.

Feel free to keep me company by emailing your thoughts about today’s match, and anything related to the World Cup to jonathan.howcroft.freelance@theguardian.com.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is an anti-Islamic, far-right political activist well known in the UK and Europe

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The man who calls himself Tommy Robinson has roared into prominence in Australia after the morning TV mainstay Karl Stefanovic posted an interview with Robinson for his podcast.

The fallout was swift. Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest locally owned media empire, has severed ties with Stefanovic, and he will not appear on a radio show with Eddie McGuire on Friday.

Company says it cannot shield customers from memory and storage chip costs – and iPhone hikes could be next

Apple raised iPad and MacBook prices on Thursday, saying it could no longer shield customers from soaring memory and storage chip costs driven by the AI industry’s data center buildout.

The move does not affect Apple’s cash cow, the iPhone. But it would take the starting price of the ⁠Neo, its lowest-priced laptop, from $599 to $699 mere months after launch.

Only 20% European homes have AC, compared to 90% in the U.S., but as the climate changes, that vast gulf may be set to shrink.

Mangione​ is facing both state and federal charges for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder in December 2024. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

HAMBURG, Germany, June 25, 2026 — As the main conference program concludes this afternoon, ISC is pleased to announce that Professor Rio Yokota, a prominent researcher working at the intersection of high performance computing, artificial intelligence, and linear algebra, will take the helm as the program chair for ISC 2027.

Rio Yokota

During today’s closing ceremony, Professor Rosa M. Badia, this year’s program chair, will officially introduce Yokota and hand the stage to him for his address to the ISC HPC community. ISC 2026, held in Hamburg from June 22 to 26, brought together over 4,000 attendees and 188 exhibitors, fostering collaboration among the international communities of HPC, AI and quantum computing as they explored the developments and trends shaping supercomputing.

ISC 2027 is set to return to Hamburg from June 7 to 11, 2027. Under Yokota’s leadership, the program will continue to emphasize the convergence of HPC, AI, data-intensive science, and emerging computing technologies. His appointment also brings a strong perspective from Japan’s supercomputing and AI research communities, where he has played an active role in advancing large-scale computing and distributed AI training.

Professor Yokota currently works at the Supercomputing Research Center, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo. He also leads the AI for Science Foundation Model Research Team at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, where his research focuses on algorithm development, GPU optimization, and distributed machine learning.

When asked about his vision and goals for ISC 2027, Yokota stated:

“I am honored to serve as Program Chair for ISC 2027 and to help shape a program that reflects how rapidly our field is evolving. HPC has always been driven by ambitious scientific challenges, and those challenges now increasingly connect simulation, data analytics, AI, and emerging computing technologies. For ISC 2027, I would like to focus on how this convergence is reshaping scientific discovery, and on the systems, algorithms, software, and communities needed to support it at scale.

“My goal is to bring these communities closer together, highlight work that is both technically rigorous and scientifically impactful, while creating opportunities for researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world to exchange ideas. I look forward to working with the ISC community to build a program that is inclusive, forward-looking, and responsive to the challenges facing science, industry, and society.”

Rio Yokota has optimized algorithms on GPUs since 2007 and was part of the team that won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2009 for their pioneering work on GPU supercomputers. More recently, he has led distributed training efforts on prominent Japanese supercomputers, including ABCI, TSUBAME, and Fugaku. As a co-developer of the large language models Swallow and LLM-jp, he is also involved in organizing international consortia such as the Accelerated Data Analytics and Computing Institute (ADAC) and the Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC).

At the RIKEN Center, Yokota’s research team is dedicated to efficiently training and deploying foundation models for scientific applications, thereby enabling scientists to enhance their research. His diverse experience positions him well to guide ISC 2027, ensuring it addresses the evolving landscape of HPC and its impact on science and innovation.

Stay tuned for a preview of the ISC 2027 program topics later this year, and visit the ISC website for more information.

About ISC 2027

ISC High Performance 2027 will take place from June 7 to 11, 2027, in Hamburg, Germany. Established in 1986, ISC, in its 42nd edition, is renowned as the world’s oldest and Europe’s leading event dedicated to HPC, AI, and quantum computing. The event brings together a wide range of professionals – including researchers, engineers, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students – to exchange knowledge, showcase new technologies, and discuss the future of supercomputing. Join us for ISC High Performance 2027 in Hamburg!

Source: ISC

The post ISC Introduces Rio Yokota as ISC 2027 Program Chair appeared first on HPCwire.

VISION debuts on the prestigious Top500 list at No. 66, the nation’s highest ranked academic supercomputer, positioning A&M as a global leader in AI research, advanced computing, national security innovation and more.

BRYAN-COLLEGE STATION, Texas, June 25, 2026 — VISION, the Texas A&M University supercomputer, is ranked as America’s most powerful academic supercomputer in the latest TOP500 list, revealed June 23 at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. VISION is ranked the 66th most powerful in the world based on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, ahead of supercomputers owned and used by corporate giants like Samsung, Dell, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco and numerous national and international agencies and laboratories.

Credit: Texas A&M

VISION triples Texas A&M’s previous supercomputer capacity and positions it as an epicenter of impactful AI education and research benefitting the state and nation. VISION empowers student and faculty researchers to develop forward-thinking solutions to pressing, complex issues with global impact.

“We did not fund VISION for bragging rights. We funded it because Texas needs answers faster,” said Robert L. Albritton, chairman of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. “This supercomputer gives researchers across the A&M System the power to speed up drug discovery, strengthen disaster response, improve agriculture, advance energy research, support national security and prepare students for an economy being reshaped by artificial intelligence.”

Early work already shows the system’s potential. In one drug-discovery project, researchers screened more than 10 million compounds in about a week, using computing power that would have taken years in a previous environment.

That kind of speed can change the way researchers work. VISION can help teams test more ideas, train larger models, process more data and move from question to result faster than before.

Texas A&M is the only academic representative in the top 15% of the rankings, and VISION sits above supercomputers at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Purdue University, the University of Florida and the University of Tokyo. At a time when the artificial intelligence boom is in full swing, advanced computer infrastructure is essential for future successes and is proving to be a strategic asset for not only universities but also industries and states. If Texas is to cement itself as an AI leader, VISION and Texas A&M will play an essential role.

VISION represents a monumental leap forward in AI processing power. It will empower researchers to train next-generation AI models and solve complex national defense challenges in mere hours instead of what previously took months or years. By compressing timelines for critical breakthroughs — like training rovers and mobile robots for complex unpredictable terrain, advancing developments towards quantum computing, predicting global cybersecurity threats and accelerating early Alzheimer’s detection — this marvel will fundamentally strengthen national security, elevate human health and deliver practical benefits like protecting the power grids and food supplies that support communities worldwide.

Texas A&M University President Susan Ballabina said VISION will help faculty and students turn ambitious research questions into results faster.

“VISION gives our faculty and students access to the kind of computing power that changes what is possible,” Ballabina said. “It will help researchers train larger models, process more data, test more ideas and move faster on work that can improve lives. Just as important, it gives students hands-on experience with the advanced tools shaping the future of science, industry and public service.”

VISION, a NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, provides high-performance supercomputing designed for state-of-the-art infrastructure for GPU-based workloads. It will support A&M research initiatives in key areas, including:

• Machine learning
• Generative AI applications
• Model training Image processing
• Graphics rendering
• Scientific simulations
• Robotics enablement
• Autonomous systems

“The VISION team’s mission is to democratize access to high-performance computing resources for every member of the Texas A&M University System by building a system around key principles, including maximum flexibility, familiar and innovative features, security that enables and protects, low barriers to entry and continuous improvement,” said Brendan Roark, associate vice president of research. “Texas A&M IT Services and the Division of Research work to ensure VISION accelerates the time to impact in delivering innovative and entrepreneurial solutions that benefit Texas A&M, the state and the nation.”

Thanks to the power of the Texas A&M University System, VISION touches most corners of the state. From West Texas A&M in the Panhandle to Texarkana, Galveston, McAllen and Kingsville and beyond, Texas A&M University System members and their communities benefit from VISION. The supercomputer also strengthens the Texas A&M University System’s ability to recruit top faculty, attract research partnerships and prepare students for fields increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and advanced computing.

The TOP500 list, according to its website, was created “to assemble and maintain a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems. Our list has been compiled twice a year since June 1993 with the help of high-performance computer experts, computational scientists, manufacturers, and the Internet community in general.”

Source: Texas A&M University

The post Texas A&M Supercomputer Named Most Powerful Among US Universities appeared first on HPCwire.

SINGAPORE, June 2026 — On June 8, Singapore launched ASPIRE 2B, its next-generation national research supercomputer, significantly advancing the country’s high performance computing (HPC) capabilities for AI, scientific computing and emerging hybrid computing approaches.

ASPIRE 2B launch on June 8, 2026.

Launched by Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information and Ministerin-Charge of Cybersecurity and Smart Nation Group, ASPIRE 2B marks a major expansion of Singapore’s national compute infrastructure to support increasingly AI and data-intensive workloads. Introduced in NSCC’s 10th anniversary year, ASPIRE 2B reflects a decade of national investment in advanced computing infrastructure and Singapore’s growing ambitions in AI and scientific innovation.

Delivering up to 115 petaFLOPS (PF) of compute power, capable of more than 100 quadrillion calculations per second, ASPIRE 2B offers close to four times the combined capacity of current national research systems, ASPIRE 2A and ASPIRE 2A+.

Scaling National Compute Capabilities to Meet Growing Research Demands ASPIRE 2B is equipped with more than 1,500 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, making it the country’s largest NVIDIA GPU cluster dedicated to research and public sector use. It will serve as a key testbed for emerging AI-driven research approaches such as agentic AI, where AI systems help automate and orchestrate end-to-end research workflows, from ideation to generative design to lab-based experimental validation. These workloads require AI training, as well as inference — where trained AI models are used to generate predictions and responses from new data — alongside large-scale data analytics and scientific simulations to be performed within a unified compute environment.

ASPIRE 2B is designed to support the new hybrid quantum-classical computing paradigm. It is expected to be linked with Quantinuum’s Helios quantum computer, with a targeted installation in Singapore near the end of this year, enabling researchers to experiment with hybrid computing algorithms that could help solve complex problems that are difficult for both systems to handle alone.

Enabling Nationally Significant Research and Applications

NSCC’s supercomputers have supported national programs such as the National Environment Agency’s Third National Climate Change Study (V3), led by the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS), where some of the world’s highest-resolution climate projections were developed to support coastal adaptation planning, climate resilience and regional food security. With ASPIRE 2B’s enhanced CPU and GPU capabilities, CCRS will be able to support a new generation of AI-powered, higher-resolution climate modeling and weather prediction to strengthen Singapore’s resilience against increasingly complex climate risks.

NSCC systems have also powered national AI initiatives such as the Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network (MERaLiON) project by A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R), including Southeast Asia-focused AI models capable of understanding regional accents, dialects, code-switching and emotions for applications across healthcare, finance and digital services. With ASPIRE 2B’s expanded AI compute capabilities, researchers will be able to train larger and more advanced multimodal models while accelerating the development of next-generation sovereign AI systems tailored for Singapore and Southeast Asia.

These developments also support Singapore’s broader push towards AI for Science, where AI and advanced computing increasingly accelerate scientific discovery. Building on ASPIRE 2A and ASPIRE 2A+, ASPIRE 2B will further enhance the quality and capability of national AI and scientific research, while supporting new initiatives such as Singapore Medical Foundation AI Model (SIMFONI), advanced robotics research and other large-scale AI workloads requiring sustained GPU access.

Prof Robert Morris, Executive Director, Singapore Medical Foundation AI Model (SIMFONI) said: “Advancing healthcare AI requires the ability to work with large and complex clinical datasets at scale. ASPIRE 2B provides the compute foundation needed to support more advanced AI models for applications such as clinical decision support and patient record analysis, contributing to more data-driven and preventive healthcare.”

Supporting Future-Ready Research

Beyond infrastructure, NSCC is evolving its operating model to better support Singapore’s long term research and innovation needs. This includes enhancements to its resource provisioning framework to prioritize national Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) programs while providing greater flexibility for institutional and emerging research demands.

NSCC will also deepen engagement with the research community through enhanced user enablement services, such as application and workflow optimization, closer technical partnerships, and consultations on algorithm–hardware co-design. Alongside this, NSCC will strengthen its focus on training and talent development through structured onboarding and curriculum co-development with universities and industry partners.

Dr Terence Hung, Chief Executive, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, said: “ASPIRE 2B reflects Singapore’s ambition to strengthen its position in trusted AI and advanced computing. It provides researchers with the compute capabilities needed to tackle larger and more complex challenges in areas critical to Singapore’s future, including healthcare, sustainability and urban resilience. As NSCC marks its 10th anniversary, ASPIRE 2B also strengthens NSCC’s role as a strategic national HPC partner. It will support research innovation, strengthen talent and capability development, and enable the next phase of Singapore’s AI and compute-driven research ambitions.”

ASPIRE 2B forms part of the $270 million national investment announced by the National Research Foundation (NRF) in 2024 to strengthen Singapore’s supercomputing infrastructure and capabilities.

About the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore

The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore was established in 2015 to manage Singapore’s national petascale facilities and high performance computing (HPC) resources. A National Research Infrastructure funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), and hosted by A*STAR, the HPC resources that we provide help support the research needs of the public and private sectors, including research institutes, institutes of higher learning, government agencies and companies.

As a national strategic technological platform, NSCC has the mission to enhance competence, capacity and competitive advantage in the use of HPC in all relevant fields such as computational science, analytics, engineering, advanced manufacturing, genomics, biomedicine, healthcare, AI and quantum computing, among many others. With the support of our research partners, NSCC catalyses national research and development initiatives, develops HPC skillsets and applications, and enhances Singapore’s research capabilities. For more information, please visit: https://www.nscc.sg.

About the National Research Foundation (NRF)

The National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF), set up on 1 January 2006, is a department within the Prime Minister’s Office. The NRF sets the national direction for research and development (R&D) by developing policies, plans and strategies for research, innovation and enterprise. It also funds strategic initiatives and builds up R&D capabilities by nurturing research talent. For more information, please visit: https://www.nrf.gov.sg.

Source: NSCC

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Blaze on Tintwistle Moor, Glossop, has burned more than 500 square metres, forcing road closures and smoke warning

A major wildfire close to Greater Manchester has torn through large areas of moorland for more than 24 hours, forcing road closures and smoke warnings as fire crews battle to bring it under control.

The blaze, on Tintwistle Moor, near Glossop, has burned an area of more than 500 square metres of moorland and woodland, with thick plumes of smoke directly affecting the villages of Tintwistle, Hollingworth and Woolley Bridge.

A jury remains deadlocked in the trial of Jonathan Rinderknecht, the man accused of starting the blaze that turned into the deadly and destructive Palisades Fire in 2025.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from autoevolution: The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security denied Polestar an authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule. Polestar will continue to sell its existing inventory of Polestar 3 and 4 crossovers in the United States and will continue to offer support to customers and access to its service network. But no new 2027 models will set wheels on American soil. The Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia. Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the United States. The rule, set out by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), classifies modern vehicles as mobile data centers and is designed to protect national security by keeping sensitive driver data and vehicle control systems out of the hands of foreign governments. Michael Lohscheller, Polestar CEO, confirms that the company is well aware that the automotive industry is entering a new phase, based on regional dynamics. So, Polestar will shift its strategy to its biggest market as it is preparing its exit from the U.S. market. The report notes that Polestar sold 5,384 cars in the U.S. in 2025, with 60,119 units sold globally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is the third price hike for Xbox consoles since May of last year.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for damaging the new blue lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is now peeling, as well as for algae in the water. But the administration has not provided evidence to back up the president’s claims. Experts say the pool’s ills have a variety of plausible explanations that do not involve intentional harm.

Installing linings on pools and making sure they properly adhere is challenging, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have told news outlets, and improper surface prep or water intrusion can cause peeling, they said. Meanwhile, algae would be expected in a shallow, still, unshaded pool fed by nutrient-rich water that had been painted dark blue, Steven Chapra, a water quality modeler and professor emeritus at Tufts University, told us.

Despite these competing explanations, Trump has repeatedly asserted that vandals are to blame. “You know, we have 100- … I think 290-, 300-foot slit right through it,” Trump said at a June 22 press event, after news reports surfaced of blue pieces of the pool’s lining separating from the bottom. “Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.”

He claimed at the same event that someone may have put fertilizer in the pool, part of a series of claims that someone had poured in some substance or chemicals. “They did something to create the algae,” he said.

Trump’s comments on vandals cutting the pool’s coating with a knife echoed theoretical statements he had made on May 4, before reports of damage to the pool. “It’s very strong. You couldn’t — if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anybody ideas,” he said, referring to the pool’s new coating. “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, so strong, so powerful.”

The president has since spoken or posted about alleged cuts in the pool at least daily, with the “gash” — or “numerous slashes” — growing to cover a length of 350 feet and the possible implements used including “a very sharp knife or razors.”

On June 24, Trump posted a photo of the dark blue bottom of the empty pool, stating, “This is the hard rubber surface — No Paint — Before the Vandals cut and pulled it apart!” On June 25, he specified that the vandals had gone to the “bottom” and “started ripping it up,” as well as cut “this very expensive stuff” at the “side of the pool right at water level.”

The White House replied to our request for more information on the vandalism with a June 25 press release claiming to have surveillance video, previously shared by the Department of the Interior with Fox News, of someone vandalizing the pool. The June 19 video, taken in the middle of the afternoon after news had broken of the damage to the pool, appears to show a person reaching into the water and pulling something out. However, it is unclear whether this individual was engaged in vandalism. The White House has not provided evidence of people causing long gashes or a series of gashes. The press release also included links to images of damage to the pool, including a jagged line on the bottom of the pool posted by a TMZ DC reporter on X, but it was unclear what had caused it. Nor has the administration provided evidence someone illicitly dumped something in the pool to cause algae growth.

The White House press release linked to a court filing from Frank Lands, Deputy Director of Operations for the National Park Service, stating that police on June 9 responded to an “NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.” Lands also said that “approximately 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool.” It is unclear who is alleged to have made these cuts or thrown the fence post tops.

The Department of the Interior sent us a link to one of its X posts, which said, “Six individuals have been arrested for vandalism at the Reflecting Pool.” The post added that seven others were given federal citations and that 17 police reports for vandalism had been filed. The department would not give us further information about these arrests and citations, including any details of the individuals’ alleged infractions. Not did they provide the names of the alleged vandals. The White House press release said that there had been at least seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed but again did not provide more details, other than to link to multiple news stories mentioning an Olympic canoeist who has disputed that he vandalized the pool. Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department referred us to the NPS.

Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the United States Marshals Service, told us that as of the morning of June 24, “we are showing 5 arrests” listed as being by the DC Safe Task Force, including one on June 19 for “vandalism (attempted destruction of property/defacing public property)” and four on June 20 for “Destruction of government property.” He did not provide further details on these arrests. The DC Safe Task Force is a multi-agency federal body created by Trump “to surge law enforcement presence in public spaces, strictly enforce ‘quality-of-life’ laws, and maximize federal immigration enforcement within the District.”

Meanwhile, experts in pools, waterproof coatings and algae have said that there are many possible causes for the reflecting pool’s issues that have nothing to do with vandalism. Below, we will discuss competing explanations.

Peeling Problems

Despite Trump’s claims of vandalism to the more than 100-year-old reflecting pool, it’s not clear what caused damage to its new lining. When pressed on June 22 on whether he had proof that vandals had made cuts in the pool, the president seemed to suggest the cuts themselves were the proof.

“Well, let’s put it this way. When you have a 350 — I think it’s 350, not 250 — a 350-foot slit from one end to the other, you think that’s proof? You think that’s proof?” Trump said to a reporter. He later suggested that there was photographic evidence, but when a reporter asked the president to release those photos Trump said, “You’ll see it in court.” He also suggested contacting the Interior and Parks departments.

What is known is that the Department of the Interior awarded a no-bid contract on April 3 to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to paint the reflecting pool, with supplemental agreements issued through June 15 to total $14.7 million. The agency justified not getting bids from various contractors by saying the project was urgent and needed to be completed by July 4.

The plan was to install an epoxy primer on top of the pool’s concrete slabs, followed by a polyurea lining tinted “American flag blue,” Superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks Kevin Griess explained in May 18 court filings.

“The rehabilitation incorporated a combination of repair materials, epoxy priming technology, elastomeric waterproofing systems, and protective finish coatings,” a June 18 press release from Rhino Linings, the company whose products were used for the new liner, said.

The idea of installing the lining over the full bottom of the pool was first suggested by the Trump administration, Griess said, and not initially by his staff. The original focus was on replacing the failed expansion joints, a major source of leakage. The project did not address the pool’s leaking pipes.

On June 18, around two weeks after the pool was refilled following the renovation, news outlets began reporting that blue material was peeling off the pool’s bottom. The New York Times later reported on June 23 that workers had identified the peeling at least two days earlier, while also noting separate damage to foam in the pool’s expansion joints as of June 9. These joints — which go around the perimeter of the pool and horizontally across it in several places — allow the pool’s concrete slabs to expand and contract as the weather changes.

However, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have said that there are many possible reasons that a coating can improperly adhere.

“You have to account for ambient conditions like rain, sun, humidity, moisture control in your substrate, thickness, evenness, and chemical compatibility,” Steve Goodale, a swimming pool consultant, told Wired, speaking about the difficulty of applying a waterproof pool lining. “There are so many things that can go wrong with that process. If the material hasn’t bonded to the substrate for any number of reasons, then ultimately, the entire system will fail.”

Goodale told the Washington Post that improper surface preparation or water seeping into the lining from the pool or from under it could also contribute to the peeling. He also said that the hydrogen peroxide that the Interior Department had used to try to treat the algae in the pool could have had an impact on the coating, although he said that this would be more likely to lead to “fading, hazing or breakdown of the material” than peeling. News outlets reported that the department had said it was using hydrogen peroxide to treat the algae starting as early as June 16.

David McFayden, CEO of the paint and inspections services company KTA-Tator, told Scientific American that the available information was too limited to blame any one factor for the peeling, but he said issues worth investigating include how the surface was prepared before applying the coating and the water chemistry.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor for the project, said in a June 21 statement that it and the NPS had “identified some areas in the Reflecting Pool that require repairs,” which will be done under warranty, and that these “do not indicate a failure of the liner.” The following day, Rhino Linings, the company that made the pool’s liner, said in a statement that the issues constituted “localized areas of finish coat separation,” and not an issue with the “underlying waterproofing membrane.”

“Was it manual intervention that made those few places peel, or was that the chemical composition of what was in the water?” Rhino vice president Francois Rivard told Politico. “We don’t know until we have further results at this point, but it is not problematic,” he said, explaining that the peeling only appears to affect the outer blue layer that is for aesthetic purposes.

Unclear Timeline of Damage

Concerns about the pool’s new coating predate the most recently identified peeling issues.

Tim Auerhahn, chairman of the pool training and consulting company the Aquatic Council, told the New York Times for a May 8 story that he would want to look closely at the impact of Trump. driving his motorcade over the newly coated surface of the pool the day before. The Times reported May 12 that Department of Interior staff had expressed concerns about bubbling and small holes in a layer of the waterproofing material. And the Times report from June 23 and court document linked to in the White House press release indicated that Park Police were aware of damage to or near the pool’s foam expansion joints by June 9.

This timeline indicates the new material in the pool had problems before the June 19 and 20 arrests the U.S. Marshals spokesperson mentioned, and before the June 19 surveillance video of someone removing something from the pool the White House press release linked to.

Few details are available about the arrests. An Olympic canoeist, David Carter Hearn, told news outlets that he was arrested on June 19 for alleged destruction of government property. He said a piece of the blue lining had already partly peeled off and he touched it out of curiosity. He said he did not destroy anything.

There are some images and videos from reporters that indicate people on June 19 — once the peeling pool was already a major news event — broke off already-peeling coating or held pieces in their hands. However, there isn’t evidence of people making gashes with a knife.

The Washington Post also reported on June 20 seeing a U.S. Marshal detain someone for allegedly taking paint out of the pool and on June 21 seeing a Park Police officer issue someone a citation for allegedly removing something from the water.

A Surge in Algae 

Beyond stopping leaking, Trump’s reflecting pool project aimed to reduce algae, which has been a recurring issue for the reflecting pool.

The project included $1.7 million in funding to Greenwater Services to install a new system for algae control. Nanobubble systems for algae control, such as the one installed by Greenwater Services, work by introducing tiny ozone bubbles to a body of water, which can kill algae.

But despite efforts to mitigate the algae, an analysis done for the Washington Post indicated that the level of algae on June 13 — the week after the pool was refilled — was higher than in other June images going back to 2021.

Trump claimed that someone may have added fertilizer to the water to cause the algal growth, but he didn’t provide any evidence for this claim.

Chapra, the water quality modeler from Tufts, told us that the reflecting pool represents “the recipe for growing algae,” without needing to invoke vandalism.

The pool is “shallow, there’s no flushing, they don’t run water through it on a permanent basis,” he said. “There’s no mixing, because they want to keep it nice and flat, so you get a reflection.” Furthermore, he said, “there’s no shading anywhere to keep solar radiation out, and somebody decided to paint the bottom dark blue,” even though this makes the pool retain more heat. The pool probably also uses high-nutrient water, he added.

The president has blamed the pool’s past algae problems on a change to the pool’s water source made under former President Barack Obama. In 2012, the government switched from filling the pool with municipal DC water to ozone-treated water from the Tidal Basin, which is fed by the Potomac River.

“He took the water from the river,” Trump said of Obama on June 22. “It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over $100 million.”

That total is incorrect. As we previously wrote, the Obama-era restoration, which also reinforced the pool’s sinking foundation and replaced its concrete bottom, cost around $35 million.

When the reflecting pool was refilled in early June, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told us, it had been filled with “DC Water,” or municipal water. Even after the Obama-era renovations, the pool had periodically been filled with city drinking water when there was substantial algae in the Tidal Basin.

Chapra said that feeding the pool from the Tidal Basin would be the “worst” in terms of algae, given that the Potomac River has “plenty of nutrients” and algae.

However, using DC Water does not eliminate the potential for algae. Ashley Bair, a researcher at the water treatment company Usalco, told Vox that a type of phosphorus added to municipal water to form a coating on the inside of lead pipes could feed algae if the water were not treated properly. DC Water has added orthophosphate since 2004, according to its website, after a switch in disinfectant and a change in water chemistry caused lead to be released into the water from pipes.

Chapra also said that regardless of water source, feces from animals and fine particulates with phosphorus in the air can add to the nutrients in an open pool. He added that he was skeptical of the ozone nanobubble technology for the project. “High enough concentrations of ozone will break the cell walls of the algae, but that releases the nutrients back into the water, and it’s not going to kill all of them,” he said. Ozone also breaks down in sunlight, he added.

Given all these factors, he said, vandalism simply “wasn’t the first thing that popped into my mind” upon seeing the algal growth in the pool.

“Like I said at the beginning, shallow, no flushing, no mixing, high-nutrient water, no shading, dark blue bottom, go figure,” he said.

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

The post Trump’s Unsupported Claims About Reflection Pool Vandalism appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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The Trump administration has reportedly asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns. The model will initially be offered to a small group of partners, with the government "approving access customer by customer during this preview period," reports The Information. The request came from conversations with the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the report said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The heaviest demand on America's water supply isn't data centers or AI. It's from everyday uses such as growing food, watering lawns and flushing toilets.

Planning permission has been sought for three additional military sites

Home Office plans to use three more former military sites to house thousands of asylum seekers have been condemned as “arrogant”, “costly” and “a political fix” by refugee charities and local stakeholders.

Planning permission is being sought to build “basic” accommodation at MOD Bicester in Oxfordshire, RAF Barnham in Suffolk and RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, a statement said. These new sites could house 3,750 claimants, the government has claimed.

Charles and Camilla to remain at Clarence House and are said to want the public to have more access to ‘monarchy HQ’

• King Charles’s tax bill: what did we learn and what is still in the dark?

• Crown estate makes more than £1bn profit for third year running

King Charles and Queen Camilla will not move into Buckingham Palace when £369m of buildings works to update it finish next year, preferring to remain at Clarence House, their London home nearby.

The announcement came as it was revealed the king paid £12.9m in income and capital gains tax in 2024-25 on his personal income, known as the privy purse, making him among the country’s top 100 taxpayers. Prince William paid £7.76m for the same period.

We know the monarch paid £24.6m in tax over the last two years, but we still don’t know how wealthy he actually is

• Crown estate makes more than £1bn profit for third year running

• King and Queen will not live at Buckingham Palace after £369m refit

King Charles has become Britain’s first monarch in modern times to reveal how much tax he pays on his private income: £24.6m over the last two years.

It’s a move celebrated by some as heralding an era of greater transparency from the monarchy. But just how open has it been?

King Charles’s property management firm rakes in £1.2bn as it continues to benefit from offshore windfarm boom

• King Charles’s tax bill: what did we learn and what is still in the dark?

• King and Queen will not live at Buckingham Palace after £369m refit

King Charles’s property management company has made more than £1bn for the third consecutive year thanks to the boom in offshore windfarms paid for through energy bills.

The crown estate, the royals’ portfolio of land and property, reported £1.2bn in profit for the last financial year, almost three times the amount it made three years ago. Two-thirds came from the offshore wind industry.

The first-ever tax disclosure by a British monarch was partly intended to contain the damage from revelations about the finances of the king’s disgraced brother, Andrew.

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced Akrites, a new initiative to coordinate vulnerability disclosure and remediation for critical open source software as AI dramatically speeds up vulnerability discovery. Founding members include AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Red Hat, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, JPMorganChase, and others. Akrites will provide a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT), a standardized coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, and act as a "maintainer of last resort" for abandoned but widely used packages. The goal is to reduce duplicate reports, avoid conflicting patches, and help upstream maintainers address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. As AI makes it easier to find security flaws, can a coordinated industry effort help protect open source, or does it risk giving large corporations too much influence over the ecosystem? "Akrites is the largest coordinated effort in history to create systems and deploy tooling that leverages the collective power of the community to make everyone safer," the Linux Foundation said in an open letter. "Akrites participants will contribute engineering resources; work to build and ship fixes; or fund the engineers who do. Some companies have contributed mightily already. The reality is, collectively, we need to contribute more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Windows models with Qualcomm Snapdragon X and Intel Panther Lake processors to MacBooks running on Apple's latest M5 chip, these are the longest-lasting laptops we've tested.

A program for veterans, current military and first responders secured almost 5,000 free tickets for World Cup matches.

Christine Erickson is two votes ahead of Jamie Smith, the Minnehaha County Auditors and Elections Office said.

Maine Democrat Graham Platner said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has aligned herself with President Donald Trump and the interests of wealthy people.

Collins, a Republican, "says she is bipartisan but she’s only bipartisan when it doesn't matter," a June 17 Platner ad said. 

The ad cited several examples of what it said were Collins’ policy positions. For this fact-check, we’re focusing on the ad’s statement that Collins "even sided with Trump, giving billionaires and corporations a handout, paid for by cuts to Medicaid and SNAP." 

The ad refers to Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, but it misrepresents Collins’ vote. Collins voted against it, in part because of Medicaid cuts.

Collins voted against Trump’s second-term tax bill

Platner’s campaign pointed us to Collins’ June 28, 2025, vote on a motion to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill and included articles that showed she rejected the legislation on final passage.

The ad doesn’t mention the bill by name but cites an article with a headline that says Collins and Sen. Josh Hawley, two key holdouts, "will support advancing GOP megabill." 

The article said that Collins planned to vote in favor of a procedural motion but wouldn’t necessarily vote for the bill.

"I am planning to vote for the motion to proceed," Collins said at the time. "Generally, I give deference to the majority leader’s power to bring bills to the Senate floor. Does not in any way predict how I’m going to vote on final passage. That’s going to depend on whether the bill is substantially changed. There are some very good changes that have been made in the latest version but I want to see further changes and I will be filing a number of amendments."

Collins voted in support of several amendments, including Democratic ones, to protect Medicaid. When those efforts failed, she voted against the bill’s passage.

Collins said she supported tax relief but primarily voted against the bill because of "the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid, affecting low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes." 

Ancor, a network of providers for people with disabilities, gave Collins an award for protecting Medicaid, citing her vote against the legislation.

Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky also voted with Democrats against the bill. Vice President JD Vance broke the tie vote in the Senate, and Trump signed it into law July 4. 

Bill’s tax cuts carried more benefits for the rich

The legislation provided tax benefits for people of varying incomes, but wealthier taxpayers came out ahead compared with lower- and middle-income taxpayers. 

The Tax Foundation found the law’s tax changes would increase after-tax incomes across the spectrum in 2025 and 2026, ranging from a 0.8% increase for the bottom 20% of taxpayers to 1.8% for the top 20%. That finding includes the new tax cuts and extending the cuts from Trump’s 2017 tax law. 

By 2034, the bottom 20% of earners will see a net reduction in post-tax income after accounting for the 2029 expiration of new tax deductions and the law's tighter rules for tax credits, said Garrett Watson, the Tax Foundation’s policy analysis director.

Some provisions temporarily help people earning low to moderate incomes, such as the tax exclusion on some tipped income.

Legislation cut Medicaid and SNAP, including in Maine

The One Big Beautiful Bill made historic cuts to safety net programs including Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for low-income people, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps. It also tightened work requirements for both programs.

Ian Yaffe, director of the Maine Office for Family Independence that operates the state’s SNAP program, told the Portland Press Herald that Maine has seen a sustained decrease in SNAP enrollment since August 2025. As of April, the number of Mainers receiving SNAP benefits had dropped by about 13,000. 

KFF projected that about 28,000 Mainers will become uninsured because of Medicaid changes. So far, enrollment in Medicaid in Maine dipped slightly. However, the largest changes to the program take effect in 2027 so drops are likely to accelerate next year. 

Collins has offered some praise for the bill she voted against, including legislation that authorized the Rural Health Transformation Program. 

Our ruling

Platner said Collins "sided with Trump, giving billionaires and corporations a hand-out, paid for by cuts to Medicaid and SNAP."

Collins voted on a motion to proceed on the One Big Beautiful Bill but warned that without substantial changes she would reject the legislation. When those changes didn’t occur, she voted against its passage.

The ad tells voters that Collins took action to harm Medicaid. But when Collins voted against the bill, she cited Medicaid cuts as a reason. A group cited her vote when it gave her an award for leadership on Medicaid.

We rate this statement False.

RELATED: Yes, Collins usually votes with Trump, as Platner said. But she broke with him at key moments.

RELATED: MAGA-Meter: Tracking Trump’s second term promises including about taxes

A group representing child actors is criticizing contracts that would allow AI to reuse a child's voice.

It's only a matter of time before iPhone and Apple Watch prices go even higher.

Your next iPhone could cost more than you think.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck a cargo ship near Oman on Thursday, further complicating the Iran-U.S. negotiations.

There appear to be new clues about the location of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding.

The president and his conservative allies have stymied other legislation as they unsuccessfully try to pass a voting regulations bill that lacks even simple majority support in the Senate.

Venezuela's acting president said the death toll from powerful twin earthquakes was likely to rise, as USGS modeling suggested thousands may have been killed.

No foul was initially called after Alyssa Thomas' fist made contact with Caitlin Clark's throat during a game between the Phoenix Mercury and Indiana Fever on Wednesday.

Decision allows Trump administration to block migrants from entering US soil and the right to claim asylum

• US politics live – latest updates

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The supreme court has given the Trump administration a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system.

The decision allows the Trump administration to revive its so-called turn-back or “metering” policy, allowing federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from physically setting foot on US soil, where federal law guarantees them the right to claim asylum and protection from persecution.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 26 No. 845.

If you're F1-curious, this is a great chance to start your engines.

Apple has sharply raised prices across its Mac, iPad, HomePod, and Apple TV lineups as surging AI-driven demand creates a global memory and storage shortage. Increases range from $30 for the HomePod mini to $1,300 for the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, with Apple CEO Tim Cook saying efforts to shield customers from higher costs had become "unsustainable." The Verge reports: On Thursday, the company adjusted the price of its new MacBook Neo, which will now start at $699 instead of $599, while the base MacBook Air will jump to $1,299 from $1,099, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is getting an increase as well, going from $1,699 to $1,999. Meanwhile, the iPad Air will now start at $749 instead of $599, while the iPad Pro is increasing to $1,199 from $999. As spotted by MacRumors, the M4 Max Mac Studio will now cost $2,499, a big jump from $1,999. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now priced at $5,299, up from $3,999. Apple is even raising the prices of its HomePod, which now costs $349 instead of $299, as well as bumping the price of the HomePod mini to $129 instead of $99. The Apple TV also now costs $199 instead of $129.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is raising the prices of some MacBooks and iPads, while Microsoft is raising Xbox prices as semiconductor costs surge.

Delcy Rodríguez said authorities were shifting rescue teams from other parts of the country to the hardest-hit La Guaira area

• Venezuela declares state of emergency after deadly twin earthquakes

• Have you been affected by the earthquakes in Venezuela?

Volunteers, medics and relatives of victims have raced to the Altamira area in Caracas hoping to help save survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings there.

“I live far away [but] ... I came here riding my motorbike as fast as I could,” said José Morillo, as he arrived outside a block of flats called Residencias Obelisco.

• Mercury star made contact with closed fist during jostle

• Fever coach slammed refs for ‘disrespectful’ no-calls

• Sign up for the WNBA 30 weekly newsletter

The WNBA has suspended Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas after she hit Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark in the throat with her fist during a game.

The play occurred in the second quarter of Wednesday night’s 111-109 road win by Phoenix. Clark was driving into the lane and fell on her side after contact. Thomas and Mercury forwards DeWanna Bonner dove for the ball, and in the jostle Thomas appeared to knee Clark in the groin. Her closed fist made contact with Clark’s throat as she fell. Clark managed to complete a pass to teammate Aliyah Boston as Thomas got up and stepped over her.

June 25, 2026 — With the GENE code, researchers can simulate physics in various fusion devices on supercomputers. To enable larger and more realistic simulations through computing power, the code family gets a new sprout: GENE-X is currently being prepared for systems accelerated by graphics processing units.

Credit: Shutterstock

Expectations for nuclear fusion are high. Although scientists know that this energy source will not be as cheap to build as solar or wind energy, the energy generated from the controlled fusion of hydrogen isotopes into helium could, in the future, help close gaps in the supply of electricity from renewable sources—likely without the long-term risks associated with nuclear power, such as highly radioactive waste that is difficult to manage and assess.

Researchers and startups worldwide are working on concepts for fusion power plants. They model plasma dynamics under the influence of strong magnetic fields which are used to stabilize particle mixtures under extreme conditions. At the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Garching near Munich, such simulations are an everyday activity. “With GENE-X, we want to simulate plasma turbulence to study the causes of heat and particle losses which help us understand the performance of a fusion device,” said Dr. Philipp Ulbl, a computational physicist working at IPP. “We also want to target modeling designs of future fusion reactors so that we can predict, among other things, the temperature and density of plasma in steady state reactor operation.”

GENE-X for Accelerated HPC

The GENE code family and especially its latest offspring, GENE-X, has helped with simulations of fusion physics. While many plasma physics codes model particle mixtures found in space, the sun, or stars, GENE was developed specifically for simulating conductive plasmas in facilities, which are based on magnetic confinement. The first GENE code was developed in 1999 at IPP as an open-source application and was gradually optimized for more detailed, three-dimensional simulations as computing power increased. By now, researchers use the code also to simulate the two most common magnetic confinement reactor concepts, the tokamak and the stellarator.

This figure shows the plasma density in a two dimensional cross section of the Joint European Torus (JET) and takes into account tritium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. The blue line marks the wall, and the grey regions represent the divertor plates used in the experiment for heat removal. Image credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

The newest version, GENE‑X, is now being prepared for deployment on supercomputers accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs). The team is currently working on implementing GENE‑X on the SuperMUC-NG Phase 2 (SNG‑2) at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), which uses Intel chips. “Intel is a comparatively new player in the GPU market, where manufacturers such as NVIDIA and AMD have been dominating the market a while”, says Jordy Trilaksono from IPP, who is responsible for adapting the code. “If we want to make our application widely available, GENE‑X should run as many of the major processor types as possible. We also want to become independent of specific vendors.”

Thanks in part to the GENE codes, computer-supported fusion simulations have become increasingly precise over recent decades, and their results can now be compared with observations from experimental fusion facilities. This iteration helps reduce costs for expensive reactors and experiments. For the modeling activities planned, the IPP team aims to process measurement data from the Joint European Torus (JET), a tokamak. This experimental fusion facility was the largest in Europe to date. It operated until 2023 in Culham, UK, and at the end of its operational life managed to generate 69 megajoules of energy from just 0.2 milligrams of plasma or fuel – enough to power a TV, a stove, and a kettle for several hours. Beyond this record, JET delivered massive amounts of data, most of which remains unanalyzed. “JET contains unique data on hydrogen isotope mixtures, which is particularly valuable for studying plasma turbulence”, says Dr. Baptiste Frei, a researcher at IPP, who’s conducting simulations for the project.

Of the more than 100,000 discharges of JET, the IPP team plans to analyze only three, from which GENE-X generates approximately 50 terabytes of data. “If the GENE‑X code runs faster, you can integrate more parameters into the model and process the resulting larger volumes of data much more quickly,” explained Dr. Sajjad Azizi. The astrophysicist is part of the Computational X Support Team at LRZ and advises the IPP group in the transformation and implementation of GENE‑X. “By adapting the code to GPUs, researchers can leverage the full computing power of HPC systems like SNG‑2. Scientific simulations are computationally demanding because they must account for many parameters and complex interactions between computing components. Pure CPU execution can easily become a bottleneck.” The researchers have big plans: With GENE-X, they aim to model not just parts of the fusion facility, as they have done so far, but the entire plant—from the walls to the core.

Combining Classical Modeling and Simulation with AI Tools

Given the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in plasma physics as well, the IPP team is taking a more fundamental approach to reworking GENE‑X. The code, originally written in Fortran, is first being expanded with an auxiliary C++ layer. This not only increases the range of programming models and tools with which the code can be adapted for future simulation tasks, but also makes it easier to accelerate simulations with GPUs and to combine with AI models or AI‑supported tools built in C++ languages. These could complement high-performance computing (HPC) methods. This porting work brings computational research another step closer to creating digital twins of fusion plasma and technologies. “The Fortran/C++ hybrid mode of GENE‑X can run on CPUs using OpenMP or on GPUs using OpenACC or OpenMP offload,” Trilaksono added, highlighting further advantages of the code transformation. As a result, GENE‑X gains flexibility, making it easier to adapt to different hardware and operating systems.

Occasionally AI also helps with modifying the code. “It still makes mistakes, of course, but it is often faster at finding errors,” said LRZ specialist Azizi. He recounted a build issue where code lines were repeatedly rewritten with debugging messages and tested on the SNG‑2 to narrow down the cause step by step. The team worked on this for some time, but AI found the simple solution very quickly — an outdated programming tool the specialists had started out with.

Supporting Commercial Concepts

All researchers involved agree that the computational paradigm shifts make this porting work more complicated. “Previously, the transition to a new computing generation took days or weeks. The switch to GPUs is much more demanding,” Ulbl said. “We already have a CUDA version of GENE‑X that we can certainly rewrite into SYCL, but that will take time.” The first version of GENE‑X was adapted on supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute as well as on the Spanish supercomputer Mare Nostrum 5 in Barcelona. Early versions confirm researchers’ expectations that GENE‑X would show substantial performance gains. The researchers saw an increase of up to a factor of 10, meaning it runs ten to thirteen times faster than its predecessor on only CPU systems.

The new code is currently being adapted to Intel GPUs. For this purpose, the LRZ support team regularly implements and tests parts of the program on SuperMUC-NG and its companion system SNG‑2. Operating metrics from these test runs, along with comparison figures from similar applications, provide clues about where algorithms can be modified and functions optimized. By autumn this year, the team hopes to run the first GENE-X-simulations on Intel GPUs. The resulting data is intended to help train AI models in the medium term and accelerate the optimization of fusion concepts.

“With GENE‑X, we want to enable the simulation of power plants and reactors that achieve at least a performance factor of 10 times larger than JET,” said Ulbl. He noted growing interest in the fusion code. In many countries, politics are promoting fusion research and the development of new technologies, and the first startups and companies are entering the field. “This is another reason why we want to adapt and improve GENE‑X,” Ulbl explained, “to support people and companies working on nuclear fusion and building the first commercial reactors.”

Funding for SuperMUC-NG was provided by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).

This article originally appeared in the Spring, 2026 issue of InSiDE magazine.

Source: Susanne Vieser, GCS

The post GCS: Modeling Fusion Physics and Technology with HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

No 10 refused demand to immediately remove immigration minister over breach of ministerial code

Shabana Mahmood is locked in an extraordinary standoff with Keir Starmer after Downing Street refused to immediately sack her junior minister for breaching the ministerial code.

The home secretary has demanded that Mike Tapp, the immigration minister, should be sacked for writing an unauthorised article calling for overseas care workers to be exempt from hardline immigration reforms.

Kennedy repeatedly said 2019 Samoa trip had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’. An email from his then colleague says they were on a vaccine-related ‘mission’

New evidence has emerged that Robert F Kennedy Jr was on a vaccine-related “mission” when he visited Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak in 2019, raising further questions about whether the US health secretary lied to the US Senate when he said the trip had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

Records obtained by the Guardian show Kennedy’s colleague told Samoan officials in an email that he and Kennedy were coming as part of a mission to study the island nation’s medical records in the aftermath of a “discontinuity in vaccinations”.

Are Apple's price hikes making you consider a refurb? Expect to pay more for those, too.

Disney-owned ABC launched awareness campaign about two FCC investigations it faces, urging viewers to write in

Brendan Carr, the Trump-aligned chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has accused Disney of running a “campaign of misinformation” as the media group defends itself against investigations the regulator has initiated.

Disney-owned ABC launched a public awareness campaign earlier this week to encourage viewers to back the network as it faces two separate investigations before the US media regulator.

Lawmakers and advocates condemn ‘disastrous’ decisions that allow Trump officials to strip away migrant protections

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Lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups on Thursday sharply denounced two US supreme court rulings that allowed the Trump administration to strip certain immigration protections and fundamentally reshape the asylum system.

Dozens of groups, advocates and members of Congress called the court’s decisions “disastrous” and “cruel”, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the rulings.

LastPass says hackers stole customers' personal information, support case records, and sales data by breaching market research partner Klue. The password manager told TechCrunch that its own systems and password vaults were unaffected. However, the hackers used their access to obtain "reams of data about LastPass customers," the report says. From the report: In a blog post that shared information about the incident, LastPass said the hackers took customers' names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as customer support case data and sales-related data. It's not yet known what was in the contents of customer support tickets, although they likely contain fragments of potentially private or sensitive information. Customers typically contact customer service when they are having a billing issue or need assistance in gaining access to their accounts. Past incidents involving customer support tickets have included credentials and government-issued identity documents. The last data breach LastPass reported was in 2022, when hackers stole the company's entire store of customer password vaults.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump has often talked up the stock market’s rise during his second term, saying increases in 401(k) retirement plan balances have made Americans wealthier.

During a June 23 speech at a Mack truck plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, Trump said, "The typical 401(k), as you know, is up almost $30,000 in … 13 months."

He’s made similar points going back to his Feb. 24 State of the Union address.

The stock market has risen during Trump’s second term. But the average $30,000 gain he cited is not supported by data; that’s about triple the increase found in a large analysis of 401(k) balances. And a growing share of Americans are withdrawing 401(k) dollars before retirement to cope with unexpected hardships. 

The White House offered no supporting evidence for Trump’s statement. White House spokesperson Kush Desai said "equity markets have hit multiple all-time highs" during Trump’s second presidency.

How much has the stock market increased during Trump’s second term?

The Standard & Poor’s 500, a metric that charts a broad selection of publicly traded stocks, shows notable gains since Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Between his second inauguration and the day of his February 2026 State of the Union address — the first time he mentioned the $30,000 figure — the S&P rose by about 13%. From his second inauguration to June 23, the day of his Pennsylvania speech, the S&P rose by about 24%.

401(k) balances are rising, but not as high as Trump said

What about the gains for typical 401(k) holders? 

First, narrowing down a "typical" 401(k) account is challenging. People of different incomes, ages and company 401(k) policies can see their balances vary widely — and that’s before factoring in the mix of assets that make up their accounts. 

"The (higher account balance) you have, the more gains you will have achieved," said Joe Fitter, a senior lecturer in finance at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

Fidelity Investments, a financial institution that operates many 401(k) plans, provides the best available data.

Every quarter, Fidelity examines balances within more than 26,000 corporate 401(k) plans serving roughly 25 million participants. It also breaks down the average balance by the account holder’s age.

We looked at Fidelity’s data for the quarterly period ending Dec. 31, 2024, and for the period ending March 31, 2026. Comparing these two figures offers a measure of the growth in 401(k) balances during the first 15 months of Trump’s second term — a good approximation of how much growth occurred during the period he’s been making this claim.

Fidelity offered breakdowns for 11 age ranges, starting at age 20 and ending at 70 and older. Averaging the gains for these 11 ranges produced an increase of $9,454 — about one-third of the $30,000 figure Trump cited.

The single biggest average increase for any particular age range was 55 to 59, which saw a rise of about $16,000. 

Experts said the average gains might be lower than $9,454.

"Averages in data like this tend to get pulled up by high-balance accounts, so the median would likely be lower than the $9,000 figure," said Mark A. Johnson, an investments and portfolio management fellow at Wake Forest University’s business school.

A $30,000 gain during this period would likely have required a balance of at least $200,000 in a 401(k), said Mark Williams, a lecturer in finance at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. But that’s not a typical amount; about 10% to 20% of U.S. adults have an account that big.

In addition, the balance increase doesn’t stem only from stock market gains. Some of the increase comes from the account holder’s own contributions and potentially those of their employer.

Why 401(k) balances may not be rising as fast as the overall stock market

The percentage increases by age in Fidelity’s 401(k) data do not necessarily match the overall growth rate of the stock market. From December 31, 2024, through March 31, 2026, the S&P 500 rose by about 11%, but the average 401(k) Fidelity measured rose by about 6.5%, and several age ranges, especially among the youngest and oldest groups, saw smaller increases.

One reason for the lag is that 401(k) accounts typically contain a mix of investment categories. Williams said the typical 401(k) mix is 60% to 65% stocks, with the remainder in other assets, such as bonds, that are less volatile. During the time period in question, bond returns were flat, he said, and that would hold down overall 401(k) returns.

Another important reason is that 401(k) accounts are a two-way street: Account owners can take out money, though they may have to pay a penalty to do so.

In general, 401(k) accounts are designed to provide retirement income, so early withdrawals — money taken out before age 59 1/2 — may incur a 10% early withdrawal penalty, plus income taxes. 

However, certain circumstances may allow an early withdrawal without incurring a penalty, including birth or adoption costs, a new disability, disaster recovery, medical or other emergencies, funeral expenses and payments to avoid an eviction or foreclosure.

Exercising this option has become increasingly common, the investment firm Vanguard reported in March. The Vanguard data showed that about 6% of the participants in its 401(k) plans took a hardship withdrawal in 2025, up from about 4.8% in 2024 and higher than the level prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

Dorothy C. Kelly, a personal finance lecturer at University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, said that 401(k) gains have limited immediate use to Americans younger than 59 1/2 who are facing a cash crunch or higher monthly bills.

"The net worth of ordinary Americans with retirement accounts may be benefiting from current high stock prices, but a growing illiquid asset such as a retirement account does not help with working Americans’ monthly bills," she said.

Our ruling

Trump said that in the past 13 months, "The typical 401(k) … is up almost $30,000."

The stock market has notched notable increases during Trump’s second term, but a $30,000 rise is not supported.

Fidelity Investments data shows that between Dec. 31, 2024, and March 31, 2026, the average increase in 401(k) balances was $9,454. No age group Fidelity studied saw an increase beyond about half of Trump’s $30,000 figure.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores other information that would give a different impression, so we rate the statement Mostly False.

Florida immigration jail that became byword for cruelty and cost state taxpayers $1.2m a day shuts down after a year

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, boasted on Thursday of deporting 21,000 people from Alligator Alcatraz, as he confirmed the closure of the notorious immigration jail hastily erected in the Everglades that became a byword for cruelty, human rights abuses and environmental damage.

Standing beside Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, at a press conference at the now dismantled site in Ochopee, in the environmentally sensitive region in south Florida, DeSantis presented its year-long operation as a victory for the president’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.

Gun control advocates decry ruling striking ban on carrying guns in most public spaces as ‘deeply dangerous’

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The US supreme court struck down a restrictive gun law in the state of Hawaii that bans people from carrying guns in certain public spaces and on private property without the permission of the property’s owner.

The decision was made in a 6-3 vote, with Justice Samuel Alito offering the majority opinion – backed by the other members of the court’s rightwing supermajority – and Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissent.

After abducting Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that America would “run” Venezuela. When asked in January who was leading Venezuela, Trump said, “We’re in charge.” 

Yet after back-to-back earthquakes rocked multiple Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, toppling scores of buildings and killing at least 188 people and injuring at least 1,520, Trump merely offered assistance.

“The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help! I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “We will be there for our new and great friends.”

One U.S. government official told The Intercept that Trump’s offer doesn’t go far enough since Venezuela is now a U.S. “vassal state.” “Don’t we run that country?” the official asked, speaking on background and referencing Trump’s comments. “That’s an obligation that exceeds friendship.”

At the same time, Venezuelan American organizations and progressive foreign policy groups are about to circulate a letter calling on the Trump administration to provide massive, unconditional humanitarian aid to Venezuela in the wake of the 7.2 foreshock and 7.5-magnitude quake, as well as long-term economic damage from U.S. sanctions, according to details of the letter shared exclusively with The Intercept by Just Foreign Policy, one of the groups that drafted the letter. The organizations argue that the United States bears a unique obligation to Venezuela and that U.S. aid “must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating.”

This all comes after Trump seemed to suggest earlier this week that the U.S. has reaped billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil wealth in the last six months.

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Trump Wanted to Replicate His Venezuela “Success” in Iran. What Has It Even Looked Like?

After ousting Maduro, Trump’s installed a puppet government run by former Maduro ally Delcy Rodriguez. She has carried out day-to-day governance under the threat of a looming U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges. Trump also warned that the U.S. might attack again if Rodriguez did not comply with his demands.

The costs of Absolute Resolve — the military operation and abduction of Maduro — topped $206 million, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and claims to be exploiting it for massive returns. This week, Trump said that the U.S. has recovered its war costs 28 times over through oil extraction; this equates to roughly $5.7 billion.

“The people are happy in the country. They have smiles,” Trump said of Venezuelans on Tuesday, prior to the earthquakes. He claimed Venezuela has shared in the economic rewards.

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When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

But the letter being drafted by the Venezuelan American and progressive groups cites a recent economic analysis by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez showing that U.S. policy has failed to produce the economic recovery Trump has claimed. The letter notes that sanctions have left Venezuela operating at a “diminished capacity,” that “the buildings that collapsed were not maintained,” and “the hospitals that must now treat nearly a thousand injured were not adequately supplied” as a direct result.

In the port city of La Guaira, for example, more than 100 buildings were destroyed in the twin earthquakes. “Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding?” the U.S. government official mused. “Any word from Trump on that?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the U.S. would ease sanctions or help to rebuild Venezuela.

U.S. Southern Command, which spearheaded the war on Venezuela earlier this year said on Thursday that it was “working with the Department of State to support U.S. government relief operations in Venezuela.” The command added that it “has established an operational planning team that includes experienced subject matter experts from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, who are advising staff and leadership responsible for disaster relief planning and mission-related decisions.”

But disaster aid is inadequate, according to Just Foreign Policy and the other groups. “Emergency relief alone will not be enough. Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports and critical infrastructure,” they wrote.

Even before the earthquakes, almost 8 million people in Venezuela were in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. The letter from Just Foreign Policy and others calls on the Trump administration to “provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance with no political conditions attached,” to release Venezuelan oil revenues currently held in U.S.-controlled accounts, and to suspend remaining sanctions impeding disaster response and reconstruction.

The post Trump Claimed to Run Venezuela. After Earthquakes, He’s Walking That Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

‘Ambitious and welcoming’ venue that opened in 2020 praised for ‘reimagining what being a museum can mean’

The Box in Plymouth has won the prestigious Art Fund museum of the year award, the largest such prize in the world, for its “ambitious and welcoming approach”.

Awarding it the £120,000 prize, judges called the Box “a revelation in so many ways” and “a true jewel in the crown of the south-west”.

All three congressional candidates that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamadani endorsed won their primaries on Tuesday. The races were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have in charting the next chapter for the Democratic Party — and a referendum on Mamdani’s power.

“Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters,” Michael Lange, political writer and elections analyst of The Narrative Wars Substack, tells The Intercept Briefing as he breaks down the wins of Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier by district. “You pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing.” 

“You had a candidate who said ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’ win the historic capital of Black America,” says Lange, of Avila Chevalier’s win over five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. “If that is not a distillation of the ‘Democratic tea party,’ I don’t quite know what is.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lange and Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett about the strategic mistakes of the traditionally progressive Working Families Party, the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party, and how the DSA is upending electoral politics from the left.

“Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party,” says Hibbett, “and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.”

Lange notes how demographic changes and pressures on the Democratic Party base are impacting voters’ priorities. “The party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially,” says Lange. “There’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent.” He adds, “You spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

AL: Maia, did you see what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had delivered to his House office on Wednesday morning?

MH: Yes, they were beautiful.

AL: The Republicans’ House campaign arm delivered flowers and a card offering their condolences to Jeffries after candidates that he endorsed lost to socialists on Tuesday night in primaries in New York.

This is what the card said. “Three losses in one night is tough. We wanted so-called ‘Leader,’” — in quotes — “Jeffries to know our thoughts are with him, his candidates, and whatever remains of his influence in the Democratic Party.” Maia, let’s get your thoughts on this.

MH: On one hand, Jeffries probably felt a little bit of relief that no one did end up challenging him, so he wasn’t one of the people facing that challenge. But it was a really bad night for establishment Democrats. Ally of Jeffries and lots of other Democratic old guard, Rep. Greg Meeks in Queens, was also mad, and he was giving comments on Wednesday morning implying that New York City was going to suffer, it wasn’t going to get as much resources from the federal government because it was losing one of its really powerful incumbents.

You’ve covered the race that toppled Espaillat pretty closely. It represents a different kind of power coming into play in New York and in Democratic politics.

AL: One of the candidates most considered a long shot prior to Tuesday is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Avila Chevalier was notably an organizer of the Columbia pro-Palestine protest alongside Mahmoud Khalil. She cited Espaillat’s refusal to help Khalil in the aftermath of his arrest as one of the main reasons that she even decided to challenge him in the first place. And she came on the national stage after writing an op-ed in support of [Khalil] and being recruited by Justice Democrats.

MH: That result was really striking, especially because if you think back to a little over a year ago, before Zohran Mamdani won the primary for New York City mayor, you were covering the arrests of these student protesters in solidarity with Palestine, and that storyline has changed so dramatically.

It seemed at the time like their power was going to fade, or that these protests were getting crushed — and now one of them is going to become a member of Congress.

AL: This was definitely not on Democrats’ bingo card, particularly Espaillat, who was a large recipient of money from the pro-Israel lobby and faced a lot of criticism for how little he did to support those students at the time.

While Avila Chevalier’s win on Tuesday was one of the biggest surprises, both liberal and conservative critics of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she is a member, framed her success as part of this narrative that we’re seeing come out from some reactions — that Ivy League transplants are taking over the Democratic Party and don’t actually reflect the working-class interests they’re claiming to represent.

MH: That was a huge criticism in another race on Tuesday night in New York, which was the competition between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso for Nydia Velázquez’s seat. Velázquez was retiring, and she had chosen Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her successor. Velázquez was considered a progressive.

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She was early to support Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. And in some ways, the DSA’s choice to run someone against her chosen successor was being presented as this betrayal and this attempt to usurp the progressive power base that had begun to grow in New York City.

AL: And then, of course, in the middle of all this, there’s Brad Lander, who many of our listeners may recall ran against Mamdani for mayor and then formed a coalition with him.

He ousted incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn less than 10 minutes after the polls closed. That was less of a shock, as Goldman had lagged behind in the polls for some months, but I think with the quickness that they called the results was another twist of the knife for Democrats in the establishment who had stood by Goldman.

MH: Yeah, and it’s funny because not that long ago, I think Goldman was considered a pretty powerful and a pretty popular politician. People talked before the 2025 mayoral race about the possibility that he could run for mayor of New York City. Maybe now he will because he’s free to do stuff. 

Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.

Next week in Colorado, there’s a race that you’ve been covering really since it started, which is an insurgent candidate named Melat Kiros, who is endorsed by Justice Democrats and is also a DSA member backed by the national DSA. She’s running to take out longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver.

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There’s also Graham Platner in Maine. There’s Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both candidates we’ve covered a lot, running for Senate. Another DSA candidate is Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin. In some of these races, the DSA is a huge driving force behind these insurgent candidates, and in other cases, they’re not actually DSA candidates, but they’re adopting this similar populist working-class-focused politics that has been elevating politicians in these races across the country.

It does seem like the story of the Trump era is that people want change. There’s the pearl-clutching version of this that’s, “Oh, God, there’s populism. There will be a Trump of the left.” But perhaps there needs to be, and populism is just governance by the people.

AL: Next, we’re going to go deeper on all of this and more with political writer and analyst Michael Lange. He writes about politics in New York City on his Substack “The Narrative Wars” and is the author of a recent piece called “The (Not So) Civil War for the Commie Corridor.” We’ll discuss the growing influence of DSA and how the group is upending electoral politics from the left. 

Michael, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Michael Lange: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

AL: Michael, we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon. I know you’ve had a busy day talking about the results from Tuesday night’s primaries in New York. Leftists are ecstatic right now. The primaries on Tuesday night were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have on charting the next chapter of the Democratic Party and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s abilities as kingmaker.

I want to go through some of these results with you, some of which were absolutely stunning. We have former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who beat Rep. Dan Goldman, which was somewhat expected. But two socialists came out on top in congressional races that were far less predictable.

You called, ahead of Tuesday, a closer race for Claire Valdez. Were you surprised by the results?

ML: Certainly the scale of it, yes. There was always a world in which — let’s start with New York 7 — where Antonio Reynoso, the candidate that Claire Valdez was facing, he’s more of an institutional progressive supported by the Working Families Party, Brooklyn borough president, was in the City Council.

There was a scenario in which his support fell off to a certain degree with younger voters, and younger voters, Claire Valdez-friendly, came to the polls en masse and broke the outcome for that way. But I was still surprised because there is a part of this district, in addition to a lot of the institutional and labor support that someone like Antonio Reynoso has, and he does also have a genuinely progressive record, and he was running on a very left-wing policy plank. 

AL: Virtually indistinguishable from Valdez’s.

ML: 100 percent right. The contrast between the candidates was very coalitional and institutional and also cultural, to a certain degree. So he kinda had these bona fides, and I thought that in some places, he can at least dent her margins.

And then the big kind of wild card is that this district is also home to a very large Orthodox Jewish community, the Satmar of South Williamsburg. Interestingly, even though they’re Orthodox Jews, they’re religious anti-Zionists. But they’ve known Reynoso for a very long time, and those folks were turning out in quite large numbers. They block vote in accordance with the whims of the rabbinical leaders there. 

So Reynoso had 10 percent of the electorate that was basically giving him close to 100 percent of the vote. So he started off with 10, and she started off with zero. And I was like, well, to claw back from that, it won’t be entirely easy. And there were public and private polls that showed this race within 2 or 3 points. So maybe I paid a little bit too much attention to that.

But Claire Valdez had a very strong close and was able to engineer a lot of young voter turnout, especially proportionally to the amount of people turning out in this lower turnout congressional primary.

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And she really ran away with it. Voters under 50 of all races, I think, supported her pretty substantially. There were some neighborhoods in this district where she was getting the same margins that Zohran Mamdani was getting versus Andrew Cuomo. Although instead of Cuomo being this fossil of the Democratic establishment, she was getting them against someone who’s lived his entire life in the district and does have other progressive and institutional validators.

I’m a little less surprised, actually, by Darializa’s win because I’ve been covering that race pretty closely and I had talked at length about how this was a prime opportunity district. Adriano Espaillat was, to some degree, in my estimation, a paper tiger and also that he was someone who was operating with a pretty hard ceiling. However they seemed to — and by they, I mean the political establishment, Hakeem Jeffries, a lot of labor unions, a lot of outside spending — seemed to really realize that there was quite a lot of vulnerability to him with one month left. Then of course, Mayor Mamdani endorsed Darializa, and that really raised the salience of the race, and then all of a sudden she’s getting attacked a lot.

There was a deleted Twitter account where they found her tweets. She said a bunch of different things, ranging from like, F Kamala Harris, to she attended an October 8 rally in New York. I thought to a certain extent that might hurt her with older voters who, again, white and Black who may not have much love for Adriano Espaillat, but I thought when you project that amount of money and negative spending onto a relatively unknown candidate, it can, in certain instances, have very drastic implications.

But she was able to really weather that, and also he was someone who had spent much of his career appealing to building Dominican American political power in Upper Manhattan. That was a stronger strategy 10 years ago when the Dominican electorate was half or even a little more than half of what this district is.

But it has been redrawn. It has experienced demographic change to a certain extent, and now it’s basically one-third Hispanic, one-third white, one-third Black. And so he was very focused on a third of the electorate, and it left him very, very vulnerable. Darializa was able to — again, for someone who had not held office before — against a 10-year Democratic incumbent, she did quite well with Black voters, and she did very well with white voters as well, of all ages and also religions.

This district has a lot of, I would say, progressive, older Jewish voters. A lot of this spending was geared at getting them to flip toward Adriano Espaillat or at least sit the race out. But they didn’t, and they backed her by considerable margins, and she paired that with real inroads with the white, Black, and Hispanic renter class, and that was enough for her to win by 3 points.

So it’s an incredible accomplishment.

AL: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the money piece because this was one of the most expensive congressional cycles in the history of New York, with more than $50 million spent. And obviously, not every seat, every congressional seat in New York was up for election. We’re talking about the handful that were up. 

Also down the ballot, super PACs spent almost five times what they spent on state legislative races in 2024, according to a report on Wednesday from New York Focus. A total of $9.6 million — including more than $2.5 million spent against DSA candidates alone, almost every single one of whom won their races.

What is the upshot here? We also saw some of the biggest national investments ever from pro-Palestine groups spending to support progressives in these races. How has all of that money changed how elections work in New York, both for the establishment and for this insurgent class?

ML: The value that this spending has is clearly diminishing. But I also think it’s worth highlighting American Priorities and Justice Democrats and some of the money that they used to support Darializa. Darializa was spent, I think, 3 or 4 to 1. Which is not great, but it’s not a margin that I guess can truly make or break a campaign.

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She was not getting out-spent 10 to 1, 20 to 1, things like that. So I think, again, stabilized some of the potential bleeding that could have come with a really hefty independent expenditure advantage one way or the other. There was, as you mentioned, tremendous super PAC spending in these downballot races. But those largely flopped. 

One of the things that New York City DSA and also Mayor Mamdani did quite well this cycle is there was a lot of emphasis — and, some of this was happenstance in the way that incumbents retired and things like that, and what came available. But for Claire Valdez running in the 7th Congressional District, there was one DSA-endorsed state Senate candidate farther down the ballot, and then there were, I believe, three competitive or open incumbent challenges, Assembly races that overlapped with the 7th District.

Basically, Claire’s race really helped raise spend, engagement, turnout in a lot of these crucial districts down the ballot. And then Claire, of course, blows it out of the water. I don’t want to say that she carried all these other folks to victory, but the dynamics of her race, campaign, and blowout certainly helped folks at the bottom of the ballot get turnout.

AL: I find it interesting that the national discourse around getting out of money in politics, which is still very strong and a big part of these candidates’ campaigns, but they’re also recognizing and being very candid about the fact that they do need money to combat some of the spending.

And obviously it’s not going to be equivalent, but you had Valdez and Reynoso trading barbs about dark money or super PAC money in the race. And she said something to the effect of, and you hear this argument all the time, “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back.” I think that’s an interesting tension that’s come out in the aftermath of this. 

[Break]

AL: Another big discourse talking point, if you will, is about whether this marks the end of the relevance of traditional progressives, many of whom voters see as beholden to the Democratic establishment.

We see this nationally with the declining relevance of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, despite the election of more and more progressives to Congress. Most people might think of the left flank of the national Democratic Party as strictly progressive. Think Kamala Harris versus Bernie Sanders. But it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, especially in New York.

You wrote recently, “It is The Socialists vs. The Progressives: NYC-DSA, the volunteer army that went from study hall to City Hall in a decade; versus the Working Families Party [WFP], the progressive third party that dominated the anti-establishment lane of New York politics for twenty years before the socialists arrived on the scene.”

For our listeners who might not be as familiar with the nuances of how this works in New York, can you break down those lanes on the left? Who is in each camp, where do they diverge, and how are they pushing Democrats to the left?

ML: I think some of the biggest differences between DSA and WFP is ideological. It is an outgrowth of that Sanders versus Warren 2020 presidential primary, but I think it’s also in structure of the organization.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that DSA is just a more democratic, member-driven organization. The way the Working Families Party does their endorsements and things like that, it is a little more top-down. As a rank-and-file member of DSA, you have a lot more input on the direction of the organization. Some of that manifests in terms of the number of people who actively participate, the number of people who are dues-paying members, who volunteer, things like that.

DSA — they push a very class-focused politics. Not that the Working Families Party does not. Also DSA’s led quite significantly on Palestine and those issues, especially after October 7.

Not to say that the Working Families Party doesn’t talk about class. I mean, it’s literally in their name, but there is a bit more of an identitarian bent to that. Even today, the leader of the Working Families Party, Jasmine Gripper, was talking about, well, Antonio built a multiracial coalition. She was saying things like that — whereas if DSA just lost a race of that magnitude, they wouldn’t say, well, we built a multiracial coalition. That type of thing. Never mind that Claire Valdez won Hispanic voters by a very large amount.

Anyhoo, I do think that it was a very difficult evening for the more traditional progressive wing of the party. And again, we saw this in the mayoral race last year with the rise of Zohran Mamdani and the stagnation of Brad Lander — who, of course, was just elected to Congress. And then especially in this Trump 2.0 world, people are hungry for a different type of politics. I foregrounded this race, the 7th District, as a battle to see who leads to left in New York. It’s very clear that after last night, DSA is the one leading the left. And I think that will have wider repercussions as well.

AL: This is a great segue because I do want to ask you about this piece that you wrote on the 7th District, where I am a resident.

ML: Oh, there you go.

AL: And in talking about that, talk a little bit about how progressives whose candidates lost last night are reacting to the results. You already mentioned Jasmine Gripper, state director for the New York Working Families Party. But you dubbed this race a “civil war in the commie corridor.”

The “commie corridor” branding has really taken off in the past couple of months. I just wanted to tip my hat to you. 

ML: It has, for sure. Thank you. 

AL: But what’s going on here, and how did this race in particular become such a referendum on Mamdani’s power?

ML: Very early on, Mamdani and a lot of New York City DSA leadership and rank and file wanted to support Claire Valdez. 

I’m a DSA member. I’ve known Claire Valdez for years before anyone cared that I said the “commie corridor” or I wrote books or anything like that. She has a lot of goodwill in the organization with just normal members. She’s a union organizer. People really just like her.

So when Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez — who, I should also say I used to work for her when I first graduated college — when she retired, there were a lot of people who went to Claire, a reluctant candidate, and said, “Oh, I think you would be really great.” And clearly the mayor shared that sentiment. A lot of people close to the mayor did as well. 

But of course, Congresswoman Velázquez, I think there was some appetite on her part to support another DSA candidate, one that she was more familiar with. But then she did not want to support Claire, so then she really went all-in on Antonio Reynoso. Those two are very close. Antonio was born and raised in the South Side of Williamsburg, which is a historically Puerto Rican area. And credit to Nydia and Antonio: They were waging fights against the machines of old in that part of town prior to 2016, prior to 2018, before DSA really asserted themselves politically.

But then, I think, she was upset that the mayor wanted to go a different route than her. She made some comments to The New York Times. It got bitter. It felt like both sides were waging a lot of capital on this outcome. There was a lot of media sparring and things like that. Obviously with hindsight, potentially the Working Families Party and the Reynoso camp, they might have raised the stakes of this race too much. Now, they probably didn’t know what was going to happen but I think probably they’re sitting here on Wednesday regretting it.

But I think that the most important thing is that Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters. And New York City DSA, for all of the local nonprofits and relationships that Antonio Reynoso had, New York City DSA out organized them.

They knocked over 300,000 doors. They knocked the entire district, and you really felt those results on Tuesday night. To pick that district to have a very high-stakes proxy war was a strategic mistake on the part of the Reynoso–Working Families Party world, because this was not like a fight in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens.

Not that it would’ve gone differently, but those are a little more progressive, granola, Brad Lander-coded areas. They were really having this fight on some of these blocks where 93 percent of voters are under the age of 50, and where Mamdani is not just a political giant, but a cultural figure.

You walk around Greenpoint or Bushwick with him, and there are women just tumbling over themselves, running out of the bar to get a picture with him. He did a selfie line at McCarren Park. And ironically, someone I went to college with who also reports on this stuff, he was saying that everyone he spoke to who said they were voting for Clara Valdez was like, “I’m doing it because of Mamdani.”

And you pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing. It’s how they were able to basically create a very favorable electorate even without the big highly salient mayoral race, the wall-to-wall media coverage, things like that.

I won’t get the voting data for probably a couple days or a week or so, but I have a hunch that the voting base this year in the 7th District was even younger than it was last year. Were the same amount of young voters, like raw, going to turn out? Not necessarily, but proportion-wise, it was pretty robust and it really cascaded on election day.

AL: You mentioned DSA sort of outorganizing the Working Families. I also want to mention that New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo told Hasan Piker at a watch party last night that his phone bank for Darializa Avila Chevalier could have identified 2,000 voters, which was the margin by which she won. A pretty spectacular effect. 

ML: Yeah, it’s funny, I thought they were going to make fun of me because I was like, “Oh, I think Adriano might eke it out.” But they were like, “Actually, we saw that you said that and we were like, all right, we gotta go into overdrive.”

AL: There you go, data-driven. 

ML: I obviously wanted Darializa to win. I quite literally voted for her. I owe it to the people who read and trust what I say to share that. 

And I do think that there was a broad sentiment, like, “Oh, she’s probably like pretty close, but will she get across the finish line?” That type of push that they were able to engineer, it’s just no other mass-member organization that I can really think of could do that. They called through every Democrat who had voted in Upper Manhattan in the last six years. I think the first list they did, they burned through it in 12 minutes. Really remarkable organizing that is exactly the type of thing that decides a race at the margins like this.

AL: The other big question coming out of last night is and really, this is in response to the way that both Democratic Party leaders and Republicans are spinning this, which is that Hakeem Jeffries has lost control of the party and that there’s a communist takeover of the Democratic Party that is out of step with the vast majority of voters outside of the coasts.

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But is this something that can work outside of New York City? There are several races with progressives and socialists on the ballot coming up. Midterms are not over, I’m sorry to our listeners. Next week in Denver, Melat Kiros is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros is a DSA member endorsed by the Denver DSA chapter and the national DSA.

Later this summer, Assembly Member Francesca Hong is running for Wisconsin governor. She’s a member of the Assembly Socialist Caucus and a DSA member. On the nonsocialist but progressive populist side, there’s also Graham Platner’s Senate race against Republican Susan Collins in Maine.

Is this a coastal formula? Why or why not?

ML: It’s funny. This is the question that’s at the heart of my forthcoming Mamdani book.

AL: Oh, wonderful. 

ML: But it won’t be out for a bit because we’re living through his effect on the Democratic Party. I do think the party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially. 

There’s this growing precarious middle class that’s really not getting ahead, really disillusioned with — it’s funny talking about this, it’s like I sound like Morris Katz because he says similar stuff.

AL: Morris Katz is a Mamdani adviser who’s also working with other progressive candidates, including Graham Platner. But Michael, continue.

ML: But yeah, you have this youngerish, but also middle-aged, we’ve even seen races where progressives and leftists have won Gen X suburbanites because even these mortgaged homeowners are really feeling squeezed by affordability. But it’s also a broader cultural alienation. It’s downstream from the loss of community, the rise of oligarchy. I think technology as well, like the tech oligarchs, it’s all intertwined. Two years from now, artificial intelligence and that type of stuff could be the number one, the number two, or the number three issue.

But I think there’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent. And so yes, does the “commie corridor” like literally travel to Michigan? Not exactly. But also the Democratic Party is pretty urbanized. It’s getting even more urbanized, especially in a primary setting.

What you’re asking is what a lot of us are asking right now? Is like, OK, you spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?

What was very interesting about New York 7 and New York 13 is that ironically, the rest of the Democratic Party is copying Mamdani’s message with respect to affordability, almost verbatim. But in 7 and 13, Claire Valdez and Darializa, and I was thinking like, oh, if maybe they underperform or maybe one of them doesn’t win, this is a tweak to make in the future cycles. They weren’t going super hard on affordability. There was a lot of talk about Palestine and AIPAC, things of that sort. Darializa also leaned into Adriano’s voting for omnibus bills that increase ICE funding, things like that. 

So my thesis was like undoubtedly those were motivating issues to Mamdani doing so well in those areas, but particularly in Upper Manhattan, that’s the heart of the multiracial working class. And I was like, a huge part of it was affordability. But what was really fascinating is that, it’s one thing to win in Ridgewood with that, but in Upper Manhattan — more tenants than any other district in the country. And Darializa won by talking a lot about Palestine and a lot about ICE. If she didn’t win, it would’ve been maybe we should’ve talked more about affordability. But she did win — in spite of all the spending. That’s like quite a, I don’t want to say a narrative buster, but it’s a very interesting, data point.

AL: It flies in the face of the claims by centrist strategists that those things are not popular with the base that they need, particularly that working-class base where they’re saying that those issues are not the bread-and-butter issues that working people come home and think about at night.

But I do think you’re touching on a key point here, which is that those issues tie into the broader frustration with not even just the positions that they’re taking, but the shutting down of discourse or the lack of teeth, particularly on the ICE thing, the lack of a response to really differentiate themselves from Republicans in the longer term.

You did mention a socialist presidential candidate. 

ML: Oh, boy. 

AL: That is the perfect segue to my final question for you which is, again, echoing a big question that came out of last night, which was where was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

ML: To her credit, she did support four state—

AL: Assembly members, yes.

ML: Who were all challenging incumbents, and they all did win.

AL: Yes. And so this is the strategy. So the criticism here, for our listeners, was that Mamdani did the work in the congressional races, and AOC did the work in the state legislature races. Both of them supported all DSA candidates in the respective races that they did endorse in.

But many people were taking shots at AOC saying that she should regret that she didn’t endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier.

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I find the argument that they were splitting their clout in a race where the left had limited resources to be a compelling one. I also find the argument that AOC is looking at building bridges with the people who will help her potentially run either for the Senate or for the presidency one day, and that it wasn’t worth her while to step into these races where Mamdani was already clearly carrying a lot of the weight.

What did you make of that strategy?

ML: Yeah. I think it’s just downstream of the nature of the relationships and the institutions that both of them have. Mayor Mamdani not endorsing any insurgent challengers in the state legislature in an effort to, not piss off, for lack of a better word, Carl Heastie, who’s the Assembly speaker.

The inverse, though, pushing a lot of chips in with respect to Congress. I mean, Claire — it’s an open seat. Everyone needs to be adults about it. But the Darializa’s thing — that was big to take on the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

With the congresswoman, it’s probably just the inverse of that. There’s also a special Nydia Velázquez connection there. 

But plenty of people running had either the mayor or they had AOC. And then I think a lot of them also had Bernie Sanders as well, and New York City DSA. So it was like, you had almost everybody with one or two or three really famous folks on their lit, and the institutional heft.

Regrettably, Conrad Blackburn was running for an Assembly seat in Harlem. He was the only candidate to lose last night.

AL: The only DSA candidate to lose.

ML: It was partially because he was the only one who did not have a Mamdani or an AOC endorsement.

It was a tricky race. I think just to zoom in and out, there was a lot of money spent against him at the beginning. When he was in Florida and a law student, he had that two-month internship in the Florida attorney general’s office, but the Florida attorney general was Pam Bondi. That, I think, hurt him considerably. But after months, I think he was able to claw back. 

I think also Darializa being on the top of the ballot was able to help him. But the Darializa versus Conrad thing is a very interesting dynamic in how their spending was treated. Whereas with Darializa, they opened the floodgates late with all these attacks, and with Conrad, they started earlier. I’m sure if they could do it over again with Darializa, they would’ve taken her much more seriously, because now, of course, Adriano Espaillat, someone who is, I don’t want to contribute to a myth here, but he is someone who built a Dominican political machine, while I don’t really agree with the politics of it, over the course of 30 years. It was a 30-year-old machine being defeated by a 32-year-old Columbia graduate student who had never run for office before. 

AL: Who said, “Fuck Kamala Harris.” 

ML: Well, yeah, if I can curse. You had a candidate who said “Fuck Kamala Harris” win the historic capital of Black America. If that is not a distillation of the “Democratic tea party,” I don’t quite know what is. For as much anti-incumbent sentiment as there just is broadly now, there has been that with Adriano Espaillat, particularly in the southern parts of his district for a while, which was another reason that he was vulnerable and he played it poorly, and I think she ran a gutsy race.

AL: Michael, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for helping us make sense of the wild ride that was Tuesday night. I look forward to reading your book when it comes out and looking forward to more of your — I don’t know if you’ll beat “commie corridor,” but we’re excited for whatever comes next.

ML: I appreciate that a lot. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

AL: We want to know what issues you are following in this exciting midterm cycle, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 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 do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover appeared first on The Intercept.

Senior official alleges in court filing that damage included about ‘70 fence post tops thrown’ into the pool

A senior National Park Service (NPS) official has said a liner along the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was “cut with a sharp knife or razor” earlier this month, repeating Donald Trump’s claims of vandalism.

Frank Lands, the deputy director for operations for NPS, made the allegation in a court filing on Wednesday, as part of a lawsuit brought by a non-profit group seeking to stop the US president’s renovation of the site.

Your next iPad, Mac, HomePod, Vision Pro or Apple TV purchase is going to cost more.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Arab Gulf leaders to reassure them that U.S. isn’t cutting them out of negotiations with Tehran.

U.K. influencer Brooke George says a man she met online repeatedly assaulted her in the UAE, according to an advocacy group. Now she's facing possible execution for allegedly stabbing him to death.

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law in Hawaii that prohibited a person with a concealed carry permit from bringing a handgun onto private property open to the public without the property owner’s consent.

In Wolford v. Lopez, Justice Samuel Alito in a 6-3 decision held that the law violated the Second and 14th Amendments. Alito said the current state law, adopted after the Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen in 2022, posed several problems.

In Bruen, a divided 6-3 Court struck down a New York state law that required a person to prove a special self-protection need to carry a licensed concealed firearm outside their residence or business. Hawaii then passed a new state law in 2023, Act 52, with the property owner consent provision. Examples of such locations included bars, restaurants serving alcohol, parks, and banks, in addition to the sensitive areas defined in Bruen.

“The restrictions imposed by Hawaii’s challenged law fall within the plain text of the Second Amendment, so the law is presumptively unconstitutional,” Alito said. “To be sure, owners of establishments that are open to the public can admit or exclude persons who are carrying guns for self-defense under either the common-law rule or Hawaii’s law. But Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”

Under that common-law rule, Alito said, “everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so. By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization.”

“When these permit holders leave home in the morning, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines,” he concluded. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.

In her concurrence, Barrett said Hawaii’s law failed the second part of a test posed by Bruen. The first part of the Bruen test determines if the plain text of the Second Amendment applies to an individual’s conduct. The second part requires the government to justify a firearms regulation by showing that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of similar regulations.

“To satisfy Bruen, Hawaii must identify historical laws that pursued an analogous goal in an analogous way.  Hawaii draws two analogies: one to 18th-century antipoaching laws and the other to 19th-century laws that were mostly designed to suppress newly freed blacks. Unsurprisingly, the analogies fail,” Barrett concluded. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joined part of her concurrence.

Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said she believed the colonial and founding era laws cited by the state in its arguments “similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, argued that Hawaii’s law fell under property law. “Hawaii’s law does not implicate the Second Amendment because there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without consent (as all agree), and the Constitution does not dictate the form of that required consent.” She also agreed with Kagan’s conclusion that enough precedent existed to meet the Bruen test. Justice Sotomayor joined Jackson’s dissent.

And for good measure, Jackson added she felt Bruen was wrongly decided but the Court misapplied the required test under Bruen. “The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law,” she concluded.

Three individuals and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition had sued the state of Hawaii. The group alleged that Hawaii’s law conflicted with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling in Antonyuk v. James (2024), a decision that struck down a state law like the Hawaii ban. The Ninth Circuit upheld most of the Hawaii law. The Supreme Court then accepted the case on Oct. 3, 2025, and heard arguments on Jan. 20, 2026

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

Jury clears 16-year-old of murder and manslaughter over the death of Aria, who died from a single stab wound

A 16-year-old boy has been found not guilty of the murder of nine-year-old Aria Thorpe, who died after being stabbed with a kitchen knife.

Aria sustained a deep wound to her chest at her home in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, on 15 December last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on "AI and the American Dream." In the letter, Anthropic shared "new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities we have ever measured." The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab" allegedly generated "more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign "targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks." According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by "using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks." As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there's already "a growing circumvention economy" to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. [...] "Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner." To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After rattling some observers by staying out of a slew of competitive congressional primaries in her home state this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., endorsed a candidate in Tennessee on Thursday. 

Ocasio-Cortez is backing Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson in the 9th Congressional District, which will be a tough win for Democrats after Republicans scrambled to gerrymander it earlier this year thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The district covering parts of Memphis and its suburbs is one of more than a dozen that Republicans have redrawn at President Donald Trump’s demand to ward off what many in the GOP see as the increasingly likely prospect that they lose both congressional chambers to Democrats in November. 

An endorsement from democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a coveted stamp of approval for progressive insurgents looking to challenge incumbents or capture open congressional seats. She has endorsed several Democratic primary candidates running for open seats in other states this cycle including Chris Rabb, who won his primary in Pennsylvania; Analilia Mejia, who won in New Jersey; and Junaid Ahmed, who lost his primary in Illinois. But critics raised eyebrows at her decision to stay out of key congressional primaries in New York; she opted instead to endorse a slate of democratic socialist candidates in the state Assembly.

The endorsement is a major boost to Pearson, who is also backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that first backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 against longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pearson originally launched his campaign with the intention of ousting two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, the last remaining Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. Cohen dropped out of the race in May after state lawmakers split up his district into three neighboring districts, saying it was “drawn to beat” him. 

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Observers theorized that Ocasio-Cortez’s absence from New York’s congressional primaries reflected a desire not to butt heads with Democratic Party leaders who endorsed against leftist challengers, potentially signaling her plans to run for higher office in a future cycle. Others argued that she stayed out to split her efforts with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to maximize the left’s political currency in a cycle with historic outside spending against their candidates. Mamdani emerged as a kingmaker in Tuesday’s elections, backing three congressional candidates who won their primaries on Tuesday: socialists Clare Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and progressive Brad Lander, and several — but not all — of the New York City DSA’s endorsed candidates.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said the left’s wins in New York’s House primaries were part of both “a moment” and “a movement” of voters demanding more from the Democratic Party after major losses in 2024. 

Endorsing in the races would have pitted Ocasio-Cortez against her congressional colleagues whose support she might need in a run for higher office, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber in November. She’s made most of her other endorsements this cycle in open seats with no incumbent, including Rabb, Mejia, Ahmed, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Sam Forstag in Montana. She endorsed Democratic candidate Randy Villegas against the incumbent Republican, Rep. David Valadao, in California. Her former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, said her decision not to endorse him likely contributed to his loss in an open California primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., by fueling attacks from his opponents.  

In New York City, Avila Chevalier and Lander ousted incumbents backed by Jeffries and Democratic leaders: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Rep. Dan Goldman. Valdez won her primary in an open seat where retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez had endorsed her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Velázquez bemoaned Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez against her pick in the months leading up to the race. And even after their candidates lost on Tuesday, Jeffries and other party leaders aired their disappointment in Mamdani’s decision to go against them. 

But in Tennessee, Pearson emerged as the frontrunner when the incumbent dropped out. He’s hoping to tap into voters’ frustrations with both parties by campaigning on economic change for the working class — a message that boosted both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. 

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wades Into Tennessee Primary, Endorsing Justin J. Pearson appeared first on The Intercept.

Civil service high-flyer caught up in Mandelson vetting row thought to be discussing comeback with Burnham’s team

The Foreign Office chief who lost his job over the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal is in discussions with Andy Burnham’s team about taking on a security-related role under the likely new prime minister, the Guardian understands.

Olly Robbins has had “early exploratory talks” with senior advisers to the newly elected Makerfield MP over a post in his putative Downing Street operation, and insiders suggested he could be appointed national security adviser.

Reform MP appears to contradict party leader’s claim money from crypto billionaire is ‘none of your business’

Robert Jenrick has said it is “legitimate” for the media to ask questions about Nigel Farage’s £5m personal donation from a cryptocurrency billionaire, just days after the Reform UK leader told an interviewer it was “none of your business”.

Jenrick, who is Reform’s shadow chancellor, said voters on the doorstep were not asking about the money given to Farage by the Thailand-based British crypto investor Christopher Harborne.

Seattle’s World Cup committee is pushing forward with “Pride Match” celebrations this week despite backlash from Egypt and Iran, who have called for the cancellation of LGBTQ+ rights festivities around the game.

Last year, Seattle’s local organising committee, which is separate from Fifa, made plans for 26 June to be a Pride-themed match coinciding with the city’s annual Pride weekend.

In December, Egypt and Iran were drawn to play each other on that date in Seattle, causing a swift firestorm and condemnation from the two countries, as Sam Levin explains

• Seattle prepares for unlikely matchup as its World Cup Pride celebration: Egypt v Iran

Decision affects hundreds of thousands with permission to live and work in US because their home countries are unsafe

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The US supreme court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation.

In another boost to Donald Trump’s unprecedented hardline crackdown on immigrants, including many of whom have lived legally in the US for years, the court issued a 6-3 ruling. That was powered ⁠by its conservative-leaning majority, overturning decisions by ⁠federal judges in New York and Washington ​DC that had halted the administration’s actions terminating TPS for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

National Park Service official Frank Lands also said at least 70 fence post tops were thrown in to the Reflecting Pool.

The Neo now costs $100 more, but the MacBook Air and Pro lines saw even larger price increases.

If you want to protect and grow your $20,000 for an extended period, a long-term CD account is worth consideration.

A law enforcement intelligence hub in New Jersey fretted that the growing class divide in the U.S. could drive a wave of lone-wolf attacks on high-flying corporate executives, according to a report obtained by The Intercept.

The New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that serve as intelligence clearinghouses for cops, warned in a bulletin earlier this year that disaffected Americans were increasingly blaming society’s ills on rich people and corporate bigwigs.

The report specifically cited the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — allegedly by Luigi Mangione — as an expression of anti-fat-cat rhetoric. To the analysts at the New Jersey fusion center, Thompson’s killing hinted at a larger trend.

“Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives,” the fusion center memo says.

By warning corporate security outfits of the danger posed by average Americans who blame their problems on the actions of corporate executives, the report effectively dedicates public resources to securing a private system that has made the few extremely wealthy at the expense of the many.

Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and longtime critic of fusion centers, said that by warning CEOs of threats, the bulletin was effectively taking the side of the rich and powerful over ordinary people who are critical of inequality — a typical dynamic at fusion centers.

“The way it’s written, the report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting,” German said. “All the resources of the national network of fusion centers, which includes federal resources along with state and local resources, are devoted toward providing security information to private entities.”

Brian Thompson Murder

The “Quarterly Executive Threat Watch” bulletin warned corporate bodyguards to switch up the daily routines of execs, limit information on public engagements, and remove bosses’ personal information from the web. The report says bosses should “remain vigilant of lone offenders with personal grievances.”

“Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the current political climate, there is a heightened threat environment surrounding corporate executives,” the report says. “Online glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and calls for violence are still apparent and further create a risk for a lone offender attack.”

A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the agency that oversees the fusion center, did not respond to a request for comment.

Days after Thompson’s killing in late 2024, Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder, allegedly motivated by injustices in the healthcare system. The then-26-year-old quickly became a cause célèbre for a wide array of supporters and a bête noire of right-wing figures, including those at the Trump administration, who branded him as a violent extremist.

Mangione’s legal team declined to comment on the fusion center report, but has in the past decried attempts to tie him to unrelated acts of violence.

Related

The Persistent Push to Depict Luigi Mangione and His Supporters as Terrorists

The report went on to cite a list of seemingly disparate incidents to highlight a possible surge in threats to the wealthy, including a satirical Christmas wishlist that called for sabotaging CEOs; a handful of 4chan posts calling for violence against executives at Netflix and elsewhere; a “far-left forum” calling for a campaign against people tied to a mining project in Michigan; and an act of vandalism by pro-Palestine activists at the home of a New York Times executive.

Another incident that made the list was the federal case against the so-called Turtle Island Liberation Front, a group of left-wing activists arrested last year whose alleged bomb plot appears to have been largely driven by a member of their group who was a longtime paid FBI informant.

“The problem with a lot of these fusion center reports is that they take a handful of incidents, not necessarily related to one another, and use them to justify and amplify these threats without any kind of analysis,” said German. “Rather than actually looking at data, their performance is measured by the number of reports they produce.”

Fusion Centers

Fusion centers, which bring together state and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on potential terror threats, rose to prominence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The centers operate under state authority, often with grants from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

Related

Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI

While data on any terror plots actually foiled by fusion center operations is scant, they have been roundly criticized for compiling surveillance and data on protest movements, communities of color, student organizers, and, recently, critics of AI data centers.

New Jersey’s only fusion center, officially known as the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, has been criticized for operating outside the typical oversight to which most state agencies are subject.

A 2023 report by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights warns of the potential for abuse in the New Jersey fusion center. The report cited the fusion center’s practice of drafting dossiers on “known troublemakers” and its reliance on so-called “intelligence-led policing,” a practice of surveilling and data collection that the American Civil Liberties Union has cited as a potential violation of the right to due process.

The Quarterly Executive Threat Watch, the bulletin that included the warning for CEOs, appears to be internally categorized as terrorism-related intelligence and was later disseminated by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to recipients across the country. (CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Then there is the issue of the center’s shadowy public-private partnership. The New Jersey fusion center does not make public which private agencies or organizations it partners with, or to whom it disseminates reports.

The January report drew heavily on the work of SITE Intelligence, a for-profit firm that has come in for criticism because of its labeling Islamic charities as terror fronts and mistakenly identifying video game footage as terror propaganda.

Like its counterparts across the country, the New Jersey fusion center feeds its reports into a national network of public and private agencies dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of information about potential threats — a practice that frequently crosses the line into surveillance of political speech, according to German and other critics of fusion centers.

“There is a lack of public accountability here,” German said. “Because they’re joint enterprises, it’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible for ensuring that the participants within these centers are acting in accordance with the law.”

The post Cops Warn CEO Bodyguards That Luigi Mangione Fever Could Spark Class War appeared first on The Intercept.

Wyden says in letter addressed to Robert F Kennedy Jr that HHS is preparing an ‘unprecedented legal framework’

The US senator Ron Wyden has accused the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of preparing to use what he describes as an “unprecedented legal framework” to deport more than 500 unaccompanied migrant children currently in the custody of the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

In a letter addressed to the HHS secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said he had obtained “credible information” that the department was using a list of more than 500 children as targets for expedited removal under a new administrative process that he says lacks statutory authority. He called the reported initiative “deeply alarming” and urged HHS to immediately suspend any related screening or removal efforts.

Former employee files complaint accusing company of ‘coercive surveillance’ and first amendment violation

The Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams is suing the tech company over its efforts to “silence” her.

A 57-page complaint filed to a US district court in California on Thursday argues that an interim arbitration ruling sought by Meta preventing Wynn-Williams from publicising her memoir, Careless People, was “improper and unlawful” and a “blatant violation of the first amendment”. It also accuses the company of “coercive surveillance”.

Tim Cook said that RAMageddon would make price increases "unavoidable." And now they're happening.

The Windmill window air conditioner was the quickest to cool down rooms in our lab testing, and there's a great deal on it right now.

Heatwave-related deaths climb in Spain, Italy and France as continent battles another day of extreme temperatures

Farryn Stock

Over in the UK, South East Water has announced a temporary hosepipe ban in Kent amid growing strain from the ongoing heatwave (31C today, 33C tomorrow).

“To safeguard that shared supply and prevent any homes from facing a sudden loss of water, we sadly need to ask our communities to not use their hosepipes immediately. We are deeply sorry for the disruption this causes, and we are incredibly grateful to everyone helping us protect Kent’s water.”

After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles." Bloomberg reports: Those engineers were "at the heart" of Ford's efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen. "We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems" and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" and "they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor." The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom -- and fear -- that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn't replace experience. "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said. But "we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals." As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power's bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Temperatures linked to third child’s death in France, where three-quarters of country is under extreme heat alert

The UK and Switzerland both recorded the hottest-ever June temperatures on Thursday, while brutally hot conditions supercharged by the climate crisis were linked to the death of a third toddler in France and a sharp rise in medical emergencies across Europe.

The UK’s new provisional high of 36.4C (97.5F), recorded in Yeovilton, Somerset, surpassed Wednesday’s June record of 36.1C in Gosport, Hampshire, which had beaten the previous peak of 35.6C set in Southampton in 1976.

June 25, 2026 — A major milestone for European science and innovation is reached today, as European users can now request free access to the EuroHPC quantum computers through the newly launched EuroHPC quantum access pilot call.

Researchers, public institutions, and industry across Europe can now access Europe’s growing quantum computing infrastructure in the same way they already access EuroHPC supercomputers. This unprecedented step enables users to experiment with different quantum technologies to advance scientific discovery and drive innovation.

Users can now access Europe’s growing quantum computing infrastructure in the same way they already access EuroHPC supercomputers.

As part of its hybrid strategy to integrate quantum computers with Europe’s world-class supercomputing infrastructure, enabling quantum-accelerated HPC, the EuroHPC JU has invested in a diverse set of complementary quantum technologies. This strategy will allow European users to experiment, test, and scale their applications on a broad range of quantum technologies, including trapped ions, superconducting circuits, photonics, neutral atoms, and adiabatic (annealing) systems, while also leveraging the power of classical HPC.

The first systems accessible through the call, with a first cut-off as of August 1, 2026, are:

• Euro-Q-Exa, based on superconducting qubits,
• Lucy, based on photonic qubits,
• Piast-Q, based on trapped-ions,
• VLQ, based on superconducting qubits.

Additional EuroHPC quantum computers will become available for future cut-off deadlines.

More Details

The quantum pilot access mode aims to provide quick access to EuroHPC JU quantum infrastructure for testing and development purposes.

This access mode is meant for all categories of users who want to collect performance data or test a method on a target system in order to document the technical feasibility of their applications. The access mode is meant also for projects focusing on code and algorithm development, development of workflows and quantum computing trainings.

The call will be continuously open, with pre-defined cut-off dates fixed every month that will trigger the evaluation of the proposals submitted up to this date.

Apply now on the EuroHPC access platform.

Source: EuroHPC JU

The post EuroHPC Opens Access to Its Quantum Computers appeared first on HPCwire.

Blocking of proposal backed by Oman signals new threat to free passage through strait vital to world economy

Iran has rejected UN-backed plans for the mass evacuation of ships through the strait of Hormuz, creating a new threat to the free passage of commercial ships through the strait.

The proposal, backed by Oman, was potentially the first phase of a broader Omani proposal to consult on setting up a new management of the strait based on voluntary fees and modelled on the Malacca and Singapore strait mechanism.

A guide to the steep Prime Day deals on Apple’s top-rated smartwatch and how to choose the right model for you

• The 40+ best Prime Day deals – and 20+ best deals from Amazon competitors

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The Apple Watch has been around for a decade, so it’s safe to say you’ve already heard the evangelism from fawning owners: fitness tracking for everything from running to rowing, phone alerts on your wrist, a limitless variety of watch faces for every occasion. The latest versions have even added the ability to take an electrocardiogram, 5G connectivity and off-grid satellite messaging.

It’s no wonder the Apple Watch Series 11 earned a five-star review from our consumer tech editor and regularly pops up in our gift guides for pretty much everyone. The Apple Watch is beloved by moms, customized by dads and requested by tweens.

This clever router fixed my spotty home wifi – and it’s currently on sale for a third off

American tennis legend Chris Evert announced that her ovarian cancer had returned in a social media post Thursday.

Dr Mazen Al-Rantisi, a 71-year-old physician well known for providing care to low-income Palestinians, was arrested in the occupied West Bank

Israeli forces on Sunday arrested a prominent 71-year-old Palestinian physician known as the “doctor of the poor” in a pre-dawn raid on his home in the occupied West Bank, prompting widespread condemnation.

Dr Mazen Al-Rantisi, a physician widely known for providing care to low-income Palestinians, was arrested in the al-Tira neighbourhood of Ramallah.

French capital hails ‘landmark decision’ against oil firm relating to disclosure of emissions from oil and gas products

A Paris court has ​ruled that the French oil company TotalEnergies must disclose the climate risks linked to emissions from its oil and gas products and set out plans to ⁠address them in a high-stakes case brought by NGOs and the city of Paris.

The ruling on Thursday is a partial victory for climate change NGOs seeking to apply France’s 2017 corporate duty of vigilance law to the climate crisis. However, the ⁠court stopped short of ordering specific measures such as limiting overseas exploration and production or setting binding ​emissions reduction targets.

People in Caracas and coastal towns describe powerful quakes that collapsed buildings and killed at least 164

As a double whammy of powerful earthquakes rattled Venezuela’s northern coast on Wednesday, residents of the capital, Caracas, scrambled out on to the streets from shuddering, fractured buildings.

“It was horrible. I felt like the house was moving to a different rhythm to the earth. I had to carry my mum out. She was paralysed by fear,” said 18-year-old Sebastian Rodríguez, whose family runs a shop in Centro Plaza, a brutalist commercial centre in the affluent neighbourhood of Los Palos Grandes.

• Charlotte get Naz Reid, seven draft picks

• Minnesota also add guard Josh Green in swap

• Ball to pair with fellow 2020 draftee Anthony Edwards

The Charlotte Hornets have agreed to trade LaMelo Ball, their starting point guard, and Josh Green to the Minnesota Timberwolves for power forward Naz Reid, a 2033 unprotected first-round draft pick, three first-round pick swaps and three future second-round picks, a person familiar with the situation told the Associated Press on Thursday.

The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because the deal, first reported by ESPN, has yet to be approved by the league.

Consumer prices rose 4.1% in May from a year earlier – a sign rising costs could pose problem for Trump in midterms

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge rose to a new three-year high in May as gas prices peaked, a sign rising costs could pose political problems for Donald Trump and his political party as midterm elections near.

Consumer prices rose 4.1% in May from a year earlier, the US commerce department said Thursday, the largest annual increase since April 2023. On a monthly basis, inflation was 0.4% last month, matching April’s increase and down from 0.7% in March.

A Caracas resident told CBS News that he "started to pray" when he felt the first earthquake hit Venezuela.

Conditions at "Alligator Alcatraz" were criticized by lawyers, families and human rights groups who claimed detainees were mistreated.

Poland's deputy prime minister tells CBS News he "wouldn't exclude the Russians doing some kind of false flag operation" to justify an attack on NATO.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration can move forward with its efforts to strip more than 356,000 Syrian and Haitian immigrants of temporary protections.

The Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto cannot be held liable under state laws for failing to warn consumers about the alleged cancer risks of its weedkiller Roundup on its label.

The 6-3 decision clears the way for the Trump administration to resume allowing federal agents at the border to turn back asylum seekers before they enter.

Opposition figures fear changes will further tighten 83-year-old president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s hold on power

Zimbabwe is on the brink of amending its constitution to give the president more time in office, a change that the government says will bring stability but that opponents have labelled a “constitutional coup”.

The upper house of Zimbabwe’s parliament voted on Wednesday 75-4 in favour of the constitutional amendments, which will allow President Emmerson Mnangagwa to stay in office until 2030 by extending presidential terms from five to seven years.

Claims health of staff and children at risk as France struggles to adapt heat-trap school buildings

Teachers in France are risking their own and students’ health in overheated schools as a severe heatwave sets new record temperatures, education unions said, urging staff to strike over “unacceptable working conditions”.

Several teaching unions on Thursday issued a joint statement denouncing a “blatant lack of preparation” by the government, after teachers have had to work in classrooms where temperatures reached up to 40C.

IBM's newest chip has transistors smaller than one nanometer. But it could pack a powerful punch in future data centers.

Micron has signed 16 "strategic customer agreements" (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with "a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle." Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron's revenue. The Register reports: Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company's Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher. The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it's worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. "Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve," he said. "Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand." Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren't much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories -- and when they come online there still won't be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. "Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply," he said. Don't assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue -- meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron's DRAM output in 2026 will "grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook." He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump signed an executive order in March requiring the creation of a list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and imposing stricter mail-in ballot rules.

Latin American and European countries also offer solidarity and help to nation already enduring a humanitarian crisis

Countries around the world, including Iran, the US and Cuba, have committed to help with rescue efforts in Venezuela after deadly twin earthquakes hit the country.

On the evening of 24 June, Venezuela was rocked by two back-to-back earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.2 and 7.5, which killed at least 164 people, injured close to 1,000 more, and caused significant damage to the capital, Caracas, as well as areas across the north of the country.

Rescue efforts under way after buildings reduced to rubble in capital and along northern coast

Hundreds of people are feared to have died and thousands have been injured in Venezuela’s largest earthquake in more than a century.

Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 hit 39 seconds apart near the town of Morón.

The case, Monsanto v Durnell, specifically dealt with claims that the company failed to warn users of product risks

• US politics live – latest updates

The US supreme court has found in favor of the former Monsanto company in a ruling that is expected to block thousands of lawsuits filed by people alleging the key ingredient in the weed killer Roundup causes cancer.

The decision was made in a 7-2 vote, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh offering the majority opinion and justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissenting opinion, joined by justice Neil Gorsuch.

The former Manchester mayor could be installed as prime minister in weeks if no other MP puts themselves forward

In her Q&A this morning Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, confirmed that she wants the government to approve the licences for the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

She said:

I’ve been very clear that I think that the North Sea is a crucial asset for the UK, and that oil and gas will be an important part of our energy mix for years to come. And I’m very keen to make sure that we use that resource, to ensure our energy security.

There are decisions to be made shortly on both Rosebank and Jackdaw. Those are quasi-judicial decisions. But in our manifesto two years ago, we committed to honour existing licences, and I hope that we do.

Dell's thinnest and lightest XPS yet is a smart choice that exemplifies how good design gets out of your way.

Stock markets on both sides of Atlantic up as concerns ease over prospect of another inflationary shock

• Business live – latest updates

Oil prices have fallen to pre-Iran war levels as more oil tankers exited the strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, fell to a low of $72.24 a barrel on Thursday, slightly lower than the day before the US and Israel launched missile attacks on Tehran on 28 February. Prices have fallen more than 20% this month.

June 25, 2026 — The UK’s next National Supercomputer – owned by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and hosted at the University of Edinburgh – is set to empower world-changing discoveries in globally significant fields such as aircraft engineering, extreme weather events and drug discovery for cancer.

The machine – made possible by an investment of up to £750 million from the UK Government – marks a step-change in the country’s compute power and will cement the UK’s status as a leader in supercomputing, which experts agree is critical to driving economic growth.

Construction on the site of the UK’s most powerful computer has begun, which experts are hailing as a milestone moment as the country moves a step closer to turbo-charging its capacity for research and innovation.

Immense power

The new machine is expected to have thousands of the latest processers, allowing it to deliver at least a billion – billion calculations per second, up from the 20 million – billion calculations per second currently delivered by the current national supercomputer.

At around fifty times more powerful than the UK’s current national supercomputer, ARCHER2, the new system will be able to carry out incredibly complex calculations in hours rather than days, and solve much larger problems than ever before. This will help make today’s impossible calculations possible.

“You would never guess from this ordinary-looking building site just how vitally important it will be for the UK and how its contents could impact on all of our lives positively,” said Professor Mark Parsons, Director of the EPCC and Dean of Research Computing. “This marks a profound leap in compute power for the UK. The value of this supercomputer across our society is vast, and will aid strong industry, a healthier economy and a happier population.”

Societal Benefits

ARCHER2 – also housed at the University – aided Covid-19 drug-discovery, empowered firms like Rolls Royce to improve aircraft engine efficiency and sustainability, and has enabled engineers to make wind farms more efficient.

Supercomputing also allows researchers to model flood risks for communities, understand changes in our ocean temperatures, and simulate earthquakes – challenges that are simply unfeasible or prohibitively costly to do in the real-world.

A recent independent report showed that ARCHER2 generated £8 per £1 invested, enabling more than £4.2bn in benefits for the UK economy.

“The best research advances can happen when skills and talent are enabled by exceptional tools,” said Professor Liz Baggs, Vice-Principal for Research and Innovation and Chair of Food and Environmental Security. “This supercomputer has the potential to help UK researchers accelerate frontiers, unlock new paradigms, and develop solutions to challenges that were previously impossible. This includes creating the next generation of medicines, revealing untold stories about our planet, and, most excitingly, leading to discoveries that we can’t even imagine yet.”

Computing Expertise

The University was chosen as the new supercomputer’s home in recognition of EPCC’s leadership in high performance computing for more than 30 years.

The University has been the home of AI research in Europe for six decades, with EPCC recently formally designated the first UK National Supercomputing Centre.

“It is an honor for the University to be trusted to host this essential piece of UK infrastructure, and a testament to the hard work of everyone involved to help make this happen,” said Professor Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor. “It is clear that this investment will strengthen UK science and with our track record in supercomputing, Edinburgh is perfectly placed to host this.”

Sustainability Measures

Having the supercomputer sited in Scotland has been a benefit to sustainability concerns thanks to its cooler air, with nature offering a simple solution to cool the system, combined with leading-edge cooling technology reducing the energy required.

Environmental considerations are at the forefront of the new supercomputer’s design, which will be more efficient than existing models, with surplus heat generated being used to warm University buildings and research planned to assess if it could also be used to warm local homes, by warming mine-water in disused mines.

ARCHER2 is already designated as net zero in operation, thanks to its use of 100% green certified electricity. The current supercomputing facility estimates that it runs with the same water usage as three typical bungalows.

Site demolition has been kept to a minimum to reduce environmental impacts and a number of sustainability projects are planned with the construction team, including tree planting, protecting ancient trees, and conservation projects for local wildlife.

“Today’s milestone in Edinburgh marks a decisive step in delivering our Compute Roadmap – building the sovereign computing power Britain needs to stay in control of its future in AI and science,” said Kanishka Narayan, UK Minister for AI and Online Safety. “For decades, Edinburgh has been at the heart of world-leading supercomputing. This new machine takes that further – making sure UK researchers, businesses and innovators have the cutting-edge power they need here in the UK, rather than relying on others. This is what will unlock the next generation of breakthroughs – from training more powerful AI systems to accelerating scientific discovery and creating new products and high-growth businesses. It is our Industrial Strategy in action, turning British ideas into the jobs and industries of the future.”

“The commencement of construction in Edinburgh marks a pivotal moment for the UK’s scientific infrastructure,” said Garth Wells, Deputy Executive Chair, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council at UKRI. “We are providing the UK’s brightest minds with the ‘industrial-scale’ tools required to solve society’s most complex challenges, from decoding the next generation of life-saving medicines to engineering a net-zero future. This £750m investment isn’t just about speed; it’s about economic growth, and ensuring the UK remains the premier destination for global innovation.”

Source: University of Edinburgh

The post UK Breaks Ground on £750M National Supercomputer in Edinburgh appeared first on HPCwire.

NEW YORK, June 25, 2026 — Qualcomm Incorporated has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Modular Inc, strengthening Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.’s software foundation for generative and agentic AI across data center and edge environments.

As AI scales, efficiency, not capability, becomes a constraint. Performance-per-watt drives the cost of inference, and cost determines what scales. Meeting this demand requires more than hardware. Developers need software that connects system-level optimization with heterogeneous, disaggregated compute, turning silicon performance into reliable and efficient AI services across accelerators, environments, and use cases.

Modular provides an open, AI-native software stack that enables AI to run efficiently across hardware architectures. Built by engineers who helped create much of today’s AI infrastructure, Modular’s unified platform runs models with industry-leading performance across CPU, GPU, NPU, and custom ASIC architectures without re-writes for each accelerator. For developers and enterprises, that means building once, deploying across any environment with lower total cost of ownership. Modular is supported by an open, industry-friendly, vendor-neutral developer community committed to improving the portability and efficiency of AI infrastructure.

The acquisition is expected to strengthen Qualcomm Technologies’ ability to deliver a more optimized AI compute layer across a broad range of platforms and use cases. It deepens the software foundation for Qualcomm Technologies’ data center strategy, supporting more efficient inference, orchestration, and deployment in distributed AI systems, while strengthening relationships with model creators, developers, hyperscalers, and enterprises.

By combining Qualcomm Technologies silicon leadership with Modular’s software expertise, Qualcomm Technologies will be well positioned to help customers move AI into production from device to cloud, with systems that are faster, more efficient, and easier to scale.

“This acquisition marks a pivotal moment not just for Qualcomm, but for the AI industry,” said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated. “As agentic AI scales across data centers and edge environments, the industry is moving toward disaggregated, multi-vendor architectures that demand a more open and modern software foundation. We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI. With Modular, we’re accelerating that shift, combining our scale and energy-efficient data center technologies with an open ecosystem approach to help drive the next chapter of AI.”

“Modular was founded on the belief that AI needs a more open and efficient software foundation that can span diverse hardware and deployment environments,” said Chris Lattner, Co-founder and CEO, Modular. “Joining Qualcomm gives us the scale and platform reach to accelerate that mission. Together, we can make AI development more accessible and performant for developers, strengthen portability across hardware, and help grow an open ecosystem that broadens participation and speeds innovation. We are excited to continue advancing our software platform as part of Qualcomm’s broader strategy from edge to cloud.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory approvals.

About Qualcomm

Qualcomm is a global computing leader at the center of the AI era, enabling intelligence to scale from the most personal devices to large‑scale infrastructure. Building on more than four decades of innovation, we develop platforms and solutions that bring together advanced AI, high‑performance, low power computing and industry‑leading connectivity—powering products and services used around the world. At Qualcomm, we are engineering human progress.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering and research and development functions and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business. Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Qualcomm patents are licensed by Qualcomm Incorporated. Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Qualcomm Dragonwing and Qualcomm Dragonfly are trademarks or registered trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated.

About Modular

Modular is an AI software infrastructure company building a unified compute platform that makes AI development and deployment more open, efficient, and accessible. Its software tools and modular technologies let developers write once and run anywhere, simplifying how they build, optimize, and run AI across diverse hardware and environments, from data center to edge. That same modularity gives customers independence from any single hardware vendor, helping them adopt AI faster, reduce integration overhead, and scale as their needs evolve, making the platform increasingly relevant in a fast-growing market.

Source: Qualcomm

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